The Body on the Beach

by Simon Brett

  ‘And how much do you reckon I do know?’ asked Jude coolly. She recognized that her situation was uncomfortable but was trying to work out whether or not it was dangerous.

  ‘You tell me,’ Rory replied. ‘You’ve clearly made some connections. The fact that you’re here and the fact that you’re talking about the body demonstrate that. But how much else have you pieced together?’

  ‘Well . . .’ She hadn’t pieced much together until that moment, but suddenly certain conclusions became glaringly obvious. ‘If, on the one hand, you have a middle-aged man who, with maximum publicity, has declared he is about to commit suicide . . . and, on the other hand, you have the body of a second middle-aged man of similar build . . . I might suspect some substitution of bodies was being contemplated.’

  There was a sharp breath from Tanya, but Rory neither confirmed nor denied the conjecture. He waited to see what else Jude was going to say.

  ‘I don’t know how the apparent death would be staged. In a car, I imagine. But not exhaust fumes. No, it has to be a method that would disfigure the corpse sufficiently to make identification difficult. Fire would probably be best. Body wearing Rory Turnbull’s clothes found in burnt-out car belonging to Rory Turnbull, body must belong to Rory Turnbull. God knows the poor man had enough reasons to do away with himself. The heroin habit that was ruining him financially, leading him to remortgage his house, put his hand in the till at the Yacht Club, try to cheat the Dental Estimates Board . . . Many men have killed themselves to avoid lesser ruin than that little accumulation. Open and shut case.’

  Rory Turnbull nodded slowly. ‘Yes. You have done well, haven’t you?’

  Tanya had been silent too long. ‘All right, so what’s wrong with all that? It hasn’t done anyone any harm, has it?’

  ‘What about Rory’s wife, Barbara?’

  ‘That frigid bitch deserves everything that’s coming to her! She’s never given Rory anything all the time they’ve been married, just sucked out his lifeblood. And she’ll be cushioned by her mother’s money, whatever happens. She’s not suffering from this.’

  ‘All right, Tanya, putting Barbara on one side . . . what about the dead man? The one who would so obligingly pretend to be Rory? Are you telling me he didn’t suffer either?’

  ‘Only the suffering he brought on himself,’ the girl snapped. ‘He was a waster, out of his head on heroin, who just hung around the beach all the time. And then one day – Monday before last – he took an overdose and Rory just happened to be the one who found the body.’ She looked at her lover with devout admiration. ‘At that moment Rory saw a way out of all our troubles. It was then the whole substitution plan came into his mind and he brought the body back here.’

  ‘But surely—’

  ‘Tanya!’ said Rory firmly. ‘I think we could do with something to drink.’

  ‘There’s some white wine in the fridge.’

  ‘No. Whisky.’ He reached for his wallet and extracted a twenty-pound note. ‘Could you go down to the off-licence and get a litre of Grouse?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Now.’

  She didn’t argue any more, but rose to her feet. Putting his arms gently on her broad shoulders, Rory planted a little kiss on her forehead. ‘Take care.’

  ‘And you.’

  Tanya flipped her shiny green anorak off a hook on the back of the door and left the bedsitter.

  ‘She’s pregnant, isn’t she?’ said Jude.

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘I should have worked it out earlier from the fact that she’d gone off coffee, but what made me certain was the way you touched her just then, your concern for her, as if she was very fragile.’

  ‘All right. So she’s pregnant. What have you got to say about that?’

  ‘Nothing. Except I assume that’s the reason why you set this whole thing up?’

  ‘The final reason, yes. The other reasons had been building for years.’

  ‘Rory, men leave their wives for younger women every day of the week. Very few of them bother to set up mock-suicides to cover their tracks. Why didn’t you just talk to Barbara, tell her you wanted out?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that!’ A pallid transformation came over the dentist’s face and Jude realized the extent of the terror he felt for his wife. ‘Barbara would never have let me get away. And if she thought I was still alive, anywhere in the world, she’d come and find me. No, I’ve always known I’d only be safe if she thought I was dead.’

