Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs (19 page)

“Inside she sees Graham Forbes and she sees what he’s doing. There is a confrontation. He threatens to kill her if she ever breathes a word of what she’s seen. Tamsin is so terrified that she hides herself back in Sandalls Manor, genuinely afraid that she’ll be killed if she ever conies out.”

Carole Seddon stopped and looked across at the passenger seat. Jude was nodding her head slowly, as she tested the junctions of the logical progression her friend had just described. Finally, she said, “No, Carole, that’s good. It’s very good.”

“Thank you.” Carole turned the Renault sedately out on to the main road towards Fethering. “And you’d say that even with your devil’s advocate hat on, would you?”

Wryly, Jude shook her head. “Ooh no. The devil’s advocate in me would want various points proved.”

“Oh. What points?”

“Let’s just start with three obvious ones. The devil’s advocate in me would want proof (a) that Graham Forbes had met and fallen in love with Irene before he returned to England for the leave that ended on the weekend of the Great Storm, (b) that he was definitely on his own when he travelled back to Kuala Lumpur the following Monday, and (c), coming up to date, that he knew the likely outcome of the Planning Committee’s meeting two weeks before it happened.”

There was a silence. Then, bitterly, Carole said, “God, you’re picky.”

§

“Darling, how too, too wonderful to hear from you!”

It was clear from Trevor Malcolm’s opening words that he’d overcome any reticence he might once have suffered from about his sexual orientation. It was also clear that the lunch he’d returned from had been a good one.

“I’m sorry it’s been such a long time.”

“Carole, my dear, what is thirty years between friends? Presumably you want something?”

“Well…”

“Oh, come on, dearie. I know I made a huge impression on you at Durham and you’ve been holding a candle for me all these years…no doubt in the snug security of your spinster bed…”

“I did actually get married, Trevor.”

“Did you? Little devil. Are you still?”

“No.”

“Thought not. That’s the thing about me. I spoil people for other men. No one really matches up, you know.”

“Mm. You didn’t get married, did you?”

He giggled a tinkling giggle. “No, I don’t think that would have been…um…appropriate. Why make one woman unhappy when you can make lots and lots of men happy?”

“Right.”

“So come on, what is it you want from me…now we seem to have ruled out the possibility that it’s my body?”

“OK. I need some information about the movements of someone who used to work for the British Council.”

“Ooh, how very sinister. What is this, Carole—are you turning detective?”

She laughed. The suggestion was too silly.

“Or is it something to do with your work? Yes, you’re at the Home Office, aren’t you?”

“Was. I’m retired.”

“Oh, my God! I don’t believe it. Anno Domini’s so cruel, isn’t she? The policemen’re looking so young these days, I feel like I’m positively cradle-snatching. And you only have to scan the obituaries to see that people are dying at absurdly young ages. No, it’s dreadful, Carole, I’m the only person of my age I know who’s kept his looks.”

“Ah.”

“Mind you, the picture in the attic is positively wizened. OK, so tell me what you want to find out and I’ll see if I can help you.”

Carole told him.

When she’d finished, he said, “Ooh, how intriguing. I’m far too polite to ask you why you want to know. I’ll just let my little mind buzz with conjecture.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to help me?”

“Might.”

“Or is all that kind of information high security?”

“Of course it is, Carole dear.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“But don’t you worry about that. I’ll find it. I always think discretion’s such an overrated virtue…don’t you?”

T
revor Malcolm rang back within the hour. It was nearly six o’clock. “You’re lucky to get me still in the office this late on a Friday.”

“I do appreciate it, Trevor.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Nothing I like more than a little
intrigue
. And I’m afraid this evening I haven’t got a whole raft of young Adonises fighting over my body.” For a moment, his facade slipped and he sounded a little wistful. “In fact, young Adonises are a bit thin on the ground these days. I keep myself in shape, but do they notice?”

Carole cut through the potential introspection. “Did you have any luck?”

“Not with the young Adonises, no.”

“I meant—”

“I know exactly what you meant, dear. And I wouldn’t have rung you back if I hadn’t got anything to tell you. The assignment wasn’t easy, let me tell you—”

“I do appreciate your making the effort, Trevor. It’s very generous of you.”

