Gone. No goodbye then, Poole thinks.
“So?” he asks as Graceford rejoins him.
“So,” she answers flatly, and changes the subject. “What do you think about the man on the beach?” She avoids Poole’s gaze, casting her own back toward the sea path.
At best she’s trying to keep things professional, at worst sparing his feelings.
He tries again. “What did she say?” He gestures out in the direction of the long-gone car.
Graceford clears her throat, looks away again. If she’s honest with herself, the nuances of other people’s relationships have never really been her strong suit. But she understands that she is expected, in this type of situation, to give some kind of response to Chris’s question. She’s supposed to have some kind of opinion. Reluctantly, she obliges.
“She said, ‘Sure, no problem, Officer.’ I mean, what else is she going to say to me? I’m a police officer. And she’s breaking the law.”
Officer Poole looks down at the loose gravel of the car park and sees his pale feet blueing in the January air. Shit.
“They’ve been warned, Chris,” Graceford continues. “No one at the station cares if she’s your wife, and I don’t either. She can’t keep doing it, Chris, she’s wasting police time.” Graceford shifts uncomfortably. She can’t tell if she’s said too much; Poole’s still staring down at the ground. “They’re breaking the law and they keep doing it.”
Poole raises his head. “I know, Beth! I know. Believe me, I know that. But I’ve said to her, you’ve heard me say to her! Haven’t you?”
Beth Graceford nods and looks away.
Poole knows that means the conversation is over.
He clears his throat and pulls himself together.
“Okay. Okay! Right,” he says, changing his tone, “let’s get going, shall we? That beach isn’t going to search itself. Is that spare uniform still in the boot of the patrol car?”
Graceford nods. “Neil’s spare uniform? Yeah, course it is.”
A mischievous smile plays across Chris’s face. “Remind me why he kept it there?” he asks as, barefoot, he follows Graceford gingerly across the gravel.
“You know this, Chris. In case someone vomited on him.” She intones knowing full well where this line of inquiry is heading. She pops open the hatchback.
Graceford had previously been partnered with Sergeant Neil Jarvis for the first five months of her posting on the Norfolk coast.
Chris’s grin broadens. “In case someone vomited on him! That happen a lot, did it? Enough to warrant the extra uniform?”
“Yeah, it did actually, Chris. It happened to Neil an above-average amount of times. So, yeah, it did warrant the extra uniform,” Graceford says with the weary authority of a recurrent eyewitness.
“Okay, then.” Poole nods mock-sagely. “Fair enough in that case, I suppose.”
She rummages around in the back of the car. “Not sure why he left it, though. Maybe ’cause of all the vomit that’s been on it? Size nine boot okay?”
“Humph, guess they’ll have to be.” Chris takes the boots and, leaning against the patrol car to brush the gravel from his feet, he slides his sockless feet into their cold leather. “I suppose we should go look for this guy’s stuff then. What do you reckon his story is? Homeless? Attempted suicide?”
“Nah, neither, I don’t think. He didn’t look homeless.”
Chris nods. “No, he didn’t.” Chris wouldn’t ever say it out loud, but he’d been surprised, the guy had been good-looking—well, all-right-looking, for a bloke. Not that good-looking guys didn’t try to commit suicide too, he supposed.
Graceford locks the car. “It all had a bit of a weird vibe, don’t you think? I don’t know. Anyway, let’s see what we can find.” She sighs. It’s a big stretch of beach. “I’ll call it in and you make a start, Chris.”
Chris climbs to the crest of the dune and the wide flat expanse of Holkham Beach spreads into view. It’s even windier up here. Still, he can hear the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears from the exertion. Inside his new boots his toes are reluctantly coming back to life.
He can see right out to the offshore wind farm a mile out to sea, the monolithic forest of turbine arms rotating with the weight of the North Sea wind. He closes his eyes and sucks in a deep breath, then lets it out.
Best make a start, he decides. He opens his eyes and scans the landscape, looking for anything the man might have left behind. A pile of warm clothes, a bag.
But there isn’t anything. Nothing but outcrops of seaweed littering the beach, dark clumps of debris washed to shore. It’s hard to pick out details from this distance; it’s possible any one of them could be clothes, perhaps, shoes, a rucksack containing a wallet or a phone or keys.
