Fethering 01 (2000) - The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett; Prefers to remain anonymous

  When the dog was shining clean and snuffling into sleep by the Aga, and when Carole had mopped up the inevitable wet footprints he had left on the kitchen floor, it seemed natural for her to continue cleaning the kitchen. As a result, it was after nine before she went into the sitting room to confront the telephone.

  She had gone through the walk back from the beach, as well as the mechanical processes of bathing Gulliver and cleaning the kitchen, without allowing herself to think about what she had seen. She had kept an equally tight control on her body, not permitting it the slightest tremor of reaction to the shock. As she had done frequently before in her life, Carole Seddon kept everything firmly damped down.

  She dialled 999 and asked for the police. In simple, unemotional sentences, she gave them the necessary information. She described her actions precisely, the direction of her walk, the time she had returned, the fact that she had bathed her dog and cleaned the kitchen. She pinpointed the exact position where the body had been found and gave her considered estimate as to how long it would be before the returning tide reached that point. She gave her address and telephone number, and was unsurprised when told that someone would be round to talk to her.

  Carole Seddon put the phone down and sat in an armchair. She did not collapse into an armchair. She sat in one.

  And then she heard the strange noise from outside. Perhaps it had just started. Or it could have been going on unheard for some time, so intense had been her concentration on the task in hand.

  The sound was a rhythmic dull thudding, something being hit repeatedly. Carole rose from her chair and moved tentatively towards the front-facing window. Through it, she saw Jude in the adjacent front garden. Her new neighbour had spread a slightly threadbare rug over a structure of boxes and was beating it with a flat besom brush. Though still wearing a trademark long skirt, Jude had removed her loose-fitting top to reveal a bright yellow T-shirt. Her large bosom and chubby arms shuddered with the efforts of her carpet-beating. In spite of the cold, her cheeks were red from the exercise.

  Carole’s instinctive reaction was one of disapproval. There was something old-fashioned in Jude’s carpet-beating. The scene could have come from a film of back-to-back terraced houses in the 1930s. Northern terraced houses. The possibility, suddenly occurring to Carole, that Jude might come from ‘the North’ prompted a visceral recoil within her. ‘The North’ still conjured up images of unwanted intimacy, of people constantly ‘dropping in’, of back doors left unlocked to facilitate this ‘dropping in’. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in Fethering.

  Back doors were kept firmly locked. Approaches to people’s houses were made strictly from the front. And, except for essential gardening and maintenance, the only part of a front garden that was used was the path. Even if the space caught the evening sun, no one would dream of sitting in their front garden. And it certainly wasn’t the proper place to do anything domestic, like beating a carpet. Passers-by, seeing someone engaged in such activities, might be forced into conversation.

  In Fethering, except for chance meetings in the High Street, social encounters were conducted by arrangement. It was inappropriate to meet someone without having received planning permission. A prefatory phone call—ideally a couple of days before the proposed encounter—was the minimum requirement.

  These thoughts were so instinctive that they took no time at all to flash through Carole Seddon’s mind, but they still took long enough to allow something appalling to happen. Jude, taking a momentary respite from her efforts with the besom, had turned and caught sight of her neighbour framed in the window. Eye contact was unavoidable.

  For Carole then to have repressed a half-smile and little flap of the hand would have been the height of bad manners. Her minimal gesture was reciprocated by a huge wave and a cheery grin.

  If she had left the contact there, Carole knew she would have appeared standoffish. And, though standoffish she undoubtedly was, she had no wish to appear so. She found her hand and face doing a little mime of “I’ll come out and say hello.”

  “My name’s Carole Seddon. Welcome to Fethering. If there’s anything I can do to help out, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”

  “Thanks very much.” Carole found her hand grasped and firmly shaken. “My name’s Jude.”

  “Yes…” Carole awaited the gloss of a surname, but wasn’t given one. “You’ll find we’re a friendly lot round here,” she lied.

  “Good.” Jude chuckled. It was a warm, earthy sound. “I get along with most people. Most people do, don’t they?”

  Carole granted this alien concept a thin smile. “Well, if I can tell you where things are…shops, dry-cleaners, you know…I’m only next door, so just ask.”

  “Thanks. I’m sure I’ll find my way around pretty quickly.”

  “Mm…” Carole found the openness of Jude’s dreamy brown eyes slightly disconcerting.

  “Equally,” her neighbour said, “if there’s anything I can do to help you out, you’ll say, won’t you?”

  Carole nodded this offer token gratitude, however incongruous might be the idea of her suddenly turning for assistance to someone she didn’t know. The woman had only just moved to Fethering, for goodness’ sake. Any support being offered should go from the established resident to the newcomer, not the other way round.

  Surely Jude didn’t imagine her neighbour was about to confide in her? Carole was hardly likely suddenly to start spilling the beans to a stranger about what she’d seen on the beach. But even as she had the thought, she was surprised how much she did want to talk about the shock she had received that morning. And there was something in those brown eyes that invited confidences.

