Eventually everyone was supplied with a drink. Denis Woodville took a long swig of his brandy and said, “Now, let’s find that phone number for you…”
He turned to a neat address book by the telephone. Whatever chaos might reign in his home, here at the Fethering Yacht Club the Vice-Commodore kept everything shipshape. As he picked up the book, he noticed the message light flashing on the answering machine. “Excuse me. Better just check this. Might be the coastguard,” he said importantly.
The message wasn’t from the coastguard. It was the voice of a bored young woman. “Vice-Commodore, it’s Tanya, calling on Monday afternoon. First, I wanted to say thanks for the lunch last week…”
Though spoken with total lack of enthusiasm, this still prompted ribald comments from the cronies round the bar.
“…and the other thing is, could you let me know whether those repairs on the sea wall have been finished yet? It’s just, um…well, I was thinking of coming for a walk to Fethering and I didn’t want to if the building’s still going on, you know…Could you call me on…”
Jude scribbled the number down on the back of an envelope. “And could I have her address please?”
“How very odd,” said the Vice-Commodore, as he passed the address book across. “What on earth does the girl want to know about the sea wall for?”
Jude had a potential answer to that question. An answer that might make a connection she’d been seeking for some time. The girl’s reason for wanting the information had been so clumsily fabricated that Jude felt a little charge of excitement.
“It’s in code,” one of the Fethering Yacht Club members announced. “It all has special meanings for the Vice-Commodore, eh? That’s how he and Tanya have managed to keep their affair secret all these years.”
The remark was greeted by some token joshing, but soon the old men moved on to more serious matters. When Jude slipped away from the clubroom, Denis Woodville was launching into his views on how the Northern Ireland problem should be solved. His recipe required rather lavish use of a reintroduced death penalty, but ‘in the long run, it would only be being cruel to be kind…’
The Vice-Commodore was in his pomp. Jude felt sure none of his surrounding pontificators had ever seen him in the drabness of his home surroundings.
§
“Have you talked to Ted Crisp?”
It was the first thing Jude asked when she arrived and Carole was proud to be able to say, “Yes. He’s game for a bit of body-hunting…round seven.”
“Good.” Jude pulled out her mobile phone. “I’ll see if Tanya’s there now.”
“You can use my phone.”
“Mm?” She was already keying in the numbers. “Oh, it’s OK.”
“But using a mobile is a lot more expensive.”
“Is it?” asked Jude, as though the idea had never occurred to her. “Ah, hello, is that Tanya? My name’s Jude. I don’t know if you remember, we met in the Crown and Anchor at Fethering on Friday. Yes, that’s right. Well, I wanted to talk about a body that got washed up on the beach here last week…”
With a rueful expression, Jude turned to Carole. “Maybe the direct approach isn’t always the best one. She hung up on me.”
“Ah. Still, wouldn’t you say that’s a sign of guilt or complicity or something? If she had no idea what you were talking about, she’d have said so, not hung up.”
“You could be right.” Jude looked down at the envelope on which she’d written Tanya’s address and phone number. “I think I’d better go and see her.”
“In Brighton?”
“Yes. I know she’s at home, don’t I? At least at the moment.”
“How will you get there? I’d offer to drive you over, but if I’m meeting Ted at seven, I—”
“No, no, don’t worry. I’ll get a cab.”
“A cab?” Carole was shocked. “All the way to Brighton?”
“It’s not far, is it?”
“It may not be far, but it’ll certainly cost you. Depends what kind of budget you’re working to, of course.”
“Budget?” Jude savoured the unfamiliar word.
“Yes, budget. You know what it means, don’t you?”
“I know what it means, of course,” said Jude mischievously, “but I’ve never really come to terms with the concept.”
Carole looked blank. But then everyone looks blank when they try to converse with someone who speaks a different language.
Jude raised her mobile phone again. “I’ll give her another try. Maybe now Tanya’s had time to think, she will want to talk to me.”
And so it proved. Guilt, anxiety or maybe simple curiosity had done their work, and Jude set off shortly after in a cab to Brighton.
§
Carole felt tense, but the anticipation was not unpleasurable. At least something was happening in her life. Searching for dead bodies might not be sensible, but it sure beat the hell out of most other Fethering residents’ pastimes.
When the phone rang at twenty-five past six, she felt a little pang of potential disappointment. It would be Ted Crisp, calling off their seven o’clock tryst.
It wasn’t.
“Carole, it’s me, Jude. I’d just got to Brighton and paid off the cab when my mobile rang. It was Maggie Kent. Nick’s gone missing!”
THIRTY-THREE
“You have called the police, have you?”
“Yes.” Maggie Kent’s voice on the telephone was tight with the effort of controlling her emotion. “At first they weren’t that interested. They said lots of kids come home late from school, and it had only been an hour, and Nick was sixteen for goodness’ sake, and… Then I told them he’d been with Aaron Spalding the night before Aaron died and they began to take me a bit more seriously.”
“So they are out looking for him?”
