Fethering 01 (2000) - The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett; Prefers to remain anonymous

  TO BE PROOFREAD

  Title:

  The Body on the Beach

  Series:

  The first book in the Fethering series

  Author:

  Simon Brett

  Year:

  2000

  Synopsis:

  Simon Brett introduces a sparkling new series of crime whodunnits starring the redoubtable Carole Seddon and her worldly wise accomplice, Jude.

  Very little disturbs the ordered calm of Fethering, a self-contained retirement settlement on England’s southern coast. Which is precisely why Carole Seddon has chosen to reside there. So the last thing Carole expects to encounter in Fethering is a new neighbour with but one name and an obviously colourful past. ‘Jude’ was not really Fethering…but neither was the body Carole found on the beach. A body, it has to be said, that has disappeared by the time the police arrive. Only Jude is ready to believe what her neighbour says she saw—and from that moment on, the two women are resolved to turn detectives.

  ONE

  Fethering is on the South Coast, not far from Tarring. Though calling itself a village, Fethering isn’t what that word immediately brings to the minds of people nostalgic for an idealized, simpler England. Despite the presence of many components of a village—one church, one shop, one pub, one petrol station, and a whole bunch of people who reckon they’re the squire—Fethering is in fact quite a large residential conurbation.

  The core is its High Street, some of whose flint-faced cottages date back to the early eighteenth century. The peasant simplicities of these buildings, sufficient for their original fishermen owners, have been enhanced by mains drainage, gas central heating, sealed-unit leaded windows and very high price tags.

  Out from the High Street, during the last century and a half, have spread, in a semicircle whose diameter is the sea, wave after wave of new developments. The late Victorians and Edwardians added a ring of solid, respectable family homes. Beyond these, in the 1930s, an arc of large, unimaginative slabs sprang up, soon to be surrounded by an infestation of bungalows. In the post-war period some regimented blocks of council housing were built in an area to the north of the village and named, by planners devoid of irony, Downside. Then in the late 1950s there burgeoned an expensive private estate of vast houses backing on to the sea. This compound, called Shorelands, was circumscribed by stern walls and sterner regulations. From that time on, stricter planning laws and a growing sense of its own exclusivity had virtually stopped any further development in Fethering.

  The roads into the village are all regularly interrupted by speed humps. Though tourism plays a significant part in the local economy, strangers to the area are never quite allowed to feel welcome.

  Because of its seaside location, the village boasts a Yacht Club, a cluster of seafront cafes and a small but tasteful amusements arcade. During the winter, of these the Yacht Club alone remains open, and to members only. But open all the year round along the front are the rectangles of glass-sided shelters, havens by day to swaddled pensioners killing a little time, and by night to amorous local teenagers. In spite of the overpowering gentility of the area, and ferociously deterrent notices about vandalism, the glass of the shelters gets broken on a regular basis.

  Fethering is set at the mouth of the Fether. Though called a ‘river’, it would be little more than a stream but for the effects of the tides, which twice a day turn a lethargic trickle into a torrent of surprising malevolence. A sea wall, stretching out beyond the low-water mark, protects the beach from the Fether’s turbulence. This wall abuts the Fethering Yacht Club, which controls access to the promenade on top. Only Yacht Club members, and some local fishermen who keep their blue-painted equipment boxes there, are allowed the precious keys which give access to this area. Against the wall, on the beachward side, is the cement ramp down which the boats of the Fethering Yacht Club flotilla reach the water.

  The sea goes out a long way at Fethering, revealing a vast, flat expanse of sludge-coloured sand. When the tide is high, only pebbles show, piled high against the footpath and the wooden breakwaters that stretch out from it like the teeth of a comb. Between the path and the start of the houses, lower than the highest part of the beach, is a strip of tough, short grass. At spring tides, or after heavy rain, pools of water break up the green. The road which separates this grass from the start of the houses is rather imaginatively called Seaview Road.

