The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Having an instinct for what’s happened, having a flash of inspiration – that’s the easy bit. It’s when you try to make the charges stick that most cases collapse.’

  Jude nodded thoughtfully. Then a slow smile spread across her broad features.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Carole.

  ‘You talked about flashes of inspiration. I think I’ve just had one.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About finding the third boy. I may be wrong, but at least I’ve an idea where we can start looking.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  They didn’t have far to go through the Shorelands Estate to reach Brigadoon. The front garden’s Victorian lampposts continued to look incongruous in their mock-Spanish surroundings.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Carole complained as they approached the studded door. ‘We know Barbara won’t be there. We know her mother won’t be there. And Rory’ll be at work in Brighton.’

  ‘It’s not them we’ve come to see,’ said Jude firmly, as she pressed the doorbell.

  The woman who came to the door was probably late forties and could have been attractive in different circumstances. She wore jeans and a faded sweat shirt; her greying hair was scraped back into a rubber band at the nape of her neck and her face had the taut, drained look of total exhaustion.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, in a surprisingly cultured voice, and waited for them to state their business.

  Jude took the initiative. ‘Good morning. This is Carole and I’m Jude. We’re both friends of Barbara Turnbull and—’

  ‘I’m afraid Mrs Turnbull isn’t in.’

  ‘No, we know that. You’re Maggie, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman conceded cautiously.

  ‘It was you we wanted to have a word with.’

  Her face closed over. ‘You’re nothing to do with the Social Services, are you?’

  ‘No, no, we’re not. I promise.’

  But that didn’t resolve her suspicions. ‘I’m sorry. I’m working.’ She reached to close the door, but Jude’s next words stopped her.

  ‘We wanted to have a word about your son.’

  A new wave of exhaustion flooded the woman’s body. Her shoulders drooped. There was a note of fatalism in her voice as she asked, ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘That’s what we want to find out.’ Jude pressed home her slight advantage. ‘In particular what he was doing last Monday night.’

  This did frighten the woman. Her spoken response, that she had no idea what they were talking about, was belied by a wildness in her eyes.

  Some instinct told Carole this was the moment once again to produce the Stanley knife from her raincoat pocket. The woman’s eyes grew wilder.

  ‘What’s that? Where did you find it?’

  The telephone on the hall table rang. Indecision flickered in Maggie’s frightened eyes. She didn’t want to invite them in, but equally she didn’t want to let them go until she knew as much as they knew. The phone rang on. It was clearly not going to be picked up by anybody else or by an answering machine. ‘Wait there,’ she said. ‘I’ll just be a moment.’

  She picked up the phone and gave the number. ‘What? Oh yes. Yes, he is here. I’ll get him to the phone.’ She crossed to the foot of the stairs and called up, ‘Mr Turnbull! Telephone!’

  She put the receiver down and crossed back to the women at the front door.

  ‘I thought Mr Turnbull would be at work,’ said Carole.

  ‘He’s not well.’ Dismissing the detail quickly, Maggie came closer and addressed them with a quiet urgency. ‘Look, I can’t really talk now. But I do want to talk.’ Then, with a mixture of dread and pleading in her voice, she said, ‘You haven’t spoken to anyone else about Nick, have you?’

  ‘No,’ replied Jude reassuringly.

  ‘Not yet,’ added Carole, who thought their level of menace should be maintained. Maggie had something to tell them; having hooked her, they didn’t want to lose her.

  ‘Carole. Good morning. What’re you doing here?’

  Rory Turnbull was coming down the stairs. He wore a shapeless towelling dressing gown. He looked raddled, hungover and haunted.

  Carole improvised wildly. ‘We were just calling about a Labrador charity I’m involved in. The Canine Trust.’

  ‘If you’re looking for a handout, I’m afraid dogs come fairly low down my pecking order of good causes.’

  ‘No, we were just . . .’ Not wishing to get tangled up in details of her fictitious charity call, Carole moved on. ‘You met my new neighbour, Jude, in the pub, didn’t you?’

