The Body on the Beach (30 page)

‘So, what with one thing and another,’ Jude concluded lightly, ‘it wasn’t really that great a plan, was it?’

She’d caught him on the raw. ‘It was a brilliant plan!’ he spat back.

‘Oh, I don’t think you can use the word “brilliant” for any plan that has to be aborted.’

‘This one’s not going to be aborted.’

‘You mean you’re still thinking of going ahead with it?’

‘Oh yes. I’m going ahead with it. Tonight. Only this time, Jude . . .’ He savoured the name as if it had an unfamiliar but not unpleasant taste ‘. . .
you’re going to be part of the plan.’

When Carole got back home from Maggie Kent’s house, she felt quite shaken. Having garaged the Renault – and not even considered cleaning its interior until the
morning – she found she was shivering as she walked the short distance to the house. Inside, even before attending to Gulliver’s needs, she turned up the central heating and lit the
log-effect gas fire. Then, once the dog was sorted, she poured herself an uncharacteristically large Scotch from the bottle which she kept for guests and which sometimes went untouched from one
Christmas to the next.

It wasn’t only her physical ordeal that had shaken her up. It was the discovery she had made in Nick Kent’s bedroom. Now she knew the identity of the body she’d found, she
could understand the reasons for the boy’s mental collapse. To have been involved in a black magic ritual with a corpse was bad enough, but to discover in the cold light of the following
morning that the body you had seen mutilated was that of your idolized father would have unhinged the most stable of adults. The effect it had had on a confused adolescent was all too
predictable.

Thank God at least that Nick had held back from wielding the Stanley knife himself.

Carole hadn’t said anything to Maggie. The awful truth would have to be faced at some point, but it should wait until the body had once again been found. And then the news should be broken
to the unknowing widow by the proper authorities.

Carole was reminded that she had intended to spend that evening with Ted Crisp trying to find the body, but after all she been through another visit to the sea wall in search of a week-old
corpse held little appeal. While the body on the beach remained anonymous, there had been an almost game-like quality to the investigations she and Jude had undertaken. But now the dead man
possessed an identity and a family context, the idea of further probing became distasteful.

She decided she’d done quite enough for that evening. Maybe Jude would ring her or call round when she got back from Brighton. In the meantime, however, Carole Seddon was going to have a
very long soak in a very hot bath.

Jude lay on the back seat of the BMW, where the body she did not know to be that of Sam Kent had lain a week before.

When Tanya had returned to her bedsitter with the whisky, Rory had got her to help tie Jude up. With soft scarves, over her clothes, so as not to leave any marks on her body.

Then Rory and Tanya had manhandled her down to the garage and into the BMW. More scarves had been used to tie her wrists and ankles to the armrests, so that she couldn’t sit up and attract
attention to herself when they were driving. Rory had not bothered to gag her. The car was soundproof.

Jude had been left in the garage for nearly an hour, while the two conspirators presumably went through the final details of their forthcoming elopement, their separate journeys and their
blissful reunion in France.

As she lay immobile in the dark, Jude could not feel optimistic. Assessing the feasibility of escape did not take long. Once she’d given up on that, she tried, with limited success, to
focus on more spiritual matters. But anger kept getting in the way. This was neither the time nor the manner in which Jude wanted to die.

Bill Chilcott appeared in the Crown and Anchor a little later than usual that evening for his customary half. And, also uncharacteristically, he brought his wife with him. He
looked sleekly bathed, the white bits of his turnip head gleaming from a recent shampooing. Sandra was also carefully groomed and both looked smug. They had clearly come to receive the plaudits of
a grateful nation.

Over in the Fethering Yacht Club, Ted Crisp reckoned, Denis Woodville would also be reliving his triumphant part in the rescue. And no doubt being upstaged by other ideas of how it should have
been done and recollections of similar incidents out in Singapore.

Bill Chilcott was a little miffed to find the Crown and Anchor bar rather empty. And no evidence of anyone who knew about his heroism.

Ted Crisp did his best to make up the deficiency. ‘Full marks for what you done out there, Bill. What is it – your “customary half”? Or will you go mad and make it a
pint?’

‘Well, as it is a rather special occasion . . .’

‘Sure. Have this on me. And what about you, Sandra?’

