by Simon Brett
She spent a terrible night. She had been nervous when Gaby was in labour with Lily, but the sheer gorgeousness of her granddaughter had dulled and sanitized the memory of that. This time she was paranoid with worry. And she knew why.
She didn’t even attempt to go to bed. She knew there was no possibility of sleep. Instead she sat downstairs in her antiseptically clean sitting room, with her mobile on the table next to her landline phone, willing them both to ring. It was a very long night.
Gulliver, sensing her distress, sat by her feet, seeming to wish there was something he could bring her by way of comfort. But there wasn’t anything.
Eventually, at six in the morning, Carole willed herself to have a shower and change into fresh clothes. She wondered whether she should pack a bag in readiness for a summons to Fulham, but no. That would be tempting providence.
In such a bad state was she that, for the second morning running, Carole found herself ringing Woodside Cottage on the dot of seven.
‘Any news?’ Jude immediately asked.
‘Nothing,’ Carole replied desolately. ‘I was thinking I should take Gulliver out for his walk, but I don’t want to leave the house.’
‘You’ve got your mobile,’ Jude reassured her, ‘and the signal on Fethering Beach is pretty good.’
‘Yes.’ There was an empty silence. ‘You wouldn’t mind taking him, would you, Jude?’
‘No, that’s fine. Just give me time to get some clothes on and I’ll be right round.’
They sat in the hygienic anonymity of Carole’s kitchen. She had offered coffee in a knee-jerk hospitable gesture and been a little surprised when Jude said yes. All her neighbour had needed to do was to pick up Gulliver and take him down to Fethering Beach. But Gulliver had decided that wasn’t about to happen straight away and snuggled down into his usual place beside the Aga.
Once they were both sitting at the table with coffee cups, Carole was surprised to find she was comforted. She felt so vulnerable that Jude’s presence was infinitely reassuring.
‘What is the matter?’ her neighbour asked.
‘My daughter-in-law’s in labour. That’s what’s the matter. You know that.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t justify the state you’re in, Carole.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do. Look, I know you pretty well by now.’ Carole didn’t like that idea of anyone knowing her ‘pretty well’, but she still found perverse comfort in Jude’s words. ‘And I know you keep a tight control on your emotions. But right now you’re in a really bad way.’
‘Maybe.’ It was more than Carole would usually admit.
‘Is it because it’s the second baby?’
Carole looked at her neighbour sharply. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jude wasn’t about to claim any psychic powers. She knew the contemptuous reaction she’d get to anything of that kind. ‘It just seemed, the state you’ve been in the last few months, compared to how you were during Gaby’s first pregnancy.’
‘I didn’t realize it showed so much.’
‘It did. It does.’
There was a silence. Then, slowly, Carole said, ‘If you really want to know …’
‘I’m not pushing you. If you’d rather not talk about it …’
But Carole was under way and not to be deflected. Her voice sounded very even as she made the confession. ‘After Stephen was born, a couple of years after I did get pregnant again. The baby went to term and was stillborn. It was a girl. I felt very guilty.’
‘But it wasn’t your fault. Just incredibly bad luck.’
‘Not guilty towards the baby. I felt guilty for the effect it had on Stephen. I became very withdrawn from everything after it happened. Withdrawn from Stephen. Withdrawn from David. I think that’s probably what ended the marriage. Neither of us could talk about it, talk about her. We just drew further apart.’
Carole wasn’t the kind of woman to cry, but Jude had no doubt about the level of emotion she was experiencing. She also knew that her neighbour would probably later regret how much she was opening up. She would feel embarrassed and never want the subject mentioned again. Jude was prepared for that. If her neighbour never again referred to this conversation, she would never raise it.
Jude reached across the table and put her hand on Carole’s. It flinched momentarily, but then let the hand stay there. Between the two women silence reigned.
It was broken by the ringing of the landline. Stephen announced that Gaby had just given birth to another girl. Mother and baby were both doing fine. She was going to be called Chloe ‘with no dots on the “e” – we don’t want to make life difficult for her when she gets to school.’
