Mr. Nobody(22)
“She said, ‘Sure, no problem, Officer.’ I mean, what else is she going to say to me? I’m a police officer. And she’s breaking the law.”
Officer Poole looks down at the loose gravel of the car park and sees his pale feet blueing in the January air. Shit.
“They’ve been warned, Chris,” Graceford continues. “No one at the station cares if she’s your wife, and I don’t either. She can’t keep doing it, Chris, she’s wasting police time.” Graceford shifts uncomfortably. She can’t tell if she’s said too much; Poole’s still staring down at the ground. “They’re breaking the law and they keep doing it.”
Poole raises his head. “I know, Beth! I know. Believe me, I know that. But I’ve said to her, you’ve heard me say to her! Haven’t you?”
Beth Graceford nods and looks away.
Poole knows that means the conversation is over.
He clears his throat and pulls himself together.
“Okay. Okay! Right,” he says, changing his tone, “let’s get going, shall we? That beach isn’t going to search itself. Is that spare uniform still in the boot of the patrol car?”
Graceford nods. “Neil’s spare uniform? Yeah, course it is.”
A mischievous smile plays across Chris’s face. “Remind me why he kept it there?” he asks as, barefoot, he follows Graceford gingerly across the gravel.
“You know this, Chris. In case someone vomited on him.” She intones knowing full well where this line of inquiry is heading. She pops open the hatchback.
Graceford had previously been partnered with Sergeant Neil Jarvis for the first five months of her posting on the Norfolk coast.
Chris’s grin broadens. “In case someone vomited on him! That happen a lot, did it? Enough to warrant the extra uniform?”
“Yeah, it did actually, Chris. It happened to Neil an above-average amount of times. So, yeah, it did warrant the extra uniform,” Graceford says with the weary authority of a recurrent eyewitness.
“Okay, then.” Poole nods mock-sagely. “Fair enough in that case, I suppose.”
She rummages around in the back of the car. “Not sure why he left it, though. Maybe ’cause of all the vomit that’s been on it? Size nine boot okay?”
“Humph, guess they’ll have to be.” Chris takes the boots and, leaning against the patrol car to brush the gravel from his feet, he slides his sockless feet into their cold leather. “I suppose we should go look for this guy’s stuff then. What do you reckon his story is? Homeless? Attempted suicide?”
“Nah, neither, I don’t think. He didn’t look homeless.”
Chris nods. “No, he didn’t.” Chris wouldn’t ever say it out loud, but he’d been surprised, the guy had been good-looking—well, all-right-looking, for a bloke. Not that good-looking guys didn’t try to commit suicide too, he supposed.
Graceford locks the car. “It all had a bit of a weird vibe, don’t you think? I don’t know. Anyway, let’s see what we can find.” She sighs. It’s a big stretch of beach. “I’ll call it in and you make a start, Chris.”
Chris climbs to the crest of the dune and the wide flat expanse of Holkham Beach spreads into view. It’s even windier up here. Still, he can hear the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears from the exertion. Inside his new boots his toes are reluctantly coming back to life.
He can see right out to the offshore wind farm a mile out to sea, the monolithic forest of turbine arms rotating with the weight of the North Sea wind. He closes his eyes and sucks in a deep breath, then lets it out.
Best make a start, he decides. He opens his eyes and scans the landscape, looking for anything the man might have left behind. A pile of warm clothes, a bag.
But there isn’t anything. Nothing but outcrops of seaweed littering the beach, dark clumps of debris washed to shore. It’s hard to pick out details from this distance; it’s possible any one of them could be clothes, perhaps, shoes, a rucksack containing a wallet or a phone or keys.
He turns back to Graceford, still on the edge of the forest path, radio in hand. He can’t hear what she’s saying but he watches her mouth move. She’s probably talking about Zara, about Zara and Mike. About how the local press always seem to arrive suspiciously early these days, just after a police call goes out, in fact.
Chris wishes he’d never mentioned the whole thing to Zara in the first place.
They’d been at home watching a Netflix true crime; he’d been trying to impress her and he’d stupidly mentioned that it was, in fact, possible to hack into the UK police radio system too. It was just a stupid passing comment, he’d been showing off. That had been about a month ago now, but after they’d binge-watched that show, Zara had started showing up places right after Chris got there. And it hadn’t been only Chris’s callouts either. Other people had started to notice too.
He hadn’t asked outright how she was doing it, because he didn’t want her to tell him, because then he would definitely have to arrest her. Which wouldn’t be great after only a year of marriage. God knows how she got hold of the illegal radio equipment she must be using.
He watches Graceford in the distance.
But what can he do? It’s hard not to speak to the press when you wake up next to it, he thinks. When it crawls all over you in its expensive underwear. When you do your morning pee while it brushes its teeth. It’s hard not to talk to the press when it looks like Zara and you’re married to it.