The Body on the Beach

Eighteen

Fethering doesn’t have an underbelly in the way that, say, Los Angeles has an underbelly, but the Downside Estate is as near as it gets.

The houses there betrayed signs not of real deprivation but of diminishing willpower and ever-tightening budgets. The Downside Estate had been built as council housing, but cut after cut in local authority spending over the years meant that maintenance had been pared to the bone. The buildings had all reached the age when serious structural refurbishment was required, not short-term making-good repairs. Their late-1940s brickwork needed repointing. Windows needed painting, even those where the original frames had been replaced by soulless double glazing. Tiny front gardens were unkempt and littered. Depressed cars crouched against the pavements on failing suspension.

The drab November weather did not add to the estate’s charms, as Carole navigated her sensible and immaculately clean Renault towards Drake Crescent. She tried to bite back her instinctive snobbishness, but the compartmentalizing habit of her mind was too strong. Here was a place, she decided, where cultural aspiration stopped at the Sun or the football, and hope existed only in the form of the National Lottery.

On the side of every house a satellite dish perched like a giant parasitic insect, leeching away more profits for Sky TV. In Downside no attempt had been made to hide them, whereas on the Shorelands Estate a visible satellite dish would have constituted a social lapse more terrible than walking around with one’s flies undone.

“Pretty grim place to live,” Carole observed, as she turned off Grenville Avenue.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve lived in worse,” said Jude, adding yet another to the list of questions that Carole must at some point put to her neighbour.

But this wasn’t the moment. “How do we know which house it is?” she asked as the car crawled along Drake Crescent. Unable to disguise her distaste, she added, “Stop and ask someone?”

Jude chuckled. “It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have to do. The people round here are human, you know.”

“Oh, I didn’t for a moment mean – ”

“Yes, you did,” said Jude cheerfully. “Anyway, I don’t think we’re going to have to ask anyone. I’d say it’s the house with the television crew outside.”

Sure enough, there was a blue and white van bearing the regional station’s logo. A couple of dour technicians were rolling up cables and stowing them in the back. An effete young man stood awkwardly by, feeling he should offer to help, but not knowing how.

Jude jumped out as soon as Carole had parked the car and went straight up to the young man. “Is this Theresa Spalding’s house?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Have you just been doing a news interview with her?”

“Not news, no. For a documentary. We’re doing an in-depth analysis of the teenage drug problem on the South Coast.”

“Oh, that’ll be interesting,” lied Carole, who’d come up to join them. All local documentaries, she knew, were ruined by inadequate budgets, sketchy research and inept presenters. “And you were talking to Mrs Spalding about her son’s death?”

“Yes. She’s obviously very cut up about it.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Jude, starting up the short path that led to Theresa Spalding’s front door.

“I’m not sure that she really wants to talk to anyone else at the moment,” said the young man. “Unless, of course, you’re social workers.”

“That’s right,” Jude called breezily over her shoulder as she pressed the doorbell.

In amazement, Carole followed her neighbour. The young man, seeing his colleagues had finished packing the van, got inside.

It was a moment or two before the front door was opened, and then only halfway. The woman was undoubtedly the one who’d come to Carole’s house, but her face had drained down to a new pallor. The darting eyes were raw with weeping and a hand flickered across in front of her as if warding off some unseen attacker.

“What do you want? I don’t want to talk to no one.”

“We may be able to help you find out how Aaron died,” said Jude, pronouncing the name ‘Arran’ as everyone else had.

“I don’t care how he died. My boy’s dead – that’s all that matters to me. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She made as if to close the door, but Carole’s incisive words stopped her. “Then perhaps you do want to talk about why you drew a gun on me…”

The door-closing movement stopped. Through the remaining crack the woman’s eyes took in the speaker’s face.

“Unless you want the police to talk to you about why you drew a gun on me.”

Reluctantly, the crack of the door widened.

“You better come in then.”

Theresa Spalding lived in a maisonette. Whether the house had been built like that or subsequently converted into two dwellings was hard to tell. The sitting room, into which Carole and Jude were grudgingly ushered, was dominated by a huge television screen. Throughout their interview, some American sitcom full of overacting teenagers was running with the sound off.

Theresa Spalding gestured to a couple of broken-down chairs, stubbed out the remains of a cigarette and, with trembling hands, shook another out of a packet. She remained standing while she lit the new one. She took a drag, as though gulping in oxygen on the top of Everest.