ELEVEN
Saturday morning was a very busy time at Polly’s Cake Shop. Though the bulk of its business came from tourists and day-trippers, Saturday morning was for the locals. The village residents these days did most of their major shopping at Sainsbury’s in Rustington or Waitrose in Littlehampton, but this was the day when they patronized the shops along Fethering Parade (including the uniquely inefficient supermarket Allinstore). Saturday morning was also the time when the working population of the village would gather in Polly’s for coffee and gossip. And weekenders from London would also muscle in, giving themselves the illusion that they were part of country life.
Unsurprisingly, the gossip that particular morning hinged largely on the body that had been discovered on the Thursday on Fethering Beach.
Carole was in Fulham, getting to know her junior granddaughter Chloe and ensuring that the nose of Lily, the senior one, was not put too much out of joint. So when Jude entered Polly’s Cake Shop for a cappuccino and a guilt-free éclair, she was surprised to find herself something of a celebrity as ‘one of the people who found the body’.
Sara Courtney saw her come in and took her order. And it was a more cheerful and bouncier Sara Courtney than Jude had seen for a while. On the previous Wednesday at Hiawatha Sara had seemed tense and a little paranoid. Now she looked more relaxed and as a result a lot prettier. And Jude could tell the change was not just the professional smiling front she put on in her working role as waitress.
‘All right?’ she asked.
‘Good, thanks. Cappuccino and éclair?’
‘Predictable, aren’t I?’
‘Not in everything, Jude.’ And with a grin Sara went off to fetch her order.
Jude quickly decided that the woman couldn’t yet have made any connection between the body found on Fethering Beach and the one she had (or hadn’t) seen in the store room at Polly’s. None of the news bulletins had yet mentioned the bullet hole in the man’s temple.
Jude slowly looked around the café, giving small smiles to people she recognized. Most Fethering residents knew all the other Fethering residents by sight. They also, even if they had never spoken, knew their names, their domestic circumstances and their secrets. Village gossip had never let respect for accuracy interrupt its flow.
Jude was quite surprised to see that Phoebe Braithwaite was sitting at a table adjacent to hers. And it was a very voluble Phoebe Braithwaite, unlike the cowed, twittery figure on the fringes of the committee meeting at Hiawatha. She was clearly a woman who blossomed once she was moved out of her husband’s shadow.
Phoebe, like the others at her table, was dressed in immaculate leisurewear. White jeans and pale blue deck shoes, a neatly cut blazer over a horizontally striped top. The image was casual and nautical, but the perfection and obvious expense of her ensemble produced an effect which was far from relaxed. Phoebe Braithwaite wasn’t the kind of woman who possessed clothes to slop around in.
Her blonded hair was flawlessly cut, suggesting she had just emerged from an appointment at Marnie’s Hair Salon along the Parade.
And in the hive of her table, she was clearly the queen bee. She led the conversation and Jude’s arrival had given her another opportunity to assert her dominance. ‘We were just talking about the t
errible discovery on the beach on Thursday …’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And you, I gather, were one of the people who had the misfortune to find the body …?’ Jude admitted that this was indeed the case. ‘Oh, you poor thing. How dreadful for you. Incidentally, I don’t think we all know each other. This is Jude and this is …’
Phoebe proceeded to introduce the other five women around her table. They were all dressed in similarly unrelaxed leisurewear and looked as if they too had just come out of Marnie’s. They all had names in the Joanna/Samantha range which Jude didn’t really take in.
‘Well, as you can imagine,’ Phoebe went on, ‘there’s been all kinds of theories around Fethering as to who the man was and how he got there.’
‘I’m not at all surprised. Fethering has the capacity to get extremely aerated about much less than a dead body.’
‘So true, Jude, so true. But tell me …’ As introducer of ‘one of the people who found the body’, Phoebe Braithwaite was going to take full advantage of her privileged position. ‘Have you got any thoughts as to who the deceased might be?’
