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

by Simon Brett

  Carole nodded. “We’ve heard her views on the subject.”

  “Anyway, to keep her out of the scene and to let me get on with my life with Philly, I made this arrangement to…I don’t know what you’d say…”

  “Buy her off?” suggested Carole.

  “Yes, that’s what it effectively was – buying her off. And she insisted that it was done properly, with a legal agreement, which may give a pointer to the kind of character she is. But at least it got her out of my hair. Anyway, that was all fine, so long as I had this big income, but when things started to go pear-shaped on the money front, oh God, I couldn’t keep Philly in our Smalting lifestyle and I couldn’t pay what I’d agreed with Nuala, and…I was very stressed.”

  Mark Dennis was silent for a moment. Neither Carole nor Jude said anything, giving him time to gather his thoughts.

  “Well,” he said eventually, “I still thought I could sort things out. I thought I could do it on my own. And I didn’t think it would take long. I only intended to leave Philly for a few days. Go up to London, borrow some money from various City friends to dig me out of my financial hole, then meet up with Nuala, somehow get her off my back…”

  “And what happened?”

  He shook his head wryly. “Should have known, really. Most of my City mates were feeling the squeeze as much as I was. Some of them actually asked to borrow money from me before I could put in my own request. Then I met up with Nuala…”

  “At the Oxo Tower.”

  “Yes, Carole. At the Oxo Tower. Typical of bloody Nuala, that. She knows I haven’t got two penny pieces to rub together, so she books in at one of the most expensive bloody restaurants in London.”

  “How did you pay for it?”

  “Oh, credit cards.” He let out a bitter little laugh. “Same way I’d been paying for everything else for the previous few months.”

  “So there was quite a big debt built up there too, was there?” asked Jude.

  “I’ll say. And of course I’d been a very high earner, so I had no problem getting new cards or increasing my credit limit, which meant the debts just spiralled upwards and upwards.” He sighed. “And the pressure on me was getting more and more intense…”

  Carole broke the silence that followed this. “What happened?”

  Mark Dennis shook his head in bewilderment. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean – you don’t know?”

  He sighed. “I literally don’t know. I had…I suppose you’d have to call it some kind of breakdown. I mean, when I left Philly, I can remember that happening. And I can remember having dinner with Nuala at the Oxo Tower – that was on the eighth of May – but…” He shook his head again, unable to fill in the gaps in his recollection.

  “So where have you been for the last few weeks?” asked Jude gently.

  “I’ve been in a psychiatric hospital for most of it. Only came out a couple of weeks ago.”

  “How did you get in there? Did you go in voluntarily?”

  “No, I was sent there. Look, I can’t actually remember a lot of this stuff myself, but from what the doctors and nurses have told me, I’ve kind of pieced together what happened. As I say, the last thing I can clearly remember was having that dinner with Nuala at the Oxo Tower on the eighth of May. What I did for the next few days I have no idea, but I was found on Dover Beach on the morning of the eleventh. I had been in the sea, was drenched through and was only wearing a pair of boxer shorts. What was more, I couldn’t speak.”

  “And you have no recollection of how you got there?”

  “None at all. And only hazy recollections of the following weeks. Because of the location, because I had apparently come out of the sea, and because I couldn’t – or perhaps wouldn’t – speak English, the fairly reasonable assumption was made that I must be an illegal immigrant, who had been shipwrecked, or perhaps dumped in the English Channel by some unscrupulous trafficker. So I was handed over to the police, who apparently questioned me for some time.”

  “Do you remember any of that?”

  “Only vague sort of impressions – and not very pleasant ones at that. I think the police thought I was holding out on them, that I actually could speak but was just pretending to be traumatized to conceal my identity. So they didn’t exactly treat me with kid gloves.”

  “Are you saying they beat you up?” asked Carole, whose Home Office background made her particularly sensitive about criticisms of the police.

