The Body on the Beach

Twelve

“Are you really looking for a job as a barmaid?” Carole couldn’t help asking as they pressed on into the icy gloom.

“Good heavens, no,” Jude replied. “I just said that to keep the old boy sweet.”

“So what, do you have a job or are you retired?”

“Ah, you mean what do I live on?”

Carole wouldn’t have put it quite that crudely, but she admitted that yes, that was more or less what she meant.

Jude chuckled. “Like the rest of us, I live on money. And money comes and money goes, doesn’t it?”

This did not come within Carole’s definition of an adequate answer, but she had no time to probe further as her sleeve was snatched and Jude’s voice hissed in her ear, “It’s all right. He’s gone.”

“What?”

A gloved hand waved up towards the top of the beach. “Our Vice-Commodore. He’s out of sight.”

“So?”

“So he can’t see what we’re doing.” And, tugging on Carole’s arm, Jude pulled her round, so that they were both walking back the way they came.

“I wish you’d tell me what we are doing,” Carole complained.

“We’re going back to where you found the body on the beach. The water’s far enough out for us to see.”

“But we’re not going to see anything. The tide’s washed over the area a good few times by now.”

“That’s not the point.”

However, Jude granted her no more information until they were standing at the foot of the breakwater, where, in what seemed like another lifetime, a dead man with a missing tooth had lain. Out of sight now in the encroaching darkness, the relentless thudding of the pile driver continued, eerily echoing off the sea.

Jude looked at the water-filled indentation at the foot of one of the breakwater’s worn stanchions. “It was here?”

“Yes. Exactly here.”

Scrunching up her eyes, Jude looked across the rain-slicked sand to where the pebbles started. “And you say the tide was coming in?”

“Yes.”

“So how far was it away from the breakwater when you found the body? How far did it have to come in to reach here?”

“About twenty yards.”

“Hm.” Jude nodded thoughtfully. “Well, there’s no way the body was swept out to sea again.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because if the incoming tide was going to move him at all, it’d move him further up the beach. He wouldn’t be swept out till after the tide had changed. And the police came to see you too soon after they hadn’t found the body for that to have happened.”

The deduction was undeniably true. Carole was surprised to encounter this new, logical streak in her neighbour.

“So…” Jude spun on her booted heel and looked around the semicircle towards the village. She stopped, facing the Fethering Yacht Club. “I think we go back up there.”

“Hm?”

“For anyone who wanted to hide a body, it’s the nearest place, isn’t it?”

“But who wanted to hide a body?”

“We don’t know that yet, do we?”

It was nearly dark when they got back to the side gate to the Yacht Club. Jude looked around but could see no one in the enveloping gloom. “OK, give me a leg-up.”

“But we can’t break in. I mean, particularly after what Denis Woodville was saying.”

“Nobody’s going to see us, Carole. And if he does find any evidence of our intrusion, he’s going to put it down to the local youngsters. ‘Kids these days just have no respect for property,”” she announced in an uncannily close echo of the Vice-Commodore’s tones. “Come on, give me a leg-up.”

With Carole’s help, Jude negotiated her long skirt over the gate and then helped her neighbour to join her inside the compound. “Now, let’s have a look at all of these hoats.”

“What are we looking for?”

“A loose cover. A sign that one of them’s been broken into.”

“You think the body might have been hidden in one of the boats?”

Jude looked around. “See anywhere else suitable?”

In the last threads of daylight, they felt their way along the rows of dinghies, Carole starting from one end, Jude from the other. On most, the blue covers were firmly battened down, either fixed with cleats or pulled tight by threaded cords. Above the two women, the wind sang in rigging and steel halyards clattered endlessly against metal masts.

“Could be something here!” Carole called out.

Jude was quickly by her side.

“Look!” Carole pointed to the rim of a boat cover, where a piece of rope dangled loose.

“Pity we haven’t got a torch. It’s really hard to see.”

“I have got a torch,” said Carole, trying to keep the smugness out of her voice. “I always carry one in my raincoat pocket. There’s no streetlighting on the High Street.”

“Isn’t there? I hadn’t noticed.”

Carole reached into her Burberry pocket and the beam of light was quickly focused on the trailing rope. It ended in a sharp right angle.

“Been cut through,” said Jude.

The severed cord had been rethreaded through the eyelets of the cover in an attempt to hide the break-in. Jude started quickly to unpick it.

“Should we be doing this?” asked Carole plaintively.

“Course we should. We are doing it anyway. And nobody can see us.”

It was true. The wet darkness around them suddenly seemed total. The floodlights focused on the sea-wall repairs were only fifty yards away but looked pale, distant and insubstantial. Someone would have to be very close to detect their tiny torch-beam.

Freeing a corner of the cover, Jude flipped it back like a bedspread from the stern of the boat. “Shine the torch here,” she said. “No, here!”

The thin stream of light picked out a name in gold lettering: Brigadoon II.

“I wonder,” said Jude. “Do you think there’s a kind of person who would give their boat the same name as their house?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Come on, let’s get the rest of this cover off and have a look inside.”

“What are you expecting to find in there? The body?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Carole shivered. The possibility was macabre. But she couldn’t deny that it was also exciting.

When they had peeled the cover right back, however, they found no body. Just the moulded fibre-glass interior of a dinghy’s hull. In the central channel a rectangle of trapped water gleamed against the torchlight. Its surface was frozen hard.

But the ice didn’t stop an acrid smell from rising to their nostrils. “Standing water,” Carole observed. “It’s been leaking in for some time.”

She ran the beam of the torch carefully over the inside of the boat. It revealed nothing they wouldn’t have expected to find there.

“Just check if there’s anything under the water.”

Putting a foot on one of the trailer wheels, Jude hoisted herself with surprising ease over the side and into the dinghy. With a gloved fist, she hammered through the sheet of ice. Then, removing her right-hand glove and supporting herself on the other arm, she felt down into the bottom of the boat. She winced at the cold of the water.

“Something here.” She produced a nut and bolt, rusted immovably together, and handed them to Carole. “Don’t think that helps us much.”

She reached down again through the cracked ice into the fetid water and felt her way systematically along the trough. “I think that’s probably it. Be too easy if we – Just a minute…”

Carole craned over the side of the boat, trying desperately to see what her neighbour had uncovered. Jude’s dripping hand raised her trophy into the torch-beam. “Look at that,” she said with triumph.

It was a large, robust Stanley knife, clicked in the open position. The light gleamed on the shiny triangle of its blade.

“Wonder how long that’s been there…?”

“Not very long,” said Carole. “Blade like that would rust very quickly. And…”

“What?”

“The woman who drew a gun on me wanted to know if I’d found a knife.”

“Yes. So she did.”

Jude slowly turned the knife over in her hand. On the other side of the handle words had been printed in uneven white paint-strokes. They read: J. T. CARPETS.