The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut tfm-12

by Simon Brett

  The gallery owner put the phone down. “Yes, that’s perfect. Gray’s there and would be delighted to talk to you about a potential commission. As I say, he’s just four doors along. The house is called ‘Sanditon’.”

  “Thank you, that’s so kind,” said Jude graciously. Then looking down towards the white tent surrounding Quiet Harbour, she continued, “Terrible, that business over there, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh yes. And, needless to say in a place like Smalting, all kinds of theories are being put forward about what actually happened.”

  “Any theories that sound believable?”

  “Most of them are pretty fanciful, to be quite honest. And I think they’ll stay that way until we get a bit more information. The police haven’t said anything more about what was actually found under the beach hut. Just ‘human remains’. Once we know the age and gender of the poor unfortunate, I think that’ll put paid to some of the sillier conjectures.”

  “So what’s the latest you’ve heard, Sonja?”

  “There was someone in only this morning who was convinced she knew who’d hidden the remains under the hut.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, she reads rather a lot of crime fiction, I’m afraid, and she said that the police frequently ignore the most obvious solution. She said the first suspect should always be the person who discovers the body.”

  “But in this case that was the Fether District Council-approved contractor who was about to repair the fire damage.”

  “Oh no, Jude, she didn’t mean him. She meant the one who discovered the fire damage. She was convinced that the murderer must be the woman who took over the hut rental from Philly Rose.”

  “Oh, was she?” said a very tight-lipped Carole.

  ♦

  “Jude, will you stop giggling!” They were walking along the promenade towards Sanditon. “It is not funny. It is not funny that I’ve just been identified as a murderer. And it’s even less funny that you have set up a meeting with an artist who’s expecting me to commission him to paint a watercolour of Fethering Beach.”

  “It’s an introduction. How else were we going to get to talk to Gray Czesky?”

  “But I don’t want to commission a watercolour from him. Certainly not at those prices. Anyway, I loathe watercolours. I just find them so insipid.”

  “Look, you’re only discussing the possibility of commissioning the painting. Obviously you don’t go through with it.”

  “But I can’t raise this man’s expectations about –”

  “Carole, it’s a commercial transaction. He’s offering a service that you can accept or refuse. You’re just checking out the possibilities. It’s quite plausible that you could subsequently find another artist prepared to do you a watercolour of Fethering Beach at a much more reasonable price.”

  “But I don’t want a watercolour of Fethering Beach!” wailed Carole.

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “It won’t. Jude, you’ve put me in a very difficult position. I have to lie to this man about wanting a painting painted, and then I’ll have to lie to him again about not wanting a painting painted.”

  “As I say, it’ll be fine. Trust me.”

  “Huh,” Carole snorted.

  ♦

  Gray Czesky’s studio was on the first floor of Sanditon, a large front bedroom commandeered for the cause of art. Carole and Jude could see why he had chosen it. A bay of huge picture windows meant that the light was excellent. The scene it illuminated, however, was one of total chaos.

  Though the rest of the house, the hall into which the artist’s wife Helga admitted them, the staircase and landing they were led through, was almost excessively neat, the studio was grotesquely untidy. Its bare boards and walls were deeply encrusted with spilled paint, the floor was a refuse dump of paint pots, broken brushes and soiled rags.

  So total was the disarray that there was an air of parody about it, as though the artist had modelled his working space on images of Francis Bacon’s studio. But here were no visceral canvases of tortured souls and twisted bodies. Instead, Gray Czesky’s neat chocolate-box watercolours struck a discordant note in the surrounding squalor.

  The artist himself also seemed a parody. His long, greying hair and paint-spattered clothing presented an image of someone who didn’t care about his appearance, but a lot of effort had gone into creating that effect. It was in marked contrast to his wife’s hausfrau look, her neat blue skirt and a pink blouse fussy with ruffles.

  “If you’d like coffee – or a drink maybe – Helga’ll get you some.”

