Fethering 01 (2000) - The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett; Prefers to remain anonymous

  The weatherman promised more of the same. The apparent improvement of that morning had been an illusion. More frost was coming. More wind. More gloom as the evenings darkened earlier and the year spiralled down to its close.

  At the start of the strident signature tune of the local news, Carole reached for the remote control. But before she pressed the off-button, she heard the voice-over menu of headlines: “Drowned boy’s mother blames drug culture.”

  Carole’s button-finger froze.

  Another newsreader who’d never make it on to national television appeared in shot. “The mother of teenager Aaron Spalding”—once again the name was pronounced ‘Arran’—“today blamed the ready accessibility of drugs to young people on the South Coast for her son’s death.”

  A woman’s distraught face filled the screen. “Aaron was a good boy. Then he got mixed up with a crowd who was doing a lot of drugs and I’m sure that’s what caused his death. He was a good boy…” Her mouth wobbled as the tears took over.

  But it wasn’t what was said that kept Carole frozen in her chair. It was the fact that she’d seen the woman before.

  In that very sitting room. Holding a gun.

  SEVENTEEN

  Any thoughts of giving up trying to be a detective evaporated as if they’d never been there. Now there was something positive to link the two fatalities. The woman who’d come to Carole’s house to ask her about the body she’d found on the beach was the mother of the boy whose body had been found on the beach the following day. Also she’d asked about a knife. There had to be a connection.

  Carole rushed out of High Tor, not even bothering to lock the front door, and hurried up the garden path of Woodside Cottage. When the bell prompted no response, she hammered on the dark wooden door.

  But there was no one in. For a moment she contemplated going down to the Crown and Anchor to see if Jude was having lunch there (which would have been a very good idea, because that was precisely what Jude was doing). But Carole’s sensible side prevailed. If she didn’t find Jude, she reasoned, then she’d have to stay in the Crown and Anchor and have a mineral water to justify her going in there. And if she did that, there was a real danger it might appear to the other residents of Fethering that she’d become the kind of woman who went into pubs on her own.

  (The option of just going in and asking Ted Crisp if he’d seen Jude did not occur to her.)

  So Carole left a message on Jude’s answering machine, asking her to phone back as soon as possible. And then she sat waiting in an agony of frustration, once again made aware of how little she knew about Jude’s life. Her neighbour could be anywhere. Maybe she did have a job and was off at work? Maybe she was visiting a family member…or a long-term lover? Maybe she owned a second home and had gone there? The possibilities were infinite.

  §

  To speed up the passage of time, Carole went to her bookshelves and consulted her reference library. Various works of criminology reflected different Home Office initiatives in which she had been involved. The volume she was looking for had come her way when she had been investigating police training methods. It was a manual about scene-of-crime techniques.

  Carole looked dispassionately at the rows of photographs of those who’d come to violent ends. There was nothing gruesome about the task; this scientific layout of wounded bodies detached them from any humanity of which they might once have been part.

  At the same time Carole focused on the image of the body she had found on Fethering beach. In particular, on the two cuts that she had seen on the man’s neck.

  She compared the picture in her mind with the picture on the page, and it confirmed a tiny doubt which had stayed with her since she first saw the corpse.

  The two cuts on the man’s neck were not deep enough. They were little more than flesh wounds and had not reached any major arteries. He might even have received the injuries post-mortem.

  Whatever had killed the man, it hadn’t been the wounds to his neck.

  Carole had hardly reached this conclusion before there was a furious ringing at her doorbell. Jude was back from the Crown and Anchor.

  §

  “We’ve got to talk to her.”

  “But, Jude, she’ll be in a terrible state. She’s only recently lost her son.”

  “She’s also only recently threatened you with a gun. Anyway, I’d have thought the one thing anyone would want to know if they’ve just lost their son is how it happened. We may be able to help her answer that question.”

  “She may know already.”

  “If she does, she can tell us. And also maybe tell us the connection between her son’s death and the body you found. Come on, we’ve got to get to the bottom of what happened, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, of course we have.” Carole had by now completely forgotten her morning’s doubts about the wisdom of pursuing the case. “So how’re we going to find her?”

  “If she’s local, she might be in the phone book. The dead boy’s called Aaron Spalding, so let’s assume she’s a Spalding too. Do we have a first name for her?”

  Carole screwed up her pale-blue eyes with the effort of recollection. “There was a caption up over the bit of interview they showed. Um…began with a ‘T’, I think. Yes, it’s coming. Theresa. That’s right—Theresa.”

  “Though presumably,” said Jude, grabbing the Worthing Area telephone directory and flicking through it, “the entry would be in her husband’s name.”

  “If she’s got a husband. You never know these days, do you?”

  There were ten Spaldings, none of them with the initial T. Carole and Jude took turns to phone them all and ask to speak to Theresa. None had anyone of that name on the premises. And all of them seemed to regard a wrong number as an infringement of their human rights.

  “So where do we go next?” asked Jude. “Ring the television company who did the interview?”

  “No, local paper,” said Carole firmly. “Comes out today. Always on a Thursday. There’s no way they wouldn’t cover a story like this.”

