The Fethering Mysteries 01; The Body on the Beach

“What?”

Jude had thought long and hard what her cover story should be. She wasn’t going to get anywhere with a complaint about Dylan. Inventing some domestic crisis was too risky; his employers were bound to know more about his family circumstances than she did. What was needed was something urgent, but unthreatening, something that would sound as though Mrs Grant-Edwards was actually doing him a good turn. Jude felt pleased with the solution she’d finally come up with.

“It’s a wallet containing his credit cards. And since he hasn’t come back to our house looking, I assume he doesn’t know where he left it. Well, I know how tiresome it can be to lose one’s credit cards. It happened to me last year and caused an awful kerfuffle. So I just wanted to ring him to put his mind at rest.”

The approach worked with the girl at J.T. Carpets. “That’s very kind of you, Mrs Grant-Edwards.”

“If we don’t all help each other out in this life, what will become of us?”

“What indeed? Right, just a moment. I’ll find Dylan’s home number for you.”

The girl gave it. Jude had asked for his address too, but she couldn’t justify pressing for that. Her cover story didn’t require her knowing where he lived. So she just thanked the girl for her help and put the phone down.

The number had a Worthing code, which meant it was local, and the first two digits were the same as Jude’s own, which meant it was very local. Dylan probably lived in Fethering. But whether with his family, a girlfriend or on his own she had no means of knowing.

The next call was going to need a change of persona and she had to get it right. Jude made herself a cup of peppermint tea while she focused on the role she was about to play. In spite of her floaty dress style, Jude was far from being a superannuated hippy, but she had met plenty of the breed. Indeed, during the time she’d lived on Majorca, people who didn’t know her well might have reckoned her as one of their number. Most of her acquaintances from that period of her life had long since settled into the worlds of domesticity and employment, often as school-teachers or in the social services. They remained harmless idealists, benignly ineffectual, posing no threat to society at any level. True, they did break the law on a regular basis, but the one they broke Jude didn’t think should be a law anyway.

She concentrated on getting the voice right. Laid-back, lazy, full of trailing vowels, that was it. And she’d use her mobile phone, so that the precise location she was calling from wouldn’t be revealed if Dylan checked 1471.

She waited till half-past eleven, which she reckoned gave a lad-about-Fethering – assuming that’s what Dylan was – time to wake up after the excesses of Friday night, and keyed in his number. She was in luck. He was at home.

“Hi.” He managed to invest the single syllable with insolence and menace.

“Is that Dylan?” Jude got exactly the right relaxed diffidence into her voice.

“Yeah. Who wants him?”

“I was given your name by someone. I want to get hold of some gear.”

“What kind of gear?”

“Pot.” She knew that’s what most users of her generation would still call it. “Cannabis.”

Dylan laughed harshly. “So you’re after some weed, eh? And what makes you think I might be able to help you?”

“I told you. A friend gave me your name.”

“I think you’d better tell me who the friend is. Otherwise I might suspect this is some kind of set-up.”

Jude took the risk. If Dylan didn’t bite, then she knew she’d have lost him. She backed her hunch. “Rory Turnbull.”

The silence lasted so long she thought she must’ve miscalculated. Then Dylan repeated, “Rory Turribull, eh? Our fine upstanding dentist?”

He didn’t mention the fine upstanding dentist’s recent disappearance. Which was good news, because it almost definitely meant he didn’t know about it. When he did, he’d be on his guard, knowing the inevitability of police investigations into all aspects of Rory Turnbull’s life.

“Yes. He said he was a customer of yours.”

“Not much of a customer. He bought very little from me. Just a bit of weed on a couple of occasions.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t carry the stuff he was after.”

“He wanted hard drugs?”

“Yes. Smack. I gave him the name of a contact in Brighton and didn’t hear from him again. So I guess that’s where he took his business.”

“Who was that contact?”

Jude realized she had been over-eager even before Dylan responded. “Hey, just a minute, just a minute. I thought you said it was weed – or was it ‘pot’? – you were after.”

“Yes,” she agreed contritely. “Can you help me?”

“Maybe. It depends how much you’re prepared to pay – ” He quoted her prices for the various grades of goods he had available. She agreed his terms without haggling, and he fixed to meet her in the seafront shelter nearest to the Fethering Yacht Club at seven o’clock that evening.

“How will I recognize you?” he asked.

“I’m very tall, nearly six foot. Thinnish, black hair. I’ll be wearing a long brown leather coat and a brown fur hat.” Jude felt fairly safe with this anti-description of herself. And, for ethical reasons, her wardrobe contained nothing made of either leather or fur.

“OK. And a name? Or at least something you can identify yourself by, in case there’s more than one tall bird in a leather coat down on the seafront tonight.”

“Caroline,” said Jude.

“OK, Caroline. See you later.”

And he put the phone down. As she switched off her mobile, a little tremor of distaste ran through Jude’s body.

One thing she knew for certain, though. She would not be anywhere near a Fethering seafront shelter at seven o’clock that evening.

For a moment she contemplated ringing the police and suggesting they make a rendezvous with Dylan at a Fethering seafront shelter at seven o’clock that evening.

But no. Deep though her hatred for the boy was, shopping him to the authorities would have been a very un- Jude thing to do.

? The Body on the Beach ?

Twenty-Eight

That afternoon, over a cup of tea at Carole’s, the two women pooled the information they had gleaned. Both had a lot to tell. They had unearthed pretty convincing evidence that Rory Turnbull had been a heroin user. That expensive habit might well have led to his embezzling the funds of the Fethering Yacht Club.

And yet, when they had told each other all their findings, both Carole and Jude were left feeling flat. They had found reasons why Rory Turnbull might have wanted to take his own life, but they’d found nothing that linked him with the body Carole had found on Fethering beach. True, the dentist had had contact with Dylan the drug dealer, and Dylan had been the initiator of the black magic mutilation of the corpse in Brigadoon II, but that still did not provide a direct connection. They had no proof that Rory Turnbull knew the body was in his boat, and there seemed no obvious way of getting any.

As they shuffled through the possibilities, even Jude’s customary good-natured calm gave way to despondency. All they were left with was that it had been a bad week for the Fethering body-count. Three deaths, and though Aaron Spalding’s might well have been prompted by guilt for what he’d done to the unnamed corpse, Rory lurnbull’s seemed to stand on its own.

“Of course, we don’t actually know it’s a death yet, do we?” reasoned Carole.

“No, not till they’ve found his body.”

“Yes, and who knows how long that’ll take? He might have driven out to some disused barn, or into the