‘None at all, I’m afraid. I’d certainly never seen him before.’
‘I think he was probably an illegal immigrant, fell off a leaky boat,’ suggested one of the women called Joanna or Samantha.
‘Well, I too think he was an illegal immigrant, but I don’t think he fell out of a boat. He fell out of the wheel housing of an aeroplane when the wheels were lowered prior to landing at Gatwick,’ said another Joanna or Samantha.
‘I’m absolutely certain,’ a third Joanna or Samantha interposed, ‘that he’s a victim of gang wars in Brighton. There’s a big turf battle over drugs going on and people they don’t like either get shot or get put in what they call a “concrete overcoat” and dropped into—’
But Phoebe Braithwaite had been upstaged for far too long. She came in forcefully, saying, ‘I think in these circumstances one should consult an expert, someone who knows about the ways of the sea. And I am fortunate to be married to just such an expert. As I’m sure most of you know, Quintus is a Commodore and he spent his entire career in the Royal Navy. So when he expresses a view on something like this, one can assume he knows what he’s talking about. And his view about the body found on Fethering Beach is—’
‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ said a voice containing no hint of apology, ‘but here’s your cappuccino and éclair, Jude love.’
It was the tall waitress Binnie, looking only marginally less eccentric in her black and white uniform than she had in her street clothes when Jude had last seen her. Her grey hair was still stretched back into a ballerina bun.
‘Oh, thanks, Binnie.’
‘Apologies for the waitress transplant. Young madam who took your order is busy chatting someone up on her mobile.’
‘Chatting someone up? Who is she—?’
But Binnie’s mind had moved on. ‘Talking about the body, were you?’
‘Well, these ladies were,’ said Jude.
‘I bet he was local.’ Binnie delivered her opinion in a manner that suggested it was the only possible view. ‘Dogs return to their own vomit.’ And with that gnomic utterance she made her way back to the kitchen.
There was a moment of bemused silence before one of the Joannas or Samanthas said, ‘All right, Phoebe, so what does Quintus say about the body?’ There was a note of resentment in her voice, as if the woman had already heard quite enough of Phoebe’s husband’s pontifications on a wide range of subjects.
But his wife was quite ready, even eager, to relay another one. ‘Well, he’s very sorry that he’s not been able to see the body first hand, because he’d be in a much better position to give an accurate assessment if he had. He’s seen a lot of casualties from naval accidents over the years. But Quintus’s view is that, because of the way the tides work around Fethering – which he knows well as an experienced yachtsman in these waters – the body could not have come from our side of the Channel.’
‘Sorry, what do you mean?’ asked one of the Joannas or Samanthas.
‘Quintus is convinced that the man didn’t enter the water from anywhere along the south coast. In other words, whoever had the daft idea about him being the victim of gang warfare in Brighton, well, that just can’t be right.’ The Joanna or Samantha in question pursed her lips. ‘Quintus thinks the man either entered the sea from the North Coast of France or fell off a vessel in the Channel.’
‘Exactly what I said!’ crowed the relevant Joanna or Samantha. ‘He’s an illegal immigrant who fell off a leaky boat! You know, these people smugglers who charge them thousands of pounds to travel in vessels that aren’t seaworthy, they’re terrible people. They’re murderers and they just don’t care. I read about them in the Daily Mail.’
So that must be right, thought Jude ironically. But Phoebe Braithwaite had resented the Joanna or Samantha’s interruption, because she hadn’t yet finished repeating her husband’s views on the body found on Fethering Beach. (Which also of course must be right, thought Jude ironically.)
‘Quintus says the most likely thing is that the body was that of a Russian sailor whose ship had called in to some port in Northern France – like Dieppe or Boulogne, let’s say. He says there are a lot of Russian seamen in every kind of commercial vessels these days. And Quintus is pretty sure that this “poor bastard” – his words, not mine, I hasten to add …’ She tittered at her daring. ‘… Anyway, he’d gone on shore leave and got a skinful of booze and missed his footing on the way back to his vessel and drowned there, and then the currents carried him out into the Channel and deposited him on Fethering Beach.’