  They negotiated the pillars of Allinstore to buy a copy of the Fethering Observer and didn’t have to search far to find what they were looking for. The front page was dominated by the headline: TRAGEDY OF DROWNED TEENAGER. Beside it, the boyish school photograph of Aaron Spalding appeared again.

  “Wonder why it’s spelt ‘Aaron’ and pronounced ‘Arran’?” Jude mused.

  “Maybe it’s a local variation. Influenced by living so near the Arun Valley.”

  “Maybe. Oh, look, there’s the address. It says, “Mrs Theresa Spalding, of Drake Crescent, Fethering.” Where’s that?”

  “Up on the Downside Estate, I’m sure. A lot of the roads there are named after famous Elizabethans. Marlowe…Sidney…Raleigh…Meant to give a bit of class when they were built. Mind you, I think it’s the only bit of class they’ve still got left.”

  “Not the most desirable part of Fethering then?”

  A wrinkle of Carole’s nose gave all the answer that was required. “So,” she said, “when do we go up to Downside and try to talk to Mrs Theresa Spalding?”

  “No time like the present,” replied Jude. “How do we get there?”

  “In my car. Unless you want to go in yours…”

  “Haven’t got one.” Jude grinned. “Never felt the need.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Fethering doesn’t have an underbelly in the way that, say, Los Angeles has an underbelly, but the Downside Estate is as near as it gets.

  The houses there betrayed signs not of real deprivation but of diminishing willpower and ever-tightening budgets. The Downside Estate had been built as council housing, but cut after cut in local authority spending over the years meant that maintenance had been pared to the bone. The buildings had all reached the age when serious structural refurbishment was required, not short-term making-good repairs. Their late-1940s brickwork needed repointing. Windows needed painting, even those where the original frames had been replaced by soulless double
glazing. Tiny front gardens were unkempt and littered. Depressed cars crouched against the pavements on failing suspension.

  The drab November weather did not add to the estate’s charms, as Carole navigated her sensible and immaculately clean Renault towards Drake Crescent. She tried to bite back her instinctive snobbishness, but the compartmentalizing habit of her mind was too strong. Here was a place, she decided, where cultural aspiration stopped at the Sun or the football, and hope existed only in the form of the National Lottery.

  On the side of every house a satellite dish perched like a giant parasitic insect, leeching away more profits for Sky TV. In Downside no attempt had been made to hide them, whereas on the Shorelands Estate a visible satellite dish would have constituted a social lapse more terrible than walking around with one’s flies undone.

  “Pretty grim place to live,” Carole observed, as she turned off Grenville Avenue.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve lived in worse,” said Jude, adding yet another to the list of questions that Carole must at some point put to her neighbour.

  But this wasn’t the moment. “How do we know which house it is?” she asked as the car crawled along Drake Crescent. Unable to disguise her distaste, she added, “Stop and ask someone?”

  Jude chuckled. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have to do. The people round here are human, you know.”

  “Oh, I didn’t for a moment mean—”

  “Yes, you did,” said Jude cheerfully. “Anyway, I don’t think we’re going to have to ask anyone. I’d say it’s the house with the television crew outside.”

  Sure enough, there was a blue and white van bearing the regional station’s logo. A couple of dour technicians were rolling up cables and stowing them in the back. An effete young man stood awkwardly by, feeling he should offer to help, but not knowing how.

  Jude jumped out as soon as Carole had parked the car and went straight up to the young man. “Is this Theresa Spalding’s house?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Have you just been doing a news interview with her?”

  “Not news, no. For a documentary. We’re doing an in-depth analysis of the teenage drug problem on the South Coast.”

  “Oh, that’ll be interesting,” lied Carole, who’d come up to join them. All local documentaries, she knew, were ruined by inadequate budgets, sketchy research and inept presenters. “And you were talking to Mrs Spalding about her son’s death?”

  “Yes. She’s obviously very cut up about it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Jude, starting up the short path that led to Theresa Spalding’s front door.

  “I’m not sure that she really wants to talk to anyone else at the moment,” said the young man. “Unless, of course, you’re social workers.”

  “That’s right,” Jude called breezily over her shoulder as she pressed the doorbell.

  In amazement, Carole followed her neighbour. The young man, seeing his colleagues had finished packing the van, got inside.

  It was a moment or two before the front door was opened, and then only halfway. The woman was undoubtedly the one who’d come to Carole’s house, but her face had drained down to a new pallor. The darting eyes were raw with weeping and a hand flickered across in front of her as if warding off some unseen attacker.

  “What do you want? I don’t want to talk to no one.”

  “We may be able to help you find out how Aaron died,” said Jude, pronouncing the name ‘Arran’ as everyone else had.

  “I don’t care how he died. My boy’s dead—that’s all that matters to me. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  She made as if to close the door, but Carole’s incisive words stopped her. “Then perhaps you do want to talk about why you drew a gun on me…”

  The door-closing movement stopped. Through the remaining crack the woman’s eyes took in the speaker’s face.

  “Unless you want the police to talk to you about why you drew a gun on me.”

  Reluctantly, the crack of the door widened.