  At regular intervals along the beach are signs reading:

  NO CYCLING AT ANY TIME

  POOP SCOOP AREA

  CLEAN IT UP.

  Though hardly separated from the coastline sprawl of Worthing, Fethering believes very strongly in its own identity. People from adjacent areas even as close as Tarring, Ferring or Goring-on-Sea are reckoned to be, in some imprecise but unarguable way, different.

  Fethering is its own little world of double-glazed windows and double-glazed minds.

  Carole Seddon had always planned to retire there. The cottage had been bought as a weekend retreat when she had both a job and a husband and, though now she had neither, she never regretted the investment.

  Carole had enjoyed working for the Home Office. The feeling of having done something useful with her life fitted the values with which she had grown up, values which at times verged on the puritanical. Her parents had lived a life without frills; perhaps the only indulgence they had shown her was the slightly frivolous ‘e’ at the end of her first name. So Carole felt she had earned a virtuous retirement—even though, she could never quite forget, it had come a little earlier than anticipated.

  Ahead of her, she imagined, until time finally distressed her body beyond repair, lay perhaps thirty years of low-profile life. Her Civil Service pension was at the generous end of adequate; the mortgage was paid off; there would be no money worries. She would look after herself sensibly, eat sensibly, take plenty of long sensible walks on the beach, perform a few unheralded acts of local charity for such organizations as the Canine Trust and be, if not happy, then at least content with her lot.

  Carole Seddon did not expect any changes in the rest of her life. She had had her steel-grey hair cut sensibly short and protected her pale-blue eyes with rimless glasses which she hoped were insufficiently fashionable ever to look dated.

  She bought a sensible new Renault, which was kept immaculately clean and regularly serviced, and in which she did a very low mileage. She had also acquired a dog called Gulliver, who was as sensible as a Labrador is capable of being, and she had kitted herself out with a sensible wardrobe, mostly from Marks & Spencer. Her only indulgence was a Burberry raincoat, which was well enough cut not to look ostentatious.

  If her clothes were older than those usually worn by a woman in her early fifties, they represented sensible planning for the future. Carole was happy to look older than her age; that accorded with the image of benign anonymity she sought.

  And someone who wished to slip imperceptibly into old age could not have chosen a better environment than Fethering in which to complete the process.

  As she took her regular walk on the beach before it was properly light that Tuesday morning in early November, these were not, however, the thoughts going through Carole Seddon’s brain. They were old thoughts, conclusions she had long ago reached and fixed in her mind; they never required reassessment.

  But new, disturbing thoughts cut through the early-morning sounds, through the hiss of the gunmetal sea, the wheeze of the wind, the resigned complaint of the gulls, the crunch of sand and shingle on to which Carole’s sensible gumboots trod. The new thoughts centred round the woman who, the previous day, had arrive
d to take possession of the house next door. It was called Woodside Cottage, though there wasn’t a wood in sight. But then Carole’s own house was called High Tor and it was a good 200 miles to the nearest one of those. That, however, was the way houses were named in Fethering.

  Despite its High Street location, Woodside Cottage had been empty for some time. Buyers were put off by the amount of modernization the property required. Its former owner, an old lady of universal misanthropy, had been dead for eighteen months. Carole’s initial neighbourly overtures, when she first started weekending in the area, had been snubbed with such ferocity that no further approaches had been made. This lack of contact, and the old lady’s natural reclusiveness, had meant it was like living next door to an empty house. Death, turning that illusion into reality, had therefore made no difference to Carole.

  But the prospect of having a real, living neighbour did make a difference. A potential variable was introduced into a life from which Carole Seddon had worked hard to exclude the unexpected.

  She hadn’t spoken to the newcomer yet. She could have done quite easily. The woman had been very much up and down her front path the previous day, the Monday, volubly ushering in and directing furniture-laden removal men. She had even engaged hitherto-unmet passers-by in conversation, exchanging cheery words with Fethering residents who, Carole knew, were deliberately taking the long route back from the beach to check out the new arrival.

