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Authors: That Way Murder Lies

BOOK: Ann Granger
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‘She came in here one night,’ said Mrs Forbes unexpectedly.
‘She?’
‘The dead girl. Mr Jenner’s daughter, was it? We had a visiting darts team here at the time and you never saw so many blokes with their eyes out on stalks. The darts were going all over the place. We’ve got lasagne today.’
‘Was she on her own?’ Meredith disregarded the offer of lasagne.
Mrs Forbes frowned and tapped a menu card against her teeth. ‘It was that crowded in here, with the darts match, that I couldn’t say. I suppose she must have been with someone. A girl like that doesn’t go into pubs on her own. Funny thing, I can’t remember anyone with her exactly, at least, not anyone I didn’t know. Of course with the visiting darts team and their girlfriends, the bar was full of strangers. She might have come with them. If you don’t want the lasagne, I’ve got a Thai green curry. That’s new on the menu.’
Dolores’ manner indicated that she’d spent enough time on chit-chat and they should make up their minds, sharpish. They settled for lasagne.
‘I don’t suppose,’ ventured Toby, ‘that you’ve got a wine list?’
The landlady gave him a fierce stare. ‘No, we’re a pub, not a restaurant. We’ve got wine, red or white. Which do you want?’
They ordered the red.
‘What a ghastly battleaxe,’ whispered Toby in awe when Mrs Forbes had marched away to deliver their order to the kitchen. ‘Is she the cook?’
‘I don’t think so. She’s got a partner, a little chap who never speaks and is hardly ever let out of the kitchen, so I guess he does it. You do realize, she thinks that you and I are engaging in illicit shenanigans behind Alan’s back?’
‘Then she’ll have to think it, won’t she?’ Toby frowned. ‘What on earth was Fiona doing in here? It’s not her sort of place at all.’
‘Toby,’ Meredith hesitated. ‘Were you very keen on her?’
‘I liked her a lot,’ he said. ‘I suppose you mean, was I in love? I don’t know.’
‘Then you weren’t,’ she said firmly. ‘I have to say, I’m a bit relieved. I thought you might be heart-broken, although you don’t look it. I don’t mean that unkindly.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Toby said with unaccustomed sharpness. ‘People think I’m superficial. Generally it’s people who don’t
know me very well. You do know me pretty well and even you think it.’
‘No …’ she protested. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound …’
He leaned forward. ‘It’s a protective disguise. I developed it when I was a kid. At boys’ schools it doesn’t do to be sensitive. We all worked hard at seeming tough and cool. What you see now is my adult version of it, I suppose. I’m really upset about Fiona. I did like her a lot, even if I didn’t – I wasn’t what people would call
in love
with her. I think she liked me in the same way. We were both oddities, if you like. That’s why we got on so well. We always were good mates, even as kids, although I saw little of her after the age of about ten when Jeremy and Chantal divorced. Fiona was abroad with her mother.You know how it is when you spend most of your time abroad? You lose touch with daily life in your own country.’
Meredith nodded. ‘Yes, I felt that very much when I first came back to England permanently after so many years abroad. Odd periods of leave at home aren’t enough.You find you’re operating from a whole different mindset. You feel like a foreigner in your own country. It’s weird. I suppose you mean Fiona felt like a foreigner here in England.’
‘That’s it. She did and so do I. Most of my school friends are married now with kids. I haven’t got much in the way of relatives, none that I can drop in on easily, anyway. People I’ve met in the service and got on well with are scattered round the globe. Fiona was in much the same boat. Her mother’s French. After she and Jeremy split, Chantal, Fiona’s mum, took her back to France. But it wasn’t a settled life, even then. Chantal took up with some bloke who took her and Fiona to live in Belgium. Then that relationship broke up and Chantal brought Fiona back to France, but to a different part. Finally, when Fiona was fourteen, Chantal and Jeremy decided through their lawyers that Fiona should go to boarding school in England and Jeremy foot the bill. So she was sent off to some scholastic institution for young ladies which she hated. She didn’t fit in there. In the holidays she either went back
to France or to stay with Jeremy who’d married Alison by then. I think Chantal had a whole string of boyfriends and some of them wanted Fiona there and some didn’t. Whether Fiona went to France depended on whom Chantal was shacked up with at the time. Also,’ Toby pulled a face. ‘Fiona was growing up and she was real stunner, you saw that. I think Chantal didn’t want competition under her own roof. You haven’t met Chantal but Jeremy’s trying to contact her about this and we are expecting her to turn up here as soon as she gets the sad news. She’s – not easy.’
