by Simon Brett
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.
Chapter 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 life-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 squeamishness. 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.
When the dog was shining clean and snuffling into sleep by the Aga, and when Carole had mopped up the inevitable wet footprints he had left on the kitchen floor, it seemed natural for her to continue cleaning the kitchen. As a result, it was after nine before she went into the sitting room to confront the telephone.
She had gone through the walk back from the beach, as well as the mechanical processes of bathing Gulliver and cleaning the kitchen, without allowing herself to think about what she had seen. She had kept an equally tight control on her body, not permitting it the slightest tremor of reaction to the shock. As she had done frequently before in her life, Carole Seddon kept everything firmly damped down.
She dialled 999 and asked for the police. In simple, unemotional sentences, she gave them the necessary information. She described her actions precisely, the direction of her walk, the time she had returned, the fact that she had bathed her dog and cleaned the kitchen. She pinpointed the exact position where the body had been found and gave her considered estimate as to how long it would be before the returning tide reached that point. She gave her address and telephone number, and was unsurprised when told that someone would be round to talk to her.
Carole Seddon put the phone down and sat in an armchair. She did not collapse into an armchair. She sat in one.
And then she heard the strange noise from outside. Perhaps it had just started. Or it could have been going on unheard for some time, so intense had been her concentration on the task in hand.
The sound was a rhythmic dull thudding, something being hit repeatedly. Carole rose from her chair and moved tentatively towards the front-facing window. Through it, she saw Jude in the adjacent front garden. Her new neighbour had spread a slightly threadbare rug over a structure of boxes and was beating it with a flat besom brush. Though still wearing a trademark long skirt, Jude had removed her loose-fitting top to reveal a bright yellow T-shirt. Her large bosom and chubby arms shuddered with the efforts of her carpet-beating. In spite of the cold, her cheeks were red from the exercise.
Carole’s instinctive reaction was one of disapproval. There was something old-fashioned in Jude’s carpet-beating. The scene could have come from a film of back-to-back terraced houses in the 1930s. Northern terraced houses. The possibility, suddenly occurring to
Carole, that Jude might come from ‘the North’ prompted a visceral recoil within her. ‘The North’ still conjured up images of unwanted intimacy, of people constantly ‘dropping in’, of back doors left unlocked to facilitate this ‘dropping in’. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in Fethering.
Back doors were kept firmly locked. Approaches to people’s houses were made strictly from the front. And, except for essential gardening and maintenance, the only part of a front garden that was used was the path. Even if the space caught the evening sun, no one would dream of sitting in their front garden. And it certainly wasn’t the proper place to do anything domestic, like beating a carpet. Passers-by, seeing someone engaged in such activities, might be forced into conversation.
In Fethering, except for chance meetings in the High Street, social encounters were conducted by arrangement. It was inappropriate to meet someone without having received planning permission. A prefatory phone call – ideally a couple of days before the proposed encounter – was the minimum requirement.
These thoughts were so instinctive that they took no time at all to flash through Carole Seddon’s mind, but they still took long enough to allow something appalling to happen. Jude, taking a momentary respite from her efforts with the besom, had turned and caught sight of her neighbour framed in the window. Eye contact was unavoidable.
For Carole then to have repressed a half-smile and little flap of the hand would have been the height of bad manners. Her minimal gesture was reciprocated by a huge wave and a cheery grin.
If she had left the contact there, Carole knew she would have appeared standoffish. And, though standoffish she undoubtedly was, she had no wish to appear so. She found her hand and face doing a little mime of ‘I’ll come out and say hello.’
‘My name’s Carole Seddon. Welcome to Fethering. If there’s anything I can do to help out, please don’t hesitate to tell me.’
‘Thanks very much.’ Carole found her hand grasped and firmly shaken. ‘My name’s Jude.’
‘Yes . . .’ Carole awaited the gloss of a surname, but wasn’t given one. ‘You’ll find we’re a friendly lot round here,’ she lied.
‘Good.’ Jude chuckled. It was a warm, earthy sound. ‘I get along with most people. Most people do, don’t they?’
Carole granted this alien concept a thin smile. ‘Well, if I can tell you where things are . . . shops, dry-cleaners, you know . . . I’m only next door, so just ask.’
‘Thanks. I’m sure I’ll find my way around pretty quickly.’
‘Mm . . .’ Carole found the openness of Jude’s dreamy brown eyes slightly disconcerting.
‘Equally,’ her neighbour said, ‘if there’s anything I can do to help you out, you’ll say, won’t you?’
Carole nodded this offer token gratitude, however incongruous might be the idea of her suddenly turning for assistance to someone she didn’t know. The woman had only just moved to Fethering, for goodness’ sake. Any support being offered should go from the established resident to the newcomer, not the other way round.
Surely Jude didn’t imagine her neighbour was about to confide in her? Carole was hardly likely suddenly to start spilling the beans to a stranger about what she’d seen on the beach. But even as she had the thought, she was surprised how much she did want to talk about the shock she had received that morning. And there was something in those brown eyes that invited confidences.
