Bones Under The Beach Hut

by Simon Brett

  Carole dared to let Gulliver off the lead while she examined her property. Though he was unfamiliar with Smalting Beach, she knew he wouldn't stray too far away from her.

  The interior of Quiet Harbour was very neat and not a little poignant. Everything in it seemed to be designed for two: a pair of folded director's chairs, a small camping table. From pegs on the wall hung two snorkels, flippers, large for him, small for her, and a set of two plastic rackets with a foam ball. On a shelf at the back stood a Camping Gaz double burner and a row of sealed plastic containers, which turned out to contain cutlery and basics such as tea bags and sachets of instant coffee. There were two large and two small bright red plastic plates and a pair of mugs with humorous inscriptions: 'MR STUD' and 'SEXY LADY'. Everything in the hut was a celebration of the relationship between Philly Rose and Mark Dennis; the relationship he had walked out of.

  The floor was covered by an offcut of newish- looking, clean green carpet, on which Carole's flip-flops left sandy marks when she entered the hut. She opened up one of the chairs and set it just inside the doorway. In time she would venture out on to the beach, but she wanted to make an unobtrusive start. And the position where she'd put her chair would get plenty of sun. It was a beautiful June day, one of those which should have presaged a perfect summer. But Carole Seddon had lived in England too long to be over-optimistic about that hope being realized.

  Not knowing that the burner would be there, she had brought a thermos of hot black coffee with her and she poured herself a cup. Out of her tote bag she drew her copy of The Times and turned to the back of the main section for the crossword. She felt the familiar tug of annoyance at the positioning of the puzzle. In the old days, before The Times went tabloid, the crossword was always on the back page with the clues beside it, so that the paper could be folded to reveal both elements at the same time. Whereas now, it was on the penultimate page with the grid and the clues on separate halves so that, unless you had the paper flat on a table you had to keep turning the folded sheets. Why was it, wondered Carole in exasperation, that people keep wanting to change things that were already working perfectly well?

  Even as she had the thought, she realized how crusty she would have sounded if she'd said the words out loud. But it didn't worry her too much. Carole Seddon was getting to the stage in life when she reckoned a little crustiness was entirely justified. And of all the things in the world to which a crusty response was justified, meddling with The Times crossword stood head and shoulders above the rest.

  'Tristram, do stand up straight. Just because you're in your bathers, there's no need to be slovenly.'

  From her perch inside Quiet Harbour, Carole could not see the owner of the over-elocuted female voice that issued this command from the adjacent beach hut - called Seagull's Nest - but its addressee was in clear vision. A boy of about five, wearing bright red shorts and a martyred expression, straightened his shoulders. 'Yes, Granny,' he said balefully.

  'And Hermione's right down by the sea! You really should keep an eye on her, Nell.'

  'Yes, Deborah, all right.' A harassed-looking, chubby young woman in a one-piece swimsuit appeared in Carole's eyeline, hurrying down to the edge of the wavelets where a blonde-haired toddler in a swimming nappy sat doing no harm to herself or anyone else. The child was absorbed in patting at the sand with a plastic spade and seemed uninterested in her mother's appearance by her side. Soon her brother, the one saddled for life with the name of Tristram, joined them and the three got into a routine of splashing games. Carole began to feel almost excited at the prospect of Lily doing the same, in less than a fortnight's time.

  The voice of the unseen female from the next beach hut started up again. 'You know, Gavin, Nell really has let herself go since she had Hermione. She hasn't made any attempt to get her figure back, has she?'

  'Well, she's kept pretty busy,' an upper-class male voice protested, 'what with the two little ones and—'

  'Mothers have always been busy,' the woman steamrollered on, 'but that doesn't mean that they should lower their standards. I was busy when I had you and Owen to look after, but I still made sure that when your father got home from work, you were both in bed and I was made up and looking my best for him.'

  'Yes, but the fact is, Mummy, you didn't have a job. Nell works full time and still—'

  'Your father would have been appalled by the idea of any wife of his having a job. He would have regarded it as a criticism of his abilities to look after his own family.'