  ‘So you really reckoned you could start over?’

  ‘Not reckoned – reckon. It’s still going to happen. Tanya and I are going to live together in France and bring up our babies there. I’ve been salting away the money for months.’

  The gleam in Rory’s eyes showed Jude how much he was caught up in his fantasies, how long he’d been nursing them, and how potent to the middle-aged was the chimera of one last chance, the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. It also showed Jude that the man she was dealing with was not entirely sane.

  ‘Tanya was meant to come into my life,’ he went on. ‘It’s been a long time coming, and there’s been a lot of shit along the way, but she was meant to happen to me. She’s wonderful. She’s the first woman I’ve ever known who hasn’t expected anything from me. Anything I give her she regards as a bonus. She has no aspirations for me.’

  The fervour with which he said the word bore witness to the agony of the years Barbara and her mother had spent trying to ‘make something’ of Rory Turnbull. Part of Jude could empathize with his need to take action, do anything that would break him out of that straitjacket, out of the suffocating aspirational gentility of the Shorelands Estate.

  ‘Me and Tanya,’ Rory Turnbull concluded proudly, ‘is a love match.’

  And Jude could see how it was. Two damaged people who had asked for very little and been more abundantly rewarded than they’d ever dared to hope.

  Appealing though this image was, it did not change the facts. ‘I’m sure it is a love match,’ said Jude, ‘but does that justify murder?’

  He gave her a pained look. ‘Tanya told you. The man died of an overdose.’

  ‘No. Tanya may well believe that, because it doesn’t occur to her to question anything you tell her, but it doesn’t work for me. The logic isn’t there. This whole business has taken months of planning. Your cheating the NHS, your fiddling the Yacht Club accounts, planting the idea of your heroin habit, that’s all long-term stuff. I’m afraid I don’t believe you set it all up, on the off chance that, when the time came – the Monday before last – you’d stumble across a body the right age and shape who’d just conveniently died of an overdose. Sorry, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t buy that. You’d targeted the man for months.’

  ‘All right.’ He made the confession lightly. ‘Yes, I saw him first in the summer, down by the pier when I went for a walk one lunchtime. He asked me for money. I gave him some and thought how wretched he was – a man about my age, about my size, and he was reduced to that. And then I thought that, though I’d got all the things he hadn’t – the money, the job, the house – I was even more wretched than he was. It was round the time I’d started seeing Tanya. I was still at that stage trying to behave correctly, trying to do the decent thing – and it was tearing me apart.

  ‘I saw the man a few times after that – just walked past him, maybe gave him money, maybe didn’t – but it was only when I knew Tanya was pregnant that the plan began to form in my mind. And, the more I thought about it, the more it started to obsess me.’

  Yes, thought Jude, that’s the word – obsess.

  ‘And, of course, because Tanya was pregnant, there was a time pressure. There were a lot of time pressures.’

  ‘The Dental Estimates Board, the Fethering Yacht Club accountants . . .’

  ‘All that.’

  ‘So how did you kill him? Where did you kill him?’

  ‘Here. I’d sent Tanya out to the cinema. She loves movie
s – particularly weepies. I’d given him the money for a lot of heroin. He’d had a hit. He was feeling good. I smothered him –’ he gestured to the bed – ‘with that pillow.’ Rory read disapproval in Jude’s expression. ‘Go on, he died happy. Better than the way it would have happened otherwise. Contaminated drugs . . . a fight with another addict . . . an infected needle . . . with someone like that it was only a matter of time. He was already lost.’

  ‘No one’s lost, Rory. Not even at the very end. Anyway, didn’t you think who he was?’

  ‘I didn’t know who he was.’

  ‘He was a human being.’

  ‘He didn’t matter.’

  She was silent for a moment before asking, ‘And what made you change your plans?’

  ‘Change my plans?’

