The Fethering Mysteries 01; The Body on the Beach tfm-1

by Simon Brett

  If what she’d just heard was an example of the vicar’s wit, Jude wasn’t convinced. What was clear, though, was that, in her hostess’s eyes, Canon Roderick Granger could do no wrong. She was almost coquettish when she talked about him. It was quite possible that the Canon was held up to her husband as an exemplar of all the things that Rory Turnbull wasn’t.

  “Anyway,” Barbara went on, “if you don’t see him this morning, you’ll catch him at the morning service on Sunday. Roddy’s sermons are quite something. Lots of jolly good laughs on the way, but a real core of serious truth.”

  “I’m not a church-goer,” said Jude.

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I accepted your invitation because I wanted to meet some local people, not because I’m ever likely to step into All Saints’.”

  Barbara Turnbull gaped like a beached fish.

  “But I’ve nothing against the Church of England,” Jude reassured her with a huge smile. “Everyone should be allowed to believe in what they want to believe in – don’t you agree?”

  Barbara’s expression showed that she certainly didn’t agree. Allow everyone to believe in what they want to believe in? That, her look seemed to say, is a short cut to anarchy.

  But her transparent thoughts remained unvoiced. “Do let me introduce you to some other people, ‘Jude’.” This time she managed to get a double set of quotation marks round the name.

  With the newcomer in her wake, Barbara bore down on a bird-like woman with spiky white hair who was saying, “And this is meant to be a civilized country. I ask you, is it civilized to park a boat trailer so that the mast goes over the hedge into one’s neighbour’s garden by a full three inches? I mean, is that the action of a civilized human being? I’d say it was the action of a boorish lout, if you want my opinion.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Barbara Turribull cooed, “but I’d like to introduce you to someone who’s a very near neighbour of yours, Sandra.”

  The bird-like eyes darted to take in Jude and form an instant opinion of her.

  “This is Sandra Chilcott.” It was said in best hostess manner. “And here’s the new owner of Woodside Cottage, whose name is…”

  “Jude,” said Jude, taking Sandra Chilcott’s thin hand in hers.

  “Jude, of course! I’ve heard all about you from Bill. Though, of course, being a man, he didn’t tell me anything very interesting. I really do think men walk around with their eyes closed, don’t you, Jude? They never notice anything.” She smiled slyly. “Didn’t take you long to find your way to the Crown and Anchor, though, did it?”

  Jude was then introduced to the two women either side of Sandra, who’d acted as audience for the diatribe about her neighbour. “Well, ‘Jude’,” one of them asked, “have you come down to Fethering in search of the quiet life?”

  “No, not really. I think quietness is an internal thing, don’t you?”

  The two women looked at her in some puzzlement, as Sandra took her cue. “If it’s quietness you’re after, I’m not sure that you’ve come to the right place. You’ll find quite a lot of exciting things happen in Fethering.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes.” Sandra Chilcott warmed to her task as news-bearer. “For example, this morning a dead body was found on the beach.”

  ∨ The Body on the Beach ∧

  Ten

  “Yippee!”

  Carole gave her visitor an old–fashioned look. Her head was still aching and she still blamed Jude for leading her astray. It was a bit premature for her new neighbour to arrive again so soon at her door – and unannounced. And particularly shouting, “Yippee!” That wasn’t the way things were done in Fethering.

  “What is the cause of your celebration?” Carole asked, rather frostily.

  Jude was blithely unaffected by the deterrence in her tone. “You were right. There was a body on the beach. I met Bill Chilcott’s wife, Sandra, at Barbara Turribull’s – and she’d heard about it on local radio.”

  “Yes, I heard too. I met Bill in Allinstore.”

  “So you’re vindicated, aren’t you?”

  “Well…”

  They’d been standing on the doorstep almost long enough for the situation to become awkward. Carole would have to either invite her neighbour in or quickly invent some excuse and get rid of her.

  But Jude solved the social dilemma before it developed. “Anyway, I was thinking there’s bound to be something about it on the local news at lunchtime.”