  Carole and Jude both refused the offer and Helga left the room, her husband hardly having acknowledged her presence. He reached for a whisky bottle fingerprinted with paint, and poured a good measure into a filthy glass. After a long swig, he gestured to a spattered sofa on to which Carole and Jude sat gingerly. Gray Czesky perched on a tall paint-covered stool.

  “Alcohol is a good antidote to thought,” he observed lackadaisically. “I find I often need to curb my thoughts. Otherwise they overpower me. My mind is so ceaselessly active. I suppose that is one of the penalties of the artistic temperament.”

  To Carole’s mind instantly came a quotation from G.K. Chesterton that one of her former colleagues at the Home Office had been fond of: “The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.” But she didn’t say anything, just let the self-appointed genius maunder on.

  “There’s a common misconception that, if one has a talent to produce work quickly, that must mean that it comes easily. But no, art is never easy. Art is a very hard taskmaster – or taskmistress is perhaps more accurate.” He gestured across the explosion in a paint factory to his own tidy little creations. “Each one of those watercolours is torn from my soul, you know.”

  This time Carole felt she had to say something. “Well, they look very nice.”

  “‘Nice’? ‘Nice’!” Gray Czesky flung a hand up to clutch at his forehead. “‘Nice’ is the accolade of the bourgeoisie. And of course the aim of the artist is to épater le bourgeois. Call my work anything you wish – challenging, controversial, incompetent even – but never condemn it to the mediocrity of ‘nice’’.”

  “All right, I won’t say it again,” said Carole through tightened lips.

  Wishing to move the conversation into less hazardous waters, Jude observed that the studio had a splendid view.

  “Yes. Though of course I never look at it. An artist does not look outside himself. The art is inside. The art has to be quarried out from within, like a rich seam of ore.”

  “But surely,” said Jude, reasonably enough, “when you’re painting a landscape you have to look at it, don’t you?”

  “I don’t look while I’m painting. I look before I paint. I memorize, I store the image within my mental gallery. For me the act of composition is always an act of recollection.”

  Carole hadn’t liked the lie that had brought them into Gray Czesky’s studio, but she reckoned it was time to play along with the subterfuge. “So have you ever memorized Fethering Beach?”

  “No. Why should I have done?”

  “Oh, of course Sonja Zentner didn’t mention the subject of the commission I’m thinking of. I’m looking for someone to do me a watercolour of Fethering Beach.”

  “Ah. Well, no, I haven’t memorized Fethering Beach, but it would be a matter of moments for me to do so. I could go along with my camera any day.”

  “Oh, so you take photographs of the views you’re going to paint and work from them? Is that what you mean by ‘memorizing’?” asked Jude.

  This did rather dilute the magic of the creative process that the artist had described, and Gray Czesky seemed to acknowledge that he’d lost ground as he mumbled a yes.

  “Well, I’ve seen examples of your work, which I like a lot,” Carole lied, “so the question really is: how much would I have to pay to commission you?”

  Now it came to money, Gray Czesky was suddenly a lot less airy-fairy. He reeled ou
t a list of prices which seemed to vary according to the size of the picture required. And the smallest option would cost over two thousand pounds.

  Carole disguised her real feelings – that if she had a spare two thousand pounds she could think of many things she’d rather spend it on – and said she’d have to mull over her next move. “I will be checking out the rates of some other artists.”

  “Other artists? Other so-called artists, I think you mean. I know the work of most of the so-called artists in the area, and there are few who aspire to being above competent draughtsmen. If you are looking for a mere wallcovering, you would do better to buy a poster or a reproduction than one of their efforts. If you want your wall to have a work of art hanging on it, then you need to commission Gray Czesky.”

  Jude saw an opportunity to move the conversation in the direction of their investigation. “You say you know all the local artists. Do you know Mark Dennis?”

  “Yes, of course I do. Good bloke, Mark. Not much talent as an artist, I’m afraid, but still a good bloke. He didn’t buy into all the bourgeois crap you get in a place like Smalting any more than I do.”

