Bones Under The Beach Hut

by Simon Brett

'Well, yes,' he conceded, 'I suppose drink is part of it. But that's more a symptom than a cause. I sometimes have to drink to subdue the agonizing thoughts that come unbidden into my mind.'

  'Oh yes?'

  'And then sometimes I admit that I do things under the influence of drink that I might not do in my more sober moments.'

  'Not that you have many of those,' said Helga.

  There was an expression of pure shock, almost as though Gray Czesky had been slapped in the face, at this surprising and sudden disloyalty from his wife. Carole and Jude wondered whether they were witnessing the moment of a worm turning, of the final straw being placed upon the overladen camel's back.

  'Well, yes, I agree, the drinking does sometimes get out of hand. But I need it. I have some of my best inspirations when I'm drunk.'

  Carole and Jude exchanged looks. Both were wondering how much inspiration it took to paint mimsy-pimsy little watercolours of local beaches and the South Downs.

  'I think, Gray,' said Helga, 'you had better tell them what happened last week. That evening when Mark came down to see you.'

  Her husband nodded his head ruefully.

  'Would this have been the Monday?'

  'Yes,' said Helga. 'Go on, Gray.'

  There was a truculent silence before he obeyed. 'Okay, I'd had a call from Mark that day.'

  'Had you been in touch with him ever since he left Smalting?' asked Jude.

  'No, it was a long time since I'd last heard from him. When he left Philly, whenever that was . . .'

  'Beginning of May,' his wife supplied.

  'Yes. At the time he asked if I minded him using our phone number for people who wanted to contact him.'

  'And did many people want to contact him?'

  A shake of the head. 'Hardly anyone. He gave me a mobile number and—'

  'If he'd got a mobile,' Carole objected, 'why did he need to have your number for messages?'

  The painter shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe he wanted to keep people at a distance. Maybe it was a new mobile and he didn't want people to know the number. Anyway, after the first few days he never answered it when I called him. Until suddenly he rang out of the blue last week.'

  'What did he say?'

  'Just that he was coming down to Smalting, and did I mind if he dropped in. I said fine.'

  'He didn't say whether he was coming down to see Philly?'

  'No.'

  'And how did he seem when you saw him?' asked Carole.

  'How do you mean?'

  'Did he seem exactly the same as he had when you last saw him?'

  Gray Czesky shrugged. 'Pretty much, I guess.'

  'No,' said Helga firmly. 'That is not true. He had put on a lot of weight. He seemed to have lost his confidence. Very . . . what's the word? Jittery. No, he was in an extremely strange state when he arrived.'

  'Was he?'

  'Yes, Gray. Though you were pretty soon too drunk to notice.'

  Her husband chuckled with a schoolboy boastful- ness. 'True, we did get well stuck into the sauce that night.'

  'Which of course led to you doing something rather stupid, didn't it?' Helga prompted implacably.

  'Yes.' His face took on a hangdog expression, which, if it was meant to curry sympathy for him, did not have the desired effect with the three women. 'Okay, well . . . Mark and I got into a kind of argument . . . not really an argument, more a sort of. . .'

  'Drunken shouting match,' suggested Helga.

  'All right. Anyway, I was telling him that artists have to be free and that bourgeois values were a trap to prevent artists from a true expression of themselves, and he was defending the smug middle-class life, saying all he wanted was to live like what he called "a normal human being" - by which he meant an inhibited, tight-arsed wage-slave with a bloody pension and life insurance and a nice neat little beach hut in Smalting. And I said that going down that route was the surest way to stifling artistic talent and nobody who gave a stuff about a beach hut could possibly be any kind of artist, and so I went out and . . .'

  He shrugged again, as Carole completed the sentence for him. 'Set fire to the beach hut that Mark and Philly used to use.'

  There was a long silence before Gray Czesky admitted that yes, that was exactly what he had done. 'As I say, I was pretty well plastered,' he added, as though that might be some kind of mitigation.