‘Ooh, a dry sherry, please, Ted.’

‘None the worse for your adventure, Bill?’

‘Good heavens, no. Sandra and I do work hard on our fitness. All that regular swimming down at the Leisure Centre has certainly paid off tonight.’

‘Not to mention our line-dancing.’

‘No, no, don’t let’s forget the line-dancing. No, Sandra and I don’t give in to
anno domini
. Did you hear how that dreadful man Denis Woodville was wheezing during
the rescue? And he didn’t swim. He only worked the mechanical winch.’

‘Well, he smokes like a chimney, doesn’t he, Bill?’

‘Yes, Sandra, filthy habit. So unhealthy. All his arteries must be totally furred up. If you want my opinion, he’ll just keel over one day.’

‘And good riddance, that’s what Bill and I say!’

‘Thought you might,’ Ted Crisp murmured. ‘But the boy was all right, was he? None the worse for his ordeal?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bill Chilcott replied. ‘He went off with his mother in Carole Seddon’s car.’

‘Oh, is that what happened?’ The landlord scratched his chin through the thickets of his beard. ‘You know, I might just give Carole a call to see that the lad’s OK
. . .’

When Rory Turnbull finally did return to his prisoner in the car, he seemed blithe, almost euphoric. He was alone. He opened the garage doors, drove the BMW out and closed them
again, before setting off at a steady pace west out of Brighton.

At least Jude could speak. She could try to reason for her life. Anything was worth trying. Without much hope, she announced, ‘It won’t work, you know, Rory.’

‘Oh, it will.’

‘The body’s been dead a week.’

‘But the weather’s been on my side. Below freezing most of the last few days.’

‘It’ll still be obvious he died a week ago. The most basic of post-mortems’ll show that – regardless of how much the body’s disfigured by the fire.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. No, it wouldn’t work . . . if fire was the method I was going to use.’

‘You’re not?’

‘No. Change of plan, due to change of circumstances. Always pays to be flexible in one’s planning, you know.’ There was a heady, almost manic, confidence about him now.
‘By the time the body’s found, nobody’ll be able to give a precise date of death. All they’ll have to identify him by will be the fact he’s in my car, he’s
wearing my clothes . . . and, of course,’ he concluded smugly, ‘they’ll be able to check his dental work.’

‘My God! The missing tooth. Did you . . .’

‘Oh yes.’ He was very full of himself now. ‘I told you, I’ve been planning this for a long time. I don’t know how he’d lost his tooth, but as soon as I
noticed it I knew what I had to do.’

‘You actually took out one of your own teeth?’

‘Not difficult for someone of my profession. I made up some story to Barbara about having been in a fight, which fitted in well with the image of general social collapse that I was
creating. And then I had a rather distinctive chromium cobalt denture made for me by our usual lab. They always put their own identification mark on all the stuff they make, so there’d be no
question it was mine. And the plate also fits into the dead man’s mouth well enough.’

Remembering something that Holly the hygienist had said in what seemed like a previous incarnation but was in fact only that morning, Jude murmured, ‘You actually had him in your surgery
to check that it fitted?’

‘Yes. It was a risk, but I did it after hours. Pretended I was helping him out of charity. He didn’t care. So long as I gave him a bit of money to buy heroin, he’d have done
anything I wanted, anything. When I offered him money for his passport, he found it and handed it over like a lamb.’

‘That’s how you set up savings accounts, isn’t it? In his name. You used the passport for identification.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said smugly.

‘You’ve really put a lot of planning into this, haven’t you, Rory?’

‘I certainly have.’ Oblivious to her irony, he took it as a straight compliment, and the way he spoke stole away Jude’s last shred of hope. Rory Turnbull was impervious to
logic. His elaborate scheme would almost definitely not work, his subterfuges would be unmasked by scientific examination, but that didn’t matter. He was so caught up in the fantasy of his
plan that he was going to go through with it regardless of anything.

‘You said,’ Jude began with trepidation, ‘you weren’t going to use fire . . .’

‘No. Not fire. The wreckage’d be found too quickly, which might prove . . . forensically embarrassing. No, I want the car to be discovered in a few weeks’ time
. . . after the fish have taken some of the flesh off the bodies.’

