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Mrs Seddon.’
     
Chapter Four
    Carole Seddon felt upset after the police’s departure. They had come to the house with an agenda; their semaphore of little nods and eyelid flickers had been prearranged.
Having arrived believing her to be a hysterical attention seeker, nothing she could say was going to make them leave with any change in their attitude.
    That’s what hurt – that they had thought her anything less than sensible. Throughout her career in the Home Office, Carole Seddon had prided herself on being a safe pair of hands.
Male colleagues had paid her the ultimate compliment of appearing unaware of her gender. Even at times of crisis, when she returned to work after the birth of her son, when her marriage to David
was turning horribly sour, she had never let her emotions show in her professional life.
    And here she was faced with a detective and a WPC being understanding about her mental state.
    There was nothing wrong with her mental state. Certainly nothing wrong with her hormonally. What stage she was at with her menopause was nobody’s business but her own. And yet the attitude
of the two police officers had undermined her confidence. She knew she wasn’t a hysteric, but the fact that someone could imagine her to be a hysteric upset the carefully maintained
equilibrium of her life.
    The unease didn’t dissipate during the course of the day. She went through the motions of her normal routine. Did a bit of housework for the rest of the morning. Forced down some soup and
a hunk of granary bread at lunchtime, then settled to the regular mental aerobics of the Times crossword. But her brain was sluggish, slow to dissect words into their component parts, slow
to make connections between them. She completed one corner, but could fill in only a few stragglers on the rest of the grid. The crossword, usually finished within half an hour, was set aside for
completion later in the day.
    Round four, she took Gulliver out for a shorter walk, through the back gate to do his business in the rough ground behind the row of cottages. Jude and her carpet were no longer in their front
garden, but, Carole noted with disapproval, the structure of boxes still was. Her new neighbour would have to learn. People in Fethering didn’t leave anything in their front gardens, except
for staddlestones, tasteful statuary and – in one rather regrettable instance – gnomes.
    Gulliver seemed to have caught his mistress’s mood, sloping along by her side with none of his usual frenetic attacks on invisible windmills. The light too was depressing. True to its
early promise, the day had never felt like day, and its leaden sky was now thickening into a November night. The cold stung her exposed cheeks and she shivered. Her circulation hadn’t got
properly going all day.
    Still Carole Seddon couldn’t lose the unpleasant aftertaste of her morning’s visitation by the police.
    Despite the sour mood they’d engendered, the thought did not for a moment occur to her that she might be in the wrong. There was no doubt that she had seen the body on the beach. The fact
that the police hadn’t found it was down either to their incompetence or – more likely – to the interference of some outside agency. Maybe they’d taken too long, arriving
after the tide had come in far enough to move the body on. Maybe someone had moved it deliberately.
    Once the body had been found – as she knew it would be – Carole Seddon was determined to get a very full apology from the West Sussex Serious Crimes Squad. Public-spirited citizens
should not be treated like criminals.
    Though the prospect of receiving some ultimate moral compensation was a comforting one, when she returned home Carole still felt unsettled. As she put on the lights and drew the curtains, she
even asked herself if she was over-reacting, if she actually was in an emotional state. Maybe a delayed response to the shock of seeing the dead body and to the implications of the