Slapton Sands (21 page)

The bay extended to the left of the road she was on. If she stepped up on to the grass bank she could see the width of flat sand descending to the sea. The sand was vast and largely featureless. There were strands of fleshy seaweed and some bits of beach debris, indistinguishable from this distance, down there on the tide line above the foam-edged breakers. But there was nothing suggestive of violence or tragedy. To her right, scrub and thorns clung to sandy soil. The small shrubs and trees were stunted and deformed by wind. They grew withered, tenacious. There were wild blackberry bushes and dune pines in little clusters. Behind them, the land had begun to rise. On the road itself, she encountered no people, no traffic. Birds coloured the
bushes, singing, industrious. And there were gulls flapping and shrieking above the flotsam and weed on the tide line.

There was no sign announcing Slapton Sands. It was a place that had existed for so long at the forefront of the mind of Alice Bourne that she had half-expected to see some physical commemoration of the fact of the place at its boundary. Not one of those illuminated signs erected out of civic pride to announce some hick town in America, but something ancient and English. She'd seen such a sign at St George's Circus in London near where they'd parked the Apache's minivan for the visit to the War Museum. Solemn and time-battered, its face bore the chiselled legend: ‘Westminster lies one mile to the west of this Monument.' Information about the cartographic fact of Slapton would surely have been just as valid. The Slapton signpost would be stone, cracked, canted. It occurred to her, as she looked for it in vain, that there may very well have been just such a post. But it would have been plucked from the ground when England faced the threat of invasion before American soldiers had ever arrived here. It gathered moss on the bed of the gravel lagoon at Slapton Leys. It had been re-rooted in the garden of a Devon village pub for morris men to dance around at Midsummer's Eve as they travestied some ancient pagan rite.

It didn't matter. She knew she had reached the place. Alice left the road and walked out on a diagonal line towards the edge of the water. The sand was firm under her feet, and the approaching sea began to roar like a dull,
rhythmic reckoning. She'd brought a small shoulder bag with her, and she stopped now and took off her shoes and rolled her jeans up above her calf muscles and put flipflops from the shoulder bag on her feet. The breeze was faint when she stood again, but it was noticeable, a sensation of freshness on her face and in her hair. And salt. Not the rank malevolence of the salt smell oozing through wallpaper and linoleum in her Whitstable flat, but a clean suggestion of the sea. She had reached the water's edge before she turned back to look at the land.

They would have dipped and plunged shorewards in their Higgins boats, heavy with hampering kit. Then the ramps would have splashed down into the waves, and with their rifles raised over their heads they would have leaped, racing, into the surf and, gulping with cold and the weight of waterlogged pack and clothing, seen what it was she was looking at now. From a soldier's perspective, the beach was a vast and featureless killing ground. Infantry landing here would be fired down on from the sangars and slit trenches and pillboxes, which were now the partially bulldozed ruins she'd seen from the coast road. There was no natural cover at all. Even without such obstacles as mines and coils of defensive wire, the beach was a suicidal location for an assault. Seeing Slapton for real, she realized instantly what she had not from her conversation with the Colorado veteran, from her reading on infantry tactics and from her scrupulous study of the detailed aerial photographs she had located in the library and mounted on the epidiascope at
Kent. The soldiers who practised for Normandy here could master the mechanics of their landing craft until they were able to embark, beach and disembark in their sleep. But the only way for them and their commanders to know whether their battle plan would work would be to try it out for real. They would have to land tanks to provide cover for an infantry advance. They would need to pulverize the beach defences using the heavy guns aboard their battlecruisers. They would need fighter-bomber support to strafe and harry defending units. Without all of these, the result would be obvious. It would be butchery. It would be a massacre.

Alice turned around to face the sea. Rory Carnegie's secret lay somewhere on its bottom, if Rachel Vine had told her the truth in a pub in Lambeth which had felt towards the end of their conversation as hushed and sanctified as a confessional. Well, the sea would tell her nothing. But Rory Carnegie might, if she could locate the man and persuade him to talk to her. Rachel hadn't known if Rory was alive still or dead. He'd be about seventy years old, she calculated. Fishing has always been a deadly profession, but he was a canny fisherman. And he took pretty good care of himself off the water. For a Scot.

