The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  ‘Right you are, “Jude”. Just black it is.’

  ‘So how do you like Fethering?’ asked Winnie Norton. Her hair, a blue that was picked up by the veins on the back of her hands, had been engineered into a rigid structure like spun sugar. The eyes were black and unashamedly curious. From the Yorkshire terrier on her lap peered another pair of black and unashamedly curious eyes. They took in Jude, not liking what they saw, and a low growl rumbled from the tiny silken body.

  Winnie Norton wore a tweed suit whose dominant colour was turquoise. There were even more rings on her hands than on her daughter’s, but they hung loosely on the thin talons.

  ‘Seems fine from what I’ve seen of it so far,’ Jude replied.

  ‘Did you know the area before you moved here?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘Well, you’ll find Fethering’s very welcoming,’ said Winnie Norton. The dog, unwilling to endorse this view, yapped petulantly. ‘Quiet, Churchill.’ She tapped his nose gently before going on, ‘Yes, very welcoming . . . to the right sort of person.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Of course, in the old days, before the war, only the right sort of person moved here, but since they developed that Downside Estate . . . well, something of an element’s crept in.’ The little black eyes scrutinized Jude, trying to gauge the risk of her being an ‘element’.

  The smaller set of black eyes on her lap had already made up their mind. Jude was definitely an ‘element’. He yapped ferociously, baring his vicious little teeth.

  ‘Now do be quiet, Churchill,’ said his mistress mildly. ‘We have to be on our best behaviour for a coffee morning, don’t we?’

  The yapping subsided into a malignant rumbling.

  ‘Have you lived here long, Mrs Norton?’ asked Jude.

  ‘All my life in the area, yes.’

  ‘But not all that time here at Shorelands?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t live on the estate. No, when I sold the big house after my husband died, I bought one of those new flats near the Yacht Club. Spray Lodge – do you know where I mean?’

  ‘Sorry. Still getting my bearings.’

  ‘It’s a very nice block. The residents do have a degree of control over who moves in.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Well, you have to these days, don’t you?’ Winnie Norton chuckled. ‘All kinds of people have got the money to move into somewhere like Fethering now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude realized that, if she didn’t quickly move the subject in another direction, she’d come to blows with the old lady. ‘Do you have any grandchildren, Mrs Norton?’

  ‘No. Barbara and Rory didn’t want children.’

  ‘Ah.’ Churchill barked approval of this situation, while Jude looked around the vast sitting room. ‘So it’s just the two of them living in this house, is it?’

  ‘Rory does very well,’ said his mother-in-law, as if that answered the question. And perhaps, Jude reflected, by Winnie Norton’s standards, it did. Rory Turnbull was making a lot of money as a dentist; therefore it behoved him to buy a large house on the Shorelands Estate. That was a fact of life, nothing to do with how much space he and Barbara actually needed. ‘Of course,’ the old lady went on, ‘he never really was our sort, but Barbara’s done wonders with him.’

  Jude began to understand why Rory Turnbull needed his intravenous drip of whisky down at the Crown and Anchor. But Winnie Norton was prevented from casting down more of her poisoned pearls of wisdom by the arrival of her daughter with Jude’s coffee.

  ‘Now you mustn’t monopolize our guest, Mummy. Incidentally, “Jude” –’ like Carole, Barbara Turnbull still couldn’t quite say the name without a penumbra of quotation marks (a fact which amused its owner hugely) – ‘we are hoping that Roddy himself will drop in later.’

  ‘Roddy?’

  ‘Canon Roderick Granger, to give him his full title. He’s the vicar of All Saints’. A tower of strength locally.’ Barbara lowered her voice and gave the newcomer a look whose beadiness matched her mother’s and Churchill’s. ‘You are a believer, aren’t you, Jude?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  The easiness of the reply brought visible relief to Barbara Turnbull’s face. ‘Thank goodness for that. In these benighted times there are lots of people who don’t even put “C of E” on forms.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was a believer in the Church of England,’ Jude pointed out.

