The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We wondered if we could come and talk to you.’

  ‘Might I ask who you are?’

  ‘My name’s Jude, and I’m with my friend Carole Seddon. We both live in Fethering. In the High Street. Please. We would like to talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’ the voice crackled back.

  ‘About things you may have seen on the beach over the last week.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ There was a silence while the voice seemed to assess the proposition. Then it went on, ‘So you are asking me, an elderly, housebound cripple, to open my door to two people I’ve never seen before . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘. . . in spite of the fact that the majority of crimes against the elderly are committed by malefactors who have infiltrated themselves into pensioners’ houses on some spurious pretext?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jude, with less confidence.

  ‘Come on up,’ the voice from the box intoned. Then the door buzzed its release. Jude pushed and held it, while Carole sorted out Gulliver. He wasn’t going to enjoy being tied by his lead to a garden seat – particularly when he reckoned he was being taken out for a walk – but there was no alternative. As they went inside the building, he gave a couple of reproachful barks at the eternal perfidy of women.

  The entrance was at the back, at the foot of a tower which housed a lift and had presumably been added at the time of the conversion into flats. Without the lift, surely no one in a wheelchair would live on the top floor.

  ‘But we don’t even know his name,’ Carole complained as they rose up through the building.

  ‘Then we’ll ask him what it is.’ Jude’s tone came as near as it ever did to exasperation.

  They emerged on to a small landing. Framed in the doorway opposite, which he had opened ready for them, was a small man in a wheelchair.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t have looked small if he could have stood up, but, crumpled down as he was, there seemed to be very little of him. He was partially paralysed, his head propped back at a strange angle. His left hand was strapped against the arm of his chair, while his right hovered over a control panel of buttons and levers. He wore a crested blazer and a cravat high around his neck. On his head was an incongruous navy corduroy cap.

  ‘Good afternoon . . . Carole and Jude, was it?’

  When he spoke, they realized that not only the entryphone had made his voice sound electronic. He talked through some kind of voicebox. The cravat must have been there to hide a tracheotomy scar.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said, flicking a control and going into sharp reverse. ‘Close the door behind you.’

  ‘Isn’t that a risk?’ asked Jude, as they came into his sitting room. ‘If we were going to rob you or beat you up, nobody would hear your cries.’

  Carole gave her neighbour a reproving look. What appalling bad taste. Had Jude no sense of the right remark for the right occasion?

  But apparently it was exactly the right remark for their host. He let out a bark of electronic laughter and said, ‘I’m prepared to take my chance with you two. I know appearances can be deceptive, but you don’t project the traditional image of teenage tearaways.

  ‘My name’s Gordon Lithgoe, by the way. I’d offer to make you tea, but I’m so cack-handed, you’d be better off doing it for yourself. The makings are over there.’

  ‘No, thank you. We don’t require tea.’ Carole didn’t want the atmosphere to become too relaxed. When they started asking him questions, Gordon Lithgoe might decide to throw them out.

  ‘This is a pretty stunning little eyrie you’ve got here,’ said Jude.

  It was. The window that took up the entire front wall dominated the space, as if the sea were part of the decor. The original thirties metal-framed panes were still intact, but outside a more modern set of sliding windows protected them from the worst of the weather. The glow of the bright November afternoon permeated the whole room. There was little furniture; someone in a wheelchair had more use for space than armchairs and sofas. On the walls were pinned large-scale maps of shorelines, creeks and channels; there were a few plaques commemorating various ships; and in rows of bookcases stood the serried blue spines of books that looked as if they must have something to do with navigation.

  Most interesting, though, from the point of view of the two women, was the area directly in front of the window. A platform had been built up there, and from it a ramp led down for the wheelchair. On the platform stood a telescope on a tripod. Two pairs of powerful binoculars lay on a nearby table, as well as an open ledger with a fountain pen lying down its middle crease. Some notes were written on the left-hand page.

