The Body on the Beach Read Free Page A

closed.
    His mouth, though, hung open. To the right of the bottom jaw, a tooth was missing. It had been missing a long time.
    The inside of one exposed wrist was pockmarked with old and new scar tissue.
    The body was hunched uncomfortably against a barnacled wooden stanchion of the breakwater. At first sight the man might have crawled there for protection, but the unnatural conformation of his
limbs denied that supposition. He hadn’t got there by his own efforts. He had been manipulated and abandoned by the sea.
    His clothes – jeans and a grey jumper – were soaked heavy. The sea had borne away one of his trainers, exposing a poignantly vulnerable sports sock, ringed in blue and red. Laced
round his upper body was an orange life-jacket, stamped in faded black letters ‘Property of Fethering Yacht Club’.
    Instinctively, Carole looked up towards the small white-balconied clubhouse at the top of the beach by the sea wall. In front of it, guarded by a stockade of white railings, were drawn up rows
of sailing boats, securely covered for the winter. She knew that if she moved closer, she would be able to hear the incessant clacking of rigging against metal masts. But there’d be nobody at
the club so early in the morning. The first-floor bar-room’s dark expanse of window looked out blankly to the sea.
    Despite his life-jacket, any theory that the man had been the victim of a sailing accident was belied by the two wounds in his neck. Washed blood-free by the sea, they were thin, like the lines
of a butcher’s cleaver in dead meat, exposing the darker flesh beneath.
    Never for a moment did it occur to Carole Seddon that the man was not dead. She felt no urge to kneel by the body and feel for pulses. It wasn’t just squeamishness. There was no point.
    Anyway, it was better to leave the corpse undisturbed for the police to examine.
    Carole was distracted by more barking. Having drawn her attention to it, Gulliver had immediately lost interest in the body. He’d found a supplanting fascination in the sea itself and was
now trying to catch the waves, fighting them back with all the optimism of a canine Canute. He’d managed to soak his body through in the process.
    One sharp call was enough to bring the dog to heel. He dissociated himself from the sea, looking round innocently as if he’d only just noticed its vast expanse. Carole stood back as he
shook the tell-tale brine out of his coat. Then he rolled over in a mass of seaweed and something else more noxious. Carole registered dully that Gulliver would need a bath when they got home.
    She gave one last look to the dead man by the breakwater, then started resolutely up the beach, Gulliver trotting maturely at her side.
    It was only half-past seven when they got back to High Tor. Carole had woken early that morning, slow to adjust to the recent change from Summer Time, and got up briskly, as
she always did. Thinking too much at the beginning of the day could so easily become brooding. It had been dark, the night’s full moon invisible, when she and Gulliver left for their walk,
and it was still gloomy when they returned, the kind of November day that would never get properly light. And never warm up either.
    Carole bathed the dog before calling the police, splashing him down with a hose outside the back door. She knew, if she didn’t, the house would smell of rotting seaweed for weeks. Gulliver
never made a fuss about being bathed. He seemed positively to enjoy the process. Maybe it was the intimacy with his mistress he valued. Carole Seddon was not given to sentimental displays, least of
all to animals, so Gulliver enjoyed the ration of contact he received from the necessary scrubbing and drying. In the cold weather she was particularly careful to get the last drop of water out of
his coat.
    When the dog was shining clean and snuffling into sleep by the Aga, and when Carole had mopped up the inevitable wet footprints he had left on the kitchen floor, it