Looking Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

needed to know. Perhaps it was all anyone wanted to know about Edwin.
    ‘That artist,’ he ventured, knowing that delaying Edwin could risk alienation, ‘I don’t know why, but I thought he was a good man, too. He was honest.’
    Edwin was moving, from slow to fast, hands on hips to push himself forward and get his stride, talking back over his shoulder, not caring if he was heard and not raising his voice.
    ‘I said you weren’t a bad man. Doesn’t mean you aren’t also daft. No
good
man would sit still and sketch a body when she might still have been alive.’
    ‘There was never a chance of that, Edwin.’
    All they really had in common was surely their grizzled, grey heads. And one of those uncertain affections which arrives too late and has nowhere to go, making them pleased to see one another, and making Edwin ration information so that John would come back, as if he would not, anyway. Wily old sod. Patrolling the cliffs like the Lone Ranger, the only man he knew who actually loved seagulls and other winged scavengers. John shivered inside his jacket. Once he had loved and watched the birds. Now he preferred plants and flowers and it seemed a long time since he had felt anything at all. Until now.
    He walked back the way he had come, back towards the car park, deserted apart from his Vauxhall, climbed into it. Pathways led out in the form of a road into the port; from there led others to every point of England and Europe. Trunk roads, ancient and modern routes connecting metropolis to metropolis. A route to his house. A route for refugees.
    The photocopied sketch crackled inside his top pocket, where it had been for three days. Another example of unuseful, neurotic behaviour, since none of it was any of his business. His help had been solicited way beyond the limited scope of his usual role in this investigation simply because he knew the cliffs, was on nodding acquaintance with the botany team who had just finished work, and the beleaguered police service had got into the habit of taking help where they could get it, especially when they did not have to pay. Help us out here, John, and he did, willingly. But something had persisted, which might not have lingered in hispragmatic mind if he had not had a daughter, had not felt, as probably every father would have felt on being told there was the body of a girl at the foot of the cliff, Oh God, is she mine? Followed by that sickening relief when it proved to be somebody else’s. Why he should have thought the body was Maria when she, as far as he knew, was still at the other end of a pathway in London, tormenting him with silence, he did not know. Except that it would have been a fitting revenge on him, and Maria was good at that, although maybe not to the point of self-destruction. He would pay for his perceived neglect of her some other way, perhaps, until she was older and might begin to understand how it had been. Maria would always think that her father had let her mother die, rather than been powerless to prevent it.
    Nor was the existence of a body without an identity sufficiently intriguing to warrant this attention, not in a town that was a conduit for immigrants, stateless persons of all ages, arriving in the dead of night, the uncontrollable trickle of those who did not want asylum or registration, separate from the constant flood who did. Immigrants like the container-load of Chinese youths who had paid to be smuggled direct to London, not trusting the sanctuary of officialdom, only to perish en route. Some of those who wanted entry and a hiding place simply died, were found in corners of this town and the country beyond, and were left unclaimed. But the sallow-skinned girl of the cliff with her dyed hair was well nourished, with a different profile.
    His mind went back to the phrase ‘well nourished’, so commonly used in a post-mortem report and frequently misunderstood. A young woman might find it an insulting description, meaning fat, but all it