The Fethering Mysteries 12; Bones Under The Beach Hut

“Then what do you want?”

“I want to find out what happened to Robin Cutter.”

He was silent for a moment, calculating. Then he said, “So if there was a piece of information I could give you – something I’d found out while I was working on the case, something no one else knows – if I were to give you that, would you get off my back?”

“I certainly would, Curt.” She wasn’t sure whether what she said was true, but she knew it was the answer he required at that moment.

“Right.” Again he was silent, assessing his situation. “Okay, try this,” he said at length. “You know the boy was being looked after by his grandparents when he disappeared?” Carole nodded. Curt Holderness pointed along the row of beach huts. “Those two old dears over there, as it happens – you know them?”

“Yes, we’ve talked to each other.”

“Okay, so you know that the old geezer brought the boy down here and he was snatched outside the ice- cream shop up on the prom.”

“I heard the circumstances.”

“Well, needless to say, the forensic boys pulled in the old man’s car as soon as possible – took it from right here where he’d parked it in Smalting – and they ran every test they could on it. Of course they found Robin Cutter’s DNA all over the interior. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Kid saw a lot of his grandparents, Lionel Oliver would have driven him around all over the place.

“Nothing odd in that. But there was something one of the forensic boys thought was odd and I remember chatting to him in the canteen about it.” He paused, fully aware of the command he had on Carole’s attention. “Now the boy – Robin Cutter – was like five, wasn’t he, at the time he disappeared – and his Mum was always insistent that when he went in the car he was clipped into a child seat, you know, for safety reasons. She’d taken Robin’s seat out of her car when she dropped the boy with his grandparents that morning and said, if they drove him anywhere, they were to make sure they used it. But when Lionel Oliver’s car was taken from here to the labs, straight after the boy had been abducted, there was no car seat fixed in it.

“Okay, the old boy had an explanation. He said he was from a different generation, that he wasn’t mollycoddled when he was a nipper…you know how that generation go on about stuff. There weren’t any car seats around when he was growing up and it’d never done him any harm. And he said the boy Robin liked being free to move around in the car, and it was their little secret and he wasn’t to tell his Mum, but his Granddad reckoned he was grown up enough not to need a car seat. Okay, the old boy’s explanation could have been the truth, certainly everything else in his account tallied and rang true, but at the time I did think it a little odd.”

It was funny, Carole had always had a feeling that at some point the investigation would entail talking further to the Olivers.

? Bones Under The Beach Hut ?

Thirty-Six

Curt Holderness didn’t exactly threaten her when he left, but Carole felt the undercurrent of menace in him. She wouldn’t volunteer to spend any more time with him in the future, and was glad there was no reason why she should. A little shudder of relief ran through her body as he set off back up the beach to his motorbike.

Her morning in the Fowey ‘Incident Room’ had taken longer than she expected. When she looked at her watch once the security officer was out of sight, she was surprised to see it was ten past twelve. She looked along the row of beach huts. Outside Mistral the Olivers sat in their usual positions. Carole was undecided as to how her next step should be taken. In spite of her desire to solve the case and crow over Jude, she found herself wishing her friend was there. Dealing with the Olivers was likely to require a level of delicacy which she wasn’t confident that she possessed.

With a synchronicity that Jude would have recognized and Carole herself pooh-poohed, at that moment her mobile phone rang. And of course it was Jude.

“Oh, I thought you were regressing to a past life?”

“Done that. Apparently I was once married to an Egyptian Pharaoh.”

“And how was that?” asked Carole sceptically.

“He was a bit of a Mummy’s boy.”

“Oh, do shut up.”

“Anyway, tell me what’s been happening. I’m agog.”

“So you should be. There’s so much to tell you. All roads seem to lead to the Olivers.”

“Have you spoken to them?”

“Not yet.” Then in a rather small voice Carole added, “I’d rather do it with you.”

“All right. I’ll come straight away.”

“Where are you now?”

“Still in Brighton.”

“But how’re you going to – ?”

“I’ll get a cab.”

“That’ll be terribly expensive to –”

Jude had rung off.

Carole tried to concentrate on The Times, but her eyes kept slipping off the newsprint and homing in on the couple in front of Mistral. She didn’t know what she would do if the Olivers moved before Jude arrived.

She tried to get her mind engaged by the crossword, but without success. Anyway, the prize crossword on a Saturday was always subtly different and Carole rarely bothered with it, even though completing the weekday ones was an essential part of her ritual. Maybe it was a kind of intellectual snobbery that kept her from the Saturday crossword. Even though she’d never enter for it, the idea of there being a prize seemed to cheapen the experience. Whereas by doing the weekday crossword she was engaging in a purely intellectual activity.

Jude arrived within the half-hour. “I’m starving,” she announced. “You can bring me up to date while we have something to eat.”

¦

Rather than expose themselves again to the high prices of The Crab Inn, Carole and Jude went to one of the many cafes on the Smalting prom. They selected one which gave them a perfect view of the back of Mistral, so that they could see if the Olivers made any kind of move, and they sat outside in the sunlight. Jude said she was desperate for fish and chips and Carole found the idea rather appealed to her as well.

While they waited for the food, Carole gave Jude a virtually verbatim report of her interviews with Kelvin Southwest and Curt Holderness.

“I knew there was something odd about our Kel,” said Jude. “I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I sensed that women weren’t his thing.”

With respect for her sensitivities in such areas, Carole asked Jude if she’d got the same feeling with Curt Holderness.

“No, he’s very definitely normal hetero. Possibly a rather aggressive and bullying normal hetero – actually probably a rather aggressive and bullying normal hetero – but no way is he a paedophile.”

Their fish and chips arrived. Beautiful. Plump fillets robustly battered and dripping with oil, not those cardboard-like scabbards of dry fish flakes which get served in so many pubs and coastal restaurants. And the chips they were served had had encounters with genuine potatoes quite recently, not in some Past Life Regression.

“Bliss,” said Jude. “Is there anything in the world to beat sitting in the sun at an English seaside resort and eating good fish and chips?”

But they both knew there was still a cloud over their idyll – the death of Robin Cutter and the need for its circumstances to be explained.