by Simon Brett
Bill Chilcott appeared in the Crown and Anchor a little later than usual that evening for his customary half. And, also uncharacteristically, he brought his wife with him. He looked sleekly bathed, the white bits of his turnip head gleaming from a recent shampooing. Sandra was also carefully groomed and both looked smug. They had clearly come to receive the plaudits of a grateful nation.
Over in the Fethering Yacht Club, Ted Crisp reckoned, Denis Woodville would also be reliving his triumphant part in the rescue. And no doubt being upstaged by other ideas of how it should have been done and recollections of similar incidents out in Singapore.
Bill Chilcott was a little miffed to find the Crown and Anchor bar rather empty. And no evidence of anyone who knew about his heroism.
Ted Crisp did his best to make up the deficiency. ‘Full marks for what you done out there, Bill. What is it – your “customary half”? Or will you go mad and make it a pint?’
‘Well, as it is a rather special occasion . . .’
‘Sure. Have this on me. And what about you, Sandra?’
‘Ooh, a dry sherry, please, Ted.’
‘None the worse for your adventure, Bill?’
‘Good heavens, no. Sandra and I do work hard on our fitness. All that regular swimming down at the Leisure Centre has certainly paid off tonight.’
‘Not to mention our line-dancing.’
‘No, no, don’t let’s forget the line-dancing. No, Sandra and I don’t give in to anno domini. Did you hear how that dreadful man Denis Woodville was wheezing during the rescue? And he didn’t swim. He only worked the mechanical winch.’
‘Well, he smokes like a chimney, doesn’t he, Bill?’
‘Yes, Sandra, filthy habit. So unhealthy. All his arteries must be totally furred up. If you want my opinion, he’ll just keel over one day.’
‘And good riddance, that’s what Bill and I say!’
‘Thought you might,’ Ted Crisp murmured. ‘But the boy was all right, was he? None the worse for his ordeal?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bill Chilcott replied. ‘He went off with his mother in Carole Seddon’s car.’
‘Oh, is that what happened?’ The landlord scratched his chin through the thickets of his beard. ‘You know, I might just give Carole a call to see that the lad’s OK . . .’
When Rory Turnbull finally did return to his prisoner in the car, he seemed blithe, almost euphoric. He was alone. He opened the garage doors, drove the BMW out and closed them again, before setting off at a steady pace west out of Brighton.
At least Jude could speak. She could try to reason for her life. Anything was worth trying. Without much hope, she announced, ‘It won’t work, you know, Rory.’
‘Oh, it will.’
‘The body’s been dead a week.’
‘But the weather’s been on my side. Below freezing most of the last few days.’
‘It’ll still be obvious he died a week ago. The most basic of post-mortems’ll show that – regardless of how much the body’s disfigured by the fire.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. No, it wouldn’t work . . . if fire was the method I was going to use.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No. Change of plan, due to change of circumstances. Always pays to be flexible in one’s planning, you know.’ There was a heady, almost manic, confidence about him now. ‘By the time the body’s found, nobody’ll be able to give a precise date of death. All they’ll have to identify him by will be the fact he’s in my car, he’s wearing my clothes . . . and, of course,’ he concluded smugly, ‘they’ll be able to check his dental work.’
‘My God! The missing tooth. Did you . . .’
‘Oh yes.’ He was very full of himself now. ‘I told you, I’ve been planning this for a long time. I don’t know how he’d lost his tooth, but as soon as I noticed it I knew what I had to do.’
‘You actually took out one of your own teeth?’
‘Not difficult for someone of my profession. I made up some story to Barbara about having been in a fight, which fitted in well with the image of general social collapse that I was creating. And then I had a rather distinctive chromium cobalt denture made for me by our usual lab. They always put their own identification mark on all the stuff they make, so there’d be no question it was mine. And the plate also fits into the dead man’s mouth well enough.’
Remembering something that Holly the hygienist had said in what seemed like a previous incarnation but was in fact only that morning, Jude murmured, ‘You actually had him in your surgery to check that it fitted?’
