The Lookout: Eden Reid, #1

By Beverley Carter

Tom Briggs is a talented tri-athlete and freelance sports reporter, and he’s missing.

Armed with only the increasingly disturbing emails he left behind, Eden Reid has been sent to track him down. She soon discovers that separating fact from fiction is not easy and the events leading up to his disappearance draw her into the dark world of a psychopath.

Three sisters living in an isolated cottage may hold the key to what happened, but they are hiding from a tragic past of their own. As their fragile existence begins to unravel, their family ties are tested to the limit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beverley Carter
• Release date: Mar 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386010821

Book preview

PART ONE

Chapter One

Victim/Victor

This is not a kiss and tell, it’s a confession. Remember that. I don’t normally wear my heart on my sleeve and yet I find I have an irrepressible urge to share this, to rid myself of it, to get it out of my system. To get her out of my system, for once and for all. To purge myself, to cleanse. To be pure again. To make you understand, I need to go back to the beginning, to the very first time I saw her.

It seems impossible that it was all so recent. The intensity of our relationship has condensed what might ordinarily take months or years into mere days. It was a beautiful January morning, the tenth, to be exact. It was bitterly cold but with a flawless sky and streaming sun. It sounds unreal but it’s true, that’s how it was. It was the type of morning you only seem to get at the pinnacle of winter. It’s as if the freezing temperatures had killed off all the bad stuff and left only purity.

Work was quiet and I’d decided to make the most of it and get a few miles in my legs before the triathlon at the end of the month. I didn’t have any other assignments in the offing, just the triathlon to cover, so I’d come up to the coast early. I thought it would be a good opportunity to familiarise myself with the route, maximise my chances of finishing in a good position. Preferably first. So the plan for the day was this – a brisk run on the beach in the morning, followed by a light lunch, then thirty miles or so on the bike in the afternoon, having given the ice a chance to melt off the roads.

I tentatively rolled down the lane to the beach, keeping the bike in the middle of the road where I thought there would be less chance of ice. I don’t particularly like towns, so I’d pedalled up the main coast road for a bit, to this clump of a village called Mistling. It was much quieter than Southwold, which I admit, was not exactly throbbing with activity in the middle of winter but I was fed up with the pink scrubbed, beige clad old fogies who always seemed to want to know what I was doing. People can be so intrusive. So, I cycled slowly through Mistling, which isn’t much of a place, and I followed a long, narrow lane down to the beach. I chained the bike up to a rusty iron fence where the road finished and the dunes began. I felt suddenly foolish, there was no one around. But then again, it’s worth a couple of grand, and I didn’t fancy the idea of putting up with some inferior replacement if it got stolen. Although the only other people I’d be likely to encounter were ruddy faced farmers and retired city folk who’d come here to presumably while away their remaining years staring vacantly at the North Sea. Surely this isn’t what they’d worked so hard for? They can’t honestly think it was all worth it, that their short time on Earth has been well spent. They should put themselves out of their miseries and just walk off into the sea. But anyway, this wasn’t exactly a dangerous inner city and none of these folks seemed the type to nick a bike. But then again, you never know. People have a habit of surprising you.

I set out across the beach at a slow jog, just to get warmed up. The air was so cold that it froze my cheeks and every breath I drew chilled the inside of my chest. A thin crust of frost glistened on the sand as I ran, cracked in places where the sand had shifted or where the tall sage spikes of marram grass pushed through.

As I ran, I blew out plumes of condensation which misted up my glasses and when I lost my footing in the dunes for the second time, I started to question the wisdom of this – the last thing I needed was an injury. So I made my way down towards the water’s edge where I hoped the sand would be a little firmer. And that’s when I saw her.

She stood in the crashing waves, a hundred yards or so away, towards Southwold, and I don’t think she saw me.  I stopped running and wiped my glasses on my shirt, which annoyingly only made it worse. I tried as best I could to see her through the smears as she began wading through the water towards the beach. I’m making her sound like Aphrodite or Ursula Andress in that James Bond film, but she wasn’t like either. She was wearing a long dark green tee-shirt with a lurid yellow logo that I couldn’t quite make out but it reminded me of the sort of thing they hand out for free at trade fairs and county shows. Her long brown hair stuck to her face and hung in dripping rat’s tails on her shoulders. She came out of the water and disappeared from view behind some dunes and the peeling, mildewed hulls of upturned boats.

