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

by Simon Brett

  When she passed on to Curt Holderness what she’d heard from the Fether District Council official, the security officer agreed instantly to a meeting. He asked where she was and said he’d come straight to Smalting. Fowey that morning was becoming a kind of ‘Incident Room’ and in Carole’s view the beach hut served the purpose pretty well. Though there was no one near enough to overhear any conversations conducted there, it was in full public view and therefore safe.

  As she had the thought, she remembered that it was in full public view, in a situation that anyone might have thought to be safe, that Robin Cutter had been abducted on that very beach. A little shudder ran through her.

  But no feeling of fear could overpower the sense of excitement welling up inside her. She was finally making real progress on the case. And on her own. Jude might live to regret wasting her time at a Past Life Regression Workshop in Brighton.

  “Funny, Carole. I hadn’t got you down as a blackmailer.”

  She looked up to see the stocky figure of Curt Holderness standing between her and the sun. She was sure he had chosen to approach from that angle to emphasize his menace. And he’d succeeded. In spite of the June heat, he was once again wearing his black motorcycle leathers, though he stripped off the blouson as, uninvited, he sat in the chair opposite her. Underneath he had on a Metallica tour T-shirt.

  “I’m not a blackmailer,” said Carole, with a calm that she didn’t feel.

  “Then what is all this about?”

  “I am interested in the disappearance of Robin Cutter.”

  “You’re not alone in that. Everyone on the South Coast has theories on the subject.”

  “Yes, but I’m interested in your involvement in it, Curt.”

  He shrugged, remarkably insouciant, given the implied accusation in Carole’s words. “All right. I was still on the force then. I worked on the case briefly. Went through some of the foot-slogging, house-to-house inquiry stuff. Didn’t come up with anything useful. If you’re hoping to get new information out of me, forget it. I don’t have any.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant. Robin Cutter was assumed to have been abducted by a paedophile…”

  “That was the general view, yes. After another high-profile local case, people were seeing paedophiles everywhere. God, the number of paranoid calls we got at the station round that time.”

  “Are you suggesting you think there was another explanation for Robin Cutter’s disappearance?”

  He shrugged again. “Not particularly, no.” His answers sounded laid-back, but Carole could sense the tension in him. He was on the alert, waiting to see which direction their interview was taking.

  “I said on the phone what Kelvin Southwest had told me…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “…about you supplying him with child pornography.”

  “Okay, I’m not denying it. The little creep wanted the stuff, I had access to it, we made a deal. It was a business arrangement.”

  “A business arrangement that led to your early retirement from the police force?”

  “Yes, all right. I don’t deny that either. And if you’re planning to blackmail me over it, I don’t think you’ll find the top brass in the force any keener to bring that out into the open now than they were at the time.”

  “No, but the fact that you dealt in child pornography has other ramifications, doesn’t it, Curt?”

  “Like what? I had access to the stuff. I had the technology to copy it. I saw a way of making a quick buck. Salaries in the police force aren’t that generous, you know.”

  “I do know. I used to work for the Home Office.” If she had hoped that Curt Holderness might be impressed by that, she was disappointed, so she went on, “It’s a well-known fact that paedophiles exchange pornography with each other, that they form rings.”

  “So?”

  “I’m just suggesting that when you and Kelvin Southwest exchanged pornography you might have discussed going a step further, to move from using images of the stuff to realizing your fantasies with an actual child.”

  It took him a second to take in the full implication of her words. And when he did, he was furious. “Are you saying that I’m one of them? That I’d be in a ring with a little perve like Kel? God, they repel me, people like that! Scum! Filth! So far as I’m concerned you could string up the lot of them today without a trial!”

  “Given that’s your view, you seem surprisingly friendly with Kelvin Southwest.”

  “That’s a business arrangement, nothing more. We’ve both done favours for each other in the past and they’re the kind of favours that we don’t want to become public knowledge.”

  “Your continuing to supply him with pornography, him having organized the security officer job for you?”

  “Exactly that, yes. The reason we spend time together is because we don’t trust each other. He’s keeping an eye on me and I’m keeping an eye on him.”

  “Curt, you say you’re not a paedophile –”

  “Too bloody right I’m not.”

  “But your police career was ended early and in disgrace because you’d been accessing child pornography.”

  “Accessing it, yes. Not bloody using it for my own purposes! God, at times I had to watch some of the stuff for professional reasons, you know, when we were trying to nail some pervy schoolteacher or someone like that…and it bloody turned my stomach. I’m glad I don’t even have to copy the stuff any more. My mate who’s still in the force does that. He hands over the CDs to me, I pass them on to Kel. Thank God, I don’t see any of the content now.”

  “But,” Carole persisted, “you were turned out of the police force for –”

  “I was turned out of the police force for copying and selling the stuff. How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t get any kick from watching filth like that. It’s disgusting!”

  “Then why did you come here so promptly when I reported what Kelvin Southwest had told me?”

