woman almost young enough, but much too pretty, to be his daughter, they had just enough sense to get back inside before laughing.
In the dark the three netting-sheds were black fingers
poking out of the shingle shore. There were no lights to show that the one nearest to the pier was someone’s home, and when the walkers reached the iron steps they saw why. The house was shut up, and there was a For Sale board wired to the railing.
2
For a moment estate agent Edwin Turnbull thought the woman with the cloud of dark hair who was waiting when he opened the office on Saturday morning wanted to buy the netting-shed. He showed her quickly to a chair, ordered coffee, would have given her shoes a quick polish if she’d asked him.
He hadn’t known what to expect of the property. Its seafront location might have sold it a dozen times over. As against that, it was clear to anyone with an eye in his head that some wild night Dimmock’s crumbling pier would break up and then it would be sheer luck whether an oak pile swept the shed away or not. No one would give a mortgage on it, or storm insurance. You can’t insure against the inevitable.
A cash buyer just might be keen enough to proceed with the purchase against wiser counsels, but the planning conditions attached to the property would weed out most eccentric millionaires. The original shed was destroyed by arson so the planners felt obliged to approve a replacement. What they would not agree to was any extension in the size of the footprint. No one would buy the shed for its location and build a mansion on the site.
Mr Turnbull was an optimist – all estate agents are, it’s part of the job description – and knew there had to be an unmarried, childless eccentric millionaire out there who wanted to be lulled to sleep by the sound of waves on shingle thirty paces from his bijou beach-house and would be undeterred by its lack of a garden, yard, car-parking or any kind of privacy. But he doubted there were two, so when Brodie asked about the shed he had her in
his office with his back against the door before she could explain the nature of her interest.
“I don’t want to buy the place,” she said for the third time, her voice taking on a steely timbre. “I want to contact the vendor.”
Mr Turnbull gave a delicate little shudder. He was a slightly stooped middle-aged man with thinning hair slicked back in a way that hadn’t been fashionable when he started doing it ten years before. “Oh no, Mrs Farrell, that’s not at all how we do things. I will convey to the vendor all expressions of interest in his house and any offers for it. He will instruct me whether to accept, or reject, or enter into negotiations. I am his agent. It’s why I’m called an estate agent.”
“Try to understand,” said Brodie with a patience that was starting to grate as it wore thin, like brake-pads. “I am not offering to buy the property. I am not trying to defraud you of your commission. I am trying to contact a man who was once a good friend, and is now so much a stranger that I didn’t know he’d left town until I saw your board at his front door. I want you to tell me where he went. I want an address for him, and a phone-number, and I want them now.”
If Mr Turnbull had fitted a panic-button under his desk he’d have been jabbing it. It was odd. She was clearly a respectable woman. Her request might have been unusual but she had said nothing he could take exception to. Yet he not only felt threatened, he knew he was meant to. As a professional visitor of other people’s homes Mr Turnbull had met dogs like that. They didn’t bark, they didn’t growl, they didn’t show their teeth — but you knew that if you handled the next few minutes wrong you were going to be picking fangs out of your leg.
He withdrew to his last defensible position. “It’s a question of confidentiality …”
Brodie withdrew to hers. It had a big gun on it. “If you’re not happy giving me
Matthew Woodring Stover; George Lucas