I stood for a moment rooted to the spot, my pulse racing, then I set off down the beach, determined to catch another glimpse of her. I gasped with a rush of excitement and realised I was smiling. I happened upon her much sooner than I expected, her sudden presence startling me. She sat on the sand, now wearing a washed out navy sweatshirt several sizes too large. The green tee shirt lay discarded next to her. Her thin, bare legs stretched out in front, shiny wet, pink and goose pimpled in the cold air and she gazed blankly out to sea as if I wasn’t even there.

Chapter Two

Samphire Cottage

Dika Woodward folded the tea towel and laid it neatly over the chrome bar on the front of the Aga. She glanced into the small blue framed mirror on the kitchen wall and smoothed down the wiry grey hair that reminded her of the lichen covered bench that was slowly decaying on the back patio. She pulled her hair back and constrained it with a red rubber band she had found by the front gate, discarded, no doubt, by the postman. Dika sighed, she was as gaunt as an undertaker and the shadows under her eyes made her look much older than her forty-one years. Turning slowly, she squinted at her sister. Caroline was ten years her junior but looked much younger. She could easily pass for still being in her twenties. Her eyes were deepest cobalt, as untroubled as an August sky. Caro’s complexion was bright and her cheeks full and rosy. Her face was embraced by waves of glossy dark chocolate hair that didn’t seem to have a single strand of grey amongst them. Dika mused that that was probably due to the total absence of any stress Caro had ever had to endure. And thank goodness for that, as she was infinitely less capable. Dika watched her sister, a battered paperback lay propped open on the kitchen table before her, its yellowing pages weighed down by a jar of homemade bramble jam.

Oblivious to Dika’s stare, Caro gazed wistfully into distant space, her mouth twitching into a smile. Her mind, if not her body, transported to some far off, exotic place. Away from the windswept cottage and the savage sea, to a soft, warm buttered world of happily ever afters.

Dika thought how unlike Caroline their youngest sister, Andrea, was. Although well into her twenties, Andrea’s small physique remained very childlike. A childlike body with a grown up head. She had never craved jewellery or makeup and her total lack of adornments left her as plain as an undressed Christmas tree. Andrea was not what you might call a natural beauty, although she was certainly natural. In fact, she couldn’t be more natural if she tried – an earth toned girl with dirt hair and sand skin and hazel eyes that, in a certain light, shone with flecks of pale gold, like the eyes of a wolf. Dika realised she was staring at Caroline.

‘Stop toying with your breakfast and eat it.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Caroline pushed a rasher of bacon to the far side of her plate with her fork.

‘You might not be hungry but that’s no reason not to eat. It’s a waste of good food, that’s what it is. And it’s not as if you don’t need it – you’re as thin as a rake.’

Caroline looked down, surveying herself nervously. ‘Do you think so?’ she asked.

‘Of course I think so,’ said Dika. ‘And it’s not just my opinion – it’s a statement of fact. You need to eat more. You shouldn’t be so picky, not at your age. You’re not a child anymore.’

Caroline looked up and drew in a deep breath. ‘Dika, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’m leaving. I’m moving out and I’m going.’

Dika’s eyes narrowed and her face flushed. ‘Oh yes?’ she asked. ‘And just how are you going to manage that? Is this just another one of your pie-in-the-sky ideas or do you have a proper plan this time?’

‘Dika, I mean it. I’m moving out and that’s all there is to it.’

Dika snorted. ‘Well just how are you going to pay for this move of yours? I’d like to know that. Don’t go expecting anything from me; it’s all I can do to make ends meet here. There isn’t a penny spare at the end of each month. Not a penny. You’ll have to get a job. Although quite what sort of a job, I don’t know. And quite who you’ll convince to take you on and pay you a wage is a mystery to me. You’ve no proper experience and just a handful of low grade GCSEs to your name. You’re hardly going to stand out. To think of everything I’ve done to keep this family together. The sacrifices I’ve made mean nothing to you, I suppose? But, of course, you know nothing of that, do you? You’ve never shown any interest in living in the real world.’ Dika snatched Caro’s book and hurled it into the corner of the room. ‘Those stupid books aren’t the real world, you know. There are no knights in shining armour. No one will ever come and rescue you, no one. The only person in the world you can rely on is me, but oh no, I’m not good enough for you. Oh no. And to think of all the sacrifices I’ve made. Well good luck to you, that’s all I can say. Good luck to you.’

‘I’m getting married,’ said Caroline.