  She looked at her watch, a huge white dial which appeared to be tied on to her chubby arm with a broad velvet ribbon. “In two minutes. So I think we ought to watch that.”

  “Yes.” Carole had been intending to do so anyway. But before she had time to say, “Thank you very much for the reminder. I’ll see you later,” and close the door, Jude had grabbed her by the hand.

  “So come on, let’s go and watch it at my place.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll knock up something for lunch. And we can open a bottle of wine.”

  “In the daytime?” Carole responded instinctively.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I think I probably had quite enough wine last night.”

  “Oh, feeling the effects, are you?” There was no judgement, only sympathy in the way the question was posed. “In that case you definitely need a hair of the dog.”

  “That reminds me. I was going to take Gulliver out for – ”

  “Come on!” And Carole’s hand, still being held, was given a quite definite yank.

  “But I haven’t got my coat!” wailed Carole.

  “We’re only going about five yards.”

  As she locked her front door and followed Jude down the symmetrical flags of her garden path, Carole managed to convince herself she was going simply because it would be good to talk about her traumatic discovery of the day before, and not because she wanted to have a snoop inside Jude’s home.

  Her neighbour’s front path was an ill-fitting jigsaw of uneven red bricks, through whose interstices moss and weeds protruded. “Got into a terrible state, hasn’t it?” Carole observed. “You’ll have to get this sorted, won’t you?”

  “Oh, I quite like it like that.” The breeziness with which Jude committed this blasphemy to the standards of Fethering suggested that it wasn’t said for effect, that she really meant it.

  She pushed the dark-wood front door open with an elbow and beckoned Carole to follow her inside. Good heavens, she hadn’t even locked it. The fact that Jude had gone only next door didn’t excuse this lapse. Suppose Carole had invited her in? Fethering High Street was a Neighbourhood Watch Area and, as everyone locally knew, the average burglary took less than three minutes.

  And, dear oh dear, as she passed through the hall, Carole noticed that Jude’s voluminous handbag was on a table right by the front door. Where had Jude come from to have such a cavalier attitude to the serious business of security? The thought reminded Carole once again that she still didn’t know where Jude had come from. In fact, she knew very little more about her neighbour than she had the moment they first met.

  The sitting room into which she was ushered was low and, because the old leaded windows hadn’t yet been replaced by sealed double-glazing units, rather dark. Though Carole had never been inside Woodside Cottage during its previous occupancy, she’d assumed that the old lady would have had more of the basic modernization done. There was no evidence of central heating radiators, though an open fire crackled cheerfully from the grate (without a fire-guard in front of it, Carole noted, awarding her neighbour another black mark for domestic security).

  Jude snapped on a couple of lights with dangly paper shades and illuminated what appeared to be an overstocked junk shop. She crossed to a portable television perched on a pile of old wooden wine-crates and switched it on. “News is on One,” she said. “Fiddle with the aerial if the picture’s fuzzy. I’ll go and open the wine.”

  And she disapp
eared into the kitchen before Carole could say that she didn’t really need wine at this time of day. As the television came to life with a picture that was indeed fuzzy and as she moved the aerial on top of the set around to improve it, Carole took in the crammed contents of the room.

  No surface was unlittered. There were piles of books and papers and knick-knacks everywhere. And there didn’t seem any theme or coherence to what was on display. Carved African animals jostled with brass handbells and green marble-stoppered bottles. Silver-framed photographs of stiff Victorians consorted with china cats and glass candlesticks. Eggs of exoti-cally veined stone lay beside Russian dolls and spinner’s bobbins.

  Snuggled in the midst of this chaos were a small sofa and two armchairs. It was impossible to tell whether they were a matching set, though their varied outlines under the brightly patterned throws that covered them suggested otherwise. Further pieces of furniture were also hung with gratuitous drapery. The room was like the nest of a kleptomaniac magpie.

