that held the chest’s top down.
As he raised the lid, he caught a foul whiff of decay, but he was too near to his goal to be put off by such a detail. Reaching into the chest, he took a grip on the Fethering Yacht Club life-jacket which was still fixed around the torso of the late Sam Kent.
With sudden strength and in one movement, Rory Turribull lifted the body out. For a moment he held the putrid flesh against his own body, almost as if it were a lover. Then he laid the body flat on the cement. With both hands, he forced the stiff dead jaws apart. He reached inside his own mouth and removed his dental plate. He fixed it inside the dead man’s mouth.
The body had bloated and was bursting out of its clothes, but that did not stop the dentist from starting to remove them. The dead man’s clothes would be destroyed and he himself would dress in a spare set he had in the car boot. He had thought it all through. For his plan to work – his precious plan that he had been nurturing for so long – the body when found must be dressed as Rory Turnbull.
“What are you doing, Rory?”
Ted Crisp rose over the side of the sea wall like an avenging fury from the ladder to which he had been clinging. At the same time Carole appeared from the shadows of the Yacht Club. When the landlord had phoned, her curiosity had proved stronger than her exhaustion.
Hearing voices, Jude shouted for help.
“You bastard! I’m not going to be stopped now!”
Rory Turribull launched himself ferociously at the landlord. The initial impetus caught Ted off balance. For a moment he swayed, about to topple back into the Fether.
But somehow he regained his equilibrium and enfolded the furious dentist in a bear hug. Rory’s elbows worked like pistons as he slammed punches into Ted’s substantial paunch. The two men weaved around like one crazed four-legged creature on the edge of the sea wall.
Carole meanwhile had freed Jude from the armrests and manoeuvred her out of the BMW to release her other bonds. As soon as her hands were free, Jude threw her arms around her friend. They stood for a moment, instinctively hugging each other. Then Jude reached into the front seat of the car for her mobile phone. “I’m calling the police!” she said.
There was a grunt and the two fighting men were suddenly apart. Rory Turribull swung a wild haymaker of a punch, which by pure chance caught Ted Crisp on the tip of the chin and sent him flying across the cement.
Freed, the dentist rushed to pick up his precious body. Grasping it under the arms, he dragged it across to the BMW. Carole and Jude watched in amazement as he opened the passenger door and jammed the corpse into its seat. He slammed the door shut and hurried round to the other side.
“You’re mad, Rory!” Jude shouted. “You’ll never get away with it!”
“Yes, I will!” he shrieked back. “I’ve got it all planned out! I told you – I’ve got it all planned out!”
He started the engine and the BMW screeched in reverse back through the Fethering Yacht Club gates. In a howl of tyres he turned it round and shot off fast down the quayside road.
Far too fast. Rory Turribull misjudged the corner and bounced off a concrete bollard. The BMW spun crazily before smashing into the Second World War mine that was used as a charity collecting box. With the impact, the car burst into flames.
When the wreckage was examined by the police, their first impression was that there were two near- identical bodies in the burnt-out car. In the mouth of one of them was a dental plate which had been specially made for Rory Turnbull.
Detailed post-mortem examination, however, revealed that the body with the dental plate had been dead for at least a week before the crash which killed the dentist.
? The Body on the Beach ?
FORTY-ONE
“The ironical thing is,” said Ted Crisp, “that because Rory died in a car crash, rather than in an apparent suicide, Barbara will actually benefit from his insurance policies.”
“And presumably inherit all that money he’d salted away,” said Jude.
“Except,” Carole pointed out, “all that money is in accounts that he’d opened using Sam Kent’s passport and so probably in Sam Kent’s name.”
“Does that mean the Kents’ll benefit? That’d be wonderful news. At least they’d get something positive out of the whole ghastly experience.”
But Carole threw a wet blanket over Jude’s optimism. “No. The accounts would have been set up illegally. I’m sure it’ll all go back to Barbara in the end.”
Ted Crisp shook his shaggy head. “Whole thing’ll take one hell of a lot of sorting out. Still, I should think Barbara and Winnie are ecstatic. They’ve got shot of Rory and the details of what he was up to will never become public knowledge. Their version of events will become the official version. As Winnie will continue to say to anyone who’ll listen, Barbara was just very unlucky in her choice of husband.”
Jude picked up the train of thought. “The poor woman worked valiantly to ‘make something of him’, but sadly ‘you can’t make silk purses out of sow’s ears’. Barbara and Winnie’s image of middle–class gentility will survive untarnished. The high values of the Shorelands Estate will be maintained.”
The landlord shuddered. “When I think what that poor bastard Rory must’ve suffered in that marriage. Being diminished all the time, having every last shred of confidence removed by those two harpies.” Another tremor went through him. “Sorry, it’s a man thing. You two haven’t got the physical equipment to understand what it’s like to be systematically emasculated.”
“No,” Jude agreed softly, “but we can empathize. Anyone who’s been in a relationship where one partner blames the other for their own inadequacies knows the kind of pain involved. Strange how it keeps happening. There are enough unpleasant people out there in the world to cut you down to size. What everyone needs at home is someone to support and bolster them.”
Carole had got so used to these enigmatic references to Jude’s past that she no longer felt a burning urge to ask the instinctive supplementary questions. Well, that is to say, she still felt the urge, but now automatically curbed it.
A week or so had passed since the dramatic events on the sea wall. Carole was wearing her freshly cleaned Burberry. The dry-cleaning, she was delighted to find, had not affected its waterproof qualities at all.
“Have you seen Maggie again, Jude?”
“Yes. I dropped in this afternoon.”
“How’s she coping?”
Jude grimaced. “It’s going to be tough, but she’ll come through it.”
“Yes.”
“And Nick?”
“He’s being brilliant, she said. He’s a good, bright boy. Whatever else all this has done, it’s certainly brought those two closer together.”
“Excellent.” Carole wondered whether the boy would ever tell his mother the worst part of his nightmare, witnessing the mutilation of what he later found to be his own father’s body. Probably not, she thought. But that would be Nick Kent’s own decision, and she reckoned that when the time came he’d be mature enough to make it.
Carole considered whether she herself should call on Maggie. No, probably not. Jude was the one with people skills, after all. “And any news been heard of lanya?”
Jude shook her head. “I haven’t heard anything, led?”
“Nothing definite. Denis Woodville said he’d tried ringing and got someone else on her number. New tenant. So no idea where she’s gone.”
They were silent, all wondering whether the poor kid had actually set off to France, to wait for the lover who would never now be coming to join her. They imagined Tanya becoming disillusioned and deciding that no men really cared, whatever they said, whatever they promised, whatever plans they made for you. And then her baby would be born, another child with a single parent, another statistic with limited prospects.
