Death under the Dryer

Eleven

There were a lot of dog owners in Fethering, but Carole Seddon prided herself on usually being on the beach with Gulliver before any of them. Waking early was a habit dinned into her all her life, to be ready for her daily train journey to school, and then her commute to the Home Office. During the relatively brief period she took off work after Stephen’s birth, the baby’s imperatives had also ensured early rising and, though in retirement the demands on her time were less, the habit was engrained. For Carole, rising late would have been an unacceptable indulgence, on a par with watching breakfast television. And getting up early on a Sunday, when most of the world was having a lie-in, gave her an even greater sense of being on the moral high ground.

Besides, Carole liked to be active as soon as she woke up. Lying in bed, being immobile even for a moment, was dangerous. It was at such moments that she could be ambushed by unwelcome thoughts. Her mind was a pressure cooker, whose lid needed to be firmly tightened down.

Gulliver didn’t care when she got him up, so long as there was a walk involved. He still became puppyishly exuberant at the prospect of being taken out, particularly to Fethering Beach, where the melange of sharp smells and the range of flotsam and jetsam represented a canine nirvana.

That Sunday dog and owner were on the beach before six o’clock. The early morning air was a cold breath of impending winter. It was hardly light when she had left High Tor and, as September gave way to October, she knew she would have to start her walks later, unless she wanted to set off in total darkness. There’d be a brief respite when Summer Time ended, and then winter would once again inexorably put its squeeze on the early mornings.

End of October the clocks changed. Carole always remembered details like that. In retirement she needed more than ever to have her year delineated, to have fixed points in the potentially unstructured void of her life. And also by the end of October, she remembered suddenly, Stephen and Gaby’s baby will probably have arrived. I will be a grandmother. The thought filled her with an uneasy mixture of excitement and apprehension.

Gulliver had the personality of all Labradors, which meant that at times he could be exceptionally soppy. But on Fethering Beach he became a hero. Beleaguered on all sides by potential attacks from waves, stones, swathes of bladderwrack, ends of rope, water-smoothed spars and broken plastic bottles, he triumphed over them all, scampering off in sudden sallies, only to return breathless to his mistress’s side with the gleam of victory in his eye. King Arthur never had a more gallant knight errant than Gulliver on Fethering Beach.

Carole didn’t always take him on the same route. Like all creatures of habit, she hated to be thought of as a creature of habit. Where the road met the beach, she would sometimes turn left towards the Yacht Club and the mouth of the Fether; other times she would go right, where the dunes stretched as far as the eye could see. Coming back, too, there were alternative routes possible. They could either take the High Street directly to High Tor, or they could walk along the bank of the river and cut back along one of the little roads parallel to the sea. Or then again, if she felt like it, having curtailed Gulliver’s freedom by putting his lead back on, Carole could take him along the little service road which ran behind the High Street shops.

For no very good reason, this was the route she chose that morning. Though busy with deliveries during the week, the road was virtually unused at weekends because there were no houses there. On one side was an area of scrubland, its surface a mixture of sand and earth, from which the local residents discouraged summer picnickers. And on the other were the backyards of the shops: some double-gated parking bays for major delivery vehicles, others like the ends of gardens, wooden-fenced with small doors. The back of Connie’s Clip Joint was of the second kind, and as Carole led Gulliver along the road that Sunday morning, she saw a man come through the door and hurry to a gleaming new Mini. Something about his movement was furtive. Just before he got into the driver’s seat, he gave a quick look around, and Carole recognized a face whose photograph she’d seen only the day before.

It was Martin Rutherford.