The Body & the Scene

The thing about arriving in a town for a funeral is that you are already looking for signs of death everywhere. Margot Finch had been doing exactly that for four days — reading omens into low tides, into the way the gulls perched on the railing of her late aunt’s cottage, into the grey, waiting quality of the November sky over Cresthollow Bay. She had not expected an actual body.

She found it — or rather, found the commotion around it — on her way back from the bakery on Harbour Street, at eight-fourteen on a Tuesday morning, with a paper bag of still-warm seeded rolls tucked under one arm and a terrible coffee in the other hand. The coffee was from the petrol station two streets over because the actual café didn’t open until nine, which told you everything you needed to know about the pace of life in Cresthollow Bay and exactly nothing about how to survive it as a journalist from London who had, until very recently, been used to flat whites at six-thirty and a desk full of deadlines.

The archive occupied a converted Victorian school building set back from the seafront, its redbrick bulk softened by two large horse chestnuts that must have been magnificent in October. Now they were November-bare, their branches making a complicated, intricate mess against the white sky, like an old map of somewhere no one had been able to find for a long time. There were three police vehicles on the pavement outside, which was three more than Margot had ever seen in Cresthollow Bay at once, and a small cluster of locals at a respectful distance doing the thing that small-town onlookers do, which is stand very still and pretend not to be watching while watching absolutely everything.

Margot stopped.

She told herself, later, that she’d stopped because she was a journalist by training and instinct, because eleven years of covering arts and culture had not cured her of the reflex to move toward things that were interesting rather than away from them. This was true. It was also true that she’d recognised the archive building from her aunt’s notes — it was where her aunt had spent two mornings a week, cross-referencing old shipping records for a local history project that would now never be finished — and that a small, irrational part of Margot had thought: I should see this. As if seeing it would connect her to something that had slipped away three weeks ago in a hospital room in Exeter.

She did not go in. She stood on the pavement and watched, which was, she would argue, an important distinction.

The body of Petra Wynn was discovered at seven fifty-two a.m. by the archive’s part-time volunteer, a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Hobbs who had come in early to unpack a donation of Victorian pamphlets and who would not, according to three separate people in the crowd around Margot, be coming back in a hurry. Margot learned all of this in approximately four minutes by the simple method of standing near the cluster of watchers and listening, which was a skill she had refined to something approaching an art form over a decade of being at press events where nobody would talk to her on the record.

Constable Ray Suggs came out of the archive’s main entrance at eight-twenty-one and immediately spotted Margot in the way that large, comfortable men who have been dealing with local drama for twenty-two years always spot the one person in the crowd who is not from there. He was broad-shouldered, unhurried, and had the kind of face that had probably once been described as boyish and now would more accurately be described as well-maintained. He moved through the onlookers with patient, practiced ease.

“You’re Margaret Finch’s niece,” he said. It was not a question. “You’re staying in the cottage on Peel Lane.”

“Margot,” Margot said. “The Margaret was my aunt’s idea and she’s no longer here to defend it.”

Something in his expression shifted — just a degree or two, but enough. He had the courtesy not to say I’m sorry for your loss in the automatic, professional way people did when they’d said it to seven families that week. He simply nodded, and Margot found she was grateful for that in a way she hadn’t anticipated.

“Are you all right?” he asked instead, which was a different question entirely.

“I’m fine. I didn’t know her.” She hesitated. “I mean — I knew Petra Wynn, a little. From last summer. My aunt introduced us at the library’s reading programme. She seemed—” Margot stopped, because seemed was an interesting verb tense to use about someone who was currently on the other side of a police cordon, and she was not going to finish that sentence with sharp or careful or like someone who catalogued things and expected them to stay where she’d left them, because all of those felt true and none of them felt sufficient.

“She was,” Constable Suggs said simply, and turned to redirect a man with a dog who was edging too close to the entrance.

Margot used the thirty seconds she had to look.

She was good at looking. It was, arguably, the only professional skill she’d consistently applied to her personal life, and it had not done her personal life many favours, but it had produced eleven years of reasonably sharp arts criticism and a mid-list reputation that she was now, in this particular life chapter, somewhat at liberty to ignore. She looked at the archive entrance. She looked at the horse chestnuts. She looked at the small huddle of Constable Suggs’s colleagues managing the scene through the glass-panelled front doors.

Then she saw it.

It was a small thing. Possibly nothing. In eleven years of reviewing theatre, gallery shows, and the occasional overwrought installation piece, Margot had developed a reliable internal sensor for the difference between something that was genuinely meaningful and something that merely looked like it should be — and what she was looking at now tripped that sensor in a way that the petrol-station coffee had absolutely failed to do.

Through the glass doors, just visible in the entrance hall of the archive, there was a vase of flowers.