THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

university on coastal erosion. We’re surveying all the north-east Norfolk beaches. We’ve made some interesting finds as well. Palaeolithic hand axe at Titchwell, a Roman bracelet at Burgh Castle, lots of shipwrecks. Steve was examining the cliffs here when he saw the rockfall. The bones were in the gap behind. It looks like they were buried fairly deeply but the earth got dislodged when the stones came down.’
    ‘How come you’re discovering these things?’ asks Judy, as they walk back along the cliff path. ‘If the sea’s advancing, wouldn’t it cover everything up?’
    Clough is glad she has asked this. He’d wanted to but was scared of looking stupid in front of Trace.
    ‘Tides change,’ says Trace shortly. ‘Sand gets moved; parts get silted up, other parts uncovered. The pebbles get pushed further up the beach. Things that were buried become exposed.’
    ‘Like our bones,’ says Steve. ‘They may have been buried well above the tidal line but the water’s getting closer, it’s wearing the earth away. Then part of the cliff came down on top of them.’
    ‘Did you get a good look at them?’ asks Clough.
    ‘Not really,’ says Steve. ‘Tide was coming in too fast. We didn’t want to get stranded on the wrong side of the beach. But, just at a glance, I’d say we were looking at more than one body.’
    Clough and Judy exchange glances. ‘Definitely human?’
    ‘In my humble opinion, yes.’
    ‘We found something else too,’ says Trace, whose opinions are never humble.
    They have reached the pub. Its sign, which, rather tactlessly, shows a man falling off a cliff, creaks in the gathering wind. They can see Ted through the window, raising a pint to his lips. In the yellow light from the window, Trace holds out something that looks a bit like loft insulation, a small ball of fluffy, yellowish fibres.
    ‘What is it?’ asks Judy.
    ‘Cotton wool?’ suggests Clough.
    ‘Whiffs a bit,’ says Steve. There is, indeed, a strong sulphuric smell coming from the material.
    ‘Fantastic,’ Clough rubs his hands together. ‘The boss is going to love this.’
    ‘Where is Nelson anyway?’ says Trace.
    ‘On holiday,’ says Clough. ‘Back on Monday. He’ll be counting the days.’
    Judy laughs. Nelson’s dislike of holidays is a byword at the station.

CHAPTER 2
     
    Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson is sitting by a pool with a glass of beer in his hand, thinking dark thoughts. It is evening and fairy lights, strung in the trees, are twinkling manically in the still water. Nelson’s wife Michelle is sitting beside him, but she is carrying on an intense discussion about highlights with the woman at the next table and has her back turned. Michelle is a hairdresser so this is her area of expertise, and Nelson knows better than to expect a pause in the monologue. His own area of expertise – murder – is less likely to prove a promising starting point for conversation.
    When Nelson informed Michelle that he had a week’s holiday still owing, she suggested that they go somewhere ‘just the two of us’. At the time, he had quite liked the sound of this. Their eldest daughter, Laura, had left for university in September and their seventeen-year-old, Rebecca, was unlikely to want to spend an entire week with her parents. ‘Besides,’ said Michelle, ‘she won’t want to miss school.’
    Nelson had grunted sceptically. Rebecca hardly everseemed to go to school, her life as a sixth-former apparently consisting entirely of mysterious ‘free periods’ and even more mysterious ‘field trips’. Even her A-Level subjects are incomprehensible to Nelson. Psychology, Media Studies and Environmental Science. Psychology? He’s seen enough of that at work. Every so often his boss, Gerry Whitcliffe, will wheel out some weedy psychologist to give him an ‘offender profile’. The upshot of this always seems to be that they are looking for an inadequate loner who likes hurting people. Well, thanks and all that, but Nelson reckoned he could have worked that out for himself, with no qualifications except a lifetime in the police force and an O level in metalwork. Media Studies seemed to be another name for watching TV, and what the hell was Environmental Science when it was at home? It’s about climate change, Michelle had said knowledgeably, but she couldn’t fool him. They had both left school at sixteen; as far as higher education was concerned, their children had entered a different