  “Anyway”—Carole shook herself back on track—“better get on. Things to do.”

  “Yes.” Jude grinned easily. “Me too. House is crammed full of boxes. God knows how long it’ll take me to sort it all out.”

  “Moving’s always a nightmare.”

  “Still, I can do it at my own pace. No hurry.”

  Carole smiled as if she endorsed this view. But she didn’t. Of course there was a hurry. One couldn’t live in mess. One had an obligation to get one’s house tidy as soon as possible. If people weren’t aware of the necessity for hurry in life, society would break down completely.

  “See you soon then.” Jude gave a relaxed wave and hefted her besom for a renewed assault on the carpet.

  “Yes. Yes,” said Carole, turning in slight confusion back towards her front door.

  Inside the house, she berated herself for how little solid fact she had got out of the conversation. She wasn’t that interested, of course, but there were things one ought to know about a new neighbour.

  She hadn’t even elicited a surname, for goodness’ sake. Jude. Just Jude. That wasn’t very satisfactory. And then again, what was the woman’s status? What was her age? Was she married, single, divorced? Was there a regular man on the scene? Carole realized that, uncharacteristically, she hadn’t even checked out Jude’s ring finger. Something compelling about those big brown eyes made it difficult to divert one’s gaze elsewhere.

  Did Jude have a job? A private income? A pension? Carole knew none of these things. Not that she was interested, but it was the kind of information that might be important at some stage.

  Good heavens, Carole realized, she hadn’t even found out whether or not Jude came from ‘the North’.

  THREE

  “So why were you walking on that part of the beach, Mrs Seddon?”

  Carole didn’t like Detective Inspector Brayfield’s tone. She was the one who’d reported the body, after all. If anything, she deserved congratulation. Certainly not this hint of suspicion in her interrogator’s voice.

  Also, why were there two of them? Not just the Inspector in his almost dandyish single-breasted black suit. There was also the uniformed WPG, Juster, who hadn’t said much but was clearly taking everything in. She sat on a straight-backed chair, tensely alert. Was there some new directi
ve that the police always had to work in twos, even for routine inquiries? Maybe it was a gender thing. Allegations of sexual harassment would not be risked if a male police officer was never left alone with a female witness.

  But the explanation didn’t seem adequate. Carole still had the feeling that their encounter was adversarial, as if the police were expecting more from her than mere corroboration of what she’d already said over the telephone. She had dealt with a great many police officers in the course of her work at the Home Office but had never before felt this aura of mistrust.

  “I always go for an early-morning walk along the beach. I have a dog.” Gulliver hadn’t provided a visual aid when the police arrived. He was still sleeping off his walk at the foot of the Aga. As a guard dog he was hopeless. His first instinct was not to deter entry, but to give any new arrival at the house a fulsome welcome. “And I always take my dog on the beach first thing.”

  “First thing’ was rather early this morning, wasn’t it, Mrs Seddon? Can hardly have been light when you set off.”

  “I woke early. It always takes me a bit of time to adjust when the clocks change.”

  “I understand,” said the Inspector, who clearly didn’t. “So why did you go to that particular part of the beach this morning?”

  “It wasn’t a particular part of the beach. It was just where I happened to be walking.” Exasperated by the scepticism in Detective Inspector Brayfield’s eye, Carole went on. “There are only two directions in which you can go along the beach. Off Seaview Road there’s a path which goes down by the Yacht Club. At the end of that you’re on the beach and you have the choice of turning left or turning right. Left you go virtually straight into the sea wall, so this morning, like most mornings, I decided to turn right.”

  She wasn’t meaning to sound sarcastic, but she knew that’s how the words were coming out.

  “For any particular reason?”

  What was it with that word ‘particular’? “No,” Carole snapped. “For no particular reason.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” It was WPG Juster this time, her voice showing the professional concern of someone who’s done a counselling course.

  “Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you!” Why were they treating her like some semi-invalid?

  “How old are you, Mrs Seddon?” Juster went on.

  “I don’t really see that it’s any business of yours, but I’m fifty-three.”

  “Ah,” said the WPC.

  “Ah,” the Inspector echoed, as if that explained everything.

  What was this—some kind of medical assessment? Had they written her off as a menopausal hysteric? Surely not. She had told them everything in a manner that was unemotional to the point of being dull. What were they trying to insinuate?

  Though these questions ran through her mind, being Carole Seddon, of course she didn’t voice any of them. Instead, she took the initiative. “Presumably,” she said, “when a body like that is found, it’s photographed in situ first, and then taken off for forensic examination?”

  Detective Inspector Brayfield, stroking the knot of his brightly coloured silk tie, agreed that that would be the normal procedure. But he wasn’t to be deflected from his dissection of her story.

  “You say there were cuts on the man’s neck and scar tissue on the inside of his wrist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which might suggest he had been an intravenous drug user?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “Do you know much about intravenous drug users, Mrs Seddon?”