‘Married? Married?’ screeched Dika, ‘since when and to whom?’ Her face flushed and she grabbed the tea towel from the Aga and twisted it tightly between her clenched fists, turning her knuckles white. She could feel rage shaking her very core.

‘Since ages and to Robbie.’

‘Robbie! That jumped up little odd job man from the caravan park? You really do set your sights high, don’t you? You’re a fool, Caro, a fool. He’ll never marry you. He’ll lead you up the garden path alright but he’ll never marry you; he’s not the marrying sort.’

‘This is exactly why I’ve been putting off telling you,’ said Caroline, ‘I, I knew you’d react like this. You’ve never given him a chance. And Robbie’s not an odd job man, he’s a plumber. They earn good money, and Robbie said I shan’t need to get a job if I don’t want to.’

‘Never given him a chance?’ Dika shouted. ‘I’ve never even met the man. If you can call him that. I mean, what sort of a man proposes to a woman without even seeking the approval of her family? The sort of man who isn’t serious, that’s what sort.’

‘Dika, he is serious. I haven’t asked him round because I knew how you’d be with him.’ Caroline was close to tears now.

‘Well you were right there! Well go on then – when’s the big day?’

‘We - we haven’t set a date yet.’ Caroline looked down at her hands, at her fingers, naked and ringless.

‘I thought not,’ said Dika, smirking. ‘It’s just as I said – he’s not the marrying type.’

‘We are getting married,’ Caroline insisted. ‘In due course, as and when the finances allow.’

‘Ha! In due course! He’ll never marry you, Caro. And is that any surprise? Why would he marry you? What could you possibly have to offer a man? Is it your scintillating conversation? Your fast wit? Or perhaps it’s your sex appeal.’

Caroline felt tears rolling down her cheeks. She flushed with annoyance. She had expected exactly this sort of reaction from Dika and that was what made it all the more irritating that even with that expectation, she still found herself floundering for words and trying to justify her decision, whilst simultaneously defending Robbie’s motives. A large tear rolled slowly into the corner of her mouth and she tasted its saltiness, like seawater. Another tear dropped and fell onto her left hand. Her naked, ringless, left hand. ‘He – he - he loves me,’ she whispered.

Dika flicked the tea towel against her leg and stamped her foot. ‘Love? Love? I wondered when you’d bring that up. You do realise that it’s nothing but a word to men. A word that gets them what they want, but only ever a word all the same. They might have some glimmer of feeling towards their offspring, something verging on affection but as to love? There isn’t a man alive who has any real comprehension of its meaning.’

‘Why would you say that, Dika? Why?’

‘Because it’s true,’ said Dika, her jaw clenched and her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s fact, not opinion. Just like the fact that you’re too thin and you don’t eat enough. Now for goodness’ sake stop snivelling and at least eat that toast before it gets any colder. I haven’t got all day to stand over you. Some of us have things to do. Now hurry up. And when you’ve finished, you can clean yourself up and help Andrea with the laundry. I think you should stay indoors today. The weather’s foul and it’s only set to get worse. It probably won’t get much above zero all day. You should stay in and make yourself useful for once. And I don’t want to hear any more of this wedding nonsense. Do you understand? Let that be an end to it.’ Dika strode across the room to the Aga and folded the tea towel neatly over the bar. She was shaking, so gripped the bar to steady herself. She could feel her pulse beating in her neck and she knew she was hyperventilating and needed to calm down. She glanced at her reflection in the small mirror on the wall, licked her fingers and with a trembling hand, smoothed down a couple of wiry sprigs of grey hair.  ‘You’ve given me a migraine,’ she said, and stormed out of the room. 

‘I HEARD THE COMMOTION this morning,’ said Andrea. ‘I was in the bath and even when I lay back and let my head go under, I could still hear Dika’s cranky voice booming through the floorboards. I thought you weren’t going to tell her yet, not until it was all finalised.’

Caroline set two mugs of tea down on the kitchen table. Andrea dipped a Bourbon biscuit in hers, waited a moment, then lifted it out and ate it in one go.

‘Don’t let Dika catch you doing that,’ said Caroline. ‘She’ll have a fit. She’ll ask you if you would expect to see the Queen eating biscuits like that.’

‘I don’t know why she always has to bring the Queen into it,’ said Andrea, removing two more biscuits from the packet on the table. ‘So how come you told her?’

‘Oh, I thought I’d get it over with,’ said Caroline. ‘She had to know sooner or later and I’ve been dreading telling her for ages. I thought if I told her now, she’d have time to get used to the idea.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Couldn’t you hear? She was loud enough. She said pretty much what I expected her to say.’

