Who she was, p.1
Who She Was, page 1
About the Author
Tony Parsons is a bestselling novelist and an award-winning journalist. His books have been published in over forty languages and his multimillion-selling novel Man and Boy won the Book of The Year prize in 2000. Most recently, he created the Max Wolfe crime series. Tony lives in London with his family.
Also by Tony Parsons
Man and Boy
One For My Baby
Man and Wife
The Family Way
Stories We Could Tell
My Favourite Wife
Starting Over
Men from the Boys
Catching the Sun
The Murder Bag (Max Wolfe #1)
The Slaughter Man (Max Wolfe #2)
The Hanging Club (Max Wolfe #3)
Die Last (Max Wolfe #4)
Girl on Fire (Max Wolfe #5)
#taken (Max Wolfe #6)
Your Neighbour’s Wife
The People Next Door
Max Wolfe Digital Shorts
Dead Time
Fresh Blood
Tell Him He’s Dead
Tony Parsons
* * *
WHO SHE WAS
Contents
Part One The Lobster Pot Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Two The Baulking House Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Three The Sleeper Train Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
For Yuriko, who walked the coastal path with me
Two days at home
Eight days at sea
But when he sleeps
He dreams of me.
Anonymous
PART ONE
* * *
The Lobster Pot
1
A bonfire was burning down on the beach.
Somewhere in the night I was dragged from my sleep by the flames on my bedroom wall, or rather by the shadow of flames. I watched them flicker and change shape for a while and when I knew for sure that sleep would not find me again, I got out of my bed to have a look. I was watching the fire on the beach from my bedroom window when Bet Farthing called.
‘Surfers, my lovely,’ Bet said in her soft Cornish burr, and it made me smile.
There was no surfing on our side of the coast. But by surfers, Bet meant folk who were not local. And like Eskimos with snow, in St Jude’s we had multiple names for people who were not local. Emmets, incomers, upcountry folk, outsiders, strangers, second homeowners, tourists, stag parties, moryons (the old Cornish word for ants), rich wankers, and, yes, surfers. Call them what you like, outsiders were the only people who would start a fire down on the beach in the middle of the night. People from outside the county, or more likely their drunk and stoned and overexcited teenage children, enjoying the first rumour of summer, feeling all wild and free so far from their private schools.
‘He’s going down there to sort them out,’ Bet said, meaning her husband Will, and my smile faded, because Will was over seventy now, and this could get messy. ‘I can’t stop the old fool, Tom. He’s already getting his boots on.’
It wasn’t the fire on the beach that Will Farthing and the other locals objected to but the crap that the outsiders so casually left behind. Broken bottles that hurt the dogs and the little kids with their crabbing buckets and nets, the litter that someone else would have to pick up from our small but pristine and beloved beach.
When the hour was late and the Bad Apple Cider was flowing, they brought the thin-skinned belligerence of the city and the suburb with them on their holidays.
They could get aggressive, start showing off for each other, too young and dumb to realise how easily a shouting match can escalate into real violence. They don’t like to be told, as Bet Farthing said. And now that he was getting his boots on, nothing on earth was going to stop Will Farthing from telling them.
‘I’ll go down there with him, Bet,’ I told her. ‘Don’t worry.’
I began pulling on some clothes.
I had a one-bedroom flat above my restaurant, the Lobster Pot. It was one of those semi-secret places that you could drive past and not even notice, perched high above the esplanade. The Lobster Pot was nothing fancy – a restaurant of old wooden tables and day-caught fish and a great view over the water, the inside lit by candles and the deck overlooking the water strung with fairy lights – my idea of a classy touch when I opened ten years ago. The menu mattered to me, and our customers usually came back for more, and that was what the business was built on. But the Lobster Pot wasn’t one of those Cornish restaurants – and there are plenty of them – that get raved about by the outside world. I had been in business for ten years and had yet to see my first restaurant critic. And that was fine by me. The Lobster Pot wasn’t much but it was good, and it was mine, and owning it was a dream that came true.
I came down the stairs from the flat, went out to the sea-view deck of the restaurant at the back and down some steep wooden steps and onto the esplanade, smelling the salt of the sea and all the things that live in it. The water hissed and moaned and moved in the night.
Bet and Will’s cottage was on the other side of St Jude’s, our fishing village, directly above the small beach where the fire was burning. But even the far side of St Jude’s was only a short walk away.
I went down the esplanade, parallel to the water, a street so narrow that a passing car meant pedestrians had to flatten themselves against the wall of the white stone fishermen’s cottages, many of them second homes or rentals now, fishermen’s cottages that had not seen an actual fisherman since the last century. Will Farthing was close to the last of the line.
