by Simon Brett
The landlord shook his head, bunching his lips in a silent whistle of disagreement. ‘Don’t you believe it. Living from hand to mouth, the lot of them.’
‘They’re certainly not. They’re—’
But the sound of Jude and Bill Chilcott’s laughter stopped Carole.
‘“Hand to mouth”. Dentist joke,’ Ted Crisp explained.
Carole said nothing. She’d never been very good at recognizing jokes.
‘Anyway, from the amount he’s been putting back in here recently, I’d say Rory Turnbull was not a happy man. Sorry, I’m forgetting I’m here to work. Two more large white wines, is it?’
‘Yes,’ replied Jude, and Carole didn’t even feel the slightest instinct to ask for a small one. ‘Rory Turnbull?’ Jude mused. ‘And you said his wife’s name’s Barbara?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why, do you know her?’ asked Bill Chilcott.
‘No. Just I had a card through the letter box yesterday. From a Barbara Turnbull. Asking me to go to some coffee morning tomorrow. As a new resident of Fethering. Something connected with All Saints’.’
‘That’d be Rory’s wife,’ Carole confirmed.
‘And I think, if you go, you’ll have the pleasure of meeting my wife, Sandra, there in the morning. She’ll be going after our swim.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Barbara Turnbull’s very active in the church locally. She and her mother, Winnie. Very devout.’
‘That’s probably what drives old Rory in here,’ said Ted. ‘Needs to swill out the odour of sanctity with a few large ones. So you going to this coffee morning then, Jude?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Joining the God squad, eh?’
‘Not sure about that. I just want to find out everything about Fethering. A new place is always exciting, isn’t it?’
Though not sure that she agreed, Carole didn’t raise any objection as they settled back at their table with the refilled glasses. But realizing she’d been given a good cue to find out a bit more about her neighbour, she asked, ‘Are you religious?’
Jude let out a warm chuckle. ‘Depends what you mean by religious.’
‘Well . . . church-going?’
The chuckle expanded into laughter. ‘Good heavens, no.’
Having elicited one small piece of information, Carole pressed her advantage. ‘I don’t know anything about you, actually . . . Jude.’ She managed to say the name with only a vestigial hint of quotation marks around it. ‘Are you married?’
‘Not at the moment. What about you?’
‘Have been. Divorced.’ Carole still felt a slight pang when she said the word. It wasn’t that she regretted the loss of her married status or that she wished David was still around. Very much the opposite. She knew she was much better off without him. But being divorced still seemed to her to carry an overtone of failure.
‘How long ago?’ asked Jude.
‘Ooh, ten years now. No, twelve. How time flies.’
‘Any children?’
‘One son. Stephen. He’s nearly thirty. I don’t see a lot of him. What about you?’
Jude looked at her watch, seeming not to hear the return question. ‘I’m really starving,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to order something to eat. Are you sure you’re not going to?’
‘Well,’ said Carole.
They both ended up ordering fish and chips. By then, Bill Chilcott, having made his customary half of bitter last exactly his customary half an hour, had left the pub with a hearty, ‘Cheerio, mine host.’
The two women’s conversation for the rest of the evening moved away from their personal details. Jude was intrigued by the two dramatic events of Carole’s day and kept returning to the body on the beach and the woman with the gun, offering ever new conjectures to explain them. Only once had Carole managed to get back to her neighbour’s domestic circumstances.
She’d said, ‘So you’re not married at the moment?’
‘No.’
‘But is there someone special in your life?’
But this inquiry had prompted only another throaty chuckle. ‘They’re all special,’ Jude had said.
Carole’s recollections of the end of the evening were a little hazy. Of course, it wasn’t just the alcohol. She may have drunk a little more wine than she usually did – quite a lot more wine than she usually did, as it happened – but it was her shocked emotional state that had made her exceptionally susceptible to its effects.
She comforted herself with this thought as she slipped into stupefied sleep.
