THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

‘No,’ she says at last. ‘He seem …’ She stops, searching for the word. ‘Thoughtful. Yes, he seemed thoughtful. Usually we chat, about the telly, about my little boy. He’s five. Archie always remembers him. At Christmas he gives me money to buy him a present.’ She presses the tissue into her eyes.
    ‘But yesterday he seemed thoughtful …’ Nelson prompts gently.
    ‘Yes. I was a bit worried about him so I went back, about half an hour later. His light was still on but he wasn’t reading. He likes to read. Murder mysteries mostly. I buy them for him from the charity shop. But yesterday he was just lying in bed. I thought he was asleep but when I lean over him he grabs my arm. I don’t think he knows who I am. He says a name, sounds something like Lucy.’
    ‘Something like Lucy?’
    ‘Yes. All morning I’m trying to think.’ Her smooth brow furrows. ‘I am trying to think of the name.’
    ‘Lucy-Ann?’ suggests Clough. ‘Lucille?’
    ‘Maybe it wasn’t a name,’ says Nelson. ‘Maybe it was something else, like “lucky”.’
    Maria shakes her head. ‘No, it was a name. I’ve heard it before.’
    ‘Lucia? Luke?’
    ‘No.’ Maria’s brow clears and she almost smiles. ‘I remember now. Lucifer. He said Lucifer.’
    ‘Lucifer,’ says Clough. ‘Bloody hell.’
    They are in Archie Whitcliffe’s bedroom, which alreadyhas an abandoned feel. The bed is stripped, the pillow gravestone-smooth. On the bedside table, Archie’s teeth are still in their glass, next to a copy of
The Nine Tailors
. The family photos still smile down from the walls, but now even the cheerily grouped children seem oddly sad. There is no-one left to look at their forced jollity, no-one except Dorothy and her staff when they clear the room, ready for their next ‘client’. Nelson looks out of the window. The grounds are immaculate but empty. A gardener is cutting the grass but, although it is a fine spring day, no-one is sitting in the basket chairs carefully arranged on the patio. Nelson turns back and, as he does so, he notices a yellowing photograph pushed to the back of the desk. Several middle-aged men sit in a row outside a house, a house which looks vaguely familiar. Three much younger men crouch in front of them. At the bottom, in spidery handwriting, is written: ‘Broughton Sea’s End Home Guard 1940.’
    Which was Archie? The gangly boy in front, trying not to smile but obviously delighted to find himself alongside these hardened veterans? The one with his hat at a jaunty angle, gas-mask in hand? Perhaps the serious one with glasses. Which of the older men was Buster Hastings? The scary-looking fellow with the walrus moustache or the fat one with buttons straining? Maybe the one looking vaguely in the wrong direction … Of course, that must be Sea’s End house in the background. He recognises the grey stone but realises that the picture must have been taken at the back of the house, in the garden that has since fallen into the sea.
    Archie’s newspaper is still folded back at yesterday’s TV.He has ringed the programmes he wanted to watch.
Countdown, Coronation Street, Panorama
, an afternoon film matinee of
Went the Day Well?
The shaky blue pen makes Nelson feel suddenly very sad.
    ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing here. Let’s go and see the doctor.’
    ‘No signs of satanic ritual then, boss?’
    ‘Show some respect,’ growls Nelson. Even as he says it, though, he remembers how Archie described Buster Hastings yesterday. ‘Hell of a chap,’ he had said.
    A real old devil.
    Ruth, like Judy, has taken the day off. Tatjana is arriving tomorrow and the spare room is still full of old boxes so she has dropped Kate at Sandra’s. She stopped off for strengthening croissants, has made a pot of coffee and is now preparing to transform the room into a bijou boudoir, suitable for someone with American standards of hygiene and comfort. The trouble is, for the last twenty minutes she has been sitting on the floor reading an article about Ian Rankin from a two-year-old copy of the
Guardian
(found at the bottom of one of the boxes). It is only the arrival of Flint, purring and standing on Ian’s face, that brings her back to the job in hand. Jesus, how do people ever tidy anything? She moves stuff from one box to another but it is still
there
, in the way. How do people like her sister-in-law ever manage to have houses where everything is shut away in cupboards and all the storage jars