  Her hostess looked horror-struck. ‘You’re not Catholic, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  Another sigh of relief. ‘There are a lot of them down here, you know. Arundel’s quite a centre for the Rock Cakes.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Mm. It’s a Catholic cathedral there, you know.’ Barbara moved on. ‘You’ll find All Saints’ is a friendly church, with quite a lot of social activities. Roddy’s very keen on that side of things. He always says it’s too easy for church-goers to get po-faced about religion.’ A little chuckle. ‘He’s such an amusing man.’

  If what she’d just heard was an example of the vicar’s wit, Jude wasn’t convinced. What was clear, though, was that, in her hostess’s eyes, Canon Roderick Granger could do no wrong. She was almost coquettish when she talked about him. It was quite possible that the Canon was held up to her husband as an exemplar of all the things that Rory Turnbull wasn’t.

  ‘Anyway,’ Barbara went on, ‘if you don’t see him this morning, you’ll catch him at the morning service on Sunday. Roddy’s sermons are quite something. Lots of jolly good laughs on the way, but a real core of serious truth.’

  ‘I’m not a church-goer,’ said Jude.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I accepted your invitation because I wanted to meet some local people, not because I’m ever likely to step into All Saints’.’

  Barbara Turnbull gaped like a beached fish.

  ‘But I’ve nothing against the Church of England,’ Jude reassured her with a huge smile. ‘Everyone should be allowed to believe in what they want to believe in – don’t you agree?’

  Barbara’s expression showed that she certainly didn’t agree. Allow everyone to believe in what they want to believe in? That, her look seemed to say, is a short cut to anarchy.

  But her transparent thoughts remained unvoiced. ‘Do let me introduce you to some other people, “Jude”.’ This time she managed to get a double set of quotation marks round the name.

  With the newcomer in her wake, Barbara bore down on a bird-like woman with spiky white hair who was saying, ‘And this is meant to be a civilized country. I ask you, is it civilized to park a boat trailer so that the mast goes over the hedge into one’s neighbour’s garden by a full three inches? I mean, is that the action of a civilized human being? I’d say it was the action of a boorish lout, if you want my opinion.’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Barbara Turnbull cooed, ‘but I’d like to introduce you to someone who’s a very near neighbour of yours, Sandra.’

  The bird-like eyes darted to take in Jude and form an instant opinion of her.

  ‘This is Sandra Chilcott.’ It was said in best hostess manner. ‘And here’s the new owner of Woodside Cottage, whose name is . . .’

  ‘Jude,’ said Jude, taking Sandra Chilcott’s thin hand in hers.

  ‘Jude, of course! I’ve heard all about you from Bill. Though, of course, being a man, he didn’t tell me anything very interesting. I really do think men walk around with their eyes closed, don’t you, Jude? They never notice anything.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Didn’t take you long to find your way to the Crown and Anchor, though, did it?’

  Jude was then introduced to the two women either side of Sandra, who’d acted as audience for the diatribe about her neighbour. ‘Well, “Jude”,’ one of them asked, ‘have you come down to Fethering in search of the quiet life?’

  ‘No, not really. I think quietness is an internal thing, don’t you?’

  The two women looked at her in some puzzlement, as Sandra took her
cue. ‘If it’s quietness you’re after, I’m not sure that you’ve come to the right place. You’ll find quite a lot of exciting things happen in Fethering.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Sandra Chilcott warmed to her task as news-bearer. ‘For example, this morning a dead body was found on the beach.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Yippee!’

  Carole gave her visitor an old-fashioned look. Her head was still aching and she still blamed Jude for leading her astray. It was a bit premature for her new neighbour to arrive again so soon at her door – and unannounced. And particularly shouting, ‘Yippee!’ That wasn’t the way things were done in Fethering.

  ‘What is the cause of your celebration?’ Carole asked, rather frostily.

  Jude was blithely unaffected by the deterrence in her tone. ‘You were right. There was a body on the beach. I met Bill Chilcott’s wife, Sandra, at Barbara Turnbull’s – and she’d heard about it on local radio.’

