THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

taking Kate and puttingher on the floor where she immediately rolls over on the rug – her favourite trick. ‘Did you hear me come in last night?’
    ‘No. Was it late? Did you have a good time?’
    ‘So-so. I think I’m too old for clubs.’
    ‘Rubbish. You just need the right company. Where’s Tatjana?’
    Shona has a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards Tatjana. Before she arrived, she was full of curiosity. ‘I remember you talking about your time in Bosnia. I can’t wait to meet her.’ But when the two finally met at the naming day party, Shona had been decidedly cool. Maybe she hadn’t expected Tatjana to be so attractive, maybe she resented the way that she had annexed Phil, maybe she was just jealous of Tatjana’s relationship with Ruth but Shona, after exchanging a few cool pleasantries, announced to Ruth that she thought Tatjana was ‘shallow’. ‘What does your Bosnian friend think of me?’ she asked, a few days later. ‘She hasn’t mentioned you,’ Ruth had replied truthfully.
    ‘I’m not sure where she is,’ she says now. ‘I suppose she went home with Judy or one of the others.’
    ‘Maybe she met a man.’
    Ruth thinks of the man Tatjana was dancing with. He was certainly gorgeous but would Tatjana really cheat on Rick?
    ‘She’s married,’ she says.
    Shona shrugs. ‘When has that ever stopped any one? Who was that on the phone?’
    ‘Nelson.’
    ‘What did he want?’
    ‘A new development in the case.’
    ‘Jesus, Ruth. You’ve even starting to talk like a policeman. I’ll get us a coffee, shall I?’
    Nelson walks slowly back along the cliff path. The scene-of-crime boys are loading Dieter Eckhart’s body into the white mortuary van. Clara and Jack Hastings stand watching. She had screamed when she first saw the body but now she is silent, her head on her father’s shoulder. Although he is smaller than her, there is something infinitely protective about the way he is stroking her hair. Nelson, thinking of his own daughters, feels moved.
    Clough is still talking to the fisherman, who gave his statement with the stolid air of one who regularly finds dead bodies tangled up in his nets. A duty policeman had answered the first 999 call but, as soon as it was clear that a body was involved, Nelson was on his way. Jack Hastings was already there when he arrived, his dogs barking excitedly as the fisherman and the PC hauled the corpse above the tide line. Nelson was wondering whether to summon Clara when she appeared, wearing a coat over her pyjamas. Clough had attempted CPR but soon gave up. As he turned the body onto its side, water spouted from the mouth and the head flopped backwards, eyes rolling. It was then that Clara screamed.
    The deputy pathologist, whom Nelson much prefers to Chris Stephenson, estimated that the body had only been in the water for a couple of hours, but that was time enough for Eckhart’s handsome face to become bloated and obscene. He is dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers and theknife wound, bloodless after immersion in the salty water, is almost directly over the heart. Nelson summons reinforcements to search for the murder weapon but he doubts that it will be found. Eckhart’s body had become wedged between rocks; otherwise it would have been carried away by the tide. The knife could be halfway to Norway by now.
    ‘Come on,’ he says now to Clara and her father. ‘It’s perishing here. Let’s go up to the house.’
    Stella Hastings meets them at the door and guides Clara inside. ‘Come on, darling. We’ll get you dressed and you can have some hot chocolate to warm you up.’
    Nelson stays in the doorway, feeling in the way but knowing that he must come in and, if possible, talk to Clara. Also, he’d rather like some hot chocolate. Jack Hastings takes pity on him.
    ‘Come into the kitchen and we’ll have something to drink,’ he says. ‘I’m sure you need to speak to Clara. She must have been the last person to see the poor fellow alive.’
    Apart from the murderer, that is, thinks Nelson, following Hastings along the stone-flagged corridor. He notes also that the ‘Kraut journalist’ has become ‘the poor fellow’.
    Hastings’ mother, Irene, is, as usual, knitting by the fire. Nelson wonders if she has been told of the morning’s events, but as he sits at the scrubbed oak table she turns to him and says, ‘Was it him? The German boy?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Poor soul,’ says Irene, knitting steadily without looking