Free The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett

particularly shouting, ‘Yippee!’ That wasn’t the way things were done in Fethering.
    ‘What is the cause of your celebration?’ Carole asked, rather frostily.
    Jude was blithely unaffected by the deterrence in her tone. ‘You were right. There was a body on the beach. I met Bill Chilcott’s wife, Sandra, at Barbara Turnbull’s –
and she’d heard about it on local radio.’
    ‘Yes, I heard too. I met Bill in Allinstore.’
    ‘So you’re vindicated, aren’t you?’
    ‘Well . . .’
    They’d been standing on the doorstep almost long enough for the situation to become awkward. Carole would have to either invite her neighbour in or quickly invent some excuse and get rid
of her.
    But Jude solved the social dilemma before it developed. ‘Anyway, I was thinking there’s bound to be something about it on the local news at lunchtime.’ She looked at her watch,
a huge white dial which appeared to be tied on to her chubby arm with a broad velvet ribbon. ‘In two minutes. So I think we ought to watch that.’
    ‘Yes.’ Carole had been intending to do so anyway. But before she had time to say, ‘Thank you very much for the reminder. I’ll see you later’, and close the door,
Jude had grabbed her by the hand.
    ‘So come on, let’s go and watch it at my place.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’ll knock up something for lunch. And we can open a bottle of wine.’
    ‘In the daytime ?’ Carole responded instinctively.
    ‘Sure, why not?’
    ‘I think I probably had quite enough wine last night.’
    ‘Oh, feeling the effects, are you?’ There was no judgement, only sympathy in the way the question was posed. ‘In that case you definitely need a hair of the dog.’
    ‘That reminds me. I was going to take Gulliver out for—’
    ‘Come on !’ And Carole’s hand, still being held, was given a quite definite yank.
    ‘But I haven’t got my coat!’ wailed Carole.
    ‘We’re only going about five yards.’
    As she locked her front door and followed Jude down the symmetrical flags of her garden path, Carole managed to convince herself she was going simply because it would be good to talk about her
traumatic discovery of the day before, and not because she wanted to have a snoop inside Jude’s home.
    Her neighbour’s front path was an ill-fitting jigsaw of uneven red bricks, through whose interstices moss and weeds protruded. ‘Got into a terrible state, hasn’t it?’
Carole observed. ‘You’ll have to get this sorted, won’t you?’
    ‘Oh, I quite like it like that.’ The breeziness with which Jude committed this blasphemy to the standards of Fethering suggested that it wasn’t said for effect, that she really
meant it.
    She pushed the dark-wood front door open with an elbow and beckoned Carole to follow her inside. Good heavens, she hadn’t even locked it. The fact that Jude had gone only next door
didn’t excuse this lapse. Suppose Carole had invited her in? Fethering High Street was a Neighbourhood Watch Area and, as everyone locally knew, the average burglary took less than three
minutes.
    And, dear oh dear, as she passed through the hall, Carole noticed that Jude’s voluminous handbag was on a table right by the front door. Where had Jude come from to have such a cavalier
attitude to the serious business of security? The thought reminded Carole once again that she still didn’t know where Jude had come from. In fact, she knew very little more about her
neighbour than she had the moment they first met.
    The sitting room into which she was ushered was low and, because the old leaded windows hadn’t yet been replaced by sealed double-glazing units, rather dark. Though Carole had never been
inside Woodside Cottage during its previous occupancy, she’d assumed that the old lady would have had more of the basic modernization done. There was no evidence of central heating radiators,
though an open fire crackled cheerfully from the grate (without a fire-guard in front of it, Carole noted,