The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  The two women exchanged looks as they strode along. Carole’s pale eyes sparkled behind their glasses. ‘Then we definitely need to talk to Tanya.’

  ‘Before we go into the exhumation business?’

  ‘Yes.’ Carole shuddered. ‘And I certainly don’t think we should do the exhumation bit alone.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting calling in the police, are you?’

  ‘Certainly not! Not till we’ve confirmed that the body’s there. I can just imagine the expression on Detective Inspector Brayfield’s face if we got him to help us burglarize one of those fishermen’s chests and found nothing in it except for boathooks and rotting bait. No, I think we should ask Ted Crisp to help us.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You sound surprised, Jude. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘I think it’s a very good idea. My only surprise is that you were the one who suggested it.’

  And it was surprising, when she came to think about it. The Carole of a week before would never have dreamed of making the suggestion.

  As they took the left turn into the High Street, Jude went on, ‘I’ll give Ted a call. I’m sure he can slip away from the pub for half an hour.’

  ‘It’s got to be this evening.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘When we look for the body.’ Carole went through the logic. ‘If Gordon Lithgoe’s idea is correct and the body was moved as a temporary measure, then tonight’s the first opportunity whoever moved it will have to retrieve it. The building workers have been there all the time since Wednesday.’

  Jude nodded, then stopped. They were outside Denis Woodville’s cottage. Its paintwork and paths were immaculately clean. The dinghy on its trailer was still in front of the garage. On his gatepost a new, meticulously hand-printed felt-tip notice read, ‘BEWARE! WEEKEND SAILORS IN VICINITY! NEXT DOOR!’ And a large arrow pointed towards the Chilcotts’ house.

  On their gatepost was a new printed notice. In a choice selection of fonts, it read, ‘DANGER! LITTLE HITLER NEXT DOOR! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!’ And an arrow pointed back at Denis Woodville’s.

  ‘I’d have thought these two were getting a bit close to the libel laws,’ Jude observed.

  ‘Only if one of them chooses to sue. And I think, deep down, both of them enjoy the game so much that they’re not going to risk putting an end to it by court procedures.’

  Jude chuckled. ‘You’re probably right. Anyway, I’m just going to see if Denis is in . . .’

  ‘To get a contact number for Tanya?’

  ‘That’s right. You take Gulliver back. I’ll be round in a minute.’

  The Vice-Commodore was in, though on his home territory he seemed diminished, less assured than he had been in the surroundings of the Fethering Yacht Club. Jude sensed in him a reluctance to invite her in, which was overcome only by ingrained good manners.

  When he ushered her through to his sitting room, she could see why. In marked contrast to the neatness of its exterior, the house’s interior was distinctly shabby. Some months had elapsed since the sitting room had experienced even the most cursory of cleaner’s attentions. In the air, as well as stale Gauloise smoke, hovered the sickly smell of rotting fruit.

  Denis Woodville’s awareness of, and embarrassment about, the state of his home suggested he very rarely had visitors. ‘I’m sorry, bit of a tip,’ he barked, with an attempt at bluffness. ‘Fact is, I was never up to much on the domestic front and, since my wife passed away, I . . . Not that I spend any longer here than I have to . . . Busy at the club a lot of the time anyway . . .’

  Escaping to the club, Jude translated. The squalor of the room brought home to her the emptiness of the old man’s life.

  ‘Do take a seat.’ He gestured vaguely to a selection of subsiding armchairs, none of which looked particularly inviting.

  ‘No, I’m fine. If you could just find that number . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Moving aside an ashtray and a couple of smeared beer mugs from a dresser, he riffled through a pile of dusty newspapers and unopened letters. ‘I’ve got it here somewhere.’ He had shown no surprise at being asked for Tanya’s number and no curiosity as to why it might be wanted. ‘Tell the young lady when you do get through to her that, if she’s changed her mind, she can have her job back. I haven’t found a replacement yet . . . that is, unless of course you were serious about wanting to do it?’

