by Simon Brett
‘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?’
Chapter 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 years 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.
It happened in a split second. Still in the air between boat and cement, he shook his hand free and landed facing away from her. He hit the ground running and weaved his way through the rows of boats towards the Fether.
‘Help!’ shouted Carole up towards the clubroom. ‘Help!’ Now she wished she’d brought every member of the Yacht Club with her to trap the boy and seal off his escape.
Dropping her torch in confusion, she ran as fast as she could, but Nick had a start and was a lot faster. She saw him vault over the far fence and rush towards the sea wall.
By the time Carole, panting with effort, reached the railings, Nick Kent was standing swaying on one of the blue fishermen’s chests on the sea wall. Is that coincidence, Carole wondered, or does he know something about the whereabouts of the body?
Such speculation would have to wait. She heard behind her the clatter of feet down wooden steps and men shouting, as she called out, ‘It’s all right, Nick! Don’t panic! Everything’s all right!’
But the hue and cry she’d feared had started. One of the Yacht Club members had found a powerful spotlight, which he focused on the trembling boy.
That was the final straw. Nick Kent recoiled from the beam, as if the light had
the physical power to push him.
Then he turned away and, trailing a thin scream, disappeared over the sea wall into the Fether.
Chapter Thirty-five
‘I still want to know,’ said Jude calmly, ‘what you were doing on Fethering beach before seven in the morning.’
‘And why should I tell you?’ Tanya sneered. ‘You’re not police or anything. I don’t have to answer your questions.’
‘No, you don’t. On the other hand, you did invite me to come here and the only possible reason for that is because I said I wanted to talk about the body on the beach. But now I’m here, you don’t seem to want to talk about it.’
‘Maybe I’ve changed my mind.’
‘You see, I think you do know more about the body than you’re saying. The person who saw you on the beach said you had come running down from the direction of the Fethering Yacht Club. I happen to know that the body you found had been stowed there overnight. In a boat called Brigadoon II.’
There was an involuntary intake of breath from Tanya. Jude knew more details than she was expecting.
‘A possible interpretation of your actions would be that you knew the body had been put in the boat, but when you went to the Yacht Club to check on it – or possibly to move it – you found it had gone. That’s what made you panic and run off down the beach, where fortunately you found the missing corpse against the breakwater. So maybe then you went off to get help to move it.’
‘You’re talking a load of rubbish.’ But it was only a token defiance. Jude could see from the sulky set of the girl’s chin that at least part of her conjecture had been correct.
‘What I still don’t know, though, is how you came to be involved with the body on the beach. What did it have to do with you, Tanya?’
Carole was well ahead of the others in reaching the sea wall. As she peered fearfully down over the side, the smell and the realization hit her at the same time. The Fether was at low tide and in the thin evening light the mudflats on either side took on the sheen of rotting meat.
Nick Kent had landed in the mud some feet away from the sea wall. The impetus of his jump had planted him up to his thighs in the ooze. His thin arms flailed around, like the wings of a moth caught on wet paint, as he tried in vain to get a purchase on the slime around him.
There was the hiss of a large wave washing up the channel from the sea. The level of the Fether was rising fast. And, even as Carole watched, Nick’s body seemed to jolt sideways, sinking deeper into the mire.
She didn’t think. She acted instinctively. There was a gleaming new metal ladder against the sea wall, which had been fixed in place by the workmen doing the repairs during the previous week. Encumbered as she was by her raincoat, Carole swung herself round to take a foothold on the top rung and shinned quickly down.
The ladder stopped about a yard above the mud. ‘It’s all right, Nick. It’s me, Carole,’ she called out to the terrified boy.
In the gloom he seemed aware of her for the first time. ‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘I want to die.’
‘No, you don’t. What you’ve done can’t be so terrible.’
‘You don’t know anything about it.’
Carole had hooked one arm around a ladder rung and stretched the other out, but was still half a yard short of the boy’s hands. She undid the belt of her Burberry, slid it out of the loops and tried to flip it across the void.
Suddenly there was a flood of light from above. The Fethering Yacht Club regulars had arrived at the edge of the sea wall. ‘We’ll get a rope to him!’ shouted Denis Woodville’s voice, authoritative and confident. It was in times of crisis that Vice-Commodores came into their own.
But his authority was not unquestioned. There came a rumbling of other elderly voices, offering a wide variety of alternative rescue plans. One of them made comparisons with a similar incident that had happened while he’d been stationed out in Singapore.
Now that she could see where she was aiming, Carole made another throw with her belt. The buckle landed right by Nick Kent’s hand. He could easily have taken hold of it and had at least some link to the dry land.
But he didn’t. His hands stayed resolutely on the mud.
He meant what he had said. He wasn’t going to do anything to help himself. He did want to die.
The metal ladder boomed and shook as someone else came down to join her. ‘We can get this rope to him,’ said an elderly male voice she didn’t recognize from somewhere above her head.
