She went on, “A man’s body I think it was you found in
“We were horrified when we found it. There was just moonlight – the moon was full that night – and” – he shuddered – “we could only see this outline. But we knew he was dead. And then Dylan…”
“Was Dylan as surprised to see the body as you and Aaron were? Or did he know it was going to be there?”
Nick Kent gave a decided shake of his head. “He was shocked, just like us. Pretended not to be, pretended he was Mr Cool, but it got to him all right. And then…”
The boy was having second thoughts about continuing, so Jude repeated coaxingly, “And then?”
He made up his mind to go on. “And then Dylan had this mad idea. He’s into all this occult stuff, you know, black magic, the Undead, all that kind of thing…and he said that if Aaron and I wanted to show we were really hard…”
“Yes?”
Nick flinched, as though he were trying to flick something off his face. “No, no, I can’t tell you.”
“Was it something to do with the knife?” asked Jude.
The boy slumped back, resistance gone. The woman seemed to know everything anyway. He might as well tell her. “Yes,” he agreed flatly. “He said if Aaron and me were really hard…he said cutting a dead man’s flesh under a full moon, it’d make us strong…and then if we wrote our names in our own blood and left them on the body…we’d have special powers…if we did it…”
“And you believed him?”
“We’d had a lot to drink. And the weed…the cannabis, you know. We weren’t thinking straight. And Dylan kept saying we were cowards and mother’s boys and…and then he took the knife and made a cut in the man’s neck. And then Aaron took the knife and he made a cut…”
“And did you, Nick?”
The boy looked away in embarrassment. “No. I couldn’t. I…Dylan said I was chicken, and I wouldn’t get the power that he and Aaron were going to get, but I…I just couldn’t…”
The boy shuddered, too overcome by the recollection to speak.
“And what about writing the names in blood?”
“Aaron did that. He wrote his name. He wanted to have special powers. There’s a girl at school he fancies – he fancied. He wanted to have power over her.”
“So he wrote his name and put it in the dead man’s pocket?”
“Yes.”
“What about Dylan? Did he write his name?”
“No, he said he didn’t need to. Because he was the leader and the power would come to him automatically.”
Anger seethed within Jude, anger against Dylan. The older boy had egged on the others, probably making up his black magic mumbo-jumbo as he went along. But he wasn’t going to incriminate himself by leaving his name around the scene of the crime. He’d allow the gullible Aaron Spalding to do so, though – and no doubt build up the boy’s natural paranoia with garish tales of the Undead. Dylan, Jude felt sure, was directly responsible for Aaron’s suicide. But she felt equally sure the older boy would never be called to account for it.
Her only comfort was the fact that it was Dylan who’d been careless enough to drop his Stanley knife in the boat. Without that she and Carole would never have made the connection to him.
“And what about you, Nick? Did you write your name?”
“No. Dylan said if I was too chicken to cut the man’s flesh, then I didn’t deserve to have any special powers. And they both laughed at me. Said I was just a kid and…” The memory of his humiliation still festered.
“And then what happened, Nick?”
“We…I don’t know. We suddenly panicked when we realized what we’d done.”
“But you personally hadn’t done anything.”
“I’d broken into the club. I’d handled the dead body. We were all in a terrible state. I think the booze and the weed made it worse. Even Dylan lost his bottle. We didn’t want to leave any signs, any evidence, so we took the body out of the boat and we…and we…”
“And you threw it over the sea wall into the Fether.”
“How do you know all this?” He was sobbing again. “You said you didn’t see us.”
“I didn’t. And then you all went your separate ways home that night – yes?”
“Yes.”
“But Aaron rang you the next morning. What did he say?”
“He said he’d woken up early and he’d panicked about us having left some clue to what we’d done down at the Yacht Club…and he’d gone down to the beach…”
“And found the body washed up by the tide.”
“Yes.”
Finally, there was corroboration for what Carole had seen on the Tuesday morning.
“He was in a terrible state. He said the evil was coming back to haunt him, that the body was one of the Undead, and it was coming after him. So I went down to the beach and met Aaron,” Nick went on, “and it was still nearly dark and we thought if we put the body back in the boat, then nobody’d ever know that we’d been there…”
“And that’s what you did?”
“Yes.”
Huge sobs were shuddering through the boy’s frame. Jude reckoned she had got everything she was going to get out of him. “One final question…Your mother said it was after you’d come back in the morning that you were in the really bad state, not the night before…”
“She didn’t see me the night before, did she? Anyway, I was still full of the booze and the cannabis…I just passed out. But the next morning…the shock hit me. I knew it wasn’t a dream. I knew we’d actually done it. I knew what I’d done.”
Something prompted a renewed outburst of emotion, more powerful than any that had come before. The boy’s jaw trembled and his whole body shook uncontrollably.
“What is it?” pleaded Jude. “What is it? What was so terrible?”
For a few moments he was incapable of framing any words, just mouthing hopelessly. Finally he managed to control himself. Nick Kent sounded like a very young child as he admitted, “I’d never seen a dead body before.”
? The Body on the Beach ?
Twenty-Four
“Well, behaviour of that kind,” concluded Carole, sitting back on her barstool in disgust, “is all too typical of the youth of today.”
“That’s a very Fethering thing to say,” said Jude.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the kind of remark I’d have expected from some old codger whose skin’s already turned to tweed. Not from someone your age.”
“I’m not young,” Carole protested. But she was flattered by the implication.
“You’re too young to start sounding off about ‘the youth of today’.”
“But what Nick Kent and the others did was appalling.” She lowered her voice as she catalogued: “Illegal drinking, taking drugs, breaking and entering – probably with intent to burgle – and then mutilating a corpse.”
“He wasn’t involved in that.”
“No, but he was in everything else. Really, Jude, am I supposed to condone that kind of behaviour?”
“No, of course you’re not. But you didn’t see the boy. You didn’t see how much he was suffering.”
“From what you’ve told me, he deserves to suffer. You’re not making excuses for him, are you?”
“No, no. I’m just saying that Nick Kent has had a rough deal. And, OK, he drank and smoked dope, and OK, he gave in to peer pressure and behaved disgustingly, but at least you can understand why. Seeing his father fall