  ‘Did I?’ Rory Turnbull’s bloodshot eyes showed no recognition but took Jude in, as though he were memorizing her features for future reference. ‘You will excuse me.’ He turned to Maggie and asked gracelessly, ‘Who did you say was on the phone?’

  ‘The BMW garage. Something about a bill or—’

  ‘I’ll take it in the study.’ Without a word to the two women still standing on his doorstep, Rory Turnbull left the hall.

  The urgency remained in Maggie’s voice as she said, ‘Listen, I can’t talk now. I’m through here at twelve. Could we meet after that?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jude. ‘Where?’

  ‘You’d better come round to my place. It’s not far. Spindrift Lane – do you know it?’

  Carole nodded. ‘I do.’

  ‘Number 26. Say half-past twelve. I’ll be back by then.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘And please don’t say anything to anyone.’ There was a naked appeal in Maggie’s eyes as she echoed Theresa Spalding’s words. ‘Nick’s a good boy. He is, really.’

  ‘I’m wondering why Rory came down,’ Carole mused as she drove them back to the High Street. ‘They must have a phone upstairs in a house that size. In their bedroom certainly.’

  ‘Come to that, why didn’t he answer it in the first place?’

  ‘Asleep? He looked pretty crumpled when he did come downstairs.’

  ‘Yes. Alternatively, he may just have been curious as to who was at the door. He heard our voices and came to have a snoop.’

  ‘He certainly subjected you to a rather searching look, didn’t he?’

  Jude nodded and gave a little shudder. ‘Uncomfortably searching. There’s something very strange happening with that man, isn’t there? He doesn’t seem to be behaving like the pillar of society a Fethering dentist should be.’

  ‘Certainly not. He’s behaving like an alcoholic.’

  ‘Or someone who’s in the throes of a nervous breakdown?’

  ‘Maybe. Still, poor old Rory’s not really our concern. Except for the fact that his boat was possibly used as a temporary morgue, I can’t see that he has anything to do with our body on the beach.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘Though Maggie clearly does have something relevant to tell us. How on earth did you know that she would, Jude?’

  ‘It was just a guess. Intuition, if you like. Barbara Turnbull had said something about Maggie’s son having psychological problems and . . . I put two and two together. You know, sometimes you just have a sense of things being connected, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ replied Carole, who never did.

  ‘Bad luck. Oh, here we are.’

  Carole brought the Renault to a halt outside Wood-side Cottage. She looked at her watch. ‘Spindrift Lane’s only five minutes’ walk away. Hardly worth taking the car. Shall I knock on your door about twenty past twelve?’

  ‘That’d be fine.’

  Carole couldn’t help herself from fishing a little. ‘So you’ll have time for a nice cup of coffee with Brad . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Jude breezily. ‘I’ll have to empty a few more boxes upstairs, I’m afraid. Brad’s car’s not here. He’s gone.’

  ‘Oh.’ Carole couldn’t for the life of her have left it there. ‘But I dare say you’ll be seeing him again . . .’

  ‘I dare say,’ Jude agreed, with an infur
iating, but probably not deliberate, lack of specificity.

  Carole parked the car in her garage. As she was doing so, she noticed on the mat a little scrape of mud left by Jude’s boot. She got out the dustpan and brush which was used only for the car and swept it up.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Spindrift Lane was part of the residential network which spread out from Fethering High Street. While not aspiring to the wealth-proclaiming grandeur of the Shorelands Estate, the houses there bore witness to lives well spent and money well invested. Paintwork gleamed and anything that could be polished had been polished. Even in November, no front grass was allowed to grow ragged and weeds had been banished from the interstices between flagstones in garden paths. The area was a testament to bourgeois values, which are, for the most part, financial values.

  Number 26 Spindrift Lane, however, fell short of these values. The front lawn was unkempt, the paint on the window-frames blistered and split. The garden gate sagged, maintaining only a tenuous contact with its hinges. Carole and Jude exchanged looks as they pushed through and approached the front door.

