The Body on the Beach

Thirty-Nine

When Carole got back home from Maggie Kent’s house, she felt quite shaken. Having garaged the Renault – and not even considered cleaning its interior until the morning – she found she was shivering as she walked the short distance to the house. Inside, even before attending to Gulliver’s needs, she turned up the central heating and lit the log-effect gas fire. Then, once the dog was sorted, she poured herself an uncharacteristically large Scotch from the bottle which she kept for guests and which sometimes went untouched from one Christmas to the next.

It wasn’t only her physical ordeal that had shaken her up. It was the discovery she had made in Nick Kent’s bedroom. Now she knew the identity of the body she’d found, she could understand the reasons for the boy’s mental collapse. To have been involved in a black magic ritual with a corpse was bad enough, but to discover in the cold light of the following morning that the body you had seen mutilated was that of your idolized father would have unhinged the most stable of adults. The effect it had had on a confused adolescent was all too predictable.

Thank God at least that Nick had held back from wielding the Stanley knife himself.

Carole hadn’t said anything to Maggie. The awful truth would have to be faced at some point, but it should wait until the body had once again been found. And then the news should be broken to the unknowing widow by the proper authorities.

Carole was reminded that she had intended to spend that evening with Ted Crisp trying to find the body, but after all she been through another visit to the sea wall in search of a week-old corpse held little appeal. While the body on the beach remained anonymous, there had been an almost game-like quality to the investigations she and Jude had undertaken. But now the dead man possessed an identity and a family context, the idea of further probing became distasteful.

She decided she’d done quite enough for that evening. Maybe Jude would ring her or call round when she got back from Brighton. In the meantime, however, Carole Seddon was going to have a very long soak in a very hot bath.

Jude lay on the back seat of the BMW, where the body she did not know to be that of Sam Kent had lain a week before.

When Tanya had returned to her bedsitter with the whisky, Rory had got her to help tie Jude up. With soft scarves, over her clothes, so as not to leave any marks on her body.

Then Rory and Tanya had manhandled her down to the garage and into the BMW. More scarves had been used to tie her wrists and ankles to the armrests, so that she couldn’t sit up and attract attention to herself when they were driving. Rory had not bothered to gag her. The car was soundproof.

Jude had been left in the garage for nearly an hour, while the two conspirators presumably went through the final details of their forthcoming elopement, their separate journeys and their blissful reunion in France.

As she lay immobile in the dark, Jude could not feel optimistic. Assessing the feasibility of escape did not take long. Once she’d given up on that, she tried, with limited success, to focus on more spiritual matters. But anger kept getting in the way. This was neither the time nor the manner in which Jude wanted to die.

Bill Chilcott appeared in the Crown and Anchor a little later than usual that evening for his customary half. And, also uncharacteristically, he brought his wife with him. He looked sleekly bathed, the white bits of his turnip head gleaming from a recent shampooing. Sandra was also carefully groomed and both looked smug. They had clearly come to receive the plaudits of a grateful nation.

Over in the Fethering Yacht Club, Ted Crisp reckoned, Denis Woodville would also be reliving his triumphant part in the rescue. And no doubt being upstaged by other ideas of how it should have been done and recollections of similar incidents out in Singapore.

Bill Chilcott was a little miffed to find the Crown and Anchor bar rather empty. And no evidence of anyone who knew about his heroism.

Ted Crisp did his best to make up the deficiency. “Full marks for what you done out there, Bill. What is it – your ‘customary half’? Or will you go mad and make it a pint?”

“Well, as it is a rather special occasion…”

“Sure. Have this on me. And what about you, Sandra?”

“Ooh, a dry sherry, please, Ted.”

“None the worse for your adventure, Bill?”

“Good heavens, no. Sandra and I do work hard on our fitness. All that regular swimming down at the Leisure Centre has certainly paid off tonight.”

“Not to mention our line–dancing.”

“No, no, don’t let’s forget the line–dancing. No, Sandra and I don’t give in to anno domini. Did you hear how that dreadful man Denis Woodville was wheezing during the rescue? And he didn’t swim. He only worked the mechanical winch.”

“Well, he smokes like a chimney, doesn’t he, Bill?”

