The Body on the Beach Read Free

shaken out of these sour thoughts by Gulliver’s bark. The dog was down near the water’s scummy edge, running round a bulky figure who was walking across the flat grey sand
towards his mistress. This was surprising, given the early hour. There weren’t many local walkers as driven and disciplined as Carole.
    The figure was so hunched against the wind into a green shiny anorak that it could have been of either gender. But even if Carole had been able to see enough face to recognize someone of her
acquaintance, she still wouldn’t have stopped to talk.
    There were social protocols to be observed on an early-morning walk along the beach at Fethering. When one met another human being – almost definitely proceeding in the opposite direction:
everyone walked at the same pace; there was very little over taking – it was bad form to give them no acknowledgement at all. Equally, to have stopped and engaged in lengthy conversation at
that time in the morning would have been considered excessive.
    The correct response therefore was ‘the Fethering Nod’. This single abrupt inclination of the head was the approved reaction to encounters with mild acquaintances, bosom friends,
former lovers, current lovers and complete strangers. And its appropriateness did not vary with the seasons. The nod was logical in the winter, when the scouring winds and tightened anorak hoods
gave everyone the face of a Capuchin monkey, and when any attempts at conversation were whisked away and strewn far across the shingle. But it was still the correct protocol on balmy summer
mornings, when the horizon of the even sea was lost in a mist that promised a baking afternoon. Even then, to respond to anyone with more than ‘the Fethering Nod’ would have been bad
form.
    For other times of day, of course, and other venues, different protocols obtained. Not to stop and chat with a friend met on an after-lunch stroll along the beach would have been the height of
bad manners. And Fethering High Street at mid-morning was quite properly littered with gossiping acquaintances.
    Such nuances of social behaviour distinguished the long-time residents of Fethering from the newly arrived. And it was the view of Carole Seddon that anyone privileged to join the local
community should be humble enough to keep a low profile until they had mastered these intricacies.
    From what she’d seen of the woman, she rather doubted whether ‘Jude’ would, though.
    Nor did the figure who passed her that morning seem aware of what was required. With an averted face and not even a hint of ‘the Fethering Nod’, he or she deliberately changed course
and broke into a lumbering – almost panicky – run up the steep shingle towards the Yacht Club.
    Gulliver’s barking once again distracted Carole. Quickly bored with the unresponsive figure in the anorak, the dog had rushed off on another of his pivotal missions to rid the world of
seaweed or lumps of tar-stained polystyrene, and disappeared round the corner of a breakwater. Invisible behind the weed-draped wooden screen, he was barking furiously. Beyond him, the sea, having
reached its twice-daily nadir, was easing back up the sand.
    Carole wondered what it would be this time. Gulliver’s ‘sensibleness’ went only so far. A crushed plastic bottle or a scrap of punctured beach ball could suddenly, to his eyes,
be transformed into a major threat to world peace. And, until forcibly dragged away, he would continue trying to bark the enemy into submission.
    But that morning it wasn’t a bottle or a scrap of beach ball that had set Gulliver off. As Carole Seddon saw when she rounded the end of the breakwater, it was a dead body.
     
Chapter Two
    He was maybe in his fifties, though his pallor made it difficult to tell. The flesh of his face, framed by matted greying hair and the sharp separate stubble of a three-day
beard, was bleached the pale beige of driftwood. It seemed to Carole a mercy that his eyes were