  “No, I’m not saying that. I don’t think there was any violence involved, just a lot of suspicion. And my recollections are so hazy that I don’t know which bits really happened and which I’ve invented. Anyway, after a few days the police must have decided that I was suffering from some genuine psychological condition – amnesia at the very least, and possibly some other arcanely named syndromes. So I was then sent to this secure psychiatric hospital in Lewes. Which is where I’ve been until a fortnight ago.”

  “But clearly your memory’s come back. You know who you are now, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Jude, I do. The process was gradual. The psychiatrists who worked with me were very good. And I had a lot of medication too.” He gestured to his flabby body. “I think that’s probably why I put on so much weight. The medication and lack of exercise.”

  “Did the psychiatrists have any explanation for what had happened to you?”

  “Conjectures, nothing concrete. They reckon that I’d just got to a point of stress where my system couldn’t cope, so everything kind of shut down. I couldn’t deal with the world around me and so my body reacted by excluding me from that world, shutting me off from it.”

  The two women exchanged looks. Something in Jude’s expression prevented Carole from expressing the scepticism Mark Dennis’s words had engendered in her.

  He shrugged. “Anyway, that was what the psychiatrists reckoned. Whether it’s true I’ve no idea, but I suppose it sounds like a kind of explanation.”

  “When you went down to Dover Beach,” asked Carole, “do you think it was with the intention of drowning yourself, of escaping your problems that way?”

  Mark Dennis pursed his lips. “To be honest I don’t know. I don’t think so. During the last few months I’ve never contemplated suicide, however bad things have been. And before that, when I was normal, if that’s the right word…well, the idea of me topping myself would have been laughable. I’ve never suffered from depression. I’ve always been told I’m a rather annoyingly positive person.”

  Jude nodded. “Yes, but depression can lie low in someone for a very long time. And your lifestyle had always been pretty pressured, hadn’t it?”

  “That’s exactly what one of the psychiatrists said to me. Almost word for word. Do you have special expertise in that area, Jude?”

  “I do a bit of healing.”

  “Ah.” He looked at her appreciatively. “I would imagine you’re very good at it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What I can’t understand,” said Carole, “is when you did finally begin to remember who you were, why you didn’t make contact with anyone?”

  “I hadn’t got many people to make contact with. My parents are both dead. There was no way I wanted to see Nuala again until I was sure I was firing on all cylinders.”

  “But what about Philly?”

  “Yes.” Mark Dennis looked sad and confused. “Yes, I know I should have got in touch with Philly as soon as I could, but…it’s complicated. I guess it’s something to do with our relationship. Philly…she’s…well, she hasn’t got a lot of confidence. She doesn’t show it, she always seems bright and bouncy, but her self-esteem is actually very low.”

  Jude, who knew this all too well, didn’t say anything, as he went on, “And the previous men in her life haven’t done much good for her. From what I can gather, they were mostly inadequates, needy emotional vampires who monopolized all of her energy with their problems rather than her giving any time to her own.

  “But when we met
, it was different. I was used to being in charge, I was full – perhaps over-full – of confidence, and I loved her. And the fact that someone like me loved her, that gave her a lot of confidence. And the fact that I enjoyed being in charge, and that I sort of protected her, she liked that too. Then of course I’m that much older, so a bit of a father figure maybe. I was like her rock. She knew that, whatever happened, she could rely on me.”

  Carole and Jude guessed more or less what he was about to say, but they did not break the silence. “Well, when our finances started to go belly up, I wasn’t so much of a rock, was I? No more Mr Reliable.”

  “But Philly didn’t take it out on you for what had happened?” asked Carole.

  “Good Lord, no. It’s not in her nature to do that. No, she was very understanding and supportive. And very practical. She said we’d have to sell Seashell Cottage, and I knew how much she loved the place, but she didn’t put any pressure on me. Philly is entirely incapable of emotional blackmail.”

  “Which, after Nuala,” Carole suggested tartly, “must have been quite a relief for you.”

