The Body on the Beach Read online

  ‘But what I need to talk about’s important too!’ Denis Woodville turned back to his guest as he made for the door. ‘Sorry, Tanya. Be with you in a moment.’

  The girl had risen from her booth, a lumpen creature in black sweat shirt, leggings and Doc Martens. Hair dyed reddish and cut short, a lot of silver dangling from the perforations in her ears. A silver stud in her nose. She looked anxious.

  ‘It’s all right, Tanya, love,’ Ted Crisp called across. ‘The Vice-Commodore’ll be back. You won’t be left to pick up the tab.’

  ‘I hope not.’ Her voice had those slack local vowels which sound uninterested even at moments of excitement. She drifted uneasily towards the bar.

  ‘Though it’s not like our Denis to be pushing the boat out like this,’ Ted went on. ‘Bit of a tightwad usually.’

  ‘Lunch is on Fethering Yacht Club expenses,’ the girl explained. ‘He wanted to say thank-you now I’ve left, and since I didn’t have anything else on today, I thought, “Well, it’s a free lunch.”’

  ‘No such thing,’ said Ted Crisp.

  ‘Sorry?’ The girl looked at him curiously.

  ‘A free lunch. No such thing.’

  ‘What?’

  He spelled it out. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch.’

  ‘No. You have to pay. In a pub or a restaurant, you always have to pay.’

  Ted Crisp recognized he wasn’t getting anywhere. Tanya was unaware of the reference. ‘You like some coffee, would you? Seem to remember when you worked behind the bar here, you were virtually on an intravenous drip of coffee.’

  The girl wrinkled her nose, a manoeuvre which the silver stud made look hazardous. ‘No, thanks.’ She looked across to the door. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

  Thelandlordchuckled.‘IthinktheVice-Commodore can look after himself in the face of drunken dentists. Don’t you worry. He’ll be back in a minute.’

  No sooner had he said the words than Denis Woodville returned. He was lighting up another Gauloise and looked rather miffed. ‘Tanya, I’ll just sort out the bill for this lot and then we’ll be off – all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ said the girl without interest.

  The Vice-Commodore reached into a pocket for an envelope full of petty cash. ‘Right, Ted, what’s the damage?’

  While he settled up, Jude attacked her baguette, which was excellent. After the unlikely couple, thin septuagenarian and broad twenty-year-old, had left, she said, ‘You said Tanya used to work for you too, Ted?’

  ‘That’s right. Not of the brightest, as you might’ve gathered from our exchange about free lunches. No, Tanya’s not a bad girl. Been in care, had a tough time when she was growing up, I gathered. But she did the job all right. And a good barmaid is hard to find.’ His eyes narrowed as he looked across at Jude. ‘Don’t suppose you fancy doing the odd shift in here, do you?’

  She chuckled. ‘Not at the moment. Maybe, if I get desperate . . .’

  ‘Yeah, nobody works for me unless they’re desperate.’ He sighed. ‘Nobody does anything for me unless they’re desperate.’

  ‘Talking of desperation, Ted . . .’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘How long’s Rory Turnbull been drinking like that?’

  ‘Only the last few months. Well, only the last few months he’s been drinking like that in here. Maybe in the privacy of the Shorelands Estate he’s been doing it for years.’

  ‘Can’t see the lovely Barbara being too keen on that.’

  ‘No, nor the old witch, her mother.’ He shuddered. ‘That Winnie. One of the best arguments for misogyny I’ve ever encountered.’

  ‘Do you know them well?’

  ‘Hardly. Only by reputation, gossip, what-have-you. You hear a lot stuck behind the bar of a pub.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘And not much of it’s very charitable.’

  ‘No. So what have you heard from Rory Turnbull while you’ve been stuck behind the bar?’

  ‘Well, it’s all the same, really. You heard the full routine today. Goes on and on round the same things – how miserable life is, what hell it is being a dentist, what hell it is being married . . . usual cheery stuff. Tell you, after an evening spent with Rory, my own life seems a bed of blooming roses.’

