by Simon Brett
‘Since that body did exist,’ Jude went on, ‘there are two rather important questions which have yet to be answered. One – whose body was it? And, two – where is the body now?’
Carole shrugged. ‘Two questions to which, I’m afraid, we can never know the answer.’
‘Don’t you believe it.’ Jude rose determinedly and switched off the television. Then she picked up the bottle and refilled the glasses, which had both unaccountably become empty. ‘I think we should find out the answers to those two questions.’
‘Us?’ said Carole. ‘But surely murder – if it is murder – that’s a job for the police.’
‘Have you been impressed by how the police have reacted so far?’
‘No, but . . .’
There was a gleam in Jude’s big brown eyes. ‘I think this could be rather fun.’ Then, briskly, she announced, ‘I’ll get us some lunch. There’s a sort of Turkish salad I do in the fridge. Aubergines and yoghurt and what-have-you. That sound all right?’
‘Sounds great,’ Carole replied. ‘Are you vegetarian?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Jude easily, as she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Carole to wonder when she’d found the time to buy aubergines. There was no way that Allinstore’s stock would have aspired to anything so exotic.
The Turkish salad was excellent and somehow, by the time they’d finished it, the wine bottle was empty too. Carole felt very warm and cosseted in the draped sofa in front of the glowing fire. She yawned.
‘Wiped out?’ asked Jude.
‘A bit. At least my headache’s gone, though.’
‘Never fails.’ Jude chuckled. ‘Go and have a little sleep.’
Carole was shocked. ‘During the day? But I’m not ill.’
Her neighbour shrugged. ‘Please yourself.’ Then she looked thoughtful. ‘I wonder who your body was . . .’
‘No idea.’
‘No, but we’re going to find out.’
‘Were you serious? What you said before lunch? About us investigating this?’
‘Of course I was. Why, don’t you think it’s a good idea?’
To her astonishment, Carole found her lips forming the words, ‘Yes, I think it’s a very good idea.’
‘Excellent. So where do we start?’
Carole looked blank. ‘Don’t know. I’m afraid I haven’t got much of a track record as an investigator.’
‘No, but you have a track record as an intelligent woman who can work things out for herself.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So what information do we currently have about your body on the beach?’
Carole stretched out a dubious lower lip. ‘All we have, I suppose, is the fact that he was wearing a life-jacket that was printed “Property of Fethering Yacht Club”.’
‘Right.’ Jude clapped her hands gleefully. ‘Then it seems pretty obvious to me that the first thing we should do is go down to Fethering Yacht Club.’
‘But we can’t do that,’ Carole objected.
‘Why not?’
‘Because we’re not members.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Jude.
Chapter Eleven
In the snugness of Woodside Cottage they hadn’t noticed the weather worsening, but when they emerged the afternoon had turned charcoal grey and relentless icy rain swirled around them. The wind kept animating new puddles on the pavement into flurries of spray. The cold wetness stung their faces.
‘Sure you wouldn’t rather have that sleep?’ Jude suggested teasingly.
‘No,’ came the crisp reply. Affront at the idea of sleeping during the daytime, though unspoken, remained implicit. ‘I’ll just get my coat and we’ll go to the Yacht Club.’
Carole hardened her heart against Gulliver’s pathetic appeals to join them – he’d go for a walk in any weather – and wrapped her Burberry firmly around her. Soon she and Jude were striding into the horizontal rain towards the Fethering Yacht Club.
Fixed to the gatepost of one of the High Street houses they passed was a plastic-enclosed notice which read, in professionally printed capitals, ‘THIS FRONT GARDEN IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSING, AT ANY LEVEL, IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’ asked Jude.
Carole chuckled. ‘It’s the Chilcotts.’
‘Bill and Sandra?’
‘The very same. They’re having a feud with their next-door neighbour.’
Jude recollected the fag-end of conversation she’d heard at Barbara Turnbull’s. ‘About where he parks his boat?’
‘About that or about anything else they happen to think of. It’s a battle that’s been running for years.’
