The Killing in the Café

NINE

‘Well,’ said Ted Crisp as the two women sat down in the Crown and Anchor with large Sauvignon Blancs that evening, ‘it sounds odd to me. Probably means the body wasn’t a “Fethering Floater”.’

‘Oh, I’ve heard of them, “Fethering Floaters”,’ said Jude. ‘But I can’t remember the details.’

‘I can remember them,’ said Carole tartly. ‘The subject came up when that poor boy Aaron Spalding drowned in the Fether.’ She was referring to the first case they had ever worked on together, just after Jude had moved into Woodside Cottage.

‘Yes. Remind me.’

Ted picked up the cue. ‘It’s an old tradition round here, a story passed down the generations. But perhaps more believable than many of the Fethering old wives’ tales. It’s something to do with the Fether being a tidal river and how that affects the currents where it actually meets the English Channel. Basically it’s reckoned that anyone who drowns in the Fether gets swept out to sea and then the undertow gets hold of the body and drags it back to land. So they usually turn up on Fethering Beach within twenty-four hours. And they’re called the “Fethering Floaters”.’

‘Well, the one we found this morning wasn’t one of them,’ Carole observed.

‘More likely washed in from the Channel,’ said Ted. ‘Illegal immigrant, perhaps, trying to get over here in a boat that wasn’t seaworthy.’ Of course he didn’t know anything about the bullet hole.

‘Perhaps,’ said Carole. ‘All I know is that from the state of decomposition, the body had been in the water for considerably longer than twenty-four hours.’

‘Yes, it had probably been in there nearer three weeks.’ As soon as the words were out, the look on Carole’s face told Jude that she shouldn’t have said that. She hadn’t mentioned anything to her neighbour about Sara Courtney’s story of having seen a dead body at Polly’s Cake Shop.

‘What do you mean by that?’ came the instant, suspicious response.

‘I just … erm …’ Jude floundered. ‘As you say, the state of decomposition. That body looked as if it had been in the sea getting on for three weeks.’

‘And since when have you been an expert in forensic pathology, Jude?’

‘Oh, you know, you see things. All those grisly American series … CSI whatever … you pick it up.’

Jude knew how unconvincing she sounded. She knew too that, when they were next alone together, Carole would grill her about her lapse. She looked down at her glass, which had unaccountably become empty.

‘I think we’d better have a couple more of the large Sauvignon Blancs,’ she said to Ted. ‘Need it after what we’ve been through today.’

Carole’s instinct to protest that she didn’t need any more was stopped at source by Ted actually pouring the drinks. ‘Police give you a rough time, did they?’ he asked.

‘They were studiously polite,’ Jude replied. ‘But obviously they wanted a lot of information.’

‘We were, after all, the first people to discover the body,’ said Carole. ‘So they started off pretty suspicious. But it soon became clear that there was no possible connection between us and the corpse.’

‘And we really had nothing to tell them, beyond the fact that we’d found it. But that didn’t stop them grilling us for what felt like hours.’

In spite of uneven encounters with the police since she’d left the Home Office, Carole still had an instinct to protect the Force when it came under attack. ‘They were just doing their job, Jude. They usually arrive on a crime scene knowing absolutely nothing about what’s happened, none of the background. You can’t blame them for all the questions.’

‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ Jude agreed grudgingly.

‘Anyway, Carole,’ said Ted, ‘at least you’ve provided the Fethering Observer with another predictable headline.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s always the same thing when a dead body’s found in this part of the world, isn’t it? The report always begins: “A woman walking her dog …” and then goes on to describe the nasties that the woman walking her dog discovered. And this time you and Gulliver have the honour of playing those two central roles.’

‘Yes, I suppose we do,’ said Carole. She was subdued, feeling the delayed shock of what she and Jude had encountered on Fethering Beach that morning.

‘Anyway,’ said Ted, ‘from my point of view, speaking as landlord of the Crown and Anchor, I’m just glad it happened now rather than at the beginning of the tourist season. Dead bodies are not among the amenities your average punter looks for in a beach holiday.’

‘But you’ve had a good summer, haven’t you?’

‘You betcha. Zosia and Ed have worked their little socks off.’ He referred to his bar manager and chef. ‘No, it’s been good.’ Ted Crisp still hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that the Crown and Anchor, mainly thanks to Zosia’s efficiency and Ed Pollack’s cooking, had become a success. Having first become a destination pub, it was now sometimes even referred to as a ‘gastropub’. Occasionally he felt nostalgia for its former scruffiness.

‘Anyway, enough about things washed up on the beach. Let us lighten the mood with a well-chosen joke.’ Ted Crisp could never forget for long that – in a former life – he had been a stand-up comic. ‘What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jude obediently. ‘What does lie at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?’

Ted Crisp burst into a raucous laugh as he replied, ‘A nervous wreck!’

Carole sniffed. ‘You’ve always known how to raise the tone, haven’t you, Ted?’

They ended up staying in the Crown and Anchor to eat. As with the second glass of Sauvignon Blanc, Carole had initially resisted the suggestion, but her mind didn’t take much changing. The morning’s events had unsettled her and the prospect of fisherman’s pie was a comforting one.

But she had hardly taken a mouthful of Ed Pollack’s speciality when Carole received a call on her mobile that put dead bodies and everything else clean out of her mind.

It was from Stephen. Gaby had gone into labour.