  A new thought struck Jude. ‘Ooh, and he has a boat, doesn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. Called Brigadoon. Same as his house.’

  Good, thought Jude. At least one of our conjectures has proved to be right.

  But it still doesn’t prove any link between the owner of Brigadoon II and the body on the beach.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Carole Seddon had woken that Thursday morning with a change of attitude. In Jude’s company, caught up in the excitement Jude generated, the idea of playing at detectives had seemed a seductive one. Finding an explanation for the body on the beach had been imperative. On her own, though, Carole found it less compelling. Life, she reflected, is full of loose ends. There are many questions that will never be answered, and a sensible person will recognize that fact and get on with things.

  So that morning Carole got on with things. She reestablished the routine of her life that her discovery of the body and her meeting with Jude had briefly interrupted.

  The weather was better, though still astringently cold and heavily overcast. She took Gulliver for his early-morning walk on the beach, striding resolutely past Woodside Cottage without a sideways glance. On her way back up the High Street, she did slow for a moment by the gate, contemplating a brief call to see if Jude’s thinking had progressed at all. But, in spite of the ambient gloom, there were no lights on, so Carole went straight into her own house and started a major cleaning offensive.

  The telephone didn’t ring all morning. This was not unusual, but that particular morning Carole kept half expecting it might.

  She was very sensible and virtuous. She even emptied out the fridge and defrosted it.

  After her morning of hard work, she felt she deserved an omelette and a glass of mineral water with the lunchtime news. There was nothing much on the international front. Reports of atrocities in the Balkans or Africa, where she got confused about which side was which – who the aggressors, who the victims – had little power to engage her interest.

  The weatherman promised more of the same. The apparent improvement of that morning had been an illusion. More frost was coming. More wind. More gloom as the evenings darkened earlier and the year spiralled down to its close.

  At the start of the strident signature tune of the local news, Carole reached for the remote control. But before she pressed the off-button, she heard the voice-over menu of headlines: ‘Drowned boy’s mother blames drug culture.’

  Carole’s button-finger froze.

  Another newsreader who’d never make it on to national television appeared in shot. ‘The mother of teenager Aaron Spalding’ – once again the name was pronounced ‘Arran’ – ‘today blamed the ready accessibility of drugs to young people on the South Coast for her son’s death.’

  A woman’s distraught face filled the screen. ‘Aaron was a good boy. Then he got mixed up with a crowd who was doing a lot of drugs and I’m sure that’s what caused his death. He was a good boy . . .’ Her mouth wobbled as the tears took over.

  But it wasn’t what was said that kept Carole frozen in her chair. It was the fact that she’d seen the woman before.

  In that very sitting room. Holding a gun.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Any thoughts of giving up trying to be a detective evaporated as if they’d never been there. Now there was something positive to link the two fatalities. The woman who’d come to Carole’s house to ask her about the body she’d found on the beach was the mother of the boy whose body had been found on the beach the following day. Also she’d asked about a knife. There had to be a connection.

  Carole rushed out of High Tor, not even bothering to lock the front door, and hurried up the garden path of Woodside Cottage. When the bell pro
mpted no response, she hammered on the dark wooden door.

  But there was no one in. For a moment she contemplated going down to the Crown and Anchor to see if Jude was having lunch there (which would have been a very good idea, because that was precisely what Jude was doing). But Carole’s sensible side prevailed. If she didn’t find Jude, she reasoned, then she’d have to stay in the Crown and Anchor and have a mineral water to justify her going in there. And if she did that, there was a real danger it might appear to the other residents of Fethering that she’d become the kind of woman who went into pubs on her own. (The option of just going in and asking Ted Crisp if he’d seen Jude did not occur to her.)

  So Carole left a message on Jude’s answering machine, asking her to phone back as soon as possible. And then she sat waiting in an agony of frustration, once again made aware of how little she knew about Jude’s life. Her neighbour could be anywhere. Maybe she did have a job and was off at work? Maybe she was visiting a family member . . . or a long-term lover? Maybe she owned a second home and had gone there? The possibilities were infinite.