‘And does the neighbour respond in kind?’
By way of answer, Carole pointed to a notice, handwritten in marker-pen capitals, which was pinned to the gatepost of the next house. It read, ‘ALL TRESPASSERS WILL BE TREATED WITH RESPECT AND COURTESY – SO LONG AS THEY’RE NOT THE PETTY-MINDED COUPLE FROM NEXT DOOR.’
Jude giggled. ‘Sounds as if the people this side have at least got a sense of humour about it.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Carole. ‘I think it’s all in deadly earnest on both sides.’
Jude looked into the garden. The trailer of a sailing dinghy with a fitted cover was parked diagonally across the cemented area in front of the garage. Its flattened mast missed the shared hedge between the feuding households by fractions of an inch. ‘So who’s the sailor?’ she asked.
‘Denis Woodville. It’s quite possible we’ll meet him at the Yacht Club. He’s rather a big noise there, so I’ve heard. Incidentally, Jude –’ Carole was finding, the more she said the name, the less pronounced were the virtual quotation marks with which she enclosed it – ‘what are we going to say when we get there? I mean, shall I say that I saw one of the club’s life-jackets on the body I found?’
‘No, no, no. Don’t mention the body – that’ll only cause a lot of unnecessary follow-up questions.’ Jude looked thoughtful for a moment, then clapped her gloved hands together as she found the solution. ‘Yes! Everyone round here seems totally obsessed by security, so that’s going to be our way in. We’ll say we saw some kids on the beach playing with a Fethering Yacht Club life-jacket and we wondered if it’d been stolen . . . You know, whether the club’s had any kind of break-in recently?’
‘But that’s not true,’ Carole objected.
Jude’s brown eyes took on a new vagueness. ‘True? Truth is such a relative concept, though, isn’t it, Carole? And telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is the surest way of completely screwing up your life, wouldn’t you agree?’
Carole certainly would not agree. Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to everyone had been one of the guiding principles of her life. It was an approach which had caused occasional awkwardnesses, moments when confrontations could have been avoided by a little tactful finessing of that truth. Indeed, if she’d been less strict in her adherence to the principle, she might still have been married. But Carole Seddon had never given in to the way of compromise. She had always told the complete truth and faced up to the consequences of her actions.
So she didn’t give any answer to Jude’s question.
Rather than going straight down the High Street and turning left on to Seaview Road, they cut along one of the side lanes and approached the Yacht Club along the banks of the Fether. Though it was hardly a day for sightseeing, Carole wanted to show Jude another aspect of the village.
There was a high path along the side of the river, the top of the defences which, further on by the Yacht Club, joined up with the sea wall. Cars were kept off this pedestrian area by serried rows of concrete bollards. Near the path a rusted Second World War mine had been converted into a collecting box for some maritime charity.
It was low tide. The Fether was a truculent sliver of brown water between swollen mudflats, which looked bleakly malevolent in the driving rain.
‘Wouldn’t fancy fa
lling down there,’ said Jude.
‘No, I think you could have a problem getting out again. Everything sinks into that lot.’
Carole pointed out a row of public moorings, pontoons loosely attached to tall posts which rode up and down the water level with every tide. The rectangles of slatted wood lay on the mud, as did a few motor launches, stranded at asymmetric angles. ‘One of those belongs to Bill Chilcott, I think.’
‘What’s that noise?’ asked Jude.
Once again Carole was aware of the heavy thumping which had done so little to help her headache that morning. As they turned a bend of the path, they saw its source. On top of the sea wall, beyond the gates controlled by the Fethering Yacht Club, a cluster of builders’ vehicles was gathered. There were a crane, two small vans and a JCB. Huge sheets of corrugated metal were piled by the blue fishermen’s chests, and a lot of men in fluorescent yellow jackets and hard hats milled around.
Rising from the centre of this activity, at the edge of the Fether, stood a tall pile-driving machine. The rhythmic thumping sounded as it forced the metal sheets deep down into the mud. Gulls protested overhead, intrigued by the commotion.
