This Thing of Darkness Read Online Free Page B

he have a name?’
    ‘Derek Moon. Aged thirty-eight. Wife. One little girl.’
    The man’s presence still seems strong and I hang there between two worlds, until Buzz nudges me back towards his one, the land of the simply living.
    We spend more time together. Walking. Pub lunch. Talking in a way that becomes less weird, as the day goes on.
    But it’s hard work and by three, we’re both ready to finish. A success, more than not.
    Buzz drives back into Cardiff. A sane man getting on with his life.
    And me, what do I do? I’ve never really had a good answer to that question, but my legs take me, as I knew they would, back to that cliff, that fall.
    A few hundred yards from the actual site, the slope eases enough that there’s a way down to the sea, steep but manageable. I scramble down to the shoreline – waves foaming over rock – and traverse across to the cliff. The water is ankle-deep mostly, thigh-deep at worst. The exact depth, however, soon becomes immaterial, as I fall sideways and soak myself.
    As I get closer to the cliff itself, the beach rises until it’s clear of the foaming water. Rocks and sand, mixed. I stare upwards at the sweep of limestone. White, grey and ochre. Stippled with lichens.
    Emptiness and the glitter of sea air. A long blue fall, that ends here, where I’m standing.
    Boulders the size of bullocks.
    Rocks the colour of tea.
    I stare upwards trying to trace the line of descent. I don’t know how you calculate these things other than by throwing crash dummies off the cliff. Except that if crash dummies bounce differently from humans, you wouldn’t achieve much and there are rules – tedious, tedious rules – about throwing actual live humans off cliffs for the purposes of practical forensic study.
    All the same, the big picture is clear. Once the guard had started his fall, he’d have encountered perhaps twenty or twenty-five feet of empty space, as he passed a long scooped-out overhang, then he’d have struck a fairly clean-looking slab as it rose to the overhang. A bit of rolling or bouncing on the slab, then he’d have been ejected by another change in slope and angle. He landed where I stand now, his skull impaled on a rock that angles sharply out of the sand like some sticklebacked Himalayan ridge.
    Accidental death?
    Maybe. Beer plus night plus cliffs equals an easy verdict.
    But two pints in a fourteen stone man is hardly drunk. And he knew this path, knew its risks. The simplest conclusions aren’t always the right ones.
    A line of chalk marks dandles up the cliff. Up into the overhang and out of it. Marks left by passing climbers.
    Although this whole coast is rocky and abrupt, the cliffs themselves are quite variable. Sometimes crags rise a hundred feet in a single swoop of limestone. Elsewhere, they’re just a mass of broken rock and tussocky grass. None of the ground is easy, however, and the weather directly following the death was stormy and wet.
    The crime scene investigation report commented, Only a limited examination of the descent route was possible, owing to difficult access conditions and adverse weather conditions. I can imagine it: a plump SOCO in a hi-vis jacket, dangling on a rope in a wicked sea-wind. Spray from the ocean and a storm blowing in. How much investigation would truly have taken place under those circumstances? And with accidental death already the only likely verdict?
    Injury to lower right parietal bone presumably inflicted by rock on descent .
    Impact site not conclusively located .
    Was it not conclusively located because no one ever properly looked? Or because it wasn’t there?
    On a true murder inquiry, those sorts of questions never go unanswered. Officers and resources are flung at the problem until those little wrinkles get fully de-wrinked. But when you have an inquiry whose whole shape, from the outset, is tilting towards a verdict of Accidental Death, no one will authorise the expense involved to tease out those last little