"Mum said we weren't to climb the cliffs because they're dangerous," whispered Danny, the virtuous ten-year-old, less interested than his brother in the sight of bare flesh.
"Shut up."
"She'd kill us if she knew we were looking at a nudie."
"You're just scared because you've never seen one before."
"Neither've you," muttered the younger boy indignantly. "Anyway, she's a dirty person. I bet loads of people can see her."
Paul, the elder by two years, treated this remark with the scorn it deserved-they hadn't passed a soul on their way around Chapman's Pool. Instead, he concentrated on the wonderfully accessible body below. He couldn't see much of the woman's face because she was lying with her feet pointing toward them, but the magnification of the lenses was so powerful that he could see every other detail of her. He was too ignorant of the naked female form to question the bruises that blotched her skin, but he knew afterward that he wouldn't have questioned them anyway, even if he'd known what they meant. He had fantasized about something like this happening-discovering a quiescent, unmoving woman who allowed him to explore her at his leisure, if only through binoculars. He found the soft flow of her breasts unbearably erotic and dwelled at length on her nipples, wondering what it would be like to touch them and what would happen if he did. Lovingly he traversed the length of her midriff, pausing on the dimple of her belly button, before returning to what interested him most, her opened legs and what lay between them. He crawled forward on his elbows, writhing his body.
"What are you doing?" demanded Danny suspiciously, crawling up beside him. "Are you being dirty?"
" 'Course not." He gave the boy a savage thump on the arm. "That's all you ever think about, isn't it? Being dirty. You'd better watch it, penis-brain, or I'll tell Dad on you."
In the inevitable fight that followed-a grunting, red-faced brawl of hooked arms and kicking feet-the Zeiss binoculars slipped from the elder brother's grasp and clattered down the slope, dislodging an avalanche of shale in the process. The boys, united in terror of what their father was going to say, abandoned the fight to wriggle back from the brink and stare in dismay after the binoculars.
"It's your fault if they're broken," hissed the ten-year-old. "You're the one who dropped them."
But for once his brother didn't rise to the bait. He was more interested in the body's continued immobility. With an awful sense of foreboding it dawned on him that he'd been masturbating over a dead woman.
*2*
The clear waters of Chapman's Pool heaved in an undulating roll to break in rippling foam around the pebble shore of the bay. By now three boats were anchored there, two flying the red ensign-Lady Rose, the Princess, and Gregory's Girl, the Fairline Squadron; the third, Mirage, a French Beneteau, flew the tricolor. Only Gregory's Girl showed any sign of real activity, with a man and a woman struggling to release a dinghy whose winching wires had become jammed in the ratchet mechanism of the davits. On Lady Rose, a scantily clad couple lounged on the flying bridge, bodies glistening with oil, eyes closed against the sun, while on Mirage, a teenage girl held a video camera to her eye and panned idly up the steep grassy slope of West Hill, searching for anything worth filming.
No one noticed the Spender brothers' mad dash around the bay, although the French girl did zoom in on the lone male walker as he descended the hillside toward them. Seeing only with the tunnel vision of the camera, she was oblivious to anything but the handsome young man in her sight, and her smitten heart gave a tiny leap of excitement at the thought of another chance encounter with the beautiful Englishman. She had met him two days before at the Berthon Marina in Lymington, when with a gleaming smile he'd told her the computer code for the lavatories, and she couldn't believe her good luck that he was here ... today ... in this shit-hole of boring isolation which her parents described as one of England's gems.
To her starved imagination he looked like a longer-haired version of Jean-Claude Van Damme in his sleeveless T-shirt and bottom-hugging shorts-tanned, muscled, sleek dark hair swept back from his face, smiling brown eyes, grittily stubbled jaw-and in the narrative tale of her own life, romanticized, embellished, unbelievably innocent, she pictured herself swooning in his strong arms and capturing his heart. Through the intimacy of magnification she watched his muscles ripple as he lowered his rucksack to the ground, only for the lens to fill abruptly with the frantic movements of the Spender brothers. With an audible groan, she switched off the camera and stared in disbelief at the prancing children, who, from a distance, appeared to be showing enthusiastic delight.
Surely he was too young to be anybody's father?
But ... A Gallic shrug...
Who knew with the English?
Behind the questing mongrel which zigzagged energetically in pursuit of a scent, the horse picked its way carefully down the track that led from Hill Bottom to the Pool. Tarmac showed in places where the track had once been a road, and one or two sketchy foundations among the overgrown vegetation beside it spoke of buildings long abandoned and demolished. Maggie Jenner had lived in this area most of her life but had never known why the handful of inhabitants in this corner of the Isle of Purbeck had gone away and left their dwellings to the ravages of time. Someone had told her once that "chapman" was an archaic word for merchant or peddler, but what anyone could have traded in this remote place she couldn't imagine. Perhaps, more simply, a peddler had drowned in the bay and bequeathed his death to posterity. Every time she took this path she reminded herself to find out, but every time she made her way home again she forgot.
The cultivated gardens that had once bloomed here had left a lingering legacy of roses, hollyhocks, and hydrangeas amid the weeds and grasses, and she thought how pleasant it would be to have a house in this colorful wilderness, facing southwest toward the channel with only her dog and her horses for company. Because of the threat of the ever-sliding cliffs, access to Chapman's Pool was denied to motorized traffic by padlocked gates at Hill Bottom and Kingston, and the attraction of so much stillness was a powerful one. But then isolation and its attendant solitude was becoming something of an obsession with her, and occasionally it worried her.
Even as the thought was in her head, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, grinding in first gear over the bumps and hollows behind her, and gave a surprised whistle to bring Bertie to heel behind Sir Jasper. She turned in the saddle, assuming it was a tractor, and frowned at the approaching police Range Rover. It slowed as it drew level with her, and she recognized Nick Ingram at the wheel before, with a brief smile of acknowledgment, he drove on and left her to follow in his dusty wake.
The emergency services had rushed into action following a nine-nine-nine call to the police from a mobile telephone. It was timed at 10:43 a.m. The caller gave his name as Steven Harding and explained that he had come across two boys who claimed a body was lying on the beach at Egmont Bight. The details were confused because the boys omitted to mention that the woman was naked, and their obvious distress and garbled speech led Harding to give the impression that "the lady on the beach" was their mother and had fallen from the cliff while using a pair of binoculars. As a result the police and coastguards acted on the presumption that she was still alive.