“You saw us?” said Carole.
“Oh yes.” He suddenly spun the chair on its wheels and shot like a rocket towards the platform by the window. He seemed to be going up the ramp far too fast, but, rather than smashing into the telescope, he came to a neat halt inches away from it. He’d practised the trick many times before.
He didn’t need to move the telescope. It was already focused. He edged the wheelchair a fraction closer and his eye was at the lens. “I could see you just like you were in the room with me. Pity I can’t lip-read. But anyway your body language told me you’d decided to come up here.”
“Do you spend most of the day watching the beach?” asked Jude.
Again, Carole wouldn’t have put the question so bluntly, but Gordon Lithgoe still didn’t seem offended. “No, I’m basically looking for shipping. That’s what interests me.” His working hand fell on to the ledger by his side. “Make a log of all their comings and goings.”
“And what about the people on the beach?” Jude maintained her direct approach. “Do you make a log of their comings and goings too?”
He spun the wheelchair round and faced them. Against the brightness of the window, it was impossible to see his expression, and from the even signal of his voice, impossible to gauge his emotion.
“Some,” he said. “Not all.”
“We’re interested in the events of Monday night last week,” said Carole. “And then through Tuesday and Wednesday.”
There was a moment’s stillness, and they were both afraid he was going to clam up. Then, suddenly releasing a brake, he glided the wheelchair down the ramp and swung gracefully round to come to rest beside them. They could now see his face. It was smiling.
“Why do you want to know this?”
Carole replied, “We think there’s been something criminal going on.”
“And you’re not police. Otherwise, as soon as you’d arrived, you’d have flashed that fact at me – along with your ID, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you?”
“Just two people who want to get to the truth of what happened.” Even as she said the words, Carole knew how pompous they sounded.
“Oh, hurrah, hurrah.” Gordon Lithgoe’s sarcasm made itself felt through the electronic crackle. “How very noble. Truth-searchers, eh? Where would this great country of ours be without people who have a sense of public duty?”
“Do I gather you don’t have a sense of public duty?”
Again Jude’s lighter tone struck the right note. “Not in the obvious way,” he replied. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that were probably criminal, and I’ve never reported any of them. I’ve seen my role throughout as essentially that of an observer.”
“But if someone were to come and ask you? If the police were to come and ask you?”
“That would be entirely different. I would certainly cooperate and tell anything I knew – if asked. But I wouldn’t just volunteer information. However” – he drummed his right hand lightly on his sunken chest – “in this case the police haven’t come and asked me. They didn’t make the deduction that I might have seen something, while you two ladies did make that deduction and have arrived on my doorstep…”
“So you’ll tell us what you saw?” asked Jude very softly.
“Yes. Of course I will. I assume what you’re interested in is the dead body which you – Carole, is it? – found on the beach on Tuesday morning?”
“How did you know it was me?”
“I told you. That telescope enlarges the face of someone on the beach as if they’re here in the room with me. I recognized you, anyway. I didn’t know your name, but I’d seen you taking your dog for a walk every morning for the last three or four years.”
It was uncomfortable to know that she’d been being observed for such a long time. Not, of course, that Carole had ever done anything on the beach of which to be ashamed, but all the same…
“What we want to know is what happened to the body after I found it.”
“Yes. It was rather active, wasn’t it – for one so dead? I’ll find the relevant log.” He spun the wheel-chair across the room to a shelf and selected one from a pile of ledgers. Carole and Jude both marvelled at the extent of his record-keeping. The ledger by the window was half full, but he had to go to another one for events of less than a week before.
He flicked through the book with his good hand till he found the place, then, pressing it to his knee, wheeled himself back towards them. He looked down at his notes. “I was first aware of the body at 6.52. That was first light. But, given where he was on the breakwater, and the fact that the tide had gone all the way out and was on its way back in, he could have been there for a couple of hours before that.”
“And I found him about seven, I should think.”
“7.02. Then you went back home with your dog.” Again, Carole felt a little shiver from the knowledge that she’d been watched. “At 7.06 a boy climbed over the railings of the Yacht Club and raised the cover of one of the boats. He didn’t like what he saw inside, I suppose, because he came running out and along the sea wall, looking down into the Fether. Then he ran down on to the beach, and he found the body at 7.21. He ran back up the beach – don’t know where he went to, I couldn’t see – but about a quarter of an hour later he came back…”
“With another boy?” Jude breathed.
“Yes. The two of them manhandled the body up the beach, over the railings into the Yacht Club and put it into the boat, the same boat the first boy had looked in.”
“And then?”
“And then the boys ran off. Out of vision of my telescope at 7.47. At 10.12 the police arrived, looked along the beach – not very hard – and then they left.”
“But what about the body?” asked Carole.
“That’s it. That’s all I can offer you. Great telescope I’ve got there, but it doesn’t have night sights. If I could afford one with those, I’d get it tomorrow.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Jude chuckled. “You’ve got to sleep sometime.”
“I don’t sleep that much,” said Gordon Lithgoe.
“So…” Carole sighed despondently. “It looks as though the body was removed on the Tuesday night, under cover of darkness. But by whom and where to, we have no means of knowing.”
“Where would you put a body, Mr Lithgoe?”
There was a scrape of electronic laughter. “I’m glad to say, Jude, that’s not a problem I’ve ever had to address. However, where you’d put a body depends on where you think people are going to look for it.”
“Ye-es. With you so far.”
“And, among the multiplicity of pastimes available to the human species, carrying dead bodies around is one of the most hazardous. If you get caught doing it, you’re facing a hell of a lot of uncomfortable explanations. What I’m saying is that, unless you’ve got transport, you don’t want to move a body far. So if, say, you’re hiding a body in a boat, and you think there’s a strong chance someone might look in that boat, then you move it to somewhere close by where they’re not going to look.”
“Into another boat?”
“Possibly. Except if one boat’s a security risk, maybe they all are.”
“Where else then?”
“Come and have a look.” Gordon Lithgoe powered his wheelchair back up the ramp. His right hand slightly reangled the telescope and adjusted the focus. “I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Have a butcher’s.”
Carole looked first. She had to arch her back to get down low enough. The telescope was trained on the top of the sea wall, where the repairs had been taking place for the previous few days. The heavy machinery had all gone, as had the workers.
Revealed were the two blue-painted low chests used by local fishermen to store their bait and equipment.
“Bit big,” said Gordon Lithgoe, “but otherwise it’s the right shape for a coffin, isn’t it?”
“Jude, have a look. And of course,” Carole went on thoughtfully, “if whoever it was put the body in there just