The other thought in her mind was a recollection of something her new neighbour had said. Carole couldn’t remember the exact words, but she felt sure Jude had suggested their working together. If the police weren’t going to show any interest in doing it, then the two of them should find out who killed the body on the beach.
Chapter Eight
Carole was woken by Gulliver’s barking. This was unusual. Normally, when she went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea, he was still comatose in his basket by the Aga. And the idea that he might have been barking to alert her to some intruder in the house was laughable. Such behaviour was not in Gulliver’s nature.
As she looked around her bedroom, Carole realized something else was odd. The curtains were not drawn and thin but bright daylight was trickling through the windows. She raised an arm to check her wristwatch, but couldn’t see the hands without her glasses. She fumbled and found them on the far edge of the bedside table, not neatly aligned on the near side where she left them every night.
She squinted to focus on the watch. A quarter to ten! Good heavens!
She sat up sharply, and then realized how much her head was aching.
Carole hurried into some clothes and rushed Gulliver out on to the open ground behind the house. The grass was still dusted with frost and her ears tingled in the cold air.
The speed and relief with which the dog squatted at the first opportunity made her realize what a narrow escape her kitchen floor had had.
She couldn’t blame the dog. He’d been very good, exercising all the control of which he was capable, while his mistress overslept. She couldn’t blame anyone but herself.
Except of course for her new next-door neighbour. It was Jude who’d led her into self-indulgence at the Crown and Anchor. Maybe Jude wasn’t such a suitable companion after all. Carole decided that any future communication between them should be strictly rationed.
She felt a little tremor of embarrassment. She had talked far too much the previous evening, confiding things that she had never confided to anyone else.
No, Jude was definitely a bad influence. Carole couldn’t remember when she’d last had a hangover.
At first she’d decided she wouldn’t take anything for the pain, just brazen it out. But after an hour or so, ready to succumb, she had gone to the bathroom cabinet, only to find it empty of aspirin. Oh well, that was meant. Serve her right. She couldn’t take anything.
Half an hour after reaching that conclusion, though, she had decided she’d have to go to the shop to get some aspirin.
As she set out, neatly belted up in her Burberry, Carole heard a heavy regular thudding which she knew didn’t come from inside her own head. There must be some construction work happening somewhere in the Fethering area. Whatever it was, the noise didn’t make her headache feel any better.
The shop was not a village shop in the old sense of the expression, though it occupied the site where a proper village shop had once stood. That old shop, incorporating a post office, had been run by an elderly couple and very rarely had in stock anything anyone might need. But that didn’t matter. The people of Fethering drove in their large cars to do their major shopping at the nearby out-of-town Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s. They used the village shop only when they’d run out of life’s little essentials – milk, bread, cheese, ketchup, cigarettes or gin – and to collect their pensions. Many of them went in to buy things they didn’t need, just so they�
��d have the opportunity for a good gossip.
But that was no way to run a business and in the late 1980s, when the elderly couple retired, the old shop was demolished, replaced by a rectangular glass-fronted structure and called a supermarket. It was one of a local chain called Allinstore – a compression that someone in a meeting must once have thought was a good idea of ‘All-in-store’. This verbal infelicity was untrue under the Trades Description Act (in fact, the store’s local nickname was ‘Nowtinstore’), but it was also symptomatic of the lacklustre style which epitomized Allinstore management. The only detail the new shop had in common with the old one was that it very rarely had in stock anything anyone might need, but people still went in to buy things they didn’t need, just so’s they’d have the opportunity for a good gossip.
In the transformation of Fethering’s shopping facilities the village had also lost its post office, which led to a lot of complicated travel arrangements on pension days. And Allinstore had become an outlet for the National Lottery, thus enabling the residents of Fethering to shatter their hopes and dreams on a weekly basis.
