As they passed over the dunes on to the beach, Jude looked back at the service road and the gates to Polly’s Cake Shop’s yard. Yes, there would be room for a couple of flats there. Not very big, but with amazing views. She looked along the row of similar yards for the other shops and wondered if any of them might be bought up for similar development. And indeed if that was part of Kent Warboys’ long-term plan.
But she wasn’t there for that kind of speculation. The purpose of the walk was to comfort Carole. ‘It’s natural for you to worry,’ she said, ‘but it will all be all right. Because of the tests she had last week you know more about the health of Gaby’s than you do about most unborn babies. And it’s not as if she had any problems with Lily’s birth, did she?’
‘Well, the labour wasn’t particularly comfortable.’
‘No, but it never is. That’s why it’s called “labour”.’ Though childless herself, through her clients Jude had a wide knowledge of the problems of pregnancy. ‘But is there any particular reason why you’re worrying so much about Gaby?’
‘Why? Should there be?’
‘I don’t know, do I? That’s why I’m asking. I just wondered if there was anything from your own experience of childbirth that might make you especially anxious.’
‘Well …’
‘What?’
But if Carole had been on the verge of some confession, she changed her mind. ‘Nothing,’ she replied briskly. ‘As you say, labour is never a walk in the park, but with Stephen … nothing went wrong.’ And that was all Jude was going to get on the subject.
It was quite cold on the beach. The clocks were due to go back the next weekend, but till then it was still dark at seven thirty in the morning. There was also a bit of sea mist. The tide was going out, exposing vast expanses of sand. Unsurprisingly the two women seemed to be alone on the beach, apart from Gulliver, who’d been released from his lead and was conducting elaborate guerrilla warfare with inanimate lumps of seaweed along the shoreline.
‘Anyway, how was your new committee meeting last night?’ Carole asked, infusing the ‘new’ with the implication that the subject was somehow frivolous and flaky.
‘Oh, like committees always are. Tedious and unnecessary.’
‘They don’t have to be.’ During her time at the Home Office, Carole had prided herself on ‘running a good committee’. ‘It’s all a matter of who’s chairing the thing. If the Chair’s weak, then nothing works.’
‘I don’t think this Chair’s weak so much as self-aggrandizing. Former naval man, pillar of the Fethering Yacht Club, who goes under the unlikely name of Quintus Braithwaite. Have you come across him?’ Carole had, after all, been a Fethering resident longer than Jude had.
‘Doesn’t ring a bell – and it’s not the kind of name you’d be likely to forget. Where does he live?’
‘The Shorelands Estate.’
Carole let out a snort of contempt. ‘Say no more. That lot never leave their gated compound, except to take their 4x4s out to Waitrose. Anyway, you say he’s not a weak Chair?’
‘No, but he seems to think it’s all about him.’
‘Oh yes.’ Carole nodded sagely. ‘That type can be almost as destructive as the weak ones. And this palaver is all in the cause of saving Polly’s Cake Shop for the village, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t understand why you got on the committee.’
‘Well, it was through a …’ Jude had nearly said ‘friend’, but she knew how shirty Carole could get when friends she didn’t know about were mentioned ‘… a client.’
‘Oh?’ Even with the change of word, Carole sounded a bit frosty.
‘Yes, she’s going through a bad patch; she needs a lot of support.’
‘Huh,’ said Carole Seddon, as only Carole Seddon could say ‘Huh’. ‘I thought you gave your patients support by healing them, not by joining committees you don’t want to be on.’
Jude knew that the use of the word ‘patients’ rather than ‘clients’ was deliberate, an attempt to rile her. She was determined not to react.
But they were interrupted by furious barking from Gulliver. He was over at the shoreline, suspicious and angry, circling something he had found there.
Carole and Jude drew closer. The darkness of the night was paling into grey and they could see quite clearly what had upset the dog.
It was the body of a man, swollen to the point of bursting out of his clothes and hideously discoloured. Ropes tied around his ankles were broken and frayed.
But they could see clearly enough that in his right temple there was a bullet hole.
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.’