Bones Under The Beach Hut

'I do know. I used to work for the Home Office.' If she had hoped that Curt Holderness might be impressed by that, she was disappointed, so she went on, 'It's a well-known fact that paedophiles exchange pornography with each other, that they form rings.'

'So?'

'I'm just suggesting that when you and Kelvin Southwest exchanged pornography you might have discussed going a step further, to move from using images of the stuff to realizing your fantasies with an actual child.'

It took him a second to take in the full implication of her words. And when he did, he was furious. 'Are you saying that I'm one of them? That I'd be in a ring with a little perve like Kel? God, they repel me, people like that! Scum! Filth! So far as I'm concerned you could string up the lot of them today without a trial!'

'Given that's your view, you seem surprisingly friendly with Kelvin Southwest.'

'That's a business arrangement, nothing more. We've both done favours for each other in the past and they're the kind of favours that we don't want to become public knowledge.'

'Your continuing to supply him with pornography, him having organized the security officer job for you?'

'Exactly that, yes. The reason we spend time together is because we don't trust each other. He's keeping an eye on me and I'm keeping an eye on him.'

'Curt, you say you're not a paedophile—'

'Too bloody right I'm not.'

'But your police career was ended early and in disgrace because you'd been accessing child pornography.'

'Accessing it, yes. Not bloody using it for my own purposes! God, at times I had to watch some of the stuff for professional reasons, you know, when we were trying to nail some pervy schoolteacher or someone like that . . . and it bloody turned my stomach. I'm glad I don't even have to copy the stuff any more. My mate who's still in the force does that. He hands over the CDs to me, I pass them on to Kel. Thank God, I don't see any of the content now.'

'But,' Carole persisted, 'you were turned out of the police force for—'

'I was turned out of the police force for copying and selling the stuff. How many times do I have to tell you? I don't get any kick from watching filth like that. It's disgusting!'

'Then why did you come here so promptly when I reported what Kelvin Southwest had told me?'

'I came because I've got a good little business going, and I don't want a nosy bitch like you to bugger it up. The police wouldn't have any interest in prosecuting me — I'm ancient history — but if they found out about my mate on the inside who's keeping up the supply for me . . . well, they'd close down the operation sharpish, and I could lose a lot of money out of that.'

'Are you implying that Kelvin Southwest isn't the only client you supply?'

'What if he isn't? The important point you seem to be failing to take on board is that I deal in the stuff, I don't use it myself.'

Carole found herself in a familiar dilemma. What Curt Holderness said sounded very plausible. His repulsion at the thought of watching child pornography seemed genuine. But then again, as with Kelvin Southwest, someone who really was a paedophile would make himself sound just as plausible.

'So,' she asked rather desperately, 'you have no idea what happened to Robin Cutter?'

'Not until his bones were found under that beach hut over there, no.' Curt Holderness suddenly turned businesslike. 'Listen, Carole, I've got to know what you're planning to do. That's why I came here. Are you going to keep the information about my mate supplying the porn to yourself? And if so, on what terms? You say you're not a blackmailer—'

'And I'm not.'

'Then what do you want?'

'I want to find out what happened to Robin Cutter.'

He was silent for a moment, calculating. Then he said, 'So if there was a piece of information I could give you — something I'd found out while I was working on the case, something no one else knows — if I were to give you that, would you get off my back?'

'I certainly would, Curt.' She wasn't sure whether what she said was true, but she knew it was the answer he required at that moment.

'Right.' Again he was silent, assessing his situation. 'Okay, try this,' he said at length. 'You know the boy was being looked after by his grandparents when he disappeared?' Carole nodded. Curt Holderness pointed along the row of beach huts. 'Those two old dears over there, as it happens — you know them?'

'Yes, we've talked to each other.'

'Okay, so you know that the old geezer brought the boy down here and he was snatched outside the ice-cream shop up on the prom.'

'I heard the circumstances.'

'Well, needless to say, the forensic boys pulled in the old man's car as soon as possible — took it from right here where he'd parked it in Smalting — and they ran every test they could on it. Of course they found Robin Cutter's DNA all over the interior. Well, they would, wouldn't they? Kid saw a lot of his grandparents, Lionel Oliver would have driven him around all over the place.

'Nothing odd in that. But there was something one of the forensic boys thought was odd and I remember chatting to him in the canteen about it.' He paused, fully aware of the command he had on Carole's attention. 'Now the boy — Robin Cutter — was like five, wasn't he, at the time he disappeared — and his Mum was always insistent that when he went in the car he was clipped into a child seat, you know, for safety reasons. She'd taken Robin's seat out of her car when she dropped the boy with his grandparents that morning and said, if they drove him anywhere, they were to make sure they used it. But when Lionel Oliver's car was taken from here to the labs, straight after the boy had been abducted, there was no car seat fixed in it.

'Okay, the old boy had an explanation. He said he was from a different generation, that he wasn't mollycoddled when he was a nipper . . . you know how that generation go on about stuff. There weren't any car seats around when he was growing up and it'd never done him any harm. And he said the boy Robin liked being free to move around in the car, and it was their little secret and he wasn't to tell his Mum, but his Granddad reckoned he was grown up enough not to need a car seat. Okay, the old boy's explanation could have been the truth, certainly everything else in his account tallied and rang true, but at the time I did think it a little odd.'

It was funny, Carole had always had a feeling that at some point the investigation would entail talking further to the Olivers.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Curt Holderness didn't exactly threaten her when he left, but Carole felt the undercurrent of menace in him. She wouldn't volunteer to spend any more time with him in the future, and was glad there was no reason why she should. A little shudder of relief ran through her body as he set off back up the beach to his motorbike.

Her morning in the Fowey 'Incident Room' had taken longer than she expected. When she looked at her watch once the security officer was out of sight, she was surprised to see it was ten past twelve. She looked along the row of beach huts. Outside Mistral the Olivers sat in their usual positions. Carole was undecided as to how her next step should be taken. In spite of her desire to solve the case and crow over Jude, she found herself wishing her friend was there. Dealing with the Olivers was likely to require a level of delicacy which she wasn't confident that she possessed.

With a synchronicity that Jude would have recognized and Carole herself pooh-poohed, at that moment her mobile phone rang. And of course it was Jude.

'Oh, I thought you were regressing to a past life?'

'Done that. Apparently I was once married to an Egyptian Pharaoh.'

'And how was that?' asked Carole sceptically.