Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer (10 page)

“No, sorry, Tamil. Daddy says it must always be put away, so that each Grail-search starts anew.”

“Tamil!” thought Carole. It must be another of those wretched nicknames, like Fimby and Diggo. But then again, parents who called their eldest daughter ‘Dorcas’ were quite capable of having another one actually christened ‘Tamil’.

The two smaller girls made no further argument, but left the room. Carole heard their footsteps clumping up the stairs and, later, the sounds of distant music wafting from their bedrooms. One appeared to be learning the oboe, the other the clarinet.

As she gathered up the pieces of the game and placed them, in long-remembered sequence, into an old flat biscuit tin, Dorcas felt no need to apologize for her parents’ lateness—or indeed to say anything else.

Carole, inept as ever at making small talk, asked what the girls’ names were.

“Their real names are Chloe and Sylvia, but they’re called Zebba and Tamil.”

The assertiveness of Dorcas’s tone put Carole off asking the obvious question: Why? Instead she observed that the girls had been playing what looked like an interesting game. Dorcas did not think the comment worthy of response.

“Is it something you’re going to develop commercially?”

“What?” The girl stopped packing the game away and for the first time looked directly at her visitor. The eyes, which Carole had previously noted as ‘honey-coloured’, were, close to, more complex than that, a very pale hazel flecked with black.

“Well,” Carole explained, “you keep reading in the papers of people who’ve made huge fortunes from devising computer and—”

“This is not a computer game!” Dorcas snapped. “It’s a board game. Daddy wouldn’t have a computer game in the house.”

“No, but hearing you playing it, it sounds very similar to a computer game.”

“It is nothing like a computer game!” The girl’s pale face was now red with anger.

“All I’m saying is that that kind of game can be very lucrative. If it’s a good idea you’ve got there, you could—”

“Nobody wants to make money out of the Wheel Quest.”

“But just think about it. You know, when all that fantasy stuff is being so successful…
Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter
, there could be quite a demand for—”

Dorcas Locke was deeply affronted by the suggestion. “We don’t want to have other people playing it.”

Her indignation was so strong that she might have said a lot more, had she not heard the sound of a car scrunching to a halt on the weedy gravel outside. Carole turned to the window to see a beat-up Volvo estate, out of which Rowley Locke and his wife were emerging.

Bridget Locke was a good-looking woman, nearly as tall as her husband. Her hair was shoulder-length ash-blonde, with a well-cut fringe. The dark trouser suit gave her an aura of efficiency, separating her from the feyness of her daughters. Indeed, they didn’t appear to have inherited any of her genetic make-up. She unloaded Waitrose carrier bags from the back of the estate, while her husband came straight through into the sitting room to greet Carole.

“Good of you to come,” he said, with no apology for his lateness. “Has Dorcas offered you coffee?”

The girl gave her father a look which implied that was the last thing she’d have done.

“No, but it’s fine. I don’t want anything, thank you.”

Dorcas put the biscuit tin containing the Wheel Quest in its regular place on the shelf and announced, “I’m going to read.”

“All right, Doone,” said her father. Oh God, another nickname, thought Carole.

Bridget Locke had by now come in through the front door and was presumably taking her shopping to the kitchen.

“How old is Dorcas?” asked Carole.

“She’s twenty-one, just finished at uni.” It was a surprise to hear the abbreviation from a man of Rowley’s age.

“Has she got a job lined up?”

He shook his head. “No, she needs a bit of time to chill out. She’s worked hard the last three years.”

“What was she studying?”

“English with drama.” That figures, thought Carole. “At Reading.”

“So you just have the three girls?”

“No, there’s a fourth. Doone—Dorcas—has a twin. Mopsa. She’s, erm, working in Cornwall at the moment, arranging holiday lets.”

“Ah.” Mopsa! You wouldn’t need a silly nickname if you were called that. Though in the Locke family, Carole would have put money on the fact that Mopsa had one. “Is that near your own place?”

“Sorry?”

“When we met before, you said you had a family place in Cornwall, called Treboddick.”

“Well remembered, Carole.” His tone was patronizing, the omniscient teacher to the aspiring student. “Yes, the cottages are in Treboddick. Mopsa’s staying down there for the duration.”

“So you have four girls.”

“Yes,” said Rowley with pride. “I do girls. Arnold and Eithne do boys.”

“How many have they got, apart from Nathan?” She thought it might be intrusive to call him ‘Fimby’. And she couldn’t have brought herself to do so, anyway.

“Just the one. His older brother Julian.”

Diggo, thought Carole. I’m getting the hang of this.

“Arnold never had my sticking power.” It was delivered as a joke, but Carole got the feeling that there was some truth behind it as well. Seeing the two brothers together, she had been left in no doubt that Rowley was the dominant one. And he, rather than the boy’s father, was very definitely leading the family investigation into Nathan’s disappearance.