  ‘Yes, I heard too. I met Bill in Allinstore.’

  ‘So you’re vindicated, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  They’d been standing on the doorstep almost long enough for the situation to become awkward. Carole would have to either invite her neighbour in or quickly invent some excuse and get rid of her.

  But Jude solved the social dilemma before it developed. ‘Anyway, I was thinking there’s bound to be something about it on the local news at lunchtime.’ She looked at her watch, a huge white dial which appeared to be tied on to her chubby arm with a broad velvet ribbon. ‘In two minutes. So I think we ought to watch that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Carole had been intending to do so anyway. But before she had time to say, ‘Thank you very much for the reminder. I’ll see you later’, and close the door, Jude had grabbed her by the hand.

  ‘So come on, let’s go and watch it at my place.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll knock up something for lunch. And we can open a bottle of wine.’

  ‘In the daytime?’ Carole responded instinctively.

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘I think I probably had quite enough wine last night.’

  ‘Oh, feeling the effects, are you?’ There was no judgement, only sympathy in the way the question was posed. ‘In that case you definitely need a hair of the dog.’

  ‘That reminds me. I was going to take Gulliver out for—’

  ‘Come on!’ And Carole’s hand, still being held, was given a quite definite yank.

  ‘But I haven’t got my coat!’ wailed Carole.

  ‘We’re only going about five yards.’

  As she locked her front door and followed Jude down the symmetrical flags of her garden path, Carole managed to convince herself she was going simply because it would be good to talk about her traumatic discovery of the day before, and not because she wanted to have a snoop inside Jude’s home.

  Her neighbour’s front path was an ill-fitting jigsaw of uneven red bricks, through whose interstices moss and weeds protruded. ‘Got into a terrible state, hasn’t it?’ Carole observed. ‘You’ll have to get this sorted, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I quite like it like that.’ The breeziness with which Jude committed this blasphemy to the standards of Fethering suggested that it wasn’t said for effect, that she really meant it.

  She pushed the dark-wood front door open with an elbow and beckoned Carole to follow her inside. Good heavens, she hadn’t even locked it. The fact that Jude had gone only next door didn’t excuse this lapse. Suppose Carole had invited her in? Fethering High Street was a Neighbourhood Watch Area and, as everyone locally knew, the average burglary took less than three minutes.

  And, dear oh dear, as she passed through the hall, Carole noticed that Jude’s voluminous handbag was on a table right by the front door. Where had Jude come from to have such a cavalier attitude to the serious business of security? The thought reminded Carole once again that she still didn’t know where Jude had come from. In fact, she knew very little more about her neighbour than she had the moment they first met.

  The sitting room into which she was ushered was low and, because the old leaded windows hadn’t yet been replaced by sealed double-glazing units, rather dark. Though Carole had never been inside Woodside Cottage during its previous occupancy, she’d assumed that the old lady would have had more of the basic modernization done. There was no evidence of central heating radiators, though an open fire crackled cheerfully from the grate (without a fire-guard in front of it, Carole noted, awarding her neighbour another black mark for domestic security).

  Jude snapped on a couple of lights with dangly paper shades and illuminated what appeared to be an overstocked junk shop. She crossed to a portable television perched on a pile of old wooden wine-crates and switched it on. ‘News is on One,’ she said. ‘Fiddle with the aerial if the picture’s fuzzy. I’ll go and open the wine.’

  And she disappeared into the kitchen before Carole could say that she didn’t really need wine at this time of day. As the television came to life with a picture that was indeed fuzzy and as she moved the aerial on top of the set around to improve it, Carole took in the crammed contents of the room.

  No surface was unlittered. There were piles of books and papers and knick-knacks everywhere. And there didn’t seem any theme or coherence to what was on display. Carved African animals jostled with brass handbells and green marble-stoppered bottles. Silver-framed photographs of stiff Victorians consorted with china cats and glass candlesticks. Eggs of exotically veined stone lay beside Russian dolls and spinner’s bobbins.

