The Unmarked Shore

The Unmarked Shore - A Reimagining

Found On: 10th September 1974

‘In the early evening of September 10th, 1974, a female body was found in a beach hut on Monmouth Beach in the popular seaside town of Lyme Regis.’

Locate International

This isn’t her real name. Nor her real life. But it could have been. An attempt to remember someone the world let slip.

***

The Cobb’s ancient spine shuddered under the gale, the Channel washing over the seawall. On Monmouth Beach, Victorian huts with peeling, pastel painted facades, salt-rotten had succumbed. A pale-blue hut creaked and collapsed inward, its boards snapping into fragments in the dark water. The storm keened through the cliffs.

Two hundred miles north, Clara Fournier pressed her forehead against the cold glass of her Bermondsey studio. The flat smelt of turpentine and burnt paper. Rain blurred the chimneys into a wash of smoke and sodium light over the dark Thames. Her reflection blurred into the storm outside. The word came to her: fantôme—a ghost, carrying another life in another tongue.

Behind her, Marie’s letters curled black in the fireplace. ‘Dearest C’—even the endearment felt like mockery now. Marie’s surgeon’s hand had written those final words: You mistake loneliness for art. I’ve found someone who doesn’t need to be saved. The fire chewed at the words, spitting them to ash. Clara watched fragments float upward.

Her paint-stained knuckles scraped the suitcase lining as she tugged at the stuck zip. The ultramarine matched the cinema ticket in her coat pocket.

Carlton Cinema, 8th September, Deux hommes dans la ville. She’d chosen the French title deliberately, drawn by its promise of justice denied. She sat in the back row, watching Alain Delon’s character edge towards ruin, facing his inevitable destruction. The ticket had lived in her pocket for three days now, proof she’d felt something beyond numbness.

From below, Mrs Vickery’s wireless crackled: ‘Severe weather warnings remain in force across Dorset and Hampshire. Coastal areas should expect significant tidal surges. Small craft are advised to remain in harbour.’ Clara turned up her coat collar, the wool scratching her collarbone. Marie used to say the coat made her look like an escaped nun.

‘Very Magdalene laundry,’ she’d teased, pulling Clara close.

‘My little refugee.’ Back then, the words felt affectionate.

She moved through the flat, pulling her life apart. The clawfoot tub where she’d spent hours hiding from Marie’s silences. The chipped saucer that served as her palette, rainbowed with dried paint. The grey cashmere scarf lay across the bed, was Marie’s parting gift, or perhaps her final cruelty. Clara had worn it on their first proper date, to the National Gallery. Marie had pointed out the brush strokes in a Monet water lily, her fingers tracing patterns in the air. ‘See how he builds light?’ she’d said.

Her fingers brushed against the corner of a postcard tucked into the edge of her mirror. The Cobb, stark against a turquoise sky. On the back, a familiar, looping hand, wish you were here. - N. She left it where it was. A fossil from a previous life

The wind banged open the window. She didn’t move, letting the storm strip the room bare.

***

Three hours later, Clara stood at Waterloo Station as the storm reached London. Her suitcase felt impossibly heavy—not just clothes, but the weight of abandoned paintings, sketches she couldn’t bear to burn, tubes of paint she’d never use again. The platform lights flickered against the faces of commuters: a man clutching his trilby, a girl with a dripping umbrella, each one isolated in their small misery.

The Dorset train arrived braking with a long screech of metal against metal. Clara folded into the window’s hush; her reflection stitched faintly into the glass like a ghost rehearsing her lines. The ticket stub was soft from rain now, the French title blurred but still legible. As London’s lights gave way to countryside, she pressed her palm against the window. The glass was cold enough to hurt.

She thought of the Cobb’s stones, worn smooth by centuries of tides. In her final sketch, she’d drawn them fractured, broken into sharp pieces. Perhaps that had been prescient. Perhaps she’d always known she was heading toward something that would require breaking.

The train pulled into Axminster at half past three. Clara stood on the empty platform, suitcase dragging behind her, and breathed air that tasted of salt and endings.

***

The morning sky pressed low over Lyme Regis, grey as pewter tankard. Geoffrey Hartwell, fifty-three, soft around the middle, had risen early to escape the B&B. He’d been hoping for decent light for photographs when he saw the beach hut door standing open.

Inside, she sat against the bench on the back wall, one knee drawn up. A grey scarf was wound around her neck, knotted with a piece of driftwood. Her eyes were closed, face turned slightly toward the sea-facing wall. A cinema ticket lay beside her right hand, its edges curled with the damp. Her shoes were gone; she wore men’s socks, bunched around her ankles.

