Bones Under The Beach Hut (3 page)

    The
voice of the unseen female from the next beach hut started up again. 'You know,
Gavin, Nell really has let herself go since she had Hermione. She hasn't made
any attempt to get her figure back, has she?'

    'Well,
she's kept pretty busy,' an upper-class male voice protested, 'what with the
two little ones and—'

    'Mothers
have always been busy,' the woman steamrollered on, 'but that doesn't mean that
they should lower their standards. I was busy when I had you and Owen to look
after, but I still made sure that when your father got home from work, you were
both in bed and I was made up and looking my best for him.'

    'Yes,
but the fact is, Mummy, you didn't have a job. Nell works full time and still—'

    'Your
father would have been appalled by the idea of any wife of his having a job. He
would have regarded it as a criticism of his abilities to look after his own
family.'

    'Maybe,
but times have changed, Mummy, and—'

    'At
least your father didn't live to see you married to Nell. He always had very
high hopes for you, Gavin. I wouldn't have liked to see him disappointed.'

    'But,
Mummy—'

    'Oh,
look, Tristram and Hermione are throwing sand at each other now. And Nell's
doing nothing to stop them. In fact, she's positively encouraging them.'

    'They're
just kids and—'

    'I'd
better go and sort this out,' the voice said ponderously, and Carole watched as
its owner came into view and processed down the beach. The woman called Deborah
was probably seventy, but she'd kept her figure well. She wore a predominantly
white bathing costume with a design of red flowers on it, and her tanned skin
had the texture of shrivelled leather. Over well-cut white hair she wore a
broad-brimmed straw hat with a thin red and white scarf tied around it. Carole
recognized the type. There were plenty of them on the South Coast. Well-heeled
widows, pampered, soign
é
and utterly
poisonous.

    Unwilling
to witness Deborah's latest attack on her daughter-in-law, Carole returned her attention
to her crossword. And as she did so, she had the thought: that is an object
lesson in how not to be a grandmother. Please, please, God, may I never behave
even vaguely like that towards Lily.

    Carole
was filling in the crossword clues almost as fast as she could write them down,
when suddenly her rollerball ran out of ink. She tried pressing harder but the
point only gouged holes into the flimsy paper. Oh no. She knew from experience
that, however well the solving was going, she couldn't do it without seeing the
letters.

    She
riffled hopefully through the contents of her tote bag for something to write
with, but without success. She sat in frustration, drumming her fingers on the
arm of her director's chair. Putting the crossword to one side and completing
it when she got back to High Tor was not an option. When she was on a roll like
this, she just had to finish the thing as soon as possible. She had to find a
pen from somewhere.

    A lot
of people might have asked to borrow one from someone in a nearby beach hut.
But not Carole Seddon. She always tried to avoid asking questions that offered
the possibility of refusal. No, her first thought was to walk up the beach to
find Smalting's newsagent and buy a ballpoint.

    But
before she put that plan into action, it occurred to her that Philly Rose and
Mark Dennis might well have used a pen for something while they were in
Quiet
Harbour.
It would be worth checking out the beach hut before taking the
long traipse up the beach to the village. Perhaps on the cutlery shelf, in or
near one of those neat plastic containers.

    When
she reached the back of the hut, she felt the solid surface give under her. She
stepped back quickly and then gingerly probed at the carpet with her toe. Yes,
there was definitely something that felt like a hole in the wooden floor.

    She
peeled back the corner of the carpet and soon enough saw what had nearly made
her trip. There was a hole in the corner, spreading across two of the planks
that made up the hut's floor. Its edges were black and charred.

    Someone
appeared to have lit a fire under
Quiet Harbour.

    Carole
inspected the outside of the hut to see if there were any clues as to what had
happened. The structure, presumably prefabricated elsewhere and assembled on
Smalting Beach, was set on four concrete slabs to prevent damp from the ground
seeping up into its woodwork. And yes, under the back corner of the hut, there
was evidence of a small fire having been lit.

    Using
a children's spade, which she had found inside, Carole poked at the charred
debris, releasing a smell of petrol that had been trapped in the folds of what
appeared to be cloth. Inspecting it more closely, she saw that strips of old
rag had been bundled together. Outermost were the remains of a tea towel, with
a design of ponies on it, maybe a souvenir from the New Forest. The minimal
evidence of flame damage on the rags suggested to her that the fire hadn't been
lit too long ago, and also that it had been extinguished before the flames
could spread and burn down the whole beach hut.

    Going
back inside, she also deduced that the green carpet in
Quiet Harbour
must have been put down after the fire had been discovered. There was no sign
even of scorching on the underside, which might - though not necessarily -
suggest that the same person who had put out the fire had also covered up the
evidence of it.

    Another
deduction: the lack of sand on its surface suggested that the carpet hadn't
been in position for that long.

    Before
she flipped it back into place, she noticed that, though most of the nails
fixing the floorboards to the struts beneath were old and deeply hammered in,
the silver round heads of a few stood almost proud of the wood. It looked as if
some running repairs had been done, but clearly before the fire had happened.
Otherwise surely the burnt planks would have been replaced . . . ? Odd, she
thought, as she flattened the carpet back down.

    Carole
had decided that she needed to talk to Jude about her discovery, so she packed
up her thermos and tote bag. In spite of her promising start she hadn't got far
on
The Times
crossword. Have to finish it back at High Tor.

    As she
clicked the padlocks shut on
Quiet Harbour,
she heard the voice of the
matriarch in
Seagull's Nest
pontificating. 'You really shouldn't give in
to the child so much, Nell. If you spoil Tristram now, he'll grow up without
any backbone or moral values.'

