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doubt, Carole.' And, clearly put
out, the little man stumped on his little legs up towards the promenade.
        Carole
now dared to catch Jude's eye and both of them burst out laughing. And Carole
was faced with the amazing fact that she had finally met a man who fancied her
more than he fancied Jude.
        But
the thought didn't comfort her as much as it might have done. After all, the
man in question was Kelvin Southwest.
        
        
         The
Times crossword was a particularly tough one that day. Or maybe the wine
and the distractions of the beach prevented Carole from giving it her full
concentration. She kept looking over to see what was happening at Quiet
Harbour.
        The
contractor's van must have been parked nearby, because he was back with his
toolbox and some planks very soon after Kelvin Southwest's departure. He went
inside the hut, occasionally reappearing to prop up against its frontage the
roll of carpet and the floorboards he'd removed.
        Then
he came out empty-handed and talked on his mobile phone. Shortly after this
Kelvin Southwest returned to Quiet Harbour - maybe the contractor's call
had been to him. The two men went inside. It was some minutes before they
re-emerged. By now the little man from Fether District Council seemed very
agitated. He paced up and down as he too made a call on his mobile.
        It
was less than a quarter of an hour before the police arrived. Two uniforms in a
patrol car. They joined up with Kelvin and the contractor, and all four went
into the hut.
        It
was half an hour before the other police vehicles, which must have been
summoned, started to appear. Some of their occupants began erecting white
screens around Quiet Harbour, while four polite but firm WPCs walked
along the shoreline asking all the holidaymakers to leave Smalting Beach.
    ----
        

Chapter Ten
        
        Human
remains. That was all that was announced on the local television news the following
morning, the Friday. Police had been summoned to Smalting Beach in West Sussex
following the discovery of what turned out to be human remains under a beach
hut there.
        The
minute the bulletin had finished Carole went straight round to Woodside
Cottage. Jude looked bleary and voluptuous in a floaty, yellow silk dressing
gown, having just stumbled out of bed. Still, catching her at that time meant
she'd got the coffee on.
        'Did
you see the news?' asked Carole.
        'No.
I'm still hardly awake.'
        Carole
relayed the minimum of information the television had provided. 'But it must
have something to do with the fire,' she went on. 'If there were human remains
in Quiet Harbour, then someone must've tried to set fire to the place to
remove evidence of their crime.'
        'What
crime?'
        'Well,
murder obviously.'
        Jude
smiled indulgently at her friend. 'You don't think you're getting a bit ahead
of yourself here, do you? Human remains don't have to be the result of a
murder.'
        'Oh,
but in this case they must be.'
        'Why?'
        'Well,
because . . .' Carole was nonplussed, but only for a moment. 'Because that's
why there were new nails in the floorboards. The murderer had taken the
floorboards up so that he could reach down to bury his victim in the sand and
shingle underneath the beach hut, then he'd replaced them and lit the fire to
destroy the evidence of what he'd done.'
        Jude
grinned in a rather infuriating way. 'Just a minute, Carole. I thought you were
supposed to be the logical one in our relationship, and the logic in what
you've just said contains serious faults.'
        'No,
it doesn't,' protested Carole, frustrated by Jude's atypical unwillingness to
catch her enthusiasm.
        'Listen.
Let's just for a moment accept your unlikely assertion that there is a murder -
and therefore a murderer - involved. Now he could have done one of two things.
He could, yes, have taken up the floorboards to bury