  “You better come in then.”

  §

  Theresa Spalding lived in a maisonette. Whether the house had been built like that or subsequently converted into two dwellings was hard to tell. The sitting room, into which Carole and Jude were grudgingly ushered, was dominated by a huge television screen. Throughout their interview, some American sitcom full of overacting teenagers was running with the sound off.

  Theresa Spalding gestured to a couple of broken-down chairs, stubbed out the remains of a cigarette and, with trembling hands, shook another out of a packet. She remained standing while she lit the new one. She took a drag, as though gulping in oxygen on the top of Everest.

  “Look, I don’t know what you want, but I’ve already got enough grief.”

  The room was full of traces of her son. A poster of the Southampton football team. A Playstation with a scattering of CD-ROM games by the television. Stephen Kings and similar paperbacks littered on a shelf, along with a neat row of horror videos. A grubby pair of trainers left by the sofa, exactly where he’d kicked them off.

  Jude took the lead. There had been no discussion between them, but instinctively they fell into their roles. If Carole, with her threats of police involvement, was the Bad Cop, then Jude was going to be the Good Cop.

  “Yes, Mrs Spalding, I understand—”

  “It’s not ‘Mrs’. I never been married. But if you think that means I didn’t bring up Aaron right—”

  “We’re not saying that…Theresa. Can I call you ‘Theresa’?”

  Carole knew she could never have got away with it, but the woman snorted permission to Jude for her first name to be used. There was something in Jude’s manner which made such things possible.

  “Thank you. I’m Jude, and my friend’s called Carole.”

  This first use of the word ‘friend’ gave Carole a warm feeling. She wasn’t sure whether she was ready yet to reciprocate the compliment, but it was still nice to know that Jude thought of their relationship in that light.

  “And we’re both desperately sorry about what happened to Aaron.”

  “Why? What business is it of yours?”

  “It wouldn’t be our business,” Carole responded sharply, “if you hadn’t come to my house and threatened me with a gun.”

  “You needn’t have worried. It wasn’t a real gun.” Theresa Spalding crossed to a dresser and pulled the weapon out of a drawer. She chucked it across into Carole’s lap for inspection. No parts of the gun’s mechanism moved except for the trigger. A moulded replica. “Just a thing Aaron bought.”

  “Why did he buy it?” asked Carole.

  “Not to do any harm!” Theresa snapped. “He’d never have done an off-licence with it. He wasn’t like that. Aaron was just a little boy and little boys like playing with guns. That’s just a toy. He bought it as a toy!”

  “Yes.” Jude’s voice smoothed down the flare-up. “But you can see why your use of the gun got us interested. What was so important to make you go to the house of someone you’d never met before and pull a gun on them—even if that gun was just a replica?”

  Theresa was sullenly silent.

  Carole picked up the baton of interrogation. “What interests me even more is the fact that you mentioned the body that I’d found on the beach that morning. How did you know about that?”

  Again there was no response.

  “Did Aaron tell you about the body?” suggested Jude gently. “Had he seen it down there?”

  “Aaron didn’t have anything to do with that bloke dying! Aaron was a good boy…” Once again, as in her television interview, these words unleashed a flood of tears from Theresa Spalding.

  Jude rose and, with an arm around her, led the woman to sit down. “Cry,” she murmured. “It’s good. You need to cry.”

  Then, crouched beside the chair, she rocked the woman in her arms, crooning words whose sound was more important than their meaning. Carole watched the calming process with surprise and a de
gree of envy, knowing that she did not possess such skills.

  Gradually, the shudderings of Theresa Spalding’s body became tremors, which twitched away to nothing. She reached into the pocket of her jeans for a crumpled tissue and rubbed it against her nose.

  “Ready to talk?” asked Jude.

  The woman nodded. To her surprise, Carole found Jude was looking at her, indicating that she was to take over for the next bit.

  “Right.” Carole had taken her glasses off and was rubbing the lenses on the end of her scarf. It was a mannerism of which she was entirely unaware, but which had been noticed by all her Home Office colleagues, a little ritual she went through before any important interview. “We weren’t suggesting that Aaron had anything to do with the death of the man I found on the beach. We just want to know why you were so concerned about that body.”

  Theresa Spalding said nothing. Jude had calmed her, she didn’t mind Jude, but she was still resistant to the Bad Cop.

  “It was nothing to do with me. I didn’t even see the body. I had no connection with it.”

  “Apart from the connection through Aaron?” said Jude.

  For a moment the woman’s face contorted. If the suggestion had come from Carole, she would have shouted some defiant response. Because Jude had spoken, though, she accepted it.

  “Yes. OK.”

  Carole picked up again. “You were particularly concerned about something in the dead man’s pocket.”

  Theresa nodded, still calm. “Yes. Aaron had told me about it. I was just afraid, if the police found it, they’d make the connection with him and come after my boy.”

  “What was it? What was in the man’s pocket?”

  She couldn’t face answering this question without another cigarette. Carole and Jude watched in silence while she fumbled with the packet and lit up again.

  “I don’t know what it was, but it was something with Aaron’s name on it. They all had to put their names on something. It was part of the test.”