‘Yes. It was a risk, but I did it after hours. Pretended I was helping him out of charity. He didn’t care. So long as I gave him a bit of money to buy heroin, he’d have done anything I wanted, anything. When I offered him money for his passport, he found it and handed it over like a lamb.’
‘That’s how you set up savings accounts, isn’t it? In his name. You used the passport for identification.’
‘Oh yes,’ he said smugly.
‘You’ve really put a lot of planning into this, haven’t you, Rory?’
‘I certainly have.’ Oblivious to her irony, he took it as a straight compliment, and the way he spoke stole away Jude’s last shred of hope. Rory Turnbull was impervious to logic. His elaborate scheme would almost definitely not work, his subterfuges would be unmasked by scientific examination, but that didn’t matter. He was so caught up in the fantasy of his plan that he was going to go through with it regardless of anything.
‘You said,’ Jude began with trepidation, ‘you weren’t going to use fire . . .’
‘No. Not fire. The wreckage’d be found too quickly, which might prove . . . forensically embarrassing. No, I want the car to be discovered in a few weeks’ time . . . after the fish have taken some of the flesh off the bodies.’
‘Bodies?’ she echoed softly.
‘Yes. I’m afraid, my dear Jude, you know far too much about what I’ve been up to for me to let you survive. But, fortunately, there has been a rumour around during the last week that I might have had another woman . . .’ A rumour that Carole and I helped to foster, thought Jude bitterly, as Rory went on, ‘Tanya heard about it from old Denis Woodville. And Ted Crisp in the pub suggested last week that you and I might be an item.’
‘He was joking.’
‘Many a true word . . . Or at least that’s how it’ll seem in retrospect. The doomed love affair. The suicide pact. The only way the two of them could be together. Which was of course why Rory Turnbull drove himself and his lover to their deaths off the sea wall at Fethering.’
Chapter Forty
The night was still and colder now. A thin moon diffused its watery glow over the snug houses of Fethering, in which, one by one, the lights were being switched off.
The BMW stopped outside the gates that led to the Yacht Club launching ramp and gave access to the sea wall. Rory Turnbull calmly got out and opened the lock with his member’s key. Back in the car, he said, ‘I’ll close the gates when I leave. On foot. And, I’m sorry to say, alone.’
He edged the car forward till it was alongside one of the fishermen’s chests. He was eager now and leapt out, leaving the door ajar.
Jude could not see as Rory took out his keys. Nor could she see him insert one into the new padlock he’d substituted for the one sawn off the previous Tuesday night. The padlock opened and he slipped it out of the hasp that held the chest’s top down.
As he raised the lid, he caught a foul whiff of decay, but he was too near to his goal to be put off by such a detail. Reaching into the chest, he took a grip on the Fethering Yacht Club life-jacket which was still fixed around the torso of the late Sam Kent.
With sudden strength and in one movement, Rory Turnbull lifted the body out. For a moment he held the putrid flesh against his own body, almost as if it were a lover. Then he laid the body flat on the cement. With both hands, he forced the stiff dead jaws apart. He reached inside his own mouth and removed his dental plate. He fixed it ins
ide the dead man’s mouth.
The body had bloated and was bursting out of its clothes, but that did not stop the dentist from starting to remove them. The dead man’s clothes would be destroyed and he himself would dress in a spare set he had in the car boot. He had thought it all through. For his plan to work – his precious plan that he had been nurturing for so long – the body when found must be dressed as Rory Turnbull.
‘What are you doing, Rory?’
Ted Crisp rose over the side of the sea wall like an avenging fury from the ladder to which he had been clinging. At the same time Carole appeared from the shadows of the Yacht Club. When the landlord had phoned, her curiosity had proved stronger than her exhaustion.
Hearing voices, Jude shouted for help.
‘You bastard! I’m not going to be stopped now!’
Rory Turnbull launched himself ferociously at the landlord. The initial impetus caught Ted off balance. For a moment he swayed, about to topple back into the Fether.
