The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  The Vice-Commodore seemed belatedly to realize that this diatribe wasn’t the approved method of welcoming a new resident. Swallowing his spleen, he announced formally, ‘Anyway, I do hope you’ll be very happy in Fethering.’ And then, in apparent contradiction of much he’d already said, he went on, ‘You’ll find people round here are very friendly . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name when you came in . . .’

  ‘Jude.’

  ‘Ah. Jude what?’

  ‘People just call me Jude.’ Carole had a little inward seethe at another missed opportunity to get more information, and was surprised to hear Jude go on, ‘Did you hear about that poor boy who drowned, Vice-Commodore?’

  ‘What? Oh yes, of course I did. Another “Fethering Floater”.’

  ‘Sorry, what does that mean?’

  ‘Bit of local folklore you could call it. Based on a peculiarity of the tides round here. Fether’s not much more than a stream really, but it’s got a nasty kick at high water. Moves pretty damn fast. Strange thing is, though, you’d have thought it’d take a body out a long way to sea. But no. Anyone who’s so unfortunate as to fall into the Fether – or so damn stupid as to jump into it – some cross-current gets them, and they usually turn up on Fethering beach within twenty-four hours. They’re your “Fethering Floaters”. Name goes back hundreds of years, I’ve been told. A bit ghoulish . . . Still, nice to have a few local traditions, eh? Something for the tourists to get their teeth into.’

  The Vice-Commodore seemed unaware of any potential bad taste in his remarks, given Aaron Spalding’s recent death. He looked at his watch and said for the second time, ‘Anyway, ladies, I think I’d better be closing up for the afternoon. So, if you’ll excuse me . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Carole and Jude stood up.

  Outside the weather had, if anything, worsened. The rain had turned to stinging sleet and the day was dwindling into darkness. It was also bitterly cold. Soon the sleet would stop and a major freeze-up set in. Denis Woodville let the two women through the small gate beside the clubhouse and reached into his pocket for the key to its padlock.

  ‘So, if you see any more Fethering Yacht Club property round the place, you let me know. And I’ll get on to the police sharpish. These little buggers have got to be caught and taught some sense of responsibility. They’ve got to learn to respect other people’s property, and if it took horse-whipping to achieve that end . . . well, you wouldn’t hear any complaints from me. What about you?’

  Gracefully, Carole avoided answering the question by saying, ‘Thank you so much for your time, Vice-Commodore. If we all work together, I’m sure we can make Fethering a much more secure place to live in.’

  ‘Absolutely certain we can. May I accompany you back up to the High Street, ladies?’

  ‘Well, since we’re all going the same—’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ said Jude, ‘but in fact we were going to have a walk along the beach before it gets completely dark.’

  ‘Were we?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jude informed Carole firmly.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Are you really looking for a job as a barmaid?’ Carole couldn’t help asking as they pressed on into the icy gloom.

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ Jude replied. ‘I just said that to keep the old boy sweet.’

  ‘So what, do you have a job or are you retired?’

  ‘Ah, you mean what do I live on?’

  Carole wouldn’t have put it quite that crudely, but she admitted that yes, that was more or less what she meant.

  Jude chuckled. ‘Like the rest of us, I live on money. And money comes and money goes, doesn’t it?’

  This did not come within Carole’s definition of an adequate answer, but she had no time to probe further as her sleeve was snatched and Jude’s voice hissed in her ear, ‘It’s all right. He’s gone.’

  ‘What?’

  A gloved hand waved up towards the top of the beach. ‘Our Vice-Commodore. He’s out of sight.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he can’t see what we’re doing.’ And, tugging on Carole’s arm, Jude pulled her round, so that they were both walking back the way they came.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me what we are doing,’ Carole complained.

  ‘We’re going back to where you found the body on the beach. The water’s far enough out for us to see.’

  ‘But we’re not going to see anything. The tide’s washed over the area a good few times by now.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  However, Jude granted her no more information until they were standing at the foot of the breakwater, where, in what seemed like another lifetime, a dead man with a missing tooth had lain. Out of sight now in the encroaching darkness, the relentless thudding of the pile driver continued, eerily echoing off the sea.

  Jude looked at the water-filled indentation at the foot of one of the breakwater’s worn stanchions. ‘It was here?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly here.’

  Scrunching up her eyes, Jude looked across the rain-slicked sand to where the pebbles started. ‘And you say the tide was coming in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So how far was it away from the breakwater when you found the body? How far did it have to come in to reach here?’

  ‘About twenty yards.’

  ‘Hm.’ Jude nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, there’s no way the body was swept out to sea again.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because if the incoming tide was going to move him at all, it’d move him further up the beach. He wouldn’t be swept out till after the tide had changed. And the police came to see you too soon after they hadn’t found the body for that to have happened.’

  The deduction was undeniably true. Carole was surprised to encounter this new, logical streak in her neighbour.

  ‘So . . .’ Jude spun on her booted heel and looked around the semicircle towards the village. She stopped, facing the Fethering Yacht Club. ‘I think we go back up there.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘For anyone who wanted to hide a body, it’s the nearest place, isn’t it?’

