Rocking Horse Road Read Free Page B

dunes
a bit later. He was by himself and his finger-in-the-socket
hair seemed to spring up from his head even
wilder than normal. Pete Marshall was there too, of
course. He stood apart from everyone wearing a mask
of sombre authority that none of us had seen on him
before, but that he would often put on again during
the following months. We stood in a group about
ten metres along the beach from the body. We barely
spoke. A tight knot of shocked girls hung back higher
up, almost in the dunes. The adults who eventually
arrived stood in pairs even further back than we
were.
    The body was being guarded by Bill Harbidge,
who had already been back to his house to call both the
ambulance and his fellow policemen. He had pulled
on his uniform jacket and hat but still had the faded
shorts and sandshoes he had been wearing when Pete
pounded on his front door. Possibly the shorts were
a concession to the mounting heat, but it was more
likely he simply couldn't find his trousers in the few
minutes he'd allowed himself before rushing back to
the crime scene.
    The tide that had discarded the body near the foot
of the first dune had been full at four in the morning
and was well out when we arrived, and the beach
seemed very wide. The waves were not as large as
they had been in the night but still rolled in with a
heavy sibilance. Occasionally one would crash down
with particular force and people would look away
from the body towards the ocean.
    Bill Harbidge announced in a voice loud enough
to carry above the sound of the waves that everyone
was to keep well back so that we didn't 'infect the
crime scene'. He needn't have worried. We would
have kept our distance anyway. We were unfamiliar
with death and seeing it there on our doorstep in the
morning light had unnerved us. Maybe we harboured
the primitive belief that whatever had happened to
the woman on the beach could be contagious. That,
like head lice, death could jump across short distances,
from one person to another.
    It took us a while to realise who she was. Even over
the wavesound, you could hear as the first person
spoke her name. 'Lucy Asher.' It wasn't Pete who said
it first; he's always been adamant about that. 'It's Lucy
Asher.' Who actually said it and exactly how they
recognised her, we're not sure. But once those four
rolling syllables were loose on the beach they were
picked up and passed quickly from person to person.
All of the girls started crying.
    We tried to recall the last time we had seen Lucy
alive. Mark Murray whispered that he had bought a
chocolate-dipped double-scoop cone from the Ashers'
dairy just the day before. It had been Lucy who rolled
it for him. Roy did even better. He claimed to have
seen Lucy walking along the road towards the reserve
as late as five o'clock the previous day.
    It was while we were comparing notes in hushed
voices that the two St John's guys turned up,
although we had not heard the ambulance. Maybe
Bill Harbidge had told them on the phone that there
was no hurry and so they hadn't bothered turning the
siren on. They came down out of the dunes further
up the beach and walked over to the body. They
were carrying a stretcher and a large red bag. Bill
intercepted them with one hand raised like a traffic
cop, which in fact he had been for a few years.
    The St John's guy with the ginger moustache
seemed to be the leader. He arrived first and spoke
to Bill, nodding solemnly. We were too far away to
hear what was said. The tall skinny one stood back,
holding the stretcher upright in an unwitting parody
of the way that surfers held their boards on the beach
every day.
    When Bill Harbidge eventually stopped talking,
Ginger Moustache walked over to the body. Lucy
was face down, half on her side. He knelt down and
pressed two fingers against her throat. It suddenly
occurred to us that maybe she wasn't dead after all.
Perhaps by some miracle she was only unconscious.
But he shook his head, too quickly it seemed to us for
such an important verdict,