Bones Under The Beach Hut

'Which of course led to you doing something rather stupid, didn't it?' Helga prompted implacably.

'Yes.' His face took on a hangdog expression, which, if it was meant to curry sympathy for him, did not have the desired effect with the three women. 'Okay, well . . . Mark and I got into a kind of argument . . . not really an argument, more a sort of. . .'

'Drunken shouting match,' suggested Helga.

'All right. Anyway, I was telling him that artists have to be free and that bourgeois values were a trap to prevent artists from a true expression of themselves, and he was defending the smug middle-class life, saying all he wanted was to live like what he called "a normal human being" — by which he meant an inhibited, tight-arsed wage-slave with a bloody pension and life insurance and a nice neat little beach hut in Smalting. And I said that going down that route was the surest way to stifling artistic talent and nobody who gave a stuff about a beach hut could possibly be any kind of artist, and so I went out and . . .'

He shrugged again, as Carole completed the sentence for him. 'Set fire to the beach hut that Mark and Philly used to use.'

There was a long silence before Gray Czesky admitted that yes, that was exactly what he had done. 'As I say, I was pretty well plastered,' he added, as though that might be some kind of mitigation.

His wife took up the narrative. 'And Gray comes back home and he is boasting about what he has done, so Mark and I rush back to the beach hut to put out the fire.'

Carole looked at Jude, who gave a little nod. Yes, that must have been when the two of them were seen by Curt Holderness. Odd, though, that Curt hadn't noticed that the beach hut was burning. Or perhaps not so odd, given how laxly the man interpreted his duties as a security officer.

'And you did put out the fire, Helga?'

'Yes. Fortunately it had not got much of a hold on the hut. Only one corner was burnt. If we had not got there so quickly I hate to think what would have happened.'

Gray Czesky, now his folly had been exposed, looked sheepishly defiant. 'As I said,' he pleaded to deaf ears, 'it's not easy having an artistic temperament.'

'Well,' said Carole, 'we're very grateful to you for telling us all of this.'

'I felt we had to,' Helga responded. 'I was suspicious of you when you came round on Monday.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, I did not think you were really wanting to commission a painting from Gray.' Carole felt herself blushing to know how transparent their ruse had been. 'It was when you rang again today that my suspicion was confirmed.'

'Really?'

'I knew then that you were plain-clothes police officers.' Carole and Jude tried to avoid catching each other's eyes. Instinctively, Carole was about to say that Helga had got the wrong end of the stick, but a moment's thought made her realize that there was no harm in the woman continuing with her misapprehension. And their mistaken identities could actually be rather useful in advancing their investigation.

'The question is now,' Helga continued, 'what you do about what we have just told you.'

Jude took note of the pleading in the woman's eyes as she said judiciously, 'Well, setting fire to the beach hut was obviously very stupid behaviour on your husband's part. . .'

'Yes?'

'. . .but at its worst it was nothing more than a drunken prank.'

'No,' Helga agreed, her hopes rekindled.

'And it wouldn't have become so important had it not been for subsequent events at the beach hut; the discovery of the human remains there. But . . .' she extended the pause, aware of the tension in the sorry couple in front of her '. . . now we know that the two discoveries are unrelated to each other . . .' she looked across to her neighbour, as if for confirmation of what she was about to say, "... I don't really think it'll be necessary for any further action to be taken.'

The relief in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage was almost palpable. Both the Czeskys sank back into their chairs, as Carole picked up the conversational baton. 'Though of course,' she said sternly, 'we might take a different view were you not to co-operate fully with us.'

'Of course we will,' said Helga earnestly. 'In what way do you wish us to co-operate?'

'We will require you to inform us . . .' Where had that 'require' come from? Carole realized she was dropping into 'police-speak'. 'We will require you to inform us of anything else you may know that might be of relevance to our investigation into the discoveries on Smalting Beach.'

She chose her words with care. With her background in the Home Office, Carole Seddon was well aware how serious a crime impersonating a police officer could be. So she deliberately hadn't confirmed Helga's assumption that their enquiries were official ones. As she walked her casuist's tightrope, Carole curbed her natural instinct towards guilt.

'Oh, of course,' said Helga. 'If there's anything we know that's relevant, of course we will tell you.'

Jude nodded with satisfaction. 'Right. Good. Well, the first thing we want to know is: where is Mark Dennis? Do you have a way of contacting him?'

Chapter Twenty-Four

It turned out to be remarkably simple. Gray provided Carole and Jude with a new mobile number for Mark Dennis. The moment the Czeskys had left Woodside Cottage, Jude, trembling with excitement, keyed it into her phone.

A brief ringing tone was quickly replaced by a message informing her that the phone she was calling was switched off. She tried again. With exactly the same result.

Neither Carole nor Jude could disguise their disappointment. To have come so close to making contact with Mark Dennis and then to . . .

'I'll keep trying it,' said Jude defiantly.

'Yes, of course. He'll answer it soon.'

But neither of them really believed the optimism in Carole's words.

Smalting was the lead story on the television news that evening. The human remains that had been found buried under a beach hut there had been identified by the police. They had belonged to a small boy called Robin Cutter.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The name was familiar, but in front of their separate televisions Carole and Jude both needed reminding where they had heard it before. The news bulletin supplied all the promptings their memories required.

The story of Robin Cutter was a sad and painful one. He had been five at the time of his disappearance, and nothing had been seen of him in the intervening eight years. At the time, relatively soon after the high-profile abduction and murder of a local schoolgirl, there had been a huge uproar in West Sussex about the case. It aroused all the country's latent visceral horror of paedophilia.

Though it was nearly ten-thirty at night, Jude went straight round to knock on the door of High Tor. The evening air was quite cool, reminding the denizens of Fethering that they were still only in June, not yet August.

Carole and Jude stayed watching television after the main bulletin, because the disappearance of Robin Cutter had happened in the area and there remained a very distant possibility that more information might be available on the local news.

Of course there wasn't. The local news reported the story with characteristic ineptitude, but added nothing to what had been seen on the national bulletin. They showed the same shot of a smiling Robin Cutter, wearing a very new blue uniform, in one of those school photographs taken against a backdrop of cloud effects. They showed the same library footage of the boy's distraught parents — Rory and Miranda — banked by police at a press conference, begging anyone who knew anything to come forward, and sending hopeless love to their son. The woman was slender with long bottle-blond hair, the husband chunky and bewildered. They faltered and were so overcome with emotion that one of the policemen had to finish reading their prepared statement.