McNulty led the way. The body lay some thirty yards from the breaking waves, but a good distance from the cliff itself from which it must have fallen. The constable had had the presence of mind to cover the corpse with a sheet of bright blue plastic, and he’d been prescient enough to arrange it so that?with the aid of rocks?the sheet didn’t touch the body.
Bea nodded and McNulty lifted the sheet to expose the corpse while protecting it from the rain. The plastic crackled and snapped like a blue sail in the wind. Bea squatted, raised her hand for the torch, and shone its light onto the young man, who lay on his back. He was blond, with sun-streaked hair that curled cherubically round his face. His eyes were blue and sightless, and his flesh was excoriated from hitting the rocks as he fell. He was bruised as well?an eye was blackened?but this looked like an older injury. The colour had yellowed as the skin healed. He was dressed for climbing: He still had his step-in harness fastened round his waist with at least two dozen metal bits and bobs hanging from it, and a rope was coiled on his chest. This remained knotted to a carabiner. But what the carabiner had been attached to…That was the question.
“Who is this?” Bea asked. “Do we have an ID?”
“Nothing on him.”
She looked towards the cliff. “Who moved the body?”
“Me and the bloke who found it.” He went on quickly lest she reprimand him, “It was that or drag it, Guv. I couldn’t’ve moved it on my own.”
“We’ll want your clothes, then. His as well. He’s up at the cottage, you say?”
“My clothes?”
“What did you expect, Constable?” She pulled out her mobile and flipped it open. She looked at the screen and sighed. No signal.
Constable McNulty, at least, wore a radio on his shoulder, and she told him to make the arrangements for a Home Office pathologist to get down here as soon as possible. This, she knew, wasn’t going to be soon at all as the pathologist would have to come from Exeter. And that would be only if he or she was actually in Exeter and not involved in something somewhere else. It was going to be a long evening and a longer night.
While McNulty radioed as ordered, she gazed once more at the body. He was a teenager. He was very good looking. He was fit, muscular. He was kitted out to climb, but like so many climbers his age, he wore no headgear. That might have saved him, but it might have been superfluous. Only a postmortem would be able to tell.
Her gaze went from the body to the cliff. She could see that the coastal path?a walking trail in Cornwall that began in Marsland Mouth and ended in Cremyll?marked a twisting passage up from the car park to the top of this rise, just as it did along much of the Cornish coast. The sea-cliff climber who lay at her feet had to have left something up there. His identification, one hoped. A car, a motocycle, a bike. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and it was impossible to believe he’d come here on foot. They’d know who he was soon enough. But one of them was going to have to go up there to see.
She said to Constable McNulty, “You’ll need to climb up and see what he’s left on the cliff top. Have a care, though. That path’s going to be murder in the rain.”
They exchanged looks at her choice of words: murder. It was too early to tell. But they would know eventually.
Chapter Three