Fethering 01 (2000) - The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett; Prefers to remain anonymous

“Not to mention the effect it had on Aaron Spalding,” Jude murmured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There seems a very strong chance that Aaron Spalding killed himself.”

  Maggie Kent nodded slowly, taking this in. It wasn’t an entirely new thought to her. “Yes.” Panic flared in her eyes. “I hope to God Nick’s all right!”

  “He will be…He will be.”

  “If only he’d tell me what happened.”

  “You still haven’t got anything beyond the fact that the three of them broke into the Yacht Club?”

  “No, not a thing. And, God knows, it’s not for want of trying.”

  “Do you think,” Jude suggested diffidently, “he might tell more to someone who wasn’t his mother?”

  “He might well, but I think it’d rather depend on who it was who asked him.”

  “What about me?” asked Jude. “Do you think he might tell something more to me?”

  Maggie Kent looked at the blonde-haired stranger on her sofa with amazement, which gave way to deliberation and then assent. “Do you know,” she said, “I think he might.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Carole knew Jude was right about seeing Nick on her own, but that didn’t take away her sense of frustration. It wasn’t jealousy—in the short period of their acquaintance, Carole had come to accept her new neighbour had people skills that she lacked—it was more annoyance at being excluded from any part of the investigation. The feeling brought home to Carole how totally absorbed she had become by the body on the beach. In less than a week the imperatives of her normal, sensible routine had been swept away by the overwhelming need to explain its mystery.

  Still, she wasn’t going to let her frustration have completely negative effects. Gulliver at least should benefit from her enforced idleness. She would take him for a long walk on the beach.

  The dog responded enthusiastically to her attention, making Carole feel guilty that he’d suffered from her recent preoccupations. He scampered about on the sand, scurrying back and forth, covering four times as much ground as his mistress. She walked along parallel to the sea, just below the pebble line, while Gulliver made his sudden, quixotic forays to challenge the unknown foes of flotsam and jetsam.

  It was a beautiful afternoon. The weather, as if in apology for its recent bad behaviour, put on a perfect display—white winter sun, evenly pale-blue sky, the full works. It still felt cold—the lack of cloud cover ensured that—but the wind had dropped and the air no longer stung the cheeks. The heavy frosts of the previous days seemed a distant memory. Carole didn’t think the night ahead would drop below freezing.

  As she walked along, her restlessness eased. Life wasn’t so bad after all, she reflected. Looking up to the crystal-clear contours of the South Downs in one direction and, the other way, across the beige sea to the distinct line where it became blue sky, Carole Seddon thought how lucky she was to live in such a beautiful place as Fethering. Amidst the crude cacophony of gulls, she heard the cry of a single curlew, like a piece of tape being wound backwards.

  She seemed to see everything with new eyes. The seaweed clusters, stranded along the pebble line, weren’t a uniform dull brown; they were a tangle of russets and copper, with the occasional unexpected burst of pimento red and fresh spinach green. Even the reminders of man’s presence did not spoil the picture. An abandoned winching mechanism, encrusted with flaking rust and leaning drunkenly sideways, had its own beauty too.

  Carole couldn’t explain why she was thinking like this. She had many fallibilities, but lyricism was not among them. Yet somehow the combination of the sparkling afternoon, the susurration of the sea and Gulliver’s ecstatic barking brought her to a feeling as near peace as her tightly constrained mind ever admitted. She had a feeling the mystery was nearing some kind of resolution.

  Carole Seddon looked at her watch. It was nearly four. In a couple of hours, Jude had suggested, they should meet in the Crown and Anchor and she’d bring Carole up to date. Meanwhile, any moment now, less than half a mile away, Jude would be confronting Nick Kent.

  “He’s coming,” Maggie Kent hissed.

  §

  She was looking out of the window in Spindrift Lane. Jude rose from the sofa to join her. Three boys in dark trousers and navy anoraks, school bags hanging single-strapped from their shoulders, were running down the middle of the road, tossing a plastic American football between them. They were red-faced from the cold and the exertion.

