Tickled to Death and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense by Simon Brett Page A

blocked another entrance . . . a passage? Even an old smugglers’ tunnel?
    He scrabbled away at the rocks, tearing his hands. The little ones scattered, but the bigger ones were more difficult. He tugged and worried at them.
    Suddenly a huge obstruction shifted. Hector jumped back as he heard the ominous roar it started. Stones scurried, pattered and thudded all around him. He scrambled back down the incline.
    The rockfall roared on for a long time and he had to back nearer and nearer the sea. But for the darkness he would have seen Janet’s body buried under a ton of rubble.
    At last there was silence. Gingerly he moved forward.
    A single lump of rock was suddenly loosed from above. It landed squarely in the middle of his skull, making a damp thud like an exploded paper bag, but louder.
    Hector Griffiths fell down on the sand. He died on 8 September.
    Outside his motor-boat, carelessly moored in his haste, dragged its anchor and started to drift out to sea.
    It was four months before the police found Hector Griffiths’ body. They were led to it eventually by a reference they found in one of his late wife’s diaries, which described a secret cave where they had made love. It was assumed that Griffiths had gone there in his dinghy because of the place’s morbidly sentimental associations, been cut off by the rising tide and killed in a rockfall. His clothes were soaked with salt water because he lay so near the high tide mark.
    It was difficult to date the death exactly after so long, but a check on the tide tables (in which, according to a Commander Donleavy, Griffiths had shown a great interest) made it seem most likely that he had died on 14 September. This was confirmed by the presence in his pocket of a NUGGY BAR , a nut and nougat confection which was not available in the shops until 10 September.
    Because the Product Manager of NUGGY BAR , after cancelling the product’s launch, had suddenly remembered a precept that he’d heard in a lecture when he’d been a Management Trainee at GLISS . . . .
    ONCE YOU HAVE MADE YOUR MAJOR DECISIONS ABOUT THE PRODUCT AND THE TIMING OF ITS LAUNCH, DO NOT INDULGE SECOND THOUGHTS .
    So he’d rescinded his second thoughts and the campaign had gone ahead as planned. (It may be worth recording that the NUGGY BAR was not a success. The majority of the buying public found it “pretty revolting”.)
    The body of Hector Griffiths’ step-daughter, Janet Wintle, was never found. Which was a pity for two old ladies in Stockport who, under the terms of a trust set up in her mother’s will, stood to inherit her not inconsiderable wealth.

THE GIRL IN VILLA COSTAS
    T HERE WAS ONLY one girl worth looking at in that planeload. I’d been doing the job for two months, since May, and I’d got quicker at spotting them.
    She was tall, but then I’m tall, so no problem there. Thin, but the bits that needed to be round were good and round. Dress: expensive casual. Good jeans, white cotton shirt, artless but pricey. Brown eyes, biscuit-coloured hair pulled back into a rubber band knot, skin which had already seen a bit of sun and just needed Corfu to polish up the colour. (Have to watch that. With a lot of the girls—particularly from England—they’re so pale you daren’t go near them for the first week. Lascivious approaches get nothing but a little scream and a nasty smell of Nivea on your hands.)
    The girl’s presence moved me forward more keenly than usual with my little spiel. “Hello, Corforamic Tours, Corforamic Tours. I am your Corforamic representative, Rick Lawton. Could you gather up your baggage please, and proceed outside the arrivals hall to your transport.”
    I ignored the puffing English matrons and homed in on the girl’s luggage.
    It was then that I saw the other one. She looked younger, shorter, dumpier; paler brown hair, paler eyes, a sort of diluted version, as if someone had got the proportions