‘Anyway –’ Carole shook herself back on track – ‘better get on. Things to do.’
‘Yes.’ Jude grinned easily. ‘Me too. House is crammed full of boxes. God knows how long it’ll take me to sort it all out.’
‘Moving’s always a nightmare.’
‘Still, I can do it at my own pace. No hurry.’
Carole smiled as if she endorsed this view. But she didn’t. Of course there was a hurry. One couldn’t live in mess. One had an obligation to get one’s house tidy as soon as possible. If people weren’t aware of the necessity for hurry in life, society would break down completely.
‘See you soon then.’ Jude gave a relaxed wave and hefted her besom for a renewed assault on the carpet.
‘Yes. Yes,’ said Carole, turning in slight confusion back towards her front door.
Inside the house, she berated herself for how little solid fact she had got out of the conversation. She wasn’t that interested, of course, but there were things one ought to know about a new neighbour.
She hadn’t even elicited a surname, for goodness’ sake. Jude. Just Jude. That wasn’t very satisfactory. And then again, what was the woman’s status? What was her age? Was she married, single, divorced? Was there a regular man on the scene? Carole realized that, uncharacteristically, she hadn’t even checked out Jude’s ring finger. Something compelling about those big brown eyes made it difficult to divert one’s gaze elsewhere.
Did Jude have a job? A private income? A pension? Carole knew none of these things. Not that she was interested, but it was the kind of information that might be important at some stage.
Good heavens, Carole realized, she hadn’t even found out whether or not Jude came from ‘the North’.
Chapter Three
‘So why were you walking on that part of the beach, Mrs Seddon?’
Carole didn’t like Detective Inspector Brayfield’s tone. She was the one who’d reported the body, after all. If anything, she deserved congratulation. Certainly not this hint of suspicion in her interrogator’s voice.
Also, why were there two of them? Not just the Inspector in his almost dandyish single-breasted black suit. There was also the uniformed WPC, Juster, who hadn’t said much but was clearly taking everything in. She sat on a straight-backed chair, tensely alert. Was there some new directive that the police always had to work in twos, even for routine inquiries? Maybe it was a gender thing. Allegations of sexual harassment would not be risked if a male police officer was never left alone with a female witness.
But the explanation didn’t seem adequate. Carole still had the feeling that their encounter was adversarial, as if the police were expecting more from her than mere corroboration of what she’d already said over the telephone. She had dealt with a great many police officers in the course of her work at the Home Office but had never before felt this aura of mistrust.
‘I always go for an early-morning walk along the beach. I have a dog.’ Gulliver hadn’t provided a visual aid when the police arrived. He was still sleeping off his walk at the foot of the Aga. As a guard dog he was hopeless. His first instinct was not to deter entry, but to give any new arrival at the house a fulsome welcome. ‘And I always take my dog on the beach first thing.’
‘“First thing” was rather early this morning, wasn’t it, Mrs Seddon? Can hardly have been light when you set off.’
‘I woke early. It always takes me a bit of time to adjust when the clocks change.’
‘I understand,’ said the Inspector, who clearly didn’t. ‘So why did you go to that particular part of the beach this morning?’
‘It wasn’t a particular part of the beach. It was just where I happened to be walking.’ Exasperated by the scepticism in Detective Inspector Brayfield’s eye, Carole went on. ‘There are only two directions in which you can go along the beach. Off Seaview Road there’s a path which goes down by the Yacht Club. At the end of that you’re on the beach and you have the choice of turning left or turning right. Left you go virtually straight into the sea wall, so this morning, like most mornings, I decided to turn right.’
She wasn’t meaning to sound sarcastic, but she knew that’s how the words were coming out.
‘For any particular reason?’
What was it with that word ‘particular’? ‘No,’ Carole snapped. ‘For no particular reason.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ It was WPC Juster this time, her voice showing the professional concern of someone who’s done a counselling course.
‘Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you!’ Why were they treating her like some s
emi-invalid?
‘How old are you, Mrs Seddon?’ Juster went on.
‘I don’t really see that it’s any business of yours, but I’m fifty-three.’
‘Ah,’ said the WPC.
‘Ah,’ the Inspector echoed, as if that explained everything.
What was this – some kind of medical assessment? Had they written her off as a menopausal hysteric? Surely not. She had told them everything in a manner that was unemotional to the point of being dull. What were they trying to insinuate?
Though these questions ran through her mind, being Carole Seddon, of course she didn’t voice any of them. Instead, she took the initiative. ‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘when a body like that is found, it’s photographed in situ first, and then taken off for forensic examination?’
Detective Inspector Brayfield, stroking the knot of his brightly coloured silk tie, agreed that that would be the normal procedure. But he wasn’t to be deflected from his dissection of her story.
‘You say there were cuts on the man’s neck and scar tissue on the inside of his wrist?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which might suggest he had been an intravenous drug user?’
‘Quite possibly.’
‘Do you know much about intravenous drug users, Mrs Seddon?’
‘No, I don’t. But I do know enough to recognize that that was a possible explanation of the scars.’
‘From things you’ve seen on television?’
