Doctor Who_ Rip Tide - Louise Cooper [22]
She delved into her memory, trying to recall exactly how often the jelly-baby man had 'happened' to be on the beach at the same time as Ruth, and came up with the answer she had already half expected: almost without exception, he was there whenever she was. All right, if he were on holiday – if – then there was nothing unusual about his visiting the beach every day. That was what holidaymakers did. But his timing was another matter. There could be no doubt of it: he was spying on Ruth. But why?
All manner of possibilities came into Nina's mind, and she realised that trying to guess the answer to that question was a pretty pointless exercise. What she needed was facts. If she couldn't get them through Ruth, then maybe the jelly-baby man could provide them instead. How to approach him, though, that was the problem. She could, of course, be absolutely direct and blunt about it, but she was honest enough to admit to herself that she didn't have the courage. Not knowing his motives put her at a disadvantage; might even put her at risk, and anyway, Nina was in the habit of taking an oblique approach to most things. Cynical it might be, but in her experience subterfuge usually worked better than openness.
She chewed over the problem during the next twenty-four hours. At one point she almost decided to drop the whole thing – after all, why should she give a damn about Ruth and whatever game she was playing? It was none of her business, and she really had far better things to do. But the feeling was short-lived. It was her business, because she loved Steve, and Steve was ill, and even though she had no evidence yet Nina was unshakeably convinced that Ruth was in some arcane way the cause of his problems. If, as she believed, the jelly-baby man knew (or at least strongly suspected) what was going on, then he had to be her next target.
Nina went to the beach again the next day. The Cornish weather was being its typically unpredictable self. After Charlie's funeral there had been several days of unremitting sunshine, but now, abruptly, it had changed again. Low pressure had come up from the southwest overnight, and the sky was a solid grey blanket with darker, fast-moving tatters scudding beneath it like smoke on the strengthening wind. The sea looked bad-tempered, with a heavy 'chop', and curtains of squally rain were moving up the coast. One squall blew in as Nina walked down the last stretch of the tarmac road, and as the rain began she ducked into the shelter of the beach shop that stood beside the lifeboat house. The squall was ferocious but short-lived; in minutes it was past and gone, leaving the road with a wet, sullen shine, and Nina emerged and walked on down to the sand.
The beach was all but empty. No rugs, towels, colourful windbreaks; just a holiday couple bundled in waterproofs and staring disconsolately at the sea, and a woman walking a dog near the tide's edge. No Ruth. No jelly-baby man, either, and Nina felt a pang of disappointment. Now that she had made the decision to target him, she wanted to do it now, without any delay and before she could lose her nerve. But he wasn't here.
Was he? Wait a minute ... who's that by Blue Rock? The tide was low, and on the far side of the beach a large, wedge-shaped outcrop had been exposed, with a tumble of boulders behind it. Someone was clambering over the boulders; like the holiday couple he was wearing waterproofs, and their colour blended in with the surrounding stone, so Nina had almost missed him. At this distance and in those clothes it was impossible to identify him with any certainty. And the jelly-baby man was usually on the other side of the beach. But there was something about the way he moved...
Nina stared hard, cursing herself for not 'borrowing' her father's binoculars. The distant figure was straddling two rocks now, and peering into a pool between them. Then he straightened. And Nina felt