‘Isn’t that your wife?’ Hen said.
He released a long breath, vibrating his lips. ‘I’m at a loss to understand how this happened.’
‘But she is-’
‘Merry, yes.’ Death has a way of making everything sound tasteless.
‘You’re confirming that this is your wife, Meredith Sentinel?’
‘I just said. Can we leave now?’
Hen closed the car door on the widowed man and used her phone to call the incident room.
‘That’s a relief,’ Stella said after she was told. ‘Are you bringing him in now? Because we’ll need to break the news as soon as possible. Don’t ask me how, but the hounds have picked up the scent. They know you took someone to the mortuary, at any rate. I’ve taken two calls in the last ten minutes.’
Hen was philosophical about the leak. She doubted if it originated with the police. Obviously she’d been spotted entering the mortuary with Dr Sentinel. The public were quick to pass tips to the press. So, for that matter, were mortuary attendants. ‘No problem, Stell. You can say we’ll be issuing a statement within the hour.’
She walked round to her side of the car and got in. ‘You have my sympathy, sir.’
Dr Sentinel said, ‘I’m finding this difficult to take in. You’ll have to make allowances.’
‘Of course, but we need to talk at the police station.’
‘I can’t help you. I can’t get my head round this.’
‘You know a lot more about her than we do.’
He sighed. ‘She drowned in the sea, you said?’
‘Someone murdered her, sir, and it’s our job to find out who, and why.’
‘You’ll be making this public, I expect?’
‘Very soon. That’s part of the process.’
They strolled on, past the lifeboat station and the fishing boats. The world was a happier place now. In Jake’s company, the worries of the last twenty-four hours were not so threatening. Jo would have liked to tuck her hand inside his arm. It was a pity the moment didn’t seem right. An opportunity might come, but it wasn’t yet. She cared too much to risk giving him the wrong impression. Like some chaste woman out of a Victorian novel, she thought.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked. An unexpected question. Mostly he avoided anything personal.
‘Fine. Just fine.’
‘About walking here, I mean.’
She grasped what he was saying. They were almost level with the section of beach where she’d found the corpse and she hadn’t given it a thought. The mobile incident room was no longer parked there. Briefly she wondered how Jake knew which section it was, and then decided anyone with an interest in the matter would have no difficulty finding out. Everyone local would have seen that big police trailer and it was obvious that the bit of beach was just below there.
‘I think I’m over that,’ she said. ‘Being with you makes it all right.’
As if embarrassed, he stepped a little to the right, putting distance between them.
This process of getting to know him was a learning curve. She tried to sound more objective, more fact-based. ‘You’re from Cornwall and yet you know this place as if you were raised here.’
‘My job.’
‘Local history?’
‘Erosion and such. Or conservancy, I should say.’
‘It’s a lot more than that, what you’ve told me about this strip of coast. So unexpected. I mean on the face of things it’s just a long stretch of shingle, pretty unromantic. Then you tell me it looks out onto a hidden deer park and a cathedral.’
‘Folklore says you can hear the bells at low tide.’
She turned to look at him. He wasn’t all factual statements. ‘Now you’re laying it on.’
He shrugged and looked down towards the water’s edge, and she had a sense that he was enjoying this. ‘Good place for fossils, too.’
‘Do you collect them?’
‘I have a few at home. And just about here… ’ He stopped and measured a slice of the seafront with his hands ‘… the skeleton of a woolly mammoth was found.’
‘On the beach?’
‘At low tide, after a storm raked off the shingle and sand and laid bare the clay.’
‘A mammoth?’
‘A fisherman found it and marked the place. The bones were recovered by a team from Brighton University.’
‘When was this?’
‘Twenty years ago. A young specimen that would have stood about nine feet tall.’
‘Big enough.’
‘Elephant-size, at any rate. The biggest mammoths grew to fourteen feet.’
She gazed at the foreshore, trying to imagine the scene. ‘What an experience, excavating something like that. Those university people must have been over the moon to get such an opportunity.’
‘You never know what will show up here. Mostly relics of the last ice age. Bones from rhinoceros, straight-tusked elephant.’
‘Where is the mammoth now?’
‘London. Natural History Museum.’
‘The Selsey Mammoth. Has anything else been found, other than bones, I mean?’
‘We get the metal detectorists here looking for Roman gold.’
‘And finding any?’
‘They were finding it before detectors were invented. A hoard of three hundred coins on the West Beach. A solid gold bar. A pair of armlets.’
‘Have you found anything?’
‘Only fossils. But you have to wait for the right conditions when the clay beds are exposed.’
‘Low tide?’
‘Spring tides are best. If you like, I could take you when the chance comes.’
‘I’d enjoy that.’
Her phone rang.
‘Sorry. This could be Gemma.’ She put it to her ear.
It was, and she sounded in good heart. ‘Jo darling, is this a good time?’
‘Sure.’ Considerately, Jake had turned away and stepped down the beach towards the sea. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d stayed.
‘Sorry to miss Starbucks,’ Gemma was saying, requiring a shift in thought of half a million years. ‘Rick told you about my problem.’
‘How did it go?’
‘Well, after much thought, they didn’t bang me up in jail.’
‘I should think not.’
‘It wasn’t so hairy as I expected at first. Would you believe they called me at seven-thirty in the morning on a Saturday, when I’m trying to get a proper lie-in? What they wanted was to be let into the office and shown where Fiona worked. They asked me all about her, and the boss.’
‘Did they know she had something going with him?’
‘They did when I’d finished with them. They spent a long time in his office and took his computer away. Asked me loads of questions about his attitude to women and where he takes his holidays and if he drinks and stuff like that. He’s the prime suspect, for sure.’
‘Are they treating it as a crime, then?’
‘You bet they are. These were CID, not plain old cops in uniform.’
‘Who was in charge? A woman detective called Mallin?’
‘No. Have you got friends in the police?’
‘Far from it. She’s the tough cookie who interviewed me about the dead woman I found at Selsey.’
‘She’d be West Sussex, then. Emsworth is Hampshire. Another county. Different set of cops. Didn’t fancy either of mine, if you want to know.’
Something to be thankful for, Jo thought. ‘I don’t see why the CID have to be involved. It could have been an accident, or suicide.’
‘Get with it, Jo. We’ve been through that already.’
‘But the police haven’t. They should be keeping an open mind.’
She gave a hoot. ‘You think?’
‘Was she injured, then-besides being drowned, I mean?’
‘They didn’t say. I was in no doubt they were serious.’
‘Was anything said about why you called at Fiona’s house?’
‘I did the right thing, apparently. They praised me up. I’m a star, a copybook executive who cares for the staff she manages. An absolute credit to Kleentext Print Solutions.’
‘Gemma, be honest. Did they really say all that?’
‘Not word for word, but that was the gist of it.’
‘And you didn’t let on that we saw the body in the water?’