‘Who was that charmer?’ Jude asked.
‘Roland Lasalle,’ said Pete through clenched teeth. ‘The developer behind this conversion.’
He didn’t seem keen to say more. He picked up a hammer and chisel and returned to the job he must have been doing when he took her call, removing from the corner of the room a triangular plywood panel which had been painted over many times. The bedrooms had been divided up and opened out in many configurations over the years. In obedience to the architects of the moment, irregular spaces and alcoves had been created and covered over in a fairly haphazard way. The room they were now in was large, indicating that the new holiday flatlets were being planned on a generous scale.
The way he wielded his hammer suggested how much Pete was still smarting from the accusation of skiving. He had never skived in his life.
A couple more over-vigorous blows from the hammer, a couple more pulls on the wedged-in chisel, and the panel came loose. He grabbed the corner and worked the cover free from its fixing nails. Through a cloud of dust, a small triangular alcove was revealed. Pete peered inside.
‘Blimey O’Reilly!’ he said. ‘I wonder how long that’s been there …?’
TWO
It was a handbag.
A woman’s red leather bucket bag, which might have been in fashion some twenty or thirty years previously. It certainly wore a coating of twenty or thirty years’ dust.
Pete and Jude exchanged looks. Surprise had now replaced hurt in his expression. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s no way that was left there accidentally.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I’m a woman, Pete. The relationship between a woman and her handbag, even in these more enlightened days, is akin to that between Siamese twins. If you carry one, you never want to let it out of your sight. There is no way the handbag’s owner could have just left it in this alcove by mistake.’
‘Equally,’ said Pete, ‘there’s no way whoever boarded this in and painted over it didn’t know that the handbag was there.’
‘Hm.’ Jude was silent for a moment. Her instinct was to reach for the bag and check its contents, but a strange voice inside her head said she shouldn’t touch anything at a crime scene. Which was, of course, complete nonsense. There was no crime involved. She and Pete had just found a handbag. She reached forward for it.
If it had been a crime scene, the police would have now possessed some very fine examples of Jude’s fingerprints. The dull leather was furry with dust.
The zip across the top was stiff but not rusted. She eased it open and examined the contents. No mobile phone from back then, obviously. Lipstick, a powder compact, a packet of tissues, some small change. In fact, only one thing that might have been unexpected in a woman’s handbag. A blue UK passport.
Jude opened it. Though dusty, the passport looked new, its pages unmarked by any stamps. The photograph was of a blonde woman with glasses. In her early twenties. She looked a little embarrassed at having her picture taken.
The name of the passport owner was Anita Garner.
Intriguing though it was, their discovery was basically just a woman’s handbag. Pete said he’d try to find out when the closing-off of the alcove might have happened. Brenton Wilkinson, the decorator he had originally worked for (now long retired), had been involved in many of the transformations of Footscrow House. The old man might be able to put a date on it. Assuming, of course, he’d still got all his marbles. Brenton Wilkinson had been in a local authority care home for some years.
Meanwhile, Jude, conscious of the importance of a lost handbag to any woman, even after twenty or thirty years, decided that she should take it to the police. Whether they would still have records of a reported missing handbag from so long ago was not really her concern. She just knew that handing the bag in was the right thing to do.
Before she delivered it, though – and she didn’t know quite why but her instinct told her to – she made a note of the document’s issue date and its owner’s personal details.
Fethering’s police station was a small building, only open during office hours. It operated as a kind of branch office for the bigger set-up in Fedborough.
The uniformed constable behind the reception desk took possession of the handbag and noted the circumstances of how it had been found. He also took Jude’s contact details. While unfailingly polite, he still managed to give the impression that finding the handbag’s owner was not high on his list of priorities. He was more interested in real crime.
And he was too young to know the extent to which the passport-owner’s name and crime had once been associated in the prurient minds of Fethering.
‘Anita Garner,’ echoed Carole. ‘It does ring a distant bell.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘No, she wasn’t in Fethering when we first came here.’ The ‘we’ was a rare giveaway. After their divorce, Carole had expunged from her life all reference to her ex-husband David. They had bought High Tor as a couple, a weekend place to give their son Stephen a bit of seaside time when he was young. But his parents had parted long before Carole – when she retired from the Home Office – had moved to Fethering full time.
‘So, how do you know the name?’
Behind their rimless glasses, Carole’s pale blue eyes screwed up in puzzlement. ‘It must have been from hearing people talk about her, I suppose. Some mystery …? Maybe she disappeared …? I’ve a feeling it was something like that. I’ll do some research,’ she concluded firmly.
‘Excellent,’ said Jude. Carole was very good at research.
Jude wasn’t as regular as her neighbour in her walking habits. Carole, under the pretence that it was her Labrador Gulliver rather than she who needed an unchanging structure to the day, was on Fethering Beach with him before seven on summer mornings and as soon as it got light in the winter. Gulliver also got another brisk constitutional and toilet break in the early evening.
Jude was more random in all of her habits. The generous nature of her curves, under their usual drapes of skirts, tops and scarves, suggested a relaxed fitness and dietary regime. Her attitude to many things in her life was relaxed. She thought being alive was a natural state of affairs, an attitude her neighbour could never quite embrace.
So, Jude didn’t go for a walk when she felt she ought to go for a walk, she walked when she felt like walking. And the next morning, the Thursday, she felt like a walk on Fethering Beach. She had a couple of clients booked in for the afternoon but nothing till then. So, she wrapped herself in a variety of warming layers of wool and set out.
For some reason, her thoughts were still browsing on the discovery of Anita Garner’s handbag. The oddity of it got to her. The act of concealment was so deliberate. For Jude, whose whole life was a quest for understanding human behaviour, an explanation was required.
Some of West Sussex’s seaside towns are big on beach huts. Brighton, Hove, Worthing and Littlehampton have great parades of them. Carole once rented one to entertain a visiting grandchild in Smalting, a little way along the coast from Fethering. And though they don’t command the astronomical prices of the ones in Bournemouth and Sandbanks, some West Sussex beach huts are very sought after. There are always long waiting lists of people eager to buy them.
Fethering, however, didn’t compete on that level. There were a few beach huts at the edge of the dunes furthest away from the mouth of the River Fether, just before the exclusive Shorelands Estate, whose most favoured properties had grounds which gave direct access to the beach.
Before walkers reached these back garden walls, they would come across an uneven row of half a dozen beach huts. They weren’t built to standard local authority specifications, not identical structures in rows like the yellow, blue and green ones at Littlehampton’s East Beach. They had been put up randomly over the years. One was an Edwardian wooden structure that would not have looked out of place in a Chekhov play, another looked like a cricket pavilion, while the rest had been put up without the advice of an architect. None really deserved to be in the category of ‘hut’. They were much more upmarket and spacious than that.