Free The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea by Mark Douglas-Home Page A

news item about the search being abandoned for a five year old boy who had been swept off a pier in the south of England by a freak wave. The pained dignity of the parents as they thanked the emergency services for trying to find their child’s body had stuck in his mind. He could picture their faces – the sucked-in cheeks, dulled eyes and grey skin, the sudden and silent tumble of tears, the gnawing of despair. Hearing their agony as well as their tenacity – they would keep looking for their boy’s remains for as long as it took – had forced Cal to think about an issue which had nagged at him uncomfortably for a few months now. Avoiding it had been one of the reasons he’d taken off to the coast; that, and a dislocated feeling of not quite belonging anywhere else.
    Did his success at tracking and finding bodies lost at sea offer people at their wits’ end, like the mother and father of that dead boy, false hope?
    Recalling his cases he couldn’t think of any where he hadn’t. It wasn’t intentional. It was just the nature of the work. Either he’d draw a blank – a matter of regret even though Cal warned in advance about his area of expertise being an ‘imprecise science’ and the sea having its own unwritten rules – or the body he led them to would be bloated, disfigured or half-devoured by scavengers of one sort or another. The media usually described these as ‘astonishing discoveries’ which provided ‘closure for the parents’. It was a phrase and a concept Cal had come to loathe. It was why he’d started to fob off those who emailed him with emotional pleas for him to take on their cases too, to help them find their relative’s body. If all that Cal could do was lead them to putrefying flesh had he helped them at all? Better, he thought now, that their memories survived intact – their dead child or spouse smiling, happy and living – than having them replaced by the stuff of continuing nightmares.
    Would the mother and father of that missing five year old boy contact him too?
    He rubbed his face, his stubble rasping under his fingers. He swore, pushed open the driver’s door, and ran across the beach, escaping his demons. At the high tide mark, he stripped off his shirt and jeans. He walked the remainder of the way to the sea and waded out until the water was up to his armpits. He let the waves wash past him before ducking his head. Splashing back through the shallows, he remembered Rachel, his ex-wife, complaining about his habit of removing himself to a distant coast instead of discussing what was wrong with their marriage. She had accused him of using his work as an avoidance technique. He couldn’t keep on running away, she’d said. In that, as well as other things, she had been wrong.
    Back at the pickup, he put on a blue shirt, cotton trousers, thick socks and walking boots. After eating breakfast – a cheese sandwich left over from the day before and a swig from a carton of milk – he drove to Boyd’s Farm. As on the previous evening, he parked at the entrance to the steading. Unlike it, there was no-one to be seen when he entered the courtyard. His progress past the Wall of Lost Soles was witnessed by two stray cats from the slate roof of the back porch and, as it turned out, by Duncan Boyd who spied on him from an upstairs window in the farmhouse, a habit it seemed. Only when Cal shouted out who he was and why he was there did Duncan emerge into the sunlight, grinning shyly, wearing baggy black trousers and a creased off-white shirt with frayed collar and cuffs which was tucked into his waistband at the front but not at the back.
    ‘Good morning, lovely day,’ Cal said.
    His greeting caused Duncan to indulge in a succession of facial expressions, from amusement to panic to vulnerability, as if he was trying out each one in an attempt to discover which felt appropriate to the day. He settled on amusement.
    ‘Wall of Lost Soles . . .’ He nodded towards the rows of shoes