  Jude grimaced. ‘Still finding my feet round here, actually. Bit early for me to commit myself to anything.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Damn, it doesn’t seem to be here. Maybe it’s in this lot.’ He moved across to attack another pile of detritus on a coffee table.

  ‘Nice-looking dinghy you have in the front there,’ said Jude, to make conversation.

  ‘Yes, she’s a Mirror.’

  ‘Ah.’ This meant nothing to her. ‘I’m surprised you don’t keep it down at the Yacht Club.’

  ‘Well, I used to, but, erm . . . well, times change . . .’ Jude suddenly understood. Denis Woodville was saying that he could no longer afford to keep his dinghy at the Yacht Club. ‘I probably won’t keep her that much longer. Dinghy like that’s a bit of a handful. I’m thinking of selling her . . . and getting something else . . . more suitable for my advanced years,’ he added, with an unconvincing flourish of bravado.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Jude, not believing a word of it.

  ‘Damn, it’s not here. I know I’ve got the number down at the club.’ The very mention of the word seemed to raise his spirits. He looked at his watch. ‘Should be opening up there soon anyway.’ The confidence in his voice mounted as the moment of leaving his squalid home drew closer. ‘Damned place can’t function without the Vice-Commodore, you know. If you wouldn’t mind coming along with me . . .’

  There was a little knot of elderly cronies already waiting for Denis Woodville to unlock the clubhouse. They called out raucous comments about his timekeeping and did not let the fact he had a woman with him pass unremarked. The Vice-Commodore glowed in their attention.

  Inside the bar-room, with the lights switched on, he whispered to Jude, ‘Have to get their drinks sorted out first or I’ll never hear the end of it. Can I get you a little something?’

  Jude refused, anxious to get away. She had a sense that the pace of the investigation was accelerating.

  Denis Woodville lit up another Gauloise and then made a great meal of pouring the drinks, with constant comments about how unsuitable it was for the Vice-Commodore to be involved in such menial tasks. Though it was clear he’d been doing it every night since Tanya left.

  None of the others moved to help him. They just sat and pontificated on the appalling state of the world and how much better everything would be if they were in charge. One of them harked back to when he’d been stationed out in Singapore and pretty well ran the show out there. If the half of what these elderly gentlemen said was true, Jude was privileged to be in the company of the finest political and logistical brains in the entire world.

  Eventually everyone was supplied with a drink. Denis Woodville took a long swig of his brandy and said, ‘Now, let’s find that phone number for you . . .’

  He turned to a neat address book by the telephone. Whatever chaos might reign in his home, here at the Fethering Yacht Club the Vice-Commodore kept everything shipshape. As he picked up the book, he noticed the message light flashing on the answering machine. ‘Excuse me. Better just check this. Might be the coastguard,’ he said importantly.

  The message wasn’t from the coastguard. It was the voice of a bored young woman. ‘Vice-Commodore, it’s Tanya, calling on Monday afternoon. First, I wanted to say thanks for the lunch last week . . .’

  Though spoken with total lack of enthusiasm, this still prompted ribald comments from the cronies round the bar.

  ‘. . . and the other thing is, could you let me know whether those repairs on the sea wall have been finished yet? It’s just, um . . . well, I was thinking of coming for a walk to Fethering an
d I didn’t want to if the building’s still going on, you know . . . Could you call me on . . .’

  Jude scribbled the number down on the back of an envelope. ‘And could I have her address please?’

  ‘How very odd,’ said the Vice-Commodore, as he passed the address book across. ‘What on earth does the girl want to know about the sea wall for?’

  Jude had a potential answer to that question. An answer that might make a connection she’d been seeking for some time. The girl’s reason for wanting the information had been so clumsily fabricated that Jude felt a little charge of excitement.

  ‘It’s in code,’ one of the Fethering Yacht Club members announced. ‘It all has special meanings for the Vice-Commodore, eh? That’s how he and Tanya have managed to keep their affair secret all these years.’

  The remark was greeted by some token joshing, but soon the old men moved on to more serious matters. When Jude slipped away from the clubroom, Denis Woodville was launching into his views on how the Northern Ireland problem should be solved. His recipe required rather lavish use of a reintroduced death penalty, but ‘in the long run, it would only be being cruel to be kind . . .’

