Bones Under The Beach Hut

Chapter 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 dead-ness 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 had.

'Oh, don't you know the circumstances of Robin's disappearance? Sorry, there was so much media coverage down here at the time I thought everyone knew every last detail.'

'I wasn't living in Fethering when it happened.'

'Ah. Well, I've told it so many times, another telling won't hurt. I can almost do it without getting upset now, so I suppose that's progress. Right. . .' And Miranda Browning reiterated the information that Carole and Jude had found on Wikipedia.

But she did add a few details that hadn't been available online. Yes, she and Rory had gone to London to see a matinee of Les Miserables, leaving Robin in the care of her husband's parents.

'Joyce and I never really got on. If she'd been in charge when Robin was abducted I don't think I'd ever have forgiven her. With Lionel, well, it was a terrible thing, but I liked him and he really adored Robin. No amount of blame from me could equal the way he blamed himself for what happened. I don't think it'd be overstating it to say that his life really stopped at that moment. He's been kind of going through the motions ever since.'

'And what about Joyce?'

Miranda Browning shrugged. 'I don't think it made a lot of difference to her. She only ever thinks about herself.'

Jude wondered whether this was just traditional daughter-in-law/mother-in-law antipathy. It didn't fit in with what she had heard from Carole, though. Granted, her neighbour hadn't spent much time with Joyce Oliver, but the comfortable woman she had spoken of seemed to be at odds with Miranda's description.

'And it was on Smalting Beach that the abduction happened?'

'Well, on the prom. On June the fifteenth. Just a little over eight years ago. I don't know why anniversaries have such significance, but I'm afraid they do.' For the first time the woman's emotions threatened to overwhelm her. Her voice wobbled for a moment, but she was quick to reassert control. 'Smalting Beach was quite crowded. And Robin loved boats of all kinds, windsurfers in particular. I can understand why Lionel let him stay outside the shop while he bought the ice cream. I'm sure I would have done the same.'

'But if the beach was crowded, why didn't anyone witness the abduction?'

Jude's massaging fingers felt the shaking of Miranda's head. 'I thought that was strange at first. But I think the fact that it was so crowded was the reason why nobody noticed. Robin was a very trusting little boy — too trusting probably. If a stranger had started talking to him, he wouldn't have been shy about replying.'

'Presumably the police talked to your father-in-law about what had happened?'

'Endlessly. And he had to suffer the agony of being a suspect, all kinds of probing into his private life, having his car forensically examined. It was very tough for him. But he never changed a single detail of his story. Which shows it must have been true — not that Lionel is capable of lying, anyway. He's a rather splendid man, I think — certainly given what he's had to put up with from Joyce.'

Again the apparently disproportionate animus against her mother-in-law. Jude would have liked to have found out more about the reasons for that, but it wasn't the moment to divert the course of Miranda's narrative.

'No, that's one of my great sadnesses about the whole thing — the estrangement from Lionel. There are terribly destructive aftershocks from an event like what happened to Robin.'

'Presumably it was that that broke up your marriage?'

'Yes. It had always been an on-off sort of relationship. But once he came back to me and we got married, I'd hoped . . . Then Robin disappeared. There were a lot of other things too. Small fault lines in the relationship that might, I suppose, in other circumstances, have been papered over. But with Robin gone they became huge great rifts. I don't really blame Rory. I just can't imagine any marriage surviving something like that. All the time you spend together there's this one huge subject looming over you. The elephant in the room. If you talk about it, it's painful. If you don't talk about it, it's equally painful. Eventually you just don't want to be together, you don't want to have the constant reminder of your shared pain.

'And, of course, had circumstances been different, I suppose we might have had another child. Been a proper little family. Still, it's too late to think about that now.' She allowed herself a small sigh of frustration.

'I hope your second marriage has been happier.'

Jude's words were greeted by a grunt of cynicism.

'No, that one didn't last either. Less than a year. I was stupid to think it would work. I'm afraid I'm not marriage material at the moment. I'm still just an emotional minefield.'

There was a silence. Then Jude removed her hands from Miranda's neck and shoulders. 'Does that feel easier? Just move your head from side to side. See if it's less tight.'

The client did as she was told. 'Yes, it is much better.'

'That's only alleviated the symptoms. Now I'll see if I can heal what's causing it.'

'Good luck,' said Miranda Browning, with a hint of bitterness. 'Sadly I don't think healing can change history.'

'No, I agree. But it maybe can change the way you react to history.'

'Diminish how much I blame myself?'

'Maybe a bit. If you turn over and lie on your front, Miranda.'

An expression of intense concentration came into Jude's brown eyes as she ran her hands along the contours of the woman's body. Once again there was no contact made, but the effort was more intense and exhausting than it had been for the actual massage.

'Did it actually help last time I did this?' Jude asked.

'Yes, it did for a few days. In fact I have felt generally better since then. That is . . . until recent events.'

'Yes, it must be ghastly having it all brought back to you.'

'Still, maybe I will be able to find a workable modus vivendi, now there's no longer any uncertainty.' But she didn't sound over-optimistic about the prospect.

'Presumably . . .' Jude chose her words with sensitivity '. . . now the police actually have a body, there's a stronger chance they may be able to track down the perpetrator, you know, the person who actually abducted Robin?'

'Maybe. They certainly seem in no hurry to release the body. So presumably every kind of forensic test is being . . .' The images this prompted were too graphic for her to finish the sentence.

'Were there suspects at the time?'

'The usual ones. Everyone vaguely local who featured on the Sex Offenders Register. They couldn't pin it on anyone, though. Lack of evidence.'

'Did you have any suspicions of anyone?'

Miranda Browning shook her head. 'It never occurred to me for a moment that it might be anyone I had met.'

'No.' Jude didn't raise the fact that in a lot of such cases the perpetrator was someone known to the family.

'Do you think it'll be a comfort to you when the culprit is found?'

'I really don't know. Whoever he is, I have hated him very deeply at times. At times I know I have wanted him dead. How I'll react now, I've no idea. I didn't know how I'd react to Robin's body being found. And through all the pain I think there may eventually be a positive side to that. Maybe it'll be the same when they arrest his murderer. As I say, at the moment I just don't know.'

The healing session, as ever, left Jude wrung out like a damp rag. Miranda Browning was very grateful, saying that it had left her feeling more relaxed. But both women knew that the residue of pain inside her was something that could never be fully healed.