The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut tfm-12 Read online

  The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut

  ( The Fethering Mysteries - 12 )

  Simon Brett

  The affluent seaside resort of Smalting is unaccustomed to crime. So when human remains are found beneath the floorboards of one of its beach huts, the community is awash with suspicion and fear.

  Amateur sleuths Carole Seddon and best friend Jude are drawn into the mystery, and their suspicion quickly falls on attractive Philly Rose, a young Londoner newly arrived in the area, whose boyfriend has recently vanished in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Kelvin Southwest, self-appointed ‘ladies’ man’ and caretaker of Smalting’s beach huts, seems to be hiding a dark secret beneath his smooth exterior, while Reginald Flowers, pompous President of the Smalting Beach Hut Association, becomes increasingly defensive about his own history.

  When the bones under the beach hut are identified, the ghosts of the past are painfully reawakened, and long-hidden secrets begin to surface. Bones Under the Beach Hut is an ingenious mystery from one of England’s favourite crime writers, exquisitely plotted, teeming with wonderful characters and packed with unexpected twists.

  Simon Brett

  Bones Under The Beach Hut

  The Fethering Mysteries #12

  2011, EN

  The affluent seaside resort of Smalting is unaccustomed to crime. So when human remains are found beneath the floorboards of one of its beach huts, the community is awash with suspicion and fear.

  Amateur sleuths Carole Seddon and best friend Jude are drawn into the mystery, and their suspicion quickly falls on attractive Philly Rose, a young Londoner newly arrived in the area, whose boyfriend has recently vanished in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Kelvin Southwest, self-appointed ‘ladies’ man’ and caretaker of Smalting’s beach huts, seems to be hiding a dark secret beneath his smooth exterior, while Reginald Flowers, pompous President of the Smalting Beach Hut Association, becomes increasingly defensive about his own history.

  When the bones under the beach hut are identified, the ghosts of the past are painfully reawakened, and long-hidden secrets begin to surface. Bones Under the Beach Hut is an ingenious mystery from one of England’s favourite crime writers, exquisitely plotted, teeming with wonderful characters and packed with unexpected twists.

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  One

  There weren’t many proper beach huts on Fethering Beach. Just a few ramshackle sheds once owned by fishermen, which had been converted for use by holidaying families. For proper regimented beach huts, with pitched roofs and the proportions of large Wendy houses, you had to go west along the coast to the neighbouring village of Smalting. And it was there that Carole Seddon had the use of a beach hut for the summer.

  Smalting was a picturesque – very nearly bijou – West Sussex village, whose inhabitants thought themselves superior to the residents of Fethering. In fact, they thought themselves superior to the residents of anywhere. Like many of the villages along that stretch of coast, the earliest extant buildings were fishermen’s cottages, which had been refurbished many times, ending up as elegant well-appointed dwellings, mostly bought by comfortably pensioned people downsizing in retirement. A couple of large houses had been added to the village in the eighteenth century, and a few more spacious holiday homes had been built by the late Victorians. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Smalting had become a fashionable seaside resort and rows of neat Edwardian terraces had sprung up. In the nineteen thirties two private estates had been developed either side of the village, and with that further building stopped. Unlike Fethering, Smalting did not spread northwards and so did not have room for any of what was still disparagingly referred to as ‘council housing’. The army of cleaners and home helps who serviced the needs of its residents all came from outside the village.

  Nobody did any basic shopping in Smalting. There was nothing so common as a supermarket. The newsagent was the nearest to a practical shop in the village, selling milk and bread as well as more traditional stock and beach items for holidaymakers. The other retailers were highly expensive ladies fashion boutiques, tiny craft galleries and antique dealers. Facing the promenade stood a row of dainty tea shops. Smalting’s one pub, The Crab Inn, had such a daunting air of gentility about it and such high prices for food that it was rarely entered by anyone under thirty. But it did very well from the over-sixties.

  The beach huts conformed to the high standards that were de rigueur for everything else in Smalting. There were thirty-six of them at the back of the beach, just in front of the promenade, and they were divided into three slightly concave rows of twelve. Eight foot in height and width, each one was ten foot deep and set on four low concrete blocks. They were painted identically – the bitumenized corrugated roofs green, the wooden walls and doors yellow and blue respectively. Touches of individualism were clearly discouraged, though a considerable variety of padlocks was on show, and some of the owners had indulged in rather elaborate name signs. These tended to feature anchors, coils of rope, shells and painted seagulls. The names chosen – Seaview, Salt Spray, Sandy Cove, Clovelly, Distant Shores and so on – didn’t demonstrate a great deal of originality.

  The beach hut of which Carole Seddon had use was called Quiet Harbour, and she felt rather guilty about her new possession. This was not unusual for Carole. Despite her forbidding exterior and controlled manner, inside she was a mass of neuroses, though this was something that she would not acknowledge to anyone, least of all herself. She had been brought up to believe that everyone should be self-sufficient, that turning to others for help was a sign of weakness. Afraid of revealing her true personality, Carole had always tried to keep people at arm’s length, not allowing anyone to get close to her. This had certainly been her practice during her career at the Home Office. She had also tried to keep her distance within marriage, which was perhaps the reason why she and David had divorced.