  One must make allowances, thought Carole magnanimously. The poor woman moved in only a couple of days ago. She’s just had everything dumped in here. When she’s got the stuff distributed around the house, this room’ll look a lot tidier.

  “Do sit down,” said Jude, bustling in from the kitchen. One hand held a bottle of red wine, the other two glasses and a corkscrew that she was busily plying. As she slumped into one of the heavily draped armchairs, she looked around with satisfaction. “At least I’ve got this room done,” she said.

  Carole’s jaw dropped. The decor was intentional. The confusion expressed how Jude wanted the room to look. But, even if Carole had been so ill-mannered as to say anything, there wasn’t time. Jude sprang up again and shoved the wine and glasses into her neighbour’s hands. “Here, you pour this.”

  Then she crossed to the still-fuzzy television and, with a cry of, “Come on, behave yourself, you little bastard!”, gave it a resounding thump on the side. The picture immediately resolved itself into crystalline clarity.

  Her timing had been perfect. The local news had just started. It was fronted by the kind of gauche female newsreader who makes you realize that, bad though network presenters may be, there remain unimaginable depths of the television barrel yet to be scraped.

  But Carole and Jude didn’t notice the girl’s incompetence; they were too caught up in what she was actually saying.

  “A body was found on the beach at Fethering this morning by a woman walking her dog.”

  “Only a day late,” Jude chuckled.

  “It wasn’t me,” Carole objected.

  “The body,” the newsreader droned on, “has been identified as that of sixteen-year-old” – Carole’s jaw dropped – “Arran Spalding…”

  As the name was mentioned, a picture of the dead boy filled the screen. One of those school photographs, posed against a vague cloud-like backdrop. The caption showed that, though it had been pronounced ‘Arran’, his name was spelt ‘Aaron’. Aaron Spalding, with his floppy blond fringe and cheekily crooked grin, looked nearer twelve than sixteen. Probably he had been when the picture was taken. Self-conscious adolescents don’t like being photographed; what showed on the screen was perhaps the most recent image available. But the innocent wickedness of his face added a poignancy to the fact of the boy’s death.

  The newsreader’s voice continued drably: “…who lived in Fethering and who had been missing for the past twenty-four hours. The cause of death has not yet been established, but the police have not ruled out foul play.”

  Then, with one of those awkward jump-cuts beloved of local newsreaders, she moved on to the allegation that a recent spate of deaths among ducks in the area had been caused by ferrets.

  The two women looked at each other in amazement. Carole noticed with even more amazement that half the contents of her wine glass had somehow disappeared.

  “But it’s…I mean…” she spluttered. “It was a middle-aged man, the body I saw. No way could it have been mistaken for a teenager.”

  “It wasn’t mistaken for a teenager,” said Jude firmly. “There have been two bodies on the beach. First the middle-aged man you saw, then this poor kid.”

  “You don’t think there’s any connection between them, do you?”

  Jude cocked her head thoughtfully to one side. “There’s no reason why there should be. It’d be a remarkable coincidence if they were connected. Then again, it’s already a coincidence that two dead bodies have appeared on consecutive days. Logic dictates that the two incidents have nothing to do with each other, but my instinct says they have. And,” she concluded mischievously, “in a straight fight between logic and instinct, I’d go for instinct every time.”

  “Hm…” Carole might have called the odds rather differently. “Well, this poor boy’s death is nothing to do with me. It’s not as if I even found the body. Some other woman with a dog. I wonder who it was…And, as for the first body, the police don’t even believe that existed.”

  “But it did!”

  Jude sounded aggrieved, almost as if it was her story that was being doubted. Carole realized, with a sudden warm feeling, that her neighbour had never for a moment questioned her account of what she had found.

  “Since that body did exist,” Jude went on, “there are two rather important questions which have yet to be answered. One – whose body was it? And, two – where is the body now?”

  Carole shrugged. “Two questions to which, I’m afraid, we can never know the answer.”

