Jude reached across the table and put her hand on Carole’s. It flinched momentarily, but then let the hand stay there. Between the two women silence reigned.
It was broken by the ringing of the landline. Stephen announced that Gaby had just given birth to another girl. Mother and baby were both doing fine. She was going to be called Chloe ‘with no dots on the “e” – we don’t want to make life difficult for her when she gets to school.’
ELEVEN
Saturday morning was a very busy time at Polly’s Cake Shop. Though the bulk of its business came from tourists and day-trippers, Saturday morning was for the locals. The village residents these days did most of their major shopping at Sainsbury’s in Rustington or Waitrose in Littlehampton, but this was the day when they patronized the shops along Fethering Parade (including the uniquely inefficient supermarket Allinstore). Saturday morning was also the time when the working population of the village would gather in Polly’s for coffee and gossip. And weekenders from London would also muscle in, giving themselves the illusion that they were part of country life.
Unsurprisingly, the gossip that particular morning hinged largely on the body that had been discovered on the Thursday on Fethering Beach.
Carole was in Fulham, getting to know her junior granddaughter Chloe and ensuring that the nose of Lily, the senior one, was not put too much out of joint. So when Jude entered Polly’s Cake Shop for a cappuccino and a guilt-free éclair, she was surprised to find herself something of a celebrity as ‘one of the people who found the body’.
Sara Courtney saw her come in and took her order. And it was a more cheerful and bouncier Sara Courtney than Jude had seen for a while. On the previous Wednesday at Hiawatha Sara had seemed tense and a little paranoid. Now she looked more relaxed and as a result a lot prettier. And Jude could tell the change was not just the professional smiling front she put on in her working role as waitress.
‘All right?’ she asked.
‘Good, thanks. Cappuccino and éclair?’
‘Predictable, aren’t I?’
‘Not in everything, Jude.’ And with a grin Sara went off to fetch her order.
Jude quickly decided that the woman couldn’t yet have made any connection between the body found on Fethering Beach and the one she had (or hadn’t) seen in the store room at Polly’s. None of the news bulletins had yet mentioned the bullet hole in the man’s temple.
Jude slowly looked around the café, giving small smiles to people she recognized. Most Fethering residents knew all the other Fethering residents by sight. They also, even if they had never spoken, knew their names, their domestic circumstances and their secrets. Village gossip had never let respect for accuracy interrupt its flow.
Jude was quite surprised to see that Phoebe Braithwaite was sitting at a table adjacent to hers. And it was a very voluble Phoebe Braithwaite, unlike the cowed, twittery figure on the fringes of the committee meeting at Hiawatha. She was clearly a woman who blossomed once she was moved out of her husband’s shadow.
Phoebe, like the others at her table, was dressed in immaculate leisurewear. White jeans and pale blue deck shoes, a neatly cut blazer over a horizontally striped top. The image was casual and nautical, but the perfection and obvious expense of her ensemble produced an effect which was far from relaxed. Phoebe Braithwaite wasn’t the kind of woman who possessed clothes to slop around in.
Her blonded hair was flawlessly cut, suggesting she had just emerged from an appointment at Marnie’s Hair Salon along the Parade.
And in the hive of her table, she was clearly the queen bee. She led the conversation and Jude’s arrival had given her another opportunity to assert her dominance. ‘We were just talking about the terrible discovery on the beach on Thursday …’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And you, I gather, were one of the people who had the misfortune to find the body …?’ Jude admitted that this was indeed the case. ‘Oh, you poor thing. How dreadful for you. Incidentally, I don’t think we all know each other. This is Jude and this is …’
Phoebe proceeded to introduce the other five women around her table. They were all dressed in similarly unrelaxed leisurewear and looked as if they too had just come out of Marnie’s. They all had names in the Joanna/Samantha range which Jude didn’t really take in.
‘Well, as you can imagine,’ Phoebe went on, ‘there’s been all kinds of theories around Fethering as to who the man was and how he got there.’
‘I’m not at all surprised. Fethering has the capacity to get extremely aerated about much less than a dead body.’
‘So true, Jude, so true. But tell me …’ As introducer of ‘one of the people who found the body’, Phoebe Braithwaite was going to take full advantage of her privileged position. ‘Have you got any thoughts as to who the deceased might be?’
‘None at all, I’m afraid. I’d certainly never seen him before.’
‘I think he was probably an illegal immigrant, fell off a leaky boat,’ suggested one of the women called Joanna or Samantha.
‘Well, I too think he was an illegal immigrant, but I don’t think he fell out of a boat. He fell out of the wheel housing of an aeroplane when the wheels were lowered prior to landing at Gatwick,’ said another Joanna or Samantha.
‘I’m absolutely certain,’ a third Joanna or Samantha interposed, ‘that he’s a victim of gang wars in Brighton. There’s a big turf battle over drugs going on and people they don’t like either get shot or get put in what they call a “concrete overcoat” and dropped into—’
But Phoebe Braithwaite had been upstaged for far too long. She came in forcefully, saying, ‘I think in these circumstances one should consult an expert, someone who knows about the ways of the sea. And I am fortunate to be married to just such an expert. As I’m sure most of you know, Quintus is a Commodore and he spent his entire career in the Royal Navy. So when he expresses a view on something like this, one can assume he knows what he’s talking about. And his view about the body found on Fethering Beach is—’
‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ said a voice containing no hint of apology, ‘but here’s your cappuccino and éclair, Jude love.’
It was the tall waitress Binnie, looking only marginally less eccentric in her black and white uniform than she had in her street clothes when Jude had last seen her. Her grey hair was still stretched back into a ballerina bun.
‘Oh, thanks, Binnie.’
‘Apologies for the waitress transplant. Young madam who took your order is busy chatting someone up on her mobile.’
‘Chatting someone up? Who is she—?’
But Binnie’s mind had moved on. ‘Talking about the body, were you?’
‘Well, these ladies were,’ said Jude.
‘I bet he was local.’ Binnie delivered her opinion in a manner that suggested it was the only possible view. ‘Dogs return to their own vomit.’ And with that gnomic utterance she made her way back to the kitchen.
There was a moment of bemused silence before one of the Joannas or Samanthas said, ‘All right, Phoebe, so what does Quintus say about the body?’ There was a note of resentment in her voice, as if the woman had already heard quite enough of Phoebe’s husband’s pontifications on a wide range of subjects.
But his wife was quite ready, even eager, to relay another one. ‘Well, he’s very sorry that he’s not been able to see the body first hand, because he’d be in a much better position to give an accurate assessment if he had. He’s seen a lot of casualties from naval accidents over the years. But Quintus’s view is that, because of the way the tides work around Fethering – which he knows well as an experienced yachtsman in these waters – the body could not have come from our side of the Channel.’