“That’s what they say. And I’m sure they are, though at what level of urgency I don’t know. But I can’t just sit here doing nothing. The thought that Nick’s out there somewhere, confused, needing me—perhaps not needing me, but needing someone…It’s so awful, I…” The dam on her emotions was cracking. Maggie Kent took a deep breath and evened out her voice as she went on, “I rang your friend Jude, because I thought Nick might have confided something to her when they talked last week.”
“And had he?” Had Jude told the mother of her son’s presence at the mutilating of a corpse?
“She told me a few bits and pieces I didn’t know. But I was really interested in what Nick and Aaron might have said to each other. Nick was in such a dreadful state over the weekend. He hardly slept at all, or ate come to that. There’s something really terrible gnawing away at him and I’m scared. I’m scared he’ll do what Aaron did.”
“You mean kill himself? Has it been confirmed that that’s what Aaron did? Because there hasn’t been an inquest yet, has there?”
“No, but the police told me. Aaron was seen by a courting couple in a car—they’ve only just come forward. He was up on the railway bridge over the Fether in the early hours of Tuesday morning. There seems no question he jumped in deliberately. And the thought that my Nick might have done the same thing is just too…” This time no floodgates would have been adequate to stop the flow of tears.
Carole waited till the note of the sobbing changed and then asked, “So what are you going to do in the short term?”
“I don’t know. I’ll go mad if I just sit around here. And I feel I should be out by the railway bridge, looking for Nick. But I’m scared, if I go out and join the search, then the phone might ring and I wouldn’t be here…”
“I’d go out if I were you. Good news’ll keep.”
“And what about bad news?”
“Generally speaking, that’ll keep too,” Carole replied grimly.
She had her own ideas of where she’d start looking for the boy. And, with a bit of luck, she’d have Ted Crisp there to help her. Carole Seddon took a large rubber-covered torch out of the cupboard under the stairs, and put on her Burberry.
§
Tanya lived in a Kemptown bedsit which, because it boasted its own bathroom, the landlord had the nerve to call a studio flat. There was a two-ring gas hob by the sink, but it didn’t look as if it got used much. The walls had once been white but were pockmarked with Sellotape scars and Blu-Tack stains where previous tenants had taken down their posters and other decorations. Tanya seemed to have put up nothing of her own. Double bed, television, video, CD player—that was all she appeared to need to express her identity.
Quite loud in the background, when she let Jude in, was the clinical voice of some pop diva, draining the emotion out of yet another song. Tanya closed the door behind her guest and, with no attempt at social graces, demanded, “What is all this then?”
“I was rather hoping you could tell me that.”
“Why should I? Particularly ‘cause I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Perhaps Tanya could on occasion be attractive, but in this aggressive mode she wasn’t. She looked massive, stolid and resentful, her face already set into a kind of middle-aged disappointment. As she had been in the Crown and Anchor, she was dressed in black, whether the identical clothes or another similar set Jude couldn’t tell. The black laced-up Doc Martens were certainly the same.
Recognizing that there was no chance of being offered a chair, Jude plonked herself down into one the landlord must have picked up at a house-clearance dealers. “As I said on the telephone, I’m talking about a body that was washed up on Fethering beach last Tuesday morning. The body of a middle-aged man. We know you saw it.”
“How do you know?”
“The usual way. Someone saw you.”
“And told you about it?”
“Exactly.”
The girl sniffed. Then suddenly she said, “I got to go to the toilet.” Pausing only by the CD player to turn up the diva even louder, she crossed the room and disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
Jude wondered whether turning up the music had been a gesture of delicacy, a recognition that embarrassing noises from the lavatory might otherwise be heard in such an enclosed space.
Certainly Tanya seemed to be doing something major in the bathroom. She was in there for a long time. Jude wondered whether the girl was fortifying herself for the interview ahead with a few drugs. The flush on her cheeks when she finally did return would have supported that hypothesis.
The first thing Tanya did after firmly shutting the bathroom door was to flick a switch on the CD and stop the diva in mid-wail. Plumping herself down on the edge of her bed, she began quickly, “All right, about this body…Yeah, OK, I was going for a walk on the beach at Fethering and I saw it. And I didn’t tell no one, ‘cause if you ever been in care, you know that anything where the police is involved is just going to cause you a lot of grief and hassle.”
“And did you see anyone else on the beach that morning?”
“No. Oh yes. There was some old girl taking her dog for a walk.” Jude wasn’t convinced Carole would have liked the description.
“And that was the only person you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“But what were you doing on Fethering beach at that time in the morning, anyway?”
“I got a job down there at the Yacht Club.”
“No, you haven’t. You finished that on the previous Friday. And the Yacht Club isn’t open before seven in the morning.”
“Well, I, er…” Tanya wasn’t a very good liar. Lying needs a flicker of brightness, which she didn’t have. Caught out in her lies, she turned to anger instead. “Look, why you going on at me? It’s my own bloody business where I go and what I do. I’m not in care any more, you know! I lead my own independent life!” She seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as Jude.
“Yes, of course. Going back to the body…”
“What?”
“Did you recognize it?”
“How d’you mean?”