  “God, you can say that again.”

  “So, when you got your memory back, the reason you didn’t contact Philly,” said Jude perceptively, “was because you were afraid you had become needy, like all her previous men.”

  “Exactly that. I wanted to wait till my own confidence had built up a bit, till I could once again be the person she needs. But I’m afraid getting to that situation promises to be a horribly slow process.”

  “You could at least have just given Philly a call, though.” There was a note of reproach in Carole’s voice. “Assured her you were still alive. She’s been worried sick about you.”

  Mark Dennis looked shamefacedly down at the sticky table top. “I know. I should have done it. But I didn’t want her to see me…damaged.”

  “You did, however, come down to Smalting last week, didn’t you?” continued Carole in the same tone. “Why didn’t you see her then?”

  “Ah.” His naughty schoolboy expression was just the same as Gray Czesky’s in similar circumstances. “I didn’t know anyone had seen me down here.”

  “You must’ve lived in a country village long enough to know that nothing – absolutely nothing – you do in a place like that is unseen.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  Jude’s approach was, as ever, less confrontational than her neighbour’s. “So why didn’t you contact Philly?” she asked gently.

  “That was what I meant to do. I’d been out of the Lewes hospital for over a week, I’d sorted out the rather dingy room I’ve got here in Littlehampton, and I felt ready to at least try and see Philly. So I took a cab to Smalting that Monday evening.”

  “Without ringing Philly to tell her you were coming?”

  “Yes, without doing that. And I think I know why. If I’m brutally honest with myself, I didn’t ring her because that meant I could still duck out of the meeting if I wanted to. You know, if when I got to Smalting I lost my nerve.”

  “And I assume you did lose your nerve. That was why you didn’t go to see her.”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly losing my nerve, though I suppose it was in a way. I got to Smalting and rather than going straight to Seashell Cottage, I…well, I thought I might drop in on Gray Czesky, just to see if he’d heard anything about Philly, to see if he knew whether she was actually still in Smalting and…Yes, I suppose I did lose my nerve.”

  “And you also, I assume, knew,” said Carole, “that going to see Gray Czesky would inevitably lead to another drinking session with him.”

  Jude continued the chain of thought. “And you wouldn’t want Philly to see you in a drunken state, because that is one of the few things you argued about. So the moment you decided to go and see Gray was the moment you decided you weren’t going to see Philly that evening.”

  Mark Dennis’s nod confirmed that she’d got it right. “And I did get very drunk, I’m afraid. I’d been off the booze since I’d had the breakdown. No bars in psychiatric hospitals – at least not that kind of bar. So the stuff I drank at Gray’s went straight to my head. And I don’t think it mixed very well with the medication I was on. Am still on, actually.” He gestured to his mineral water. “That’s why I’m drinking this. Anyway, that night I was certainly in no condition for a heart-warming, violins-in-the-background reunion with Philly.”

  “And then, of course,” Carole observed acidly, “Gray Czesky chose that evening for another of his anti-bourgeois exploits, didn’t he?”

  “Setting fire to the beach hut,” Mark agreed glumly. “Yes, he’s a madman when he gets a few drinks inside him.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “Oh, he got into one of his tirades about how no one understands artists, and the rest of the world has a down on them and only cares about middle-class consumerism.”

  “Great from someone whose lifestyle is funded by a rich wife.”

  “I know, I know. Anyway, Gray suddenly gets into this great rant about beach huts symbolizing everything that’s wrong with the bourgeoisie, and then he disappears. Helga and I thought he’d just gone for a pee, but ten minutes later he’s back proclaiming that he’s set fire to one of the beach huts.”

  “Do you think he deliberately chose Quiet Harbour?” asked Carole. “Did he know that you and Philly had rented it?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps he did. Quite possibly he was getting at me because he reckoned I was too bourgeois to be what he defined as a proper artist.”

