Bones Under The Beach Hut

'You don't know if he'd met someone else ... or gone back to someone?' asked Jude.

'No. And if I did know I wouldn't tell you. As I say, there's a freemasonry among blokes about that kind of thing. We leave the Mills and Boon stuff to the gentler sex. Me and Mark were just good drinking mates. We got healthily smashed from time to time and we didn't talk about relationships.' He put a heavy, doom-laden emphasis on the word.

'And you haven't seen Mark Dennis since he left Smalting?'

'That's another of those things where if I had I wouldn't tell you.'

It didn't seem as though their information gathering was going to progress much further. Carole rose to her feet and said, 'Thank you very much for your time, Mr Czesky. I'll make my decision about the commission very soon and get back to you either way. Do you have a card with your phone number on it?'

'Helga's got some downstairs.'

'I'll ask her as we go out.'

'Don't worry, I'll see you down. Don't feel ready to go straight back to the coalface of my art.' This was so melodramatically pronounced that Jude looked to see if Gray Czesky was actually sending himself up. But there was no gleam of humour in his eye. When it came to the subject of himself, he was a man incapable of irony.

He led the two women out on to the landing, and once again they were struck by the contrast between the manufactured squalor of the artist's workplace and the middle-class neatness of the rest of the house. Just as Jude started down the stairs, Carole suddenly said, 'Oh, will you excuse me? I just want to have one more look at one of the watercolours — to help me make up my mind,' and slipped back into the studio.

Gray Czesky shrugged and followed Jude down to the hall. He called to his wife as though she were a servant, asking her to bring one of his cards. Moments later Carole joined them.

'Thank you again, Mr Czesky.' She smiled at Helga. 'And Mrs Czesky.'

'No point in thanking her,' said the woman's gracious husband. 'She didn't do anything. Never do much, do you, Hel? Except get under my feet and stop me concentrating on my art.'

Carole and Jude waited for the explosion they reckoned those words must have detonated in any twenty-first-century woman, but none came. Instead, Helga Czesky giggled. And then her husband giggled too. Clearly his insulting of her was some kind of love ritual that seemed to turn them both on.

Helga was the first to recover her powers of speech. She grinned mischievously at the two women and said, 'I am very lucky, aren't I, to be married to a genius — no?'

No, thought Carole and Jude in unison.

Outside Sanditon, Carole became very mysterious, hurrying back to where she had parked the Renault. Jude kept asking what was happening, but she got no reply till they were both inside the car.

Then, milking the drama from her revelation, Carole announced, 'When I went back into the studio just now, it wasn't to take another look at the water-colours.'

'Oh?'

'It was to pick up this.'

'What?' asked Jude, playing along with her neighbour's narrative style.

Carole unclasped the handbag on her lap and produced from it a paint-spattered scrap of cloth. Jude's close inspection revealed it to be a strip of an old tea towel with a design of ponies on it.

'This,' Carole declared, 'is an exact match to one of the pieces of cloth that was used to set fire to Quiet Harbour.'

Chapter Eighteen

'So where do you reckon we stand now?' asked Jude. They had got a takeaway baguette lunch from The Copper Kettle and were sitting outside Fowey eating it. Although gathering clouds suggested that they'd had the best of the day, Jude had nonetheless stripped down to her bikini. Gulliver lay panting on the sand, having accepted there was no point in complaining further about being chained to a beach hut.

'I'm not quite sure,' Carole replied. 'But although he wouldn't tell us, I did get the strong impression that Gray Czesky had seen Mark quite recently.'

'As recently as the early hours of last Tuesday morning?'

'Hm, it'd be nice if we could prove that, wouldn't it? Be nice also if we could confirm that the woman with Mark was his wife Nuala.'

'Well, from what Philly said she sounds quite easy to recognize.'

'Yes, I'll try to get a description from Curt Holderness of the woman he saw that night. Give him a call when I get home.'

'Haven't you got your mobile with you?'

'Yes, I have, but . . .' Carole blushed.

'What?'

'I don't really approve of mobile phones being used on beaches.'

Jude's eyes shot heavenwards. Her neighbour always retained the capacity to surprise her with a new prohibition or neurosis. But she made no comment and asked, 'You know what Philly thought, don't you?'

'That Mark had done away with his wife, and that they were her remains under Quiet Harbour?'

'Yes. Does it work for you?'

Carole screwed up her face as she evaluated the proposition. 'I don't think it does really. "Human remains" ... it all comes back to the definition of "human remains". To me that implies that they're from someone who's been dead quite a while. Wouldn't the media talk about "a dead body" if it was from a recent killing? And I'm sure they'd give the gender. "The body of a woman was discovered under a beach hut at Smalting," that's what they'd say. Not "human remains".'

'Maybe not.'

'I must say the police are being very slow to give out any more information, aren't they?'

'Presumably the remains are undergoing forensic investigation. When they've identified who the remains belong to then they'll announce it in a press conference.'

'Well, I wish they'd get a move on,' said Carole testily. 'It's been nearly a week.'

'They just don't think about the necessities of amateur sleuths, do they?'

'No, they don't.'

Though the sun was now hidden behind banks of clouds, Jude lay in her lounger as if sunbathing and it took Carole a little while to realize that her neighbour was asleep.

Quietly Carole detached Gulliver's lead from the hook on Fowey and set out along the shingle with him, following the curve of the beach huts. He gave her only a token look of reproach, recognizing that a walk on a lead was better than no walk at all.

Shrimphaven was still locked up. Whatever it was that the girl did in there on her laptop, she wasn't doing it that Monday afternoon.

Outside Mistral, as ever, Lionel Oliver, still apparently dressed for the office, lay back on his deckchair, his suit jacket hanging over its back. There was no sign of his wife but, as Carole approached, he waved down to the shoreline and she saw Joyce walking along with her bare feet in the water.

'Loves paddling,' the old man observed. 'The wife's always loved paddling. Even now she's whatever age she is.'

'Well, there's nothing like the feeling of the sand between one's toes,' said Carole, more expansive than usual. The fact that she would do anything to avoid the feeling of the sand between her toes was not relevant. Making conversation with people on Smalting Beach was now part of an ongoing enquiry, and Carole had always been more at ease doing things for a work purpose rather than just in her own persona.

She was surprised how affable Lionel Oliver appeared. When she'd seen him before, he'd looked detached, 'in a world of his own' as Joyce had put it. But now he seemed ready to talk, and it wasn't an opening that Carole was about to waste. Any of the regular beach hut users were potential witnesses to what had really happened on Smalting Beach.

She told Lionel her name and he gave her his. Though they had been aware of each other on the beach, this was the first time they had actually spoken. Then Carole moved into investigative mode.