But somehow he regained his equilibrium and enfolded the furious dentist in a bear hug. Rory’s elbows worked like pistons as he slammed punches into Ted’s substantial paunch. The two men weaved around like one crazed four-legged creature on the edge of the sea wall.
Carole meanwhile had freed Jude from the armrests and manoeuvred her out of the BMW to release her other bonds. As soon as her hands were free, Jude threw her arms around her friend. They stood for a moment, instinctively hugging each other. Then Jude reached into the front seat of the car for her mobile phone. ‘I’m calling the police!’ she said.
There was a grunt and the two fighting men were suddenly apart. Rory Turnbull swung a wild haymaker of a punch, which by pure chance caught Ted Crisp on the tip of the chin and sent him flying across the cement.
Freed, the dentist rushed to pick up his precious body. Grasping it under the arms, he dragged it across to the BMW. Carole and Jude watched in amazement as he opened the passenger door and jammed the corpse into its seat. He slammed the door shut and hurried round to the other side.
‘You’re mad, Rory!’ Jude shouted. ‘You’ll never get away with it!’
‘Yes, I will!’ he shrieked back. ‘I’ve got it all planned out! I told you – I’ve got it all planned out!’
He started the engine and the BMW screeched in reverse back through the Fethering Yacht Club gates. In a howl of tyres he turned it round and shot off fast down the quayside road.
Far too fast. Rory Turnbull misjudged the corner and bounced off a concrete bollard. The BMW spun crazily before smashing into the Second World War mine that was used as a charity collecting box. With the impact, the car burst into flames.
When the wreckage was examined by the police, their first impression was that there were two near-identical bodies in the burnt-out car. In the mouth of one of them was a dental plate which had been specially made for Rory Turnbull.
Detailed post-mortem examination, however, revealed that the body with the dental plate had been dead for at least a week before the crash which killed the dentist.
Chapter Forty-one
‘The ironical thing is,’ said Ted Crisp, ‘that because Rory died in a car crash, rather than in an apparent suicide, Barbara will actually benefit from his insurance policies.’
‘And presumably inherit all that money he’d salted away,’ said Jude.
‘Except,’ Carole pointed out, ‘all that money is in accounts that he’d opened using Sam Kent’s passport and so probably in Sam Kent’s name.’
‘Does that mean the Kents’ll benefit? That’d be wonderful news. At least they’d get something positive out of the whole ghastly experience.’
But Carole threw a wet blanket over Jude’s optimism. ‘No. The accounts would have been set up illegally. I’m sure it’ll all go back to Barbara in the end.’
Ted Crisp shook his shaggy head. ‘Whole thing’ll take one hell of a lot of sorting out. Still, I should think Barbara and Winnie are ecstatic. They’ve got shot of Rory and the details of what he was up to will never become public knowledge. Their version of events will become the official version. As Winnie will continue to say to anyone who’ll listen, Barbara was just very unlucky in her choice of husband.’
Jude picked up the train of thought. ‘The poor woman worked valiantly to “make something of him”, but sadly “you can’t make silk purses out of sow’s ears”. Barbara and Winnie’s image of middle-class gentility will survive untarnished. The high values of the Shorelands Estate will be maintained.’
The landlord shuddered. ‘When I think what that poor bastard Rory must’ve suffered in that marriage. Being diminished all the time, having every last shred of confidence removed by those two harpies.’ Another tremor went through him. ‘Sorry, it’s a man thing. You two haven’t got the physical equipment to understand what it’s like to be systematically emasculated.’
‘No,’ Jude agreed softly, ‘but we can empathize. Anyone who’s been in a relationship where one partner blames the other for their own inadequacies knows the kind of pain involved. Strange how it keeps happening. There are enough unpleasant people out there in the world to cut you down to size. What everyone needs at home is someone to support and bolster them.’
