THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

world.
    Nelson had fancied Scotland, or even Norway, but he had to use up his week before the end of March and Michelle wanted sun. If you don’t go for long haul, the only sun in March seemed to be in the Canary Islands, so Michelle had booked them a week’s full board in a four star hotel in Lanzarote.
    The hotel was nice enough and the island had a strange ash-grey charm of its own, but for Nelson the week was purgatory. On the first night, Michelle had struck up a conversation with another couple, Lisa and Ken from Farnborough. Within ten minutes, Nelson had learnt all hehad ever wanted to know about Ken’s job as an IT consultant or Lisa’s as a beautician. He learnt that they had two children, teenagers, currently staying with Lisa’s parents (Stan and Evelyn), that they preferred Chinese takeaways to Indian and considered George Michael to be a great all-round entertainer. He learnt that Lisa was allergic to avocados and that Ken had Irritable Bowel Syndrome. He learnt that Lisa went to Salsa on Wednesdays and that Ken had a golf handicap of thirteen.
    ‘How many children do you have?’ Lisa had asked Nelson, fixing him with an intense short-sighted stare.
    ‘Three,’ said Nelson shortly. ‘Three daughters.’
    ‘Harry!’ Michelle leant forward, gold necklaces jangling. ‘We’ve got
two
daughters, Lisa. He’ll forget his own name next.’
    ‘Sorry.’ Nelson turned back to his prawn cocktail. ‘Two girls, nineteen and seventeen.’
    Only once, in the course of the evening, did the conversation falter and die.
    ‘What do you do for a living, Harry?’ asked Ken.
    ‘I’m a policeman,’ answered Nelson, stabbing ferociously at his steak.
    ‘Thank God,’ said Nelson to Michelle when they got back to their room. ‘We’ll never have to talk to those God-awful people again.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ asked Michelle, wrapping herself in a towel and heading for the shower.
    Nelson hesitated before answering; he didn’t want to piss her off too much as he was counting on first-night-of-the-holidaysex. ‘Well, we haven’t got a lot in common with them, have we?’
    ‘I liked them,’ said Michelle, turning on the water. ‘I’ve asked them to join us for crazy golf tomorrow.’
    And that was it. They played golf with Lisa and Ken, they went sightseeing together, in the evenings they ate at adjoining tables and once, in a night of unparalleled awfulness, they had visited a karaoke bar. Hell, muses Nelson as he sits listening to the relative merits of gold versus red with a hint of honey, can hold nothing worse than singing ‘Wonderwall’ in a duet with a computer programmer from Farnborough.
    ‘We must get together another time,’ Ken is saying now, leaning towards Nelson. ‘Lees and I were thinking of Florida next year.’
    ‘We’ve been to Disneyland Florida,’ says Michelle, ‘when the girls were younger. It was great, wasn’t it Harry?’
    ‘Grand.’
    ‘Well, time to go again without the kids,’ says Ken. ‘Why should they have all the fun eh?’
    Nelson regards him stonily. ‘Harry’s a real workaholic,’ says Michelle. ‘It’s hard to get him to relax.’
    ‘Must be a stressful job, being a policeman,’ says Lisa. She’d said the same thing, with variations, whenever his job was mentioned.
    ‘You could say that,’ says Nelson.
    ‘Harry’s had a tough year,’ says Michelle, in a sympathetic undertone.
    You could say that, too, thinks Nelson, as they finally leave the poolside restaurant and repair to the lounge forcoffee. Last year had produced two child-killers, at least three madmen and a curious relationship, the like of which he had never known before. Thinking about this relationship, Nelson stands up suddenly. ‘Going to stretch my legs,’ he explains. ‘Might give Rebecca a quick call too.’ Mobile phone reception is better in the open air.
    Outside, Nelson walks around the pool twice, thinking of crimes with which he could charge Ken. Then he retreats into the darkness of the ‘Italian Terrace’, a rather desolate area full of empty urns and artistically broken columns.
    He clicks onto Names and scrolls down the Rs.
    ‘Hallo,’ he says at last. ‘How are you doing?’
    Dr Ruth Galloway is, in fact, doing rather badly. Phil, her Head of Department at the University of North Norfolk (UNN), had insisted on holding a planning meeting at five o’clock. As a result, Ruth was late at the childminder’s for the third time that week. As she