Fethering 01 (2000) - The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Round four, she took Gulliver out for a shorter walk, through the back gate to do his business in the rough ground behind the row of cottages. Jude and her carpet were no longer in their front garden, but, Carole noted with disapproval, the structure of boxes still was. Her new neighbour would have to learn. People in Fethering didn’t leave anything in their front gardens, except for staddlestones, tasteful statuary and—in one rather regrettable instance—gnomes.

  Gulliver seemed to have caught his mistress’s mood, sloping along by her side with none of his usual frenetic attacks on invisible windmills. The light too was depressing. True to its early promise, the day had never felt like day, and its leaden sky was now thickening into a November night. The cold stung her exposed cheeks and she shivered. Her circulation hadn’t got properly going all day.

  Still Carole Seddon couldn’t lose the unpleasant aftertaste of her morning’s visitation by the police.

  Despite the sour mood they’d engendered, the thought did not for a moment occur to her that she might be in the wrong. There was no doubt that she had seen the body on the beach. The fact that the police hadn’t found it was down either to their incompetence or—more likely—to the interference of some outside agency. Maybe they’d taken too long, arriving after the tide had come in far enough to move the body on. Maybe someone had moved it deliberately.

  Once the body had been found—as she knew it would be—Carole Seddon was determined to get a very full apology from the West Sussex Serious Crimes Squad. Public-spirited citizens should not be treated like criminals.

  Though the prospect of receiving some ultimate moral compensation was a comforting one, when she returned home Carole still felt unsettled. As she put on the lights and drew the curtains, she even asked herself if she was over-reacting, if she actually was in an emotional state. Maybe a delayed response to the shock of seeing the dead body and to the implications of the wounds on its neck?

  Uncharacteristically, she wanted to talk to someone about the whole incident. For a brief, irrational moment, she even contemplated confiding in her new neighbour. She couldn’t forget the unusual quality of empathy she’d seen in those wide brown eyes.

  But that was ridiculous. Even if Carole Seddon had been the kind of person who talked to her neighbours about anything more weighty than the weather, she didn’t even know this woman.

  These uncharacteristic thoughts were interrupted when the doorbell rang.

  She had received no early warning over the previous couple of days. No acquaintance was due to come round for tea. It must be someone selling something, Carole concluded as she approached the front door. Probably one of those men with a zip-up bag full of dishcloths, oven gloves and plastic storage boxes who would flash some laminated card of authorization. If it was, she’d send him off with a flea in his ear. There was a consensus view in Fethering that all such visitors were lookouts for criminal gangs. Carole Seddon wasn’t about to have her joint cased for the benefit of burglars.

  By the time she opened the door, she had built up a healthy head of righteous steam against the expected salesman and was surprised to be confronted by a thin, haunted-looking woman she had never seen before.

  §

  “Did you find a body on the beach this morning?”

  Now Carole knew why she had let the woman in. Her instinct was always to get rid of unexpected callers—particularly callers in grubby jeans and purple quilted anoraks. But something in the woman’s eyes had indicated that her visit was serious, maybe even important. Carole had ushered her stiffly into the sitting room, sat her down and waited till the reason for her presence was explained.

  Now she knew she’d done the right thing. In the same armchair where Detective Inspector Brayfield had sat that morning, disbelieving her story of having found a body on the beach, here was a woman actually asking about her discovery.

  “What makes you think I did?” Carole responded cautiously.

  “I know you did.” The voice was uneducated South Coast, not from the more discriminating purlieus of Fethering. “It was a woman with a beige raincoat and a Labrador,” she went on. “You fit the description.”

  “Whose description?”

  “Never mind that. Look, I know it was you, so we can cut out the bullshit.”

  Carole Seddon appraised the woman in front of her. The face had about it a deadness the colour and texture of papier mache. The hair was flat and dull like tobacco. Only the eyes were alive, burning with a desperate energy.

  “The police have been to see me this morning,” said Carole evenly. “According to them, when they looked, there was no body on the beach.”

  “I’m not interested in the police. You know and I know there was a body on the beach this morning. Down at the end of the breakwater.”

  While it was gratifying to have her story corroborated, Carole still wanted to know where the woman had got her information. “Were you watching me? Was it you who I saw walking away from the body?”

  “I didn’t go on the beach this morning.” The woman dismissed these irrelevant details and hurried on to what really concerned her. “Did you take something from the body? Something out of his jacket pocket?”

  “No, I certainly didn’t. I didn’t touch it.” Carole spoke with the affront of someone whose upbringing did not countenance theft, least of all from the dead.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “Listen, it’s important.”

  “It may be important, but the fact remains that I did not take anything from the body I found on the beach this morning!”

  “There wasn’t no knife?”

  “Knife? I didn’t see any knife.”

  This answer seemed to provide a moment of reassurance. The woman was silent, her eyes darting from side to side as she considered the next tack to take. “Do you know where it went?” she asked eventually.

  “The body?”

  “Of course the body.”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “After you seen it, did you see anyone else go near it?”

  “No. I went home and rang the police. And—as I’ve just told you—when they finally came to see me, they said they hadn’t been able to find the body.”