“Look, I don’t know what you want, but I’ve already got enough grief.”

The room was full of traces of her son. A poster of the Southampton football team. A Playstation with a scattering of CD-ROM games by the television. Stephen Kings and similar paperbacks littered on a shelf, along with a neat row of horror videos. A grubby pair of trainers left by the sofa, exactly where he’d kicked them off.

Jude took the lead. There had been no discussion between them, but instinctively they fell into their roles. If Carole, with her threats of police involvement, was the Bad Cop, then Jude was going to be the Good Cop.

“Yes, Mrs Spalding, I understand – ”

“It’s not ‘Mrs’. I never been married. But if you think that means I didn’t bring up Aaron right – ”

“We’re not saying that…Theresa. Can I call you ‘Theresa’?”

Carole knew she could never have got away with it, but the woman snorted permission to Jude for her first name to be used. There was something in Jude’s manner which made such things possible.

“Thank you. I’m Jude, and my friend’s called Carole.”

This first use of the word ‘friend’ gave Carole a warm feeling. She wasn’t sure whether she was ready yet to reciprocate the compliment, but it was still nice to know that Jude thought of their relationship in that light.

“And we’re both desperately sorry about what happened to Aaron.”

“Why? What business is it of yours?”

“It wouldn’t be our business,” Carole responded sharply, “if you hadn’t come to my house and threatened me with a gun.”

“You needn’t have worried. It wasn’t a real gun.” Theresa Spalding crossed to a dresser and pulled the weapon out of a drawer. She chucked it across into Carole’s lap for inspection. No parts of the gun’s mechanism moved except for the trigger. A moulded replica. “Just a thing Aaron bought.”

“Why did he buy it?” asked Carole.

“Not to do any harm!” Theresa snapped. “He’d never have done an off-licence with it. He wasn’t like that. Aaron was just a little boy and little boys like playing with guns. That’s just a toy. He bought it as a toy!”

“Yes.” Jude’s voice smoothed down the flare-up. “But you can see why your use of the gun got us interested. What was so important to make you go to the house of someone you’d never met before and pull a gun on them – even if that gun was just a replica?”

Theresa was sullenly silent.

Carole picked up the baton of interrogation. “What interests me even more is the fact that you mentioned the body that I’d found on the beach that morning. How did you know about that?”

Again there was no response.

“Did Aaron tell you about the body?” suggested Jude gently. “Had he seen it down there?”

“Aaron didn’t have anything to do with that bloke dying! Aaron was a good boy…” Once again, as in her television interview, these words unleashed a flood of tears from Theresa Spalding.

Jude rose and, with an arm around her, led the woman to sit down. “Cry,” she murmured. “It’s good. You need to cry.”

Then, crouched beside the chair, she rocked the woman in her arms, crooning words whose sound was more important than their meaning. Carole watched the calming process with surprise and a degree of envy, knowing that she did not possess such skills.

Gradually, the shudderings of Theresa Spalding’s body became tremors, which twitched away to nothing. She reached into the pocket of her jeans for a crumpled tissue and rubbed it against her nose.

“Ready to talk?” asked Jude.

The woman nodded. To her surprise, Carole found Jude was looking at her, indicating that she was to take over for the next bit.

“Right.” Carole had taken her glasses off and was rubbing the lenses on the end of her scarf. It was a mannerism of which she was entirely unaware, but which had been noticed by all her Home Office colleagues, a little ritual she went through before any important interview. “We weren’t suggesting that Aaron had anything to do with the death of the man I found on the beach. We just want to know why you were so concerned about that body.”

Theresa Spalding said nothing. Jude had calmed her, she didn’t mind Jude, but she was still resistant to the Bad Cop.

“It was nothing to do with me. I didn’t even see the body. I had no connection with it.”

“Apart from the connection through Aaron?” said Jude.

For a moment the woman’s face contorted. If the suggestion had come from Carole, she would have shouted some defiant response. Because Jude had spoken, though, she accepted it.

“Yes. OK.”

Carole picked up again. “You were particularly concerned about something in the dead man’s pocket.”

Theresa nodded, still calm. “Yes. Aaron had told me about it. I was just afraid, if the police found it, they’d make the connection with him and come after my boy.”

“What was it? What was in the man’s pocket?”

She couldn’t face answering this question without another cigarette. Carole and Jude watched in silence while she fumbled with the packet and lit up again.

