‘Not at all, sounds like you have it all under control.’

‘Do I?’ DS Andrews now emitted a nervous laugh. ‘Not bad for my first murder investigation then.’

Joel didn’t think this was the right time to announce it was his too. He opted for ‘I’m on the phone if you need me’ instead.

‘I’ll try not to.’

Joel ended the call and started back towards his house and the family he could see within it. The first call was done but still he couldn’t shake a nagging feeling.

Maybe he wasn’t ready.

DS Andrews was glad to finish the call; cold gusts of wind were sweeping in unabashed off the English Channel and had been biting at his exposed hands. Now he pushed them into the warmth of his coat pocket.

‘That the SIO?’ a woman’s voice asked, sternly enough to cut through the wind rather than be carried. Sandra Allum – Kent’s most senior CSI officer and a familiar face at the more serious crimes.

‘So it would seem.’

‘Is he coming out? Only we’re just about ready to go here.’ She stood straighter from where she had been stooped over the headless corpse of Marcus Olsen. He had been watching her wrap the hands and feet in clear plastic ready for transportation when his phone had rung, even managing to smile at her quip about how their victim had been kind enough to save her the job of wrapping up the head too. She had laid out a white body bag, using the smooth pebbles of St Margaret’s beach to hold it down. The backdrop was Dover’s famous white cliffs, the dramatic chunk of white even more brilliant due to a recent chalk slip that had taken any stains or patches of moss with it. Huge chalk boulders were now gathered at the bottom of the cliff to be constantly prodded and probed by the movement of a curious sea. There was a pub too: the aptly named Coastguard, the landlord of which had been kind enough to offer a temporary injection of warmth via a coffee cup in exchange for an opportunity to pump him for information on what the tide had brought in. The initial find had drawn a clump of people who had gathered in the car park, but only a few hardy souls now remained. The crowd had thinned noticeably when the landlord was sent away with nothing new to report.

On another day this was a beautiful place. Today, DS Andrews was waiting for the inevitable request to help with lifting a soaked and bloody corpse into the zip-up body bag. And in the freezing cold.

‘He’s not coming out, no. He doesn’t start back until Monday officially. Seems I’ll be running it until then.’

‘Stitch-up?’ He could still detect Sandra’s grin, despite the mask and hood covering most of her face.