Chapter 1

The woman who greets us at the door is in her late fifties.

“It’s you!” she cries, throwing her arms out towards me. “I can’t believe it!”

I step back. “Tiggy Jones. The mystery author. We have an appointment. And this is Raider.”

She shakes herself. “Tiggy. Of course. Our appoin…”

Suddenly she’s falling backwards and I rush forward to grab the door. It slows her fall and she slides to the floor, sitting against it.

“I’ll get you a glass of water,” I say.

“A pen! Paper! In the hallstand. Quickly!”

There’s a drawer below a shelf and bevelled mirror. When I hand her the notepad and pen, she scribbles something, tears off the page and pushes it into her pocket. Then she leans back against the door and closes her eyes.

I don’t know what to do. “Can I help you up?”

Her eyes fly open. “I’ve remembered!”

Two days earlier.

I’m confined like a prisoner when the email from my publisher arrives. My first reaction is to reject it. But could it set me free?

Dear Mr Barron

As a big fan of the mysteries by your star author Antigone Jones, I’m writing to offer her my life story as the plot for her next book.

My public life is well-known, but my private life is secret. In exchange, I need her to research some things I’ve forgotten. Especially one crucial thing that’s keeping me awake at night.

Please pass on this offer to Antigone as a matter of urgency. I look forward to discussing it with her.

Yours sincerely

Helena Loxton (Dr)

As I read this, I’m sitting in Simeon Barron’s holiday cottage in Lympstone on the Exe Estuary in Devon. My Dalmador Raider is stretched out on a floor rug, missing his armchair at home but making the best of our incarceration.

Unlike me.

Under normal circumstances, Simeon trusts me to get on with the writing and he’s unlikely to have forwarded Dr Loxton’s letter. Of course her offer is intriguing and my dangerous curiosity is piqued but I’m never short of ideas for my mysteries, ideas I borrow from sundry places and make unique for my protagonist Piper Halliday. I don’t need fans to share their lives with me as potted plots. If Dr Loxton needs to remember something from her past, she’d do better with a private investigator. And after dabbling into too many real mysteries that have turned out to be crimes, I’ve sworn off acting like an amateur PI.

My fingers hover over the keyboard, poised to reject the offer. Except there’s a reason I’m under ‘house arrest’ here in Lympstone and not at home a few kilometres away in Topsham. Dr Loxton’s timing couldn’t be more impeccable.

I’m suffering from what I’m calling ‘writer’s dock’. ‘Dock’ not ‘block’ because the word has several meanings that make it a better description of my predicament.

Its maritime meaning describes my inherited boathouse, sitting on the bank of the Exe Estuary like a ship in dock for repairs. As I’ve watched the renovations taking shape from the bay window of my upstairs flat directly opposite, the excitement has distracted me from starting my next book.

Dock also means ‘to cut’. My involvement in the renovations has docked all book ideas from my brain.

And since yesterday afternoon I’m ‘in the dock’. After weeks of urgent phone calls from Sim, trying to keep me focused on my writing, his solution has been to confine me like a prisoner in this cottage. Until I’ve cobbled together something that looks like a first draft, I’ve agreed. Every afternoon my project manager, Rupert Chester, will send me a video of the day’s building works. And I’ll make a site visit once a week.

“We’ve designed it together, Tiggy,” Rupert keeps reminding me. “And I won’t make any decisions without running them past you. Promise.”

I trust Rupert. And the money for the renovations is tight. He’s ‘docked’ his hours as an estate agent to manage our project. We can’t afford for me to interfere with his job and neglect my own.

The building team is secretly relieved that I’m no longer snapping endless progress shots from my crow’s nest and running down the stairs to stick my oar in (boathouse lingo). Rupert’s also been able to move into my place – and rent out his own for short-term stays – saving him travel time in traffic to the site each day. And he’s there overnight to respond in case there are any security issues.

But my resentment at being sidelined isn’t making me creative. Sim knows me too well.

Enter Dr Helena Loxton with a ready-made plot, waving the magic word …

Secret.

As an Australian, newly arrived in the UK, I’m not familiar with Dr Loxton’s public life here but the internet is full of news reports, interviews and book reviews. She’s a forensic scientist! Listed as one of twenty-five famous females working in the field. She also wears the crown for complex crime-solving and is called in to rescue cold cases that have plunged into the deep freeze.

I start reading a long biographical piece about her career trajectory. The banner at the top shows a recent photo of a mature woman with silvering hair pulled back softly from her face, holding a microscope slide up to the light. But the inset shows a much younger version – a bikini-clad brunette in her early twenties who could have been a model. Another reason she became famous? The tabloids do like their cover girls – and they either don’t even mind if she also has brains or completely ignore the fact.

The tale begins with one of Dr Loxton’s most famous cases, unfolding like a crime novel.

WEARING THE CASE-CRACKING CROWN

Early one morning thirty years ago, the body of a young woman was found hanging from the end of an old jetty on a remote Scottish beach. She was wearing a bikini under a hi-vis vest, the pockets of which were stuffed with several kilos of pebbles. Her feet were bare.

She was identified as Liberty Ford (23), a graphic designer from London. The police confirmed her identity from a tote-bag left on the sand. As well as a driving licence, it contained a blank greeting card with the word Farewell printed on the front.

Liberty’s death was recorded as a suicide but her family were certain she had been murdered. The obvious suspect was her boyfriend Craig Turnbull, a carpenter who kept a workman’s vest in his truck.

