MAXWELL'S POINT a thrilling murder mystery with plenty of twists (Schoolmaster Murder Mysteries Book 12) by M.J. Trow

Author:M.J. Trow [Trow, M.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JOFFE BOOKS crime thrillers and mysteries
Published: 2024-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

There was still a crowd beyond the fluttering tape by the time the moon came out. They were mostly holiday-makers, grockles the local called them, who would have something a bit different to write about on their postcards to granny. ‘It ain’t half hot, Gran, and we all looked at a cadaver today.’

One who stood there, by the cordon where the police had placed them, was watching events more closely than the rest. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He pulled his hood further over his head as the night on the beach gradually became more chill.

For the locals, it was becoming business as usual in a grim sort of way. The SOCO team looked like a bad Sci-Fi Doomsday scenario from a B-movie in the Fifties, wandering the beach in their white, translucent suits, hooded and masked as if an outbreak of Ebola had just occurred.

‘Have you any idea, guv, how much evidence there is on this bloody beach?’ It had been welling up inside Geoff Hare for some time. He’d been here nearly three hours, not suited up like the others, but receiving their reports on a minute-by-minute basis. Bottles, cans, nappies, broken bits of this and that were carefully collected, labelled, photographed, stashed in black bags in the back of patrol cars and vans. Cynics might see this as a particularly vicious ploy by some environmentalist group to enforce a carrying out of beach clearance.

Yes, in answer to Hare’s question, DCI Hall had a very good idea. He’d seen it all being collected too and this was not his first body on a beach. The irony was, he knew deep down, that this was all irrelevant. Jim Astley had got it right, as he usually did. Jim Astley had gone home now, muttering about his bedtime and his sciatica, as though the two were somehow linked.

Hall didn’t answer his sergeant but wandered back into the canvas erected over the corpse. The arc lights were still on, throwing the body into sharp relief. He was a slightly built man; Astley reckoned in his late thirties. His head, or what was left of it, had a shock of tumbling blond hair à la the early Hugh Grant and his eyes were grey. There was a mass of blood matted into the hair across the forehead and there was no doubt in the minds of either the policeman or the pathologist that the man had fallen from a great height. The presumption was that that height was the cliffs towering above the beach at Dead Man’s Point. It was the fall that killed him, pulverising the left side of his face and driving the jagged stones into his skull.

Henry Hall nodded to the SOCO boys waiting for orders. ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘Bag this one if you’ve done. That’s tomorrow’s little task for Dr Astley.’

The only question was, Hall was thinking as he went outside, grateful for the cool air of the beach, did you

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