  Her name, the woman readily volunteered to everyone she spoke to, was ‘Jude’. Carole’s lips shaped the monosyllable with slight distaste. ‘Jude’ had about it an over-casual air, a studied informality. Carole Seddon had never before had a friend called Jude and she wasn’t about to start now.

  The woman’s relentless casualness was the reason why her neighbour hadn’t engaged her in conversation. Though, as she sat by her open kitchen window, Carole had heard Jude’s exchanges with other residents, she’d had no wish to be identified with the communal local nosiness. Her early-morning walk with Gulliver completed before the new resident and the removal vans arrived, she had had no further need to leave the house that day except for a quick mid-afternoon dog-relieving visit to the waste ground behind. Carole would find a more appropriate, more formal occasion on which to introduce herself to her new neighbour.

  But she didn’t see theirs ever becoming a close relationship. The newcomer’s casualness extended to her dress, an assemblage of long skirts and wafty scarves, and also to her hair, blonde—blonded, surely—and coiled into a loose bird’s-nest, precariously pinned in place. That could of course have been a temporary measure, the hair pushed untidily out of the way of the inevitable dust generated by moving house, but Carole had a feeling it was the regular style. Jude, she knew instinctively, wasn’t her sort of person.

  She felt the prickle of small resistances building up within her. Carole Seddon had spent considerable time and energy defining her own space and would defend it against all encroachments.

  She was shaken out of these sour thoughts by Gulliver’s bark. The dog was down near the water’s scummy edge, running round a bulky figure who was walking across the flat grey sand towards his mistress. This was surprising, given the early hour. There weren’t many local walkers as driven and disciplined as Carole.

  The figure was so hunched against the wind into a green shiny anorak that it could have been of either gender. But even if Carole had been able to see enough face to recognize someone of her acquaintance, she still wouldn’t have stopped to talk.

  There were social protocols to be observed on an early-morning walk along the beach at Fethering. When one met another human being—almost definitely proceeding in the opposite direction: everyone walked at the same pace; there was very little over taking—it was bad form to give them no acknowledgement at all. Equally, to have stopped and engaged in lengthy conversation at that time in the morning would have been considered excessive.

  The correct response therefore was ‘the Fethering Nod’. This single abrupt inclination of the head was the approved reaction to encounters with mild acquaintances, bosom friends, former lovers, current lovers and complete strangers. And its appropriateness did not vary with the seasons. The nod was logical in the winter, when the scouring winds and tightened anorak hoods gave everyone the face of a Capuchin monkey, and when any attempts at conversation were whisked away and strewn far across the shingle. But it was still the correct protocol on balmy summer mornings, when the horizon of the even sea was lost in a mist that promised a baking afternoon. Even then, to respond to anyone with more than ‘the Fethering Nod’ would have been bad form.

  For other times of day, of course, and other venues, different protocols obtained. Not to stop and chat with a friend met on an after-lunch stroll along the beach would have been the height of bad manners. And Fethering High Street at mid-morning was quite properly littered with gossiping acquaintances.

  Such nuances of social behaviour distinguished the long-time residents of Fethering from the newly arrived. And it was the view of Carole Seddon that anyone privileged to join the local community should be humble enough to keep a low profile until they had mastered these intricacies.

  From what she’d seen of the woman, she rather doubted whether ‘Jude’ would, though.

  Nor did the figure who passed her that morning seem aware of what was required. With an averted face and not even a hint of ‘the Fethering Nod’, he or she deliberately changed course and broke into a lumbering—almost panicky—run up the steep shingle towards the Yacht Club.

  Gulliver’s barking once again distracted Carole. Quickly bored with the unresponsive figure in the anorak, the dog had rushed off on another of his pivotal missions to rid the world of seaweed or lumps of tar-stained polystyrene, and disappeared round the corner of a breakwater. Invisible behind the weed-draped wooden screen, he was barking furiously. Beyond him, the sea, having reached its twice-daily nadir, was easing back up the sand.

