The Body on the Beach (29 page)

‘And how much do you reckon I do know?’ asked Jude coolly. She recognized that her situation was uncomfortable but was trying to work out whether or not it was dangerous.

‘You tell me,’ Rory replied. ‘You’ve clearly made some connections. The fact that you’re here and the fact that you’re talking about the body demonstrate
that. But how much else have you pieced together?’

‘Well . . .’ She hadn’t pieced much together until that moment, but suddenly certain conclusions became glaringly obvious. ‘If, on the one hand, you have a
middle-aged man who, with maximum publicity, has declared he is about to commit suicide . . . and, on the other hand, you have the body of a second middle-aged man of similar build
. . . I might suspect some substitution of bodies was being contemplated.’

There was a sharp breath from Tanya, but Rory neither confirmed nor denied the conjecture. He waited to see what else Jude was going to say.

‘I don’t know how the apparent death would be staged. In a car, I imagine. But not exhaust fumes. No, it has to be a method that would disfigure the corpse sufficiently to make
identification difficult. Fire would probably be best. Body wearing Rory Turnbull’s clothes found in burnt-out car belonging to Rory Turnbull, body must belong to Rory Turnbull. God knows the
poor man had enough reasons to do away with himself. The heroin habit that was ruining him financially, leading him to remortgage his house, put his hand in the till at the Yacht Club, try to cheat
the Dental Estimates Board . . . Many men have killed themselves to avoid lesser ruin than that little accumulation. Open and shut case.’

Rory Turnbull nodded slowly. ‘Yes. You have done well, haven’t you?’

Tanya had been silent too long. ‘All right, so what’s wrong with all that? It hasn’t done anyone any harm, has it?’

‘What about Rory’s wife, Barbara?’

‘That frigid bitch deserves everything that’s coming to her! She’s never given Rory anything all the time they’ve been married, just sucked out his lifeblood. And
she’ll be cushioned by her mother’s money, whatever happens. She’s not suffering from this.’

‘All right, Tanya, putting Barbara on one side . . . what about the dead man? The one who would so obligingly pretend to be Rory? Are you telling me he didn’t suffer
either?’

‘Only the suffering he brought on himself,’ the girl snapped. ‘He was a waster, out of his head on heroin, who just hung around the beach all the time. And then one day –
Monday before last – he took an overdose and Rory just happened to be the one who found the body.’ She looked at her lover with devout admiration. ‘At that moment Rory saw a way
out of all our troubles. It was then the whole substitution plan came into his mind and he brought the body back here.’

‘But surely—’

‘Tanya!’ said Rory firmly. ‘I think we could do with something to drink.’

‘There’s some white wine in the fridge.’

‘No. Whisky.’ He reached for his wallet and extracted a twenty-pound note. ‘Could you go down to the off-licence and get a litre of Grouse?’

‘But—’

‘Now.’

She didn’t argue any more, but rose to her feet. Putting his arms gently on her broad shoulders, Rory planted a little kiss on her forehead. ‘Take care.’

‘And you.’

Tanya flipped her shiny green anorak off a hook on the back of the door and left the bedsitter.

‘She’s pregnant, isn’t she?’ said Jude.

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘I should have worked it out earlier from the fact that she’d gone off coffee, but what made me certain was the way you touched her just then, your concern for her, as if she was
very fragile.’

‘All right. So she’s pregnant. What have you got to say about that?’

‘Nothing. Except I assume that’s the reason why you set this whole thing up?’

‘The final reason, yes. The other reasons had been building for years.’

‘Rory, men leave their wives for younger women every day of the week. Very few of them bother to set up mock-suicides to cover their tracks. Why didn’t you just talk to Barbara, tell
her you wanted out?’

‘I couldn’t do that!’ A pallid transformation came over the dentist’s face and Jude realized the extent of the terror he felt for his wife. ‘Barbara would never
have let me get away. And if she thought I was still alive, anywhere in the world, she’d come and find me. No, I’ve always known I’d only be safe if she thought I was
dead.’

‘So you really reckoned you could start over?’

‘Not reckon
ed
– reckon. It’s still going to happen. Tanya and I are going to live together in France and bring up our babies there. I’ve been salting away the
money for months.’