  Maggie had changed out of her working clothes into a navy woollen suit. With hair neatly brushed, her appearance matched the educated accent which had seemed so discordant earlier in the morning. As she ushered her two visitors into the sitting room, her mouth was tight with anxiety. Their welcome was polite – she had been well brought up – but not warm.

  Carole and Jude were sat down on a sofa in a room that was sparsely furnished and, like the exterior of the house, could have done with being decorated. The grate in the fireplace was bleakly empty. The bunched curtains in the bay window had faded unevenly. There was a portable television, but no video recorder. The room boasted few ornaments, but those there were looked to be of good quality. The two watercolour seascapes on the wall made Carole want to know the artist’s name. On the mantelpiece stood a pair of rather fine brass candlesticks and a photograph of a boy aged about fourteen. It was a school one, posed against a cloudy background, like the picture of Aaron Spalding featured in the Fethering Observer.

  Maggie stood in front of the fireplace and confronted them. ‘All right. What is all this? What’s Nick being accused of?’

  ‘We’re not accusing your son of anything,’ Jude replied calmly. ‘May I call you Maggie?’

  ‘Maggie . . . Mrs Kent . . . I don’t care. Just tell me what you know.’

  ‘You’ve heard about the death of that boy Aaron Spalding?’ A curt nod of acknowledgement. ‘Well, we have reason to believe that Aaron Spalding, with two other youths, was messing around on the seafront here at Fethering on Monday night.’

  ‘How do you mean, “messing around”?’

  ‘They had a few drinks and then they broke into the Fethering Yacht Club.’

  Maggie Kent didn’t say anything. She still watched and waited, gauging how much they knew.

  ‘We know that one of the other youths was called Dylan. He’s training as a fitter with J. T. Carpets . . .’

  Carole decided that Jude’s gentle approach was too much Good Cop, so she came in heavily in her Bad Cop persona. ‘And we have reason to believe that the third youth was your son, Nick.’

  For the first time in their acquaintance, Jude turned a look of reproof on her neighbour. They were going too fast. Maggie Kent didn’t look like a woman who’d crumple in the face of bullying. They needed to play her very carefully if they were going to get anything out of her.

  Maggie was silent for a moment. The women on the sofa watched her, each afraid that Carole had blown it.

  Eventually she spoke. Her voice was quiet and measured. It was costing her a lot to achieve, but she was in control. ‘Are you suggesting that my son had anything to do with Aaron Spalding’s death?’

  ‘No,’ Jude hastened to assure her. ‘Certainly not. Whatever happened to Aaron happened on the Tuesday night. We’re concerned about events on the Monday.’

  ‘Why? Why are you concerned about them?’

  Carole took this on. ‘Because I have reason to believe that a crime was committed that night.’

  Anger blazed in Maggie Kent’s eyes. ‘And you think Nick did it?’

  ‘No. I’m not quite sure what the crime was and I certainly have no idea at this point who did it. We’re just trying to piece together the events of Monday night.’ There was a silence, before Carole went on, ‘I’ve spoken to the police about this, but they seem unwilling to take me seriously.’

  ‘Oh? So your aim is not to turn all your information over to the police?’

  ‘No. Not until we know precisely what happened and have a completely watertight case. I’m not going to be treated like a hysterical woman a second time.’

  ‘Hm . . .’ Maggie Kent nodded, taking in what she’d been told. Something Carole had said had relaxed her. The tension across her shoulders had lessened. She moved restlessly over towards the window and looked out into the November coldness. Then, seeming to reach a decision, she turned back and lowered herself into an armchair.

  ‘All right.’ There was a new complicity in her voice. ‘I want to know what happened on Monday night at least as much as you do. But tell me first how you know Nick was involved. Were there witnesses?’

  Jude shook her head. ‘Not so far as we know. It was guesswork and a bit of luck, really. I’d had coffee with Barbara Turnbull and she’d been complaining about how her cleaning lady couldn’t come in because of some problem with her son. I just made the connection.’

