Bones Under The Beach Hut (24 page)

    'And
you did put out the fire, Helga?'

    'Yes.
Fortunately it had not got much of a hold on the hut. Only one corner was
burnt. If we had not got there so quickly I hate to think what would have
happened.'

    Gray
Czesky, now his folly had been exposed, looked sheepishly defiant. 'As I said,'
he pleaded to deaf ears, 'it's not easy having an artistic temperament.'

    'Well,'
said Carole, 'we're very grateful to you for telling us all of this.'

    'I
felt we had to,' Helga responded. 'I was suspicious of you when you came round
on Monday.'

    'Oh?'

    'Yes,
I did not think you were really wanting to commission a painting from Gray.'
Carole felt herself blushing to know how transparent their ruse had been. 'It
was when you rang again today that my suspicion was confirmed.'

    'Really?'

    'I
knew then that you were plain-clothes police officers.' Carole and Jude tried
to avoid catching each other's eyes. Instinctively, Carole was about to say
that Helga had got the wrong end of the stick, but a moment's thought made her
realize that there was no harm in the woman continuing with her
misapprehension. And their mistaken identities could actually be rather useful
in advancing their investigation.

    'The
question is now,' Helga continued, 'what you do about what we have just told
you.'

    Jude
took note of the pleading in the woman's eyes as she said judiciously, 'Well,
setting fire to the beach hut was obviously very stupid behaviour on your
husband's part. . .'

    'Yes?'

    '. .
.but at its worst it was nothing more than a drunken prank.'

    'No,'
Helga agreed, her hopes rekindled.

    'And
it wouldn't have become so important had it not been for subsequent events at
the beach hut; the discovery of the human remains there. But . . .' she
extended the pause, aware of the tension in the sorry couple in front of her '.
. . now we know that the two discoveries are unrelated to each other . . .' she
looked across to her neighbour, as if for confirmation of what she was about to
say, "... I don't really think it'll be necessary for any further action
to be taken.'

    The
relief in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage was almost palpable. Both the
Czeskys sank back into their chairs, as Carole picked up the conversational
baton. 'Though of course,' she said sternly, 'we might take a different view
were you not to co-operate fully with us.'

    'Of
course we will,' said Helga earnestly. 'In what way do you wish us to
co-operate?'

    'We
will require you to inform us . . .' Where had that 'require' come from? Carole
realized she was dropping into 'police-speak'. 'We will require you to inform
us of anything else you may know that might be of relevance to our
investigation into the discoveries on Smalting Beach.'

    She
chose her words with care. With her background in the Home Office, Carole
Seddon was well aware how serious a crime impersonating a police officer could
be. So she deliberately hadn't confirmed Helga's assumption that their
enquiries were official ones. As she walked her casuist's tightrope, Carole
curbed her natural instinct towards guilt.

    'Oh,
of course,' said Helga. 'If there's anything we know that's relevant, of course
we will tell you.'

    Jude
nodded with satisfaction. 'Right. Good. Well, the first thing we want to know
is: where is Mark Dennis? Do you have a way of contacting him?'

    It
turned out to be remarkably simple. Gray provided Carole and Jude with a new
mobile number for Mark Dennis. The moment the Czeskys had left Woodside
Cottage, Jude, trembling with excitement, keyed it into her phone.

    A
brief ringing tone was quickly replaced by a message informing her that the
phone she was calling was switched off. She tried again. With exactly the same
result.

    Neither
Carole nor Jude could disguise their disappointment. To have come so close to making
contact with Mark Dennis and then to . . .

    'I'll
keep trying it,' said Jude defiantly.

    'Yes,
of course. He'll answer it soon.'

    But
neither of them really believed the optimism in Carole's words.

    Smalting
was the lead story on the television news that evening. The human remains that
had been found buried under a beach hut there had been identified by the
police. They had belonged to a small boy called Robin Cutter.

    The
name was familiar, but in front of their separate televisions Carole and Jude
both needed reminding where they had heard it before. The news bulletin
supplied all the promptings their memories required.

    The
story of Robin Cutter was a sad and painful one. He had been five at the time
of his disappearance, and nothing had been seen of him in the intervening eight
years. At the time, relatively soon after the high-profile abduction and murder
of a local schoolgirl, there had been a huge uproar in West Sussex about the
case. It aroused all the country's latent visceral horror of paedophilia.

    Though
it was nearly ten-thirty at night, Jude went straight round to knock on the
door of High Tor. The evening air was quite cool, reminding the denizens of
Fethering that they were still only in June, not yet August.

    Carole
and Jude stayed watching television after the main bulletin, because the
disappearance of Robin Cutter had happened in the area and there remained a
very distant possibility that more information might be available on the local
news.

    Of
course there wasn't. The local news reported the story with characteristic
ineptitude, but added nothing to what had been seen on the national bulletin.
They showed the same shot of a smiling Robin Cutter, wearing a very new blue
uniform, in one of those school photographs taken against a backdrop of cloud
effects. They showed the same library footage of the boy's distraught parents -
Rory and Miranda - banked by police at a press conference, begging anyone who
knew anything to come forward, and sending hopeless love to their son. The
woman was slender with long bottle-blond hair, the husband chunky and
bewildered. They faltered and were so overcome with emotion that one of the
policemen had to finish reading their prepared statement.