Carole had got so used to these enigmatic references to Jude’s past that she no longer felt a burning urge to ask the instinctive supplementary questions. Well, that is to say, she still felt the urge, but now automatically curbed it.
A week or so had passed since the dramatic events on the sea wall. Carole was wearing her freshly cleaned Burberry. The dry-cleaning, she was delighted to find, had not affected its waterproof qualities at all.
‘Have you seen Maggie again, Jude?’
‘Yes. I dropped in this afternoon.’
‘How’s she coping?’
Jude grimaced. ‘It’s going to be tough, but she’ll come through it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Nick?’
‘He’s being brilliant, she said. He’s a good, bright boy. Whatever else all this has done, it’s certainly brought those two closer together.’
‘Excellent.’ Carole wondered whether the boy would ever tell his mother the worst part of his nightmare, witnessing the mutilation of what he later found to be his own father’s body. Probably not, she thought. But that would be Nick Kent’s own decision, and she reckoned that when the time came he’d be mature enough to make it.
Carole considered whether she herself should call on Maggie. No, probably not. Jude was the one with people skills, after all. ‘And any news been heard of Tanya?’
Jude shook her head. ‘I haven’t heard anything. Ted?’
‘Nothing definite. Denis Woodville said he’d tried ringing and got someone else on her number. New tenant. So no idea where she’s gone.’
They were silent, all wondering whether the poor kid had actually set off to France, to wait for the lover who would never now be coming to join her. They imagined Tanya becoming disillusioned and deciding that no men really cared, whatever they said, whatever they promised, whatever plans they made for you. And then her baby would be born, another child with a single parent, another statistic with limited prospects.
‘It’ll be tough for Tanya.’ Jude shook her head sadly. ‘It’s always tough to bring up a kid on your own.’
Her sympathy sounded so heartfelt that Carole wondered whether that too came from personal experience. Had Jude been a mother? Carole still knew almost nothing about her neighbour’s background. Whenever they got on to personal matters, however much she tried to resist the temptation, Carole always seemed to end up talking about herself.
And there does come a point when you know someone too well to be able to ask about the basic facts of their life. Carole had decided she’d have to set up a dinner party for Jude and a couple of the nosier denizens of Fethering. The village was rich in the expertly curious. Yes, if she invited people who hadn’t met the newcomer before, they might be able to winkle out all the details that Carole had so
signally failed to uncover. It remained deeply frustrating for her to know so little.
Recognizing that she wasn’t going to get any more of Jude’s history at that point, Carole moved the conversation on. ‘What’s sad about the whole Rory Turnbull story is that his plan was so preposterous. The chances of it working even first time round were minimal. I’m sure a basic post-mortem would have revealed the burnt-out body wasn’t his. And by the time the corpse was a week old, he had no chance of getting away with it.’
Jude shook her head grimly. ‘But by then he was so caught up in his plan that he couldn’t let go.’
‘He’d already committed murder, apart from anything else,’ said Ted. ‘He had to go through with it.’
‘But why go through all that rigmarole? Why on earth didn’t he just dump his wife and go off with a younger woman – like thousands of other married men before him?’ asked Carole, with the bitterness of experience.
‘You underestimate the hold Barbara had on him. I asked him that very question in Tanya’s flat and I’ve never seen a man’s face lose colour the way his did. He was literally terrified of his wife.’
Another tremor passed through Ted Crisp’s body. ‘Sorry. Man thing again.’
They heard the pub door open. Spot on cue, Bill Chilcott appeared. As ever, he was dressed in quasi-nautical style. And there was a smug smile on his root vegetable face. ‘Evening, mine host.’
‘Evening, Bill.’ There was a mumble of greetings from the others. ‘Your customary half?’
‘I thank you kindly. And my customary half-hour away from my other half – from the little woman, that is.’ Bill Chilcott chuckled, then turned to Jude. ‘Or is it politically incorrect to make such a remark in the presence of a liberated woman de nos jours?’
‘I can assure you, it’s no more politically incorrect than anything else I’ve heard you say.’