“Yes, I am generous. Not recognized as much as it should be, perhaps, but it gives me a warm inward glow. And you don’t get many of those to the pound these days. Still, you want to know what I found out, don’t you?”

“Would be nice.”

“Mm. Well, I had to be a bit lateral. Most of the relevant information would be in personnel files and the Council tends to be a bit anal with those, very unwilling to let all and sundry peer through them…which I suppose you can understand. There are a few little details of my time in Morocco that I wouldn’t necessarily want everyone to know about. By no means. That business with the two waiters and the camel…hmm…So, as I say, I had to think laterally…I went to the Literature Department instead.”

“How would that help?”

“A lot of the work someone like Graham Forbes would have been doing out in Malaysia would be hosting tours by British writers, you see. So I thought, if there was anyone out there over the time you’ve asked about…Well, Bob would be your male aunt, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Carole, a little bewildered. “Very clever.”

“Hm…Yes, I always have been clever…in every area except my private life…Still, I don’t want to whinge. That would just be too painful. No, it was wonderful. I hit pay-dirt straight away. There was a writer out on a tour in Malaysia at exactly the right time.”

“Brilliant. Do you have any means of contacting him?”

“All on his file. Address, telephone, fax…It’s even been updated with an e-mail address.”

“Trevor, you’re a genius.”

“Yes, I am, aren’t I? Not that you’d know it from the way the riff-raff round here treat me…Some of us were born, you know, just not to be appreciated…”

§

Carole had heard a blip on her Call Waiting towards the end of her conversation with Trevor Malcolm, but she hadn’t bothered to respond to it. At the end of her call, she checked 1471.

At first she didn’t know the number. Then she recognized it as Barry Stillwell’s. It didn’t seem like less than twenty-four hours since she’d had her date with him; could have been years before.

What on earth did Barry want? She didn’t bother to ring him back.

§

Sebastian Trent was very happy to talk to them. Carole had rung on the Friday evening and he’d said in his laid-back, slightly aristocratic voice that he always did ‘interviews and stuff in the afternoon. “I write in the mornings. Can only do three hours a day. If I do more, my writing just gets glib.”

He suggested three o’clock on the Monday. Carole tried to spell out to him what she wanted to ask about, but he waved the detail away with, “I’m sure we can sort all that out when you come. House is dead easy to find. You are familiar with Hampstead, I assume?”

She didn’t really know why she wanted Jude to come along with her for this part of the investigation. Maybe it was just that she felt uncertain of her own people skills and knew that everyone responded to Jude’s easy manner. She was also keen to bring their enquiries together, so that they didn’t get into another ‘devil’s advocate’ situation. If they both got information at the same time, they might find making sense of it easier.

Jude agreed readily—indeed enthusiastically. “Yes,” she said, “I haven’t had to go to London for a while. The timing’s right.”

That was intriguing. Why did Jude have to go up to London? But, as ever, Carole didn’t have time to put the supplementary questions.

“But can we meet there—at Sebastian Trent’s house?”

“Yes, if you like.”

Carole was slightly put out. She’d had in mind a girls’ jolly, travelling up on the train from Fethering together and then perhaps a nice lunch somewhere. She didn’t, however, let her disappointment show.

Jude went on, “I think this was meant to happen.”

“What was meant to happen?”

“You suggesting I should go up to London. I’m clearly meant to go up there this weekend. It’s a synchronicity thing. There’s someone I ought to see.”

But, once again, before the compulsion to see this person—or indeed his or her identity—could be explored, the conversation had moved on.

§

On the Sunday morning, Carole took Gulliver for a long walk on Fethering Beach. He was completely recovered now from his injury and extravagantly grateful to her for the extended excursion.

Automatically, when she got back to High lor, Carole went to the phone and checked 1471. Barry Stillwell had rung again. Again she didn’t call him back.

“I just feel story-telling is simplistic. There’s so much one can do with language beyond merely passing on narratives. Rather than opening up the potentialities locked in language, plotting can limit them.”

