Never Coming Back Read Online Free Page B

had stayed here their whole lives because they’d wanted to avoid the same thing.
    Healy watched as the man from the pub stepped down on to the sand of the cove, feet sinking into the shingle, the dad following in his wake. “Don’t go any further!” Healy shouted to them, trying to prevent them contaminating any evidence that was down there. The rain and the wind would have damaged the scene already, but they had to preserve what they could. Healy shouted again for them to stop. This time they listened, but didn’t look back, as if unwilling to cede control to Healy. Finally, alongside Healy came the boy—maybe only twelve or thirteen—his face ghostly white, his hands rolled into fists at his side, eyes fixed off tohis right, at the highest point of the cove, where something was sitting. Healy tried to get a better view of what it was, then dropped down a couple of feet to a platform gouged out of the rock. All the time, rain jagged in, almost horizontal, swirled around by the wind rolling off the sea.
    Dread slithered through his stomach as he made the last jump down into the cove, and his boots started disappearing into the fine shingle. He looked at the man from the pub, then at the dad, then at the boy—cowed and frightened—waiting in the space behind them all. Waves crashed on the beach. “Stay here,” Healy said to them all, including the boy. “Don’t follow me. We need to preserve whatever’s here.”
    He waited for a moment, watching to see whether they were paying attention, and then he started making his way toward the back of the cove. Sea spray stalked him as he moved. He climbed toward a raised platform of rock at the far end of the cove and, as he did, he got a better view of what the boy had found.
    It wasn’t crab bait.
    He doubted the boy had even seen the whole thing: it required a level of elevation, a physical height, the boy simply wouldn’t have. Healy took another step forward. The wind and the rain masked the stench of decay, but it was there, in the background; accumulating, getting worse.
    I thought it was a piece of sliced meat at first
, the kid had told Healy, chewing his bottom lip as they left the pub.
I thought it had shells stuck to it
. But it wasn’t shells and it wasn’t sliced meat. Healy looked back to where the men and the boy were waiting. Clouds sloped over the hills either side of the beach, dark and twisted and pregnant with even heavier rain. Then the smell came again and he turned back to it, wrapped loosely in plastic, most of it—apart from an arm—washed up into the shadows of a gully.
    Pale and skinny.
    Bloodless.

5
    Soon after, the police descended on the village. Healy had made the call himself, from inside the cove, and then waited for them on the main beach. He’d sent the locals back to the other side of the sea wall. The first responders found him—two uniforms with about five years’ experience between them—and as he explained who he was and what he’d discovered, he saw the color drain from their faces. In this part of the world, most cops would go their whole lives without seeing a major crime scene; but for these two it had taken less than three years. He took one of them back over the rocks and down the other side to see the body while the other one stayed and called in CID and forensics. Healy pointed to where the arm snaked out from the shadows. Perched on top of the rocks, the uniform eyed it nervously for a second before nodding and retreating to the safety of the beach.
    Healy followed.
    Scene of crime turned up forty minutes later, forensics in tow. Inside an hour they had a tent erected as close to the cove as possible, and the SOCO—a weatherbeaten guy in his early sixties—had set up an incident room in the village hall. Techs did their best to preserve evidence, to scour the cove for what had been left behind with the body, but the whole time