The Lifeboat House at Old Hunstanton stood on a track leading to the sands, a café opposite, with tables outside. Shaw had a picture of the landing taken in 1920 – a Model-T Ford parked outside, ladies in small hats and knee-length skirts running barefoot in the sand.
The maroon had brought the usual crowd, holiday-makers keen to see some drama on an otherwise dull, hot afternoon. The RNLI shore crew was already marking out a path for the Flyer down to the sea, a distant smudge of blue over miles of dry sand. Shaw got his suit on, his helmet and a lightweight windcheater, and checked the radio link with the HM Coast Guard at Hunstanton. They ran up the doors on the new boathouse, and the hovercraft lay within, the skirt deflated, so that it sat like a cat in a basket. Shaw got in the pilot’s seat, fired up the two diesel engines, and felt the craft rise, swaying slightly, the sound a distant roar through the helmet buffers.
Edging Flyer out through the doors, Shaw flipped down the visor on the helmet as the sand began to fly, a cloud drifting, so that when he got clear of the old beach huts he couldn’t see his house along the beach. They crossed the tidal sands in a cloud of sand and noise, Shaw juggling the joystick to balance the ailerons behind the two spinning propellers which drove the Flyer forward. The sea, when they reached it, was like liquid mercury, an unruffled expanse which looked oily, almost syrupy. Shaw swung her east, accelerated to top speed at 30 knots, and hugged the coast. Onshore he saw a pair of horses skittering near Thornham as the engine noise hit them. Off Brancaster they cut through a sailing race, scattering twelve-footers, as Shaw took a short cut across the sands off Scolt Head.
Ahead he saw the incoming haar, a wall of phlegm-white mist, as unbroken as the white cliffs of Dover. They’d ride into it, settle her on dry sand, and try to find the yacht on foot.
Shaw slowed to 10 knots as Flyer slipped out of the Flyer in a loop, tracing the edge of a bar of sand dried golden before the mist had swept landward. Then he cut the engines, the skirt sank, and they landed with a kiss.
One crewman took the navigator’s seat and monitored the radio while the rest climbed over the skirt. A turning halogen beacon was activated on the cabin roof, the beam cutting into the mist, sweeping around them like a lighthouse beam.
Driscoll was out on the sand last. ‘Right. Let’s do north, south, east, west. Don’t lose sight of the light. Take a hailer – ping it if you see her. You OK?’
Valentine was watching the water form a moat round his black slip-ons. ‘Sure.’
‘That way,’ said Driscoll, pointing north. ‘There’s a compass on the cuff of the jacket.’
Valentine looked at the little needle, then set out. Shaw went east, encountering only the skeleton of a conger eel in the first fifty yards. He stopped, looking down at the plastic cartilage, then back at the distant light. He walked another fifty, his eyes beginning to lose any sense of proportion or relative distance. It was like being lost in a giant sauna.
The single electronic ping, when it came, was eerie, echoing round him. He ran back to the hovercraft and then saw the others heading north, along Valentine’s trail. Monkey Business was blindingly white. A light shone from one of the cabin windows on the first deck. Somewhere they could hear the crackle of a radio on an open frequency.
Driscoll threw a weighted rope ladder up and over the deck rail so that it hung down uninvitingly. Shaw climbed first, then held it still for Valentine, who fought to hold on as it corkscrewed under him. The deck was clean, sluiced, spotless; the brass fittings managing a dull gleam despite the gloom.
‘Dr Peploe?’ Shaw felt an idiot shouting, and was unnerved by the echo bouncing back off the impenetrable fret. The first deck was largely enclosed in smoked brown glass. He walked to a glass door, tried to slide it across, but it was locked. He pressed his eye to the glass but could see nothing within except a fly on the inside: a bluebottle, then another.
They climbed to the second deck up a teak staircase with brass runners. Half of this deck was open at the sides and housed the cockpit. It looked like the flight deck of a 747: a sonar pattern in vivid green on black, the radio signal mapped out in decibel bars.
Red warning lights flashed on the engine monitor display.
There was a hatch down into the deck below which opened with an expensive click. Four carpeted steps led
A central corridor led aft from the saloon, teak doors on either side, one into a dining room, another into a Jacuzzi. Another at the far end led to the master bedroom, the bed itself filling most of the cabin, the ceiling a single mirror. In the corner was a spiral staircase leading up to a perspex hatch marked SOLARIUM. A small electric illuminated sign read IN USE.
Shaw climbed until he could get his shoulder up against the hatch. Then he paused. There was a sound, and he looked up through the perspex. Bluebottles, hundreds, wheeling in a demented reel, the iridescent colours making them look like creeping jewels.
Shaw took a breath, pushed the hatch, and the hinges creaked. He climbed another step, bending at the waist, using his body as a lever. Another step, then all his strength applied to unfurl his body. He felt the air-pressure pop in his ears. Then he felt the flies, pouring past him, thudding off his skin in tiny percussions, probing his eyes, his nose, his lips. Forcing his legs to climb, he stumbled into the solarium. The roof was a tinted green-glass bubble, dotted with flies, the hum of the insects amplified in the bowl of the room.
Suspended in a semi-circle were four sun lamps, like operating-theatre lights, the panels emitting a soft cherry-red glow.
The flies, spooked by the open hatch, were beginning to return to their meal, massing in the eye sockets and around the nose. Sweat sprang from Shaw’s skin. He walked to the wall where a thermometer hung: 49°C, 110°F. The surgeon’s skin had burnt on the upper surfaces of the knees and chest – a red burn, black at the edges.
He heard Valentine gagging below. Shaw pulled up the windcheater so that it covered his mouth and nose, zipping it closed.
When had he last seen Peploe? Twenty-four hours ago. If he’d come across the corpse at a crime scene in the open air he’d have guessed it had lain there a week, maybe more. In the oven-like solarium, under the tanning lamps, Gavin Peploe’s body was already in an advanced stage of decomposition.
He heard Valentine’s footsteps on the short staircase. He appeared, holding a grey handkerchief to his mouth.
They stood either side of the corpse. A glass, empty, was on the bedside table beside an iPod and a mobile phone, the concentric rings edged down the side of the beaker showing that the water had evaporated by degrees.
Peploe lay flat, his head supported by a velour inflatable pillow. There was a thin patina of vomit on his lips and chest. The eyes were open, crowded with flies. Shaw tried to close the eyelids, brushing the insects aside.
Shaw felt dizzy in the heat, sick at the sight of such a vibrant, churning death. But he made himself take an inventory of the scene, so that he saw what was in Peploe’s right hand. The fingers had come open so that the object they held had almost dropped free onto the sunbed. It was a plastic sweet dispenser in the shape of a dragon – a cylinder in which candy could be stored, then flipped up into the dragon’s mouth, then knocked out like Tic-Tac mints. It was Play-Doh yellow, with red and blue stripes. The dragon’s mouth was open where the next sweet should be, but they could see that instead of a sweet there was a pill – blue, oval, resting on the plastic pink tongue, like an offering.