She turned her back on the sea and studied the land again. Not this time in the disciplined way a soldier might, but as someone would seeing it the way she did, as an American, as a visitor seeing a foreign landscape properly from this perspective for the first time. Beyond the ridge of
the coast road and the undistinguished scrub to its rear, the land must have gathered soil and mineral richness, rising as steep green hills with patches of verdant woodland. The trees were a mix of cedar, sycamore, elm and larch. There was no precise element to this vista of grass and tall trees and gentle hills that defined it specifically as English. At least, there was no element she could identify, unless it was the soft light and crepuscular shadows. But the indefinable, defining something, was there nevertheless. The scene was English in the same unmistakable way as would be churning milkmaids, maypoles, a girning fool in a smock on a country stile. And you may as well include the green man, she thought to herself. And those damned morris dancers.

She was filled, looking at the hills and the dark shapes of gathered woodland, all at once with a feeling she always associated with English twilights. It usually crept up on her in that silence when the singing of birds became suddenly more audible, with the sun sinking and the sky starting to flush pink in the west and objects gaining a gloamy, summery luminescence, as though they were not real, those pub benches, those tables and table umbrellas and garden walls. As though they were pretend objects cut from crepe paper, from the intense fabric of stage or film props. Usually, there would be music, something recently familiar but fundamentally strange. She recalled Sandy Denny, her voice ululant and sad, singing ‘The Banks of the Nile', on a cassette player at a Canterbury garden party. At first, she had
mistaken this mood for melancholy. And then, because it felt vaguely sad, with homesickness. But what it was, she realized now, was alienation. It was the feeling of being somewhere, somehow strange, and being unable to escape your surroundings and return to the familiar, to the recognizably safe, to the effortlessly known and understood. It was a childlike sentiment. She felt it at twilight because the coming of darkness signalled to her instinct that she was spending another night away from home. She felt it now because it must have been what those boys had felt thirty-odd years ago approaching this inalienable English landscape from the sea.

What would they have made of the south Devon hills, those boys from the wheatfields of Nebraska, from Iowa and the flat, arid earth of west Texas? Would their collective hearts have sunk each time they rehearsed their landing at the sheer, remote-from-home strangeness of where they fetched up?

Perhaps they did. But Alice Bourne believed that Americans were tougher, too, back then. They were far less given to indulgent sentiment. They were still a pioneering people. Childhood was a swift rite of passage, not a coddling America's youth felt any collective reluctance to leave behind. Sure, they were boys. But they were tough boys, in it together. They had their army buddies; they had what their German enemies called camaraderie. She could hear the sea behind her. It seemed to shudder and hiss against the shingle and sand. The sea. The encroaching, whispering,
assaulting waves of the sea. Each of those boys was alone in death, though, she thought. Camaraderie compensates only the living.

Alice went back to the cottage in Strete and took a bath. She got the sit-up-and-beg from the lean-to behind the cottage. She cycled to the post office on her landlady's map that doubled as a provisions store. She bought a bottle of lemonade and cream crackers and triangles of processed cheese wrapped in foil in a wheel-shaped, compressed-paper box. She put her purchases in the basket mounted between the handlebars of the bike and cycled back and ate a picnic on the beach. I could be right out of an Agatha Christie story, she thought, chewing. Except that I'm too messy an eater. And I haven't a smooth but sinister vicar with me to move along the plot. She was beat when finally she got back to the cottage. She read for a while and then hit the sack. The phone rang twice after she went to sleep. The second time it rang and rang before it finally stopped. Either her landlady had persistent friends, Alice thought, snug under the eaves and the covers. Or she owes someone urgent money.

It was the following morning before she saw her landlady's note and remembered she was supposed to call DS Emerson. By the time she saw the note, she was on her way out of the door with her camera loaded with film and her notebook in her bag. She looked at the telephone in the hallway. It was pink, this instrument, the precise colour of cheap nail varnish. The note was in her hand. Should she
call Emerson now? The English were funny about their phones. Thirty miles was considered long distance and the cost of a trunk call astronomical. The only place she'd seen the phone profligately used was in episodes of
The Sweeney.
She wouldn't do it, she decided. The very fact of the phone put her in a position of trust she wasn't about to abuse. It was eight o'clock that evening and she was in the pub on the northern end of Slapton seafront when she finally fished the number from her bag and returned DS Emerson's call.

