remember the exact words, but she felt sure Jude had suggested their working together. If the police weren’t going to show any interest in doing it, then the two of them should find out who killed the body on the beach.
? The Body on the Beach ?
Eight
Carole was woken by Gulliver’s barking. This was unusual. Normally, when she went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea, he was still comatose in his basket by the Aga. And the idea that he might have been barking to alert her to some intruder in the house was laughable. Such behaviour was not in Gulliver’s nature.
As she looked around her bedroom, Carole realized something else was odd. The curtains were not drawn and thin but bright daylight was trickling through the windows. She raised an arm to check her wristwatch, but couldn’t see the hands without her glasses. She fumbled and found them on the far edge of the bedside table, not neatly aligned on the near side where she left them every night.
She squinted to focus on the watch. A quarter to ten! Good heavens!
She sat up sharply, and then realized how much her head was aching.
Carole hurried into some clothes and rushed Gulliver out on to the open ground behind the house. The grass was still dusted with frost and her ears tingled in the cold air.
The speed and relief with which the dog squatted at the first opportunity made her realize what a narrow escape her kitchen floor had had.
She couldn’t blame the dog. He’d been very good, exercising all the control of which he was capable, while his mistress overslept. She couldn’t blame anyone but herself.
Except of course for her new next-door neighbour. It was Jude who’d led her into self-indulgence at the Crown and Anchor. Maybe Jude wasn’t such a suitable companion after all. Carole decided that any future communication between them should be strictly rationed.
She felt a little tremor of embarrassment. She had talked far too much the previous evening, confiding things that she had never confided to anyone else.
No, Jude was definitely a bad influence. Carole couldn’t remember when she’d last had a hangover.
At first she’d decided she wouldn’t take anything for the pain, just brazen it out. But after an hour or so, ready to succumb, she had gone to the bathroom cabinet, only to find it empty of aspirin. Oh well, that was meant. Serve her right. She couldn’t take anything.
Half an hour after reaching that conclusion, though, she had decided she’d have to go to the shop to get some aspirin.
As she set out, neatly belted up in her Burberry, Carole heard a heavy regular thudding which she knew didn’t come from inside her own head. There must be some construction work happening somewhere in the Fethering area. Whatever it was, the noise didn’t make her headache feel any better.
¦
The shop was not a village shop in the old sense of the expression, though it occupied the site where a proper village shop had once stood. That old shop, incorporating a post office, had been run by an elderly couple and very rarely had in stock anything anyone might need. But that didn’t matter. The people of Fethering drove in their large cars to do their major shopping at the nearby out-of-town Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s. They used the village shop only when they’d run out of life’s little essentials – milk, bread, cheese, ketchup, cigarettes or gin – and to collect their pensions. Many of them went in to buy things they didn’t need, just so they’d have the opportunity for a good gossip.
But that was no way to run a business and in the late 1980s, when the elderly couple retired, the old shop was demolished, replaced by a rectangular glass-fronted structure and called a supermarket. It was one of a local chain called Allinstore – a compression that someone in a meeting must once have thought was a good idea of ‘All- in-store’. This verbal infelicity was untrue under the Trades Description Act (in fact, the store’s local nickname was ‘Nowtinstore’), but it was also symptomatic of the lacklustre style which epitomized Allinstore management. The only detail the new shop had in common with the old one was that it very rarely had in stock anything anyone might need, but people still went in to buy things they didn’t need, just so’s they’d have the opportunity for a good gossip.
In the transformation of Fethering’s shopping facilities the village had also lost its post office, which led to a lot of complicated travel arrangements on pension days. And Allinstore had become an outlet for the National Lottery, thus enabling the residents of Fethering to shatter their hopes and dreams on a weekly basis.
The architect who’d designed the new supermarket (assuming such a person existed and the plans hadn’t been scribbled on the back of an envelope by a builder who’d once seen a shoebox) had placed two wide roof- supporting pillars just in front of the main tills. Whether he’d done this out of vindictiveness or had simply been infected by the endemic Allinstore incompetence was unknowable, but the result was that many shopping hours were wasted and much frustration caused by customers negotiating their way around these obstructions. Mercifully Allinstore did not supply its shoppers with trolleys, only wire baskets, but many of its elderly clientele brought in their own wheeled shopping containers and these added to the traffic mayhem around the pillars.
Carole, aspirin packet in hand, was stuck behind one of them, out of sight of the tills, when she heard a familiar male voice say, “Apparently they found a dead body on the beach this morning.”
She craned forward, encroaching on the elderly lady with a wheeled basket in front of her, and saw Bill Chilcott.
“Really?” said the girl behind the till, with the same level of interest she would have accorded to the news that there were no more toilet rolls on the shelf.
“Oh yes,” he asserted. “Heard it on the BBC local news this morning.”
Carole leaned over the elderly lady in front of her. “Morning, Bill.”
“I don’t know,” he said, unnecessarily loudly and with what he imagined to be a lecherous grin. “Crown and Anchor last night, Allinstore this morning. We can’t go on meeting like this. People will start to talk.”
“Yes.” Carole dismissed the pleasantry with a curt smile. “What’s this about dead bodies?”
“I heard it on the radio when Sandra and I came back from our swim at the Leisure Centre. A dead body found washed up on Fethering beach.”
“Did they say who it was? Or what had happened to him?”
“They didn’t even say whether it was a ‘him’. Probably be more on the lunchtime news. Mind you, if you want my opinion…” It was a mystery why Bill Chilcott always made this proviso; he was going to give his opinion anyway. “I should think it’s one of those
He loaded the words with contempt. Though the precise details of Bill Chilcott’s naval background were ill- defined, he never missed an opportunity of saying that seafaring should be left to the professionals. “Some idiot who took out a pleasure boat without sufficient knowledge of local conditions and
But as Bill Chilcott’s hobbyhorse gathered momentum, Carole stopped listening. In spite of her headache, she felt a glow of vindication. She looked forward to grovelling apologies from Detective Inspector Brayfleld and WPG Juster. There had been a body on the beach.
? The Body on the Beach ?
Nine
Jude found the Shorelands Estate rather spooky as she walked through on the way to Barbara Turnbull’s coffee morning. It took a lot to cast down her spirits. The frosty greyness of the morning hadn’t done it. Nor had she had any adverse reaction to the wine of the night before. She’d drunk no more than a usual evening’s intake. But Jude had a feeling that spending any length of time in Shorelands could bring her spirits down very quickly indeed.
Though laid out on lavishly spacious lines, the predominant feeling the estate gave her was one of