  “Don’t you believe it.” Jude rose determinedly and switched off the television. Then she picked up the bottle and refilled the glasses, which had both unaccountably become empty. “I think we should find out the answers to those two questions.”

  “Us?” said Carole. “But surely murder – if it is murder – that’s a job for the police.”

  “Have you been impressed by how the police have reacted so far?”

  “No, but…”

  There was a gleam in Jude’s big brown eyes. “I think this could be rather fun.” Then, briskly, she announced, “I’ll get us some lunch. There’s a sort of Turkish salad I do in the fridge. Aubergines and yoghurt and what-have-you. That sound all right?”

  “Sounds great,” Carole replied. “Are you vegetarian?”

  “Sometimes,” said Jude easily, as she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Carole to wonder when she’d found the time to buy aubergines. There was no way that Allinstore’s stock would have aspired to anything so exotic.

  ♦

  The Turkish salad was excellent and somehow, by the time they’d finished it, the wine bottle was empty too. Carole felt very warm and cosseted in the draped sofa in front of the glowing fire. She yawned.

  “Wiped out?” asked Jude.

  “A bit. At least my headache’s gone, though.”

  “Never fails.” Jude chuckled. “Go and have a little sleep.”

  Carole was shocked. “During the day? But I’m not ill.”

  Her neighbour shrugged. “Please yourself.” Then she looked thoughtful. “I wonder who your body was…”

  “No idea.”

  “No, but we’re going to find out.”

  “Were you serious? What you said before lunch? About us investigating this?”

  “Of course I was. Why, don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

  To her astonishment, Carole found her lips forming the words, “Yes, I think it’s a very good idea.”

  “Excellent. So where do we start?”

  Carole looked blank. “Don’t know. I’m afraid I haven’t got much of a track record as an investigator.”

  “No, but you have a track record as an intelligent woman who can work things out for herself.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So what information do we currently have about your body on the beach?”

  Carole stretched out a dubious lower lip. “All we have, I suppose, is the fact that he was wearing a life-jacket that was printed ‘Property of Fethering Yacht C
lub’.”

  “Right.” Jude clapped her hands gleefully. “Then it seems pretty obvious to me that the first thing we should do is go down to Fethering Yacht Club.”

  “But we can’t do that,” Carole objected.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not members.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said Jude.

  ∨ The Body on the Beach ∧

  Eleven

  In the snugness of Woodside Cottage they hadn’t noticed the weather worsening, but when they emerged the afternoon had turned charcoal grey and relentless icy rain swirled around them. The wind kept animating new puddles on the pavement into flurries of spray. The cold wetness stung their faces.

  “Sure you wouldn’t rather have that sleep?” Jude suggested teasingly.

  “No,” came the crisp reply. Affront at the idea of sleeping during the daytime, though unspoken, remained implicit. “I’ll just get my coat and we’ll go to the Yacht Club.”

  Carole hardened her heart against Gulliver’s pathetic appeals to join them – he’d go for a walk in any weather – and wrapped her Burberry firmly around her. Soon she and Jude were striding into the horizontal rain towards the Fethering Yacht Club.

  Fixed to the gatepost of one of the High Street houses they passed was a plastic-enclosed notice which read, in professionally printed capitals, THIS FRONT GARDEN IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSING, AT ANY LEVEL, IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Jude.

  Carole chuckled. “It’s the Chilcotts.”

  “Bill and Sandra?”

  “The very same. They’re having a feud with their next-door neighbour.”

  Jude recollected the fag-end of conversation she’d heard at Barbara Tumbull’s. “About where he parks his boat?”

  “About that or about anything else they happen to think of. It’s a battle that’s been running for years.”

  “And does the neighbour respond in kind?”

  By way of answer, Carole pointed to a notice, handwritten in marker-pen capitals, which was pinned to the gatepost of the next house. It read, ALLTRESPASSERS WILL BE TREATED WITH RESPECT AND COURTESY – SO LONG AS THEY’RE NOT THE PETTY-MINDED COUPLE FROM NEXT DOOR.