Sebastian Trent stood with an arm resting nonchalantly along the mantelpiece of his artfully lived-in sitting room. His unruly grey curls were reflected in the large arched mirror over the fireplace. He was dressed, with calculated casualness, in chunky brown brogues, loose-cut chinos, a slightly frayed button-down Oxford shirt and a shapeless grey cardigan into whose pockets his fists were pushed down.

On a shelf behind him, adjacent to the mirror—conveniently, had a photographer been present—were copies of his thin literary oeuvre. Carole had thought it politic to consult a reference book before meeting the author, and found that Sebastian Trent had published five novels. They had all been critically lauded for ‘playing with the concepts of magic realism and postmodernism and subverting both to produce a synthesis that is uniquely Trent’.

Carole was surprised that writing books of that kind made enough money for the three-storey Hampstead pile in which the author lived. But then she didn’t know much about the world of publishing.

It was clearly his novels Sebastian Trent wished to pontificate on. Carole now understood why he had shooed away the details of what she wanted to ask him about. He would have said the same, whatever the questions. She and Jude were being treated to the authorial overview of his own work, and it was clearly a routine that he’d wheeled out many times before. No doubt his audiences in Malaysia in 1987 had been treated to something very similar.

His manner was that of a skilled lecturer or interviewee. The timing was practised, the jokes honed and the whole presented with that particular brand of self-depreciation which masks huge arrogance.

Carole recognized that they had a problem. Getting Sebastian Trent off his literary tramlines was not going to be easy.

“I am interested,” he continued, “not in the mere meanings of words but in their resonance. In some ways, I suppose, I could be called a semioticist, except that I’m not solely interested in the adumbration of covert references which get attached to words. I am also concerned by their sounds, the anomalies of homonyms, the latent misunderstandings inherent in assonantal rhymes, the misleading potential of the word half-heard. This is what gives such a rich texture to my writing. And this is why I feel readers only get the full experience on a second reading of my novels. Take, for instance, the Tuscan idyll sequence in my—”

“I’m sorry,” said Jude, “but this isn’t what we came here to talk about.”

Sebastian Trent was so taken aback to be stopped in mid-flow that he could only mouth helplessly. This was the first time in his authorial experience that he’d been interrupted. Listeners usually hung with rapt attention on his every insight and
apergu
, frequently taking notes.

Carole grinned inwardly. Now she knew why her instinct had told her to bring Jude along.

“The reason we came,” her Mend went on with an engagingly innocent smile, “was to talk about a trip you made for the British Council to Malaysia in 1987.”

“Oh.” The supremely articulate Sebastian Trent was still so much in shock that he was reduced to a monosyllable.

“Now, as we understand it, Sebastian, you were in Malaysia in October of that year…”

He gave a bewildered nod.

“You spent most of your time in Kuala Lumpur, but also travelled to Ipoh and Penang.”

He couldn’t deny that either.

“And while you were out there your British Council host was Graham Forbes.”

Another nod.

Carole wondered how long this could go on. It was wonderful while it lasted, but surely at some point Sebastian Trent was going to ask why he was being grilled in this way. She didn’t have to wait long.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but what is this all about?”

“Oh, didn’t Carole say on the phone?” asked Jude coolly.

No, thought Carole, she’s not going to throw this over to me, is she? She needn’t have worried.

Glibly, Jude continued, “We’re trying to contact Graham Forbes’s wife, Sheila.”

He didn’t ask why. Having apparently come to terms with the fact that they weren’t after his pearls of literary wisdom, Sebastian Trent now seemed keen only to send them on their way. “Presumably you contact her through Graham. He’s retired now, but I think I’ve got an address for him. Somewhere in Sussex, I seem to remember.”

Carole came in to do her bit. “You didn’t know that he’d remarried?”

“No.” Sebastian Trent didn’t sound particularly interested in the information. Graham Forbes may have been his host in Kuala Lumpur, but no closeness seemed to have developed between them.

“He remarried someone called Irene. Chinese woman. I wondered if you’d met her while you were out in Malaysia.”