‘That’s sad,’ Meredith said. ‘But I suppose it’s a common enough story.’
Unexpectedly Toby said, ‘I know Fiona gave the impression of being a tough brat but you can see why. Like me, she’d learned young to put up a defence. She wasn’t really that bad but people hadn’t treated her all that well.There was enough money, you see, for both her father and her mother to salve their consciences with expensive school fees and presents.’
‘And all she wanted was love?’ asked Meredith a little drily.
‘I don’t say both Jeremy and Chantal didn’t love her. I know Jeremy did, I don’t doubt it for a minute, but I don’t think he was any good at showing it. I suppose Chantal did. But they both managed to persuade themselves they were doing everything that they needed to do and Fiona was well taken care of.’ Toby paused. ‘Love’s s funny thing,’ he added. ‘Sort of, you know, adjustable. Like a conscience.’
‘Hello, there, Miss Mitchell,’ said a male voice.
They looked up and saw Ted Pritchard standing by them. He wore a washed-out T-shirt with a faded advertisement for a popular lager on it, probably a promotional gift from a brewery. His curly hair was sprinkled with wood dust like a bad case of dandruff.
‘Popped in for my lunch,’ he explained his presence. ‘We take it in turns to go out for a bite to eat, Steve and me.’ He bent an eye on Toby. ‘The other gentleman not with you today, then?’
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Toby.
‘No, Ted, he’s working. We’re both making the most of the Easter holiday break.’
‘Nice for some, eh?’ said Ted amiably and wandered away to the bar.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Toby with deep feeling, ‘that they don’t spend all their time in the country poking their noses into other people’s business. Who is that guy?’
‘He makes garden furniture. Alan and I want him to make some for us, for the vicarage garden when we get round to fixing it up.’
‘I’ve never understood the obsession some people have with gardening,’ said Toby morosely.
‘About Fiona. Did Jeremy give her a lot of money?’ Meredith asked him after a moment’s silence.
Toby shrugged. ‘When she was younger, I think he did. But then, you see, when she was eighteen she came into her own money, from her grandfather. So she was independent.’
This surprised Meredith. It also knocked a plank out of the motive she’d been building for Fiona to be the poison pen letter-writer. It wouldn’t do, she decided, to suggest to Toby that Fiona might have had a hand in the letters. At least not yet.
A hand appeared between them holding an opened wine bottle. ‘The red!’ announced Dolores and vanished.
‘We’re not to get a chance to sample it, then,’ muttered Toby and took hold of the bottle. He released it at once with a yelp. ‘Where the hell has she been storing it? It’s warm!’
Meredith touched it. It was certainly alarmingly warm. ‘By a radiator or the oven?’ she suggested. ‘Under those electric lights always on in the bar? There are some bottles up there like this one.’
‘Right!’ said Toby grimly, gripping the offending bottle by the neck. ‘I’m not paying for this. I’m resigned to paying over the odds for a bottle of plonk but not for a bottle of hot plonk!’ He strode towards the bar.
Meredith watched with interest as an animated conversation took place at the bar. Dolores flung back her blond locks and
placed her hands on her hips. Toby’s gestures grew ever more Mediterranean. Ted, leaning on the bar with cigarette smoke swirling around his head and consuming an apparently all-liquid lunch, was watching with interest. At the instant Meredith was about to jump up and intervene before it came to violence, Dolores grabbed the bottle and, looking even more like the figurehead on a galleon, surged out of the bar and through the kitchen door.
Toby returned looking flushed, baffled and disconcerted.
‘Well?’ Meredith asked him.