‘She wasn’t keen then?’ asked Andrea, a smile slowly forming.

‘Not exactly, no. She said Robbie won’t marry me. He’s not the sort, apparently. Even though she’s only ever seen him from a distance, she seems to think she can tell. And she seemed to think he ought to ask for her approval. I don’t know which century she thinks this is. Oh, and then she asked me what I thought I had to offer a man.’

‘Bloody cheek,’ said Andrea. ‘Just because no man has ever shown any interest in her, she assumes it’s the same for us.’

‘Good job she doesn’t know about your little liaisons with the holidaymakers then,’ Caroline took a biscuit and grinned.

Andrea shrugged. ‘It’s not illegal.’

‘No. Just as well.’

‘It’s just a bit of fun. Who cares? It’s not as if there’s anything else to do around here. Mind you, Caro, I should have taken a leaf out of your book and found myself one of the employees. At least they’re here all year. Things can get a bit boring in winter.’

‘Are you going to be alright here, after I’ve left?’ asked Caroline.

‘I expect so,’ said Andrea. ‘So do you think Dika will come round to the prospect of your leaving?’

‘I think it will take her a while. She practically ordered me to stay in the house and forget the whole thing.’

‘No!’ Andrea laughed. ‘She has a nerve. You know you should just ignore her and do what you want. She can’t do anything. You shouldn’t let her push you around – I don’t and she’s pretty much given up trying to tell me anything.’ Andrea took another biscuit and smirked. ‘Poor Robbie. I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes when he finally meets her.’

‘It’s not funny,’ said Caroline. ‘I just hope she doesn’t scare him off, that’s my fear. I won’t ever find another man like Robbie.’

‘No,’ said Andrea. ‘I don’t suppose you will. He’s one of a kind, that’s for sure. Which reminds me, I met another weirdo yesterday, down at the beach.’

‘Andy, you’re as bad as Dika. What makes you say he was a weirdo?’

‘Because he was. He’d been out running. In January.’

‘You’d been out swimming, in January. That’s infinitely weirder.’ Caroline smiled.

‘Well, alright, but you didn’t see him, Caro. He had this horrid bony face and black rimmed glasses that were all steamed up. He looked like a pervert.’

‘I dare say you should know.’

‘Seriously, Caro, he was weird. He was wearing Lycra cycling shorts and he stood there, right in front of me on the beach while I was drying my hair, panting. And he was, well, just pointing it at me.’

‘Pointing what at you?’

‘You know. It.’

Caroline laughed. ‘Andy, you have such an imagination.’

‘No, I’m serious, and he just stood there staring at me as if he expected me to speak to him.’

‘And did you?’

‘No I didn’t. I didn’t even look at him. I just got up and walked off.’

Chapter Three

Victim/Victor

This is not a kiss and tell, it’s a confession. Remember that. So I’m not going to tell you her name. You might find it out anyway; there may be something in the local rag, although I doubt it would make the nationals. Or perhaps one day you might force it out of me, but for the moment I’m just going to call her Tawny. It suits her – she has tawny hair, tawny eyes and the pixie like, heart shape of her face is in itself slightly owlish. She is very much like a tawny owl.

After that first meeting, I started making excuses to myself to get back to that beach again, to find her again.  I didn’t have a clue where she’d gone. After standing like an idiot on the beach, I’d scrambled through the dunes after her. She’d disappeared through a gap in a decrepit stretch of wooden palings held together top and bottom with rusting wire, beyond which lay a scraggy hedgerow of stunted thorn riddled trees. I squeezed through the gap but once in the hedgerow I found myself none the wiser as to where she had gone.  A deeply rutted old farm track disappeared off in either direction but there was no sign whatsoever of Tawny. The ground was frozen hard so there were no new footprints that might have helped. For days afterwards, I cycled around, looking at every cottage and farmhouse in turn and wondering if this is where Tawny lived.  I felt sure she couldn’t have gone far – who would walk around in a baggy sweatshirt and with a towel on their head in January? Mistling seems to be a fairly small village population wise but it’s more spread out than I had initially realised.