  “I came because I’ve got a good little business going, and I don’t want a nosy bitch like you to bugger it up. The police wouldn’t have any interest in prosecuting me – I’m ancient history – but if they found out about my mate on the inside who’s keeping up the supply for me…well, they’d close down the operation sharpish, and I could lose a lot of money out of that.”

  “Are you implying that Kelvin Southwest isn’t the only client you supply?”

  “What if he isn’t? The important point you seem to be failing to take on board is that I deal in the stuff, I don’t use it myself.”

  Carole found herself in a familiar dilemma. What Curt Holderness said sounded very plausible. His repulsion at the thought of watching child pornography seemed genuine. But then again, as with Kelvin Southwest, someone who really was a paedophile would make himself sound just as plausible.

  “So,” she asked rather desperately, “you have no idea what happened to Robin Cutter?”

  “Not until his bones were found under that beach hut over there, no.” Curt Holderness suddenly turned businesslike. “Listen, Carole, I’ve got to know what you’re planning to do. That’s why I came here. Are you going to keep the information about my mate supplying the porn to yourself? And if so, on what terms? You say you’re not a blackmailer –”

  “And I’m not.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want to find out what happened to Robin Cutter.”

  He was silent for a moment, calculating. Then he said, “So if there was a piece of information I could give you – something I’d found out while I was working on the case, something no one else knows – if I were to give you that, would you get off my back?”

  “I certainly would, Curt.” She wasn’t sure whether what she said was true, but she knew it was the answer he required at that moment.

  “Right.” Again he was silent, assessing his situation. “Okay, try this,” he said at length. “You know the boy was being looked after by his grandparents when he disappeared?” Carole nodded. Cur
t Holderness pointed along the row of beach huts. “Those two old dears over there, as it happens – you know them?”

  “Yes, we’ve talked to each other.”

  “Okay, so you know that the old geezer brought the boy down here and he was snatched outside the ice-cream shop up on the prom.”

  “I heard the circumstances.”

  “Well, needless to say, the forensic boys pulled in the old man’s car as soon as possible – took it from right here where he’d parked it in Smalting – and they ran every test they could on it. Of course they found Robin Cutter’s DNA all over the interior. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Kid saw a lot of his grandparents, Lionel Oliver would have driven him around all over the place.

  “Nothing odd in that. But there was something one of the forensic boys thought was odd and I remember chatting to him in the canteen about it.” He paused, fully aware of the command he had on Carole’s attention. “Now the boy – Robin Cutter – was like five, wasn’t he, at the time he disappeared – and his Mum was always insistent that when he went in the car he was clipped into a child seat, you know, for safety reasons. She’d taken Robin’s seat out of her car when she dropped the boy with his grandparents that morning and said, if they drove him anywhere, they were to make sure they used it. But when Lionel Oliver’s car was taken from here to the labs, straight after the boy had been abducted, there was no car seat fixed in it.

  “Okay, the old boy had an explanation. He said he was from a different generation, that he wasn’t mollycoddled when he was a nipper…you know how that generation go on about stuff. There weren’t any car seats around when he was growing up and it’d never done him any harm. And he said the boy Robin liked being free to move around in the car, and it was their little secret and he wasn’t to tell his Mum, but his Granddad reckoned he was grown up enough not to need a car seat. Okay, the old boy’s explanation could have been the truth, certainly everything else in his account tallied and rang true, but at the time I did think it a little odd.”

  It was funny, Carole had always had a feeling that at some point the investigation would entail talking further to the Olivers.

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Thirty-Six

  Curt Holderness didn’t exactly threaten her when he left, but Carole felt the undercurrent of menace in him. She wouldn’t volunteer to spend any more time with him in the future, and was glad there was no reason why she should. A little shudder of relief ran through her body as he set off back up the beach to his motorbike.

  Her morning in the Fowey ‘Incident Room’ had taken longer than she expected. When she looked at her watch once the security officer was out of sight, she was surprised to see it was ten past twelve. She looked along the row of beach huts. Outside Mistral the Olivers sat in their usual positions. Carole was undecided as to how her next step should be taken. In spite of her desire to solve the case and crow over Jude, she found herself wishing her friend was there. Dealing with the Olivers was likely to require a level of delicacy which she wasn’t confident that she possessed.

  With a synchronicity that Jude would have recognized and Carole herself pooh-poohed, at that moment her mobile phone rang. And of course it was Jude.

  “Oh, I thought you were regressing to a past life?”

  “Done that. Apparently I was once married to an Egyptian Pharaoh.”

  “And how was that?” asked Carole sceptically.

  “He was a bit of a Mummy’s boy.”

  “Oh, do shut up.”

  “Anyway, tell me what’s been happening. I’m agog.”

  “So you should be. There’s so much to tell you. All roads seem to lead to the Olivers.”

  “Have you spoken to them?”

  “Not yet.” Then in a rather small voice Carole added, “I’d rather do it with you.”

  “All right. I’ll come straight away.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Still in Brighton.”

  “But how’re you going to – ?”

  “I’ll get a cab.”

  “That’ll be terribly expensive to –”

  Jude had rung off.