The gleam in Rory’s eyes showed Jude how much he was caught up in his fantasies, how long he’d been nursing them, and how potent to the middle-aged was the chimera of one last
chance, the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and make a fresh start. It also showed Jude that the man she was dealing with was not entirely sane.

‘Tanya was meant to come into my life,’ he went on. ‘It’s been a long time coming, and there’s been a lot of shit along the way, but she was meant to happen to me.
She’s wonderful. She’s the first woman I’ve ever known who hasn’t expected anything from me. Anything I give her she regards as a bonus. She has no
aspirations
for
me.’

The fervour with which he said the word bore witness to the agony of the years Barbara and her mother had spent trying to ‘make something’ of Rory Turnbull. Part of Jude could
empathize with his need to take action, do anything that would break him out of that straitjacket, out of the suffocating aspirational gentility of the Shorelands Estate.

‘Me and Tanya,’ Rory Turnbull concluded proudly, ‘is a love match.’

And Jude could see how it was. Two damaged people who had asked for very little and been more abundantly rewarded than they’d ever dared to hope.

Appealing though this image was, it did not change the facts. ‘I’m sure it is a love match,’ said Jude, ‘but does that justify murder?’

He gave her a pained look. ‘Tanya told you. The man died of an overdose.’

‘No. Tanya may well believe that, because it doesn’t occur to her to question anything you tell her, but it doesn’t work for me. The logic isn’t there. This whole
business has taken months of planning. Your cheating the NHS, your fiddling the Yacht Club accounts, planting the idea of your heroin habit, that’s all long-term stuff. I’m afraid I
don’t believe you set it all up, on the off chance that, when the time came – the Monday before last – you’d stumble across a body the right age and shape who’d just
conveniently died of an overdose. Sorry, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t buy that. You’d targeted the man for months.’

‘All right.’ He made the confession lightly. ‘Yes, I saw him first in the summer, down by the pier when I went for a walk one lunchtime. He asked me for money. I gave him some
and thought how wretched he was – a man about my age, about my size, and he was reduced to that. And then I thought that, though I’d got all the things he hadn’t – the
money, the job, the house – I was even more wretched than he was. It was round the time I’d started seeing Tanya. I was still at that stage trying to behave correctly, trying to
do
the decent thing
– and it was tearing me apart.

‘I saw the man a few times after that – just walked past him, maybe gave him money, maybe didn’t – but it was only when I knew Tanya was pregnant that the plan began to
form in my mind. And, the more I thought about it, the more it started to obsess me.’

Yes, thought Jude, that’s the word – obsess.

‘And, of course, because Tanya was pregnant, there was a time pressure. There were a lot of time pressures.’

‘The Dental Estimates Board, the Fethering Yacht Club accountants . . .’

‘All that.’

‘So how did you kill him? Where did you kill him?’

‘Here. I’d sent Tanya out to the cinema. She loves movies – particularly weepies. I’d given him the money for a lot of heroin. He’d had a hit. He was feeling good.
I smothered him –’ he gestured to the bed – ‘with that pillow.’ Rory read disapproval in Jude’s expression. ‘Go on, he died happy. Better than the way it
would have happened otherwise. Contaminated drugs . . . a fight with another addict . . . an infected needle . . . with someone like that it was only a matter of time.
He was already lost.’

‘No one’s lost, Rory. Not even at the very end. Anyway, didn’t you think who he was?’

‘I didn’t know who he was.’

‘He was a human being.’

‘He didn’t matter.’

She was silent for a moment before asking, ‘And what made you change your plans?’

‘Change my plans?’

‘Yes. For your plan to work, the suicide in the car had to be staged as soon as possible after the man had died. The longer you left it, the more the body would decay and the more open
your deception would be to exposure by forensic examination. Why didn’t you do it the night you killed him?’

Rory Turnbull grimaced. ‘Because of the bloody police.’

‘What? Surely they didn’t know what you were up to?’

‘No. The trouble was I wanted to leave it fairly late, so that there wouldn’t be many people around. But he’d died about six and—’

‘You mean you’d killed him about six.’

‘Whatever. There’s a garage in this block that’s hardly used – that’s where my car is at the moment, actually. By midnight, which was the time intended to take the
body down there, it had started to stiffen up.’