  His wife took up the narrative. 'And Gray comes back home and he is boasting about what he has done, so Mark and I rush back to the beach hut to put out the fire.'

  Carole looked at Jude, who gave a little nod. Yes, that must have been when the two of them were seen by Curt Holderness. Odd, though, that Curt hadn't noticed that the beach hut was burning. Or perhaps not so odd, given how laxly the man interpreted his duties as a security officer.

  'And you did put out the fire, Helga?'

  'Yes. Fortunately it had not got much of a hold on the hut. Only one corner was burnt. If we had not got there so quickly I hate to think what would have happened.'

  Gray Czesky, now his folly had been exposed, looked sheepishly defiant. 'As I said,' he pleaded to deaf ears, 'it's not easy having an artistic temperament.'

  'Well,' said Carole, 'we're very grateful to you for telling us all of this.'

  'I felt we had to,' Helga responded. 'I was suspicious of you when you came round on Monday.'

  'Oh?'

  'Yes, I did not think you were really wanting to commission a painting from Gray.' Carole felt herself blushing to know how transparent their ruse had been. 'It was when you rang again today that my suspicion was confirmed.'

  'Really?'

  'I knew then that you were plain-clothes police officers.' Carole and Jude tried to avoid catching each other's eyes. Instinctively, Carole was about to say that Helga had got the wrong end of the stick, but a moment's thought made her realize that there was no harm in the woman continuing with her misapprehension. And their mistaken identities could actually be rather useful in advancing their investigation.

  'The question is now,' Helga continued, 'what you do about what we have just told you.'

  Jude took note of the pleading in the woman's eyes as she said judiciously, 'Well, setting fire to the beach hut was obviously very stupid behaviour on your husband's part. . .'

  'Yes?'

  '. . .but at its worst it was nothing more than a drunken prank.'

  'No,' Helga agreed, her hopes rekindled.

  'And it wouldn't have become so important had it not been for subsequent events at the beach hut; the discovery of the human remains there. But . . .' she extended the pause, aware of the tension in the sorry couple in front of her '. . . now we know that the two discoveries are unrelated to each other . . .' she looked across to her neighbour, as if for confirmation of what she was about to say, "... I don't really think it'll be necessary for any further action to be taken.'

  The relief in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage was almost palpable. Both the Czeskys sank back into their chairs, as Carole picked up the conversational baton. 'Though of course,' she said sternly, 'we might take a different view were you not to co-operate fully with us.'

  'Of course we will,' said Helga earnestly. 'In what way do you wish us to co-operate?'

  'We will require you to inform us . . .' Where had that 'require' come from? Carole realized she was dropping into 'police-speak'. 'We will require you to inform us of anything else you may know that might be of relevance to our investigation into the discoveries on Smalting Beach.'

  She chose her words with care. With her background in the Home Office, Carole Seddon was well aware how serious a crime impersonating a police officer could be. So she deliberately hadn't confirmed Helga's assumption that their enquiries were official ones. As she walked her casuist's tightrope, Carole curbed her natural instinct towards guilt.

  'Oh, of course,' said Helga. 'If there's anything we know that's relevant, of course we will tell you.'

  Jude nodded with satisfaction. 'Right. Good. Well, the first thing
we want to know is: where is Mark Dennis? Do you have a way of contacting him?'

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It turned out to be remarkably simple. Gray provided Carole and Jude with a new mobile number for Mark Dennis. The moment the Czeskys had left Woodside Cottage, Jude, trembling with excitement, keyed it into her phone.

  A brief ringing tone was quickly replaced by a message informing her that the phone she was calling was switched off. She tried again. With exactly the same result.

  Neither Carole nor Jude could disguise their disappointment. To have come so close to making contact with Mark Dennis and then to . . .

  'I'll keep trying it,' said Jude defiantly.

  'Yes, of course. He'll answer it soon.'