  “I gather he’s left Smalting,” said Carole.

  An expression of crafty caution came into Gray Czesky’s face as he responded, “Yes, I’d heard that.”

  “We know Philly, his girlfriend,” said Jude. “She’s terribly cut up about Mark leaving.”

  The artist shrugged. “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Can’t be tied down by bourgeois morality if you’re an artist.”

  Carole bit back her instinctive response to that remark, instead asking, “I don’t suppose you have any idea where he went?”

  Gray Czesky grinned roguishly. “There is a kind of freemasonry among men, you know. We support our mates, but we don’t get involved in their love lives. If a bloke splits up with a girlfriend, not our problem. Doesn’t matter whether we like the girl or not, we know where our duty lies. We’ll support him, go out for a few drinks, help him forget, but we won’t offer advice or comment. He’s done what he wants to do, he no doubt had good reasons for doing it, it’s his business.”

  “You’re saying you don’t know why Mark walked out on Philly?”

  Another shrug. “Presumably he didn’t want to stay with her any more.”

  “You don’t know if he’d met someone else…or gone back to someone?” asked Jude.

  “No. And if I did know I wouldn’t tell you. As I say, there’s a freemasonry among blokes about that kind of thing. We leave the Mills and Boon stuff to the gentler sex. Me and Mark were just good drinking mates. We got healthily smashed from time to time and we didn’t talk about relationships.” He put a heavy, doom-laden emphasis on the word.

  “And you haven’t seen Mark Dennis since he left Smalting?”

  “That’s another of those things where if I had I wouldn’t tell you.”

  It didn’t seem as though their information gathering was going to progress much further. Carole rose to her feet and said, “Thank you very much for your time, Mr Czesky. I’ll make my decision about the commission very soon and get back to you either way. Do you have a card with your phone number on it?”

  “Helga’s got some downstairs.”

  “I’ll ask her as we go out.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll see you down. Don’t feel ready to go straight back to the coalface of my art.” This was so melodramatically pronounced that Jude looked to see if Gray Czesky was actually sending himself up. But there was no gleam of humour in his eye. When it came to the subject of himself, he was a man incapable of irony.

  He led the two women out on to the landing, and once again they were struck by the contrast between the manufactured squalor of the artist’s workplace and the middle-class neatness of the rest of the house. Just as Jude started down the stairs, Carole suddenly said, “Oh, will you excuse me? I just want to have one more look at one of the watercolours – to help me make up my mind,” and slipped back into the studio.

  Gray Czesky shrugged and followed Jude down to the hall. He called to his wife as though she were a servant, asking her to bring one of his cards. Moments later Carole joined them.

  “Thank you again, Mr Czesky.” She smiled at Helga. “And Mrs Czesky.”

  “No point in thanking her,” said the woman’s gracious husband. “She didn’t do anything. Never do much, do you, Hel? Except get under my feet and stop me concentrating on my art.”

  Carole and Jude waited for the explosion they reckoned those words must have detonated in any twenty-first-century woman, but none came. Instead, Helga Czesky giggled. And then her husband giggled too. Clearly his insulting of her was some kind of love ritual that seemed to turn them both on.

  Helga was the first to recover her powers of speech. She grinned mischievously at the two women and said, “I am very lucky, aren’t I, to be married to a genius – no?”

  No, thought Carole and Jude in unison.

  ♦

  Outside Sanditon, Carole became very mysterious, hurrying back to where she had parked the Renault. Jude kept asking what was happening, but she got no reply till they were both inside the car.

  Then, milking the drama from her revelation, Carole announced, “When I went back into the studio just now, it wasn’t to take another look at the water-colours.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was to pick up this.”

  “What?” asked Jude, playing along with her neighbour’s narrative style.

  Carole unclasped the handbag on her lap and produced from it a paint-spattered scrap of cloth. Jude’s close inspection revealed it to be a strip of an old tea towel with a design of ponies on it.

