The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  ‘Not while Nick’s been around, no. Sam did come back here a few times the first few weeks, but it was only to try and get money off me. Steal money from me if I wasn’t here. He took virtually everything in the house that had any value and sold it off to feed his heroin habit. Even took his passport one time – no doubt he managed to get a few quid for that from illegal-immigrant racketeers. He’s just gone.’ Maggie Kent let out a defeated sigh. ‘When he started going downhill, I felt dreadful, kept thinking I could save him from himself, that I should save him from himself. Now, I haven’t got the energy even to think about him. So far as I’m concerned, Sam no longer exists.’

  ‘But Nick must’ve been in an awful state when his father left,’ Jude persisted gently.

  ‘Oh yes, it was terrible for him. And Sam’s departure coincided with running out of money for the school fees, so suddenly Nick’s changing schools. I’m not saying anything against state education . . . well, yes, I am, actually. You grow up middle class and your mind rides along certain tracks for so long that it’s almost impossible to derail it. Nick was much better taught at his private school than he is now, and he mixed with a much less damaging bunch of kids than he does now. There, I’ve said it! Deeply politically incorrect and I don’t give a damn!’

  The outburst had exhausted her further. Maggie Kent sagged in her chair, the anger drained out of her.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I should move out of here – I’ll have to move out of here soon, anyway, the building society will see to that – and buy a little flat somewhere cheaper, and get Nick back into a decent school for his A-levels and . . .’ She sighed. ‘But I seem to lack the will. I keep thinking something’ll happen, to sort out this whole bloody mess. Maybe I’m not so different from Sam, after all.’ She slumped back, defeated.

  ‘So, going back to Monday night,’ Jude prompted tentatively, ‘what time did Nick get home?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Not that late – one, two, I suppose. I was aware of him coming in, but I didn’t see him. Quite honestly, I get so sick of all the rows about the time he comes in that if I can duck one I do.

  ‘But he went out again early the next morning and it was what happened then that really affected him. The phone rang when I was hardly awake. Someone wanted to speak to Nick. Young voice, one of his mates I assumed, so I gave the lad an earful about ringing at that hour and got Nick to the phone. I don’t know what was said, but it sure scared the hell out of my son. He threw some clothes on and rushed straight out of the house. I don’t know where he was going, he wouldn’t tell me, but he was shaking like a leaf.’

  ‘What time would that have been?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Ooh . . . Five past seven, say.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Anyway, I was worried sick. Though Nick’s given me quite a few nasty frights over the last few months, I’d never seen him in that kind of state. But of course I was due up at Brigadoon to be a dutiful Mrs Mop to the lovely Barbara . . . so I wait around as long as I can. And then, just when I’m about to leave, Nick comes back. He was in a worse state than ever, sobbing like a baby. No, worse than a baby. He was hysterical.’

  ‘Did he tell you the reason?’

  ‘No. Oh, I got bits out of him . . . that he’d been out with Dylan and Aaron the night before . . . that they’d had a few drinks . . . I think they did some drugs too. He didn’t admit it in so many words, but I’m pretty sure they did. And apparently they were talking about black magic, some gobbledegook I didn’t understand, but which seemed to have got Nick pretty scared. Anyway, he told me that they broke into the Yacht Club . . . said it was just a lark, that they didn’t do any harm.’

  ‘But you reacted this morning when I showed you the Stanley knife,’ Carole pointed out. ‘He must’ve said something about that.’

  ‘Yes, Nick mentioned it. He said that Dylan, who works as a carpet-fitter, had his knife with him. But then he seemed to regret saying that and clammed up. I asked if any of the boats had been vandalized and he assured me they hadn’t.’

  ‘But Dylan was definitely with Nick and Aaron when they broke into the Yacht Club?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Carole and Jude exchanged a look. Neither of them had believed Dylan’s disclaimer at the time he said it.

  ‘That was all the night before,’ said Jude thoughtfully. ‘But it’s Nick’s trip the following morning that seems really to have upset him. Did you find out anything about that?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a thing. He kept saying he couldn’t tell anyone about it. That he couldn’t tell me, of all people.’

  ‘“You, of all people” because you were his mother or because what happened had something to do with you?’

  Maggie Kent shrugged helplessly at Jude’s question. ‘I haven’t a clue. All I know is that my son was in a terrible state of shock . . . Oh, and I did notice he had sand on his trainers.’

  ‘So he’d been on the beach.’ Carole stated the obvious. ‘The boy who phoned him that morning, are you sure you didn’t recognize the voice?’

  ‘I’d never heard it before. I mean, I could tell it was someone round Nick’s age. They all talk ridiculously gruffly. Partly street cred and partly because they haven’t got used to their voices having broken. But this wasn’t one I recognized.’

  ‘Could it have been Aaron Spalding?’

  ‘Possibly. But I never heard Aaron Spalding speak, so I wouldn’t know.’

  There was a silence. Carole and Jude’s minds were racing.

  ‘You’re sure there wasn’t anything else, Maggie?’ asked Jude.

  ‘No, sorry. Nick clammed up again. That was all I could get out of him.’

  ‘But he didn’t go to school on the Tuesday?’

  ‘He was in no state to go anywhere. I stayed here with him, tried to calm him down a bit. Wednesday he stayed here again, but he was more his old self. Then we heard about Aaron’s death and I’m afraid Nick just cracked up again.’

  ‘Is he at home now?’ asked Carole.

  Maggie shook her head. ‘He said he felt up to school this morning. So he went there, and I went to the Shorelands Estate to be patronized by Barbara bloody Turnbull.’

  ‘So you really have no idea what the three of them got up to at the Fethering Yacht Club?’

  ‘No, but it was something pretty horrifying, if the effect it had on my son is anything to go by . . .’

  ‘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.’

  Chapter 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 imperat
ives 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 justified. 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 Brigadoon II. The body of a man in his fifties. But it’s what you did with the body that interests me.’