‘I said I it was warm,’ Toby informed her. ‘And she said it was room temperature which it ought to be. I said only if the room was a sauna. I told her I wanted another one. She said they were all the same. I said I wasn’t going to pay for a bottle of warm wine and was prepared to argue my case before the magistrates. She offered to put it in the fridge for a bit.’
By this time Meredith had buried her face in her hands and was helpless with laughter.
‘It will be undrinkable!’ growled Toby at her shaking shoulders. ‘But arguing with that woman is like arguing with a tank!’
Meredith wiped her eyes. ‘That’s Dolores, for you.’
A small depressed-looking man emerged furtively from the kitchens bearing two plates on which stood brown glazed terrines. He placed these before them. ‘The lasagne,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll bring your wine in a minute. I’ve popped it in the freezer for a couple of minutes.’
‘Look forward to it,’ murmured Toby. He picked up a fork and plunged it into the lasagne. ‘I wonder what’s in here.’
‘It looks all right. I’ll have to tell Alan about Fiona being seen here. You’re right. It’s not her sort of place and I can’t believe she came here for a night out. Do you reckon she was meeting someone? Did she know anyone local?’
Toby shrugged. ‘Search me. She didn’t say.’ He tasted the lasagne cautiously. ‘Edible,’ he said. ‘Something, I suppose.’ He put down his fork again. ‘Meredith, I’ve got a sort of confession.
Fiona and I weren’t in love in the way I suppose you and Alan must be, but we were good friends, and I was getting round to asking her if she’d marry me:
Meredith was startled into silence. Eventually she asked simply, ‘Why?’
‘Why are you and Alan getting married? No, don’t answer that. Ignore it. Forget I asked. I know why you two are getting married. Anyone seeing the pair of you together would know why. In my case, I just thought I’d like to be married. Fiona seemed to me a person I’d like to be married to. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I’d been thinking it over for a few weeks.’
‘You’re not going to tell me you were considering a marriage of convenience?’
He had the grace to blush. ‘You could call it that. You see, over the last couple of years I’ve discovered I’ve turned into the embassy bachelor. It’s not a role I’m that keen to play. Fiona, well, she was living in that flat of hers in Docklands and coming down here occasionally for a few days with Jeremy and Alison. It seemed to me she didn’t have much of a life, not really. People always thought, because she was so good-looking, she must be out every night painting the town red. But the way she talked, it wasn’t like that. I knew she wasn’t working now, so she didn’t have colleagues she could have a drink with, nothing like that. But as a diplomatic wife, she’d have had a ready-made role to play, a social life, chance to travel. She had no proper roots in England. We got on OK. It might have worked.’
His manner had grown steadily more defensive as he spoke. ‘All right, I admit it, now I’m telling you about it, sitting here, it sounds pretty stupid. But when I just thought about it by myself, it didn’t.You’ll say that no man in his right mind would consider asking a girl he’d never even kissed to marry him.’
‘I’m not saying that, Toby. I’m just wondering whether she’d ever, you know, given you any encouragement. Did you get the impression she’d quite like to be married to you?’
Toby looked uncomfortable. ‘To be honest, no. She was always
very friendly. I think she liked talking to me. Although, now I think about it, I did most of the talking. She didn’t tell me much about herself. I didn’t ask personal questions because I thought I knew her and because something in her manner didn’t encourage it. One does think one knows relatives. I suppose I was making assumptions. Right or wrong, I’d made up my mind to put the idea to her.’
‘But you hadn’t actually asked her?’
‘No. I was hoping to work my way round to it this weekend.’
Impulsively Meredith put out her hand and covered his which rested on the table top. ‘Oh, poor Toby. What can I say?’
‘Harr-um!’ A throat was noisily cleared above their heads.‘Sorry to disturb you, I’m sure,’ said Dolores Forbes. A bottle was set down between them with a thump. ‘Your chilled wine!’
 
Jess Campbell got back to regional HQ at midday and was rummaging in a drawer of her desk when she became aware someone had entered her office and was standing by the door.
‘Just a sec!’ she called. ‘Be with you in a jiff.’

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