They also dated from a time before certain nitpicking restrictions had been imposed by Fether District Council. More recently built beach huts were forbidden from having electrical power or plumbing. On some beaches, under sufferance, barbecues were allowed, but basically nothing was permitted that might extend a day’s stay overnight. That was a rule that was strictly policed by the local authority. The nice middle-class people of the South Coast were paranoid about their empty spaces being commandeered by ‘travellers’, illegal immigrants and what they saw as other freeloaders. They distrusted all outsiders and assumed that their countryside and shoreline should be the exclusive preserve of people like them.
The old huts on Fethering Beach, however, had been put up long before such strictures and so retained their ancient rights to power and plumbing. Nights could be spent in them with impunity. And their owners were rich enough to conform to Fethering’s standards of respectability.
As Jude walked towards the huts, she saw ahead of her someone she knew. The woman’s name was Lauren Givens. ‘Knew’ was in the Fethering sense of the word. Which meant that each woman knew the other by name, they knew a certain amount about each other’s background but hadn’t spent any length of time in each other’s company. On passing such an acquaintance on the beach, Carole would have vouchsafed a curt and silent ‘Fethering nod’. Jude, having a more expansive personality, upgraded this, as she overtook the woman, to a beaming smile and a ‘Good morning’.
Lauren Givens’s reaction was unusual. She can’t have heard Jude’s approach, because she turned towards her as in shock at the greeting. She had been slowing down, possibly to go to one of the beach huts, but now, with a flustered, ‘Oh, hello’, she stood still for an uncertain moment. Then, clapping her hand on the empty back pocket of her jeans, she announced, ‘Oh damn, I’ve left my phone at home’, and set off smartly back towards the village.
The moment she had turned around, the heavens suddenly opened, with a deluge of icy February rain.
Oh dear. Amongst the voluminous woollen layers Jude had wrapped herself in that morning, none was even mildly waterproof. And she didn’t have an umbrella with her. There was no point in hurrying to minimize her exposure to the rain. She reconciled herself to arriving back at Woodside Cottage in a totally sodden state.
Ahead of her on the beach, Lauren Givens had made a different calculation. She clearly reckoned running would get her home quicker, back into the dry. And her running seemed somehow a continuation of the furtiveness she had demonstrated when surprised by Jude.
As the first discomforting drips trickled down between her collar and her back, Jude idly wondered why Lauren Givens had reacted like that. She sieved her brain for the little she knew about the woman. Some kind of artist, she recollected … well, perhaps a craftswoman would be nearer the mark. Made little ceramic toadstools and ‘collectibles’, which sold in gift shops along the South Coast.
Not in quantities to make a living from, but Jude seemed to recall there was a rich husband in the background. Couldn’t remember his name, didn’t even know that she’d ever heard it. Some job in international marketing …? Member of Fethering Yacht Club …? He stayed in London most of the week, while his wife was a permanent Fethering resident. Oh yes, and there had been a flyer through the letterbox recently about a Pottery Open Day that Lauren was hosting in her studio the following Wednesday.
But that was the sum total of the local gossip Jude had heard about the couple.
Fortunately, she hadn’t left her phone at home. Because at that moment it rang.
The police station in Fedborough. Would it be convenient for them to call on her at home around four that afternoon? They wanted to ask for more detail about the circumstances of her finding Anita Garner’s handbag.
Carole’s relationship with her laptop was typical of most of her relationships. She had started from a position of distrust and scepticism. Like anything else new, this new technology couldn’t be healthy. Engaging with it would be tantamount to signing up to a Faustian pact. The small advantages the laptop brought would come at a terrible cost. It was safer not to get involved.
Then, gradually, she began to feel a little isolated without access to email. Everyone else seemed to have it, even people considerably older than she was, people she might have consigned to the ungenerous category of ‘fuddy-duddies’. Carole Seddon’s main aim in life was to pass unnoticed under the radar, but there came a point when not having email drew more attention to her as a non-conforming oddity. Then there was all that information available at the click of a mouse. And Carole loved information.
Even better, from Carole Seddon’s point of view, owning a laptop offered the possibility of doing one’s shopping without having to talk to anyone.
Needless to say, she didn’t advertise the fact that she was intending to join the information technology revolution. After much private reading-up on the subject, she paid a clandestine visit to PC World in Clincham and quickly made her purchase. She then, rather than leaving her neat Renault in front of High Tor as usual, parked it back in the garage, smuggling her new possession into the house unseen.
It was only after two intense weeks of familiarizing herself with the technology that she casually mentioned to Jude that she’d bought a laptop.
And from that moment on, the relationship between woman and machine had been intense. The only anomaly about it was that Carole did not acknowledge the laptop’s portability. Her keyboard activities almost always took place in the spare bedroom. Everything had an allocated space in the circumscribed life of High Tor, and that was the computer room. The miniaturizing achievements of Silicon Valley geniuses in breaking away from the cumbersome behemoths of previous generations were wasted on Carole Seddon. She used her laptop like a desktop.
So, it was in her spare room that she began her research into the life of Anita Garner. She started with Google. There were a surprising number of people referenced as ‘Anita Garner’ or close variations of the name. A paediatrician in Napier New Zealand, a vocalist with grunge revival band of the 1990s who hailed from Little Rock Arkansas, an event caterer from Porthcawl in Wales … None of them seemed to have any connection with Fethering.
Which meant that Carole had to focus her research more locally. She remembered that amongst the limited facilities of the village library was a complete bound set of copies of the Fethering Observer, since its first appearance in 1893.
Leaving a reproachful Gulliver by the Aga – he’d quickly deduced that he wasn’t going to get a bonus walk – Carole set off to investigate.
The police – one male, one female, both in uniform – arrived on the dot of four at Woodside Cottage. They did not stay long and Jude rather wondered why they’d bothered to come at all. She had been unable to add much to what she had told the desk sergeant the day before. And her visitors seemed to accept the unlikelihood of her having anything to do with the woman whose handbag had been immured long before Jude had moved to Fethering.
The detail they did seem interested in – and indeed asked her repeated questions about – was Pete’s reaction to the discovery. Had he been surprised to find the handbag?