  This news too seemed to reassure the woman, but only for a moment. Her tone changed. There was overt aggression in her next question. “What were you doing down on the beach, anyway?”

  “I was taking my dog for a walk.”

  “Oh yes?” The woman could do scepticism just as well as Detective Inspector Brayfield. Then, abruptly, she asked, “Did the police say they’d come back?”

  “To see me again? No.”

  “If they do come back, you’re not to tell them anything about it.”

  Carole was getting exasperated. “About what, for God’s sake?”

  “About what you seen on the beach. About you seeing anyone moving the body.”

  “I’ve told you! I didn’t see anyone moving the body!”

  “If you’re lying and I find out you snitched to anyone about what you seen, there’ll be trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” asked Carole, almost contemptuously.

  “This kind of trouble,” said the woman with a new, sly menace in her voice.

  As she spoke, she reached inside her quilted anorak and pulled out a gun.

  FIVE

  Carole was too affronted to feel any fear. “Put that thing away!” she ordered. “What on earth do you think you’re doing? This is Fethering, not Miami Beach.”

  The woman waved the gun threateningly. “You shut up! I think you’d better cooperate with me.”

  Carole rose from her seat and moved towards the telephone. “I’m going to call the police.”

  “Do that and I’ll shoot you!”

  The words stopped her in her tracks. Carole turned to look at the woman, assessing the risk of the threat being carried out.

  Something she saw in the wild, darting eyes told her that the da
nger was real. The woman’s expression wasn’t natural. Perhaps she was under the influence of some drug. Indeed, that would make sense of her erratic behaviour since she’d arrived at the house. She wasn’t entirely in control of her actions.

  Which being the case, she was quite capable of using the gun. Carole returned silently to her seat.

  “So tell me what you did see,” the woman demanded.

  “I didn’t see anything other than what I’ve told you about.”

  Apparently coolness wasn’t the best response. It seemed only to inflame the woman more. Waving the gun with increasing—and rather disturbing—abandon, she said, “Cut the crap. You’re nothing in this. You get shot, it doesn’t matter. So long as the police never find out who moved the body.”

  Her speech was slurring now, becoming something of a ramble. But that didn’t make its content any less disturbing. Being shot by someone coherent or being shot by someone rambling didn’t make a lot of difference, Carole realized. You were still dead.

  “They’ll never find out from me,” Carole said calmly, “because I don’t know who moved the body.”

  The woman looked puzzled. “Whose body? My son’s body? My son’s not dead.” Then, with another worryingly casual wave of the gun, she slurred, “You could be lying.”

  “Yes, I could be, but I’m not.”

  “Does this gun frighten you?”

  “Of course it does. I’m not stupid.”

  “Sometimes,” the woman maundered on, “people get shot just to keep them quiet. To make sure they don’t say anything.”

  This is ridiculous, thought Carole. I am sitting in my own sitting room—in Fethering of all places -and a woman I’ve never seen before is threatening to shoot me with a gun. People will never believe me when I tell them. On the other hand, of course, I may not be around to tell them.

  Though her brain was working fast, her body was paralysed. Carole could do nothing. The gun was still pointing straight at her and a new, dangerous focus had come into the woman’s eyes when…the front doorbell rang.

  There was a momentary impasse. Then the woman hissed, “Don’t answer it.”

  “But everyone knows I’m here. The lights are on. If I don’t answer, they’ll get suspicious and call the police.”

  The barrel wavered while the woman weighed this up. Then she relented. Flicking the gun towards the door, she said, “See who it is. Don’t invite them in, though.”

  “All right. I won’t.”

  As she went towards the front door, Carole reflected wryly on Gulliver’s qualities as a guard dog. Two people—one at least of whom was carrying a gun—had rung her front doorbell in the previous half-hour. And Gulliver hadn’t even stirred from his cosy doze by the Aga.

  Carole opened the front door. The frost had set in fiercely while she’d been indoors and the cold air scoured her face. In the cone of light spreading from the overhead lamp stood Jude. Her blonde hair was covered by a floppy hat and she appeared to be wearing some kind of poncho.

  “Carole, hi. I wondered whether you fancied going down to the Crown and Anchor for a drink?”

  Under normal circumstances, the knee-jerk response would have been, “No, thank you. I’m afraid I’m not a ‘pub person’.” But the presence of a gun-toting, possibly drug-crazed woman in her sitting room disqualified the circumstances from being normal. “Well...”

  But that was all she had time to say. There was the clatter of a door behind her. Carole rushed back to find her sitting room empty. The sound of the back door slamming shut drew her through into the kitchen. That too was empty. From his position at the foot of the Aga, Gulliver looked up blearily. A real help, he was.

  She moved with caution towards the window over the sink and peered into the encroaching darkness. There was no sign of the woman, but the gate at the end of the garden flapped open.

  Carole turned back to see Jude framed in the kitchen doorway. That wasn’t the Fethering way, her instincts told her. To come into someone’s house without being invited, that wouldn’t do at all.

  “So what about a drink?” asked Jude casually.

  To her surprise, Carole Seddon found her lips forming the words, “Yes. Yes, what a good idea.”

