THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

security door? For weeks she’d slept with a knife by her bed but then the cleaner had got another job and moved away and she had been safe once more.
    But this man isn’t a suitor, she is sure. He doesn’t love her. There is nothing hopeful or expectant in the way he is standing. He is watching, as if they are playing a board game and he is waiting for her next move. When she moves, he will strike. He doesn’t want to marry her; he wants to kill her.
    Nelson yawns and rubs his eyes. He’s exhausted but he doesn’t want to go to bed just yet. If he leaves it a bit longer Michelle will be asleep. If she is awake, she might be in the mood for sex and, for the first time in his married life, Nelson doesn’t want to sleep with his wife. He doesn’t think he could stand the guilt.
    He sits at the desk, listening to the TV in the next room. Hugh Anselm’s words – pedantic, intelligent, sometimes sad – run on a constant loop through his head. Who had visited Hugh in February, switched off his stairlift and left him to die, struggling with the seatbelt, trying to reach the controls? Who had come to Archie’s room in the night, smothered him and departed without a sound? Who had stabbed Dieter Eckhart and thrown his body into the sea? Was it the same person or three different people?
    We have only told one other person that this film exists. The last of the three of us left alive will leave instructions as to where to find this evidence.
    The last of the three …
    Nelson goes back to Hugh Anselm’s unfinished letters.
Maybe you too have had a letter from Daniel?
    He hears Irene Hastings’ voice, the first time he met her.
Well, there were a few young boys. You could be in the Home Guard
if you were too young or too old to fight. I’m not sure about Hugh or Danny. Archie’s still alive, though …
    Danny. Daniel. The mysterious third man. The man whose surname no-one remembers. The man who has vanished. But Hugh had a letter from him and, knowing Hugh, he will have kept the letter.
    He goes back through the file, his eyes trained for any name beginning with D. Daniel Abse, the MP. Danny de Vito, the actor (Hugh was an unexpected fan of the American sitcom
Taxi
). Daniel Barenboim (admired for his work in the Middle East). But no letters from an ex-comrade called Daniel or Danny.
    Eventually, in desperation, he goes back to the
Broughton and Rockham Parish News.
There, between a recipe for snoek casserole and an exhortation to Dig for Victory, he finds it. December 1940.
TRAGIC DEATH OF BROUGHTON LAD
     
The body washed ashore on the beach at Broughton was yesterday identified as being that of Daniel West, 18, son of Marjorie and the late Lawrence West of the High Street, Broughton. Daniel was an apprentice fitter at Jensen’s Garage and a keen member of the Home Guard. He was hoping to be called up in the New Year. Mr Stephen Jensen, 50, described the boy as ‘a real hard worker’ and offered his condolences to his mother.
    So Daniel West had died, only a few months after the six Germans were murdered. It seems inconceivable that neither Irene nor Archie would remember this fact. But not as inconceivable as the fact that Hugh Anselm apparently had aletter from Daniel some seventy years after he died. It can’t be the same Daniel. Surely?
    He jumps because his phone is ringing. He can’t find it at first because it has fallen into the box of papers. He gets it on the last note of the ring tone.
    Clough.
    ‘You’d better get down here, boss. It’s that girl, Maria. She reckons someone’s trying to kill her.’

CHAPTER 28
     
    It is past midnight when Nelson arrives at Maria’s bedsit. Maria is sitting at the table with Clough beside her. A uniformed PC is checking the area around the house. George is asleep in the double bed. The whole thing feels slightly surreal, not least because their conversation has to be conducted in whispers. The room is dark apart from George’s nightlight, which projects blue stars and moons onto the ceiling. Maria is clearly very upset – she has a mug in front of her and when she raises it to drink, her hand shakes.
    ‘I made her tea,’ says Clough. Rather defensively, Nelson thinks.
    ‘Wonderful. I’ll put you in for a medal.’
    ‘She was hysterical.’
    Maria raises huge, tear-washed eyes to his face. ‘Someone is waiting outside my house. Someone is trying to kill me.’
    ‘All right, Maria. Let’s start at the beginning.’
    Nelson tries to speak softly