  ‘But who wanted to hide a body?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet, do we?’

  It was nearly dark when they got back to the side gate to the Yacht Club. Jude looked around but could see no one in the enveloping gloom. ‘OK, give me a leg-up.’

  ‘But we can’t break in. I mean, particularly after what Denis Woodville was saying.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to see us, Carole. And if he does find any evidence of our intrusion, he’s going to put it down to the local youngsters. “Kids these days just have no respect for property,”’ she announced in an uncannily close echo of the Vice-Commodore’s tones. ‘Come on, give me a leg-up.’

  With Carole’s help, Jude negotiated her long skirt over the gate and then helped her neighbour to join her inside the compound. ‘Now, let’s have a look at all of these boats.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘A loose cover. A sign that one of them’s been broken into.’

  ‘You think the body might have been hidden in one of the boats?’

  Jude looked around. ‘See anywhere else suitable?’

  In the last threads of daylight, they felt their way along the rows of dinghies, Carole starting from one end, Jude from the other. On most, the blue covers were firmly battened down, either fixed with cleats or pulled tight by threaded cords. Above the two women, the wind sang in rigging and steel halyards clattered endlessly against metal masts.

  ‘Could be something here!’ Carole called out.

  Jude was quickly by her side.

  ‘Look!’ Carole pointed to the rim of a boat cover, where a piece of rope dangled loose.

  ‘Pity we haven’t got a torch. It’s really hard to see.’

  ‘I have got a torch,’ said Carole, trying to keep the smugness out of her voice. ‘I always carry one in my raincoat pocket. There’s no streetlight
ing on the High Street.’

  ‘Isn’t there? I hadn’t noticed.’

  Carole reached into her Burberry pocket and the beam of light was quickly focused on the trailing rope. It ended in a sharp right angle.

  ‘Been cut through,’ said Jude.

  The severed cord had been rethreaded through the eyelets of the cover in an attempt to hide the break-in. Jude started quickly to unpick it.

  ‘Should we be doing this?’ asked Carole plaintively.

  ‘Course we should. We are doing it anyway. And nobody can see us.’

  It was true. The wet darkness around them suddenly seemed total. The floodlights focused on the sea-wall repairs were only fifty yards away but looked pale, distant and insubstantial. Someone would have to be very close to detect their tiny torch-beam.

  Freeing a corner of the cover, Jude flipped it back like a bedspread from the stern of the boat. ‘Shine the torch here,’ she said. ‘No, here!’

  The thin stream of light picked out a name in gold lettering: Brigadoon II.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Jude. ‘Do you think there’s a kind of person who would give their boat the same name as their house?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Come on, let’s get the rest of this cover off and have a look inside.’

  ‘What are you expecting to find in there? The body?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  Carole shivered. The possibility was macabre. But she couldn’t deny that it was also exciting.

  When they had peeled the cover right back, however, they found no body. Just the moulded fibreglass interior of a dinghy’s hull. In the central channel a rectangle of trapped water gleamed against the torchlight. Its surface was frozen hard.

  But the ice didn’t stop an acrid smell from rising to their nostrils. ‘Standing water,’ Carole observed. ‘It’s been leaking in for some time.’

  She ran the beam of the torch carefully over the inside of the boat. It revealed nothing they wouldn’t have expected to find there.

  ‘Just check if there’s anything under the water.’

  Putting a foot on one of the trailer wheels, Jude hoisted herself with surprising ease over the side and into the dinghy. With a gloved fist, she hammered through the sheet of ice. Then, removing her right-hand glove and supporting herself on the other arm, she felt down into the bottom of the boat. She winced at the cold of the water.

  ‘Something here.’ She produced a nut and bolt, rusted immovably together, and handed them to Carole. ‘Don’t think that helps us much.’

  She reached down again through the cracked ice into the fetid water and felt her way systematically along the trough. ‘I think that’s probably it. Be too easy if we – Just a minute . . .’

  Carole craned over the side of the boat, trying desperately to see what her neighbour had uncovered. Jude’s dripping hand raised her trophy into the torch-beam. ‘Look at that,’ she said with triumph.

  It was a large, robust Stanley knife, clicked in the open position. The light gleamed on the shiny triangle of its blade.

  ‘Wonder how long that’s been there . . .?’

  ‘Not very long,’ said Carole. ‘Blade like that would rust very quickly. And . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The woman who drew a gun on me wanted to know if I’d found a knife.’

  ‘Yes. So she did.’

  Jude slowly turned the knife over in her hand. On the other side of the handle words had been printed in uneven white paint-strokes. They read: ‘J. T. CARPETS’.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘So what have we got?’ asked Jude.

  They were back in Carole’s house, sitting in front of her log-effect gas fire. She had chosen the system because she knew it would be a lot more sensible than an open fire. None of that endless business of filling coal scuttles, loading log baskets and sweeping out grates. But for the first time, with her new neighbour installed in a sofa in front of her virtual fire, Carole felt a little wistful for a grate glowing with real flames.

