The bus from Cromer to West Runton ran every forty minutes, and he caught the one that pulled away from the stop on Cadogan Road at ten past one. A handful of pensioners sat near the front, shopping bags wedged between their feet. A young mother with a pushchair folded into the luggage rack stared at her phone. No one looked at him. He took a seat halfway down, next to a window filmed with salt, and watched the town thin out into hedgerow and ploughed field.
The watch sat in the pocket of his trench coat, heavier than it had any right to be. He did not take it out. He had already memorised the initials, the tarnish, the brown stain that had dried into the seam where the case met the hinge. What he needed now was the place. The cliff edge. The drop.
The bus climbed gently, the land flattening out before it fell away into the North Sea. When the driver called the stop, James stepped down onto a narrow lane lined with brambles, the air immediately sharper than it had been in Cromer. The wind came off the water with a sound like something being dragged across gravel. He turned up his collar and walked.
The path to the cliffs was mud and chalk, rutted by farm traffic and half washed out by the last heavy rain. Gulls hung overhead, motionless against the wind, then dropped away toward the beach. James kept his hands in his pockets and his head down, noting the tyre tracks that had dried into the mud, the cigarette butt ground into the verge, the way the brambles on the seaward side grew stunted and leaned inland. Details. He had been trained to notice them, and the habit had never left him, even when the work that required it had dried up.
The cliff edge appeared without drama. One moment there was gorse and rough grass, the next there was nothing but grey air and the sound of water a long way down.
He stopped six feet back from the drop and let the scene settle around him. The police would have trampled this ground three weeks ago, but weather and time would have done their own work since. He was not expecting to find anything they had missed. He was expecting to find what they had not known to look for.
Below, the sea chewed at the base of the cliffs. The tide was halfway out, exposing a skirt of chalk rubble and dark weed. A fall from this height would not be survivable. The police report had called it accidental. A man walking alone, a crumbling edge, a moment of inattention. It happened. It happened often enough along this stretch of coast that the council had put up signs warning walkers to keep back.
But Thomas Vane had been local. He would have known the cliffs. He would have known which sections were unstable and which were not.
James walked the edge slowly, scanning the ground in a grid he held in his head. The grass was flattened in places, but that could have been wind or sheep or the boots of the recovery team. He noted a patch of disturbed earth where something heavy had been dragged, then decided it was too far from the edge to be relevant. He noted a scrap of blue plastic caught in a gorse bush and left it where it was.
Ten minutes in, he found the first thing that did not belong.
It was half buried in a clod of chalky soil near the very edge, where the turf gave way to bare rock. A piece of black plastic, curved, about two inches long, with a jagged break at one end and a series of moulded ridges along its inner surface. He crouched and worked it free with his fingers, then held it up to the light.
The plastic was thick, the kind used for high-impact casings. The ridges were threads for a screw fitting. A lens housing, or part of a battery compartment. He turned it over. On the unbroken edge, faint but legible, were the letters AG-L and a partial numeral that might have been a 7.
Maglite. A heavy duty one, the kind that took four D-cell batteries and could double as a weapon if you held it right.
He looked at the ground around the find. The soil here was looser than the surrounding area, as if it had been kicked or scuffed. He pressed his fingers into it and felt the give. Not a natural erosion pattern. Someone had disturbed this patch recently, and not with a spade.
A man walking alone does not carry a four-cell Maglite. A man walking alone at dusk might, but Thomas Vane had fallen in the early afternoon, according to the report. And a torch that size, dropped or thrown, would not have broken itself against soft chalk. It would have broken against something harder. Or been broken deliberately.
James pocketed the fragment and stood. The wind had picked up, and the gulls had gone quiet. He became aware, gradually, that he was no longer alone on the cliff path.
The man was fifty yards off, walking toward him with the careful stride of someone who wanted to be seen approaching. He wore a waxed jacket over a shirt and tie, and his shoes were polished to a shine that had no business on a muddy cliff path. His hair was grey at the temples and combed back, and his face carried the smooth, practised pleasantness of a man who attended a great many public meetings.
James waited. He did not move away from the edge.
“Mr. Watt.” The man stopped a comfortable distance away and offered a smile that involved only his mouth. “Marcus West. I’m on the council. I thought I recognised you from the bus.”
James had not seen him on the bus. He had been watching for a black saloon, not a man in a waxed jacket, but the oversight unsettled him.
“You’ve got a good memory for faces.”
“Comes with the job.” West gestured at the cliff edge with a small, economical movement. “Nasty business, this. I heard about poor Thomas. Terrible thing.”
“You knew him.”
“Everyone knew Thomas. Or knew of him. The Vane family have been in Cromer a long while.” He paused, and the wind filled the space. “I understand his widow came to see you.”
James said nothing.
“Small town,” West said. “People talk. I don’t suppose it’s any of my business, but I did wonder what a private investigator would be doing up here. The police have already concluded their inquiry.”
“I like the view.”
The smile tightened a fraction. “Of course. Well. I only wanted to introduce myself. And to say that if you’re thinking of making a nuisance of yourself, you might want to reconsider. The Vane family have been through a great deal. Digging around in their affairs won’t do anyone any good.”
The words were polite. The tone was not. James had heard the same cadence before, in briefing rooms and embassy corridors, from men who had never needed to raise their voices to make themselves understood.
“Is that a council matter?” James asked.
“It’s a community matter. We look after our own.”
“I’m sure you do.”
West held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, then nodded, as if something had been settled. “Enjoy your walk, Mr.. Watt. And do be careful near the edge. It’s not as stable as it looks.”
He turned and walked back the way he had come, his polished shoes picking their way through the mud with the same careful deliberation. James watched him go until the path curved behind a stand of wind bent hawthorn and the man was gone.
Only then did James let himself look past the path, toward the lane where the bus had dropped him.
The black saloon was parked on a farm track a quarter of a mile inland, half hidden by a hedge but unmistakable. The same car that had idled outside his office that morning. The same dark shape, motionless against the grey sky. It had not been there when he arrived. He was certain of that.
He stood with the wind at his back and the sea loud below him, and he did not look away from the car. After a long moment, the engine turned over, and the saloon pulled slowly onto the lane and disappeared in the direction of Cromer.
James waited until the sound of it had faded into the wind. Then he took the broken piece of torch from his pocket, wrapped it in a clean handkerchief, and placed it carefully in the inside pocket of his coat, next to the watch.
He had come to the cliffs expecting to find nothing. He had found a warning, a witness, and the first solid piece of evidence that Thomas Vane had not been alone when he fell.
The bus back to Cromer was due in twenty minutes. He began to walk toward the stop, his collar up and his head down, the taste of salt sharp on his lips.
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