“Had you seen the man before? Either dead or alive?”
“Bloody hell!” She looked deeply affronted. “Seen him dead—what do you take me for? You imagine I’m the sort of person who spends her time with dead bodies?”
“I’m not suggesting that.”
“I should bloody hope not. So far as I’m concerned, he’s just some poor bugger who fell off a boat or something and got washed up on Fethering beach. Why?” Tanya looked at Jude with a new curiosity and cunning in her eye. “Do you know who he was?”
THIRTY-FOUR
There was no sign of Ted Crisp by the entrance gate of the Fethering Yacht Club, where they had agreed to meet. Carole looked at her watch and saw with irritation that it was already ten past seven. She had never been late for anything in her life and she couldn’t understand why everyone couldn’t be like her. There was nothing difficult involved. It was simply a matter of leaving enough time—in fact, a matter of being organized.
Her earlier prejudices about Ted Crisp started bubbling back to the surface. The landlord of the Crown and Anchor certainly wasn’t organized. No doubt, over a few drinks with his regulars, he’d completely forgotten the arrangement he’d made to meet Carole. The last thing you could expect from someone with a background as a stand-up comedian was reliability.
Still, she comforted herself, it might be just as well there was only one of them doing the first bit of her search. More than one might attract too much attention. When she fixed to meet Ted Crisp, she had forgotten that at seven o’clock in the evening the Vice-Commodore and his cronies would be setting the world to rights in the Fethering Yacht Club bar. She had once or twice peered covertly upwards and been relieved to see no one actually sitting in the window. Hopefully, on a winter’s evening, they’d all be clustered round the bar counter. But there were undoubtedly members up there, and they did represent a security hazard.
Of course, there was nothing to stop her from marching upstairs and telling the Vice-Commodore what she proposed to do. She wasn’t planning anything illegal—rather the reverse, it was a very public-spirited act. But such an approach to Denis Woodville would be too public. Carole didn’t want to raise a hue and cry. In the unlikely event of her actually finding Nick, she didn’t want him to be frightened off by too many people. The boy was in a very fragile emotional state…if he was still alive…and Carole had to make herself believe that he was still alive.
She lifted the latch on the white gate that led into the Yacht Club’s forecourt. It seemed to make a disproportionately loud click in the winter night and an equally loud one when she closed it. The sea was a long way down the beach, its rustling muted. The only sound seemed to be the harsh scrape of Carole’s boots on the cement.
She could have found her way to the right boat blindfold. The events of the previous week, and the images they had spawned, led her inexorably towards Brigadoon II. She trembled a little as she approached. The chill she felt had nothing to do with the weather.
Carole stopped, and the whole world seemed very still. She cocked an eye up towards the bar-room’s broad window, but her luck held. There was still no outline of anyone observing her.
It was when she took the next step that she heard the noise.
A low keening, like that of some small, injured animal.
And it definitely came from inside Brigadoon II.
Carole knew how pivotal her next actions would be. She couldn’t be sure what she would find inside the boat, but she had a good idea of what it might be. She must be very cautious.
She remembered exactly how Jude and she had turned the end of the cover over the previous Wednesday. She didn’t want to use the torch, but her eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom. The cut rope had not been repaired. Everything was as it had been.
Carole held the switched-off torch high in her right hand, estimating the direction of its beam. At the moment she flipped back the boat’s cover, she pressed the on-button.
Blearily frozen in its beam was Nick’s face. He looked about ten ye
ars old. Tears coursed down his cheeks and still the low, thin wail poured painfully out of him. He was curled in a foetal position against the fibreglass of the hull. What had been hard ice was now a pool of water which had soaked through his school uniform.
“Nick,” said Carole, as gently as she knew how. Jude would be doing this better, her mind kept saying. Jude has a better touch. I’m not good with people.
She forced herself to banish these thoughts. They weren’t relevant. Jude might do it better, but Jude wasn’t there. Carole Seddon was the one facing the terrified boy. Carole Seddon was the one who would have to cope with the situation. There was no alternative.
“Nick,” she murmured again.
The boy squinted into the light. “Who are you?” he sobbed.
“My name’s Carole. I’m a friend of Jude, who you talked to last week.” He made no response. “Your mother’s been terribly worried. She really wants to see you, Nick.”
But this was the wrong thing to say. A new tremor of sobbing came over the boy. Through it, Carole could hear him saying, “No, I can’t see her. I can’t see Mummy. Not after what I’ve done.”
“You haven’t done anything so terrible,” said Carole, feeling in her words for the soothing timbre she’d heard in Jude’s voice. “Nothing that can’t be forgiven.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done.”
“True. All I know is that you need to go home. To see Mummy.”
She stretched out her hand over the transom of the boat and, to her huge gratification, saw the boy slowly uncurl himself, rise and step towards her. He put his icy hand in hers. Carole braced herself to take the strain, as Nick stepped on to the back of the boat, preparing to jump down. Maybe I’m not so bad at this people business after all, thought Carole with a little glow of pride.
Fethering 01 (2000) - The Body on the Beach Page 20