The Fethering Mysteries 01; The Body on the Beach tfm-1

by Simon Brett

  “If it says ‘j. T. CARPETS’ on it, then there’s a strong chance that it does belong to J.T. Carpets, I’d have said.” The girl’s voice was poised just the right side of insolence. But only just. “Did one of our fitters leave it in your house?”

  “No. I found it…on the beach.” No need to be too specific.

  “Oh, all right. So why’re you telling me?”

  “I just thought you might want it back.”

  “Not that bothered,” said the girl. “I mean, it’s only a Stanley knife. Not like it’s the only one in the building.”

  “Oh.”

  Some residual compassion in the girl responded to the disappointment in Carole’s tone. “I mean, if you’re passing the office, drop it in by all means,” she conceded magnanimously.

  “But none of your staff has reported the knife missing?”

  “Oh, come on, if they’ve lost company property, they’re hardly going to go shouting to the boss about it, are they?”

  “No, I suppose not. So you have no idea which member of your staff might’ve mislaid the – ”

  “Listen, lady. You drop it into the office, that’d be very public-spirited of you. If you don’t, the company’s not going to go to the wall – right? And, since it is now after half-past five, I’ll say thank you very much for calling and goodbye!”

  The phone was put down with some vigour. Carole felt uncomfortable. The patronizing tone been all too reminiscent of Detective Inspector Brayfield’s. And Carole was also left with the feeling that she had a lot to learn about being a detective.

  ♦

  Jude’s appointment turned out not to be with Rory Turnbull. She was told when she arrived at the smart reception area that she’d be seen by a Mr Frobisher. While she waited, Jude was aware of much toing and froing among the receptionists and dental nurses, as though the impact of some offstage crisis was being minimized for the watching patients.

  The man who greeted her when she was ushered into his surgery was about forty and fit-looking, with an unreconstructed Australian accent. He was immaculately clean in white coat and rubber gloves, and his surroundings matched him. All the equipment was shiny and new. Even his dental nurse looked as though she’d been recently delivered and only just removed from her wrappings.

  “I was put on to this practice by Barbara Turribull,” said Jude, as she was settled into the chair and floated into a prone position.

  “Oh yes?” said Mr Frobisher, without much interest.

  “So I thought I might be seen by Mr Turribull.”

  “There are three of us in the practice. We tend to share out the new patients. I hope that’s all right with you…”

  “Yes, yes. Absolutely fine. So is Mr Turnbull in today?”

  “No, he isn’t, as it happens.” Was Jude being hypersensitive in detecting a slight resentment in Mr Frobisher’s reaction to his colleague’s absence? He sat astride his mobile stool and focused the overhead light on her face. “So, Mrs – ”

  “Please call me ‘Jude’. Everyone does.”

  “Very well then, Jude…any problems with your teeth?”

  “No, I just wanted to get registered.”

  “Fine. Well, I’ll have a quick look and confirm everything’s OK.”

  For the next few minutes, Mr Frobisher’s probing around her mouth made further conversation impossible. He called out a few notes to the dental nurse, who clicked them in on a keyboard.

  There was an interruption when one of the receptionists entered with a sheaf of printed papers. Some silent semaphore with Mr Frobisher caused him to break away from his examination of Jude’s teeth. With an ‘Excuse me a moment’, he crossed to look at what the receptionist had brought in.

  “No, that has to be wrong.”

  “It’s in black and white, Frobie.”

  “Must be a misprint. Tell them I’ll come and have a word in a couple of minutes, OK?”

  He crossed back to his patient as the receptionist left the surgery. “Sorry about that. We’re having an inspection by the RDO – that’s the Regional Dental Officer. Routine stuff, but they always manage to disrupt the whole place.”

  “What is it that they – ”

  “Now, open wide again please.”

  So Jude was unable to find out more about the workings of Regional Dental Officers. And Mr Frob-isher gave her little opportunity for further conversation when the examination was concluded.

  “Good. No serious problems at the moment. Couple of places where the gums’re looking a bit red, though. Look after your gums and it makes my job of looking after your teeth a lot simpler.”

