The Body on the Beach Read Free Page B

seemed natural for her to
continue cleaning the kitchen. As a result, it was after nine before she went into the sitting room to confront the telephone.
    She had gone through the walk back from the beach, as well as the mechanical processes of bathing Gulliver and cleaning the kitchen, without allowing herself to think about what she had seen.
She had kept an equally tight control on her body, not permitting it the slightest tremor of reaction to the shock. As she had done frequently before in her life, Carole Seddon kept everything
firmly damped down.
    She dialled 999 and asked for the police. In simple, unemotional sentences, she gave them the necessary information. She described her actions precisely, the direction of her walk, the time she
had returned, the fact that she had bathed her dog and cleaned the kitchen. She pinpointed the exact position where the body had been found and gave her considered estimate as to how long it would
be before the returning tide reached that point. She gave her address and telephone number, and was unsurprised when told that someone would be round to talk to her.
    Carole Seddon put the phone down and sat in an armchair. She did not collapse into an armchair. She sat in one.
    And then she heard the strange noise from outside. Perhaps it had just started. Or it could have been going on unheard for some time, so intense had been her concentration on the task in
hand.
    The sound was a rhythmic dull thudding, something being hit repeatedly. Carole rose from her chair and moved tentatively towards the front-facing window. Through it, she saw Jude in the adjacent
front garden. Her new neighbour had spread a slightly threadbare rug over a structure of boxes and was beating it with a flat besom brush. Though still wearing a trademark long skirt, Jude had
removed her loose-fitting top to reveal a bright yellow T-shirt. Her large bosom and chubby arms shuddered with the efforts of her carpet-beating. In spite of the cold, her cheeks were red from the
exercise.
    Carole’s instinctive reaction was one of disapproval. There was something old-fashioned in Jude’s carpet-beating. The scene could have come from a film of back-to-back terraced
houses in the 1930s. Northern terraced houses. The possibility, suddenly occurring to Carole, that Jude might come from ‘the North’ prompted a visceral recoil within her.
‘The North’ still conjured up images of unwanted intimacy, of people constantly ‘dropping in’, of back doors left unlocked to facilitate this ‘dropping in’. It
wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in Fethering.
    Back doors were kept firmly locked. Approaches to people’s houses were made strictly from the front. And, except for essential gardening and maintenance, the only part of a front garden
that was used was the path. Even if the space caught the evening sun, no one would dream of sitting in their front garden. And it certainly wasn’t the proper place to do anything domestic,
like beating a carpet. Passers-by, seeing someone engaged in such activities, might be forced into conversation.
    In Fethering, except for chance meetings in the High Street, social encounters were conducted by arrangement. It was inappropriate to meet someone without having received planning permission. A
prefatory phone call – ideally a couple of days before the proposed encounter – was the minimum requirement.
    These thoughts were so instinctive that they took no time at all to flash through Carole Seddon’s mind, but they still took long enough to allow something appalling to happen. Jude, taking
a momentary respite from her efforts with the besom, had turned and caught sight of her neighbour framed in the window. Eye contact was unavoidable.
    For Carole then to have repressed a half-smile and little flap of the hand would have been the height of bad manners. Her minimal gesture was reciprocated by a huge wave and a cheery grin.
    If she had left the contact there, Carole knew