Chapter One
The board outside the surf school said the sea was nine degrees. Raine reckoned whoever chalked it up had never been in.
She went in anyway. At fifty-four she had decided that a woman who could get into the North Sea at seven on an October morning could get through anything Middlesbrough threw at her by teatime. It had held up for six years. Her GP called it brave. Libby called it a midlife crisis with a towel. Uncle Des, who had taught her to swim off Redcar beach when she was six, still told anybody who’d listen that she’d swallowed half the North Sea doing it.
She swam out past the break and turned towards Huntcliff, counting strokes so she wouldn’t think about her feet. The cliff was still a black wall. Behind her the pier stood on its iron legs with the first grey light coming through, and at the end of the promenade Cath from the café was hosing her paving with the energy of a woman who hated paving.
Forty out, forty back. Three times. On the last length a gull came down low and gave her a look of open contempt.
“Same to you,” Raine said, and got a mouthful of sea for it.
Her phone started as she was wading in. It was in the pocket of her robe on the bottom step of the slipway. It rang out, stopped, and started again straight away. Nobody rang twice at quarter past seven to tell you you’d won the lottery.
She got to it on the third go, dripping on the screen.
“Kelly.”
“Ma’am, it’s Jackie in control. Sorry. What’s that noise? Are you in the sea?”
“It’s fine, I’ve just got out. What’ve you got?”
“Coastguard volunteer at Saltburn’s called in a body on the beach, under the pier. Uniform’s coming from Redcar, but you’re logged as nearest.”
Raine looked up at the pier. From the slipway she could see the lamp posts and the railings and the steps at the landward end. She couldn’t see underneath.
“Right,” she said. “Who called it in?”
“A Glen Raw. He’s staying with it.”
“Tell uniform to come down the bank by the Ship, not the pier steps, and get the pier shut. Nobody walks out on it. And Jackie? If the press ring, I’ve not been told, I’m not on, and I’m definitely not stood on a beach in my cossie.”
“I don’t know a thing, ma’am.”
She pulled the sea robe on over her wet costume, shoved her bare feet into her trainers and tucked the flask under her arm. Her thighs had gone numb. She set off along the tide line at a fast, stiff walk, past weed and plastic bottle tops and the snapped blades of razor shells, and told herself she didn’t look too undignified.
A man in a navy and orange jacket stood about twenty yards from the pier legs, HM COASTGUARD across his back. He turned when he heard her. Late forties, maybe fifty, with grey stubble and a woollen hat. He took one look at the dressing gown and the bare legs and the trainers with no socks, and put his arm out sideways like a barrier.
“Stay back there, love. You don’t want to come any further. The police are on their way.”
“I am the police.”
He looked her up and down again, slowly, from the wet hair to the trainers. “Are you, now.”
Cheeky sod.
“DI Kelly. I’ve left my warrant card in my other dressing gown.” She held up her phone with the call log still on the screen. “Control rang me four minutes ago, because I was the nearest thing they’d got. Ring them back and ask for Jackie if you like. She’ll tell you I was in the sea.”
He looked at the phone. Then at her face. His arm came down.
“Glen,” he said, and held out his hand. She shook it. His was cold and dry and steady.
He nodded back towards the pier without looking round. “She’s under there. I haven’t touched her. I went close enough to check, but there’s no checking to do.”
He’d gone a bad grey colour round the mouth. Raine unscrewed the flask and held it out.
“Here. It’s got two sugars in. Don’t tell my daughter, she thinks I’m diabetic waiting to happen.”
He took it, drank, and handed it back. “Ta.”
“Did you walk straight in and straight out?”
“Same line.” He pointed. Two sets of boot prints, in and back, close together. “I know what you lot like.”
“Glen, you’ve made my morning. You wouldn’t believe how many people go for a good look and a wander round first.”
She told him to stay where he was and went in alongside his prints.
Under the pier the girders dripped. The sand was wetter there and smelled of rust and weed, and the cold came up through her soles. She stopped two strides short.
She had a private name for this bit. She called it the first look, and she made herself do it slowly. Whoever this was only got one first look from the person who would find out what had happened to her.
The girl lay on her back, head to the land, feet to the sea. Her arms were by her sides. Someone had straightened her legs. Jeans, white trainers, a short black puffer jacket zipped to the throat. Her hair was long and dark and had been combed out across the sand in a fan, and it had dried in places into stiff ropes with grit in them. Her eyes were half open. There was sand in the corner of her mouth.
Nineteen, Raine thought. Twenty at most. Libby’s age.
She crouched, knees cracking. “All right, pet,” she said quietly. “I’m here now.”
Nobody heard except the girders. She’d been talking to the dead for twenty-eight years, and she wasn’t going to stop now to look professional.
Around the girl, on the sand, was a ring of black.
Sea coal. Lumps the size of a thumbnail and smaller, the dull black stuff that came ashore along this coast after a blow. When Raine was small, men had still gathered it off Redcar beach with a horse and cart. Her granddad burned it in the grate in Grangetown and swore at it all winter because it spat.
The ring was unbroken. It went all the way round, a foot clear of the body at every point. The lumps touched. Where the sand dipped, they had been pressed down to keep the line level. Somebody had knelt here a long time doing this, in the dark, with the tide going out behind them.
Raine found her jaw was aching. She unclenched it.
The high-water mark lay a yard beyond the girl’s feet, a ragged strip of weed and foam. The ring stopped short of it with a hand’s width to spare.
She looked at the girl’s hands. Clean, nails painted pale pink, one broken. The jacket was dry on top and dark underneath where it touched the sand. The trainers were done up in double knots. Libby had done hers like that at six, and screamed blue murder if anyone else tried.
Behind her Glen said, “Do you know her?”
“No.” She stood. “You?”
“No.”
“What brought you down here this early?”
“I walk it every morning. Huntcliff to the pier and back. You find all sorts after a big tide.” He lifted his chin at the ring. “Never that, though.”
“No,” Raine said. “Me neither.”
Up on the bank two uniforms were sliding down past the Ship. The younger one reached the sand first, saw her, and slowed right down.
“Ma’am? Is that... are you in your swimming stuff?”
“Well spotted. You’ll go far.” She pointed. “Tape from that leg to that leg and right round, start a scene log, and nobody comes under here without telling me first. Not CID, not the press, not the Chief Constable if he turns up in his slippers.”
“Ma’am.”
She turned back to the girl. The light was reaching further in under the pier now, and there was a flat, square shape in the left pocket of the puffer jacket.
As she looked at it, it lit up through the fabric.
Then it buzzed against the sand. It went on for a long time, stopped, and lit again, and through the thin black nylon Raine could read the word on the screen.
Mam.