  Carole wondered what it would be this time.

  Gulliver’s ‘sensibleness’ went only so far. A crushed plastic bottle or a scrap of punctured beach ball could suddenly, to his eyes, be transformed into a major threat to world peace. And, until forcibly dragged away, he would continue trying to bark the enemy into submission.

  But that morning it wasn’t a bottle or a scrap of beach ball that had set Gulliver off. As Carole Seddon saw when she rounded the end of the breakwater, it was a dead body.

  TWO

  He was maybe in his fifties, though his pallor made it difficult to tell. The flesh of his face, framed by matted greying hair and the sharp separate stubble of a three-day beard, was bleached the pale beige of driftwood. It seemed to Carole a mercy that his eyes were closed.

  His mouth, though, hung open. To the right of the bottom jaw, a tooth was missing. It had been missing a long time.

  The inside of one exposed wrist was pockmarked with old and new scar tissue.

  The body was hunched uncomfortably against a barnacled wooden stanchion of the breakwater. At first sight the man might have crawled there for protection, but the unnatural conformation of his limbs denied that supposition. He hadn’t got there by his own efforts. He had been manipulated and abandoned by the sea.

  His clothes—jeans and a grey jumper—were soaked heavy. The sea had borne away one of his trainers, exposing a poignantly vulnerable sports sock, ringed in blue and red. Laced round his upper body was an orange life-jacket, stamped in faded black letters ‘Property of Fethering Yacht Club’.

  Instinctively, Carole looked up towards the small white-balconied clubhouse at the top of the beach by the sea wall. In front of it, guarded by a stockade of white railings, were drawn up rows of sailing boats, securely covered for the winter. She knew that if she moved closer, she would be able to hear the incessant clacking of rigging against metal masts. But there’d be nobody at the club so early in the morning. The first-floor bar-room’s dark expanse of window looked out blankly to the sea.

  Despite his li
fe-jacket, any theory that the man had been the victim of a sailing accident was belied by the two wounds in his neck. Washed blood-free by the sea, they were thin, like the lines of a butcher’s cleaver in dead meat, exposing the darker flesh beneath.

  Never for a moment did it occur to Carole Seddon that the man was not dead. She felt no urge to kneel by the body and feel for pulses. It wasn’t just squeam-ishness. There was no point.

  Anyway, it was better to leave the corpse undisturbed for the police to examine.

  Carole was distracted by more barking. Having drawn her attention to it, Gulliver had immediately lost interest in the body. He’d found a supplanting fascination in the sea itself and was now trying to catch the waves, fighting them back with all the optimism of a canine Canute. He’d managed to soak his body through in the process.

  One sharp call was enough to bring the dog to heel. He dissociated himself from the sea, looking round innocently as if he’d only just noticed its vast expanse. Carole stood back as he shook the tell-tale brine out of his coat. Then he rolled over in a mass of seaweed and something else more noxious. Carole registered dully that Gulliver would need a bath when they got home.

  She gave one last look to the dead man by the breakwater, then started resolutely up the beach, Gulliver trotting maturely at her side.

  §

  It was only half-past seven when they got back to High Tor. Carole had woken early that morning, slow to adjust to the recent change from Summer Time, and got up briskly, as she always did. Thinking too much at the beginning of the day could so easily become brooding. It had been dark, the night’s full moon invisible, when she and Gulliver left for their walk, and it was still gloomy when they returned, the kind of November day that would never get properly light. And never warm up either.

  Carole bathed the dog before calling the police, splashing him down with a hose outside the back door. She knew, if she didn’t, the house would smell of rotting seaweed for weeks. Gulliver never made a fuss about being bathed. He seemed positively to enjoy the process. Maybe it was the intimacy with his mistress he valued. Carole Seddon was not given to sentimental displays, least of all to animals, so Gulliver enjoyed the ration of contact he received from the necessary scrubbing and drying. In the cold weather she was particularly careful to get the last drop of water out of his coat.