  The Vice-Commodore was in his pomp. Jude felt sure none of his surrounding pontificators had ever seen him in the drabness of his home surroundings.

  ‘Have you talked to Ted Crisp?’

  It was the first thing Jude asked when she arrived and Carole was proud to be able to say, ‘Yes. He’s game for a bit of body-hunting . . . round seven.’

  ‘Good.’ Jude pulled out her mobile phone. ‘I’ll see if Tanya’s there now.’

  ‘You can use my phone.’

  ‘Mm?’ She was already keying in the numbers. ‘Oh, it’s OK.’

  ‘But using a mobile is a lot more expensive.’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Jude, as though the idea had never occurred to her. ‘Ah, hello, is that Tanya? My name’s Jude. I don’t know if you remember, we met in the Crown and Anchor at Fethering on Friday. Yes, that’s right. Well, I wanted to talk about a body that got washed up on the beach here last week . . .’

  With a rueful expression, Jude turned to Carole. ‘Maybe the direct approach isn’t always the best one. She hung up on me.’

  ‘Ah. Still, wouldn’t you say that’s a sign of guilt or complicity or something? If she had no idea what you were talking about, she’d have said so, not hung up.’

  ‘You could be right.’ Jude looked down at the envelope on which she’d written Tanya’s address and phone number. ‘I think I’d better go and see her.’

  ‘In Brighton?’

  ‘Yes. I know she’s at home, don’t I? At least at the moment.’

  ‘How will you get there? I’d offer to drive you over, but if I’m meeting Ted at seven, I—’

  ‘No, no, don’t worry. I’ll get a cab.’

  ‘A cab?’ Carole was shocked. ‘All the way to Brighton?’

  ‘It’s not far, is it?’

  ‘It may not be far, but it’ll certainly cost you. Depends what kind of budget you’re working to, of course.’

  ‘Budget?’ Jude savoured the unfamiliar word.

  ‘Yes, budget. You know what it means, don’t you?’

  ‘I know what it means, of course,’ said Jude mischievously, ‘but I’ve never really come to terms with the concept.’

  Carole looked blank. But then everyone looks blank when they try to converse with someone who speaks a different language.

  Jude raised her mobile phone again. ‘I’ll give her another try. Maybe now Tanya’s had time to think, she will want to talk to me.’

  And so it proved. Guilt, anxiety or maybe simple curiosity had done their work, and Jude set off shortly after in a cab to Brighton.

  Carole felt tense, but the anticipation was not unpleasurable. At least something was happening in her life. Searching for dead bodies might not be sensible, but it sure beat the hell out of most other Fethering residents’ pastimes.

  When the phone rang at twenty-five past six, she felt a little pang of potential disappointment. It would be Ted Crisp, calling off their seven o’clock tryst.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘Carole, it’s me, Jude. I’d just got to Brighton and paid off the cab when my mobile rang. It was Maggie Kent. Nick’s gone missing!’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  ‘You have called the police, have you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maggie Kent’s voice on the telephone was tight with the effort of controlling her emotion. ‘At first they weren’t that interested. They said lots of kids come home late from school, and it had only been an hour, and Nick was sixteen for goodness’ sake, and . . . Then I told them he’d been with Aaron Spalding the night before Aaron died and they began to take me a bit more seriously.’

  ‘So they are out looking for him?’

  ‘That’s what they say. And I’m sure they are, though at what level of urgency I don’t know. But I can’t just sit here doing nothing. The thought that Nick’s out there somewhere, confused, needing me – perhaps not needing me, but needing someone . . . It’s so awful, I . . .’ The dam on her emotions was cracking. Maggie Kent took a deep breath and evened out her voice as she went on, ‘I rang your friend Jude, because I thought Nick might have confided something to her when they talked last week.’

  ‘And had he?’ Had Jude told the mother of her son’s presence at the mutilating of a corpse?