  ‘Yes. For your plan to work, the suicide in the car had to be staged as soon as possible after the man had died. The longer you left it, the more the body would decay and the more open your deception would be to exposure by forensic examination. Why didn’t you do it the night you killed him?’

  Rory Turnbull grimaced. ‘Because of the bloody police.’

  ‘What? Surely they didn’t know what you were up to?’

  ‘No. The trouble was I wanted to leave it fairly late, so that there wouldn’t be many people around. But he’d died about six and—’

  ‘You mean you’d killed him about six.’

  ‘Whatever. There’s a garage in this block that’s hardly used – that’s where my car is at the moment, actually. By midnight, which was the time intended to take the body down there, it had started to stiffen up.’

  ‘Rigor mortis.’

  ‘Yes. I’d meant to put him in the boot, but I didn’t want to risk giving the body any unexplained injuries by bending the joints, so I just laid him on the back seat with a coat over him. I left Tanya here, as we’d agreed – we were going to meet in France a week or so later – and I set off. Just on the outskirts of Fethering, a car came towards me, flashing its lights.’

  ‘Bill Chilcott.’

  ‘Yes. I thought driving off at speed would draw more attention than stopping, so I stopped. Bill was just being charitable. He told me there were police staking out Seaview Road and stopping every car that came along. Random breath-tests – Sussex Police are very hot on drink-driving. Well, that really got me scared, because there’s no other way to the Shorelands Estate except via Seaview Road.’

  ‘But why did you have to go home?’

  ‘Because that’s how I’d planned it!’ he snapped petulantly. ‘The petrol and the rags and stuff I was going to use were all in the garage at Brigadoon.’

  ‘Were you actually planning to stage your suicide in your own home?’

  ‘Yes. On the paved area in front of the house.’ A vindictive light burned in his eye. ‘Very fitting – show all the tight-arsed snobs of the Shorelands Estate what Barbara and her bloody mother had driven me to. I thought that’d be very funny. A social indiscretion on that scale . . . they’d really find hard to live down.’

  No, thought Jude, I am not dealing here with someone who’s even mildly sane.

  ‘Anyway, I panicked. I daren’t risk the police looking inside the car. I decided I couldn’t go through with the plan that night, so—’

  ‘So you hid the body inside your boat at the Fethering Yacht Club.’

  ‘Yes, I – How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘Call it educated guesswork. And did you put the life-jacket on it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought, if anyone found the body, it might look more like an accident. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘You certainly weren’t,’ said Jude coolly. ‘My next educated guess, incidentally, would be that you went home and the following morning early, terrified that someone might have found the body overnight, rang Tanya and asked her to go to Fethering and check it was where you’d left it.’

  The dentist looked bewildered. ‘Did she tell you this?’

  ‘No. I think Tanya looked and the body was missing. But shortly afterwards she found it washed up on the beach. She went to ring you and tell you what had happened. Then two small boys—’

  ‘What?’ He turned pale. ‘How do you know all this stuff? Are you psychic?’

  ‘A bit,’ said Jude, with a self-effacing grin, ‘though, as it happens, that’s not how I know. So, did Tanya see the boys had put the body back in the boat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which meant your plan was all set to happen again, a mere twenty-four hours late. Body back in place, no police breathalyzer traps . . . Why didn’t you do it on the Tuesday night?’

  ‘Because I was disturbed by somebody. I’d just got the body out of the boat when I heard a noise. There was someone snooping around. A boy.’

  ‘Do you think he saw you?’

  ‘Yes. Just as I was lifting the body out of the boat. I was holding it in front of me and I came face to face with the boy. He screamed.’

  Yes, he would have done, thought Jude. Poor Aaron Spalding, his head filled with half-digested stories of black magic and the Undead. The boy, tortured by guilt, had come back to check the scene of his crime and seen the dead body apparently moving. The Undead had come back to claim its victim. That could easily have been enough to unhinge the terrified Aaron, to make him throw himself into the Fether. Unless, of course . . . ‘You didn’t harm the boy, did you, Rory?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t! I don’t know what happened to him. He ran off along the river bank. He’d got me rattled, though, so I put my plans off for another twenty-four hours.’