At the end of the esplanade, the street started winding steeply down towards the Platt, which is what locals called the harbour.
It was April now but still felt out of season as I passed the closed signs of the surf shop, the fudge shop and the ice-cream shop.
But the six months of Sundays were ending soon, and I passed the places that were open all year round. The bakery – Pasty Master – and the pub, the Rabbit Hole, with its black-and-white bunting, the colours of the flag of our Cornish nation, the interior warmly glowing like a honey-coloured cave, and the church, the boathouse, the icehouse where the catch was stored when it could not be sold immediately, and the Loft – which wasn’t a loft at all, but the quayside shack where the dwindling tribe of St Jude’s fishermen kept all their kit.
I went up what we called the downalongs – the cobbled alleyways and streets that formed the old town, hardly wide enough for a man to pass, let alone a car, where generations of tin miners and their families had lived and died, but not for a hundred years or so – and then down to the end of Pudding Bag Lane, where my friends the Farthings lived.
Bet and Will’s front door was open, and Will was in the hall, sitting on the bottom step of the staircase, struggling into his boots, Bet watching him with her arms folded in weary marital disapproval.
Will and Bet Farthing were both large people, tall, hard and hefty, too big for the small cottage where they had spent their entire married life, and they filled the hallway. An old black Lab stared up at them with wonder at all this activity in the middle of the night. Will was a pot fisherman, catching lobster and crab for as much of the year as he could and then mackerel with hook and line when their winter schools came and the lobsters were gone. He had been doing it for more than fifty years and it was starting to wear him out. He was breathing heavily as he pulled his boots on.
Bet glanced at me, both of us glad that I was going down there with him.
‘I don’t know why we can’t just get the law on ’em,’ Bet was saying. ‘I don’t see why you have to go down there. Bloody Clint Eastwood here, he is.’
‘Skipper’s not always right,’ Will said, standing up, winking at me. ‘But he’s always skipper.’
‘And sometimes skipper’s a silly old fool,’ Bet said.
Will looked at me with a sly, snaggle-toothed grin, and winked, as if we were going to have some fun sorting out these surfers. There was a lifetime of weather etched on his smiling face. He clapped his hands. His silver hair was cropped close, and it gave him the look of an elderly skinhead, always up for some mischief.
Will and I walked down a short narrow street to the far end of the quay and then down a slope to the beach.
But there were no surfers around the fire.
There was only her.
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR GRAVES: The jewel in Cornwall’s crown, they call St Jude’s. A picturesque fishing village, they call it. I went crabbing there on that little beach when I was a kid.
And so it just goes to show, doesn’t it?
Murder can happen anywhere.
2
She sat cross-legged by the fire, warming herself on this freezing night, a hoodie pulled over her face, giving her the look of a character from Tolkien, or the lady from the Scottish Widows commercial.
Will and I stood at a respectful distance.
I cleared my throat.
‘We saw the fire,’ I said.
‘Thought you was surfers,’ Will said, with an embarrassed chuckle.
She looked up quickly, staring at us for a moment through the flames.
‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you,’ she said, her accent what my mother would have called ‘well-spoken’. Not quite posh, dialled down from the old-school cut glass, but near enough to read the evening news. There was also a hint of the north in there somewhere, the trace of an earlier accent, and a poorer place, that she had discarded somewhere along the way.
Will and I stood there on the other side of the fire, abashed and surprised.
The sea crashed against distant rocks, sighed in the night, withdrew. She rubbed at her hair inside the hoodie with her hand and I saw it looked wet.
I stared out into the roaring blackness.
She hadn’t actually been swimming, had she?
Will looked at me for a lead, but I hesitated, still not understanding who she was or what she was doing here or why she had started a fire on our beach. She wasn’t homeless. She wasn’t a camper wandering the coastal path.
‘I have to wait until morning,’ she said. ‘For the estate agent? He’s bringing the keys. It was so cold in the car. And it was such a long drive.’ She stretched her arms above her head.
It was true. St Jude’s was a long drive from anywhere.
Will understood what was happening before I did.
‘Grandma Jo’s place,’ he said. ‘You’re waiting for the keys to Grandma Jo’s place.’
Grandma Jo had been one of those much-loved elderly relatives who wasn’t really anyone’s elderly relative. Her home was – had been for a lifetime – a small cream-and-blue cottage that overlooked the harbour.
I remembered Grandma Jo’s funeral at the end of last summer, the hearse edging through the narrow, crowded streets, the tourists with their ice creams and takeaway pasties pressing themselves against the walls of the esplanade, gawping at the mourners, and our tears. The cream-and-blue cottage had been empty since then.
