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

by Simon Brett

  “So you start rewriting the book again, to accommodate these new ideas?”

  “Yes, that’s what I do exactly, more or less.”

  The girl was silent. Carole didn’t think it was the moment to comment that Katie Brunswick’s way of writing a book seemed a rather odd approach to any enterprise, so she moved on to the real purpose of her chocolate-brownie subterfuge. “I was speaking to Curt Holderness this morning.”

  “Oh?” Katie was alert, alarmed even.

  “He was offering me various ways in which he could bend the rules with regard to these beach huts.”

  “Was he?” she asked cautiously.

  “He did actually tell me that he’s made an arrangement with you…”

  “Mm?”

  “…allowing you to stay here overnight when you want to.”

  “Yes, well, I went on this course where one of the tutors told me two important things about being a writer. He said that you had to have a dedicated room of your own to work in – just like Virginia Woolf said. A space with the minimum of distractions in it.”

  “Which you’ve got here.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he also said a writer never knows when inspiration is going to strike, and you must never ignore its summons. As soon as you have an idea you must leap to pen and paper, or the keyboard or whatever else you use.”

  “I see. So sometimes you need to stay here overnight when inspiration strikes you?”

  “Yes. Or when inspiration might strike me.”

  “Ah.”

  “Curt Holderness only charged me a hundred quid for the concession. It still makes this a jolly cheap office, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Well, I hope inspiration didn’t strike much in the last few days.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The most recent couple of times I’ve been here, this place was locked up.”

  “Yes.” Katie Brunswick looked a little embarrassed. “The fact was, when the police started investigating here on the beach, well, I didn’t particularly want to be around.”

  “Squeamishness?”

  “No, I just didn’t want to be questioned…you know, in case the fact that I was sometimes staying here overnight came up.”

  “Ah. I understand.” Carole looked beadily at her. “So when was the last time you spent the night here?”

  Katie Brunswick screwed up her eyes as she tried to remember. “Last Monday. I mean, not the Monday just gone, the one before.”

  A little charge of excitement ran through Carole. “And did you see anything that night?”

  “What sort of thing?” came the cautious response.

  “Any people on the beach?”

  “I did see some actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “Normally if I stay overnight I close the doors, so that it’s not so obvious that I’m in here. But it had been a hot day and was still pretty warm in the small hours. It was very stuffy in here, so I reckoned I could risk leaving the doors open.”

  “So who did you see?” asked Carole, her throat tense with excitement.

  “I saw that painter guy who lives on the prom.”

  “Gray Czesky?”

  “Yes. He was very drunk. He wandered down on to the beach and staggered off behind the beach huts over there.”

  “What? Near Quiet Harbour? Near the one the police are investigating?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “Perhaps. I can’t remember. I think perhaps he had a plastic carrier bag with him.”

  “What time would this have been, Katie?”

  “I don’t know. I was quite caught up with what I was writing. Early hours, I suppose. One or two in the morning.”

  “Did you see him leave the beach?” A shake of the head. “Did you see anyone else?”

  “Yes. A bit later…I don’t know how much later because I was caught up in the book, but I heard voices whispering. A man and a woman.”

  “Could you hear what they were saying?”

  “No. But I looked out and I saw them both going the same way Gray Czesky had gone.”

  “Towards Quiet Harbour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who were they, Katie?”

  “One was the guy who used to be in Quiet Harbour with his girlfriend.”

  “Mark Dennis?”

  “I don’t know his name, but he’s got that small girlfriend with almost white-blond hair. Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t seen them down here on the beach much recently.”

  “And did you see the woman he was with?” asked Carole.

  “Yes. She doesn’t go out much, seems to spend most of her time in the house. But I have seen her a couple of times with Gray Czesky. It was his wife, Helga.”

  Jude was back at Woodside Cottage when Carole returned to Fethering. They stood tensely together in Jude’s sitting room while Carole dialled the number Nuala Cullan had given them.

  A machine answered. It requested anyone who wanted to leave a message for Gray or Helga Czesky to speak after the tone.

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Twenty-Three

  Carole switched off the phone, then consulted Jude who advised her to leave a message. “We need to see them, don’t we?”

  “What should I say? Maintain the pretence that I want Gray to do me a watercolour of Fethering Beach?”

  “No, I think we’ve gone beyond that. Take the direct approach. Say you want to talk about the fire that was started under Quiet Harbour.”

  “Strange that they don’t answer. I got the impression that they were both in the house most of the time. Katie Brunswick said Helga don’t go out much.”

  “Maybe they’re the sort who always leave the answering machine on. So that they can screen incoming calls.”

  So it proved. Carole left a terse message ending with Jude’s number, and it was a matter of moments before the phone rang. Jude answered. It was Helga. She sounded cautious and a little distressed.

  “Please, who am I talking to?” Over the phone her German accent was thicker.

  “My name’s Jude.”

  “It was not your voice which left the message.”

  “No. That was my friend Carole. We did meet on Monday. We were the ones who came to your house to discuss a commission with your husband.”