‘Rigor mortis.’

‘Yes. I’d meant to put him in the boot, but I didn’t want to risk giving the body any unexplained injuries by bending the joints, so I just laid him on the back seat with a
coat over him. I left Tanya here, as we’d agreed – we were going to meet in France a week or so later – and I set off. Just on the outskirts of Fethering, a car came towards me,
flashing its lights.’

‘Bill Chilcott.’

‘Yes. I thought driving off at speed would draw more attention than stopping, so I stopped. Bill was just being charitable. He told me there were police staking out Seaview Road and
stopping every car that came along. Random breath-tests – Sussex Police are very hot on drink-driving. Well, that really got me scared, because there’s no other way to the Shorelands
Estate except via Seaview Road.’

‘But why did you have to go home?’

‘Because that’s how I’d planned it!’ he snapped petulantly. ‘The petrol and the rags and stuff I was going to use were all in the garage at Brigadoon.’

‘Were you actually planning to stage your suicide in your own home?’

‘Yes. On the paved area in front of the house.’ A vindictive light burned in his eye. ‘Very fitting – show all the tight-arsed snobs of the Shorelands Estate what Barbara
and her bloody mother had driven me to. I thought that’d be very funny. A social indiscretion on that scale . . . they’d really find hard to live down.’

No, thought Jude, I am not dealing here with someone who’s even mildly sane.

‘Anyway, I panicked. I daren’t risk the police looking inside the car. I decided I couldn’t go through with the plan that night, so—’

‘So you hid the body inside your boat at the Fethering Yacht Club.’

‘Yes, I – How the hell did you know that?’

‘Call it educated guesswork. And did you put the life-jacket on it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I just thought, if anyone found the body, it might look more like an accident. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘You certainly weren’t,’ said Jude coolly. ‘My next educated guess, incidentally, would be that you went home and the following morning early, terrified that someone
might have found the body overnight, rang Tanya and asked her to go to Fethering and check it was where you’d left it.’

The dentist looked bewildered. ‘Did she tell you this?’

‘No. I think Tanya looked and the body was missing. But shortly afterwards she found it washed up on the beach. She went to ring you and tell you what had happened. Then two small
boys—’

‘What?’ He turned pale. ‘How do you know all this stuff? Are you psychic?’

‘A bit,’ said Jude, with a self-effacing grin, ‘though, as it happens, that’s not how I know. So, did Tanya see the boys had put the body back in the boat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which meant your plan was all set to happen again, a mere twenty-four hours late. Body back in place, no police breathalyzer traps . . . Why didn’t you do it on the
Tuesday night?’

‘Because I was disturbed by somebody. I’d just got the body out of the boat when I heard a noise. There was someone snooping around. A boy.’

‘Do you think he saw you?’

‘Yes. Just as I was lifting the body out of the boat. I was holding it in front of me and I came face to face with the boy. He screamed.’

Yes, he would have done, thought Jude. Poor Aaron Spalding, his head filled with half-digested stories of black magic and the Undead. The boy, tortured by guilt, had come back to check the scene
of his crime and seen the dead body apparently moving. The Undead had come back to claim its victim. That could easily have been enough to unhinge the terrified Aaron, to make him throw himself
into the Fether. Unless, of course . . . ‘You didn’t harm the boy, did you, Rory?’

‘No, of course I didn’t! I don’t know what happened to him. He ran off along the river bank. He’d got me rattled, though, so I put my plans off for another twenty-four
hours.’

‘But because other people knew the body had been stowed inside
Brigadoon II
, you moved it to another hiding place.’

Once again he gave her a look as if she had unnatural powers. ‘Are you sure Tanya didn’t tell you all this?’

‘Positive. Don’t worry, she’d never betray you.’

‘More educated guesswork then?’

‘If you like. I’d say you put the body inside one of those blue fishermen’s boxes near the Yacht Club . . .’ A hissed intake of breath told her she’d hit
another mark ‘. . . little knowing that the next morning that whole area would be cordoned off and under the blaze of spotlights while the workmen carried out repairs on the sea
wall.’

Rory’s expression acknowledged the accuracy of this conjecture too.