  Snuggled in the midst of this chaos were a small sofa and two armchairs. It was impossible to tell whether they were a matching set, though their varied outlines under the brightly patterned throws that covered them suggested otherwise. Further pieces of furniture were also hung with gratuitous drapery. The room was like the nest of a kleptomaniac magpie.

  One must make allowances, thought Carole magnanimously. The poor woman moved in only a couple of days ago. She’s just had everything dumped in here. When she’s got the stuff distributed around the house, this room’ll look a lot tidier.

  ‘Do sit down,’ said Jude, bustling in from the kitchen. One hand held a bottle of red wine, the other two glasses and a corkscrew that she was busily plying. As she slumped into one of the heavily draped armchairs, she looked around with satisfaction. ‘At least I’ve got this room done,’ she said.

  Carole’s jaw dropped. The decor was intentional. The confusion expressed how Jude wanted the room to look. But, even if Carole had been so ill-mannered as to say anything, there wasn’t time. Jude sprang up again and shoved the wine and glasses into her neighbour’s hands. ‘Here, you pour this.’

  Then she crossed to the still-fuzzy television and, with a cry of, ‘Come on, behave yourself, you little bastard!’, gave it a resounding thump on the side. The picture immediately resolved itself into crystalline clarity.

  Her timing had been perfect. The local news had just started. It was fronted by the kind of gauche female newsreader who makes you realize that, bad though network presenters may be, there remain unimaginable depths of the television barrel yet to be scraped.

  But Carole and Jude didn’t notice the girl’s incompetence; they were too caught up in what she was actually saying.

  ‘A body was found on the beach at Fethering this morning by a woman walking her dog.’

  ‘Only a day late,’ Jude chuckled.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ Carole objected.

  ‘The body,’ the newsreader droned on, ‘has been identified as that of sixteen-year-old –’ Carole’s jaw dropped – ‘Arran Spalding . . .’

  As the name was mentioned, a picture of the dead boy filled the screen. One of those school photographs, posed against a vague cloud-like backdrop. The caption showed that, though it had been pronounced ‘Arran’, his name was spelt ‘Aaron’. Aaron Spalding, with his floppy blond fringe and cheekily crooked grin, looked nearer twelve t
han sixteen. Probably he had been when the picture was taken. Self-conscious adolescents don’t like being photographed; what showed on the screen was perhaps the most recent image available. But the innocent wickedness of his face added a poignancy to the fact of the boy’s death.

  The newsreader’s voice continued drably: ‘. . . who lived in Fethering and who had been missing for the past twenty-four hours. The cause of death has not yet been established, but the police have not ruled out foul play.’

  Then, with one of those awkward jump-cuts beloved of local newsreaders, she moved on to the allegation that a recent spate of deaths among ducks in the area had been caused by ferrets.

  The two women looked at each other in amazement. Carole noticed with even more amazement that half the contents of her wine glass had somehow disappeared.

  ‘But it’s . . . I mean . . .’ she spluttered. ‘It was a middle-aged man, the body I saw. No way could it have been mistaken for a teenager.’

  ‘It wasn’t mistaken for a teenager,’ said Jude firmly. ‘There have been two bodies on the beach. First the middle-aged man you saw, then this poor kid.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s any connection between them, do you?’

  Jude cocked her head thoughtfully to one side. ‘There’s no reason why there should be. It’d be a remarkable coincidence if they were connected. Then again, it’s already a coincidence that two dead bodies have appeared on consecutive days. Logic dictates that the two incidents have nothing to do with each other, but my instinct says they have. And,’ she concluded mischievously, ‘in a straight fight between logic and instinct, I’d go for instinct every time.’

  ‘Hm . . .’ Carole might have called the odds rather differently. ‘Well, this poor boy’s death is nothing to do with me. It’s not as if I even found the body. Some other woman with a dog. I wonder who it was . . . And, as for the first body, the police don’t even believe that existed.’

  ‘But it did!’

  Jude sounded aggrieved, almost as if it was her story that was being doubted. Carole realized, with a sudden warm feeling, that her neighbour had never for a moment questioned her account of what she had found.