    Jude
had all the windows open, which meant there was enough breeze to set her bamboo
wind chimes going. When she had first heard them, Carole had dismissed the
chimes as just more evidence of her neighbour's New Age idiocy, but now she had
come to find the sound rather comforting. Not, of course, that she would ever
have told Jude that.

    The
sitting room of Woodside Cottage looked as it always did: throws and drapes and
cushions disguising the precise outlines of its sofas and armchairs. Scarves
and floaty tops, as ever, did the same service for the house's owner. Even in
the summer, Jude was bedecked in extras that blurred the contours of her
substantial, comfortable body. Her blond hair was piled up on top of her head,
tentatively secured by an array of pins and clips.

    Carole
had always envied the ease with which Jude carried herself. Spontaneity seemed
to come spontaneously to her, in her choice of clothes and in every other area
of her life. Whereas Carole, whose sartorial ambition was not to draw attention
to herself, still agonized over the extent to which she was achieving that
desired effect. She avoided bright colours, wearing unpatterned shirts, jackets
and skirts. Though she frequently wore trousers, she never wore jeans. Her shoes
were sensible enough to chair an official inquiry.

    Every
six weeks Carole had her grey hair cut into exactly the same helmet-like shape,
and her pale blue eyes always took in the world suspiciously through rimless glasses.
She was thin - to her mind, angular - and it never would have occurred to her
that she actually had rather a good figure.

    To
Jude life always seemed a natural state of affairs, to Carole something of an
imposition.

    But
over coffee that Tuesday morning in Woodside Cottage she was too excited by her
news to indulge her usual anxieties. 'And there was quite a lot of
petrol-soaked rag under the corner of the beach hut, so I think there must have
been a serious attempt to burn the whole thing down.'

    'Yes,
but it could just have been vandals,' said Jude. 'I mean, even in a place as up
itself as Smalting I'm sure there's a rough element.'

    This
idea didn't accord with Carole's image of the neighbouring village. 'Or they
could have come in from somewhere else,' she said darkly.

    'Perhaps.
Anyway, I'm sure there's a lot of vandalism to everything on the beaches. Young
people have a few too many drinks, feel like a bit of wanton destruction,
there's no one there protecting the beach huts ... I don't quite see what you
find sinister about it, Carole.'

    'Not
sinister so much as intriguing. Not the attempted burning of the hut - that, as
you say, could be just mindless vandalism - but the fact that a new bit of
carpet had been put inside to cover the evidence.'

    'There
could be a perfectly innocent explanation for that too. Philly Rose wanting the
hut to be usable until it got repaired?'

    'Who
would she get to repair it?'

    'I
would imagine there'd be someone from the Fether District Council who'd deal
with that sort of thing.'

    To
Carole's mind, Jude wasn't getting nearly as excited as she should be about the
charred hole in the floor of
Quiet Harbour.
'But maybe Philly Rose
didn't want to tell anyone from Fether District Council about the fire? Maybe
she has a secret to hide?'

    'Maybe
she has, but if that secret is to do with the fire, you wouldn't have expected
her to agree to let out the beach hut if the new occupant was going to discover
it as quickly as you did.'

    Carole
felt disgruntled. Her neighbour was being uncharacteristically negative.
'Listen, Jude,' she continued, 'I was wondering whether the fire had anything
to do with the disappearance of Philly Rose's boyfriend?'

    'Mark?
What, are you suggesting she burnt him to death in the beach hut?'

    'No,
of course I'm not. I just do think that there's something odd about the fact
that there had been a fire under the hut, someone had put it out and someone -
possibly the same person or maybe another - had covered the hole up with a bit
of carpet. And I would like to ask Philly Rose if she has any explanation for
what happened.'

    'All
right,' said Jude casually. 'Then let's ask her.'

    'What?'
Carole was taken aback by such a direct suggestion. 'Can we do that?'

    'Yes,
of course we can.' Jude looked at the large-faced watch secured to her wrist by
a broad red ribbon. 'I'll call Philly and ask her if she'd like to join us for
lunch at the Crown and Anchor.'

    'Today?'
Carole had an instinct that any kind of social meeting should always be
arranged a few days in advance. 'Will she be free?'

    'I
don't know. If she isn't she won't come. And if she is she will.'

    'How
can you be so sure?'

    'Three
reasons. A) She's become a good friend of mine. B) She's very hard up and would
love to have lunch bought for her. And C) She's very lonely since Mark left and
needs people to talk to.'

    'Oh,'
said Carole, 'fine then.'

    They
arrived at Fethering's only pub, the Crown and Anchor, before Philly, and were
greeted in his usual lugubrious manner by the shaggily bearded landlord Ted
Crisp, dressed in his summer uniform of faded T-shirt and jeans. He was
actually now having difficulty in justifying his customary air of gloom. In the
past he could always put it down to bad business. At times the Crown and
Anchor's finances had been quite rocky and once the pub had nearly had to
close, but those days were gone. The fine June weather was bringing the
holidaymakers in in droves and Ted now had a very efficient staff to back him
up. His Polish bar manager Zosia had taken away all his anxieties about
staffing, and his chef Ed Pollack was going from strength to strength. The
landlord responded very sniffily to the word 'gastropub', but in the view of
many restaurant guides and well-heeled clients, that was what the Crown and
Anchor was becoming known as throughout West Sussex. Anyone who wanted evidence
of that should have tried booking a table for a Saturday evening or Sunday
lunchtime. Often there would be nothing available for a month ahead.