  And when she had moved permanently to Fethering in retirement (early retirement) Carole Seddon still kept herself to herself. She had acquired a Labrador called Gulliver for the sole purpose of looking purposeful, so that her walks across Fethering Beach did not appear to be the wanderings of someone lonely, but the essential behaviour of someone who had a dog to walk.

  So intimacy was not a natural state for Carole Seddon. Even Jude, her neighbour and closest friend, sometimes found herself shut out. Carole was hypersensitive to slights, quick to take offence. And she worried away about things.

  Just as she was now worrying away about her use of Quiet Harbour. Like many people who lack confidence, Carole was wary of breaking even the most minor of regulations. There were many things in her life that she couldn’t control, but one thing she could was keeping the right side of the law. Her work at the Home Office had encouraged her natural law-abiding tendencies, and she would try to avoid even tiny infringements, like keeping out a library book beyond its due date or being twenty-four hours late in applying for the road tax on her Renault. And Carole wasn’t convinced that her using the beach hut was entirely, 100 per cent legal.

  The contact had come through Jude, inevitably from one of her clients. In Woodside Cottage, the house next to Carole’s High Tor, Jude worked as a healer and alternative therapist. Neither of these job descriptions cut much ice with her neighbour, who regarded as suspect any medical intervention that wasn’t carried out by a traditionally qualified doctor. Whenever the subject of Jude’s work came up in their conversations, Carole had to keep biting her lips to prevent the words ‘New Age mumbo-jumbo’ from coming out of them. But she had to admit the be
nefits of her neighbour’s work when it came to broadening their social circle. And on more than one occasion, it had been through a client who had come to Woodside Cottage for healing that Carole and Jude had become involved in criminal investigations.

  It was in the role of client that Philly Rose had come to Jude. She was crippled by back pain and, as was so often the case, the cause of the agony lay in her mind rather than her body.

  Philly, in her early thirties, and her older boyfriend Mark Dennis had moved down from London to Smalting some six months before, just at the beginning of January. For both of them it had been a new start, Philly giving up employment as a graphic designer to go freelance and Mark chucking his highly paid City job to do what he’d always wanted and be a painter. Cushioned by his savings and recent huge bonus, the two of them had embraced country living, involving themselves in everything that the South Coast had to offer. Their two sports cars were traded in for a Range Rover. They acquired two cocker spaniels, bought a sailing dinghy, planted their own vegetables. Both took a lot of exercise. Mark lost the extra weight put on by his City lifestyle. Their make-over seemed complete.

  Renting one of Smalting’s beach huts was just another symbol of how deeply they were digging their roots into the new environment.

  And then one day at the beginning of May, Mark had walked out. That was all the information Carole had. Maybe Jude knew more, but client confidentiality or perhaps a wish to protect the woman’s privacy had stopped her from revealing anything else. What Carole did gather, though, was that her boyfriend’s departure had not only shattered Philly emotionally, but also left her in dire financial straits. There hadn’t turned out to be much freelance work for a graphic designer in West Sussex and, having lost Mark’s substantial contribution to their mortgage payments, Philly felt the threat of repossession looming.

  As a result, she was trying to realize the value of any assets she could. The Range Rover was sold and replaced with an eight-year-old Nissan. The sailing dinghy was advertised for sale, but had yet to find a buyer. And Philly had confided to Jude that if she could recoup any of the annual rental they’d paid for the beach hut – some six hundred and fifty pounds – that too would be welcome.

  Needless to say, it was Jude who’d suggested the idea to her neighbour. Up until that point Carole would have reckoned she had no need for a beach hut. She could never see herself as a ‘hutter’ (as the users were inevitably called). Beach huts were for visitors, families from London perhaps, who needed somewhere to store all their impedimenta for days at the seaside. For someone like her, living only a few hundred yards from the sea at High Tor in Fethering High Street, renting a beach hut would be a pointless indulgence.

  But that was before Carole knew that her granddaughter Lily was coming to stay in Fethering for a week that summer. Lily was the new element in Carole’s life, whose existence had gone some way to thawing the permafrost of her grandmother’s emotions. Not blessed with natural maternal instincts, Carole reckoned she had failed in the upbringing of her only child Stephen. He had reacted to her emotional distance – and perhaps to his parents’ divorce – by building up a carapace of his own. Burying himself in his work (which involved money and computers in a relationship his mother could never quite understand), he too had minimized engagement with his fellow human beings. But marriage to the vivacious Gaby had changed all that, and the arrival of Lily had also contributed to the humanization of Stephen Seddon. He was never going to be the relaxed life and soul of any party, but family life had saved him from the route of total desiccation on which he seemed to have been set.

  And though Carole was very cautious in assessing her emotional reactions to everything, what she felt for Lily did seem wonderfully spontaneous. Somehow, without the worries about her competence as a parent, which had dogged her during Stephen’s childhood, Carole did have the feeling of starting something new, the possibility that her instinctive attraction to her granddaughter represented something that she had never experienced before – uncomplicated love.