Detective Inspector Michael Grayson arrived as the tide turned. Forty-eight years old, twenty-three years on the force, he’d worked enough suicides to recognise the particular stillness they left behind. The pebble in his coat pocket—worn smooth by his thumb—had been in his possession for eighteen months, since the morning he’d found Sarah’s note on the kitchen table.

He stepped into the hut with careful reverence. The scarf drew his attention first—expensive cashmere, twisted with the driftwood in a knot that spoke of deliberation. Then the ticket: Deux hommes dans la ville, dated three days prior. A French film about justice and redemption, played to mostly empty houses.

‘The shoes?’ he murmured to PC Andrews.

‘Not here, sir. Odd, leaving them behind like that.’

Grayson let silence settle as he crouched to examine the scene. Tucked beneath her was a folded paper, water-stained but legible: ‘Meet me at the Cobb at dawn. N.’ The handwriting was different from the signature on her provisional identification—a library card for Clara Fournier. But who was N?

***

Over the following fortnight, Grayson built Clara’s last days piece by piece. The cinema manager remembered her.

‘Kept checking her watch,’ he said. ‘Like she was waiting for someone who never came.’ The B&B proprietor in Charmouth confirmed she’d been a guest for three weeks, paying cash, barely speaking.

‘Drew constantly,’ the woman said. ‘Beach scenes, over and over. Always the same bit of coast.’

The left luggage locker at Axminster Station held her suitcase: art supplies, a few clothes, seventeen sketchbooks. The earliest were signed Clara Fournier, but the recent ones bore no name at all. The progression told its own story—confident portraits giving way to abstract seascapes, finally dissolving into obsessive studies of the Cobb itself.

Dental records suggested North American origin—the amalgam work was distinctive of Canadian health services from the 1960s. Through Interpol, Grayson contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Their search of missing persons files from the 1970s yielded nothing. Clara Fournier had either never been reported missing, or had been deliberately erased from official records.

The case consumed him. His flat became a map of her final weeks, sketches photocopied and pinned to walls, a timeline. His sergeant suggested he request reassignment’ but the Detective ignored him.

At night, he studied Clara’s self-portraits, trying to understand the progression from the confident woman in the early sketches to the hollow-eyed figure in the final drawings. Something had broken her long before she reached Lyme Regis.

***

The cinema owner, Mr Patel, had worked the Carlton for thirty years. He remembered Clara not for any dramatic gesture, but for her stillness.

‘Sat in the same seat three nights running,’ he told Grayson.

‘Back row, aisle seat. Watched the credits until the lights came up, then left without a word. It was as if she expected someone, though no one ever arrived.’

The note haunted Grayson. ‘N’ could be anyone; but the handwriting suggested intimacy, familiarity. Someone who knew Clara would understand the reference to dawn at the Cobb. Someone who had perhaps arranged to meet her there.

But if someone had planned to meet Clara, why hadn’t they come forward? Why had she died alone?

Grayson walked the Cobb at different hours, trying to see it through Clara’s eyes. At dawn, when the light was soft and forgiving. At dusk, when shadows turned the stones into something primordial. At night, the beacon lights beam swept the stones, part-warning, part-blessing.

The local fishermen remembered her.

‘Quiet woman,’ said Jimmy Clarkson, mending nets outside the Harbour Master’s office. ‘Sketched for hours, never spoke. Always wore that grey scarf, even when it was warm. Strange, that.’

***

The inquest was brief. Dr Elizabeth Harman, the coroner, had reviewed similar cases for thirty years. Her voice was a dry, administrative instrument, flattening tragedy into procedure. 'In the matter of Clara Fournier, aged fifty-eight... cause of death was ligature strangulation, applied by the deceased. No evidence of third-party involvement. We find the balance of her mind was disturbed.'

Grayson watched from the back as the clerk recorded the verdict. In the public gallery, no one claimed her. No family or friends came forward. The verdict ended her story, into a single entry on official paperwork.

The bus driver who’d brought Clara to Lyme Regis testified briefly. The bus driver twisted his cap in his hands, looking at a point somewhere past Grayson's shoulder.

'Aye, she rode the Tuesday service. Three weeks running. Always had that sketchbook clutched to her, like it was something precious. Never saw her without it.'

He paused, finally meeting Grayson's eye. 'Funny thing, that. Wasn't with her when they found her, was it?'

That evening, Grayson returned to the beach hut. The scene had been released, the police tape removed, but he could still see her outline in the weathered wood. He sat where she had died, trying to understand her final choice.

The driftwood lay at his feet, the piece that had held the scarf. He picked it up, feeling its weight, its rough texture. Sarah had used a belt, efficient and final. Clara had chosen something, a piece of driftwood, something the sea itself had shaped.