  “Ah.” Helga didn’t take issue with them about the subterfuge. She had more pressing priorities. “You said you knew something about the fire at Quiet Harbour…?”

  “Yes. We know who lit it,” said Jude, making what was little more than a conjecture sound like a certainty.

  “I see.” Helga was silent for a moment. “Yes, we must meet,” she said finally, in a voice of long suffering.

  ♦

  They had agreed to come round to Woodside Cottage. Gray Czesky had been tidied up, presumably on his wife’s insistence. He was out of his paint-spattered work clothes, and in grey trousers and a blue blazer looked somehow like a large naughty schoolboy waiting for a dressing-down from the headmaster.

  It was evident that in the current situation his wife represented that kind of authority figure at least as much as Carole and Jude did. Once the couple had sat down and refused offers of tea and coffee, Helga announced, “Gray has something he wishes to confess to you.”

  He was shamefaced, but still had a bit of his old bravado left. “It’s hell,” he began, “having an artistic temperament. Nobody really understands, nobody knows what goes on inside my brain.”

  None of the three women said anything, leaving him to dig himself out of his own hole. “I don’t really always have control of myself. My emotions are so volatile, I don’t know what I’m going to feel from one moment to the next. It’s as if I’m being blown all over the place by an unidentifiable power that is stronger than I am.”

  “An unidentifiable power like drink?” Carole suggested rather meanly.

  “Well, yes,” he conceded, “I suppose drink is part of it. But
that’s more a symptom than a cause. I sometimes have to drink to subdue the agonizing thoughts that come unbidden into my mind.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “And then sometimes I admit that I do things under the influence of drink that I might not do in my more sober moments.”

  “Not that you have many of those,” said Helga.

  There was an expression of pure shock, almost as though Gray Czesky had been slapped in the face, at this surprising and sudden disloyalty from his wife. Carole and Jude wondered whether they were witnessing the moment of a worm turning, of the final straw being placed upon the overladen camel’s back.

  “Well, yes, I agree, the drinking does sometimes get out of hand. But I need it. I have some of my best inspirations when I’m drunk.”

  Carole and Jude exchanged looks. Both were wondering how much inspiration it took to paint mimsy-pimsy little watercolours of local beaches and the South Downs.

  “I think, Gray,” said Helga, “you had better tell them what happened last week. That evening when Mark came down to see you.”

  Her husband nodded his head ruefully.

  “Would this have been the Monday?”

  “Yes,” said Helga. “Go on, Gray.”

  There was a truculent silence before he obeyed. “Okay, I’d had a call from Mark that day.”

  “Had you been in touch with him ever since he left Smalting?” asked Jude.

  “No, it was a long time since I’d last heard from him. When he left Philly, whenever that was…”

  “Beginning of May,” his wife supplied.

  “Yes. At the time he asked if I minded him using our phone number for people who wanted to contact him.”

  “And did many people want to contact him?”

  A shake of the head. “Hardly anyone. He gave me a mobile number and –”

  “If he’d got a mobile,” Carole objected, “why did he need to have your number for messages?”

  The painter shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to keep people at a distance. Maybe it was a new mobile and he didn’t want people to know the number. Anyway, after the first few days he never answered it when I called him. Until suddenly he rang out of the blue last week.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that he was coming down to Smalting, and did I mind if he dropped in. I said fine.”

  “He didn’t say whether he was coming down to see Philly?”

  “No.”

  “And how did he seem when you saw him?” asked Carole.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Did he seem exactly the same as he had when you last saw him?”

  Gray Czesky shrugged. “Pretty much, I guess.”

  “No,” said Helga firmly. “That is not true. He had put on a lot of weight. He seemed to have lost his confidence. Very…what’s the word? Jittery. No, he was in an extremely strange state when he arrived.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yes, Gray. Though you were pretty soon too drunk to notice.”

  Her husband chuckled with a schoolboy boastfulness. “True, we did get well stuck into the sauce that night.”

  “Which of course led to you doing something rather stupid, didn’t it?” Helga prompted implacably.

  “Yes.” His face took on a hangdog expression, which, if it was meant to curry sympathy for him, did not have the desired effect with the three women. “Okay, well…Mark and I got into a kind of argument…not really an argument, more a sort of…”

  “Drunken shouting match,” suggested Helga.

  “All right. Anyway, I was telling him that artists have to be free and that bourgeois values were a trap to prevent artists from a true expression of themselves, and he was defending the smug middle-class life, saying all he wanted was to live like what he called ‘a normal human being’ – by which he meant an inhibited, tight-arsed wage-slave with a bloody pension and life insurance and a nice neat little beach hut in Smalting. And I said that going down that route was the surest way to stifling artistic talent and nobody who gave a stuff about a beach hut could possibly be any kind of artist, and so I went out and…”

  He shrugged again, as Carole completed the sentence for him. “Set fire to the beach hut that Mark and Philly used to use.”

