The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut

Mark was his wife Nuala.”

“Well, from what Philly said she sounds quite easy to recognize.”

“Yes, I’ll try to get a description from Curt Holderness of the woman he saw that night. Give him a call when I get home.”

“Haven’t you got your mobile with you?”

“Yes, I have, but…” Carole blushed.

“What?”

“I don’t really approve of mobile phones being used on beaches.”

Jude’s eyes shot heavenwards. Her neighbour always retained the capacity to surprise her with a new prohibition or neurosis. But she made no comment and asked, “You know what Philly thought, don’t you?”

“That Mark had done away with his wife, and that they were her remains under Quiet Harbour? ”

“Yes. Does it work for you?”

Carole screwed up her face as she evaluated the proposition. “I don’t think it does really. ‘Human remains’…it all comes back to the definition of ‘human remains’. To me that implies that they’re from someone who’s been dead quite a while. Wouldn’t the media talk about ‘a dead body’ if it was from a recent killing? And I’m sure they’d give the gender. ‘The body of a woman was discovered under a beach hut at Smalting,’ that’s what they’d say. Not ‘human remains’.”

“Maybe not.”

“I must say the police are being very slow to give out any more information, aren’t they?”

“Presumably the remains are undergoing forensic investigation. When they’ve identified who the remains belong to then they’ll announce it in a press conference.”

“Well, I wish they’d get a move on,” said Carole testily. “It’s been nearly a week.”

“They just don’t think about the necessities of amateur sleuths, do they?”

“No, they don’t.”

¦

Though the sun was now hidden behind banks of clouds, Jude lay in her lounger as if sunbathing and it took Carole a little while to realize that her neighbour was asleep.

Quietly Carole detached Gulliver’s lead from the hook on Fowey and set out along the shingle with him, following the curve of the beach huts. He gave her only a token look of reproach, recognizing that a walk on a lead was better than no walk at all.

Shrimphaven was still locked up. Whatever it was that the girl did in there on her laptop, she wasn’t doing it that Monday afternoon.

Outside Mistral, as ever, Lionel Oliver, still apparently dressed for the office, lay back on his deckchair, his suit jacket hanging over its back. There was no sign of his wife but, as Carole approached, he waved down to the shoreline and she saw Joyce walking along with her bare feet in the water.

“Loves paddling,” the old man observed. “The wife’s always loved paddling. Even now she’s whatever age she is.”

“Well, there’s nothing like the feeling of the sand between one’s toes,” said Carole, more expansive than usual. The fact that she would do anything to avoid the feeling of the sand between her toes was not relevant. Making conversation with people on Smalting Beach was now part of an ongoing enquiry, and Carole had always been more at ease doing things for a work purpose rather than just in her own persona.

She was surprised how affable Lionel Oliver appeared. When she’d seen him before, he’d looked detached, ‘in a world of his own’ as Joyce had put it. But now he seemed ready to talk, and it wasn’t an opening that Carole was about to waste. Any of the regular beach hut users were potential witnesses to what had really happened on Smalting Beach.

She told Lionel her name and he gave her his. Though they had been aware of each other on the beach, this was the first time they had actually spoken. Then Carole moved into investigative mode.

“Terrible business, wasn’t it?” She nodded over towards Quiet Harbour.

“What’s that?”

She spelled it out. “What was found under the beach hut there.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Most beaches have had their tragedies. Funny how everyone thinks of a beach as a friendly place and you look out from somewhere like here and the tide goes out so far and you think of the sea as a warm, friendly thing. But it has great power. Even here it has power to wash people away, power to drown them.”

Carole wasn’t quite sure what kind of conversation she’d been expecting from Lionel Oliver, but it hadn’t been a disquisition on the qualities of the sea. She didn’t make any comment, though. He hadn’t finished yet.

“I worked as an undertaker,” he went on. “And I suppose in that line of business we do get closer to human tragedy than people in other walks of life. We see people at their most disturbed, and we see the consequences of carelessness and folly…and misery.”

“Well, most people are bound to be miserable when they lose someone,” suggested Carole.

But that wasn’t what he’d meant. “I mean sometimes it’s misery that makes someone do something that requires an undertaker’s services. It’s very sad, that. I mean, if you’re dealing with bodies every day, you get a kind of immunity to the sort of shock most people’d feel. Because most people, what, they see a dead body once, twice in their lives perhaps? But we…we never get to the point of forgetting that the bodies we deal with are human beings – at least I hope we don’t. I hope I never did. But we get so’s we can deal with bodies without emotions getting in the way.

“And most of the bodies we dealt with…well, it’s clearly a blessing that they come to the end. Bodies that have been worn away by disease and decay and pain…that cliche ‘a merciful release’…it’s true for many of them. But when there’s a body there’s nothing wrong with, that’s when it gets to you.”

“‘Nothing wrong with’? But they’re dead, aren’t they?”

“I’m talking about the ones who needn’t be dead, who’ve made the decision to die.”

“Suicides?”

The old man nodded. He looked out over the placid grey-green sea as he continued, “There was one did it here, you know.”

“Oh?”

“Ten years back, maybe not that long. I didn’t see it, not when it happened. But obviously I saw the body. They’d got him out of the water quite quickly, so there wasn’t a mark on him. Wearing a suit he was, he’d come straight down to the beach from his office. He worked in one of the Smalting estate agents. And the reason he’d done it, well, it wasn’t a good enough reason. I’m not sure that anything’s ever a good enough reason, not for that. Some girl he was in love with had dumped him, that was all. I mean, all right, I can see you might get upset over something like that, it might take you a few months, even a few years to get over it, but’s not a reason to top yourself, is it? Not enough reason.”

He was silent for a moment, but Carole was confident he’d continue.

“What he’d done, how he did it…he’d just filled his pockets with stones, hardly stones, really. There are not many big stones on the beach here, mostly just shingle. And he’d put the shingle in the pockets of his jacket and his trousers, and he’d just walked straight out into the sea.

“It was low tide, I heard, so it took him a long time before the water got up to his knees, a long time till it got up to his waist, a long time till it got up to his neck. So he had plenty of time to think about what he was doing, plenty of time to change his mind. But he didn’t.

“There were quite a lot of people on the beach, apparently, but no one did anything. I don’t think any of them realized what he was doing. Yes, perhaps they thought it odd, a man dressed in a suit walking straight into the sea, but maybe they thought it was some stunt, that he’d done it for a bet or something. And by the time they’d realized that he’d disappeared under the sea and someone had phoned the coastguard…well, it was too late.

“And when they brought the body to my parlour, there was, like I say, not a mark on him. He must have worked out in a gym, he was well toned. Could have lasted another fifty years. It was when I had to bury ones like that that it upset me. That and the children too. You never quite get used to burying the children.”

The old man shrugged, shook his head and relapsed into silence.

After a few moments, Carole said softly, “And now there’s another dead body on Smalting Beach.”