“It’s not far, is it?”
“It may not be far, but it’ll certainly cost you. Depends what kind of budget you’re working to, of course.”
“Budget?” Jude savoured the unfamiliar word.
“Yes, budget. You know what it means, don’t you?”
“I know what it means, of course,” said Jude mischievously, “but I’ve never really come to terms with the concept.”
Carole looked blank. But then everyone looks blank when they try to converse with someone who speaks a different language.
Jude raised her mobile phone again. “I’ll give her another try. Maybe now Tanya’s had time to think, she will want to talk to me.”
And so it proved. Guilt, anxiety or maybe simple curiosity had done their work, and Jude set off shortly after in a cab to Brighton.
¦
Carole felt tense, but the anticipation was not unpleasurable. At least something was happening in her life. Searching for dead bodies might not be sensible, but it sure beat the hell out of most other Fethering residents’ pastimes.
When the phone rang at twenty-five past six, she felt a little pang of potential disappointment. It would be Ted Crisp, calling off their seven o’clock tryst.
It wasn’t.
“Carole, it’s me, Jude. I’d just got to Brighton and paid off the cab when my mobile rang. It was Maggie Kent. Nick’s gone missing!”
? The Body on the Beach ?
Thirty-Three
“You have called the police, have you?”
“Yes.” Maggie Kent’s voice on the telephone was tight with the effort of controlling her emotion. “At first they weren’t that interested. They said lots of kids come home late from school, and it had only been an hour, and Nick was sixteen for goodness’ sake, and…Then I told them he’d been with Aaron Spalding the night before Aaron died and they began to take me a bit more seriously.”
“So they are out looking for him?”
“That’s what they say. And I’m sure they are, though at what level of urgency I don’t know. But I can’t just sit here doing nothing. The thought that Nick’s out there somewhere, confused, needing me – perhaps not needing me, but needing someone…It’s so awful, I…” The dam on her emotions was cracking. Maggie Kent took a deep breath and evened out her voice as she went on, “I rang your friend Jude, because I thought Nick might have confided something to her when they talked last week.”
“And had he?” Had Jude told the mother of her son’s presence at the mutilating of a corpse?
“She told me a few bits and pieces I didn’t know. But I was really interested in what Nick and Aaron might have said to each other. Nick was in such a dreadful state over the weekend. He hardly slept at all, or ate come to that. There’s something really terrible gnawing away at him and I’m scared. I’m scared he’ll do what Aaron did.”
“You mean kill himself? Has it been confirmed that that’s what Aaron did? Because there hasn’t been an inquest yet, has there?”
“No, but the police told me. Aaron was seen by a courting couple in a car – they’ve only just come forward. He was up on the railway bridge over the Fether in the early hours of Tuesday morning. There seems no question he jumped in deliberately. And the thought that my Nick might have done the same thing is just too…” This time no floodgates would have been adequate to stop the flow of tears.
Carole waited till the note of the sobbing changed and then asked, “So what are you going to do in the short term?”
“I don’t know. I’ll go mad if I just sit around here. And I feel I should be out by the railway bridge, looking for Nick. But I’m scared, if I go out and join the search, then the phone might ring and I wouldn’t be here…”
“I’d go out if I were you. Good news’ll keep.”
“And what about bad news?”
“Generally speaking, that’ll keep too,” Carole replied grimly.
She had her own ideas of where she’d start looking for the boy. And, with a bit of luck, she’d have Ted Crisp there to help her. Carole Seddon took a large rubber-covered torch out of the cupboard under the stairs, and put on her Burberry.
¦
Tanya lived in a Kemptown bedsit which, because it boasted its own bathroom, the landlord had the nerve to call a studio flat. There was a two-ring gas hob by the sink, but it didn’t look as if it got used much. The walls had once been white but were pockmarked with Sellotape scars and Blu-Tack stains where previous tenants had taken down their posters and other decorations. Tanya seemed to have put up nothing of her own. Double bed, television, video, CD player – that was all she appeared to need to express her identity.
Quite loud in the background, when she let Jude in, was the clinical voice of some pop diva, draining the emotion out of yet another song. Tanya closed the door behind her guest and, with no attempt at social graces, demanded, “What is all this then?”
“I was rather hoping you could tell me that.”
“Why should I? Particularly ‘cause I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Perhaps Tanya could on occasion be attractive, but in this aggressive mode she wasn’t. She looked massive, stolid and resentful, her face already set into a kind of middle-aged disappointment. As she had been in the Crown and Anchor, she was dressed in black, whether the identical clothes or another similar set Jude couldn’t tell. The black laced-up Doc Martens were certainly the same.
Recognizing that there was no chance of being offered a chair, Jude plonked herself down into one the landlord must have picked up at a house-clearance dealers. “As I said on the telephone, I’m talking about a body that was washed up on Fethering beach last Tuesday morning. The body of a middle-aged man. We know you saw it.”
“How do you know?”
“The usual way. Someone saw you.”
“And told you about it?”
“Exactly.”
The girl sniffed. Then suddenly she said, “I got to go to the toilet.” Pausing only by the CD player to turn up the diva even louder, she crossed the room and disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
Jude wondered whether turning up the music had been a gesture of delicacy, a recognition that embarrassing noises from the lavatory might otherwise be heard in such an enclosed space.
Certainly Tanya seemed to be doing something major in the bathroom. She was in there for a long time. Jude wondered whether the girl was fortifying herself for the interview ahead with a few drugs. The flush on her cheeks when she finally did return would have supported that hypothesis.
The first thing Tanya did after firmly shutting the bathroom door was to flick a switch on the CD and stop the diva in mid-wail. Plumping herself down on the edge of her bed, she began quickly, “All right, about this body…Yeah, OK, I was going for a walk on the beach at Fethering and I saw it. And I didn’t tell no one, ‘cause if you ever been in care, you know that anything where the police is involved is just going to cause you a lot of grief and hassle.”
“And did you see anyone else on the beach that morning?”
“No. Oh yes. There was some old girl taking her dog for a walk.” Jude wasn’t convinced Carole would have liked the description.
“And that was the only person you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“But what were you doing on Fethering beach at that time in the morning, anyway?”
