She rang straight through to the Crown and Anchor. Ted Crisp was initially grouchy at her suggestion, but then it was a point of honour with him to be initially grouchy to most suggestions. And his attitude quickly softened. Though Carole Seddon didn’t have the natural charm of her neighbour, in her background was the unlikely fact that she and Ted Crisp had once had a brief affair, and he was still more indulgent to her than he might have been to other supplicants.
Within three minutes he had agreed that the Smalting Beach Hut Association could use his function room that evening at no charge, ‘so long as they all drink lots of booze’.
Carole immediately rang back Reginald Flowers to pass on the good news.
¦
Jude was still tussling with her moral dilemma. Part of her wanted to ring Miranda Browning, to offer condolences and, if required, some healing treatment. But another part accused her of shabby opportunism for even thinking of the idea. Was it born out of compassion or, as Carole had baldly suggested, to help them advance on their investigation? Jude couldn’t decide.
While she was going through this uncharacteristic agonizing, her phone rang. The woman at the other end identified herself as Miranda Browning.
“I was desperately sorry to hear the news,” said Jude. “I hadn’t realized that you were the poor boy’s mother, you know, when I met you before under that name.”
“Browning’s the name of my second husband.” The woman’s voice was strong. Though there was tension in her tone, there was no self-pity. She wasn’t about to give way to tears.
“So you are Lionel and Joyce Oliver’s daughter and you first married someone called Cutter?”
“No, Cutter’s my maiden name. His father’s Rory Oliver.”
“But why was Robin’s surname not Oliver?”
“Rory and I weren’t married when Robin was born. We weren’t together at the time. I didn’t think it likely we ever would be again, so I registered Robin under my surname. All his documentation was as ‘Cutter’, when he started at play school he was ‘Robin Cutter’. By the time Rory and I had got back together and married, the name had stuck. I’m sure in time we would have changed it, but…” Her voice wavered for the first time, “…we weren’t given that opportunity.”
“No.” Jude spoke softly, already in therapist mode. “As I say, I’m desperately sorry…about what happened eight years ago…and about what’s happened now.”
“Thank you,” said Miranda Browning, with considerable grace. “Obviously this has brought it all back, and, inevitably perhaps, the headaches have started again. I could hardly get out of bed or stand up this morning. And I can’t imagine the stress is going to get any less over the next few weeks, so I just wondered…the treatment you gave me last time worked so well…if you’ve got a spare appointment you could slot me into?”
“I’m free this afternoon,” said Jude.
They fixed a time. As she put the phone down Jude beamed, unsurprised by what had happened. But she wouldn’t tell her neighbour whether she had made the call to Miranda Browning or Miranda had called her. Unlike Jude, Carole Seddon didn’t believe in synchronicity.
? Bones Under The Beach Hut ?
Twenty-Seven
Miranda Browning arrived at the gate of Woodside Cottage in a taxi. In spite of the June heat, she had a scarf tied over her hair and wore dark glasses. She looked anxiously from side to side as she paid the cabbie and was still casting nervous glances back to the road when Jude opened the door to her.
After welcoming her client and leading her into the sitting room, Jude gestured to the glasses and asked, “For the headaches?”
“Not really,” replied Miranda Browning, taking them off. “More so’s I’m not recognized. It’s all started again. Bloody press camped outside my front door. They’re quite capable of following me here and door-stepping you as well.”
“So how did you get away?”
“Practice,” came the wry response. “I’ve got a cab firm I trust completely. They pick me up in the alley at the back of my garden. So far the press pack haven’t caught on to that yet. Early days, though, this time round.”
Again Jude was aware of the lack of self-pity in Miranda Browning’s tone. The woman had had to develop a stoicism, a survivor’s instinct. Whatever she was feeling inside, she was damned if she was going to expose her emotions to the world. Which was probably why her deep, suppressed pain manifested itself in physical symptoms, like headaches.
Jude uncovered her treatment bench, another draped shape in her sitting room of swathed furniture. The windows were all open, letting in a light breeze that set her bamboo wind chimes tinkling. She pulled out paper sheeting from a roll at the end of the bench and laid it over the plastic surface. Then she set down a pillow shaped like a fat horseshoe. “Take off as much as you feel comfortable with, Miranda. And then lie on your front.”
The woman stripped down to bra and pants. Though she had put on weight in the eight years since she’d appeared on television after her son’s disappearance, her skin was still firm and her muscles well toned.
“Just lie still, relax as far as you can and I’ll check where the trouble’s originating from.” Jude’s eyes fixed in an expression of intense concentration as she ran her hands up and down the woman’s body, not quite touching, sensitive to the variations of temperature she could feel. The hands lingered a while over the small of the back, then moved up and hovered around the shoulders. Jude’s fingers tensed. Although they still made no contact, they seemed to be pressing against some resistance.
“We both now know what’s been causing the headaches, don’t we, Miranda? The problem is convincing your body of what’s really going on. Stop it from expressing your grief in this physical way.”
“I don’t know that it is grief now, Jude. Oh, I’ve had my share of grieving, but that’s been kind of subsumed. Since the remains were identified as Robin’s I haven’t cried at all.”
“Maybe it’d be better if you did?”
“I don’t know. I’ve certainly served my time on the crying front. But now…there’s a kind of deadness in me. Not the wild mood swings I used to have after it first happened. I think, except for the bloody headaches, I feel better now I know there’s no hope. I suppose, so long as there was a possibility that somewhere in the world a thirteen-year-old Robin was walking around, so long as there was this vague, vague chance that I might one day see him again…”
Miranda’s words were heavy with the deadness of which she had spoken. Jude didn’t say anything, but she began to feel less guilty about the possible prurience of her interest in the woman’s tragedy. Talking, she knew, would be part of the healing process for Miranda Browning. And if what the woman said helped Carole and Jude in their investigation, well, that was just a bonus. But she wasn’t going to prompt, just let Miranda Browning talk if she wanted to.
And evidently she did want to. “Now I know, you see. I am a woman whose child died. A mother whose son died. It’s not a nice thing to know, but it’s now a fact. Soon we’ll have to have a funeral and all that entails. And presumably that’ll involve Rory and his parents…it won’t be easy.
“Some women who’ve lost children say it helps having the physical remains to mourn and a grave to visit. Mothers of boys killed in war, that kind of thing. I don’t know whether that’ll make much difference for me. I’m certainly not expecting ever to feel…closure,” she said, echoing Carole. “I don’t think I’ll ever achieve closure. The loss of a child is like an open wound. It’ll never heal properly, but perhaps it can be dressed in such a way that you are not in constant pain.”
Jude moved her hands to touch the sides of the woman’s neck. “I’m just going to do a bit of ordinary massage. The muscles here are very knotted. And then we’ll try the proper healing.”
Miranda Browning submitted meekly as the fingers and thumbs probed into the taut flesh. “Yes, I can feel that releasing something,” she said.
Jude feared that her interruption might have stemmed the woman’s flow, but it hadn’t. “What I hope will change is the amount of blaming I’ve done over the last eight years. Blaming my ex-husband, blaming his parents, most of all blaming myself. I must say I can’t see that ever going away.”
“Why do you blame your husband’s parents?” asked Jude, feigning a little more ignorance than she actually
