As he drank the cup of coffee that his secretary had just brought in, he let his mind wander over more pleasant subjects. He’d emailed Liz the day before and they would be meeting for dinner on the first night of his stay in London. He sensed she was as hesitant as he was about their growing closeness, but hoped she shared his underlying conviction that theirs was a relationship worth pursuing. It was not merely that he was lonely, though he was, but he was also genuinely attracted to Liz.
There had been other opportunities and even a few, usually terrible, ‘dates’. Well-meaning friends and even his sister and brother-in-law had been eager to introduce him to eligible women, often divorcees, sometimes single women who had simply never met the right man. How often he had sat through dinner parties which had the subtext of finding someone for ‘poor Richard’; how often he had tried to parry the post-party enquiries as to whether he would like the phone number of Victoria, or Eleanor, or Amanda.
With Liz there was none of that; he had met her on his own, thank God, and more to the point, she had suffered a loss equivalent to his. Who knew what would come of it? But for the first time since his wife’s death, he had a real interest in finding out.
He had just reapplied himself to the speech when his secretary came in again to say apologetically that one of the officers from the Immigration team wanted to have an urgent word with him about a report of something suspicious at Dunwich beach.
‘Ask him to come in,’ said Pearson, pushing his speech away with relief.
Inspector Gurwant Singh was the only Sikh in the Suffolk force. He was a tall man, and with his neatly rolled beard and pale blue turban he made an impressive figure.
‘Come in. Sit down and tell me what’s happened.’
‘Well, sir,’ Inspector Singh began, ‘I have a source that I’ve known for several years. He has a small boat-building yard at one end of Dunwich beach. He’s been keeping an eye out for me on that bit of the coast and I’ve asked him to ring me if he sees any stuff on the beach, unidentified boats or anything that might indicate an unauthorised landing.’
Pearson nodded but said nothing.
‘He rang me at eight this morning,’ went on Singh. ‘He said that he had been disturbed in the night by what sounded like a lorry or a bus. He has a cottage just by the gap in the dunes where the path goes up from the beach to the track that leads through the marsh to the coast road. He said he thought it was strange but he didn’t get out of bed to look and just went back to sleep. He’s quite an old man, over seventy now,’ Singh added, as if to explain this failure of his source. ‘But this morning when he went down to the boatyard he saw that the shingle was all disturbed and there were signs that people had been walking there. Quite a few people – it couldn’t have just been a couple of twitchers, sir. The tide was still quite high when he first went down to the beach but as it fell he saw signs that some sort of a boat had come in. At this time of the year it’s usually pretty deserted down there during the week and always at night. I wondered, sir, if you would care to accompany me to interview my source.’
‘I would indeed, Inspector,’ said Pearson, pushing his chair back and standing up. ‘Let’s go straightaway. What’s his name?’
‘He’s called Geoff Gumm, sir. He’s getting on now, as I said. But he’s got all his marbles and he can still build a fine boat.’
‘I’ll look forward to meeting him,’ said Pearson. ‘I’ve been thinking of buying a boat since I arrived in Suffolk. Sailing used to be my favourite form of relaxation. My brother-in-law is a great sailor but he sails in the north and since I’ve been down here in Suffolk I’ve not been out on the water.’
It took them over an hour to drive to the beach. They parked at the edge of the marshes and scrunched their way across the wide expanse of shingle beach to a fenced-off area where two small fishing boats were standing on wheeled trailers, their brightly painted hulls a splash of colour against the grey pebbles of the beach. As they approached they were greeted with a volley of barking from a black and white sheepdog, which bounced out from behind the fence with a ball in its mouth. It dropped it at Inspector Singh’s feet, then lay down, furiously wagging its tail, until the policeman picked up the ball and hurled it across the beach.
‘That’s Judy,’ said Singh as the dog rushed after the ball. ‘If you throw her ball for her she’s your friend for life.’
‘Not much of a watchdog, then,’ said Pearson.
‘Not fierce,’ agreed Singh. ‘But she does bark.’
They found Geoff Gumm in the large wooden shed that served as office and workshop for his one-man boat-building business. He was sitting on a stool crouched over some planks he had been sanding down. He uncoiled himself, took off his eye shield and stood up as the two police officers came in.
‘I thought it was you when I heard Judy,’ he said. ‘I can tell from her bark whether it’s someone she knows or a stranger.’ Gumm was almost as tall as Inspector Singh and stood surprisingly straight given his age and the fact that he must spend a lot of his time bent over his work. He was lean, almost thin; his face and his sinewy arms were like dark brown leather and his hair was startlingly white in contrast.
‘Come and take a seat in the office,’ he said after Singh had introduced the Chief Constable. ‘Have a glass of my home-made lemonade.’ They sat on tall wooden stools round a high oak table covered with sheets of drawings and sketches while Geoff Gumm went to a fridge in the corner and got out a wine bottle from which he poured lemonade into three glasses.
He sat down to join the two visitors. ‘Cheers,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Cheers, Geoff,’ replied Singh. ‘Would you tell the Chief what you told me on the phone this morning about what happened last night?’
‘Well,’ said Geoff, ‘it was about four thirty this morning. Judy woke me up. She has a special bark in the night. Not like when you arrived just now, more a warning sort of growl – though it’s enough to wake me. I heard the sound of a heavy vehicle – not a car but something bigger. Then I could hear footsteps on the gravel and a few voices.
‘We do occasionally get parties at night down on the beach but it’s a bit late in the year for that now. My bedroom’s at the front of the cottage so it looks over the path that comes up from the beach through the dunes. It’s just behind the boatyard, over there’ – he waved an arm towards the back of the shed. ‘I have very thick curtains to keep out the draughts when it’s windy in winter and not much light gets in, so I didn’t see any vehicle lights, if it had any on. Anyway, I’m sorry to say I didn’t get out of bed to see what was going on. I’d had a pretty busy day and I just went back to sleep when I heard it drive away.
‘But then when I went down to the yard this morning I saw all the shingle on the beach stirred up and as the tide dropped – it was high tide at about four last night – I saw marks of a boat having come in. Quite a substantial one too: some sort of decent-sized dinghy, I’d guess. It could have landed people from a larger vessel standing off the shore. That’s when I decided to ring Inspector Singh. I’m sorry now I didn’t look out of the window.’ He rubbed one brown hand through his hair ruefully.
‘Thank you,’ said Pearson. ‘That’s very helpful.’ He turned to Singh. ‘Shall we go and look at what tracks this vehicle has left? Then I think we should get a forensic team down here to examine them and the boat traces on the beach before they get obliterated. Meanwhile we can get someone from Southwold down here to tape off the lane and that part of the beach.’