  ‘Very nautical flavour,’ Jude went on. ‘Were you in the Navy?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Gordon Lithgoe. ‘No chance of someone like me passing the medical. So I’ve always had to remain as just an interested amateur.’

  ‘Still –’ Jude looked around the room again – ‘this is a wonderful place.’

  ‘Just as well,’ his voice crackled back, ‘since the only times I leave it these days is to have operations.’ There was another rasp of laughter. ‘Apropos of which, ladies, sorry about the cap, but it’s prettier than the scars underneath.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ said Carole, ever ready with the required Fethering platitude.

  Her recourse to what passed locally for good manners reminded him of his own. ‘Do sit down.’ He pointed to two upright kitchen chairs. ‘Sorry, not very comfortable, but then I have few visitors. The woman who brings my meals never stays. Otherwise, it’s the nurse, the occasional social worker, very rarely the doctor and, even more rarely, the odd friend. Have to be odd to come and see someone like me – half man, half electronic gadget – wouldn’t they?’

  There was not a nuance of self-pity in his words. There hadn’t been in anything he had said. He seemed, if anything, amused by his plight.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, signalling the end of social niceties, ‘you are here for a purpose. I saw you deciding to come up here.’

  ‘You saw us?’ said Carole.

  ‘Oh yes.’ He suddenly spun the chair on its wheels and shot like a rocket towards the platform by the window. He seemed to be going up the ramp far too fast, but, rather than smashing into the telescope, he came to a neat halt inches away from it. He’d practised the trick many times before.

  He didn’t need to move the telescope. It was already focused. He edged the wheelchair a fraction closer and his eye was at the lens. ‘I could see you just like you were in the room with me. Pity I can’t lip-read. But anyway your body language told me you’d decided to come up here.’

  ‘Do you spend most of the day watching the beach?’ asked Jude.

  Again, Carole wouldn’t have put the question so bluntly, but Gordon Lithgoe still didn’t seem offended. ‘No, I’m basically looking for shipping. That’s what interests me.’ His working hand fell on to the ledger by his side. ‘Make a log of all their comings and goings.’

  ‘And what about the people on the beach?’ Jude maintained her direct approach. ‘Do you make a log of their comings and goings too?’

  He spun the wheelchair round and faced them. Against the brightness of the window, it was impossible to see his expression, and from the even signal of his voice, impossible to gauge his emotion.

  ‘Some,’ he said. ‘Not all.’

  ‘We’re interested in the events of Monday night last week,’ said Carole. ‘And then through Tuesday and Wednesday.’

  There was a moment’s stillness, and they were both afraid he was going to clam up. Then, suddenly releasing a brake, he glided the wheelchair down the ramp and swung gracefully round to come to rest beside them. They could now see his face. It was smiling.

  ‘Why do you want to know this?’

  Carole replied, ‘We think there’s been something criminal going on.’

  ‘And you’re not police. Otherwise, as soon as you’d arrived, you’d have flashed that fact at me – along with your ID, w
ouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what are you?’

  ‘Just two people who want to get to the truth of what happened.’ Even as she said the words, Carole knew how pompous they sounded.

  ‘Oh, hurrah, hurrah.’ Gordon Lithgoe’s sarcasm made itself felt through the electronic crackle. ‘How very noble. Truth-searchers, eh? Where would this great country of ours be without people who have a sense of public duty?’

  ‘Do I gather you don’t have a sense of public duty?’

  Again Jude’s lighter tone struck the right note. ‘Not in the obvious way,’ he replied. ‘I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that were probably criminal, and I’ve never reported any of them. I’ve seen my role throughout as essentially that of an observer.’

  ‘But if someone were to come and ask you? If the police were to come and ask you?’

  ‘That would be entirely different. I would certainly cooperate and tell anything I knew – if asked. But I wouldn’t just volunteer information. However –’ he drummed his right hand lightly on his sunken chest – ‘in this case the police haven’t come and asked me. They didn’t make the deduction that I might have seen something, while you two ladies did make that deduction and have arrived on my doorstep . . .’