  SIX

  Carole wasn’t a ‘pub person’ and it was a long time since she had been to the Crown and Anchor. When they first bought the cottage, while she still had a husband, they had gone once or twice for a drink before Sunday lunch. But that period of cohabitation with David in Fethering hadn’t lasted, and pub-going didn’t seem appropriate to her single status. Except for a couple of visits on those rare occasions when her son came to see her, Carole hadn’t stepped inside the Crown and Anchor for at least five years.

  To someone who didn’t know Fethering, it might seem strange that there was only one pub. Though the Crown and Anchor had been adequate for a fishermen’s village, the residential sprawl that had developed seemed to demand more watering holes. But they had never appeared. The Victorians were puritanical about drinking and later residents had been drawn to Fethering by the attractions of its privacy rather than its communal amenities. When the Downside Estate developed, plans were submitted for a new pub up in that area, but traditionalist influences prevailed and the applications were repeatedly rejected. By then the residents of Fethering were determined to ring-fence their village and prevent further expansion of any kind.

  Besides, a short country drive to the east, to the west, or north into the Downs gave access to a wide range of characterful hostelries. There was no need for more pubs in Fethering.

  Carole certainly hadn’t been in the Crown and Anchor since the new management took over. Though established for nearly three years, in Fethering they were still known as the ‘new’ management. And even though there was only one of them, that one was always referred to as ‘they’.

  In fact, it was a ‘he’, and he was one of the reasons why Carole hadn’t been in the pub recently. Ted Crisp had arrived with a reputation, and since his arrival in the village it had been amplified by local gossip.

  Carole knew him by sight. His hair was too long, he had a scruffy beard and shuffled around in jeans and sweat shirts. She had from time to time vouchsafed the most minimal of ‘Fethering Nods’ when meeting him in the village shop, but had never exchanged words. The reputation Ted Crisp carried did not endear him to her.

  There was the drinking, for a start. An occupational hazard for publicans, everyone knew, but in Ted Crisp’s case it was rumoured sometimes to get out of hand. Not all the time, to be fair, but every now and then he was said to go on major benders.

  Reports of his behaviour towards women were also exchanged in hushed voices among the lady residents of Fethering. Though the village was hardly at the sharp end of the political-correctness debate, Ted Crisp’s attitude was not approved of. It was one thing for a quaint elderly gentleman to call a lady love’ or chivalrously to tell her not to worry her pretty little head about things that didn’t concern her. It was something else entirely for a man hardly even into middle age to make coarse comments of an overtly sexual nature.

  And, according to Ted Crisp’s burgeoning reputation, that was what he did. No doubt that kind of thing went down well enough with the younger women, who would snap back at him in kind. But then what did you expect from girls who thought nothing of going into pubs on their own? There was probably no objection from the older brassy divorcees in the village either. But sexual innuendo wasn’t the sort of attention that someone of Carole Seddon’s background and character would appreciate. Her state of shock might have driven her into the Crown and Anchor that evening, but that did not mean that she was about to engage in vulgar badinage with its landlord.

  Jude appeared to be untrammelled by such inhibitions. With an, ‘I’ll get these’, she gestured Carole to a table, bustled up to the bar and greeted Ted Crisp as if she’d been a regular for years. Carole looked around the bar with some surprise. She’d expected something more garish, with flashi
ng slot machines. Instead, she could have been in a comfortable family sitting room. And there was no piped music—a surprise, and a blessing.

  “How’re you then, young Jude?” Ted Crisp asked, with what Carole categorized as a lecherous leer.

  “Not so bad, Ted,” came the easy reply, reinforcing the impression that they’d known each other for years. Maybe they had, thought Carole. Maybe theirs was a relationship which went back a long way. Maybe there was even a ‘history’ between them.

  “But the landlord’s next words ruled out that supposition. And how are you liking the upright citizens of Fethering? Or am I the only one you’ve met yet?”

  “I’ve talked to a few people.” Jude gestured across to the table. “You know Carole, of course?”

  There’s no ‘of course’ about it. He doesn’t know me, thought Carole. He knows who I am, but he doesn’t know me. All he knows is that I’ve never been in his pub before. Could this be a moment of awkwardness?

  It wasn’t. Ted Crisp extended a beefy arm in a wave and called, ‘Evening, darlin’’ across the bar. Carole felt a little frisson of embarrassment. She wasn’t anyone’s ‘darlin’’. Still, the bar was fairly empty. She could recognize nobody there likely to spread to other Fethering residents the news that Carole Seddon had allowed herself to be called ‘darlin’’ by Ted Crisp.

  “So what’re you going to get pissed on tonight?” the landlord asked.

  “Two white wines, please,” said Jude.

  “Large ones?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Carole had a momentary urge to remonstrate. Whenever given the choice between large and small—whatever the commodity on offer—she instinctively opted for small. But she did feel rather shaken and trembly this evening. Maybe it was one of those moments when she needed a large glass of wine.

  For the first time she let her mind address itself to what had recently happened in her sitting room. Locking up the house and maintaining small talk with Jude as they walked to the Crown and Anchor had effectively blocked off the encounter. Now she allowed the shock to assert itself.