‘We’ve got nothing, lads, and I’m not sure where we go from here. Any suggestions?’
Lewis Lewis scratched his head, then pulled out a packet of Players Navy Cut and offered them around. ‘We’ve never actually seen where she went into the sea and where the body was found, have we?’
Two of his colleagues took a cigarette, Evans and the photographer declining. When they had lit up, the senior detective constable queried what could be gained.
‘It’s almost a couple of weeks now, and we’ve had some rain and plenty of wind. What’s going to be left?’
Ben Evans thought for a moment, then whistled and beckoned to the uniformed man, who had been standing guard at the gate into the road. When he came up the path, Evans asked him if he was the one who had answered the call of the fisherman who had found the body.
‘Yes, sir – and I was there when the coastguards hauled her ashore.’
‘What about the place where she went swimming? Have you been down there since?’
The PC, a middle-aged man nearing retirement, nodded.
‘I was the one who found her dressing-gown thing, behind a gorse bush above the rocks.’
‘Can you show us both those places, Constable? We may as well have a look now we’re here.’
They trooped off behind the officer, who went a few yards along the track to the right, then turned down between stunted bushes and across to the top of the cliff.
Here a wide, shallow amphitheatre sloped steeply down to the rocks below, lined with coarse grass and patches of gorse. There was a narrow, ankle-twisting path going down to the sea, marked by muddy earth and outcropping stones.
The PC set off, followed more cautiously by the others and eventually they reached a band of flatter grass immediately above the rocky gullies, in which grey water surged and sucked with the swell.
‘Do people swim in that?’ said Evans, pointing down to the water, ten feet below.
‘Yes, plenty of them, especially at the weekends and in better weather than this.’ The constable pointed up at the low clouds from which an intermittent drizzle came down.
‘And this is where Mrs Prentice must have gone in?’ asked Lewis.
The uniformed man pointed to a nearby gorse bush, where a few bright yellow flowers resisted the wind and salt. ‘That’s where I found her clothing, sir. One of these thick white towelling jobs, with a tie-belt, like you get in Turkish baths on the films. There was a blue bath-towel as well.’
‘What about shoes?’ asked the photographer. ‘She’d hardly have come down that flaming path we just used in her bare feet?’
The constable shook his head. ‘No shoes, nothing but that dressing gown and towel.’
Ben Evans looked at Lewis.
‘That’s a bit odd, unless she was one of these “back to nature” folks and despised shoes.’
‘She may have some sort of sandals or rubber shoes and kept them on until she got down on the rocks,’ explained the PC. ‘I’ve seen a lot of people with those, it saves the feet until they’re right at the water’s edge.’
He pointed down at the grey rocks that formed the walls of the gullies. ‘They get right down there, then jump or clamber down into the water. They say it’s more fun than just walking in off a sandy beach, though at low tide, there’s a little stretch of sand exposed here.’
‘So where are the shoes now?’ demanded one of the search team.
‘Well they weren’t there when I came down to find the clothes,’ retaliated the constable. ‘But that was a day later, they could have been washed off by a big wave or blown off by the wind.’
The superintendent had a few photos taken of the site, then they clambered back up to the top of the cliffs. Once on the track to the houses, Ben Evans decided to cover all his bases and look at the place where the body was recovered.
‘It’s about a quarter of a mile, sir. Do you want to walk or drive?’ asked their guide. Opting to do it the hard way, the posse set off eastwards and passed the last of the houses, when the stony road became even more uneven.
‘Really need a Land Rover along here,’ observed Lewis, as they came to another dip in the high cliffs which went down to the rocks a couple of hundred feet below.
‘That’s Pwlldu Head further on,’ said the local man, pointing to a blunt promontory beyond the dip.
He led them cautiously down another even more difficult path to a similar ledge above the waves and pointed out the place where the body had been seen in the water.
‘Up against the back end of that narrow crack, it was,’ he told them.
Ben Evans nodded. ‘You reckon it could have washed along from where we were just now?’
The constable had no doubts about it. ‘Twelve years I’ve been here, sir, I’ve seen many accidents in that time. They can end up anywhere from anywhere – as far as Porthcawl or even right up-channel. Sometimes, we never find them, they get pulled back out to sea.’
There was nothing else to look at, so they grunted and puffed their way back to the top. Once on the track again the group stood for a breather and a smoke, the photographer and the two DCs hoping that the search was over and that they could make for home.
The superintendent stood, deep in thought.
With absolutely nothing found, he failed to see that this case was going anywhere. Though he instinctively disliked Michael Prentice for an arrogant womanizer, that was no reason to accuse him of murder – and there was very poor evidence to even consider charging him with assaulting his late wife. He stood rubbing the bristles on his chin and staring at the ground, then realized that his eyes were actually focused on something.
Ben nudged his inspector and pointed to the ground near his feet. ‘Reckon this is recent, Lewis?’
He squatted down and peered more closely at a dark stain on the grey limestone on the edge of the track. Just where the uneven surface gave way to thin grass was a smear of jet black, about six inches long and half as wide. In the middle, a jagged spike of stone poked up through it, the top clean and almost white.
Lewis Lewis crouched down and delicately touched the black stain.
‘It’s obviously engine oil. Somebody’s stopped here and some has dripped from their sump.’
‘Looks as if they’ve run the sump over the top of that rock. That’s a fairly fresh scrape on it.’
Evans motioned to the photographer to unpack his kit again and get a couple of close-ups of the oil patch. Then he told the detective constable who was acting as Exhibits Officer to take a sample from it. The DC took a small screw-top glass pot from his case, the type used in hospital laboratories. With a clean wooden spatula, he carefully scraped off as much of the black smear as possible and put it inside, labelling it and attaching a brown cardboard exhibits ticket, which he signed after the place, date and time.
‘Could be anyone, guv,’ cautioned Lewis.
‘Any port in a storm, lad,’ replied Evans. ‘We’ve got bee-all else. But let’s go back to the house, before our golfer gets home.’
They retraced their steps to Bella Capri and Evans led them to the side of the house, in front of the garage.
‘We left the keys inside,’ pointed out Lewis.
Evans shook his bull-like head. ‘Doesn’t matter, he was leaving his car out here, while his floozie’s was in the garage.’
He looked at the concrete hardstanding outside the garage and saw with satisfaction that a much longer black stain disfigured the ground.
‘We’ll have a bit of that, too,’ he told the exhibits man and the DC repeated his operation, harvesting another sample in a different bottle.