  But neither of them really believed the optimism in Carole's words.

  Smalting was the lead story on the television news that evening. The human remains that had been found buried under a beach hut there had been identified by the police. They had belonged to a small boy called Robin Cutter.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The name was familiar, but in front of their separate televisions Carole and Jude both needed reminding where they had heard it before. The news bulletin supplied all the promptings their memories required.

  The story of Robin Cutter was a sad and painful one. He had been five at the time of his disappearance, and nothing had been seen of him in the intervening eight years. At the time, relatively soon after the high-profile abduction and murder of a local schoolgirl, there had been a huge uproar in West Sussex about the case. It aroused all the country's latent visceral horror of paedophilia.

  Though it was nearly ten-thirty at night, Jude went straight round to knock on the door of High Tor. The evening air was quite cool, reminding the denizens of Fethering that they were still only in June, not yet August.

  Carole and Jude stayed watching television after the main bulletin, because the disappearance of Robin Cutter had happened in the area and there remained a very distant possibility that more information might be available on the local news.

  Of course there wasn't. The local news reported the story with characteristic ineptitude, but added nothing to what had been seen on the national bulletin. They showed the same shot of a smiling Robin Cutter, wearing a very new blue uniform, in one of those school photographs taken against a backdrop of cloud effects. They showed the same library footage of the boy's distraught parents - Rory and Miranda - banked by police at a press conference, begging anyone who knew anything to come forward, and sending hopeless love to their son. The woman was slender with long bottle-blond hair, the husband chunky and bewildered. They faltered and were so overcome with emotion that one of the policemen had to finish reading their prepared statement.

  'The mother looks vaguely familiar,' said Jude.

  'Who is she?'

  'I don't know. It'll come to me.'

  They switched off the television. At the time Robin Cutter disappeared, Jude had not yet moved to Fethering and had only been aware of the national reaction to the case. That had been strong, but as nothing compared to the frenzy in West Sussex. Carole could vividly recall the local furore and hysteria about what was assumed to be another paedophile atrocity. 'We must find out more about it,' she announced.

  'What, now?'

  'Yes, Jude. I'm sure there'll be lots more on the internet.'

  'You're right. Will you bring your laptop down?'

  Carole was given a moment's pause by this novel idea. Though, after a slow and sceptical start, she had now embraced computer technology with considerable enthusiasm, she still somehow had not accepted the concept of her laptop's portability. It never moved from the spare bedroom, which she used as a kind of study. 'No, I think we'd better go upstairs,' she said.

  Jude converted an incipient giggle into a sigh and followed her neighbour.

  Carole's view that there would be 'lots more on the internet' proved to be an understatement. There were literally hundreds of thousands of references to Robin Cutter, ranging from the straight facts of his disappearance on Wikipedia, newspaper and BBC websites, to the homicidal ravings of anti-paedophile fanatics. Though at the time of his supposed abduction bloggers had hardly existed, the contemporary ones still included his names in their lists of victims. As ever, the internet offered opportunities to the kind of people who used to write letters in block capitals with lots of underlining. It had become the soapbox of the unhinged bigot.

  'God, it's nasty,' said Jude, as they both looked at one of the wilder polemics. 'I suppose paedophiles are about the only minority left that everyone feels justified in denouncing.'

  'I'm sorry? I don't know what you mean.'

  'Well, it's no longer politically acceptable to discriminate against women or foreigners or lesbians or gays. About the only targets left to criticize are paedophiles.'

  Carole was appalled. 'Jude, are you saying you support what they do?'

  'Of course I'm not. I'm just saying it must be terrible to grow up with those kind of impulses.'

  'What, you think they can't help themselves?'

  'Possibly not.'

  Carole Seddon was so shocked to the core of her being that she could hardly get her words out. 'But the things they do! You're not going to try to defend those on the grounds that the poor paedophiles can't help themselves?'