“I don’t know what it was, but it was something with Aaron’s name on it. They all had to put their names on something. It was part of the test.”

The Bad Cop and the Good Cop exchanged glances. The understanding passed that Jude should take over again. “Who’s ‘they’?” she asked softly.

“The other lads. The ones he was with when they found the body.”

“Did they find the body at the Yacht Club?”

Theresa nodded. “Aaron got in about four that morning. I started to bawl him out, but I could see what a bad way he was in. He’d been doing some stuff, I could tell. Weed, I suppose – maybe something stronger. Bit of smack perhaps. He was crying just like a kid. Wasn’t much more than a kid, really. Got in with the wrong company, that was all that was wrong with Aaron. What chance did he have, living with me, no man around…well, no man around for long? And me always on some medication for the depression and the panic attacks. I did try to look after him. He never got put into care. Times they wanted to, but I wouldn’t let them. I brought him up on my own, all on my own.”

Jude nodded, soothing, commending the achievement. “So what did Aaron tell you?”

“He said they’d been drinking. He didn’t say they’d been doing stuff too, but I knew they had. And then they decided to break into the Yacht Club…I don’t know what for…maybe a bit of thieving or just to smash the boats up. It wasn’t Aaron’s idea, it was the others. And they broke into one boat and they found this man’s body…He was dead. He was definitely dead before they found him. And they…I don’t know what they did to the body, or exactly what they put in his pockets, but it was some test…some kind of test…”

“A test to prove how hard they were?” Jude suggested. “How tough they were?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know. Aaron’s been into a lot of this horror stuff, you know, books and films and stuff. A lot of that age are. Black magic stuff, you know. Maybe what they done to the body was something to do with that. You know what kids that age are like – terrified, but it doesn’t do to show they’re terrified, so they egg each other on to show how brave they are, and they do stupid things. Anyway, whatever they actually did, it ended up with them chucking the body over the sea wall into the Fether. That’s all Aaron told me, but he was in a bad way, a really bad way. He’d scared himself something terrible. He kept saying that the body would come back to life, that it was one of the Undead or some such crap, and that it’d come after him. And then he was afraid too the police was going to come and get him as soon as the body was found. I tried to calm him and put him to bed…Then I slept for a couple of hours, and Aaron was here when I woke up round eight…but later in the morning I went down the shops…and when I come back, he was gone…” A sob came into her voice. “And that was the last time I saw my boy.”

“I still thought he was coming back then, but I wanted to do a kind of damage-limitation thing – stop anyone who knew anything about the body talking to the police. That’s why I come round your place with the gun.

“But Aaron didn’t come back.” She swallowed down the sob welling up in her throat. “It was the drugs. He got into bad company and they started him doing drugs…and Aaron couldn’t cope…not with that and the other things they done. I think he just couldn’t take it any more. He was convinced this Undead body was going to come after him and get him…so he must’ve jumped into the Fether at high tide Tuesday night…and that was the end.”

She didn’t burst into tears this time, but stood, her body shaking with dry sobs.

“Did you tell all this to the police?” asked Carole.

“No, not the half of it. I don’t want them thinking my boy’d been messing around with dead bodies.”

“So why did you tell us?”

“Ib stop you telling the police about the gun.” There was a naked appeal in the bloodshot eyes she turned on Carole. “That was the only reason I turned it on you. I was trying to frighten you, so’s you wouldn’t tell the police what Aaron’d done. You won’t tell them, will you?”

“No. We won’t tell them.”

“What about his friends?” asked Jude. “The ones he was with?”

“Friends!” Theresa Spalding spat out the word. “You don’t call someone who gets a sixteen-year-old boy into drugs a ‘friend’, do you?”

“No, you don’t. But who were they?”

“I don’t know for definite. There’s a bunch that gets together. Could have been any of them. But there’s one who I’m sure was involved. Older boy. Aaron worshipped him, thought he was the business all right. Asked him round here once or twice, but I turfed him out. I can always spot a bad ‘un. I’m sure it was him who got Aaron into drugs.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dylan.”

“Surname?”

“Don’t know. Never heard it.”

“Any idea where he lives?”

Theresa Spalding shook her head. “Somewhere local. Went to the same school as Aaron. Few years older, though, like I said. He’s left the school. Think he’s got a job now.”

“Doing what?”

“Carpet-fitter.”