  To speed up the passage of time, Carole went to her bookshelves and consulted her reference library. Various works of criminology reflected different Home Office initiatives in which she had been involved. The volume she was looking for had come her way when she had been investigating police training methods. It was a manual about scene-of-crime techniques.

  Carole looked dispassionately at the rows of photographs of those who’d come to violent ends. There was nothing gruesome about the task; this scientific layout of wounded bodies detached them from any humanity of which they might once have been part.

  At the same time Carole focused on the image of the body she had found on Fethering beach. In particular, on the two cuts that she had seen on the man’s neck.

  She compared the picture in her mind with the picture on the page, and it confirmed a tiny doubt which had stayed with her since she first saw the corpse.

  The two cuts on the man’s neck were not deep enough. They were little more than flesh wounds and had not reached any major arteries. He might even have received the injuries post-mortem.

  Whatever had killed the man, it hadn’t been the wounds to his neck.

  Carole had hardly reached this conclusion before there was a furious ringing at her doorbell. Jude was back from the Crown and Anchor.

  ‘We’ve got to talk to her.’

  ‘But, Jude, she’ll be in a terrible state. She’s only recently lost her son.’

  ‘She’s also only recently threatened you with a gun. Anyway, I’d have thought the one thing anyone would want to know if they’ve just lost their son is how it happened. We may be able to help her answer that question.’

  ‘She may know already.’

  ‘If she does, she can tell us. And also maybe tell us the connection between her son’s death and the body you found. Come on, we’ve got to get to the bottom of what happened, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, of course we have.’ Carole had by now completely forgotten her morning’s doubts about the wisdom of pursuing the case. ‘So how’re we going to find her?’

  ‘If she’s local, she might be in the phone book. The dead boy’s called Aaron Spalding, so let’s assume she’s a Spalding too. Do we have a first name for her?’

  Carole screwed up her pale-blue eyes with the effort of recollection. ‘There was a caption up over the bit of interview they showed. Um . . . began with a “T”, I think. Yes, it’s coming. Theresa. That’s right – Theresa.’

  ‘Though presumably,’ said Jude, grabbing the Worthing Area telephone directory and flicking through it, ‘the entry would be in her husband’s name.’

  ‘If she’s got a husband. You never know these days, do you?’

  There were ten Spaldings, none of them with the initial T. Carole and Jude took turns to phone them all and ask to speak to Theresa. None had anyone of that name on the premises. And all of them seemed to regard a wrong number as an infringement of their human rights.

  ‘So where do we go next?’ asked Jude. ‘Ring the television company who did the interview?’

  ‘No, local paper,’ said Carole firmly. ‘Comes out today. Always on a Thursday. There’s no way they wouldn’t cover a story like this.’

  They negotiated the pillars of Allinstore to buy a copy of the Fethering Observer, and didn’t have to search far to find what they were looking for. The front page was dominated by the headline: ‘TRAGEDY OF DROWNED TEENAGER’. Beside it, the boyish school photograph of Aaron Spalding appeared again.

  ‘Wonder why it’s spelt “Aaron” and pronounced “Arran”?’ Jude mused.

  ‘Maybe it’s a local variation. Influenced by living so near the Arun Valley.’

  ‘Maybe. Oh, look, there’s the address. It says, “Mrs Theresa Spalding, of Drake Crescent, Fethering.” Where’s that?’

  ‘Up on the Downside Estate, I’m sure. A lot of the roads there are named after famous Elizabethans. Marlowe . . . Sidney . . . Raleigh . . . Meant to give a bit of class when they were built. Mind you, I think it’s the only bit of class they’ve still got left.’

  ‘Not the most desirable part of Fethering then?’

  A wrinkle of Carole’s nose gave all the answer that was required. ‘So,’ she said, ‘when do we go up to Downside and try to talk to Mrs Theresa Spalding?’