  ‘So you’ll tell us what you saw?’ asked Jude very softly.

  ‘Yes. Of course I will. I assume what you’re interested in is the dead body which you – Carole, is it? – found on the beach on Tuesday morning?’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I told you. That telescope enlarges the face of someone on the beach as if they’re here in the room with me. I recognized you, anyway. I didn’t know your name, but I’d seen you taking your dog for a walk every morning for the last three or four years.’

  It was uncomfortable to know that she’d been being observed for such a long time. Not, of course, that Carole had ever done anything on the beach of which to be ashamed, but all the same . . .

  ‘What we want to know is what happened to the body after I found it.’

  ‘Yes. It was rather active, wasn’t it – for one so dead? I’ll find the relevant log.’ He spun the wheelchair across the room to a shelf and selected one from a pile of ledgers. Carole and Jude both marvelled at the extent of his record-keeping. The ledger by the window was half full, but he had to go to another one for events of less than a week before.

  He flicked through the book with his good hand till he found the place, then, pressing it to his knee, wheeled himself back towards them. He looked down at his notes. ‘I was first aware of the body at 6.52. That was first light. But, given where he was on the breakwater, and the fact that the tide had gone all the way out and was on its way back in, he could have been there for a couple of hours before that.’

  ‘And I found him about seven, I should think.’

  ‘7.02. Then you went back home with your dog.’ Again, Carole felt a little shiver from the knowledge that she’d been watched. ‘At 7.06 a boy climbed over the railings of the Yacht Club and raised the cover of one of the boats. He didn’t like what he saw inside, I suppose, because he came running out and along the sea wall, looking down into the Fether. Then he ran down on to the beach, and he found the body at 7.21. He ran back up the beach – don’t know where he went to, I couldn’t see – but about a quarter of an hour later he came back . . .’

  ‘With another boy?’ Jude breathed.

  ‘Yes. The two of them manhandled the body up the beach, over the railings into the Yacht Club and put it into the boat, the same boat the first boy had looked in.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then the boys ran off. Out of vision of my telescope at 7.47. At 10.12 the police arrived, looked along the beach – not very hard – and then they left.’

  ‘But what about the body?’ asked Carole.

  ‘That’s it. That’s all I can offer you. Great telescope I’ve got there, but it doesn’t have night sights. If I could afford one with those, I’d get it tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Jude chuckled. ‘You’ve got to sleep sometime.’

  ‘I don’t sleep that much,’ said Gordon Lithgoe.

  ‘So . . .’ Carole sighed despondently. ‘It looks as though the body was removed on the Tuesday night, under cover of darkness. But by whom and where to, we have no means of knowing.’

  ‘Where would you put a body, Mr Lithgoe?’

  There was a scrape of electronic laughter. ‘I’m glad to say, Jude, that’s not a problem I’ve ever had to address. However, where you’d put a body depends on where you think people are going to look for it.’

  ‘Ye-es. With you so far.’

  ‘And, among the multiplicity of pastimes available to the human species, carrying dead bodies around is one of the most hazardous. If you get caught doing it, you’re facing a hell of a lot of uncomfortable explanations. What I’m saying is that, unless you’ve got transport, you don’t want to move a body far. So if, say, you’re hiding a body in a boat, and you think there’s a strong chance someone might look in that boat, then you move it to somewhere close by where they’re not going to look.’

  ‘Into another boat?’

  ‘Possibly. Except if one boat’s a security risk, maybe they all are.’

  ‘Where else then?’

  ‘Come and have a look.’ Gordon Lithgoe powered his wheelchair back up the ramp. His right hand slightly reangled the telescope and adjusted the focus. ‘I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Have a butcher’s.’

  Carole looked first. She had to arch her back to get down low enough. The telescope was trained on the top of the sea wall, where the repairs had been taking place for the previous few days. The heavy machinery had all gone, as had the workers.