The architect who’d designed the new supermarket (assuming such a person existed and the plans hadn’t been scribbled on the back of an envelope by a builder who’d once seen a shoebox) had placed two wide roof-supporting pillars just in front of the main tills. Whether he’d done this out of vindictiveness or had simply been infected by the endemic Allinstore incompetence was unknowable, but the result was that many shopping hours were wasted and much frustration caused by customers negotiating their way around these obstructions. Mercifully Allinstore did not supply its shoppers with trolleys, only wire baskets, but many of its elderly clientele brought in their own wheeled shopping containers and these added to the traffic mayhem around the pillars.
Carole, aspirin packet in hand, was stuck behind one of them, out of sight of the tills, when she heard a familiar male voice say, ‘Apparently they found a dead body on the beach this morning.’
She craned forward, encroaching on the elderly lady with a wheeled basket in front of her, and saw Bill Chilcott.
‘Really?’ said the girl behind the till, with the same level of interest she would have accorded to the news that there were no more toilet rolls on the shelf.
‘Oh yes,’ he asserted. ‘Heard it on the BBC local news this morning.’
Carole leaned over the elderly lady in front of her. ‘Morning, Bill.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, unnecessarily loudly and with what he imagined to be a lecherous grin. ‘Crown and Anchor last night, Allinstore this morning. We can’t go on meeting like this. People will start to talk.’
‘Yes.’ Carole dismissed the pleasantry with a curt smile. ‘What’s this about dead bodies?’
‘I heard it on the radio when Sandra and I came back from our swim at the Leisure Centre. A dead body found washed up on Fethering beach.’
‘Did they say who it was? Or what had happened to him?’
‘They didn’t even say whether it was a “him”. Probably be more on the lunchtime news. Mind you, if you want my opinion . . .’ It was a mystery why Bill Chilcott always made this proviso; he was going to give his opinion anyway. ‘I should think it’s one of those weekend sailors.’
He loaded the words with contempt. Though the precise details of Bill Chilcott’s naval background were ill-defined, he never missed an opportunity of saying that seafaring should be left to the professionals. ‘Some idiot who took out a pleasure boat without sufficient knowledge of local conditions and got what was coming to him. If you want my opinion, they should impose some kind of regulations on the kind of people who’re allowed to take boats . . .’
But as Bill Chilcott’s hobbyhorse gathered momentum, Carole stopped listening. In spite of her headache, she felt a glow of vindication. She looked forward to grovelling apologies from Detective Inspector Brayfield and WPC Juster. There had been a body on the beach.
Chapter Nine
Jude found the Shorelands Estate rather spooky as she walked through on the way to Barbara Turnbull’s coffee morning. It took a lot to cast down her spirits. The frosty greyness of the morning hadn’t done it. Nor had she had any adverse reaction to the wine of the night before. She’d drunk no more than a usual evening’s intake. But Jude had a feeling that spending any length of time in Shorelands could bring her spirits down very quickly indeed.
Though laid out on lavishly spacious lines, the predominant feeling the estate gave her was one of claustrophobia. The main entrance gates looked as if they were never closed, but they were nonetheless gates. The ‘20 mph’ speed signs and the ‘CRIME ALERT IN OPERATION’ notices on lampposts gave Jude the feeling of being under surveillance.
This was reinforced by the contents of a display board which she stopped to read. Behind glass, under a neatly painted wooden sign reading ‘Shorelands Estate’, was a list of regulations for residents. Since these included orders as to how visibly washing could be hung out to dry and times at which lawn-mowing was permitted, Jude felt relieved that Shorelands was a part of Fethering way out of her price range.
Though of massive proportions and, in most cases, with much-sought-after sea-backing locations, none of the houses appealed to her either. The estate was far too upmarket to go for uniformity. Each house was very positively different from all the others, and each failed to appeal to Jude in a different way. Every conceivable architectural style was represented, but in a manner that seemed more parody than homage. Whether with Tudor beams, tall Elizabethan clusters of chimneys, geometric Georgian windows, Alpine chalet gables, thatched roofs or the turrets of French châteaux, all the houses seemed firmly rooted in the time of their construction, the unglamorous 1950s.
