“About twenty yards.”
“Hm.” Jude nodded thoughtfully. “Well, there’s no way the body was swept out to sea again.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because if the incoming tide was going to move him at all, it’d move him further up the beach. He wouldn’t be swept out till after the tide had changed. And the police came to see you too soon after they hadn’t found the body for that to have happened.”
The deduction was undeniably true. Carole was surprised to encounter this new, logical streak in her neighbour.
“So…” Jude spun on her booted heel and looked around the semicircle towards the village. She stopped, facing the Fethering Yacht Club. “I think we go back up there.”
“Hm?”
“For anyone who wanted to hide a body, it’s the nearest place, isn’t it?”
“But who wanted to hide a body?”
“We don’t know that yet, do we?”
It was nearly dark when they got back to the side gate to the Yacht Club. Jude looked around but could see no one in the enveloping gloom. “OK, give me a leg-up.”
“But we can’t break in. I mean, particularly after what Denis Woodville was saying.”
“Nobody’s going to see us, Carole. And if he does find any evidence of our intrusion, he’s going to put it down to the local youngsters. ‘Kids these days just have no respect for property,”” she announced in an uncannily close echo of the Vice-Commodore’s tones. “Come on, give me a leg-up.”
With Carole’s help, Jude negotiated her long skirt over the gate and then helped her neighbour to join her inside the compound. “Now, let’s have a look at all of these hoats.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A loose cover. A sign that one of them’s been broken into.”
“You think the body might have been hidden in one of the boats?”
Jude looked around. “See anywhere else suitable?”
In the last threads of daylight, they felt their way along the rows of dinghies, Carole starting from one end, Jude from the other. On most, the blue covers were firmly battened down, either fixed with cleats or pulled tight by threaded cords. Above the two women, the wind sang in rigging and steel halyards clattered endlessly against metal masts.
“Could be something here!” Carole called out.
Jude was quickly by her side.
“Look!” Carole pointed to the rim of a boat cover, where a piece of rope dangled loose.
“Pity we haven’t got a torch. It’s really hard to see.”
“I have got a torch,” said Carole, trying to keep the smugness out of her voice. “I always carry one in my raincoat pocket. There’s no streetlighting on the High Street.”
“Isn’t there? I hadn’t noticed.”
Carole reached into her Burberry pocket and the beam of light was quickly focused on the trailing rope. It ended in a sharp right angle.
“Been cut through,” said Jude.
The severed cord had been rethreaded through the eyelets of the cover in an attempt to hide the break-in. Jude started quickly to unpick it.
“Should we be doing this?” asked Carole plaintively.
“Course we should. We are doing it anyway. And nobody can see us.”
It was true. The wet darkness around them suddenly seemed total. The floodlights focused on the sea-wall repairs were only fifty yards away but looked pale, distant and insubstantial. Someone would have to be very close to detect their tiny torch-beam.
Freeing a corner of the cover, Jude flipped it back like a bedspread from the stern of the boat. “Shine the torch here,” she said. “No, here!”
The thin stream of light picked out a name in gold lettering:
“I wonder,” said Jude. “Do you think there’s a kind of person who would give their boat the same name as their house?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Come on, let’s get the rest of this cover off and have a look inside.”
“What are you expecting to find in there? The body?”
“It’s a possibility.”
Carole shivered. The possibility was macabre. But she couldn’t deny that it was also exciting.
When they had peeled the cover right back, however, they found no body. Just the moulded fibre-glass interior of a dinghy’s hull. In the central channel a rectangle of trapped water gleamed against the torchlight. Its surface was frozen hard.
But the ice didn’t stop an acrid smell from rising to their nostrils. “Standing water,” Carole observed. “It’s been leaking in for some time.”
She ran the beam of the torch carefully over the inside of the boat. It revealed nothing they wouldn’t have expected to find there.
“Just check if there’s anything under the water.”
Putting a foot on one of the trailer wheels, Jude hoisted herself with surprising ease over the side and into the dinghy. With a gloved fist, she hammered through the sheet of ice. Then, removing her right-hand glove and supporting herself on the other arm, she felt down into the bottom of the boat. She winced at the cold of the water.
“Something here.” She produced a nut and bolt, rusted immovably together, and handed them to Carole. “Don’t think that helps us much.”
She reached down again through the cracked ice into the fetid water and felt her way systematically along the trough. “I think that’s probably it. Be too easy if we – Just a minute…”
Carole craned over the side of the boat, trying desperately to see what her neighbour had uncovered. Jude’s dripping hand raised her trophy into the torch-beam. “Look at that,” she said with triumph.
It was a large, robust Stanley knife, clicked in the open position. The light gleamed on the shiny triangle of its blade.
“Wonder how long that’s been there…?”
“Not very long,” said Carole. “Blade like that would rust very quickly. And…”
“What?”
“The woman who drew a gun on me wanted to know if I’d found a knife.”
“Yes. So she did.”
Jude slowly turned the knife over in her hand. On the other side of the handle words had been printed in uneven white paint-strokes. They read: J. T. CARPETS.
? The Body on the Beach ?
Thirteen
“So what have we got?” asked Jude.
They were back in Carole’s house, sitting in front of her log-effect gas fire. She had chosen the system because she knew it would be a lot more sensible than an open fire. None of that endless business of filling coal scuttles, loading log baskets and sweeping out grates. But for the first time, with her new neighbour installed in a sofa in front of her virtual fire, Carole felt a little wistful for a grate glowing with real flames.
She had felt uncertain about inviting Jude in for a cup of tea, but the unalterable rules of reciprocal hospitality dictated that she should. The trouble was, when you invited someone in, you never knew how long they were going to stay. A drink with Jude in the Crown and Anchor had escalated, without apparent effort, into supper and a lot more drinks in the Crown and Anchor. With someone like Jude, who could say what ‘a cup of tea’ might escalate into?
And once inside the house, with Gulliver greeted and fed, the unalterable rules of reciprocal hospitality