  'No, no. I'm just saying that it must be very difficult to grow up discovering that the only way you can get sexual satisfaction is by committing an act that society reckons to be the ultimate taboo.'

  Carole shuddered. 'I am sorry. There are times when I just don't understand you, Jude.' Which was true. There were many subjects on which the two of them were never going to think alike. Which perhaps made their friendship all the more remarkable. And strong.

  'What I'm saying is that people lose all sense of proportion when paedophilia is mentioned. And there's a lot of ignorance about the subject. I mean, do you remember that case of the paediatrician who had graffiti scrawled over her house?'

  'Jude, paedophilia remains a horrible and unforgivable crime.'

  'Yes, Carole, but . . .' Jude decided it wasn't the moment to pursue her argument. She was as appalled as anyone by the crimes perpetrated by paedophiles, but her healer's instinct was always to look inside personalities, to try to understand what triggered their behaviour. But explaining what she meant to Carole would not have been an easy task, so she turned her attention back to the laptop. 'Anyway, let's just see how much basic information we can get about the case.'

  'Very well,' said Carole, still looking at her neighbour in a rather old-fashioned way.

  They returned to Wikipedia. 'With that name I'm surprised they haven't been attacked too,' Jude observed.

  The basic information was quite simple, almost banal in its simplicity. Robin Cutter had been spending a day with his grandparents near Fedborough while his mother and father had gone to London to see a matinee of Les Miserables. In the morning his grandfather had driven the boy down to Smalting Beach. After they'd parked the car, Robin had asked for an ice cream. While his grandfather went into the shop, the boy had asked to stay outside and watch the windsurfers. When his grandfather came out of the shop, Robin Cutter had disappeared. And he had never been seen again.

  But it was the name of the grandfather that made Carole and Jude gasp.

  Lionel Oliver.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The identity of the victim whose bones had been discovered under Quiet Harbour led to a predictable media frenzy. The Robin Cutter story was again on the front pages of many of the Thursday morning's national newspapers. The red tops didn't need any encouragement to go into anti-paedophile overdrive, and even Carole's more sedate Times gave wide coverage to the revelation. As ever in such instances, much was made of previous cases of similar atrocities, turning knives in the wounds of other families who had already suffered enough.

  Carole and Jude watched
the lunchtime television news in Woodside Cottage. There had been little development overnight, so they found out little more than they had been told in the Wednesday evening bulletin. The last part of the report, however, was an interview with the dead boy's mother.

  Miranda Cutter had changed considerably in the years since her son's disappearance. The slender blond had morphed into a plump woman with dyed red curls. And her surname had changed to Browning.

  In the interview she said what all bereaved parents say in such situations, that at least now she finally knew Robin was dead, that now he could have a proper funeral, and she could try to move forward with her life. Miranda Browning didn't say anything about her son's killer and the need for him to be brought to justice. She didn't need to. Every newspaper in the country was doing the job for her.

  As soon as the interview had finished Carole looked across at Jude and saw a strange expression on her neighbour's face. 'What is it?'

  'I know her. Miranda Browning. She's one of my clients.'

  'Oh?'

  'Yes. Someone referred her to me last year because she'd been getting these terrible headaches. I managed to alleviate the symptoms, but I knew what was really causing them was some deep inner tension, some powerful emotion she was holding in. She wouldn't tell me what it was. Now I know, though.'

  'When you say she's a client, Jude . . .'

  'Hm?'

  '. . .do you mean she's a friend too?'

  'I don't know her that well.'

  'Well enough to ring her with condolences, you know, about what's happened?'

  'I wouldn't want to trouble her at a time like this.'

  'A time when she probably needs your healing services more than ever,' Carole suggested. 'If our investigation's going to get any further . . .'

  'What do you mean?'

  'If we find out who killed her son, then we'll help her get that psychological thing Americans go on about so much.'

  'Closure?'

  'Yes. Look, she probably knows more about the case than anyone else, and you've got a direct line to her.'