Bones Under The Beach Hut

Chapter Twenty-Three

Carole switched off the phone, then consulted Jude who advised her to leave a message. 'We need to see them, don't we?'

'What should I say? Maintain the pretence that I want Gray to do me a watercolour of Fethering Beach?'

'No, I think we've gone beyond that. Take the direct approach. Say you want to talk about the fire that was started under Quiet Harbour.'

'Strange that they don't answer. I got the impression that they were both in the house most of the time. Katie Brunswick said Helga don't go out much.'

'Maybe they're the sort who always leave the answering machine on. So that they can screen incoming calls.'

So it proved. Carole left a terse message ending with Jude's number, and it was a matter of moments before the phone rang. Jude answered. It was Helga. She sounded cautious and a little distressed.

'Please, who am I talking to?' Over the phone her German accent was thicker.

'My name's Jude.'

'It was not your voice which left the message.'

'No. That was my friend Carole. We did meet on Monday. We were the ones who came to your house to discuss a commission with your husband.'

'Ah.' Helga didn't take issue with them about the subterfuge. She had more pressing priorities. 'You said you knew something about the fire at Quiet Harbour . . . ?'

'Yes. We know who lit it,' said Jude, making what was little more than a conjecture sound like a certainty.

'I see.' Helga was silent for a moment. 'Yes, we must meet,' she said finally, in a voice of long suffering.

They had agreed to come round to Woodside Cottage. Gray Czesky had been tidied up, presumably on his wife's insistence. He was out of his paint-spattered work clothes, and in grey trousers and a blue blazer looked somehow like a large naughty schoolboy waiting for a dressing-down from the headmaster.

It was evident that in the current situation his wife represented that kind of authority figure at least as much as Carole and Jude did. Once the couple had sat down and refused offers of tea and coffee, Helga announced, 'Gray has something he wishes to confess to you.'

He was shamefaced, but still had a bit of his old bravado left. 'It's hell,' he began, 'having an artistic temperament. Nobody really understands, nobody knows what goes on inside my brain.'

None of the three women said anything, leaving him to dig himself out of his own hole. 'I don't really always have control of myself. My emotions are so volatile, I don't know what I'm going to feel from one moment to the next. It's as if I'm being blown all over the place by an unidentifiable power that is stronger than I am.'

'An unidentifiable power like drink?' Carole suggested rather meanly.

'Well, yes,' he conceded, 'I suppose drink is part of it. But that's more a symptom than a cause. I sometimes have to drink to subdue the agonizing thoughts that come unbidden into my mind.'

'Oh yes?'

'And then sometimes I admit that I do things under the influence of drink that I might not do in my more sober moments.'

'Not that you have many of those,' said Helga.

There was an expression of pure shock, almost as though Gray Czesky had been slapped in the face, at this surprising and sudden disloyalty from his wife. Carole and Jude wondered whether they were witnessing the moment of a worm turning, of the final straw being placed upon the overladen camel's back.

'Well, yes, I agree, the drinking does sometimes get out of hand. But I need it. I have some of my best inspirations when I'm drunk.'

Carole and Jude exchanged looks. Both were wondering how much inspiration it took to paint mimsy-pimsy little watercolours of local beaches and the South Downs.

'I think, Gray,' said Helga, 'you had better tell them what happened last week. That evening when Mark came down to see you.'

Her husband nodded his head ruefully.

'Would this have been the Monday?'

'Yes,' said Helga. 'Go on, Gray.'

There was a truculent silence before he obeyed. 'Okay, I'd had a call from Mark that day.'

'Had you been in touch with him ever since he left Smalting?' asked Jude.

'No, it was a long time since I'd last heard from him. When he left Philly, whenever that was . . .'

'Beginning of May,' his wife supplied.

'Yes. At the time he asked if I minded him using our phone number for people who wanted to contact him.'

'And did many people want to contact him?'

A shake of the head. 'Hardly anyone. He gave me a mobile number and—'

'If he'd got a mobile,' Carole objected, 'why did he need to have your number for messages?'

The painter shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe he wanted to keep people at a distance. Maybe it was a new mobile and he didn't want people to know the number. Anyway, after the first few days he never answered it when I called him. Until suddenly he rang out of the blue last week.'

'What did he say?'

'Just that he was coming down to Smalting, and did I mind if he dropped in. I said fine.'

'He didn't say whether he was coming down to see Philly?'

'No.'

'And how did he seem when you saw him?' asked Carole.

'How do you mean?'

'Did he seem exactly the same as he had when you last saw him?'

Gray Czesky shrugged. 'Pretty much, I guess.'