  'Maybe, but times have changed, Mummy, and—'

  'At least your father didn't live to see you married to Nell. He always had very high hopes for you, Gavin. I wouldn't have liked to see him disappointed.'

  'But, Mummy—'

  'Oh, look, Tristram and Hermione are throwing sand at each other now. And Nell's doing nothing to stop them. In fact, she's positively encouraging them.'

  'They're just kids and—'

  'I'd better go and sort this out,' the voice said ponderously, and Carole watched as its owner came into view and processed down the beach. The woman called Deborah was probably seventy, but she'd kept her figure well. She wore a predominantly white bathing costume with a design of red flowers on it, and her tanned skin had the texture of shrivelled leather. Over well-cut white hair she wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a thin red and white scarf tied around it. Carole recognized the type. There were plenty of them on the South Coast. Well-heeled widows, pampered, soigné and utterly poisonous.

  Unwilling to witness Deborah's latest attack on her daughter-in-law, Carole returned her attention to her crossword. And as she did so, she had the thought: that is an object lesson in how not to be a grandmother. Please, please, God, may I never behave even vaguely like that towards Lily.

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  Carole was filling in the crossword clues almost as fast as she could write them down, when suddenly her rollerball ran out of ink. She tried pressing harder but the point only gouged holes into the flimsy paper. Oh no. She knew from experience that, however well the solving was going, she couldn't do it without seeing the letters.

  She riffled hopefully through the contents of her tote bag for something to write with, but without success. She sat in frustration, drumming her fingers on the arm of her director's chair. Putting the crossword to one side and completing it when she got back to High Tor was not an option. When she was on a roll like this, she just had to finish the thing as soon as possible. She had to find a pen from somewhere.

  A lot of people might have asked to borrow one from someone in a nearby beach hut. But not Carole Seddon. She always tried to avoid asking questions that offered the possibility of refusal. No, her first thought was to walk up the beach to find Smalting's newsagent and buy a ballpoint.

  But before she put that plan into action, it occurred to her that Philly Rose and Mark Dennis might well have used a pen for something while they were in Quiet Harbour. It would be worth checking out the beach hut before taking the long traipse up the beach to the village. Perhaps on the cutlery shelf, in or near one of those neat plastic containers.

  When she reached the back of the hut, she felt the solid surface give under her. She stepped back quickly and then gingerly probed at the carpet with her toe. Yes, there was definitely something that felt like a hole in the wooden floor.

  She peeled back the corner of the carpet and soon enough saw what had nearly made her trip. There was a hole in the corner, spreading across two of the planks that made up the hut's floor. Its edges were black and charred.

  Someone appeared to have lit a fire under Quiet Harbour.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  Carole inspected the outside of the hut to see if there were any clues as to what had happened. The structure, presumably prefabricated elsewhere and assembled on Smalting Beach, was set on four concrete slabs to prevent damp from the ground seeping up into its woodwork. And yes, under the back corner of the hut, there was evidence of a
small fire having been lit.

  Using a children's spade, which she had found inside, Carole poked at the charred debris, releasing a smell of petrol that had been trapped in the folds of what appeared to be cloth. Inspecting it more closely, she saw that strips of old rag had been bundled together. Outermost were the remains of a tea towel, with a design of ponies on it, maybe a souvenir from the New Forest. The minimal evidence of flame damage on the rags suggested to her that the fire hadn't been lit too long ago, and also that it had been extinguished before the flames could spread and burn down the whole beach hut.

  Going back inside, she also deduced that the green carpet in Quiet Harbour must have been put down after the fire had been discovered. There was no sign even of scorching on the underside, which might - though not necessarily - suggest that the same person who had put out the fire had also covered up the evidence of it.

  Another deduction: the lack of sand on its surface suggested that the carpet hadn't been in position for that long.