  “Yes,” said Jude contritely.

  “Make an appointment to see one of our hygienists on your way out, will you?”

  “Sure. I – ”

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go and sort out this RDO.”

  She couldn’t make him stay. And even if she had been able to make him stay, Jude wasn’t sure what questions she would have wanted to ask Mr Frobisher.

  “Tell reception to apologize to the next appointment,” he told the nurse as he left the room. “Only be about five minutes.”

  On the coastline train that rattled through an unbelievable number of small stations and rattled past an even more unbelievable number of bungalows on its way back to Fethering, Jude tried to comfort herself with the fact that there was nothing wrong with her teeth. But the predominant feeling in her mind was one she shared with Carole – that she had a lot to learn about being a detective.

  ∨ The Body on the Beach ∧

  Fifteen

  The Crown and Anchor was on the way back from Fethering Station. Jude knew she shouldn’t really, but the thought of grabbing a bite to eat there rather than knocking something together at home was appealing. She could be an excellent cook when she felt like it, but she very rarely did feel like it.

  Jude knew she shouldn’t really spend the money either. But what the hell? Tomorrow would be soon enough to start her economy regime. She went into the pub.

  There were maybe half a dozen people scattered around the sitting room that was the Crown and Anchor’s interior. Most were tucked away in alcoves, their presence betrayed by a glimpse of elbow or a murmur of chatter. The room looked comforting, as did the lugubrious grin Ted Crisp gave her from behind the bar.

  “Couldn’t keep away from me, eh, young Jude? My old animal magnetism doing its stuff?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So what can I do you for? Or are you just after my body?”

  “I was thinking of lunch.”

  He accepted this philosophically. “First things first. And first thing’s got to be a drink, hasn’t it? Wodger fancy – apart from me, of course?”

  “Glass of white wine.”

  “Large, I take it?”

  “Why not? And something to eat. Nothing very big. Do you do sandwiches?”

  “We not only do sandwiches, we also do baguettes. Bread rolls with delusions of grandeur, no less. List of fillings on the board.”

  Jude looked at the selection written out in multicoloured chalk. “I’ll have the tuna and sweet corn, please.”

  “You won’t regret it. Good choice, that. One tuna and sweet corn baguette!” he shouted out towards the kitchen. “Normally write the orders down. Not when we’re slack like this, though.”

  “Who’ve you got cooking today?”

  “No idea. She’s a woman. Knows her place. Never comes out of the kitchen.”

  Jude could sense a degree of calculation in his words. Ted Crisp was sizing her up, testing the level at which she’d be offended.

  She denied him the satisfaction of a response. “You ever been married, Ted?”

  “Used to be. You can tell. I’m still round-shouldered. Didn’t take, though.” The landlord shook his shaggy head gloomily. “Like an unsuccessful heart transplant. My body rejected it.” He was silent for a moment. “Actually, that’s not true. My body didn’t reject her. She rejecte
d me. Walked out after three months. With a double-glazing salesman. “But he’s so transparent,” I said. “Can’t you see right through him?” She didn’t listen. Said she wanted the security. Wanted to be with someone who didn’t always come staggering in at four in the morning…”

  “Having been out drinking?”

  “Having been out working, I’ll thank you very much, young Jude. And maybe a bit of drinking after the working. But the human body is like an old clock, you know. It needs to unwind.”

  “So what did you do that kept you out till four every morning?”

  “Stand-up. I was on the circuit. When I moved here was the first time I’d ever been in a downstairs room in a pub.”

  “That explains a lot, Ted.”

  “Like what?”

  “Your jokes. They sound like they come from someone who used to be a comedian.”

  He screwed up his face in a mock-wince. “Ooh, you know how to hurt, don’t you? Anyway, you’re right. I wasn’t a huge success on the circuit. It’s a business where you’re only as good as your last joke, and, as you’ve so diplomatically pointed out, my last joke was bloody terrible. So…about four years too late, I saw the wisdom of what my former wife’d said and went for security. Sold up the house, borrowed far too much from the brewery to get this place and…here I am.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Stand-up?” He screwed his lips into a little purse of disagreement. “Nah. No different here. As a pub landlord, I still get heckled and shouted at and have glasses thrown at me by a bunch of drunkards.”

