The Sudoku Inheritance

Part I - Foreplay

As well as my humour, my playlist facility seemed to be intact too, as I seemed to be humming Blondie's "Tide is high" as if my life depended on it: 

It's not the things you do that tease and wound me bad 

But it's the way you do the things you do to me 

The tide is high but I'm holding on 

I'm gonna be your number one. 

But who was doing the teasing and wounding? I couldn't recall, nor could I remember whose number one I wanted to be. 

Another wave crashed onto the flotsam of my limp body, tumbling me violently up the beach, rasping my bare skin like a Black and Decker sander using number sixty grit.  

I coughed and gasped and vomited all at the same time. Snot and fonds of Japanese seaweed covered my face. My eyes stung from the salt. My lungs were burning so hot that no water could quench them. I could taste blood - luckily there were no sharks here in the Solent. 

My body stopped moving momentarily as the wave paused to consider its options. Teasing me. Face down, with arms above my head, I dug my fingers into the sand with all the force I could muster, trying to gain some purchase and inch my way out of the cloying water. But the eddy was too fierce and I was dragged inexorably by the undertow back down the beach, my fingers ploughing furrows in the soft wet sand for Neptune himself to sow his mischief. 

My legs were useless, numb, unresponsive. Maybe they weren't there anymore. 

Again and again I was tossed back up the beach, each time my fingers grasping salvation, only to be denied and sucked back to purgatory. It was like that ubiquitous dream - running through treacle towards some distant target that never gets any closer, as your legs crumble and your will-power drains into the ground. 

I don't know how long I'd been in the sea.  

I remembered being on the boat.  

We'd had supper at the beach cafe with a celebratory bottle of champagne - cheap plonk but we felt like millionaires. We were celebrating something... we'd solved a riddle or something... we'd found something... money? Afterwards we'd laid on the beach as the sun set, and I had commented on the growing cumulo-nimbus clouds coming down the English Channel, sent by those pesky French. I'd bought tickets for us to go somewhere... somewhere nice... Venice?  

After the tourists had vacated the sand spit, we'd fulfilled each other in the sand dunes. She'd joked something about one for the road, whatever that meant. But it was good, it always was. Though she'd seemed distant, preoccupied, even puzzled. 

But then, she often puzzled me. 

Jasmine! 

Yes, Jasmine, she was the one.  

She had wanted to go out in a boat but I hated the sea. She knew that. She countered my protestations about the weather with the promise of cocktails - sex on the beach followed by sex at sea. We had stolen - no, borrowed - a dinghy. Then we had set to sea with a bottle of Bacardi, or two - useful, I giggled, if we had to send an SOS message. She seemed unaffected by the sweet white rum as she sat in the bows of the dinghy toying with the anchor rope. I stood bare-chested on the transom, carefully balanced like a Venetian gondolier singing Just One Cornetto, much to her amusement. She was throwing breadsticks at me and I was driving them off for a six down deep cover using an oar as a remarkably effective bat. It was a good game. 

She had emptied my pockets in case I fell in and soaked my phone and wallet. She was always thoughtful like that. 

Then the moon had sneakily hidden behind one of those ominous anvil clouds.