Carole squinted upwards. ‘You’ll have to lasso it round him. He’s not cooperating.
‘Damn it,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll go and get some duckboards. Perhaps we can get across the mud to him.’ The ladder shuddered again as he clambered back up and started shouting, ‘Get some duckboards! Bloody kid’s on a kamikaze mission! Won’t help himself!’
These orders prompted more shouting from other elderly male voices. One advocated ringing the coastguard. One recommended a boathook under the boy’s collar. A third said he remembered something similar happening when he’d been stationed out in Singapore. Denis Woodville could be heard saying he’d go to the nearest boat and try saving the boy from the water.
The reasons why managers need to go on management training courses were all too apparent. There was a serious plethora of chiefs, and a serious deficit of Indians.
Carole tried another flick across the void with her Burberry belt. It slipped out of her cold fingers and lay, a dead snake, on the mud between them.
She couldn’t see Nick’s expression. While the old men above argued about the optimum escape plan, they had forgotten about keeping the light pointing down on to the mud.
But Carole could see less of Nick, there was no question about that. He was now embedded in the ooze up to his chest and had to hold his arms up to keep them free of its embrace. The tide was sending ever stronger waves against the outflow of the Fether, and, with each hissing onrush, the water level crept closer to the stranded boy.
Carole slipped out of her precious Burberry. ‘Nick!’ she called out, as softly as she dared against the rush of the water. ‘Grab hold of my coat. Then I can hang on until help comes.’
She flipped the Burberry out, in the manner patented by Sir Walter Raleigh. It landed, chequered-lining down, flat against the slime. Demonstrating once again that the mind has scant regard for the gravity of situations, Carole found herself thinking of cleaning bills and wondering whether dry-cleaning would remove the waterproof qualities of the material.
The hem of the Burberry was almost touching Nick. He could easily have reached out and grabbed hold, taken a strong purchase on the cloth and given himself a chance.
Still, he did nothing.
‘For God’s sake, Nick!’ Carole shouted in exasperation. ‘Is this really how you want to die?’
‘I don’t care how it happens, so long as I die!’ came back the petulant reply.
Carole took a deep breath. Once again, the thought came to her that Jude would do this better. But Jude wasn’t here. Carole Seddon was the only person who could make the boy change his mind and start participating in his own rescue. And Carole Seddon was bloody well going to do it.
‘If you die now, Nick,’ she began in a firm, no-nonsense way, ‘what would your father think?’
‘Don’t talk about my father!’ he shrieked.
‘Why not? I know he’s not around at the moment . . .’
‘You can say that again!’
‘. . . but you used to be close. And if he comes back to find that you gave away your life in such a pathetic way as this, what’s he going to think?’
‘He’s not going to come back! Can’t you understand – he’ll never come back! He’s gone for good!’
Carole changed tack. ‘All right. Say that’s true . . . Say he never does come back . . . That means your mother will have lost one of the two men in her life for ever, and you’re about to deprive her of the other. Think of her. Think what this’ll do to Mummy.’
> ‘It’s better than telling her,’ the boy countered doggedly. ‘It’s better than her finding out what happened.’
‘For God’s sake, Nick, she’s your mother! Mothers were put on the earth to forgive their children – whatever they’ve done.’
‘Not this.’
‘Yes, even this, whatever it may be. The one thing a mother won’t forgive is herself, if she allows one of her children to take his own life. She’ll blame herself for that throughout the rest of her days. Is that the fate you want to condemn your mummy to?’ There was silence. ‘The fate that Aaron Spalding’s mother’s condemned to?’
Carole knew it had been a risk, and the boy definitely flinched at the name. At the same moment, a rogue wave, a bit ahead of itself, broke noisily behind him. The slap sent up a little column of spray which came down over his head, flattening his hair to a shiny skullcap.
Whether it was the imminent reality of his demise or Carole’s arguments which swayed him, she would never know. All that mattered was that suddenly, convulsively, Nick Kent grabbed hold of the hem of the Burberry. Carole could feel the shock of his weight, the socket-wrenching tug on the arm that grasped the raincoat’s collar, and the equally painful strain on the arm that was hooked round the ladder.
‘OK, we’re coming with the duckboards!’ a self-important voice announced from the top of the sea wall. ‘Easy does it. We’ll just – oh, bugger!’
Carole heard something heavy rushing through the air, then a sound like a small fart as the object flumped into the mud. A slatted rectangle of duckboarding stuck upright at an angle out of the ooze. It was a good three yards away from both the ladder and the sinking boy.
Again, Carole’s mind, with its poorly developed sense of occasion, demanded why, in a crisis of this kind, when the best help available was required, the rescue mission seemed to be in the hands of Dad’s Army or the Keystone Cops?
From above, she could hear more argument. One pompous elderly voice was saying that duckboards weren’t the answer, they should be throwing down a lifebelt. Another argued back that duckboards were the answer, but they needed to be lowered down on ropes. A third announced that a similar thing had happened when he’d been stationed out in Singapore.