When you enter the village by road, the first thing you see is the tall sandstone church and the small graveyard that surrounds it with scabby old gravestones. Dappled with lichen, they’re chipped and tilting and have been worn blank by the weather. There’s the pub opposite and a cluster of small cottages tucked behind a sliver of grass that a broken sign optimistically refers to as ‘The Green’.  Then the road snakes around and there are a few Victorian houses, semis mostly, and a few squat looking detached houses with flat red bricked fronts and pan tiled roofs. There are a couple of turnings off the main road – a crescent of post war council houses and a cul-de-sac of bungalows. I couldn’t picture Tawny residing in either of these roads. Then there’s the village stores that has deliberately rustic looking wicker baskets full of fruit and vegetables in the window and no doubt has gaudy inflatable sea creatures and plastic buckets and spades dangling from the rafters in the summer months. After that, the houses gradually peter out until you get to the caravan park - Sea View Holiday Park – how very original. They could be pulled up on the Trades Description Act; whichever way you look, either the scruffy grass bank, the crumbling concrete seawall, or the dunes obliterate any chance of a sea view. The road then comes to an abrupt halt. It just ends with a rusting gate with a pointless stretch of iron railings on one side. There isn’t even a turning area for anyone who has driven down here by mistake; they’d have to reverse all the way back into the village before the road became wide enough for a three point turn. Then they’d have to go back out the way they came in. There is only one road in and one road out of Mistling.

Then I saw her again. Don’t you just love that feeling when your heart stops, like BAM! And you get this sudden, sharp pain in your chest. Then it fires up again but now it’s racing, pounding, galloping and you feel sick, dizzy and excited all at once. That was the power she had.

In the days that followed, I gradually learned Tawny’s routine. We’d meet at the beach. We always met at the beach. I’d learnt Tawny’s habits and it seemed that she’d learnt mine.  I’d cycle down to the lane and chain the bike to the railings like I had on that first morning and I’d go and find Tawny. She’d either be walking among the dunes or else crouched down between the old clinker built boats that were anchored to the beach. Upturned so as not to fill with rain, they looked like a pod of beached whales that someone with no skill had painted in garish colours for a joke. Neither place offered much respite from the cold wind that blasted in relentlessly from the sea, but these places did at least provide some degree of privacy for our meetings.

Tawny was a woman of few words and as such, she was a hard nut to crack. She had this faraway look about her sometimes, when she was thinking. She was always so deep in thought. Her eyes would be half closed, while her mouth was half open. It made her look dim, but I knew it was just an act. Tawny wasn’t at all dim. Oh no. Anything but.

Chapter Four

Samphire Cottage

Caro rested her book in her lap and keeping her place with a folded brown envelope, she stared at her elder sister. Dika’s features looked every bit as harsh as her personality. Her skin looked dry, almost flaky and had an oddly pale tone, as if it were cold. Perhaps her being harsh had made her look that way or perhaps she had simply grown into her looks.

‘I want to leave,’ said Caroline suddenly. ‘I want to leave and I am going to leave.’

Dika pretended not to have heard and reached forward, wriggling her bony hand into a thick suede gauntlet. She opened the door to the wood burner and placed a section of leylandii into the glowing embers. ‘That’s all that dreadful plant is good for,’ she said and closed the wood burner’s glazed door. ‘People plant it for cheap instant hedging, Caro. Fast growing privacy that quickly gets out of hand. Serves them right, if you ask me. Remind me to tell the log man not to fob me off with any more of it; it burns far too quickly to be of much use. He gives me more of that ridiculous conifer than anything else.’

Caroline resisted the urge to argue. Dika knew full well that she ordered mixed logs, not the more expensive hardwood only option, and she hated the way her sister would only place one log on the fire at a time. It was yet another example of her frugality. Another pointless example. ‘I am going to leave,’ she said again, more firmly this time.

Dika fixed her with an icy stare. ‘Don’t start that again, Caro, you know you can’t leave. And even if you could, you couldn’t leave now. I know that you’ve nowhere to go.’

‘People leave their homes all the time. They grow up and they move on. I want to move on – it’s perfectly natural.’ Caroline dropped her gaze and pulled at a twist of hair, winding it tightly around her fingers.

‘It’s not perfectly natural for you to leave, Caroline, not at your age. You had your chance to go and live somewhere else once before but you spoiled it.’

‘I didn’t spoil it – it wasn’t my fault.’ Caroline could feel herself growing hot and she began to feel sick.

‘Yes it was, Caroline, you know it was. And besides, that’s what made father’s mind up and that’s why he left me in charge – to look after you. To look after you and your equally useless sister.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Dika. And you know I don’t know what you mean about father. Quite how I could have left then, I don’t know. I was only eight. Father had probably already made up his mind. I had nothing to do with it.