  “No, I don’t. But I do know enough to recognize that that was a possible explanation of the scars.”

  “From things you’ve seen on television?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  Brayfield nodded, as if this too was of profound relevance. Then he said, “Could we just recap once again exactly what happened this morning?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” She couldn’t help herself. But, feeling the intense scrutiny of the two police officers after her outburst, she took a deep breath before saying, “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “Was there anyone else around on the beach this morning when you took your walk?”

  “Apart from the dead body?”

  “Apart indeed from the dead body. Do you recall seeing anyone else?”

  “No, I don’t think I did…” She screwed up her eyes with the effort of recapturing the scene. “Ooh yes, yes, there was someone.”

  Carole was aware of WPC Juster tautening in her chair and realized how guilty she must sound, first forgetting, then remembering. But she was damned if she was going to feel guilty. She had nothing to feel guilty about. She was just doing her duty as a public-spirited citizen. Never again, though. Next time she found a dead body, she’d walk away and leave some other unfortunate passer-by the task of breaking the news to the police.

  “So who was this?” asked Detective Inspector Bray-field evenly. “Who did you see?”

  “It was someone in a shiny green anorak with the hood tied up tight. They were walking into the wind, you see. They hurried straight past me.”

  “Hurried?”

  “Almost ran.”

  “Uh-huh. And was it a man or a woman?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “Really?” Though deliberately ironing out the intonation, he still couldn’t remove the last wrinkle of scepticism. “You didn’t speak to this person?”

  “No. I just gave them a nod.”

  “And did they speak to you?”

  “No.”

  “Or give you a nod?” Carole shook her head. “That’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, obviously if we had any means of tracking down this other person on the beach, then we might have another witness of your dead body, mightn’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which might be very useful.” Before Carole had time to say anything, the Inspector moved abruptly on. “So you came straight back here from the beach?”

  “As I told you, yes.”

  “But before calling the police, you bathed your dog?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was covered with seaweed and soaked with salt water. If I hadn’t given him a bath, the whole house’d smell.”

  “Hm. And then, after washing the dog, you cleaned your kitchen.” The Inspector ran a hand over his chin, as if checking the quality of his morning’s shave. “You don’t often find dead bodies on the beach, do you, Mrs Seddon?”

  “No, of course I don’t!”

  “So, given the fact that it’s an unusual—and probably rather a shocking—thing to happen to you, can you understand why I’m surprised that you bathed your dog and did some of your housework before reporting it?”

  “I can see that, with hindsight, it may sound rather odd, but at the time it seemed the perfectly logical thing to do.”

  “Did it?”

  “Maybe I was in shock. Maybe I needed to do something mechanical, something mundane, to calm myself down.”

  “Or maybe, Mrs Seddon, you just needed time to work things out.”

  “Work what out?”

  “What you were going to say when you rang the police.”

  “I didn’t need to work that out. I just had to say exactly what I’d seen.”

  “The body on the beach?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And to direct us to where that body was lying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Mrs Seddon, everything you’ve told us this morning makes perfect sense.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “We followed your directions to the letter. They were very clear.” Carole nodded in acknowledgment of the compliment. “We went down to the breakwater you described and everything was absolutely fine…except for one small detail.”

  “And what was that?”

  “When we got to the breakwater, there was nothing there. There was no bod
y on the beach, Mrs Seddon.”

  FOUR

  Carole Seddon felt upset after the police’s departure. They had come to the house with an agenda; their semaphore of little nods and eyelid flickers had been prearranged. Having arrived believing her to be a hysterical attention seeker, nothing she could say was going to make them leave with any change in their attitude.

  That’s what hurt—that they had thought her anything less than sensible. Throughout her career in the Home Office, Carole Seddon had prided herself on being a safe pair of hands. Male colleagues had paid her the ultimate compliment of appearing unaware of her gender. Even at times of crisis, when she returned to work after the birth of her son, when her marriage to David was turning horribly sour, she had never let her emotions show in her professional life.

  And here she was faced with a detective and a WPG being understanding about her mental state.

  There was nothing wrong with her mental state. Certainly nothing wrong with her hormonally. What stage she was at with her menopause was nobody’s business but her own. And yet the attitude of the two police officers had undermined her confidence. She knew she wasn’t a hysteric, but the fact that someone could imagine her to be a hysteric upset the carefully maintained equilibrium of her life.

  The unease didn’t dissipate during the course of the day. She went through the motions of her normal routine. Did a bit of housework for the rest of the morning. Forced down some soup and a hunk of granary bread at lunchtime, then settled to the regular mental aerobics of the Times crossword. But her brain was sluggish, slow to dissect words into their component parts, slow to make connections between them. She completed one corner, but could fill in only a few stragglers on the rest of the grid. The crossword, usually finished within half an hour, was set aside for completion later in the day.