“Can you remember his name?”
Bishop rolled his eyes and smiled. “Yes. It was Noah. I’m not sure of his second name, but he got very drunk and asked me and Sam, one of the other waiters, if we’d like to go down onto the beach with him.”
“And you’re sure he’s called Noah?”
Bishop nodded. “Yeah. He made some joke that he could make us come two by two, you know, like Noah did on the ark.”
“What a smooth talker,” said Tristan. “And did you?”
“No way! That’s tacky, and I needed my job to pay me through uni. He offered us money, but that was a step too far.”
“How much money?”
“A hundred quid each. He had the cash in his codpiece.”
“Codpiece?”
“It was a Roman masked ball. He was dressed as Casanova, with white tights, a sort of bodice, and a Zorro-style mask, but then, so were most of the other men.”
“Was Noah’s wife there?”
“No. He didn’t mention being married.”
“Were women at the party?”
“Yeah, it was couples, all kinds of people.”
“Did you talk to Noah much? Did he say how he knew Max and Nick?”
“He said he’d invested in Jesper’s but they’d bought him out and he’d moved on to bigger things. He said he invests a lot in property. I got the impression that he was bragging about his cash.”
“Did you take any photos of the party?”
“No, we were working. I got some photos of the house when we were setting up. It’s gorgeous. A big pool with a view over the sea.”
“Have you got them on your phone?” asked Tristan.
“Hang on,” he said, pulling out his phone and scrolling through lots of photos. “Here we go.” He turned the phone round so Tristan could see and scrolled through pictures of a huge modern white box house, perched on the edge of a sandy stretch of beach, overlooking the sea.
“This is in the UK?” asked Tristan.
“I know, it looks like somewhere abroad. Max and Nick live right on the end of a long patch of beach, goes on for miles, really desolate. There aren’t many other houses around . . . ,” he said, scrolling through more photos.
“Is that Max?” asked Tristan when he got to a photo of a stocky man from behind, wearing a baseball cap. He was directing a couple of deliverymen with a trolley filled with drinks.
“Yeah. That’s when we were setting up. That’s Nick, there,” he said, indicating another tall man with his back toward the camera next to a large white canopy set up on the lawn in front of the swimming pool. He was lifting the boxes off the trolley. He had short light-brown hair, and he was well built.
“You got any other photos of them?” asked Tristan.
“Let me see,” Bishop said, scrolling through the photos from the inside of the marquee, where a bar was being set up and a huge ice sculpture was being lifted into place.
“I’ve got photos of the beach. There’s a thick patch of dunes in front of the house. That’s where Noah wanted to go with me and Sam. He gave us the impression he’s been there before, in the dunes.”
“How did he react when you said no?”
“I was called away, but Sam told me afterward he wouldn’t leave him alone. In the end, he told Noah to f off. Noah flipped up the tray of drinks Sam was carrying and called him all kinds of things.”
“What did Max do?”
“I don’t know if he was there. By this time, the party was rowdy and loud, so no one really noticed. Max was more worried about people going too far down on the beach.”
“Why?”
“I’ve got a picture I took when we went down to the beach before the party,” he said. “Here.”
It was a photo of the sun setting over a vast expanse of sandy beach; the tide was far out. To the left was a huge sign planted in the sand dunes that read: NO CARS, BIKES, MOTORBIKES, OR QUADS
ALLOWED PAST THIS POINT
MAX PENALTY ￡400 WARNING
WARNING! DO NOT WALK OR DRIVE
ANY KIND OF VEHICLE OUT TO
THE SOFT SAND AND MUD AT LOW TIDE
“Max said that Nick is obsessed about the tide on the beach in front of their house—when it’s going out, how far it’s going out. And when it’s going out if there are people still on the beach. There’s been so many people who’ve got stranded out in the mud, and a couple of times their party guests have gotten drunk and wandered out when the tide’s low, and they almost got stranded when it came back in,” said Bishop.