posed. “In that case you definitely need a hair of the dog.”
“That reminds me. I was going to take Gulliver out for – ”
“Come on!” And Carole’s hand, still being held, was given a quite definite yank.
“But I haven’t got my coat!” wailed Carole.
“We’re only going about five yards.”
As she locked her front door and followed Jude down the symmetrical flags of her garden path, Carole managed to convince herself she was going simply because it would be good to talk about her traumatic discovery of the day before, and not because she wanted to have a snoop inside Jude’s home.
Her neighbour’s front path was an ill-fitting jigsaw of uneven red bricks, through whose interstices moss and weeds protruded. “Got into a terrible state, hasn’t it?” Carole observed. “You’ll have to get this sorted, won’t you?”
“Oh, I quite like it like that.” The breeziness with which Jude committed this blasphemy to the standards of Fethering suggested that it wasn’t said for effect, that she really meant it.
She pushed the dark-wood front door open with an elbow and beckoned Carole to follow her inside. Good heavens, she hadn’t even locked it. The fact that Jude had gone only next door didn’t excuse this lapse. Suppose Carole had invited her in? Fethering High Street was a Neighbourhood Watch Area and, as everyone locally knew, the average burglary took less than three minutes.
And, dear oh dear, as she passed through the hall, Carole noticed that Jude’s voluminous handbag was on a table right by the front door. Where had Jude come from to have such a cavalier attitude to the serious business of security? The thought reminded Carole once again that she still didn’t know where Jude had come from. In fact, she knew very little more about her neighbour than she had the moment they first met.
The sitting room into which she was ushered was low and, because the old leaded windows hadn’t yet been replaced by sealed double-glazing units, rather dark. Though Carole had never been inside Woodside Cottage during its previous occupancy, she’d assumed that the old lady would have had more of the basic modernization done. There was no evidence of central heating radiators, though an open fire crackled cheerfully from the grate (without a fire-guard in front of it, Carole noted, awarding her neighbour another black mark for domestic security).
Jude snapped on a couple of lights with dangly paper shades and illuminated what appeared to be an overstocked junk shop. She crossed to a portable television perched on a pile of old wooden wine-crates and switched it on. “News is on One,” she said. “Fiddle with the aerial if the picture’s fuzzy. I’ll go and open the wine.”
And she disappeared into the kitchen before Carole could say that she didn’t really need wine at this time of day. As the television came to life with a picture that was indeed fuzzy and as she moved the aerial on top of the set around to improve it, Carole took in the crammed contents of the room.
No surface was unlittered. There were piles of books and papers and knick-knacks everywhere. And there didn’t seem any theme or coherence to what was on display. Carved African animals jostled with brass handbells and green marble-stoppered bottles. Silver-framed photographs of stiff Victorians consorted with china cats and glass candlesticks. Eggs of exoti-cally veined stone lay beside Russian dolls and spinner’s bobbins.
Snuggled in the midst of this chaos were a small sofa and two armchairs. It was impossible to tell whether they were a matching set, though their varied outlines under the brightly patterned throws that covered them suggested otherwise. Further pieces of furniture were also hung with gratuitous drapery. The room was like the nest of a kleptomaniac magpie.
One must make allowances, thought Carole magnanimously. The poor woman moved in only a couple of days ago. She’s just had everything dumped in here. When she’s got the stuff distributed around the house, this room’ll look a lot tidier.
“Do sit down,” said Jude, bustling in from the kitchen. One hand held a bottle of red wine, the other two glasses and a corkscrew that she was busily plying. As she slumped into one of the heavily draped armchairs, she looked around with satisfaction. “At least I’ve got this room done,” she said.
Carole’s jaw dropped. The decor was intentional. The confusion expressed how Jude wanted the room to look. But, even if Carole had been so ill-mannered as to say anything, there wasn’t time. Jude sprang up again and shoved the wine and glasses into her neighbour’s hands. “Here, you pour this.”
Then she crossed to the still-fuzzy television and, with a cry of, “Come on, behave yourself, you little bastard!”, gave it a resounding thump on the side. The picture immediately resolved itself into crystalline clarity.
Her timing had been perfect. The local news had just started. It was fronted by the kind of gauche female newsreader who makes you realize that, bad though network presenters may be, there remain unimaginable depths of the television barrel yet to be scraped.
But Carole and Jude didn’t notice the girl’s incompetence; they were too caught up in what she was actually saying.
“A body was found on the beach at Fethering this morning by a woman walking her dog.”
“Only a day late,” Jude chuckled.
“It wasn’t me,” Carole objected.
“The body,” the newsreader droned on, “has been identified as that of sixteen-year-old” – Carole’s jaw dropped – “Arran Spalding…”
As the name was mentioned, a picture of the dead boy filled the screen. One of those school photographs, posed against a vague cloud-like backdrop. The caption showed that, though it had been pronounced ‘Arran’, his name was spelt ‘Aaron’. Aaron Spalding, with his floppy blond fringe and cheekily crooked grin, looked nearer twelve than sixteen. Probably he had been when the picture was taken. Self-conscious adolescents don’t like being photographed; what showed on the screen was perhaps the most recent image available. But the innocent wickedness of his face added a poignancy to the fact of the boy’s death.
The newsreader’s voice continued drably: “…who lived in Fethering and who had been missing for the past twenty-four hours. The cause of death has not yet been established, but the police have not ruled out foul play.”
Then, with one of those awkward jump-cuts beloved of local newsreaders, she moved on to the allegation that a recent spate of deaths among ducks in the area had been caused by ferrets.
The two women looked at each other in amazement. Carole noticed with even more amazement that half the contents of her wine glass had somehow disappeared.
“But it’s…I mean…” she spluttered. “It was a middle-aged man, the body I saw. No way could it have been mistaken for a teenager.”
“It wasn’t mistaken for a teenager,” said Jude firmly. “There have been two bodies on the beach. First the middle-aged man you saw, then this poor kid.”
“You don’t think there’s any connection between them, do you?”
Jude cocked her head thoughtfully to one side. “There’s no reason why there should be. It’d be a remarkable coincidence if they were connected. Then again, it’s already a coincidence that two dead bodies have appeared on consecutive days. Logic dictates that the two incidents have nothing to do with each other, but my instinct says they have. And,” she concluded mischievously, “in a straight fight between logic and instinct, I’d go for instinct every time.”
“Hm…” Carole might have called the odds rather differently. “Well, this poor boy’s death is nothing to do with me. It’s not as if I even found the body. Some other woman with a dog. I wonder who it was…And, as for the first body, the police don’t even believe that existed.”
“But it did!”
Jude sounded aggrieved, almost as if it was her story that was being doubted. Carole realized, with a sudden warm feeling, that her neighbour had never for a moment questioned her account of what she had found.
“Since that body did exist,” Jude went on, “there are two rather important questions which have yet to be answered. One – whose body was it? And, two – where is the body now?”
Carole shrugged. “Two questions to which, I’m afraid, we can never know the answer.”
“Don’t you believe it.” Jude rose determinedly and switched off the television. Then she picked up the bottle and refilled the glasses, which had both unaccountably become empty. “I think we should find out the answers to those two questions.”
“Us?” said Carole. “But surely murder – if it is murder – that’s a job for the police.”