    'The
mother looks vaguely familiar,' said Jude.

    'Who
is she?'

    'I
don't know. It'll come to me.'

    They
switched off the television. At the time Robin Cutter disappeared, Jude had not
yet moved to Fethering and had only been aware of the national reaction to the
case. That had been strong, but as nothing compared to the frenzy in West
Sussex. Carole could vividly recall the local furore and hysteria about what
was assumed to be another paedophile atrocity. 'We must find out more about
it,' she announced.

    'What,
now?'

    'Yes,
Jude. I'm sure there'll be lots more on the internet.'

    'You're
right. Will you bring your laptop down?'

    Carole
was given a moment's pause by this novel idea. Though, after a slow and
sceptical start, she had now embraced computer technology with considerable
enthusiasm, she still somehow had not accepted the concept of her laptop's
portability. It never moved from the spare bedroom, which she used as a kind of
study. 'No, I think we'd better go upstairs,' she said.

    Jude
converted an incipient giggle into a sigh and followed her neighbour.

    Carole's
view that there would be 'lots more on the internet' proved to be an
understatement. There were literally hundreds of thousands of references to
Robin Cutter, ranging from the straight facts of his disappearance on
Wikipedia, newspaper and BBC websites, to the homicidal ravings of
anti-paedophile fanatics. Though at the time of his supposed abduction bloggers
had hardly existed, the contemporary ones still included his names in their
lists of victims. As ever, the internet offered opportunities to the kind of
people who used to write letters in block capitals with lots of underlining. It
had become the soapbox of the unhinged bigot.

    'God,
it's nasty,' said Jude, as they both looked at one of the wilder polemics. 'I
suppose paedophiles are about the only minority left that everyone feels
justified in denouncing.'

    'I'm
sorry? I don't know what you mean.'

    'Well,
it's no longer politically acceptable to discriminate against women or
foreigners or lesbians or gays. About the only targets left to criticize are
paedophiles.'

    Carole
was appalled. 'Jude, are you saying you support what they do?'

    'Of
course I'm not. I'm just saying it must be terrible to grow up with those kind
of impulses.'

    'What,
you think they can't help themselves?'

    'Possibly
not.'

    Carole
Seddon was so shocked to the core of her being that she could hardly get her
words out. 'But the things they do! You're not going to try to defend those on
the grounds that the poor paedophiles can't help themselves?'

    'No,
no. I'm just saying that it must be very difficult to grow up discovering that
the only way you can get sexual satisfaction is by committing an act that
society reckons to be the ultimate taboo.'

    Carole
shuddered. 'I am sorry. There are times when I just don't understand you, Jude.'
Which was true. There were many subjects on which the two of them were never
going to think alike. Which perhaps made their friendship all the more
remarkable. And strong.

    'What
I'm saying is that people lose all sense of proportion when paedophilia is
mentioned. And there's a lot of ignorance about the subject. I mean, do you
remember that case of the paediatrician who had graffiti scrawled over her
house?'

    'Jude,
paedophilia remains a horrible and unforgivable crime.'

    'Yes,
Carole, but . . .' Jude decided it wasn't the moment to pursue her argument.
She was as appalled as anyone by the crimes perpetrated by paedophiles, but her
healer's instinct was always to look inside personalities, to try to understand
what triggered their behaviour. But explaining what she meant to Carole would
not have been an easy task, so she turned her attention back to the laptop.
'Anyway, let's just see how much basic information we can get about the case.'

    'Very
well,' said Carole, still looking at her neighbour in a rather old-fashioned
way.

    They
returned to Wikipedia. 'With that name I'm surprised they haven't been attacked
too,' Jude observed.

    The
basic information was quite simple, almost banal in its simplicity. Robin
Cutter had been spending a day with his grandparents near Fedborough while his
mother and father had gone to London to see a matinee of
Les Miserables.
In the morning his grandfather had driven the boy down to Smalting Beach. After
they'd parked the car, Robin had asked for an ice cream. While his grandfather
went into the shop, the boy had asked to stay outside and watch the
windsurfers. When his grandfather came out of the shop, Robin Cutter had
disappeared. And he had never been seen again.

    But
it was the name of the grandfather that made Carole and Jude gasp.

    Lionel
Oliver.

    The
identity of the victim whose bones had been discovered under
Quiet Harbour
led to a predictable media frenzy. The Robin Cutter story was again on the
front pages of many of the Thursday morning's national newspapers. The red tops
didn't need any encouragement to go into anti-paedophile overdrive, and even
Carole's more sedate
Times
gave wide coverage to the revelation. As ever
in such instances, much was made of previous cases of similar atrocities,
turning knives in the wounds of other families who had already suffered enough.

    Carole
and Jude watched the lunchtime television news in Woodside Cottage. There had
been little development overnight, so they found out little more than they had
been told in the Wednesday evening bulletin. The last part of the report,
however, was an interview with the dead boy's mother.