The Shingle Shoe

The tide was low and the Palace Pier lights scribbled crooked patterns on the water. DS Marlowe was off duty, collar open, killing time with the gulls when she walked up out of the dusk - tall, blonde, the kind of woman Brighton didn’t attract unless London had grown too hot.

She carried a shoe. Not a heel, not a pump, but a mesh beach shoe, damp with salt. She held it out like an exhibit.

‘You’re a detective,’ she said, cool as a gin at half-past midnight. ‘Then you’ll know this isn’t just lost property.’

Marlowe took it. Light as air, but wrong. A seam bulged in the sole. He split it open and felt metal: a key, old, salt-stained.

‘Found it under the pier,’ she said. ‘Thought you might make sense of it.’

By the time he looked up, she was walking away along the promenade, heels striking sparks. He should have dropped the shoe in the nearest bin. Instead, he turned the key over all night, seeing her face in the smoke of his cigarette.

Next morning he prowled the arches and under the pier. The key fitted a rust-eaten locker, waiting like a mouth half-open. Inside was the twin shoe, heavy. Out spilled a bundle of banknotes, banded and damp, and tucked in the mesh a photograph: the blonde, younger, smiling beside Harry Klyne - the local conman who twenty years earlier had bled three bookies dry before vanishing with half a fortune.

Marlowe barely had time to curse before the cosh landed and the world went black, blacker. The beach hit him in the teeth. When he came round, the notes and the photo were gone. Only the empty shoe sat grinning at him.

She’d set him up, sure. But why show her face? Why drop a detective into Harry’s pocket? His head rang with answers he didn’t like.

Klyne had once held court at The Blue Parrot, a smoky dive on Middle Street where the piano never stayed in tune and the gin was cheaper than the women’s perfume. Marlowe pushed through the door, the band hammering something half-jazz, half-dirge.

She was there. Alone at a table, whisky glass sweating in her hand. The blonde looked up and gave him a smile that could cut Brighton in two.

‘So you found the locker,’ she said.

‘And the cosh,’ Marlowe growled, sliding into the chair opposite. ‘Neat play. You use detectives often, or just when Harry’s on your heels?’

Her laugh was low, bitter. ‘Harry’s always on my heels. I stole the key from him, thought I could buy myself a way out. But Harry’s coming, I couldn’t stop him, and when he walks through that door I need to be three streets gone.’

Marlowe lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl. ‘And the money?’

She leaned close, breath hot with whisky. ‘Long gone, darling. Like me.’

Then she was up, coat over her arm, heels clicking through the blue haze. Marlowe sat there with the smoke and the piano and the empty chair, knowing the only thing he’d earned was the echo of her perfume.

On Brighton Beach, you don’t find shoes. They find you. 

(With apologies, of course, to Raymond Chandler.)