The Body on the Beach

Sixteen

Carole Seddon had woken that Thursday morning with a change of attitude. In Jude’s company, caught up in the excitement Jude generated, the idea of playing at detectives had seemed a seductive one. Finding an explanation for the body on the beach had been imperative. On her own, though, Carole found it less compelling. Life, she reflected, is full of loose ends. There are many questions that will never be answered, and a sensible person will recognize that fact and get on with things.

So that morning Carole got on with things. She reestablished the routine of her life that her discovery of the body and her meeting with Jude had briefly interrupted.

The weather was better, though still astringently cold and heavily overcast. She took Gulliver for his early-morning walk on the beach, striding resolutely past Woodside Cottage without a sideways glance. On her way back up the High Street, she did slow for a moment by the gate, contemplating a brief call to see if Jude’s thinking had progressed at all. But, in spite of the ambient gloom, there were no lights on, so Carole went straight into her own house and started a major cleaning offensive.

The telephone didn’t ring all morning. This was not unusual, but that particular morning Carole kept half expecting it might.

She was very sensible and virtuous. She even emptied out the fridge and defrosted it.

After her morning of hard work, she felt she deserved an omelette and a glass of mineral water with the lunchtime news. There was nothing much on the international front. Reports of atrocities in the Balkans or Africa, where she got confused about which side was which – who the aggressors, who the victims – had little power to engage her interest.

The weatherman promised more of the same. The apparent improvement of that morning had been an illusion. More frost was coming. More wind. More gloom as the evenings darkened earlier and the year spiralled down to its close.

At the start of the strident signature tune of the local news, Carole reached for the remote control. But before she pressed the off-button, she heard the voice-over menu of headlines: “Drowned boy’s mother blames drug culture.”

Carole’s button-finger froze.

Another newsreader who’d never make it on to national television appeared in shot. “The mother of teenager Aaron Spalding” – once again the name was pronounced ‘Arran’ – “today blamed the ready accessibility of drugs to young people on the South Coast for her son’s death.”

A woman’s distraught face filled the screen. “Aaron was a good boy. Then he got mixed up with a crowd who was doing a lot of drugs and I’m sure that’s what caused his death. He was a good boy…” Her mouth wobbled as the tears took over.

But it wasn’t what was said that kept Carole frozen in her chair. It was the fact that she’d seen the woman before.

In that very sitting room. Holding a gun.