  Before she flipped it back into place, she noticed that, though most of the nails fixing the floorboards to the struts beneath were old and deeply hammered in, the silver round heads of a few stood almost proud of the wood. It looked as if some running repairs had been done, but clearly before the fire had happened. Otherwise surely the burnt planks would have been replaced . . . ? Odd, she thought, as she flattened the carpet back down.

  Carole had decided that she needed to talk to Jude about her discovery, so she packed up her thermos and tote bag. In spite of her promising start she hadn't got far on The Times crossword. Have to finish it back at High Tor.

  As she clicked the padlocks shut on Quiet Harbour, she heard the voice of the matriarch in Seagull's Nest pontificating. 'You really shouldn't give in to the child so much, Nell. If you spoil Tristram now, he'll grow up without any backbone or moral values.'

  Jude had all the windows open, which meant there was enough breeze to set her bamboo wind chimes going. When she had first heard them, Carole had dismissed the chimes as just more evidence of her neighbour's New Age idiocy, but now she had come to find the sound rather comforting. Not, of course, that she would ever have told Jude that.

  The sitting room of Woodside Cottage looked as it always did: throws and drapes and cushions disguising the precise outlines of its sofas and armchairs. Scarves and floaty tops, as ever, did the same service for the house's owner. Even in the summer, Jude was bedecked in extras that blurred the contours of her substantial, comfortable body. Her blond hair was piled up on top of her head, tentatively secured by an array of pins and clips.

  Carole had always envied the ease with which Jude carried herself. Spontaneity seemed to come spontaneously to her, in her choice of clothes and in every other area of her life. Whereas Carole, whose sartorial ambition was not to draw attention to herself, still agonized over the extent to which she was achieving that desired effect. She avoided bright colours, wearing unpatterned shirts, jackets and skirts. Though she frequently wore trousers, she never wore jeans. Her shoes were sensible enough to chair an official inquiry.

  Every six weeks Carole had her grey hair cut into exactly the same helmet-like shape, and her pale blue eyes always took in the world suspiciously through rimless glasses. She was thin - to her mind, angular - and it never would have occurred to her that she actually had rather a good figure.

  To Jude life always seemed a natural state of affairs, to Carole something of an imposition.

  But over coffee that Tuesday morning in Woodside Cottage she was too excited by her news to indulge her usual anxieties. 'And there was quite a lot of petrol-soaked rag under the corner of the beach hut, so I think there must have been a serious attempt to burn the whole thing down.'

  'Yes, but it could just have been vandals,' said Jude. 'I mean, even in a place as up itself as Smalting I'm sure there's a rough element.'

  This idea didn't accord with Carole's image of the neighbouring village. 'Or they could have come in from somewhere else,' she said darkly.

  'Perhaps. Anyway, I'm sure there's a lot of vandalism to everything on the beaches. Young people have a few too many drinks, feel like a bit of wanton destruction, there's no one there protecting the beach huts ... I don't quite see what you find sinister about it, Carole.'

  'Not sinister so much as intriguing. Not the attempted burning of the hut - that, as you say, could be just mindless vandalism - but the fact that a new bit of carpet had been put inside to cover the evidence.'

  'There could be a perfectly innocent explanation for that too. Philly Rose wanting the hut to be usable until it got repaired?'

  'Who would she get to repair it?'

  'I would imagine there'd be someone from the Fether District Council who'd deal with that sort of thing.'

  To Carole's mind, Jude wasn't getting nearly as excited as she should be about the charred hole in the floor of Quiet Harbour. 'But maybe Philly Rose didn't want to tell anyone from Fether District Council about the fire? Maybe she has a secret to hide?'

  'Maybe she has, but if that secret is to do with the fire, you wouldn't have expected her to agree to let out the beach hut if the new occupant was going to discover it as quickly as you did.'

  Carole felt disgruntled. Her neighbour was being uncharacteristically negative. 'Listen, Jude,' she continued, 'I was wondering whether the fire had anything to do with the disappearance of Philly Rose's boyfriend?'

  'Mark? What, are you suggesting she burnt him to death in the beach hut?'