  There was a long silence before Gray Czesky admitted that yes, that was exactly what he had done. “As I say, I was pretty well plastered,” he added, as though that might be some kind of mitigation.

  His wife took up the narrative. “And Gray comes back home and he is boasting about what he has done, so Mark and I rush back to the beach hut to put out the fire.”

  Carole looked at Jude, who gave a little nod. Yes, that must have been when the two of them were seen by Curt Holderness. Odd, though, that Curt hadn’t noticed that the beach hut was burning. Or perhaps not so odd, given how laxly the man interpreted his duties as a security officer.

  “And you did put out the fire, Helga?”

  “Yes. Fortunately it had not got much of a hold on the hut. Only one corner was burnt. If we had not got there so quickly I hate to think what would have happened.”

  Gray Czesky, now his folly had been exposed, looked sheepishly defiant. “As I said,” he pleaded to deaf ears, “it’s not easy having an artistic temperament.”

  “Well,” said Carole, “we’re very grateful to you for telling us all of this.”

  “I felt we had to,” Helga responded. “I was suspicious of you when you came round on Monday.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I did not think you were really wanting to commission a painting from Gray.” Carole felt herself blushing to know how transparent their ruse had been. “It was when you rang again today that my suspicion was confirmed.”

  “Really?”

  “I knew then that you were plain-clothes police officers.” Carole and Jude tried to avoid catching each other’s eyes. Instinctively, Carole was about to say that Helga had got the wrong end of the stick, but a moment’s thought made her realize that there was no harm in the woman continuing with her misapprehension. And their mistaken identities could actually be rather useful in advancing their investigation.

  “The question is now,” Helga continued, “what you do about what we have just told you.”

  Jude took note of the pleading in the woman’s eyes as she said judiciously, “Well, setting fire to the beach hut was obviously very stupid behaviour on your husband’s part…”

  “Yes?”

  “…but at its worst it was nothing more than a drunken prank.”

  “No,” Helga agreed, her hopes rekindled.

  “And it wouldn’t have become so important had it not been for subsequent events at the beach hut; the discovery of the human remains there. But…” she extended the pause, aware of the tension in the sorry couple in front of her “…now we know that the two discoveries are unrelated to each other…” she looked across to her neighbour, as if for confirmation of what she was about to say, “…I don’t really think it’ll be necessary for any further action to be taken.”

  The relief in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage was almost palpable. Both the Czeskys sank back into their chairs, as Carole picked up the conversational baton. “Though of course,” she said sternly, “we might take a different view were you not to co-operate fully with us.”

  “Of course we will,” said Helga earnestly. “In what way do you wish us to co-operate?”

  “We will require you to inform us…” Where had that ‘require’ come from? Carole realized she was dropping into ‘police-speak’. “We will require you to inform us of anything else you may know that might be of relevance to our investigation into the discoveries on Smalting Beach.”

  She chose her words with care. With her background in the Home Office, Carole Seddon was well aware how serious a crime impersonating a police officer could be. So she deliberately hadn’t confirmed Helga’s assumption that their enquiries were official ones. As she walked her casuist’s tightrope, Carole curbed her natur
al instinct towards guilt.

  “Oh, of course,” said Helga. “If there’s anything we know that’s relevant, of course we will tell you.”

  Jude nodded with satisfaction. “Right. Good. Well, the first thing we want to know is: where is Mark Dennis? Do you have a way of contacting him?”

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Twenty-Four

  It turned out to be remarkably simple. Gray provided Carole and Jude with a new mobile number for Mark Dennis. The moment the Czeskys had left Woodside Cottage, Jude, trembling with excitement, keyed it into her phone.

  A brief ringing tone was quickly replaced by a message informing her that the phone she was calling was switched off. She tried again. With exactly the same result.

  Neither Carole nor Jude could disguise their disappointment. To have come so close to making contact with Mark Dennis and then to…

  “I’ll keep trying it,” said Jude defiantly.

  “Yes, of course. He’ll answer it soon.”

  But neither of them really believed the optimism in Carole’s words.

  ♦

  Smalting was the lead story on the television news that evening. The human remains that had been found buried under a beach hut there had been identified by the police. They had belonged to a small boy called Robin Cutter.

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Twenty-Five

  The name was familiar, but in front of their separate televisions Carole and Jude both needed reminding where they had heard it before. The news bulletin supplied all the promptings their memories required.

  The story of Robin Cutter was a sad and painful one. He had been five at the time of his disappearance, and nothing had been seen of him in the intervening eight years. At the time, relatively soon after the high-profile abduction and murder of a local schoolgirl, there had been a huge uproar in West Sussex about the case. It aroused all the country’s latent visceral horror of paedophilia.

  Though it was nearly ten-thirty at night, Jude went straight round to knock on the door of High Tor. The evening air was quite cool, reminding the denizens of Fethering that they were still only in June, not yet August.

  Carole and Jude stayed watching television after the main bulletin, because the disappearance of Robin Cutter had happened in the area and there remained a very distant possibility that more information might be available on the local news.