  “Not in Fethering, surely?”

  “Don’t you believe it. Come Saturday night, they’ve all tanked up at home on the old Sanatogen Tonic Wine, they’ve got their pensions in their pockets and evil in their hearts. I tell you, you can hardly move in here for the flying zimmer frames. Ooh, here’s your baguette.” He reached out through the hatch to a disembodied hand from the kitchen. “Get outside of that and you won’t hurt, young lady.”

  There was a clatter from the front door and Jude turned to see Rory Turnbull making a clumsy entrance. He hadn’t shaved that morning and looked unkempt.

  The dentist weaved his way up to the bar. “Large Scotch please, Ted.”

  “If you’re sure…”

  The note of warning in the landlord’s voice hit a raw nerve. “Of course I’m bloody sure! Otherwise I wouldn’t have bloody asked you for it, would I?”

  As Ted Crisp turned to get the drink, Jude ventured a, “Hello. We sort of met in here the other night, didn’t we?”

  “Hm?” Rory Turnbull’s eyes had difficulty in focusing on her.

  “And actually I went to your surgery this morning. Mr Frobisher looked after me.” Just as well it wasn’t you, thought Jude, or my mouth’d be bearing the scars. “Your wife put me in touch.”

  “My wife?” He seemed puzzled by the alien concept.

  “Yes, Barbara.”

  “Oh, that wife.” He let out a bark of laughter, as though this were some huge joke. “Thanks, Ted.” He took a long swallow from the glass.

  “Why, you got another wife, Rory?” asked the landlord. “Little totty tucked away somewhere?”

  The dentist smiled slyly. “I should be so lucky. Don’t think you can get away with that kind of thing in Fethering.”

  “Don’t you believe it.” Ted Crisp struck his forehead in a mock moment of revelation. “I just realized. Jude! You suddenly appear here in Fethering, nobody has a clue who you are, why you’re here…You’re Rory Turnbull’s bit of stuff, aren’t you?”

  She smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I’m afraid my only connection with Rory is professional – not even that, actually, because I saw his partner rather than him.”

  “And you say my wife put you in touch?”

  “Yes. Everyone needs a dentist, don’t they?”

  This struck Rory Turnbull as very funny. “I’ll say. Oh yes, everyone needs a dentist. Everyone needs someone with a steady hand to probe around their smelly mouth. Everyone needs that frisson of lying in a high-tech chair and just waiting to be hurt. And nobody thinks what the dentist needs. Nobody thinks how much it costs him to be there in the surgery every morning, there with the steady hand and the fixed grin and the knowledge that what he’s doing is so stressful it’s lopping the years off his life, one by one. How many dentists get to enjoy the wonderful pensions they salt away so much for through their working lives? Very few, very few. Because they drop dead, you see. Or if they don’t drop dead, they top themselves. Did you know that dentists have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession? And why do you think that is? It’s because what they do manages to be both deadly boring and agonizingly stressful at the same time. It’s because being a dentist combines – ”

  But here the maudlin aria was interrupted by a voice from across the pub. “Rory. I only just noticed you were in here. I wonder if you could…”

  It was Denis Woodville. He was standing next to an alcove where, unnoticed by Jude, he had been lunching with a large young woman dressed in black, who had also risen to her feet. On the seat behind her, where it had been cast off, lay the semicircle of a green anorak.

  “No, sorry, Vice-Commodore,” said Rory Turnbull. “Can’t stay. Have to finish my drink” – he gulped down what remained in one – “and do some very important things.” Shovelling a pocketful of small change on to the bar counter, he set off unsteadily towards the door, repeating to himself, “Very important things.”

  “But what I need to talk about’s important too!” Denis Woodville turned back to his guest as he made for the door. “Sorry, Tanya. Be with you in a moment.”