‘Repairs to the sea wall,’ Carole explained. ‘I’d heard it was due to be done some time.’ She shivered. ‘What a day for them to start.’
From inside the Fethering Yacht Club, but for the dull thudding of the pile driver, you wouldn’t have known about the repair work taking place only fifty yards away. The building equipment was as invisible as everything else beyond the windows of the bar. The way the wind whipped the rain about in every direction, sitting in the Fethering Yacht Club that afternoon was like being in a car-wash.
Carole’s conjecture had proved right and it was Denis Woodville who let them in. He was a tall, angular man with a high domed head surrounded by a little frill of white hair that gave the impression of a joke-shop tonsure. His nose was beaky and he had the sagging, papery skin of a heavy smoker. A politically incorrect Gauloise drooped from yellow-stained fingers and he kept sucking at it, as if desperate to tar up the last few unpolluted cells of his lungs. He perched on a stool and had gestured his visitors to sit on two others. Beside him, on the shelf that ran the length of the sea-facing window, was a balloon of brandy from which he took sips between drags of his cigarette. The bar-room was punctiliously neat and – the adjective could not be avoided – shipshape.
‘Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they’d nicked one of our life-jackets,’ he said after Jude had glibly produced her lie. ‘Lot of bloody kids always trying to break into this place.’
Denis Woodville’s accent was unusual, upper class on the surface but very carefully spoken, as if he was afraid he might at any moment betray a less cultured voice beneath.
‘And into the boats,’ he continued, gesturing outside.
Though the windows were blinded with rain, Carole and Jude had seen what he was talking about as they approached the clubhouse. Rows of dinghies on trailers were regimented on a cement rectangle in front of the building, all zipped up to the necks of their masts in sturdy fitted covers.
‘Bloody awful times we live in,’ Denis Woodville went on. ‘Nobody has any respect for property any more. Kids aren’t brought up with any respect for anything, that’s the trouble. May not be a fashionable sentiment, but bring back National Service, I say. A couple of years of doing what they’re told, thinking about other people rather than themselves for a change – that’d bring the little buggers into line.’
His taking a reflective swallow of brandy enabled Carole to ask, ‘Is this clubroom open right through the winter?’
‘Yes. Every day. Normally a few regulars come in at midday, but when the weather’s like this . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Won’t put off the evening crowd, though, I’m sure. Actually, just as well there’s no one in this lunchtime, because we’ve recently lost our barmaid – finished work on Friday. And you can’t really have the Vice-Commodore pulling pints, can you?’ He chuckled at the incongruity of the idea.
‘So are you actually the Vice-Commodore?’
The note of awe that Jude had injected into her voice had the right effect. Denis Woodville preened himself as he replied, ‘Yes. I am. Hotly contested election for the post last year, but I won through. Members of this club still appreciate the old-fashioned values of integrity and common sense, you know.’
‘I’m sure they do. Are there a lot of members?’ Jude asked ingenuously.
‘Couple of hundred. Not all very active. Some’re London folk who’re just weekenders down here. We tend to be a bit careful about the kind of people we let in. Open the doors too wide and you could end up with all kinds of riff-raff, eh?’
‘I suppose you could,’ said Jude, in a manner that might have implied agreement.
‘And it’s all run by volunteers, is it?’ asked Carole. ‘You don’t have any permanent staff?’
‘We club officials give our services free,’ the Vice-Commodore replied grandly. ‘Obviously, expenses taken when required by the Treasurer and so on. That’s Rory Turnbull, he’s our Treasurer. Dentist chap. You know him, don’t you, Mrs Seddon?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s got problems at the moment, you know . . .’
‘Oh? Problems with what?’
‘Club accounts. Don’t tally, I’m afraid. It’s the bloody accountant’s cock-up. Honestly, these days you can’t even trust the professionals. Just scrape through their bloody exams and then reckon they’ve got a meal-ticket for life. And when they get their sums wrong, it’s the client who has to pay, of course. Do you know, the accountant who looks after the club has managed to mislay over a thousand quid somewhere during the last year. Rory’s on to the case and it’s getting sorted, but even so . . . it all takes time, doesn’t it? In the old days, if you employed a professional, you could rely on getting a professional job done. Not any more.’