“Yes, Sandra, filthy habit. So unhealthy. All his arteries must be totally furred up. If you want my opinion, he’ll just keel over one day.”

“And good riddance, that’s what Bill and I say!”

“Thought you might,” Ted Crisp murmured. “But the boy was all right, was he? None the worse for his ordeal?”

“I don’t know,” Bill Chilcott replied. “He went off with his mother in Carole Seddon’s car.”

“Oh, is that what happened?” The landlord scratched his chin through the thickets of his beard. “You know, I might just give Carole a call to see that the lad’s OK…”

When Rory Turnbull finally did return to his prisoner in the car, he seemed blithe, almost euphoric. He was alone. He opened the garage doors, drove the BMW out and closed them again, before setting off at a steady pace west out of Brighton.

At least Jude could speak. She could try to reason for her life. Anything was worth trying. Without much hope, she announced, “It won’t work, you know, Rory.”

“Oh, it will.”

“The body’s been dead a week.”

“But the weather’s been on my side. Below freezing most of the last few days.”

“It’ll still be obvious he died a week ago. The most basic of post-mortems’ll show that – regardless of how much the body’s disfigured by the fire.”

“I’m sure you’re right. No, it wouldn’t work…if fire was the method I was going to use.”

“You’re not?”

“No. Change of plan, due to change of circumstances. Always pays to be flexible in one’s planning, you know.” There was a heady, almost manic, confidence about him now. “By the time the body’s found, nobody’ll be able to give a precise date of death. All they’ll have to identify him by will be the fact he’s in my car, he’s wearing my clothes…and, of course,” he concluded smugly, “they’ll be able to check his dental work.”

“My God! The missing tooth. Did you…”

“Oh yes.” He was very full of himself now. “I told you, I’ve been planning this for a long time. I don’t know how he’d lost his tooth, but as soon as I noticed it I knew what I had to do.”

“You actually took out one of your own teeth?”

“Not difficult for someone of my profession. I made up some story to Barbara about having been in a fight, which fitted in well with the image of general social collapse that I was creating. And then I had a rather distinctive chromium cobalt denture made for me by our usual lab. They always put their own identification mark on all the stuff they make, so there’d be no question it was mine. And the plate also fits into the dead man’s mouth well enough.”

Remembering something that Holly the hygienist had said in what seemed like a previous incarnation but was in fact only that morning, Jude murmured, “You actually had him in your surgery to check that it fitted?”

“Yes. It was a risk, but I did it after hours. Pretended I was helping him out of charity. He didn’t care. So long as I gave him a bit of money to buy heroin, he’d have done anything I wanted, anything. When I offered him money for his passport, he found it and handed it over like a lamb.”

“That’s how you set up savings accounts, isn’t it? In his name. You used the passport for identification.”

“Oh yes,” he said smugly.

“You’ve really put a lot of planning into this, haven’t you, Rory?”

“I certainly have.” Oblivious to her irony, he took it as a straight compliment, and the way he spoke stole away Jude’s last shred of hope. Rory Turribull was impervious to logic. His elaborate scheme would almost definitely not work, his subterfuges would be unmasked by scientific examination, but that didn’t matter. He was so caught up in the fantasy of his plan that he was going to go through with it regardless of anything.

“You said,” Jude began with trepidation, “you weren’t going to use fire…”

“No. Not fire. The wreckage’dbe found too quickly, which might prove…forensically embarrassing. No, I want the car to be discovered in a few weeks’ time…after the fish have taken some of the flesh off the bodies.”

“Bodies?” she echoed softly.

“Yes. I’m afraid, my dear Jude, you know far too much about what I’ve been up to for me to let you survive. But, fortunately, there has been a rumour around during the last week that I might have had another woman…” A rumour that Carole and I helped to foster, thought Jude bitterly, as Rory went on, “lanya heard about it from old Denis Woodville. And Ted Crisp in the pub suggested last week that you and I might be an item.”

“He was joking.”

“Many a true word…Or at least that’s how it’ll seem in retrospect. The doomed love affair. The suicide pact. The only way the two of them could be together. Which was of course why Rory Turribull drove himself and his lover to their deaths off the sea wall at Fethering.”