concentrate on Rory Turribull. Now, the assumption is that he’s committed suicide…”
“And it seems a very reasonable assumption. He left a note, for a start, saying that that was what he intended to do. And the more we discover about his circumstances, the more impossible his situation seems to have been. His marriage must always have been unhappy – certainly if Barbara had the same kind of attitude to him as his mother-in-law has. And his finances were getting totally out of control. I mean, now we’ve discovered he’d remortgaged the house and he had no savings left. He must’ve been really desperate to start fiddling the Yacht Club accounts. And making false claims for dental work on the NHS, that had to be a short-term thing. He knew he’d get found out in time.”
“And why was he doing all this? Why did he need all that money?”
“To feed his heroin habit.”
“And on what basis do we say he had a heroin habit?”
“Come on, Jude. You got that from Dylan, didn’t you?”
“Not really. All I got from Dylan was the fact that he gave Rory a contact name for hard drugs. Rory came to him because he was the Fethering local drug dealer – well known to be, Ted Crisp told us as much. Didn’t take us long, did it? Two not-very-streetwise women, and we get on to Dylan straight away, don’t we? And all we actually know is that Rory bought a bit of weed from Dylan, and then asked for a contact name to get hold of the smack. We have no proof he ever followed up on that contact.”
“But we do. Rory’s mother-in-law found evidence – she found the drug equipment in his study. Oh, come on, Jude, we can’t argue with this. It all stacks up.”
“Yes, it all stacks up.” Jude stopped and narrowed her brown eyes to look out over the sea. Now the weather had changed, there was even a trace of blue in the waves. “And I think it all stacks up too conveniently.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve known a few drug addicts in my time,” said Jude, “and the one thing that distinguishes them is secrecy about their habit. Not when they’re with other junkies perhaps, but they don’t want the outside world to know. And yet we’re being asked to believe that a middle–class dentist leaves evidence of his drug habit round the house where his mother-in-law can find it. And where his wife could easily have found it if his mother-in-law hadn’t. Winnie told you that Barbara snooped around in the loft and found the pornography he’d stashed away – and he’d made a much bigger effort to hide that. So Rory knew full well that anything left round his house was a serious security risk.”
“But surely – ”
Jude seemed unaware of the interruption as she went on, “Besides, what Winnie found was so obvious. What – a syringe, some tinfoil and a packet of white powder?”
“That’s what she said.”
“And she also said that she recognized what it was because she’d seen stuff like that on television. What she saw was like an identikit shorthand for drug addiction – something that even a genteel, middle–class lady in her seventies was bound to recognize. No, I’m sorry, I don’t buy it. There’s something going on here.”
“But what?”
Jude let out a wry little laugh. “If we knew that, wouldn’t life be simple? The only thing I do know, though, is that Rory Turnbull isn’t dead.”
“How do you know that? All the evidence points to the fact that he definitely is dead.”
“And that’s how I know it. There’s too much evidence. I detect a bit of overkill in the planning here.”
“Whose planning?”
“Rory Turnbull’s, I would imagine. Though what he was planning and why, I have no idea.”
“Well, even if he’s not dead,” said Carole, “it’s no surprise that he’s off the scene right now, is it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Retribution was getting dangerously close. He must’ve known when the Regional Dental Officer would be coming to make his inspection. And when Denis Woodville would be talking to the accountants, come to that.”
“Yes.” Jude rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “It might in fact have been better from Rory’s point of view if those things had come out after his apparent suicide. I wonder…”
“What?”
“Dunno. Just wonder if he had to change his plans for some reason. But since we don’t know what his plans were, such speculation becomes rather difficult. Oh, what the hell? I’m going to paddle.”
And suddenly Jude was running down to the sea’s edge.
“You’re not going to take off your shoes, are you?” Carole called after her. “The water’ll freeze your toes off.”
“No, no, these boots are supposed to be waterproof!”
Jude jumped into the shallows and kicked about in frustration, raising flurries of spray around her. Gulliver, identifying the kind of game he never got to play with his owner, leapt into the water to join her, barking joyously. Carole stood a few yards above the tide mark, looking old–fashioned.
She gave covert looks along the beach in both directions and up towards the pebbles. There was no one in sight. Thank goodness. Flamboyance of the kind Jude was manifesting wasn’t quite the thing in Fethering. Carole reminded herself how glad she was that she wasn’t prone to such childish displays. But still she felt a little wistful.
“It’s not true!” Jude called out through the spray.
“What’s not true?”
“The manufacturer’s claim for these boots. They’re not waterproof.”
“Oh. Well…” Carole couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t sound smug, so she said nothing.
Jude came out of the sea with a broad grin across her face. “There,” she said. “Feel better for that.”
Gulliver followed her out. Stopping alongside, he shook himself, covering her with fine spray.
“Gulliver, you naughty boy!”
“It’s all right, Carole. I’m so wet already, it doesn’t matter. Stay cool.”
Carole wasn’t sure that she’d ever been cool, so staying cool might have been a problem. But again she didn’t say anything.
Jude stood at the sea’s edge, unaware of the wavelets lapping away at her heels. She looked up towards Fethering and her brow wrinkled. “I’m sure the solution’s very simple…if only we could work it out.”
“Huh.” Carole turned to face in the same direction, but stayed in front of Jude. Although her gumboots were infallibly waterproof, she didn’t want to get them wet.
Jude looked across towards the Yacht Club. Behind it, the men who’d been repairing the sea wall were dismantling their site. The cranes had already gone and other equipment was being loaded on to large flatbed trucks. The builders’ work had been done. The wall was shored up and the quick-flowing Fether once again properly contained.
“Let’s just think about your body,” she said. “What we know of the movements of your body.”
“All right. Well, how it got there we have no idea, but we do know that it was lying in
“Then they did their black magic ritual with it and chucked it into the Fether…”
“But, true to form, it became a ‘Fethering Floater’ and was washed up on the beach the next morning, where I found it…”
“Though the ‘someone else’ you saw walking away from the breakwater may have found it before you did.”
“Possibly.”
“And then Aaron Spalding found it, presumably after you did.”
“I imagine so.”
“He rang Nick Kent and together the two boys manhandled the body back to where they’d found it. By the time the police started looking, the body was back in
“Yes, though it wasn’t there on the Wednesday afternoon when we looked inside the boat.”
“No.” Jude tugged pensively at an errant strand of her blonde hair. “So, given the fact that moving dead bodies around during the daytime tends to attract attention, it seems reasonable to assume that the body was moved out of the boat on the Tuesday night.”
“The same night that Aaron Spalding jumped – or fell – into the Fether.”