His fingers found the pebble in his coat pocket, smooth and egg-shaped, found on Monmouth Beach at dawn. He rubbed his thumb over its surface, but there were no answers there. Her grave lay in the far corner of the churchyard, a council clerk’s afterthought. On the headstone they’d carved ‘Clarice.’ Even her name was wrong.

Later, he knelt on the frozen earth, the pebble’s weight warm in his palm. ‘They erased you twice,’ he whispered to the unmarked ground. The wind carried the salt breath of the ocean, and somewhere below the cliff, waves gnashed at the Cobb’s stones, relentless and patient.

***

Dr. Marnie Chen traced the disappeared. Her work was an archaeology of absence, sifting through digital silt and paper trails to find the shape of a life. Clara Fournier had surfaced not as a person, but as an anomaly: a ghost in the machine. A cold-case algorithm had flagged her distinctive Canadian dental work—a whisper of amalgam from a 1960s Ottawa clinic—a country of origin with no corresponding missing person's file.

For eighteen months, a DNA sample taken during the post-mortem had drifted through international databases, a message in a bottle on a digital sea. When the match finally came, it was to a nursing home in Cobourg, Ontario, and to an elderly woman who, Marnie sensed, had been waiting forty-nine years for the world to ask about Clara.

Natalie Fournier was eighty-six and still sharp as any knife. During their video call, she sat by a window streaked with November grime, her hands twisted in her lap.

‘Clara disappeared in November 1973,’ she told Marnie. ‘One day she was there, mixing paint in our kitchen, covering everything in cobalt blue. Next day, gone. Took nothing but a sketchbook and her passport.’

The flat they’d shared above Kensington Market had been raided by police the following week. Not looking for Clara—looking for evidence of ‘unnatural acts.’ Someone had informed them about the two women living together. The landlord evicted Natalie the same day.

‘I waited two years for her to come back,’ Natalie said.

‘Then I gave up waiting. Started a new life in Ottawa, met Helen. But I kept one thing.’

The camera shook as she moved away, returning with a small wooden box.

‘Clara hid this before she left. Said if anything happened, I should keep it safe.’

Inside the box was a sketchbook, wrapped in oilcloth. The pages, yellowed with age but still intact. The early drawings showed their life together—Natalie reading while Clara sketched, hands intertwined on a park bench, morning light through gauze curtains. Then the drawings changed. The Cobb appeared first as a simple seawall sketch, but returned obsessively. Until the final pages, dominating every drawing; sometimes whole and sometimes fractured, but always calling.

On the last page, Clara had written a single line: ‘If I’m not brave enough to live, at least I can choose where to die.’

‘She used to have nightmares about drowning,’ Natalie said, her voice barely audible over the computer’s speakers.

‘But she loved the sea too much to fear it. The Cobb was from a postcard I sent her; I went to Lyme Regis on holiday in ’71. She kept that postcard for two years, sketched it over and over.’

Marnie printed every page of Clara’s hidden sketchbook, each one a fragment of a love that had been forced underground.

***

Marnie flew to London six months later. She’d digitised every page of Clara’s sketchbook, sent copies to Grayson, and arranged for a proper headstone: ‘Clara Fournier, 1915-1973, Artist.’

At Lyme Regis, she found Grayson waiting by the grave. They’d corresponded throughout her research, two strangers bound by their refusal to let Clara remain nameless.

Grayson placed a smooth pebble on the fresh headstone.

‘She knew exactly where she wanted to be.’

Marnie watched the waves. ‘Why here?’

‘Because it was beautiful,’ he said.

They walked together to the Cobb, carrying Clara’s story between them. The ancient stones stretched into the grey morning, unchanged by time or tragedy. Tourists drifted onto the Cobb, cameras dangling, guidebooks open to Mary Anning, and Jane Austen and oblivious of the fact a woman’s life had ended here.

Marnie opened the original sketchbook—Natalie had insisted she bring it back to where Clara’s journey had ended. The wind turned the pages, flipping through years of sketches. On the final page, Clara’s words seemed to shimmer in the salt air: ‘If I’m not brave enough to live, at least I can choose where to die.’

They stood together in silence, watching the tide retreat from the Cobb’s ancient foundation. Clara’s story lived on, not in records, but in the memory of blue paint and in the salt air and in the love, Natalie had carried for her.

The sea had swallowed Clara’s last words, but in return leaving people to remember her.

Marnie closed the sketchbook and tucked it safely in her bag. Tomorrow she would return it to Natalie, completing a circle that had taken fifty years to close. But for now, she stood on the Cobb with Grayson, two guardians of memory in a world that preferred to forget.

She said it quietly, more to the wind than to Grayson: 'A palimpsest.'

The Cobb endured, a manuscript written and rewritten by the sea, its secrets held in stone and salt.