  Maggie Kent’s lip curled. ‘And I bet the lovely Barbara was really sympathetic about the situation?’

  ‘From your tone, I don’t get the feeling I need to answer that.’

  ‘No. I hope she’s not a great friend of yours . . . In fact, I don’t much care if she is a great friend of yours. So far as I’m concerned, Barbara Turnbull is 100 per cent British cow.’

  Carole had expected Jude to agree with this and was surprised to hear only a demure, ‘I don’t really know her that well.’

  ‘Right. Fine. Well, I’ve been working for her for seven or eight months and I do know her – quite well enough. I wouldn’t put up with her patronizing poison if I had any alternative.’

  ‘Aren’t there many jobs round here?’ asked Jude innocently.

  ‘Not many that don’t involve travelling. I don’t have transport these days. And I don’t want to take on anything full-time yet. I still feel I should be around for Nick . . . you know, when he comes home from school.’ She bit her lip. ‘Not that it seems my being around for him is doing that much good.’

  ‘Adolescence has always been pretty much purgatory.’

  Not for the first time, Carole was struck by Jude’s instinctive ability to get on someone’s wavelength and say exactly the right thing. Maggie Kent nodded, coaxed into confidences. ‘Yes, and he lost his father at a very difficult time.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that—’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean “lost” in that sense. Nick’s father’s still alive – at least, I assume he is, I haven’t heard anything to the contrary – but for all the use he is to his son – or to me, come to that – he might as well be dead.’ She sighed, before launching into a potted history she’d delivered many times before. ‘Sam – that’s my husband – lost his job about three years ago. He worked in the printing industry – managerial job, good salary, all the accessories that go with a nice middle-class lifestyle. House in a desirable part of Fethering, two cars, son at private school, little wife needn’t go out to work – all sorted. Then suddenly there’s a takeover. Big German conglomerate buys up Sam’s company and there’s major reorganization, restructuring, redeployment, and all those other words beginning with “re-” which mean basically that people lose jobs. And Sam’s out with a year’s money.

  ‘He wasn’t good at being out of work. Sam was always one of those men who felt defined by his job. That was his status, his sense of identity. Take it away and – as I discovered – there wasn’t a l
ot else there. At first Sam just pretended it hadn’t happened, made no changes to the way we lived our lives, kept Nick on at the private school, all that. He seemed to think something was going to happen, some deus ex machina was going to swoop down from the skies with a large chequebook and make everything all right again.

  ‘Well – surprise, surprise – that didn’t happen. Sam realized rather belatedly that, unless he did something about it, nothing would happen. So he applied for a few jobs, but he wasn’t good at selling himself. His confidence was so shot to pieces by then, he was going into interviews virtually telling them that he wasn’t what they were looking for. Which – all too readily – they believed.

  ‘From then on, it just got worse. The money ran out, Sam started drinking and, to make things even worse, he got into drugs. Cannabis at first – “to dull the pain”, he kept saying – but pretty soon he was on to the hard stuff. Heroin. Under those circumstances, the marriage didn’t stand a chance. Rows over money, rows about . . . about anything. Soon we stopped bothering with subjects to have rows about, we just cut straight to the row.

  ‘And then my dear husband walked out. In about eighteen months Sam’d gone from executive to dosser. I don’t know where he is now. Living rough somewhere, I imagine. I wouldn’t dare look too closely in shop doorways along the Strand or on street corners in Brighton, in case I recognized my husband . . . assuming of course that I ever went to London or Brighton, and didn’t spend all my time incarcerated in bloody Fethering!’

  Gently, Jude eased the conversation on. ‘And you say all this had a bad effect on Nick?’

  ‘Of course it did. Devastating. For a start, he’d always worshipped his father, and suddenly there’s this pathetic wreck around the house all the time. And Mum and Dad, who’d always seemed to get on so well, stop getting on well at all. And all Nick’s friends are going off on expensive holidays and we can’t afford to. And then one day there’s not even a pathetic wreck round the house. His father’s upped and gone.’

  ‘And he hasn’t been back since?’