  “I always tell him he mustn’t play in the street.” But Maggie spoke indulgently; she didn’t sound too angry about it. “Not that there’s that much traffic down here.”

  One of the boys stopped by the sagging gate of number 26. He was holding the ball, which he tossed with some unheard but raucous comment to one of his mates. He received a cheerful gibe back and grimaced some response. Jude recognized the face from the photograph on the mantelpiece, though it was at least two years out of date. Nick Kent’s features had thickened since and his hair darkened a few shades, but he still looked a child.

  As he parted from his friends and turned in at the gate, his persona changed. Quick as the flick of a switch, the jokey face-pulling gave way to an expression of deep anxiety.

  There was the sound of the front door opening and slamming shut, the thump of his school bag dropped on the hall floor and the thud of footsteps starting up the stairs.

  “Hi, Nick. Could you come in here a minute?”

  “Just going to the loo,” he called back to Maggie’s summons. His voice was roughened by the local accent and the gruffness which his mother had mentioned.

  The footsteps thundered on upstairs. A door opened and closed. After what seemed a long time, a lavatory flushed. The door opened and, with seeming reluctance, the footsteps dawdled back down again.

  The boy stood in the doorway, registering shock at the unexpected visitor in the sitting room. “What is this?” he asked on a note of panic.

  “Nick, this is Jude.”

  “Oh?”

  “She wants to talk to you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk to her!”

  He turned to bolt, but was stopped by Jude’s even voice saying, “I want to talk to you about this knife, Nick.”

  He wheeled slowly round on his heel, unwillingly drawn to the Stanley knife that Jude held out towards him. When he saw it, his worst fears seemed to be confirmed. The colour left his face and tears welled in his eyes. He collapsed on to the sofa. “Is she from the police?” he asked dully.

  “No.” Maggie Kent looked as though she wanted to rush across and cradle her son in her arms, protect him from all the evil in the world. But she restrained herself.

  “No,” Jude confirmed. “I’m not from the police. I’m not trying to cause any trouble for you. In fact, I want to save you from trouble. I want to find out what happened on Monday night. I want to find out what it was that got you so upset on Monday night and Tuesday morning. I think you’ll feel better if you talk about it.”

  Maggie Kent listened with increasing surprise. There was a strange, almost hypnotic quality in her visitor’s voice. It relaxed her own tensions a little, and seemed to be having the same effect on her son.

  The boy on the sofa was silent, but his crumpled face betrayed complex emotions. He did want to talk, he wanted to end the pain he was going through, blot out the memories which were causing him such anguish. But at the same time he was afraid of the consequences that confession might unleash.

  “Where did you get that knife?” he asked finally, his voice clotted with confusion.

  “I found it in the bottom of a boat at Fethering Yacht Club. A boat called Brigadoon II.”

  There was a long silence. Nick looked drained, his will sapped.

  “I think you’d better tell me about it,” said Jude.

  “I can’t…”

  “Or perhaps I should take this knife to the police…”

  Threatening wasn’t her usual style but at that moment seemed justifi
ed. Its instantaneous effect proved her right. Nick Kent broke down, shedding about five years along with the tears that coursed down his cheeks. Jude could feel the urge within Maggie to go and hug her son, but restrained her by a little shake of the head. With difficulty, the mother stayed where she was.

  “So, will you tell me?” Jude gently maintained the pressure.

  “I can’t…” The emotion had eroded the roughness of his voice. His accent now matched his mother’s. “I can’t…not with Mummy here.”

  Jude looked into Maggie’s eyes and could see the hurt there. It was only a small rejection, but Nick was definitely rejecting her.

  Maggie Kent, however, was a brave woman, and she accepted the priorities of the situation. “Right. I’ll go and put the kettle on.” She crossed to the door. “Give me a call when I can come in again.” She managed to exclude sarcasm, but she couldn’t keep the pain out of her voice.