Grandma Jo had moved into the cottage as a young bride half a century ago, when the fishermen’s dwellings were all still full of men who really did fish for a living. She had never had children but had doted on the sons and daughters of her neighbours. After the death of her husband, decades ago, Grandma Jo had lived alone. I stared up into the blackness above the beach. In the daytime, you would be able to see her cream-and-blue cottage from here.
There was luggage scattered around the bonfire. Not much. A couple of suitcases, some smaller bags.
‘You’re moving in,’ I said, aware of just how lumbering and awkward I must seem to her.
‘Second home?’ Will said politely, making conversation. ‘Holiday place, like?’
She shook her head, and a stray tendril of long damp hair slipped from under the hoodie, and I didn’t know it then, because you could not tell by the light of the fire and the thin sliver of moon, but her hair was dark red, like copper.
She tucked the rogue tendril of hair behind her ear.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s my new home. I’ve got a year’s lease.’
Will and I stared at each other, and I could tell he felt it too.
Like we were the ones who were intruding.
Will lifted his chin to sea.
‘Tide’s coming in,’ he pointed out.
The woman followed his gaze. Will cleared his throat.
‘You might want to move yourself before the estate agent chap gets here,’ he told her. ‘Beach will be gone by then, it will.’
She briefly nodded, and we mumbled our goodnights, and she smiled beneath her hoodie, warming her hands on the fire. It was made up of wood with stripy scraps of blue-and-white canvas attached, clinging like the little flags of some defeated army. I realised it was the tattered remains of a deckchair she was burning.
That was – odd. That was – not quite right. Who burns a deckchair?
Will and I mumbled our farewell, turned away, going back up the slope to the village, and the night closed around her.
‘Don’t understand the tides, do they?’ Will said, not unkindly. ‘Townies, I mean.’
Townies. That was another one of our words for outsiders. Townies. Ten years ago – another lifetime – I had been a townie in St Jude’s.
And it was true. Will was right.
Townies did not understand the way the sea ebbed and flowed, as regular as sunlight and moonlight. There were two high tides and two low tides every day, and they didn’t get it, all those townies.
The moon pulls the sea.
And the sea can do nothing to resist.
There was a little Japanese sports car parked outside Will and Bet’s cottage, its hot engine still clicking and ticking from a fast drive back from the bright lights of Padstow.
Charlie – Bet and Will’s grown-up son – was in the kitchen, dressed for a night out, slightly dishevelled, reeking of craft beer and cologne. Charlie Farthing was a good-looking young man around thirty, touchingly self-conscious about his thinning fair hair, big like Will and Bet but with a polish about him which he had brought back from university. We were old friends – in fact, Charlie had been my first friend, and my best friend, when I came to St Jude’s ten years ago with wild dreams about opening a restaurant called the Lobster Pot, and Charlie was a student on his long summer holiday. I must have been around the age he was now. Charlie had been the only local who seemed genuinely interested in someone who had left his life in the city to open a restaurant in St Jude’s. I realised later that our friendship was based on a kind of benign envy. I envied Charlie Farthing’s deep, lifelong roots in the place I had fallen in love with, while he envied me for what he imagined was the glamorous urban life that I had left behind. For Charlie’s dreams were all of getting out.
He smiled at me now as his father frowned at him.
‘No work in the morning then?’ Will said.
Charlie leaned against the table. He was a little tipsy. ‘Late start tomorrow, Dad.’
‘Five generations of fishermen,’ Will muttered, ‘to produce a tour guide.’
Charlie grinned at me, rolled his eyes, flashed his even white teeth. He had a glamorous sheen about him that was wasted in St Jude’s.
Bet was looking at her husband, waiting for an update on the crazy bonfire-starting surfers.
‘It’s … a maid,’ Will said, dumbfounded.
‘A woman?’
Will nodded. ‘Aye, a maid. A girl. A woman. All by herself.’
‘Not surfers then?’
‘No.’
Bet stared at the kitchen window. ‘A woman, you say?’
‘Renting Grandma Jo’s place, she reckons,’ Will said, as if there was an element of doubt. ‘Waiting for the estate agent chap to bring the keys first thing.’
We all looked towards the fire on the beach.
‘And you pair of doughnuts just left her out there? A woman all alone in the middle of the night on our beach, and you left her there?’ Bet was looking from her husband to me and back again, furious with us both. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
She bustled out of the house, not shutting the front door behind her. The black Lab ambled after her. That’s the other thing about these people and this place. Despite all the names we have for outsiders, and all the things we say, and all the resentments we nurture, the locals are kind. They truly are. If you can pierce the thin skin of hostility, the veneer of indifference and hard shell of commercial cynicism, then you will discover a world of kindness among the people of Cornwall like you have never known.