  ‘No time like the present,’ replied Jude. ‘How do we get there?’

  ‘In my car. Unless you want to go in yours . . .’

  ‘Haven’t got one.’ Jude grinned. ‘Never felt the need.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fethering doesn’t have an underbelly in the way that, say, Los Angeles has an underbelly, but the Downside Estate is as near as it gets.

  The houses there betrayed signs not of real deprivation but of diminishing willpower and ever-tightening budgets. The Downside Estate had been built as council housing, but cut after cut in local authority spending over the years meant that maintenance had been pared to the bone. The buildings had all reached the age when serious structural refurbishment was required, not short-term making-good repairs. Their late-1940s brickwork needed repointing. Windows needed painting, even those where the original frames had been replaced by soulless double glazing. Tiny front gardens were unkempt and littered. Depressed cars crouched against the pavements on failing suspension.

  The drab November weather did not add to the estate’s charms, as Carole navigated her sensible and immaculately clean Renault towards Drake Crescent. She tried to bite back her instinctive snobbishness, but the compartmentalizing habit of her mind was too strong. Here was a place, she decided, where cultural aspiration stopped at the Sun or the football, and hope existed only in the form of the National Lottery.

  On the side of every house a satellite dish perched like a giant parasitic insect, leeching away more profits for Sky TV. In Downside no attempt had been made to hide them, whereas on the Shorelands Estate a visible satellite dish would have constituted a social lapse more terrible than walking around with one’s flies undone.

  ‘Pretty grim place to live,’ Carole observed, as she turned off Grenville Avenue.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’ve lived in worse,’ said Jude, adding yet another to the list of questions that Carole must at some point put to her neighbour.

  But this wasn’t the moment. ‘How do we know which house it is?’ she asked as the car crawled along Drake Crescent. Unable to disguise her distaste, she added, ‘Stop and ask someone?’

  Jude chuckled. ‘It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have to do. The people round here are human, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t for a moment mean—’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ said Jude cheerfully. ‘Anyway, I don’t think we’re going to have to ask anyone. I’d say it’s the house with the television crew outside.’

  Sure enough, there was a blue and white van bearing the regional station’s logo. A couple of dour technicians were rolling up cables and stowing them in
the back. An effete young man stood awkwardly by, feeling he should offer to help, but not knowing how.

  Jude jumped out as soon as Carole had parked the car and went straight up to the young man. ‘Is this Theresa Spalding’s house?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Have you just been doing a news interview with her?’

  ‘Not news, no. For a documentary. We’re doing an in-depth analysis of the teenage drug problem on the South Coast.’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be interesting,’ lied Carole, who’d come up to join them. All local documentaries, she knew, were ruined by inadequate budgets, sketchy research and inept presenters. ‘And you were talking to Mrs Spalding about her son’s death?’

  ‘Yes. She’s obviously very cut up about it.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Jude, starting up the short path that led to Theresa Spalding’s front door.

  ‘I’m not sure that she really wants to talk to anyone else at the moment,’ said the young man. ‘Unless, of course, you’re social workers.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jude called breezily over her shoulder as she pressed the doorbell.

  In amazement, Carole followed her neighbour. The young man, seeing his colleagues had finished packing the van, got inside.

  It was a moment or two before the front door was opened, and then only halfway. The woman was undoubtedly the one who’d come to Carole’s house, but her face had drained down to a new pallor. The darting eyes were raw with weeping and a hand flickered across in front of her as if warding off some unseen attacker.

  ‘What do you want? I don’t want to talk to no one.’

  ‘We may be able to help you find out how Aaron died,’ said Jude, pronouncing the name ‘Arran’ as everyone else had.

  ‘I don’t care how he died. My boy’s dead – that’s all that matters to me. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  She made as if to close the door, but Carole’s incisive words stopped her. ‘Then perhaps you do want to talk about why you drew a gun on me . . .’