  The door shut behind her. “So, Nick…”

  “How much do you know?” The tears had stopped. He seemed to have accepted the inevitability of talking.

  “I know what you told your mother…and a bit more that we worked out for ourselves.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “I’ve been investigating this with a friend of mine called Carole Seddon.”

  The name meant nothing to him, but it brought a new anxiety. “She’s not with the police either?”

  “No. If anything, she’s extremely anti the police.” Another silence. “Come on, Nick. I know you were with Dylan and Aaron. I know you had some beers. I think you probably had some drugs too…”

  “It was only cannabis,” he retorted, his use of the botanical name rather than any slang term making him sound younger than ever. “Dylan had it with him.”

  “I thought he might have done.”

  “And he, Dylan, was getting at Aaron and me. Saying we were just kids, that we were mother’s boys, that we were chicken…”

  “Chicken of doing what?”

  “Smoking the…the cannabis…the weed.”

  “But you did that. So what else did he say you were scared of doing?”

  “Breaking the law. He said we were goody-goodies.”

  “He said that, for instance, you wouldn’t dare break into the Yacht Club?”

  There was a hesitation before Nick Kent admitted that this was indeed what Dylan had said.

  “And you proved him wrong, and you broke in -or just climbed over the railings, that wasn’t too difficult—and you chose a boat at random, which happened to be Brigadoon II, and Dylan got out his knife and cut through the rope holding down the cover—”

  “How do you know all this?” Panic flared again in the boy’s eyes. “You didn’t see us, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t see you. But you told most of that stuff to your mother.”

  Nick nodded, partially reassured.

  “Of course, what you didn’t tell your mother was what you found in the boat.”

  “No.” For a moment he looked defiant. “And there’s no reason why I should tell you either!”

  “No reason, I agree. Though of course I could still take the Stanley knife to the police.”

  This time the threat wasn’t so potent. “So, you take it to the police! That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “No,” Jude agreed softly. “Not until they find the body.”

  This really did shock him. “How did you know about the body?” he murmured in horrified fascination.

  Jude heaved a mental sigh of relief. He’d fallen for it. He’d conceded that there had been a body in the boat. She went on, “A man’s body I think it was you found in BrigadoonII. The body of a man in his fifties. But it’s what you did with the body that interests me.”

  “We were horrified when we found it. There was just moonlight—the moon was full that night—and”—he shuddered—“we could only see this outline. But we knew he was dead. And then Dylan…”

  “Was Dylan as surprised to see the body as you and Aaron were? Or did he know it was going to be there?”

  Nick Kent gave a decided shake of his head. “He was shocked, just like us. Pretended not to be, pretended he was Mr Cool, but it got to him all right. And then…”

  The boy was having second thoughts about continuing, so Jude repeated coaxingly, “And then?”

  He made up his mind to go on. “And then Dylan had this mad idea. He’s into all this occult stuff, you know, black magic, the Undead, all that kind of thing…and he said that if Aaron and I wanted to show we were really hard…”

  “Yes?”

  Nick flinched, as though he were trying to flick something off his face. “No, no, I can’t tell you.”

  “Was it something to do with the knife?” asked Jude.

  The boy slumped back, resistance gone. The woman seemed to know everything anyway. He might as well tell her. “Yes,” he agreed flatly. “He said if Aaron and me were really hard…he said cutting a dead man’s flesh under a full moon, it’d make us strong…and then if we wrote our names in our own blood and left them on the body…we’d have special powers…if we did it…”

  “And you believed him?”

  “We’d had a lot to drink. And the weed…the cannabis, you know. We weren’t thinking straight. And Dylan kept saying we were cowards and mother’s boys and…and then he took the knife and made a cut in the man’s neck. And then Aaron took the knife and he made a cut…”

  “And did you, Nick?”