‘So Quintus reckoned he drowned?’ asked Jude.
‘Well, of course, yes. What other possibility is there?’
Jude thought it was probably just as well that the assembled ladies in Polly’s Cake Shop didn’t know about the bullet hole she had seen in the man’s temple.
And the bullet hole which Sara Courtney had seen earlier actually inside Polly’s Cake Shop. Assuming, of course, that Sara Courtney had seen anything.
Which, in spite of the woman’s denials, Jude now felt certain she had.
She also felt certain that before too long the investigating police would make public the fact that the man had been shot. And she wondered what fresh theories that news would generate among the Joannas or Samanthas of Fethering.
TWELVE
Jude woke up on the Sunday morning and switched on Radio Four. She wasn’t a regular listener to the channel, but now awaited in every bulletin something about the Fethering Beach body. She was rather confused to find that she wasn’t hearing the regular news programme, and took a moment to realize that British summertime had ended and she’d gained an hour during the night.
Jude also woke up with something of a dilemma. She hadn’t seen Sara Courtney again after the woman had taken her order in Polly’s Cake Shop the previous morning. Presumably she’d been busy in the kitchen. Anyway, even if they had met again, the café was a rather public arena in which to have the kind of conversation Jude needed to have with Sara.
It was because she knew about the woman’s fragility that she felt the conversation just had to take place. So far Sara hadn’t apparently made any connection between the body she saw (or hallucinated) and the one found the previous Thursday on Fethering Beach. But it was only a matter of time before the news emerged that the man had been shot rather than drowned. The information would probably be revealed in a police news conference and then spread around all of the media. It’d be front-page news in the Fethering Observer. There was no way Sara could avoid knowing about it.
And, given the woman’s previous history, Jude was worried about the effect the revelation would have on her. If the case of the Fethering Beach body became a murder inquiry, Sara Courtney would either have to become involved or live in fear of being investigated.
So Jude wanted to talk to her, fill her in on what was likely to happen, to cushion the prospe
ctive blow.
But that Sunday morning there was no reply from either her landline or her mobile. Jude left messages on both, asking Sara to ring back but not giving any clue as to why she wanted to talk.
Jude got up in a leisurely fashion and had a long bath, laced with essential oils, while incense burned around her.
She was surprised how much she wanted to talk to Carole, to share with her speculation about the body they had discovered. But she’d heard nothing since her neighbour had set off for Fulham on the Friday morning. Jude could have rung the mobile, but didn’t want to intrude on the euphoria and anxiety of Chloe’s arrival. Carole would communicate in her own good time.
So, relaxed by her bath and still feeling self-indulgent, Jude decided that she would treat herself to lunch at the Crown and Anchor. Having picked up a copy of the Mail on Sunday (really just to make her cross), she arrived on the dot of twelve, just as the pig-tailed blond bar manager Zosia was unlocking the door for Sunday opening.
The Polish girl enveloped her in a huge hug. Zosia had adored both of them ever since Jude and Carole had investigated the death of her brother Tadeusz. Had Carole been there, she too would have received a huge hug, which would have pleased and embarrassed her in equal measure.
Zosia went straight behind the bar and, without asking for the order, poured a large glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. ‘If you’re lunching, Ed’s Sunday Special is a cassoulet. And we’ve got all the usual joints as well.’
‘Cassoulet sounds wonderful. Real winter warmer. Funny how the clocks changing always makes you feel that winter’s on the way.’
‘Would you like me to put your order through straight away?’
‘I’m not in a hurry, Zosia.’
‘Well, look, shall I put it through in half an hour? I only say that because we’ve got a big family party booked in at twelve thirty. Might be wise to get your order in before the kitchen gets really busy.’
‘Good thinking. Yes, if you could put it through in half an hour, that’d be great. Thus giving me half an hour’s drinking time to get really cross with the Mail on Sunday.’