  ‘She told me a few bits and pieces I didn’t know. But I was really interested in what Nick and Aaron might have said to each other. Nick was in such a dreadful state over the weekend. He hardly slept at all, or ate come to that. There’s something really terrible gnawing away at him and I’m scared. I’m scared he’ll do what Aaron did.’

  ‘You mean kill himself? Has it been confirmed that that’s what Aaron did? Because there hasn’t been an inquest yet, has there?’

  ‘No, but the police told me. Aaron was seen by a courting couple in a car – they’ve only just come forward. He was up on the railway bridge over the Fether in the early hours of Tuesday morning. There seems no question he jumped in deliberately.

  ‘And the thought that my Nick might have done the same thing is just too . . .’ This time no floodgates would have been adequate to stop the flow of tears.

  Carole waited till the note of the sobbing changed and then asked, ‘So what are you going to do in the short term?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll go mad if I just sit around here. And I feel I should be out by the railway bridge, looking for Nick. But I’m scared, if I go out and join the search, then the phone might ring and I wouldn’t be here . . .’

  ‘I’d go out if I were you. Good news’ll keep.’

  ‘And what about bad news?’

  ‘Generally speaking, that’ll keep too,’ Carole replied grimly.

  She had her own ideas of where she’d start looking for the boy. And, with a bit of luck, she’d have Ted Crisp there to help her. Carole Seddon took a large rubber-covered torch out of the cupboard under the stairs, and put on her Burberry.

  Tanya lived in a Kemptown bedsit which, because it boasted its own bathroom, the landlord had the nerve to call a studio flat. There was a two-ring gas hob by the sink, but it didn’t look as if it got used much. The walls had once been white but were pockmarked with Sellotape scars and Blu-Tack stains where previous tenants had taken down their posters and other decorations. Tanya seemed to have put up nothing of her own. Double bed, television, video, CD player – that was all she appeared to need to express her identity.

  Quite loud in the background, when she let Jude in, was the clinical voice of some pop diva, draining the emotion out of yet another song. Tanya closed the door behind her guest and, with no attempt at social graces, demanded, ‘What is all this then?’

  ‘I was rather hoping you could tell me that.’

  ‘Why should I? Particularly ’cause I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Perhaps Tanya could on occasion be attractive, but in this aggre
ssive mode she wasn’t. She looked massive, stolid and resentful, her face already set into a kind of middle-aged disappointment. As she had been in the Crown and Anchor, she was dressed in black, whether the identical clothes or another similar set Jude couldn’t tell. The black laced-up Doc Martens were certainly the same.

  Recognizing that there was no chance of being offered a chair, Jude plonked herself down into one the landlord must have picked up at a house-clearance dealers. ‘As I said on the telephone, I’m talking about a body that was washed up on Fethering beach last Tuesday morning. The body of a middle-aged man. We know you saw it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The usual way. Someone saw you.’

  ‘And told you about it?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The girl sniffed. Then suddenly she said, ‘I got to go to the toilet.’ Pausing only by the CD player to turn up the diva even louder, she crossed the room and disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

  Jude wondered whether turning up the music had been a gesture of delicacy, a recognition that embarrassing noises from the lavatory might otherwise be heard in such an enclosed space.

  Certainly Tanya seemed to be doing something major in the bathroom. She was in there for a long time. Jude wondered whether the girl was fortifying herself for the interview ahead with a few drugs. The flush on her cheeks when she finally did return would have supported that hypothesis.

  The first thing Tanya did after firmly shutting the bathroom door was to flick a switch on the CD and stop the diva in mid-wail. Plumping herself down on the edge of her bed, she began quickly, ‘All right, about this body . . . Yeah, OK, I was going for a walk on the beach at Fethering and I saw it. And I didn’t tell no one, ’cause if you ever been in care, you know that anything where the police is involved is just going to cause you a lot of grief and hassle.’

  ‘And did you see anyone else on the beach that morning?’

  ‘No. Oh yes. There was some old girl taking her dog for a walk.’ Jude wasn’t convinced Carole would have liked the description.