  The boy looked away in embarrassment. “No. I couldn’t. I…Dylan said I was chicken, and I wouldn’t get the power that he and Aaron were going to get, but I…I just couldn’t…”

  The boy shuddered, too overcome by the recollection to speak.

  “And what about writing the names in blood?”

  “Aaron did that. He wrote his name. He wanted to have special powers. There’s a girl at school he fancies—he fancied. He wanted to have power over her.”

  “So he wrote his name and put it in the dead man’s pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Dylan? Did he write his name?”

  “No, he said he didn’t need to. Because he was the leader and the power would come to him automatically.”

  Anger seethed within Jude, anger against Dylan. The older boy had egged on the others, probably making up his black magic mumbo-jumbo as he went along. But he wasn’t going to incriminate himself by leaving his name around the scene of the crime. He’d allow the gullible Aaron Spalding to do so, though -and no doubt build up the boy’s natural paranoia with garish tales of the Undead. Dylan, Jude felt sure, was directly responsible for Aaron’s suicide. But she felt equally sure the older boy would never be called to account for it.

  Her only comfort was the fact that it was Dylan who’d been careless enough to drop his Stanley knife in the boat. Without that she and Carole would never have made the connection to him.

  “And what about you, Nick? Did you write your name?”

  “No. Dylan said if I was too chicken to cut the man’s flesh, then I didn’t deserve to have any special powers. And they both laughed at me. Said I was just a kid and…” The memory of his humiliation still festered.

  “And then what happened, Nick?”

  “We…I don’t know. We suddenly panicked when we realized what we’d done.”

  “But you personally hadn’t done anything.”

  “I’d broken into the club. I’d handled the dead body. We were all in a terrible state. I think the booze and the weed made it worse. Even Dylan lost his bottle. We didn’t want to leave any signs, any evidence, so we took the body out of the boat and we…and we…”

  “And you threw it over the sea wall into the Fether.”

  “How do you know all this?” He was sobbing again. “You said you didn’t see us.”

  “I didn’t. And then you all went your separate ways home that night—yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Aaron rang you the next morning. What did he s
ay?”

  “He said he’d woken up early and he’d panicked about us having left some clue to what we’d done down at the Yacht Club…and he’d gone down to the beach…”

  “And found the body washed up by the tide.”

  “Yes.”

  Finally, there was corroboration for what Carole had seen on the Tuesday morning.

  “He was in a terrible state. He said the evil was coming back to haunt him, that the body was one of the Undead, and it was coming after him. So I went down to the beach and met Aaron,” Nick went on, “and it was still nearly dark and we thought if we put the body back in the boat, then nobody’d ever know that we’d been there…”

  “And that’s what you did?”

  “Yes.”

  Huge sobs were shuddering through the boy’s frame. Jude reckoned she had got everything she was going to get out of him. “One final question…Your mother said it was after you’d come back in the morning that you were in the really bad state, not the night before…”

  “She didn’t see me the night before, did she? Anyway, I was still full of the booze and the cannabis…I just passed out. But the next morning…the shock hit me. I knew it wasn’t a dream. I knew we’d actually done it. I knew what I’d done.”

  Something prompted a renewed outburst of emotion, more powerful than any that had come before. The boy’s jaw trembled and his whole body shook uncontrollably.

  “What is it?” pleaded Jude. “What is it? What was so terrible?”

  For a few moments he was incapable of framing any words, just mouthing hopelessly. Finally he managed to control himself. Nick Kent sounded like a very young child as he admitted, “I’d never seen a dead body before.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Well, behaviour of that kind,” concluded Carole, sitting back on her barstool in disgust, “is all too typical of the youth of today.”

  “That’s a very Fethering thing to say,” said Jude.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the kind of remark I’d have expected from some old codger whose skin’s already turned to tweed. Not from someone your age.”

  “I’m not young,” Carole protested. But she was flattered by the implication.