The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut

“Well, you did leave Edgington Manor School under a cloud.”

“Yes, but that wasn’t because I was fiddling with the children. For God’s sake, Carole! If you’re looking for a pervert on Smalting Beach, you’d do much better concentrating on Kelvin Southwest. Ask him about those afternoons when he goes into one of the empty beach huts with his binoculars and spies on the nippers changing. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear that that’s only the beginning of what he gets up to. But don’t you dare accuse me of anything like that!”

“Then, if it wasn’t for that reason, why did you leave the school?” asked Carole evenly.

He sighed, shook his head and looked shamefaced. “I stole something.”

“Stole something? What?”

“Edgington Manor School was founded quite a long time ago. Late eighteenth century. And one of its first old boys was an admiral in Nelson’s navy. Admiral Henryson. Not very well known, but like Nelson he was killed at Trafalgar. And his widow presented his dress uniform to the school. It stood in a glass case in the Lower Hall. I passed it half a dozen times a day, and each time I passed it I was more determined that it should be mine, that I should add it to my collection. At first the idea was just an idle fancy, but it became an obsession.

“So I worked out how I’d steal it. During the school holidays. Make it look as though vandals had broken into the school. I’d got it all worked out, all justified in my own mind. Edgington Manor School had never done me any favours, the place owed me something. I was two years off retirement and I was determined that there was one final favour the place was going to do me.

“Plan all went fine. I had keys to certain doors in the school, I knew how to switch off the burglar alarm. I took Admiral Henryson’s uniform. Nobody in the school ever looked at it, none of those sports-obsessed spotty boys gave a damn about the thing. It was right that it should belong to someone who appreciated its full value. I felt no guilt. I still don’t feel any guilt.”

“But you didn’t get away with it, did you, Reg?”

He shook his head wearily. “No. I’d been seen breaking into the school by some officious young housemaster. Out in the grounds pushing his bloody infant in a buggy or whatever they call those things. By the time I got out of the building, the police were waiting for me.”

“And you were charged with theft?”

“Yes. Some schools would have hushed it up. They wouldn’t have wanted the adverse publicity. But that wasn’t the way my sanctimonious bloody headmaster thought. He said Edgington Manor School was trying to make its pupils into honest citizens and they should therefore be made aware of the penalties for dishonesty. We’d always hated each other, and suddenly he saw the perfect opportunity to make an example of me. So yes, I went through the courts, which let me tell you was pretty bloody humiliating. I subsequently spent six months at Her Majesty’s pleasure…which wasn’t much fun either. However many times I told them the truth of what I was in for, the other prisoners assumed…schoolteacher, kicked out at my age, must have been for…” He shuddered. “Anyway, somehow I survived that, but obviously when I was released, my career was finished.

“So after a time I moved down here, where I thought, where I hoped, that no one would ever know about that episode in my past. I still don’t know how Curt Holderness did find out about it.”

“Through a policeman he’d met who’d worked up near Edgington Manor School.”

“Ah. Right.” Reginald Flowers looked very weary. His long confession had taken its toll.

“One thing I can’t quite understand,” Carole began, “is why it matters so much to you. I mean, you did wrong, but most people would not think that you did anything very seriously wrong. Given all the stuff you’ve got here in the beach hut, you could almost laugh it off, as an example of the single-mindedness of the obsessive collector. I mean, if Curt Holderness did go public about what you did, who do you think would actually be that worried? You’re only successful as a blackmailer if your victim has got a lot to lose. And I don’t really see that you have a lot to lose.”

“What!” demanded Reginald Flowers in amazement. “How can you say that? It’d be a total disaster. Are you suggesting that, if it was known I had a criminal record, I would be allowed to remain as President of the Smalting Beach Hut Association?”

? Bones Under The Beach Hut ?

Thirty-Three

Smalting Beach was considerably busier when Carole left The Bridge and continued Gulliver’s interrupted walk. They covered half a mile in the Fethering direction, and though the dog would much rather not have been on a lead, he still patently enjoyed himself.

With a slight shock, Carole realized that she was only a day away from the arrival of Gaby and Lily. The mysteries of Mark Dennis and Robin Cutter had been preoccupying her. One of them was solved. She wondered what the chances were of the second being elucidated before she had to go into full-on grandmother mode. The odds weren’t promising. She tried to close her mind to the case and concentrate on her imminent visitors. She wasn’t successful.

On their way back to Fowey, Carole and Gulliver’s route took them along the line of the other beach huts, of which more had been opened up during their walk. Outside Cape of Good Hope sat Dora Pinchbeck with a piled-high cornet of pistachio ice cream and a Daily Mail. In her personal domain, in front of her beach hut, she looked very much more in control of life than on the previous occasions Carole had met her. It seemed that, when she wasn’t being diminished and patronized by Reginald Flowers, the woman did actually have an identity of her own.

She greeted Carole warmly and glowed when congratulated on the success of the quiz night. “Yes, it all seemed to go very well,” she agreed. “In spite of the snafu over the booking of the venue.”

Carole was surprised at Dora’s use of the military slang expression ‘snafu’. Easier to imagine it coming from Reginald Flowers’s lips. And she wondered whether Dora was actually quoting her ‘boss’.

“Oh well, everyone makes mistakes,” she said soothingly.

“I agree. Some of us just don’t admit to them, though.” Carole’s look asked for an explanation, so Dora nodded towards The Bridge. “Lord High and Mighty over there never admits to having made a mistake.”

“Oh?”

“Did he tell you that I’d screwed up the booking at St Mary’s Church Hall?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Typical. That’s how control freaks always come unstuck. Incapable of delegating, on the rare occasions when they do make mistakes, they always have to find someone else to blame. And in Reg’s case it’s nearly always Little Me.”

She spoke with remarkable lack of rancour, given the way her ‘boss’ treated her. Carole began to wonder if the efficient master/incompetent secretary routine was some kind of game they played, and whether their relationship was in fact rather closer than it appeared on the outside.

“Anyway,” she said, “good to see you, Dora. Come along, Gulliver.”

She was stopped by a question from Dora that was spoken so softly that she hardly heard it. But it sounded like, “Any developments on the case?”

She turned back. “I beg your pardon?”

“The investigation into Robin Cutter’s death.”

Oh dear, thought Carole, are Jude and I that transparent? There we are, imagining we’re conducting our enquiry secretly and it seems that the whole of Smalting – and quite possibly Fethering too – knows all about our endeavours. She tried to think of some appropriately enigmatic response, but before she could say it, Dora Pinchbeck went on, in a confidential tone, “I’m a friend of Helga Czesky…”

“Oh?”

“…and she told me…you know, who you really are.”

“Ah.” It took Carole a moment to realize the significance of this. It was only a few days since she and Jude had had the confrontation with Gray and Helga Czesky at Woodside Cottage, but so much had happened since that it felt a lifetime away. Of course, as she recalled with some pleasure, the Czeskys had left that meeting convinced that Carole and Jude were both plain-clothes policewomen. If that was the information that Helga had imparted to