  Revealed were the two blue-painted low chests used by local fishermen to store their bait and equipment.

  ‘Bit big,’ said Gordon Lithgoe, ‘but otherwise it’s the right shape for a coffin, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jude, have a look. And of course,’ Carole went on thoughtfully, ‘if whoever it was put the body in there just as a temporary measure . . . and they didn’t know what was about to happen . . . their plans would have been really screwed up by the builders coming in.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude rose from the telescope. ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Are you off to have a snoop?’ asked Gordon Lithgoe eagerly. ‘I’d love to watch your exhumation through the telescope. But hurry – while the light lasts.’

  ‘Yes, we must go. Mr Lithgoe, I can’t thank you enough—’

  ‘Please call me Gordon.’

  ‘No, but you’ve been so generous with your time.’

  ‘Time is not a commodity I need to ration. I have far too much of it. Any visitor is a welcome diversion. As I said there are people who come and see me occasionally, but—’

  ‘Theresa Spalding,’ said Jude with one of her sudden insights.

  ‘What?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Theresa Spalding used to come and see you, didn’t she, Gordon?’

  ‘Yes, yes, she did.’

  ‘And you mentioned the body on the beach to her?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And described Carole?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which explains why she came to your house, Carole.’

  ‘It must do, yes.’

  ‘But, Jude, you said she used to come and see me. Is she not coming again?’

  ‘I hope she is, Gordon. But she’s not well at the moment. Did you hear, her son died? She’s taken it very badly and she’s in hospital.’

  ‘Ah.’ The news seemed to bring him deep sadness. ‘I hope she’ll be all right. She’s had a lot to cope with, that girl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Carole broke in briskly, ‘we must be on our way. Can’t thank you enough for—’

  ‘Carole, there’s something we’re forgetting!’

  ‘What, Jude?’ She spoke testily. She wanted to be on her wa
y. Gulliver had been left tied up in the garden for far too long.

  ‘The person you saw on the beach before you found the body.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness, yes.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Gordon Lithgoe, ‘I wondered if you’d ask about that.’ He referred again to his ledger. ‘That’d be the one who saw the body at 6.57.’

  ‘Around then it must have been, yes.’

  ‘In a shiny green anorak.’

  ‘Yes. Who was he?’

  ‘Wa sn’t a “he”. It was a “she”.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Young girl. It was hardly light, so I couldn’t see when she actually came on to the beach, but she was running down from the direction of the Yacht Club. Seemed to be in a panic, until she found the body.’

  ‘What did she look like?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Couldn’t see the colour of her hair, because she had her anorak hood done up tight. Large young woman, though. And I could see one thing . . . She had a silver stud in her nose.’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  When they got out of the building, Gulliver provided an excellent illustration for the meaning of the word ‘hangdog’. He was very reproachful.

  ‘I’ll have to take him home before we do anything else,’ said Carole. ‘Anyway, I don’t want him present if there is going to be an exhumation.’

  ‘No.’

  They set out back towards the High Street, keeping on Seaview Road, which was firmer underfoot than the beach.

  ‘We’ve got to talk to Tanya,’ said Jude.

  ‘She’s not the only young woman in the world with a silver nose-stud.’

  ‘No, but she’s the only one who has a connection to Fethering Yacht Club. If only we could also find a connection between her and Rory Turnbull . . .’

  ‘Well, he was Treasurer of the club, so she must’ve met him there.’

  ‘Ye-es. Have we got anything else, though?’

  ‘Hm . . . Ooh, just a minute, we might have. What about the girl your dental hygienist mentioned?’

  ‘Well done, Carole. How stupid of me! I should’ve remembered that. Of course! Denis Woodville said she lived in Brighton, so if she was coming to do an evening shift at the club bar, then the timing would be absolutely right for Rory to give her the occasional lift to work when he’d finished at the surgery.’