The Fossil Beach Murders by Rachel McLean, book 6 in the Dorset Crime series - Chapter 1

PC Douglas Anderson was having a bad day.

He’d been woken at 4am by his daughter Poppy, and despite Naomi getting up and sending him back to bed, he hadn’t found sleep afterwards.

At 6:30 when he’d eventually given up, he’d discovered that the boiler was on the blink and there was no hot water for a shower.

And now, despite the skies being clear when he left home, raindrops the size of gumdrops were splattering his police uniform.

Douglas yawned and tried to shake himself out as he ran from his car to Lyme Regis police station, but it only made water run down the back of his neck.

Ugh.

He didn’t need this. Not now. Not with his brain running on empty for the fifth time in as many days.

“Dougie!”

He looked up to see his partner, PC Wendy Sharman, running towards him. She skidded to a halt in front of him, leaning over to ball her fists on her knees.

“Dougie,” she said. “No time to come inside. There’s been a landslip up at the Spittles.”

“What?” he asked, his brain not yet woken beyond Neanderthal mode.

“A landslip. Didn’t you hear me the first time?” She straightened up and rolled her eyes “You’ve had another broken night, haven’t you?”

He yawned. “Babies.”

She punched his arm. “I did warn you. Come on, I’ll drive.”

He followed her to their panda car, an underpowered Astra that often rebelled against the hill that led from the station to the main road.

“Where was it again?” he asked her.

“The Spittles,” she said. The cliffs north of Lyme Regis.

He rolled his shoulders to relieve the fatigue, and strapped himself in. He watched in a daze as Wendy backed out of their space. On mornings like this, Douglas sometimes wondered whether the laws that banned driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs should be broadened to cover the effects of living with four-month-old babies.

Ten minutes later they were at the Charmouth Road car park.

“Is this the closest we can get?” he asked as Wendy unfastened her seatbelt.

“Sorry, mate,” she told him, “you know it is.”

He did. In the event of a landslip, they approached from below, not above. And even then, they would come at it from a distance. They kept powerful binoculars in the car so they could assess the damage from the beach.

The Coastguard would have already been alerted. They were sometimes able to get a better angle, come in via helicopter.

But everyone in this town – at least everyone who wasn’t a tourist – knew that you never tackled the coastal path after a landslip. Not unless you wanted to start another one.

He knew the drill. Approach from a sensible position, keep your distance, take photographs, assess, and wait for the coastal protection boffins to decide what needed to be done.

The council employed civil engineers, specialists in assessing the impact of a landslip and working out a new route for the coastal path. They’d been planning ground stabilisation measures in this area, but hadn’t started work yet. The engineers were miles away in Dorchester; they wouldn’t be here until lunchtime.

Douglas pulled up his collar as they took the steps down from the car park. The steps were slippery and the wind bit at the exposed skin of his face. Where the steps ended wasn’t all that far away from where they’d begun at the police station, but they needed a car as close as possible.

Wendy looked up at him.

“You on a go-slow?”

“Oi.” He picked up pace, hurrying down after her as fast as he could without slipping. At the bottom, they turned towards the Spittles, the cliffs outside town that were famed both for their dangerous walking conditions and their fossil finds.

Douglas could see it as they approached, a scar on the land. Fresh clay marked the spot where the last two weeks’ rain had weakened the cliff face and finally sent it tumbling down to the sea. He winced, hoping to God nobody had been up there when it happened.

“What time was it reported?” he asked Wendy, panting as they ran.

“Six am.”

He nodded. At 6am he’d been lying awake, about to give up on sleep. Had he heard anything?

No, his cottage was on the other side of Lyme Regis, past the Cobb. He’d slept through landslips in the past.

He scanned the cliffs ahead of them. The nearest houses were behind them, beyond the car park. The nearest with a view of the cliffs were towards Charmouth.

“Who was it that made the call?” he asked.

“Old Samuel Waller, up at Black Ven.”

Douglas nodded. Samuel was eighty-six, but had hearing like a feral cat. He’d reported landslips before.

“He didn’t come out here, did he?”

“Not that I know of,” Wendy replied, raising her voice against the wind.

Good.

The heavy rain was thinning and the sun was doing its best to put in an appearance over the sea to the east. But an ominous gloom hung over the bay.

“We should stop here,” Wendy said.

Douglas almost crashed into her as she ground to a halt. “Sorry, mate.”

“You need to convince that baby to sleep some more.”

“That’s what babies do,” he replied. “Sleep in the day, keep their parents up all night.”

Wendy had the binoculars to her eyes. She peered towards the landslip.

“That’s why you won’t catch me having one,” she said.

Douglas would have said the same thing himself five years ago, when he’d been Wendy’s age. But things changed.

“What can you see?” he asked.

“Give me a minute.” She frowned and scanned the cliffs slowly.

The tide was out, and they were on the beach below the concrete walkway that led out from the centre of Lyme Regis. Here, the beach was a mix of rocks and sand, striations clear from the actions of the tide over millennia. This was the stretch of beach where the tourists came fossiling in the summer, where Mary Anning had famously found her Ichthyosaurs.

Wendy held out a hand to shush him. Douglas hadn’t been speaking.

“What can you see?” he whispered.

“Shush. I don’t know yet.” She took a step forward.

“Thought it wasn’t safe to go any further,” he said.

“Yeah, but…” She lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “Take a look through these. Tell me what you see.”

The binoculars were high-powered, worth a fortune. The first line of defence against the landslips was to see what damage they’d already done.

Douglas looped the strap around his neck and brought the eyepiece up to his face.

“What am I looking for?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” Wendy replied. “I want you to say what you see.”

“Fair enough.”

He scanned the cliff. It didn’t take long to pinpoint the spot where the land had fallen. Slowly, he panned downwards from the clifftop towards the beach. He followed the line that the earth would have taken as it fell towards the sea. He frowned.

He panned up again and stopped halfway.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I know what I think it is,” Wendy told him. “But what do you think it is?”

“It looks like…” He felt his chest clench. “Shit.”

He lowered the binoculars and looked at Wendy.

“Was somebody up there?”

“At six in the morning?” she replied. “It would have been dark.”

“Dog walkers can be hardy types.”

She whistled. “I bloody hope that’s not a dog walker.”

He brought the binoculars back up to his eyes and found the spot.

“There’s two of them,” he said.

“What?” Wendy grabbed the binoculars, yanking his head down with the strap. He unlooped it and let her take them.

“Put it around your neck,” he told her. “We don’t want to drop them.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She looped the strap roughly around her neck and brought the binoculars back up to her eyes.

“You’re right,” she said. “There’s two of them.”

Douglas swallowed. There were two bodies up there. Right in the middle of the landslip.

She looked up at him, her eyes wide. This was Wendy’s first landslip since qualifying. Sleep deprivation or not, he needed to take charge.

“We need to get search and rescue up there,” he said. “Right now.”