  Carole tried to concentrate on The Times, but her eyes kept slipping off the newsprint and homing in on the couple in front of Mistral. She didn’t know what she would do if the Olivers moved before Jude arrived.

  She tried to get her mind engaged by the crossword, but without success. Anyway, the prize crossword on a Saturday was always subtly different and Carole rarely bothered with it, even though completing the weekday ones was an essential part of her ritual. Maybe it was a kind of intellectual snobbery that kept her from the Saturday crossword. Even though she’d never enter for it, the idea of there being a prize seemed to cheapen the experience. Whereas by doing the weekday crossword she was engaging in a purely intellectual activity.

  Jude arrived within the half-hour. “I’m starving,” she announced. “You can bring me up to date while we have something to eat.”

  ♦

  Rather than expose themselves again to the high prices of The Crab Inn, Carole and Jude went to one of the many cafes on the Smalting prom. They selected one which gave them a perfect view of the back of Mistral, so that they could see if the Olivers made any kind of move, and they sat outside in the sunlight. Jude said she was desperate for fish and chips and Carole found the idea rather appealed to her as well.

  While they waited for the food, Carole gave Jude a virtually verbatim report of her interviews with Kelvin Southwest and Curt Holderness.

  “I knew there was something odd about our Kel,” said Jude. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I sensed that women weren’t his thing.”

  With respect for her sensitivities in such areas, Carole asked Jude if she’d got the same feeling with Curt Holderness.

  “No, he’s very definitely normal hetero. Possibly a rather aggressive and bullying normal hetero – actually probably a rather aggressive and bullying normal hetero – but no way is he a paedophile.”

  Their fish and chips arrived. Beautiful. Plump fillets robustly battered and dripping with oil, not those cardboard-like scabbards of dry fish flakes which get served in so many pubs and coastal restaurants. And the chips they were served had had encounters with genuine potatoes quite recently, not in some Past Life Regression.

  “Bliss,” said Jude. “Is there anything in the world to beat sitting in the sun at an English seaside resort and eating good fish and chips?”

  But they both knew there was still a cloud over their idyll – the death of Robin Cutter and the need for its circumstances to be explained.

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Thirty-Seven

  Lionel Oliver was, as ever, gazing abstractedly out to sea, but he looked up as they approached. He recognized Carole and rose politely from his chair when introduced to Jude.

  His wife’s chair was empty. He raised a finger to his lips and pointed to the inside of Mistral. “Joyce is having a little zizz in there. Always does after lunch.” Carole and Jude could see her stretched out on the towel-covered bench seat at the back of the hut.

  “We wanted to talk to you about Robin,” said Jude gently.

  “Everyone suddenly wants to talk to me about Robin.” He gestured to Joyce’s chair. “If one of you wants to sit…”

  “You take it, Carole. I’ll be quite happy on the shingle.”

  “Yes,” Lionel Oliver went on, “there’s been a lot of interest in Robin since…since what was found under Quiet Harbour.”

  “Interest from the police?”

  “Oh yes. From the police.”

  He was silent. Carole wasn’t sure how to move the conversation along, but Jude’s instinct was sure. “You loved Robin, didn’t you, Lionel?”

  “Oh yes. I loved him very much. Still do love him, even though he’s not here to love any more.”

  “And you’ve talked a lot about him to the police?”

  “I certainly have. A lot around the time he dis
appeared. And now a lot more. They rang this morning. They want to talk to me again.” He looked at his watch. “They’re going to pick me up here this afternoon. Inspector Fyfield’s going to come. In a car. Very thoughtful of them to send a car for me, isn’t it? But then of course you probably know that, don’t you?”

  Jude flashed a puzzled look at Carole, who sent a no-don’t-say-anything one back. It seemed that Helga Czesky’s assumption that they were police officers had spread as far as the Olivers.

  “Different department I suppose you’d be,” the old man went on. “They use a lot of women in this area, I believe, you know, when it concerns the death of a child.”

  There was a strange calm about him, a kind of resignation, as if some great weight had just been removed from his shoulders.

  “We heard about the fact that you didn’t put Robin’s car seat in the car.”

  “No, I should have thought of that. In the panic I forgot. Invented some story on the spur of the moment that seemed to convince the police, but maybe they’ve been suspicious all that time.”

  “And no one in Smalting saw him, did they, when he waited for you outside the ice-cream shop?”

  “No.”

  “I think I know why,” said Jude softly.

  Carole looked at her neighbour in astonishment. She knew Jude was capable of making great – almost magical – leaps of logic, but had no idea what she was about to reveal this time.

  “Robin never came to Smalting that afternoon, did he, Lionel?”

  Slowly the old man shook his head.

  “That’s why he didn’t need the car seat. He was already dead, wasn’t he?”

  A nod confirmed this. Carole couldn’t work out how Jude had reached the conclusion she had, but it did make sense of a lot of anomalies in the case.

  “When I saw he was dead,” said Lionel, “I knew I had to hide the body. I couldn’t leave him there. Miranda would never have forgiven us. I had to hide him somewhere temporarily, until the furore died down and I could make a more permanent resting place for him.”