He spent another minute with a flashlight, checking carefully over the patch of ground where he’d grabbed Joanna to see if she’d dropped anything, but all was clear.
He got into his car and sat for a moment in the silence.
What now? She had to disappear. Her body. Her computer. All DNA evidence had to vanish.
An idea came to him. It was bold and risky, but if it worked . . . He started the engine, and he drove away.
1
THIRTEEN YEARS LATER
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
“How expensive will it be to fix?” asked Kate Marshall, watching Derek, the elderly handyman, as he slowly measured the broken window frame. They were standing beside a 1950 Airstream aluminum caravan, and the midmorning sun was glinting off the curved edge of its roof. Kate squinted and slid her sunglasses down.
“We’re talking about round glass windows,” said Derek in his broad Cornish accent. He tapped the edge of his tape measure on the frame. “Expensive to fix.”
“How expensive?”
He paused, sucking air through his lips. Derek seemed incapable of answering a question without an infuriatingly long pause. He rolled his top denture round his mouth. “Five hundred.”
“You charged Myra two hundred pounds to mend one of these round windows,” said Kate.
“She was having a tough time, what with the cancer. And round glass is more work for a glazier. The handle’s embedded in the glass.”
Myra had been Kate’s friend for nine years, and they’d grown close. Her death, eighteen months ago, had been sudden and a shock.
“I appreciate that you helped Myra, but five hundred pounds is way too much. I can find someone else.”
Derek rolled his dentures around his mouth again, and the pink gummy edge of the prothesis appeared fleetingly through his lips. Kate took off her sunglasses and met his gaze, refusing to look away.
“It’ll take a week, with the specialist glass cutting and what ’ave you, but let’s call it two fifty.”
“Thank you.”
Derek picked up his tool bag, and they walked back down the sloping hill through the caravan site to the road. There were eight static caravans, neatly spaced apart, in a hotchpotch of styles from modern white UPVC to the oldest, a Romani caravan with faded red and green paint. The caravans were rented out to people who came for walking or surfing holidays. Each caravan had a couple of bedrooms and a small kitchen, and some of the newer ones had bathrooms. The caravan site was on the lower end of the hospitality scale, but it was particularly popular with surfers because it was an inexpensive place to stay and a short walk down to the beach, which had some of the best surf in Devon and Cornwall. The holiday season would be starting in one week, and it felt like spring had finally arrived. The surrounding trees were bursting into leaf, and the sky was a clear blue.
When they reached the short set of concrete steps down to the road, Kate offered Derek her arm for support, but he ignored her, wincing as they slowly descended to where his car was parked. He opened the boot and heaved in his tool bag. He looked up at her; his watery blue eyes were piercing.
“I bet it was a shock when Myra left you her house and her business in her will.”
“Yes.”
“An’ she left nothing to her son . . .” Derek tutted and shook his head. “I know they weren’t close, but as I always say, blood is thicker than water.”
It had been a surprise to Kate that Myra had left everything to her. It had caused a lot of anger from Myra’s son and his wife, and it had generated a lot of local gossip and snide remarks.
“You’ve got my number. Let me know when the glass is ready,” said Kate, not wanting to continue the conversation.
Derek looked annoyed that Kate wasn’t going to give him any more.
He nodded curtly, got into his car, and drove away, leaving her in a wake of black smoke.
She coughed and wiped her eyes and then heard the faint tone of her mobile phone ringing. She hurried across the road to a squat, square building. On the ground floor was the campsite shop, still boarded up from the winter. Kate climbed a set of steps on the side of the building to the second floor and let herself into the small flat where Myra had lived, which Kate now used as an office.
A row of windows ran the length of the back of the building with a view out over the beach. The tide was out, exposing the black seaweed-covered rocks. To the right, a row of cliffs jutted out, forming the edge of the bay, and beyond was the university town of Ashdean, which she could see clearly on this bright, sunny day. Her phone stopped ringing when she reached her desk.