  'No, of course I'm not. I just do think that there's something odd about the fact that there had been a fire under the hut, someone had put it out and someone - possibly the same person or maybe another - had covered the hole up with a bit of carpet. And I would like to ask Philly Rose if she has any explanation for what happened.'

  'All right,' said Jude casually. 'Then let's ask her.'

  'What?' Carole was taken aback by such a direct suggestion. 'Can we do that?'

  'Yes, of course we can.' Jude looked at the large-faced watch secured to her wrist by a broad red ribbon. 'I'll call Philly and ask her if she'd like to join us for lunch at the Crown and Anchor.'

  'Today?' Carole had an instinct that any kind of social meeting should always be arranged a few days in advance. 'Will she be free?'

  'I don't know. If she isn't she won't come. And if she is she will.'

  'How can you be so sure?'

  'Three reasons. A) She's become a good friend of mine. B) She's very hard up and would love to have lunch bought for her. And C) She's very lonely since Mark left and needs people to talk to.'

  'Oh,' said Carole, 'fine then.'

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  They arrived at Fethering's only pub, the Crown and Anchor, before Philly, and were greeted in his usual lugubrious manner by the shaggily bearded landlord Ted Crisp, dressed in his summer uniform of faded T-shirt and jeans. He was actually now having difficulty in justifying his customary air of gloom. In the past he could always put it down to bad business. At times the Crown and Anchor's finances had been quite rocky and once the pub had nearly had to close, but those days were gone. The fine June weather was bringing the holidaymakers in in droves and Ted now had a very efficient staff to back him up. His Polish bar manager Zosia had taken away all his anxieties about staffing, and his chef Ed Pollack was going from strength to strength. The landlord responded very sniffily to the word 'gastropub', but in the view of many restaurant guides and well-heeled clients, that was what the Crown and Anchor was becoming known as throughout West Sussex. Anyone who wanted evidence of that should have tried booking a table for a Saturday evening or Sunday lunchtime. Often there would be nothing available for a month ahead.

  Ted Crisp had even extended the premises. At one side of the sea-facing frontage there now stood what looked like a Victorian conservatory. Though used by the pub's ordinary customers - particularly on a fine June day when all the doors and windows were open - it could be shut off from the main bar
area. This was now the 'Function Room', available for wedding receptions and other private parties. There was no way round the fact: the Crown and Anchor was doing really good business.

  Though deprived of his traditional excuse for grumpiness, Ted Crisp was not about to change his habitual mien. From behind the bar he looked up gloomily at Carole and Jude's entrance. 'Two large Chilean Chardonnays, I assume,' he pronounced, in the manner of a newsreader reporting a tsunami.

  'Cheer up, Ted, it might never happen,' said Jude.

  'How d'you know it hasn't already?' he demanded, as he handed the glasses across.

  'Getting a lot of bookings for the Function Room?'

  'Mustn't grumble.'

  'But you still will, won't you, Ted?' That was rewarded by a grunt.

  'What's good for lunch?' asked Carole.

  'Ed says the Dover sole's to die for.'

  'Ooh, that sounds nice.'

  'Shall I take your order?' Ted reached for a pad of paper.

  'Not quite yet. We've got a friend joining us,' Jude explained.

  'Please yourself,' said Ted, in a manner that people who didn't know him so well would have regarded as rude, and he turned to serve another customer.

  In spite of the sunny weather Carole and Jude decided they'd sit inside. The alcove tables in the bar were less full than those in the sun and, although their conversation with Philly Rose was not exactly confidential, a degree of privacy would be welcome.

  They had hardly sat down before she arrived, looking around the bar and waving when she saw Jude. Philly Rose was small, thin as a whippet, with almost ash-blond hair and surprisingly dark brown eyes. She wore a sleeveless eau de Nil top over white jeans and red Converse trainers.

  Once they'd been introduced, Carole went to get the woman a drink, just a mineral water with ice and lemon. And they thought they might as well order food at the same time so all three opted for the recommended Dover sole.