THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

Nine times out of ten police work is about simple stuff. It was a carnumber-plate that caught the Yorkshire Ripper, tax evasion that caught Al Capone. Never skimp on routine procedure.’ Mind you, he can’t see Cloughie and co being tempted to be too intellectual.
    Katie’s a grand little kid though. He’d forgotten how much fun they are at that age. Michelle always used to tell him off for making the girls too excited at bedtime. He’d done the bear routine with them too, the old ones are the best. He remembers Laura, hysterical with laughter, falling off the bed and crying; Rebecca screaming when he’d jumped out at her wearing a gorilla mask. Maybe Michelle had a point. He could see that it must have been irritating, stuck at home with young children, having to do all the discipline and boring bits, then having someone come home at bedtime pretending to be a bear. But, then again, he had to have
some
fun with them. In the early years he’d hardly seen his daughters during daylight hours. It’ll be no different with Katie, he thinks. Worse because she won’t even know who he is. He’ll just be some lunatic stranger with funny voices and ingratiating presents. Cathbad will be more of a presence in her life than him. He grinds the gears furiously.
    Michelle isn’t home but, amazingly, Rebecca is. Even more amazingly, she’s doing her homework. Admittedly, she’s listening to her iPod, texting her friends and eating a cheese sandwich but she’s also writing an essay entitled ‘Coastal Erosion and its impact on Rural Communities’.
    ‘What’s this about, love?’ he asks, dropping a kiss on her head.
    ‘It’s for environmental science. It’s about all these peoplewho’re, like, getting really pissed off because their villages are disappearing.’
    Nelson thinks of Jack Hastings who, by all accounts, is getting more than pissed off because Sea’s End House is disappearing. Whitcliffe has shown him a surveyor’s report condemning the house. Nelson thinks of the back garden, those few yards and then that vertiginous drop onto the rocks below. He tries to imagine how it would have been – a lawn, mown in those fancy stripes, roses, a sundial, Buster and Irene lounging in their deckchairs, drinking dry martinis, looking out over the cove. Will Jack be forced to leave the house his father built? He’ll be pissed off then, all right. Could the strain of losing his house be enough to turn Jack Hastings into a killer?
    As usual, Rebecca is flipping between several internet sites, looking for material. She’s expert at cutting and pasting. Nelson hopes this will be enough for the A-Level examiners. She’s too quick for him though, scanning to and fro, highlighting, dropping in text files, finding clip art—
    ‘Hang on a second!’
    ‘What?’ She pauses in mid click.
    ‘That last site. Something about the war.’
    ‘Oh … do you mean ilovehistory.com?’
    ‘Possibly. Can you go back?’
    Obligingly, Rebecca finds the page and makes it large enough to be seen by his decrepit eyes.
    The coastal defence
, he reads,
was to include fifty tons of fuel, to be blown up in the shallow waters of the North Sea. This operation drew on fire ships used by Drake against the Armada …
    He goes into the kitchen to ring Ruth, switching on the kettle as he does so. She takes a while to answer and sounds hassled. He can hear Katie crying in the background.
    ‘Ruth. Did you get the results back from the material? That you found in the barrel.’
    ‘Yes. I sent you a report.’
    ‘Tell me again.’
    ‘It was gun cotton. Cotton dowsed in nitric and sulphuric acid. The material’s immersed in the acid and then dried. Makes it extremely flammable.’
    ‘I bet.’
    ‘Apparently when it’s lit it produces an almighty blast. Jules Verne uses it in one of his books to power a space rocket.’
    ‘And what was in the other barrels?’
    ‘A mix of adhesive tar, lime and petrol.’
    The beach at Broughton Sea’s End, thinks Nelson, as he drinks his tea, was one massive depth charge. The Home Guard had prepared a welcome for possible German invaders that would have blasted them into space. Was that the work of Ernst, the clever scientist? A German who had lived most of his life in Broughton Sea’s End. A German determined to do all he could to defeat the Nazis. Maybe he was a German Jew … Nelson knows that all sorts of people were interned at the start of the war – old people, youngsters, Jews, communists –