The couple had been holidaying at Barlocco Bay but after an argument, Craig had left Liberty in their rented cottage and driven to a pub about 10 miles away. His account to police was backed up by witnesses that he drank too much and fell asleep in his truck. The following morning, he tried to phone Liberty on the landline in the cottage. Getting no answer, he paid for a shower and was having breakfast when her body was discovered by a passing boat.

The Ford family hired a private forensic scientist, Dr Helena Loxton from Frensci. She had gained a reputation for cracking difficult cases by looking beyond fingerprints and DNA tests.

‘She thinks outside the basic forensic toolbox,’ said Tremayne Templeton, a barrister who has had first-hand experience of Loxton’s methods on several stubborn cases. ‘She’s adventurous in her examination techniques and her meticulous scientific process has convicted a lot of criminals who might otherwise have slipped through the cracks to offend again.’

Loxton herself attributes creativity and persistence to her success. ‘It’s about being open-minded and never giving up. I apply innovative thinking to rigorous scientific method.’

Looking at the existing evidence for Liberty Ford’s death, Loxton agreed that suicide didn’t quite fit.

So far, the piece has omitted a description of exactly how Liberty died. As I keep reading the very detailed account of Helena’s re-enactment, this feels deliberate.

The jetty was old and skeletal. Many of the decking boards were missing, with large gaps in between. To walk to the end where her body was found, Liberty would have had to jump over several large gaps, with her pockets full of pebbles making it virtually impossible without tripping or falling. The other way would have been to wade into the water and climb the structure with the weighted pockets banging against her ribs. Either route would have left tell-tale bruises and other traces on her body but these were not itemised in the post mortem report. Had her body been put there by someone else?

Loxton set about designing an experiment to test her theory. She needed a young woman of about the same size and weight as Liberty to wear clothing similar to that worn by the deceased. Fortunately, Loxton herself had the right proportions for the job. To save the Ford family paying for a trip to Scotland, she found a jetty with a similar profile on a remote beach near her home in Devon. It was in better condition but was suitable enough for the first step of the test.

One afternoon, with a small team to document the re-enactment, Loxton used chalk to mark which decking planks she could step on, as if the other planks were gaps. Donning a hi-vis vest weighed down with pebbles over her bikini, she proceeded to make her way along the jetty, stepping and jumping to the end. The video showed how difficult the journey was, as the vest joggled and threatened to topple her over, bruising her bare ribs. And something she hadn’t expected: splinters in her feet and other abrasions from stubbing her toes – all photographed by her team. Liberty Ford had no bruising on her torso and her feet were unmarked. Even her toenail polish was unchipped.

She painted her toenails before she killed herself? That should have been a red flag. Unless it’s like wearing your best undies in case you’re hit by a bus and have to go to the hospital.

Satisfied with this outcome, Loxton waited four weeks for her injuries to heal and returned to the same location at low tide – to match the tide when Libby died. This time, wearing the same attire, Loxton waded into the water and tried to climb the underneath structure at the far end of the jetty. Not only was it very high, but she discovered that the beams were too far apart for someone of her height to climb. She could touch the beam above but not enough to get a grip and the weighted vest was too heavy for someone of her stature to pull herself up. This time, her hands came away lacerated by mussels and covered in slime.

Her re-enactment proved that Liberty had not hung herself from the end of the pier, either from above or below. But who else had done it?

‘The police reviewed my findings and surprised me by re-opening the case. I thought my two disadvantages would prevent this: I was relatively new to forensic science and I was a young attractive woman with brains. I think that’s three disadvantages.’ She laughed. ‘The police took a good look at Craig Turnbull. He was a big buffed fellow who worked out at the gym. He regularly snapped photos of himself lifting weights, doing chin presses and other feats of strength and putting them in a photo album. In one photo he had lifted a young woman onto his shoulder like a sack and balanced on one foot. This indicated that if he’d strangled Liberty, he had the strength and agility to carry her body to the end of the jetty and hang her over the end.’

But it wasn’t proof. Turnbull had told police that he hadn’t been on the jetty at all while they’d been staying at the cottage.

Turnbull’s clothing was never examined at the time, but a detective made a note of his distinctive gym shoes. The police obtained a warrant and retrieved the shoes from his bedroom. Dr Loxton examined them and under the microscope she found traces of wooden splinters wedged into the sole. They’d broken off, but left a miniscule sliver behind. A trip by Scottish police to the jetty at Barlocco Bay to collect samples proved that they came from its rotting planks.

‘He’d lied about not walking on the jetty and the splinters could only have lodged in his soles if he’d been jumping from plank to plank, while carrying a heavy burden. For me, the gaps between the planks were far apart but he could have traversed the spaces easily, even with Liberty’s dead weight on his shoulder.’

Under questioning about the new evidence, Craig Turnbull confessed to Liberty’s murder by strangulation and saved the family from the stress of a trial.

Somehow, the images of Helena cracking the case in a bikini were leaked to the press and she became the darling of the headline writers.

BIKINI BABE CATCHES KILLER

Sitting back in my chair, I’m suddenly excited. What an amazing woman. The possibilities for creating a fictionalised story inspired by Helena’s public life – using a case less infamous than this one – are already bubbling up. And she wants me to investigate a ‘secret’ in her private life.

I’m hooked and I can’t stop reading.