“In my car. Unless you want to go in yours…”
“Haven’t got one.” Jude grinned. “Never felt the need.”
? The Body on the Beach ?
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 Windows needed painting, even those where the original frames had been replaced by soulless double glazing.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…”
The door-closing movement stopped. Through the remaining crack the woman’s eyes took in the speaker’s face.
“Unless you want the police to talk to you about why you drew a gun on me.”
Reluctantly, the crack of the door widened.
“You better come in then.”
¦
Theresa Spalding lived in a maisonette. Whether the house had been built like that or subsequently converted into two dwellings was hard to tell. The sitting room, into which Carole and Jude were grudgingly ushered, was dominated by a huge television screen. Throughout their interview, some American sitcom full of overacting teenagers was running with the sound off.
Theresa Spalding gestured to a couple of broken-down chairs, stubbed out the remains of a cigarette and, with trembling hands, shook another out of a packet. She remained standing while she lit the new one. She took a drag, as though gulping in oxygen on the top of Everest.
“Look, I don’t know what you want, but I’ve already got enough grief.”
The room was full of traces of her son. A poster of the Southampton football team. A Playstation with a scattering of CD-ROM games by the television. Stephen Kings and similar paperbacks littered on a shelf, along with a neat row of horror videos. A grubby pair of trainers left by the sofa, exactly where he’d kicked them off.
Jude took the lead. There had been no discussion between them, but instinctively they fell into their roles. If Carole, with her threats of police involvement, was the Bad Cop, then Jude was going to be the Good Cop.
“Yes, Mrs Spalding, I understand – ”
“It’s not ‘Mrs’. I never been married. But if you think that means I didn’t bring up Aaron right – ”
“We’re not saying that…Theresa. Can I call you ‘Theresa’?”
Carole knew she could never have got away with it, but the woman snorted permission to Jude for her first name to be used. There was something in Jude’s manner which made such things possible.
“Thank you. I’m Jude, and my friend’s called Carole.”
This first use of the word ‘friend’ gave Carole a warm feeling. She wasn’t sure whether she was ready yet to reciprocate the compliment, but it was still nice to know that Jude thought of their relationship in that light.
“And we’re both desperately sorry about what happened to Aaron.”
“Why? What business is it of yours?”
“It wouldn’t be our business,” Carole responded sharply, “if you hadn’t come to my house and threatened me with a gun.”
“You needn’t have worried. It wasn’t a real gun.” Theresa Spalding crossed to a dresser and pulled the weapon out of a drawer. She chucked it across into Carole’s lap for inspection. No parts of the gun’s mechanism moved except for the trigger. A moulded replica. “Just a thing Aaron bought.”
“Why did he buy it?” asked Carole.
“Not to do any harm!” Theresa snapped. “He’d never have done an off-licence with it. He wasn’t like that. Aaron was just a little boy and little boys like playing with guns. That’s just a toy. He bought it as a toy!”