  She had felt uncertain about inviting Jude in for a cup of tea, but the unalterable rules of reciprocal hospitality dictated that she should. The trouble was, when you invited someone in, you never knew how long they were going to stay. A drink with Jude in the Crown and Anchor had escalated, without apparent effort, into supper and a lot more drinks in the Crown and Anchor. With someone like Jude, who could say what ‘a cup of tea’ might escalate into?

  And once inside the house, with Gulliver greeted and fed, the unalterable rules of reciprocal hospitality dictated that Carole should at least suggest the option of something other than ‘a cup of tea’. In Jude’s house she’d been offered wine, so when she returned from the kitchen to the sitting room, she said, ‘I’ve put the kettle on, but if you’d rather have a glass of wine . . .’

  This had prompted a quick glance at her large watch-face from Jude and a, ‘No thanks, I don’t want anything. Bit early for me to start on the wine, anyway. But don’t let me stop you.’

  The response had caught Carole on the back foot, seeming to imply that if anyone had an over-enthusiasm for alcohol it was her. But Jude’s brown eyes contained no censure or patronage. Carole was coming to the conclusion that her new neighbour was a very unusual person. Certainly in Fethering.

  ‘We’ve got the knife,’ said Carole, picking up from Jude’s question. ‘But whether that has any relevance to the body on the beach, we just don’t know, do we?’

  ‘Let’s start from the other point of view,’ said Jude. ‘If we assumed that the knife did have something to do with the body . . . would that help?’

  ‘It depends what it had to do with the body.’

  ‘All right. Well, your woman with the gun mentioned a knife, so that’s a start. But suppose it actually belonged to the dead man . . . that it dropped out of his pocket while he was hidden away in the boat?’

  ‘We don’t know he was hidden away in the boat,’ Carole objected.

  ‘No, but let’s assume that too. Think about it. Where else could the body have been hidden where the police wouldn’t see it?’

  ‘The boats are the obvious place, I agree. Or I suppose there are those chest things on the sea wall, where the fishermen keep their stuff. They’re kept padlocked, but if someone was prepared to break into a boat, they’d be equally ready to cut through a padlock.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Surely, though, if the police were looking properly for the body I told them about, then they’d have gone up to the Yacht Club, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Ah, but were they looking properly? Or had they already marked you down as a hysterical fantasist before they got to the scene?’

  Carole was affronted. ‘I don’t see how they could possibly have done that. When I rang them, I was extremely unemotional and controlled.’

  ‘But you did say that you’d bathed Gulliver before calling them.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think I did.’

  Jude shrugged. ‘That was probably what did it.’

  ‘How? But . . .’ Carole didn’t pursue the objection. ‘All right, assuming the body was hidden in the boat after I found it, that does raise a few other questions, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Like who hid it there?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And, more to the point, Carole, who removed it from the boat before we looked under the cover this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes. And, still maintaining all the assumptions about there being a connection, the only clue we have to help us answer those questions is the Stanley knife . . .’

  ‘Which might have belonged to the dead man . . . or might have belonged to the person who left the body there . . .’

  ‘Or might have belonged to anyone else in the world,’ Carole couldn’t help saying.

  ‘Ssh. Ssh.’ Jude spoke very soothingly, as if she were some kind of therapist. ‘We’re just letting our ideas flow. Hold back on the logic for a little bit longer.’

  ‘All right.’

  Jude’s brows wrin
kled as her mind focused. ‘Anyway, the knife couldn’t have belonged to anyone else in the world. There are geographical limitations, logistical limitations . . . No, when you come right down to it, there are very few people to whom that Stanley knife could have belonged. Hm . . .’ She twirled a tendril of blonde hair thoughtfully between finger and thumb. ‘I suppose in fact the most likely person to have dropped the knife – is the boat’s owner . . .’

  ‘Who might be Rory Turnbull . . . assuming we go along with the theory that he would give the same name to his boat as his house.’

  ‘Let’s go along with that for a moment.’ As she concentrated, Jude seemed to go in an almost trancelike state.

  ‘Well,’ said Carole with no-nonsense practicality, ‘easy enough to find out who owns the boat. We simply ask our friend the Vice-Commodore.’

  Jude dragged herself back to reality. ‘Alternatively, I haven’t registered with a dentist down here yet. Now I’ve met Barbara Turnbull and her mother, I’d like to know more about Rory.’

  ‘All right. He’s a bit of a sad case, as you saw in the pub. Anyway, you pursue that line of inquiry.’ Carole moved into the delegating mode which had served her so well during her Home Office career. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll find out about J. T. Carpets. Start with Yellow Pages, then see where I go from there.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jude. ‘That sounds very good.’ Then, with another look at the moon-face of her watch, she stood up. ‘I must be off.’

  And within a minute she was out of the house, leaving Carole to wonder why she had to be off so suddenly. And to realize that, after all her worries about Jude staying too long, she wouldn’t have minded her staying a little longer.

  The red light on the answering machine was flashing when Jude got back to Woodside Cottage. Just one message. From Brad, saying he hoped she’d settled in all right to her new home and lots of luck for the next stage of her life. And it’d be good to see her.

  Yes, she thought, it’d be good to see Brad too. Been a while. She’d call him later. First, though, she dialled a local number.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice was politely deterrent.

  ‘Barbara, it’s Jude.’