  “This,” Carole declared, “is an exact match to one of the pieces of cloth that was used to set fire to Quiet Harbour.”

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Eighteen

  “So where do you reckon we stand now?” asked Jude. They had got a takeaway baguette lunch from The Copper Kettle and were sitting outside Fowey eating it. Although gathering clouds suggested that they’d had the best of the day, Jude had nonetheless stripped down to her bikini. Gulliver lay panting on the sand, having accepted there was no point in complaining further about being chained to a beach hut.

  “I’m not quite sure,” Carole replied. “But although he wouldn’t tell us, I did get the strong impression that Gray Czesky had seen Mark quite recently.”

  “As recently as the early hours of last Tuesday morning?”

  “Hm, it’d be nice if we could prove that, wouldn’t it? Be nice also if we could confirm that the woman with Mark was his wife Nuala.”

  “Well, from what Philly said she sounds quite easy to recognize.”

  “Yes, I’ll try to get a description from Curt Holderness of the woman he saw that night. Give him a call when I get home.”

  “Haven’t you got your mobile with you?”

  “Yes, I have, but…” Carole blushed.

  “What?”

  “I don’t really approve of mobile phones being used on beaches.”

  Jude’s eyes shot heavenwards. Her neighbour always retained the capacity to surprise her with a new prohibition or neurosis. But she made no comment and asked, “You know what Philly thought, don’t you?”

  “That Mark had done away with his wife, and that they were her remains under Quiet Harbour?”

  “Yes. Does it work for you?”

  Carole screwed up her face as she evaluated the proposition. “I don’t think it does really. ‘Human remains’…it all comes back to the definition of ‘human remains’. To me that implies that they’re from someone who’s been dead quite a while. Wouldn’t the media talk about ‘a dead body’ if it was from a recent killing? And I’m sure they’d give the gender. ‘The body of a woman was discovered under a beach hut at Smalting,’ that’s what they’d say. Not ‘human remains’.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I must say the police are being very slow to give out any more inform
ation, aren’t they?”

  “Presumably the remains are undergoing forensic investigation. When they’ve identified who the remains belong to then they’ll announce it in a press conference.”

  “Well, I wish they’d get a move on,” said Carole testily. “It’s been nearly a week.”

  “They just don’t think about the necessities of amateur sleuths, do they?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  ♦

  Though the sun was now hidden behind banks of clouds, Jude lay in her lounger as if sunbathing and it took Carole a little while to realize that her neighbour was asleep.

  Quietly Carole detached Gulliver’s lead from the hook on Fowey and set out along the shingle with him, following the curve of the beach huts. He gave her only a token look of reproach, recognizing that a walk on a lead was better than no walk at all.

  Shrimphaven was still locked up. Whatever it was that the girl did in there on her laptop, she wasn’t doing it that Monday afternoon.

  Outside Mistral, as ever, Lionel Oliver, still apparently dressed for the office, lay back on his deckchair, his suit jacket hanging over its back. There was no sign of his wife but, as Carole approached, he waved down to the shoreline and she saw Joyce walking along with her bare feet in the water.

  “Loves paddling,” the old man observed. “The wife’s always loved paddling. Even now she’s whatever age she is.”

  “Well, there’s nothing like the feeling of the sand between one’s toes,” said Carole, more expansive than usual. The fact that she would do anything to avoid the feeling of the sand between her toes was not relevant. Making conversation with people on Smalting Beach was now part of an ongoing enquiry, and Carole had always been more at ease doing things for a work purpose rather than just in her own persona.

  She was surprised how affable Lionel Oliver appeared. When she’d seen him before, he’d looked detached, ‘in a world of his own’ as Joyce had put it. But now he seemed ready to talk, and it wasn’t an opening that Carole was about to waste. Any of the regular beach hut users were potential witnesses to what had really happened on Smalting Beach.