‘Sally Emerson.'

This surprised Alice. She'd expected to have to leave a message. She was momentarily silent, coins in her fingers over the slit in the metal box you pushed them through.

‘Is that Alice Bourne?'

‘Yes. It's me. Hi.'

Nothing. Then: ‘We got a match on that latent. The print we took from the note in your room where it was pressed over the gum?'

‘I know what a latent is.'

‘We've vastly improved our whole forensic database,' Emerson said. ‘After the Black Panther case?'

The detective sounded nervous. Alice said: ‘The match for the print?'

‘A Paddington prostitute was roughed up by a punter. Her pimp arrived and confronted the punter, armed with a knife. Your partial matches a print on the knife handle left by the punter after he'd taken the knife from the pimp and
cut him up with it.' Emerson sounded odd. ‘And cut the girl.'

Pips interrupted, and Alice shoved coins into the slot. ‘So what's the connection? Apart from the print.'

‘The crime I'm talking about was committed early in 1944,' Emerson said. ‘The man who committed it was an American soldier based at Slapton Sands.'

Breathing was a function Alice Bourne was unaware of normally. Now it came so laboured that it threatened her capacity to speak.

‘What was his name?'

‘Johnny Compton.'

‘Where is he now?'

‘Not where he's supposed to be. He's dead, Miss Bourne. According to his record, Compton died at Slapton Sands.'

‘You've got his army file in front of you?'

‘Not exactly,' Emerson said. ‘I did a course with a chap who works at the American embassy. I asked him to get whatever he could on Compton, released and telexed to me.'

‘OK. OK.' The breathing was already marginally better. It was a relief, what she was hearing, in a way. ‘What did Compton's father do?'

‘Why do you want to know?'

‘Do you have that information?'

‘Compton was from a military family, it seems. His father fought with distinction in the First World War.'

‘He was an infantryman,' Alice said. ‘He was a doughboy sergeant. He fought at Ypres.'

‘I think you ought to come back to Canterbury,' Emerson said. Her tone now was measured, neutral.

‘I saw Johnny Compton three days ago. In Canterbury, near the Cathedral Gate.'

There was a silence. Then: ‘He'd be a man in his early sixties now.'

Alice laughed.

‘I think you ought to come back here.'

‘What for?' Alice said. She was thinking about the rusty, arterial gush of water down the side of a Paddington tenement. Of a grey visage behind grey nets and filthy glass. ‘You don't believe in ghosts.'

‘There's something else. David Lucas was hurt yesterday in a diving accident.'

‘Oh Jesus.'

‘He's OK,' Emerson said. ‘He spent the night under observation. But he's absolutely fine.'

‘Would you tell me how the accident happened?'

‘I think you should come back to Canterbury, Miss Bourne.'

After Alice hung up, she thought about what Champion had said at his supper gathering about Sally Emerson, about how her talent would take her to Scotland Yard, where she would gain no further promotion and eventually become disillusioned. This case at least, would provide her with no
collar. It would do nothing for her detective's reputation. From inside the pub, the jukebox was loud when customers, mostly young men, opened the swing doors to the lavatories and a row of coathooks over a bench where the phone had been installed. Someone was singing on the jukebox about how he must have been through about a million girls. It was Elvin Bishop, the song ‘Fooled around and Fell in Love'. A ploughman's lunch had provided her dinner, cheddar cheese and pickled onions eaten to the same cock-happy soundtrack. Thin Lizzie swaggering on about the boys being back in town. Or Bad Company, Paul Rodgers crooning mightily about some easy sexual conquest. Why didn't they fucking grow up, all of them? She could think of several things she would like to do with Messrs Bishop, Lynott and Rodgers. None of them involved a bed. The pickled onions had been shallots really, and they had given her heartburn. Or maybe the music had. Or the pint of cider she'd drunk, eating her bread and cheese. Except that it wasn't heartburn, was it? She was sick with dread at what Emerson had told her about Johnny Compton. She was sick with guilt and foreboding about David Lucas. She looked at the phone, wishing she could call someone. Wishing she could call her dad, truth be told, hear once again the comfort and resolution in her father's voice. She went back into the pub, where at least she wasn't bothered. Not bothered, anyway, by the living.