The architectural style echoed in the Turnbulls’ home was Spanish. The wrought-iron gates in the high white-painted walls might have led into the vineyards of some well-heeled Andalusian grandee, were it not for the coy metal name-plate with a squirrel motif which revealed that the house was called Brigadoon. And the authentic Spanishness of the frontage, with its heavily embossed door, terracotta pots in niches and gratuitous curlicues of wrought iron, was also let down by two quaint Victorian lampposts and by the metal expanse of the double garage’s up-and-over door.
The house into which Jude was admitted had been recently ‘improved’ by an expensive interior designer. No attempt had been made to continue the Spanish theme inside. The carpets toned with the walls; the walls were suitably complemented by the discreet pastel patterns of the curtains. Each item of furniture knew its place. The strain of all this tastefulness was almost tangible. To Jude the interior of Brigadoon had the homely charm of an intensive care unit.
But her impression of the decor was only fleeting. As ever, she was much more interested in people than in things, and immediately focused on the woman who had opened the door to her with a brisk, ‘Ah, hello, you must be the new owner of Woodside Cottage. I’m Barbara Turnbull. I’m sorry, I didn’t know your name, so I hope you didn’t mind my just addressing the card to “The New Resident”. But you said on the phone you’re called “Jude”.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Jude . . . er . . .?’ the hostess fished.
‘Just Jude’s fine.’
Barbara Turnbull was in her fifties and was one of those women who’d spread sideways. She walked with a slight swaying motion, but carefully, as if afraid her bulk might knock things over. Her hair, dyed a copper-beech colour, had been recently cut short. She wore a broad green skirt and little matching waistcoat over a blouse with an ivy design. Her stout legs ended in improbably small, flat blue shoes with decorative buckles. There were a lot of rings on her hands. Uniform beige make-up covered her face, and her lips were highlighted by lipstick of an only slightly darker beige.
‘I’m afraid the house is a complete tip,’ she said, as she hung up Jude’s coat and led her through the hall. Barbara Turnbull’s remark was completely at odds with the evidence. The house looked as if ind
ividual motes of dust were removed with tweezers every hour on the hour. ‘My cleaning lady, Maggie, couldn’t come in this morning. Just called five minutes before she was due to arrive to say she’d got some problem with her son. Honestly, people are so inconsiderate.’
‘Her son couldn’t help being ill, could he?’ Jude suggested.
‘That’s not the point. Maggie should have had some contingency plan ready for that eventuality. Anyway, I’m not sure he was ill. Some other problem, I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s very neurotic, from all accounts. Maggie seems to have no control over that boy of hers. Psychological problems . . . But then . . . single parent.’ Barbara spoke the words as though no further explanation were needed. Jude might have taken issue with her, but they had reached the door of the large front sitting room and she was ushered inside.
‘Now, hello, everyone,’ said Barbara loudly. ‘This is “Jude”, who’s recently moved in to Woodside Cottage in the High Street. I’ll just tell you who everyone is.’
‘Don’t bother.’ Jude knew she’d never remember a whole catalogue of anonymous names. She’d do much better talking to the other guests individually, matching names with personalities. ‘I’ll work it out as we—’
Too late. Barbara Turnbull was determined to go through the full list. There were about a dozen, all women, with an average age of well over sixty. Jude got the impression that few of them had ever had jobs beyond looking after husbands and children. They were dressed as though their lives had become one long stationary cruise. Most of the faces looked deterrent, one or two more approachable. All of them wore too much make-up.
‘. . . and this is my mother, Winnie.’ Barbara Turnbull’s guided tour finished on the smallest and oldest person present. ‘Winnie Norton. Now, “Jude”, why don’t you sit and have a chat to Mummy while I get you some coffee. How do you like it?’
‘Just black, please.’
‘Any sweetener?’
‘No, thanks.’
