“Have you been impressed by how the police have reacted so far?”
“No, but…”
There was a gleam in Jude’s big brown eyes. “I think this could be rather fun.” Then, briskly, she announced, “I’ll get us some lunch. There’s a sort of Turkish salad I do in the fridge. Aubergines and yoghurt and what-have- you. That sound all right?”
“Sounds great,” Carole replied. “Are you vegetarian?”
“Sometimes,” said Jude easily, as she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Carole to wonder when she’d found the time to buy aubergines. There was no way that Allinstore’s stock would have aspired to anything so exotic.
¦
The Turkish salad was excellent and somehow, by the time they’d finished it, the wine bottle was empty too. Carole felt very warm and cosseted in the draped sofa in front of the glowing fire. She yawned.
“Wiped out?” asked Jude.
“A bit. At least my headache’s gone, though.”
“Never fails.” Jude chuckled. “Go and have a little sleep.”
Carole was shocked. “During the day? But I’m not ill.”
Her neighbour shrugged. “Please yourself.” Then she looked thoughtful. “I wonder who your body was…”
“No idea.”
“No, but we’re going to find out.”
“Were you serious? What you said before lunch? About us investigating this?”
“Of course I was. Why, don’t you think it’s a good idea?”
To her astonishment, Carole found her lips forming the words, “Yes, I think it’s a very good idea.”
“Excellent. So where do we start?”
Carole looked blank. “Don’t know. I’m afraid I haven’t got much of a track record as an investigator.”
“No, but you have a track record as an intelligent woman who can work things out for herself.”
“Maybe.”
“So what information do we currently have about your body on the beach?”
Carole stretched out a dubious lower lip. “All we have, I suppose, is the fact that he was wearing a life-jacket that was printed ‘Property of Fethering Yacht Club’.”
“Right.” Jude clapped her hands gleefully. “Then it seems pretty obvious to me that the first thing we should do is go down to Fethering Yacht Club.”
“But we can’t do that,” Carole objected.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not members.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” said Jude.
? The Body on the Beach ?
Eleven
In the snugness of Woodside Cottage they hadn’t noticed the weather worsening, but when they emerged the afternoon had turned charcoal grey and relentless icy rain swirled around them. The wind kept animating new puddles on the pavement into flurries of spray. The cold wetness stung their faces.
“Sure you wouldn’t rather have that sleep?” Jude suggested teasingly.
“No,” came the crisp reply. Affront at the idea of sleeping during the daytime, though unspoken, remained implicit. “I’ll just get my coat and we’ll go to the Yacht Club.”
Carole hardened her heart against Gulliver’s pathetic appeals to join them – he’d go for a walk in any weather – and wrapped her Burberry firmly around her. Soon she and Jude were striding into the horizontal rain towards the Fethering Yacht Club.
Fixed to the gatepost of one of the High Street houses they passed was a plastic-enclosed notice which read, in professionally printed capitals, THIS FRONT GARDEN IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSING, AT ANY LEVEL, IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.
“What the hell does that mean?” asked Jude.
Carole chuckled. “It’s the Chilcotts.”
“Bill and Sandra?”
“The very same. They’re having a feud with their next-door neighbour.”
Jude recollected the fag-end of conversation she’d heard at Barbara Tumbull’s. “About where he parks his boat?”
“About that or about anything else they happen to think of. It’s a battle that’s been running for years.”
“And does the neighbour respond in kind?”
By way of answer, Carole pointed to a notice, handwritten in marker-pen capitals, which was pinned to the gatepost of the next house. It read, ALLTRESPASSERS WILL BE TREATED WITH RESPECT AND COURTESY – SO LONG AS THEY’RE NOT THE PETTY-MINDED COUPLE FROM NEXT DOOR.
Jude giggled. “Sounds as if the people this side have at least got a sense of humour about it.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Carole. “I think it’s all in deadly earnest on both sides.”
Jude looked into the garden. The trailer of a sailing dinghy with a fitted cover was parked diagonally across the cemented area in front of the garage. Its flattened mast missed the shared hedge between the feuding households by fractions of an inch. “So who’s the sailor?” she asked.
“Denis Woodville. It’s quite possible we’ll meet him at the Yacht Club. He’s rather a big noise there, so I’ve heard. Incidentally, Jude” – Carole was finding, the more she said the name, the less pronounced were the virtual quotation marks with which she enclosed it – “what are we going to say when we get there? I mean, shall I say that I saw one of the club’s life-jackets on the body I found?”
“No, no, no. Don’t mention the body – that’ll only cause a lot of unnecessary follow-up questions.” Jude looked thoughtful for a moment, then clapped her gloved hands together as she found the solution. “Yes! Everyone round here seems totally obsessed by security, so that’s going to be our way in. We’ll say we saw some kids on the beach playing with a Fethering Yacht Club life-jacket and we wondered if it’d been stolen…You know, whether the club’s had any kind of break-in recently?”
“But that’s not true,” Carole objected.
Jude’s brown eyes took on a new vagueness. “True? Truth is such a relative concept, though, isn’t it, Carole? And telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is the surest way of completely screwing up your life, wouldn’t you agree?”
Carole certainly would not agree. Telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to everyone had been one of the guiding principles of her life. It was an approach which had caused occasional awkwardnesses, moments when confrontations could have been avoided by a little tactful finessing of that truth. Indeed, if she’d been less strict in her adherence to the principle, she might still have been married. But Carole Seddon had never given in to the way of compromise. She had always told the complete truth and faced up to the consequences of her actions.
So she didn’t give any answer to Jude’s question.
¦
Rather than going straight down the High Street and turning left on to Seaview Road, they cut along one of the side lanes and approached the Yacht Club along the banks of the Fether. Though it was hardly a day for sightseeing, Carole wanted to show Jude another aspect of the village.
There was a high path along the side of the river, the top of the defences which, further on by the Yacht Club, joined up with the sea wall. Cars were kept off this pedestrian area by serried rows of concrete bollards. Near the path a rusted Second World War mine had been converted into a collecting box for some maritime charity.
It was low tide. The Fether was a truculent sliver of brown water between swollen mudflats, which looked bleakly malevolent in the driving rain.
“Wouldn’t fancy falling down there,” said Jude.
