Free Footsteps on the Shore by Pauline Rowson

weariness settle over him. Two corpses in one day were enough to sadden and sicken any copper, but the body in the mud – horrific though it was – was far less upsetting than this. This death he took personally and with complete bewilderment; who on earth could have wanted the slender woman with the lean face and sad, deep brown eyes dead?
    Yesterday he’d smiled and spoken to Venetia Trotman, now she was lying with the right-hand side of what was left of her barely recognizable and battered face pressed against the wet grass. Her right arm was crumpled under her body, her left arm outstretched, slim fingers clenched. She was wearing the same clothes he’d seen her dressed in yesterday: a navy blue cardigan over a white jumper, navy blue trousers, socks and blue deck shoes. But no coat. Yesterday, when he had left her just after five thirty, she had been wearing a red and blue sailing jacket.
    She was facing her home; a substantial brick and tiled period house that Horton knew by its design had to be at least two hundred years old. Had she been returning there from the boat, which was moored at the bottom of a concrete slipway at the end of this extensive garden, when her assailant had attacked her? He couldn’t see the boat from where he was standing because the house and garden were on a raised bank above the shore, which was screened by a tangle of trees and bushes. Or had she gone into the garden from the house to investigate a noise or someone suspicious lurking in the shrubbery and surprised her attacker? But why no coat? Perhaps she’d been in too much of a hurry to investigate the disturbance to put it on, though it had been a cold night. And depending on her time of death she would also have got wet. It had started raining at about 5 a.m. He’d laid on his bunk, after yet another fitful night’s sleep, listening to it hitting the deck.
    Dr Clayton and SOCO might be able to tell them more, or rather tell Superintendent Uckfield because this was definitely murder, unlike the body in the harbour, which could be suicide or an accidental death. Horton had already rung the head of the major crime team. Soon Uckfield and the great useless hulk, DI Dennings, would be clodhopping all over the place. Horton had asked for a tent and arc lights, the day was drawing in and in less than an hour it would be sunset. Cantelli had called Dr Price who was on his way.
    ‘This place must be the best-kept secret this side of the Solent,’ Cantelli said, as Horton stepped aside to let two officers cordon off the area around the body. Another two were sealing off the road to the house: a narrow, winding no through lane with no other dwellings situated along its stretch of roughly a mile. The only neighbours were rabbits in the surrounding fields to the north and west, and ghosts that haunted the ruins of the Roman fort of nearby Portchester Castle to the east, which faced on to Paulsgrove Lake, a wide expanse of sea feeding into Portsmouth Harbour.
    ‘I didn’t know it existed until yesterday,’ Horton admitted, glad to turn away from the body and falling into step beside Cantelli, with a heavy heart, as they headed towards the house.
    ‘I’m amazed property developers haven’t been banging on their door, it’s just ripe for marina flats and houses,’ Cantelli said. ‘The Trotmans could have sold this land for a fortune.’
    ‘Perhaps they valued their privacy.’ And the price of that privacy might just have cost Venetia Trotman her life, thought Horton.
    ‘Did she have any relatives?’
    ‘I only spoke to her about the boat.’
    ‘And you call yourself a detective.’
    Horton gave a brief smile, knowing that sometimes humour helped to handle the brutality of a situation. ‘If I’d known she was going to be murdered I’d have asked,’ he replied, thinking sometimes this job was shit. No, correction, most times it was. But the thought of getting the scum who had bashed her head in, and making a strong enough case