  “So you and Helga,” suggested Jude, “immediately rushed down to the beach to put the fire out?”

  “Yes.” The two women exchanged looks. Curt Holderness’s sighting had been confirmed. “Fortunately the fire hadn’t taken much hold. We were able to extinguish it quite easily.”

  “So what did you do then? Go back to Sanditon?”

  “No, I was feeling so shitty with the booze, all I wanted to do was get to bed. I called a cab, just managed to avoid throwing up over its upholstery, and went to bed the minute I got back to my room here in Littlehampton. The next morning I woke up with the worst hangover of my life.”

  “So that again wasn’t the perfect day for your reconciliation with Philly?”

  “Too right, Jude.”

  “But that was over a week ago,” said Carole. “Why didn’t you get in touch with her once you’d recovered from the hangover?”

  “I kept putting off calling her. I was worried about how she’d react to me, whether she’d be furious, whether I’d ruined everything. But finally by the Friday I’d convinced myself I had to take the risk. Call Philly, accept whatever consequences that action might trigger.”

  “I don’t think they’d be bad consequences,” said Jude gently.

  Mark Dennis appeared not to hear her, as he went on, “Then of course on the Thursday morning I hear on the news that human remains have been found under a beach hut at Smalting. Well, I knew that meant the place was going to be swarming with police and, though my recollections of what had happened to me after I was found on Dover Beach were vague, there was no way I was ever voluntarily going to put myself in touch with the police again, so…” His words trickled away to silence.

  “Have you heard about the identification of the remains that were found?” asked Carole.

  “Yes. It keeps being on the news. You can’t escape it.”

  “And do you know anything about Robin Cutter?”

  “Only what I’ve heard in the last few days.” From the way he spoke there was no doubt that Mark Dennis was telling the truth.

  He shook his head in puzzlement. “So that’s where I am. Still totally confused.” He looked earnestly at Jude and asked, “What do you think I should do?”

  She held out her mobile phone towards him. “Ring Philly.”

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Thirty-One

  Mark Dennis was afraid – tremblingly, shudderingly afraid. They had driven straigh
t from the pub to Seashell Cottage. When the Renault drew up outside, he asked the two women to come to the front door with him. Then he changed his mind and asked Jude to go on her own and check whether Philly Rose really wanted to see him.

  As they waited in the car, Carole was aware of his body convulsing with bone-deep sobs. She was embarrassed and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Their wait felt long, but it was only a couple of minutes. Then Jude came out on to the street and said through the Renault’s open window, “She wants to see you, Mark.”

  Reassured but still scared, he again asked them to come into the cottage with him. The two women felt a little strange as they escorted Mark through the front door, which Philly held open, but such was the emotional tension between the two young people, they could recognize the need for some kind of catalyst for this first explosive contact.

  Awkwardness filled the tiny hall while Philly closed the door. Wordlessly, she ushered her three guests into the kitchen/dining area. The uneasy silence continued until their hostess offered tea.

  “Yes,” said Mark very formally. “Yes, thank you, Philly. I’d like a cup of tea.”

  Carole and Jude refused the offer. “We should really be on our way,” said Jude.

  “No, don’t go!” The plea from Mark Dennis was instinctive, and still frightened.

  “I think we should.” Jude looked at the two of them, facing each other, frozen, their eyes avoiding engagement. “Come on, Carole. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  In the Renault on the way back to Fethering, Carole asked, “What do you reckon? The minute we left, they fell into each other’s arms and love’s young dream was re-established?”

  “I hope so,” said Jude. But she didn’t sound sure.

  “Well, at least that’s one mystery solved,” Carole observed, “but I can’t believe Mark had anything to do with Robin Cutter.”

  “No.” Jude was thoughtful, abstracted.

  “So I suppose it’s another visit tomorrow morning to Smalting Beach. Hope that Reginald Flowers’s bronchitis has cleared up, assuming that that’s why he wasn’t there today.”

  “Hm.”