  ‘But because other people knew the body had been stowed inside Brigadoon II, you moved it to another hiding place.’

  Once again he gave her a look as if she had unnatural powers. ‘Are you sure Tanya didn’t tell you all this?’

  ‘Positive. Don’t worry, she’d never betray you.’

  ‘More educated guesswork then?’

  ‘If you like. I’d say you put the body inside one of those blue fishermen’s boxes near the Yacht Club . . .’ A hissed intake of breath told her she’d hit another mark ‘. . . little knowing that the next morning that whole area would be cordoned off and under the blaze of spotlights while the workmen carried out repairs on the sea wall.’

  Rory’s expression acknowledged the accuracy of this conjecture too.

  ‘So, what with one thing and another,’ Jude concluded lightly, ‘it wasn’t really that great a plan, was it?’

  She’d caught him on the raw. ‘It was a brilliant plan!’ he spat back.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you can use the word “brilliant” for any plan that has to be aborted.’

  ‘This one’s not going to be aborted.’

  ‘You mean you’re still thinking of going ahead with it?’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m going ahead with it. Tonight. Only this time, Jude . . .’ He savoured the name as if it had an unfamiliar but not unpleasant taste ‘. . . you’re going to be part of the plan.’

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  When Carole got back home from Maggie Kent’s house, she felt quite shaken. Having garaged the Renault – and not even considered cleaning its interior until the morning – she found she was shivering as she walked the short distance to the house. Inside, even before attending to Gulliver’s needs, she turned up the central heating and lit the log-effect gas fire. Then, once the dog was sorted, she poured herself an uncharacteristically large Scotch from the bottle which she kept for guests and which sometimes went untouched from one Christmas to the next.

  It wasn’t only her physical ordeal that had shaken her up. It was the discovery she had made in Nick Kent’s bedroom. Now she knew the identity of the body she’d found, she could understand the reasons for the boy’s mental collapse. To have been involved in a black magic ritual with a corpse was bad enough, but to discover in the cold light of the following morning that the body you had seen mutilated was th
at of your idolized father would have unhinged the most stable of adults. The effect it had had on a confused adolescent was all too predictable.

  Thank God at least that Nick had held back from wielding the Stanley knife himself.

  Carole hadn’t said anything to Maggie. The awful truth would have to be faced at some point, but it should wait until the body had once again been found. And then the news should be broken to the unknowing widow by the proper authorities.

  Carole was reminded that she had intended to spend that evening with Ted Crisp trying to find the body, but after all she been through another visit to the sea wall in search of a week-old corpse held little appeal. While the body on the beach remained anonymous, there had been an almost game-like quality to the investigations she and Jude had undertaken. But now the dead man possessed an identity and a family context, the idea of further probing became distasteful.

  She decided she’d done quite enough for that evening. Maybe Jude would ring her or call round when she got back from Brighton. In the meantime, however, Carole Seddon was going to have a very long soak in a very hot bath.

  Jude lay on the back seat of the BMW, where the body she did not know to be that of Sam Kent had lain a week before.

  When Tanya had returned to her bedsitter with the whisky, Rory had got her to help tie Jude up. With soft scarves, over her clothes, so as not to leave any marks on her body.

  Then Rory and Tanya had manhandled her down to the garage and into the BMW. More scarves had been used to tie her wrists and ankles to the armrests, so that she couldn’t sit up and attract attention to herself when they were driving. Rory had not bothered to gag her. The car was soundproof.

  Jude had been left in the garage for nearly an hour, while the two conspirators presumably went through the final details of their forthcoming elopement, their separate journeys and their blissful reunion in France.

  As she lay immobile in the dark, Jude could not feel optimistic. Assessing the feasibility of escape did not take long. Once she’d given up on that, she tried, with limited success, to focus on more spiritual matters. But anger kept getting in the way. This was neither the time nor the manner in which Jude wanted to die.