  A visit from Stephen and family to High Tor on Christmas Day had been successfully achieved, and now a pattern had emerged of their meeting up every six weeks or so, either in Fethering or at Stephen and Gaby’s house in Fulham. At times Carole still couldn’t believe how well she got on with her daughter-in-law, but Gaby had a generous and inclusive personality.

  While recognizing that Carole was not necessarily easy, she managed to achieve a relaxed relationship with her mother-in-law, whose basis was their mutual adoration of Lily.

  Happy with the way things were going, Carole was still amazed when Gaby proposed that she and Lily should come and stay in Fethering for a whole week. At the end of June Stephen had a work commitment that was going to take him to New York, and his wife reckoned Lily was just at the age to appreciate a seaside holiday. The little girl was starting to toddle and although the flat, slow gradient of Fethering Beach didn’t offer any rock pools, it still offered sufficient riches of wavelets and worm casts and seaweed to fascinate a two year old.

  Carole made no prevarication when the suggestion was made. She told Gaby it was a great idea, but once everything had been agreed she went through much anxiety about the forthcoming visit. Carole Seddon was one of those people whose forays into society had to be shored up with periods sequestered in High Tor with only Gulliver for company. The thought of someone – even someone as easy as Gaby – sharing her home for a week was a troubling one. Would the two of them still get on after such sustained exposure to each other? And would there be enough going on in Fethering to satisfy the demands of a toddling two year old?

  It was just after she had begun to ask herself these questions that Jude suggested her taking over Philly Rose’s beach hut. The timing was perfect. Philly had proposed her paying for just a month to see how the arrangement worked out, but Carole, in an atypical moment of extravagance, had said no, she’d pay for the whole year. Given her financial situation, it was no surprise that Philly didn’t argue.

  These negotiations had been conducted through Jude. Carole had yet to meet Philly Rose, and she was happy about that. She suffered from that very English unwillingness to conduct financial dealings face to face, which is of course why estate agents in England do so well.

  But, with the agreement made and her cheque safely in Philly Rose’s bank account, Carole felt she could treat Quiet Harbour as her own. Though she still had some anxiety about the legality of the subletting arrangement, she did not ultimately regret her decision. According to local Fethering gossip, beach huts along that part of the South Coast were highly sought after, and there was a long waiting list of aspiring purchasers and renters.

  And now, rather to her amazement, Carole Seddon was about to become a hutter.

  ∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧

  Two

  The deal with Philly Rose was concluded at the beginning of June, but it took a couple of weeks before Carole plucked up the courage to visit her acquisition. A new owner of a beach hut in Smalting must of necessity be an object of curiosity for the more established users. Everyone would be bound to look at her.

  But eventually Carole had to overcome her misgivings and bite the bullet. It was a Tuesday in mid-June. Gaby and Lily would be arriving for the start of their seaside holiday on the following Sunday week. If Carole was going to look vaguely competent as the denizen of a beach hut (would she ever get to the point of thinking of herself as a hutter?), she needed to have a few dry runs. And she had nearly a fortnight to make it look as though beach-hut life was second nature to her.

  Because of her disquiet about potential illegality, Carole had spent much time consulting the website of Fether District Council to check local by-laws. (Having for a long time resisted the lure of computers, she had finally succumbed, and with the zeal of a convert was now in a relationship with her laptop which made many happy marriages look inadequate.) She was relieved not to find on the website any ruling that specifically prohibited subletti
ng of beach huts, and her researches also brought her another bonus piece of information. Dogs were allowed on Smalting Beach.

  She was quite surprised by this. Carole knew there were beaches in Bognor, Felpham and Littlehampton where no dogs were allowed during the summer. And she would have expected a place as refined as Smalting to be very strict in such matters. The idea of dogs fouling their precious sand must have been anathema to the gentry of the village. But according to the website there were no restrictions, even in the summer months when the beach would be crowded with visiting families. Carole eventually decided the reason for this anomaly. Most of the inhabitants of Smalting probably were dog owners themselves and so would lobby against anything that might curb their own pets’ movements.

  Anyway, she was cheered by the thought that she could have the support of Gulliver during her first experimental day at the beach hut.

  ♦

  Carole had once again fallen into the error so common among shy people – the idea that everyone is watching their every movement. But when she pitched up at Smalting Beach with her tote bag and Labrador, nobody took a blind bit of notice. Though the beach was quite full, mostly families with very small children taking advantage of the relative calm before the schools broke up, they were all too preoccupied with their splashings and sandcastles to register the newcomer undoing the padlocks of Quiet Harbour.

  The blue double doors at the front went virtually the entire width of the hut. Across them a stainless- steel bar was fitted into slots and padlocked at either end. There was also a padlock on the staple and hasp where the two doors met, so there were three keys on the yellow plastic-tagged ring that Jude had got from Philly Rose. In spite of the protective rubber covers that fitted over the slots, the salt air had got in and the keys were hard to turn. When she had finally – and with difficulty – opened the doors, she fixed the hooks that hung from them into the rings at the sides of the hut.