  The girl had risen from her booth, a lumpen creature in black sweat shirt, leggings and Doc Martens. Hair dyed reddish and cut short, a lot of silver dangling from the perforations in her ears. A silver stud in her nose. She looked anxious.

  “It’s all right, Tanya, love,” Ted Crisp called across.

  “The Vice-Commodore’ll be back. You won’t be left to pick up the tab.”

  “I hope not.” Her voice had those slack local vowels which sound uninterested even at moments of excitement. She drifted uneasily towards the bar.

  “Though it’s not like our Denis to be pushing the boat out like this,” Ted went on. “Bit of a tightwad usually.”

  “Lunch is on Fethering Yacht Club expenses,” the girl explained. “He wanted to say thank-you now I’ve left, and since I didn’t have anything else on today, I thought, ‘Well, it’s a free lunch’.”

  “No such thing,” said Ted Crisp.

  “Sorry?” The girl looked at him curiously.

  “A free lunch. No such thing.”

  “What?”

  He spelled it out. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

  “No. You have to pay. In a pub or a restaurant, you always have to pay.”

  Ted Crisp recognized he wasn’t getting anywhere. Tanya was unaware of the reference. “You like some coffee, would you? Seem to remember when you worked behind the bar here, you were virtually on an intravenous drip of coffee.”

  The girl wrinkled her nose, a manoeuvre which the silver stud made look hazardous. “No, thanks.” She looked across to the door. “I hope he’s all right.”

  The landlord chuckled. “I think the Vice-Commodore can look after himself in the face of drunken dentists. Don’t you worry. He’ll be back in a minute.”

  No sooner had he said the words than Denis Woodville returned. He was lighting up another Gauloise and looked rather miffed. “Tanya, I’ll just sort out the bill for this lot and then we’ll be off – all right?”

  “Fine,” said the girl without interest.

  The Vice-Commodore reached into a pocket for an envelope full of petty cash. “Right, Ted, what’s the damage?”

  While he settled up, Jude attacked her baguette, which was excellent. After the unlikely couple, thin septuagenarian and broad twenty-year-old, had left, she said, “You said Tanya used to work for you too
, Ted?”

  “That’s right. Not of the brightest, as you might’ve gathered from our exchange about free lunches. No, Tanya’s not a bad girl. Been in care, had a tough time when she was growing up, I gathered. But she did the job all right. And a good barmaid is hard to find.” His eyes narrowed as he looked across at Jude. “Don’t suppose you fancy doing the odd shift in here, do you?”

  She chuckled. “Not at the moment. Maybe, if I get desperate…”

  “Yeah, nobody works for me unless they’re desperate.” He sighed. “Nobody does anything for me unless they’re desperate.”

  “Talking of desperation, Ted…”

  “Hm?”

  “How long’s Rory Turribull been drinking like that?”

  “Only the last few months. Well, only the last few months he’s been drinking like that in here. Maybe in the privacy of the Shorelands Estate he’s been doing it for years.”

  “Can’t see the lovely Barbara being too keen on that.”

  “No, nor the old witch, her mother.” He shuddered. “That Winnie. One of the best arguments for misogyny I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Do you know them well?”

  “Hardly. Only by reputation, gossip, what-have-you. You hear a lot stuck behind the bar of a pub.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “And not much of it’s very charitable.”

  “No. So what have you heard from Rory Turnbull while you’ve been stuck behind the bar?”

  “Well, it’s all the same, really. You heard the full routine today. Goes on and on round the same things – how miserable life is, what hell it is being a dentist, what hell it is being married…usual cheery stuff. Tell you, after an evening spent with Rory, my own life seems a bed of blooming roses.”

  A new thought struck Jude. “Ooh, and he has a boat, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s right. Called Brigadoon. Same as his house.”

  Good, thought Jude. At least one of our conjectures has proved to be right.

  But it still doesn’t prove any link between the owner of Brigadoon II and the body on the beach.

  ∨ The Body on the Beach ∧

  Sixteen