Because of the difficulty of retrieving a badly injured person from the foreshore, the coastguards dispatched a Search and Rescue helicopter from Portland to winch her off. Meanwhile, PC Nick Ingram, diverted from a burglary investigation, approached via the track that skirted the inappropriately named West Hill on the eastern side of Chapman's Pool. He had had to use bolt cutters to slice through the chain on the gate at Hill Bottom, and as he abandoned his Range Rover on the hard standing beside the fishermen's boat sheds, he was hoping fervently that rubberneckers wouldn't grab the opportunity to follow him. He was in no mood to marshal petulant sightseers.
The only access from the boat sheds to the beach where the woman lay was by the same route the boys had taken-on foot around the bay, followed by a scramble over the rocks at Egmont Point. To a man in uniform, it was a hot and sweaty business, and Nick Ingram, who stood over six feet four inches and weighed upward of 240 pounds, was drenched by the time he reached the body. He bent forward, hands on knees, to recover his breath, listening to the deafening sound of the approaching SAR helicopter and feeling its wind on his damp shirt. He thought it a hideous intrusion into what was obviously a place of death. Despite the heat of the sun, the woman's skin was cold to the touch, and her widely staring eyes had begun to film. He was struck by how tiny she seemed, lying alone at the bottom of the cliff, and how sad her miniature hand looked waving in the spume.
Her nudity surprised him, the more so when it required only the briefest of glances about the beach to reveal a complete absence of towels, clothes, footwear, or possessions. He noticed bruising on her arms, neck, and chest, but it was more consistent with being tumbled over rocks on an incoming tide, he thought, than with a dive off a clifftop. He stooped again over the body, looking for anything that would indicate how it had got there, then retreated rapidly as the descending stretcher spiraled dangerously close to his head.
The noise of the helicopter and the amplified voice of the winch operator calling instructions to the man below had attracted sightseers. The party of hikers gathered on the clifftop to watch the excitement, while the yachtsmen in Chapman's Pool motored out of the bay in their dinghies to do the same. A spirit of revelry was abroad because everyone assumed the rescue wouldn't have happened unless the woman was still alive, and a small cheer went up as the stretcher rose in the air. Most thought she'd fallen from the cliff; a few thought she might have floated out of Chapman's Pool on an inflatable airbed and got into difficulties. No one guessed she'd been murdered.
Except, perhaps, Nick Ingram, who transferred the tiny, stiffening body to the stretcher and felt a dreadful anger burn inside him because Death had stolen a pretty woman's dignity. As always, the victory belonged to the thief and not to the victim.
As requested by the nine-nine-nine operator, Steven Harding shepherded the boys down the hill to the police car, which was parked beside the boat sheds, where they waited with varying degrees of patience until its occupant returned. The brothers, who had sunk into an exhausted silence after their mad dash around Chapman's Pool, wanted to be gone, but they were intimidated by their companion, a twenty-four-year-old actor, who took his responsibilities in loco parentis seriously.
He kept a watchful eye on his uncommunicative charges (too shocked to speak, he thought) while trying to cheer them up with a running commentary of what he could see of the rescue. He peppered his conversation with expressions like: "You're a couple of heroes..." "Your mum's going to be really proud of you..." "She's a lucky lady to have two such sensible sons..." But it wasn't until the helicopter flew toward Poole and he turned to them with a smile of encouragement, saying: "There you are, you can stop worrying now. Mum's in safe hands," that they realized his mistake. It hadn't occurred to either of them that what appeared to be general remarks about their own mother applied specifically to "the lady on the beach."
"She's not our mum," said Paul, dully.
"Our mum's going to be really angry," supplied Danny in his piping treble, emboldened by his brother's willingness to abandon the prolonged silence. "She said if we were late for lunch she'd make us eat bread and water for a week." (He was an inventive child.) "She's going to be even angrier when I tell her it's because Paul wanted to look at a nudie."
"Shut up," said his brother.
"And he made me climb the cliff so he could get a better look. Dad's going to kill him for ruining the binoculars."
"Shut up."
"Yeah, well, it's all your fault. You shouldn't have dropped them. Penis-brain!" Danny added snidely, in the safe knowledge that their companion would protect him.
Harding watched tears of humiliation gather in the older boy's eyes. It didn't take much reading of the references to "nudie," "better look," "binoculars," and "penis-brain" to come up with a close approximation of the facts. "I hope she was worth it," he said matter-of-factly. "The first naked woman I ever saw was so old and ugly, it was three years before I wanted to look at another one. She lived in the house next to us, and she was as fat and wrinkled as an elephant."
"What was the next one like?" asked Danny with the sequential logic of a ten-year-old.
Harding exchanged a glance with the elder brother. "She had nice tits," he told Paul with a wink.
"So did this one," said Danny obligingly.
"Except she was dead," said his brother.
"She probably wasn't, you know. It's not always easy to tell when someone's dead."
"She was," said Paul despondently. "Me and Danny went down to get the binoculars back." He unraveled his bundled T-shirt to reveal the badly scratched casing of a pair of Zeiss binoculars. "I-well, I checked to make sure. I think she drowned and got left there by the tide." He fell into an unhappy silence again.
"He was going to give her mouth-to-mouth," said Danny, "but her eyes were nasty, so he didn't."
Harding cast another glance in the older brother's direction, this time sympathetic. "The police will need to identify her," he said matter-of-factly, "so they'll probably ask you to describe her." He ruffled Danny's hair. "It might be better not to mention nasty eyes or nice tits when you do it."
Danny pulled away. "I won't."
The man nodded. "Good boy." He took the binoculars from Paul and examined the lenses carefully before pointing them at the Beneteau in Chapman's Pool. "Did you recognize her?" he asked.
"No," said Paul uncomfortably.
"Was she an old lady?"
"No."
"Pretty?"
Paul wriggled his shoulders. "I guess so."
"Not fat then?"
"No. She was very little, and she had blond hair."
Harding brought the yacht into sharp focus. "They're built like tanks, these things," he murmured, traversing the sights across the bay. "Okay, the bodywork's a bit scratched, but there's nothing wrong with the lenses. Your dad won't be that angry."
Maggie Jenner would never have become involved if Bertie had responded to her whistle, but like all dogs he was deaf when he wanted to be. She had dismounted when the noise of the helicopter alarmed the horse, and natural curiosity had led her to walk him on down the hill while the rescue was under way. The three of them rounded the boat sheds together, and Bertie, overexcited by all the confusion, made a beeline for Paul Spender's crotch, shoving his nose against the boy's shorts and breathing in with hearty enthusiasm.
Maggie whistled, and was ignored. "Bertie!" she called. "Come here, boy'."