‘No,’ Carole apparently agreed. ‘It’s rather impressive that this whole set-up’s run without any paid employees.’
‘Well, of course, we pay the casual workers . . . cleaners, bar staff . . .’
‘Except,’ said Jude, ‘you say you haven’t got any bar staff at the moment.’
‘No. Tanya finished Friday, as I said. Did you know her?’ Carole shook her head. ‘Rather large girl. No thing of beauty, and got this great industrial rivet punched through her nose, but polite enough to the members. And didn’t drink the profits, just cup after cup of coffee all day.
‘Well, anyhow, she suddenly reckons in her wisdom that this place was “too far from Brighton”, so she’s going to look for something closer to home. I don’t know, young people nowadays just don’t stick at anything. She’d got a perfectly good job here, done six months, members getting to know her, doing very well, and suddenly she decides a twenty-minute train journey is too much for her. Kids’ve got no tenacity these days.’
‘So will you be advertising for a replacement barmaid?’ asked Jude.
‘Yes, have to get round to it. Why, you looking for a job?’
‘Might be.’
This reply, as well as amazing Carole, seemed to release some warmth in Denis Woodville. He smiled into Jude’s brown eyes as he said, ‘If you want to pursue it, let me have a CV, and maybe I can put in a word with the committee.’
‘I might just do that.’
Did she mean it, Carole wondered. Could she possibly mean it? People who had cottages in the High Street of Fethering didn’t work behind bars. Once again she realized how little she knew of Jude’s background. Maybe her neighbour actually did need a job and maybe she wouldn’t be above working as a barmaid. Once again, Carole determined to get a few basic facts about Jude’s life sorted out.
The relaxation of Denis Woodville’s formality continued. ‘Would either of you like a drink, by the way?’
‘No, thank you,’ replied Carole firmly, before Jude could once again succumb and lead her further astray.
‘Oh.’ The Vice-Commodore looked wistfully down
at his empty brandy balloon. ‘Well, I’d better not have another one either. Better get back home, I suppose.’ The prospect didn’t appeal to him. ‘Yes, better close up. Open again at six. The six o’clock regulars never miss a night, come hell, high water or both.’
‘I gather from Carole,’ said Jude, ‘that we’re neighbours, Mr Woodville.’
‘Please . . .’ He raised a veined hand in admonition. ‘Don’t call me Mr Woodville.’
‘All right, if you—’
‘Vice-Commodore’ll do fine.’
‘Oh. Very well, Vice-Commodore.’
‘And we’re neighbours you say? How’s that?’
‘I’ve just moved into Woodside Cottage in the High Street.’
‘Oh, right. Really? Place needs a hell of a lot of work, doesn’t it?’
‘I quite like it as it is.’
‘Do you?’ Denis Woodville scratched his bald dome in disbelief. ‘Good heavens.’
‘And you’re just down nearer the sea? Carole showed me. The house with the dinghy in the front garden.’
‘That’s the one, yes.’
‘Next door to the Chilcotts.’ Jude was apparently unaware of the clouding of the Vice-Commodore’s expression as she chattered on. ‘I’ve only met Sandra and Bill briefly. I look forward to getting to know them better.’
‘I wouldn’t get too excited about the prospect,’ said Denis Woodville darkly.
‘Oh? Is he a member of the club here?’
Carole couldn’t decide whether Jude had calculated the effect of her innocent inquiry, but it was certainly explosive.
‘Bill Chilcott? A member of the Fethering Yacht Club? Oh, for heaven’s sake! We do have quite strict requirements for entry here, you know. The last thing we want is the kind of jumped-up little creep who talks about boats and sailing all the time and in fact doesn’t know a blind thing about any of it.’
‘Ah.’
‘This is a serious Yacht Club, you know.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘The likes of Bill Chilcott have to moor their boats up on the public moorings. Bloody weekend sailors!’