'No,' said Helga firmly. 'That is not true. He had put on a lot of weight. He seemed to have lost his confidence. Very . . . what's the word? Jittery. No, he was in an extremely strange state when he arrived.'

'Was he?'

'Yes, Gray. Though you were pretty soon too drunk to notice.'

Her husband chuckled with a schoolboy boastfulness. 'True, we did get well stuck into the sauce that night.'

'Which of course led to you doing something rather stupid, didn't it?' Helga prompted implacably.

'Yes.' His face took on a hangdog expression, which, if it was meant to curry sympathy for him, did not have the desired effect with the three women. 'Okay, well . . . Mark and I got into a kind of argument . . . not really an argument, more a sort of. . .'

'Drunken shouting match,' suggested Helga.

'All right. Anyway, I was telling him that artists have to be free and that bourgeois values were a trap to prevent artists from a true expression of themselves, and he was defending the smug middle-class life, saying all he wanted was to live like what he called "a normal human being" — by which he meant an inhibited, tight-arsed wage-slave with a bloody pension and life insurance and a nice neat little beach hut in Smalting. And I said that going down that route was the surest way to stifling artistic talent and nobody who gave a stuff about a beach hut could possibly be any kind of artist, and so I went out and . . .'

He shrugged again, as Carole completed the sentence for him. 'Set fire to the beach hut that Mark and Philly used to use.'

There was a long silence before Gray Czesky admitted that yes, that was exactly what he had done. 'As I say, I was pretty well plastered,' he added, as though that might be some kind of mitigation.

His wife took up the narrative. 'And Gray comes back home and he is boasting about what he has done, so Mark and I rush back to the beach hut to put out the fire.'

Carole looked at Jude, who gave a little nod. Yes, that must have been when the two of them were seen by Curt Holderness. Odd, though, that Curt hadn't noticed that the beach hut was burning. Or perhaps not so odd, given how laxly the man interpreted his duties as a security officer.

'And you did put out the fire, Helga?'

'Yes. Fortunately it had not got much of a hold on the hut. Only one corner was burnt. If we had not got there so quickly I hate to think what would have happened.'

Gray Czesky, now his folly had been exposed, looked sheepishly defiant. 'As I said,' he pleaded to deaf ears, 'it's not easy having an artistic temperament.'

'Well,' said Carole, 'we're very grateful to you for telling us all of this.'

'I felt we had to,' Helga responded. 'I was suspicious of you when you came round on Monday.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, I did not think you were really wanting to commission a painting from Gray.' Carole felt herself blushing to know how transparent their ruse had been. 'It was when you rang again today that my suspicion was confirmed.'

'Really?'

'I knew then that you were plain-clothes police officers.' Carole and Jude tried to avoid catching each other's eyes. Instinctively, Carole was about to say that Helga had got the wrong end of the stick, but a moment's thought made her realize that there was no harm in the woman continuing with her misapprehension. And their mistaken identities could actually be rather useful in advancing their investigation.

'The question is now,' Helga continued, 'what you do about what we have just told you.'

Jude took note of the pleading in the woman's eyes as she said judiciously, 'Well, setting fire to the beach hut was obviously very stupid behaviour on your husband's part. . .'

'Yes?'

'. . .but at its worst it was nothing more than a drunken prank.'

'No,' Helga agreed, her hopes rekindled.

'And it wouldn't have become so important had it not been for subsequent events at the beach hut; the discovery of the human remains there. But . . .' she extended the pause, aware of the tension in the sorry couple in front of her '. . . now we know that the two discoveries are unrelated to each other . . .' she looked across to her neighbour, as if for confirmation of what she was about to say, "... I don't really think it'll be necessary for any further action to be taken.'

The relief in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage was almost palpable. Both the Czeskys sank back into their chairs, as Carole picked up the conversational baton. 'Though of course,' she said sternly, 'we might take a different view were you not to co-operate fully with us.'

'Of course we will,' said Helga earnestly. 'In what way do you wish us to co-operate?'

'We will require you to inform us . . .' Where had that 'require' come from? Carole realized she was dropping into 'police-speak'. 'We will require you to inform us of anything else you may know that might be of relevance to our investigation into the discoveries on Smalting Beach.'

She chose her words with care. With her background in the Home Office, Carole Seddon was well aware how serious a crime impersonating a police officer could be. So she deliberately hadn't confirmed Helga's assumption that their enquiries were official ones. As she walked her casuist's tightrope, Carole curbed her natural instinct towards guilt.

'Oh, of course,' said Helga. 'If there's anything we know that's relevant, of course we will tell you.'

Jude nodded with satisfaction. 'Right. Good. Well, the first thing we want to know is: where is Mark Dennis? Do you have a way of contacting him?'