‘Bod
ies
?’ she echoed softly.

‘Yes. I’m afraid, my dear Jude, you know far too much about what I’ve been up to for me to let you survive. But, fortunately, there has been a rumour around during the last
week that I might have had another woman . . .’ A rumour that Carole and I helped to foster, thought Jude bitterly, as Rory went on, ‘Tanya heard about it from old Denis
Woodville. And Ted Crisp in the pub suggested last week that you and I might be an item.’

‘He was joking.’

‘Many a true word . . . Or at least that’s how it’ll seem in retrospect. The doomed love affair. The suicide pact. The only way the two of them could be together.
Which was of course why Rory Turnbull drove himself and his lover to their deaths off the sea wall at Fethering.’

The night was still and colder now. A thin moon diffused its watery glow over the snug houses of Fethering, in which, one by one, the lights were being switched off.

The BMW stopped outside the gates that led to the Yacht Club launching ramp and gave access to the sea wall. Rory Turnbull calmly got out and opened the lock with his member’s key. Back in
the car, he said, ‘I’ll close the gates when I leave. On foot. And, I’m sorry to say, alone.’

He edged the car forward till it was alongside one of the fishermen’s chests. He was eager now and leapt out, leaving the door ajar.

Jude could not see as Rory took out his keys. Nor could she see him insert one into the new padlock he’d substituted for the one sawn off the previous Tuesday night. The padlock opened and
he slipped it out of the hasp that held the chest’s top down.

As he raised the lid, he caught a foul whiff of decay, but he was too near to his goal to be put off by such a detail. Reaching into the chest, he took a grip on the Fethering Yacht Club
life-jacket which was still fixed around the torso of the late Sam Kent.

With sudden strength and in one movement, Rory Turnbull lifted the body out. For a moment he held the putrid flesh against his own body, almost as if it were a lover. Then he laid the body flat
on the cement. With both hands, he forced the stiff dead jaws apart. He reached inside his own mouth and removed his dental plate. He fixed it inside the dead man’s mouth.

The body had bloated and was bursting out of its clothes, but that did not stop the dentist from starting to remove them. The dead man’s clothes would be destroyed and he himself would
dress in a spare set he had in the car boot. He had thought it all through. For his plan to work – his precious plan that he had been nurturing for so long – the body when found must be
dressed as Rory Turnbull.

‘What are you doing, Rory?’

Ted Crisp rose over the side of the sea wall like an avenging fury from the ladder to which he had been clinging. At the same time Carole appeared from the shadows of the Yacht Club. When the
landlord had phoned, her curiosity had proved stronger than her exhaustion.

Hearing voices, Jude shouted for help.

‘You bastard! I’m not going to be stopped now!’

Rory Turnbull launched himself ferociously at the landlord. The initial impetus caught Ted off balance. For a moment he swayed, about to topple back into the Fether.

But somehow he regained his equilibrium and enfolded the furious dentist in a bear hug. Rory’s elbows worked like pistons as he slammed punches into Ted’s substantial paunch. The two
men weaved around like one crazed four-legged creature on the edge of the sea wall.

Carole meanwhile had freed Jude from the armrests and manoeuvred her out of the BMW to release her other bonds. As soon as her hands were free, Jude threw her arms around her friend. They stood
for a moment, instinctively hugging each other. Then Jude reached into the front seat of the car for her mobile phone. ‘I’m calling the police!’ she said.

There was a grunt and the two fighting men were suddenly apart. Rory Turnbull swung a wild haymaker of a punch, which by pure chance caught Ted Crisp on the tip of the chin and sent him flying
across the cement.

Freed, the dentist rushed to pick up his precious body. Grasping it under the arms, he dragged it across to the BMW. Carole and Jude watched in amazement as he opened the passenger door and
jammed the corpse into its seat. He slammed the door shut and hurried round to the other side.

‘You’re mad, Rory!’ Jude shouted. ‘You’ll never get away with it!’

‘Yes, I will!’ he shrieked back. ‘I’ve got it all planned out! I told you – I’ve got it all planned out!’

He started the engine and the BMW screeched in reverse back through the Fethering Yacht Club gates. In a howl of tyres he turned it round and shot off fast down the quayside road.