Further revelations of sibling rivalry were prevented by the arrival of Bridget Locke from the kitchen. Carole was immediately impressed by how sensible she seemed, a beacon of sanity in the midst of her flaky family. Maybe, to allow the family to be as flaky as they appeared, someone had to be in touch with the real world.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to meet you the other day in Fethering,” Bridget apologized. “One of us has to work, I’m afraid.”

The words weren’t spoken viciously, but there was no doubt they represented a dig at her husband. Carole wondered what Rowley Locke did for a living. Not a lot, was the answer implicit in his wife’s remark.

“Don’t worry. I did seem to meet quite a lot of the family.”

“That’s always the case when you mix with the Lockes.” Rowley Locke spoke as if Carole were the recipient of a privilege, but his wife’s ‘Yes’ again suggested less than full-bodied support for his view.

“Have you come here because you know something about Nathan’s whereabouts?” Carole realized that this was the first time she had heard anxiety about the boy’s fate from any member of the family. Bridget Locke was not the sort to give in to panic, but she was obviously deeply worried about Nathan.

“No, sadly, I don’t know anything about that.”

“Don’t worry about it, Bridget. The boy’s just lying low for a while,” Rowley said.

“And where does a boy of sixteen lie low for more than a fortnight? What does he live on? Eithne says he hasn’t drawn any money out of his account.”

Carole felt this gave her an opportunity to mention the unmentionable. “The gossip around Fethering is that the boy might have committed suicide.”

“Well, that’s nonsense!” said Rowley forcibly. “Like all gossip it’s totally unsubstantiated.” His wife was not so sure. “Oh, come on, Bridget, you’ve known Nathan for ten years. He’s not the kind to harm himself.”

“Not under normal circumstances, no. But who knows how any of us would react to being the prime suspect in a murder investigation?”

“We’d do what Nathan has done. Go underground until it all blows over.”

“You make it sound so easy, Rowley. You can’t just disappear in a country like this. And also the idea that a police investigation is just going to ‘blow over’ is, I would say, at the very least naive.”

Carole did not get the impression that the Lockes normally argued like this. Maybe her presence in connection with Nathan’s disappearance was the catalyst that enabled Bridget to unburden herself of what she was really feeling.

“And I wonder whether what Carole calls ‘Fethering gossip’ may not have some truth in it. Particularly if…”

“Particularly if what?” asked her husband sharply.

Bridget Locke took a deep breath. She knew he wasn’t going to like what she was about to say. “Look, Nathan’s at a difficult age and he was in the throes of his first big love affair. That’s confusing enough for anyone. Particularly for someone who’s never really engaged with the real world.”

“That’s a very unfair description of him.”

“No, it’s not. It’s accurate. So there’s Nathan, facing the conflicting pressures of love and lust and the girl’s demands and his parents’ disapproval and—”

“Now that’s unfair, Bridget. Arnold and Eithne are the most tolerant parents in the world. They wouldn’t mind Nathan bringing a girl home and going to bed with her. They didn’t mind when Diggo had—”

“No, they wouldn’t disapprove of Nathan having sex, but they would disapprove of the girl he was having sex with.”

“They never really met Kyra.”

“I’m not talking about Kyra. They’d disapprove of anyone who Nathan fancied. No girl would be good enough for the Lockes.”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“No, I’m…” But she didn’t continue. It was an old argument, not worth reviving in the presence of a stranger. “All I’m saying is that we should at least entertain the possibility that Nathan might have…harmed himself.” As her husband snorted disagreement, Bridget Locke chose her next words very carefully. “Particularly if he was actually responsible for the girl’s death.”

Rowley was appalled. “You can’t say that! You’re talking about your nephew. You can’t say he’s a murderer.”

“Until it has been proved otherwise, you must at least acknowledge why the police see him as a major suspect.”

“No. The police have got it wrong,” he insisted, before appealing to Carole. “Come on, you’ve got something new to tell us. You said on the phone there was someone else who had a motive to kill Kyra Bartos.”

Carole quickly recapped what Jude had heard from Connie Rutherford about her ex-husband. Rowley Locke seized on the information avidly. “Well, there you are, you see! This Martin Rutherford, he wanted to stop Kyra Bartos shopping him about the sexual harassment. He must have killed her. It was nothing to do with Nathan.”

Bridget looked at Carole. “Do the police know about this? Did Connie tell them?”

“I didn’t actually ask her, but I think we can safely assume she did.”

“Hmm.”

“If we don’t know for certain that they have been told, then we must see to it that they are,” Rowley announced.

“How?” asked his wife.

“I’ll tell them.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“No,” Carole agreed. “Going round scattering murder accusations at people can get you into serious trouble.”

“I’m not suggesting that I’ll tell the police in person. I’ll just see that they get the information.”

“What will it be, Rowley? An anonymous letter? A call from a phone box with you holding a handkerchief over the receiver?”

Rowley Locke didn’t enjoy his wife sending him up like this. With a rather petulant cry of “I’ve got to sort out some stuff,” he left the room, and Carole heard his footsteps stomping upstairs.

“I’m sorry.” Bridget Locke sighed. “He can be very childish at times.”

“I’m sure you’re all under a lot of stress at the moment.”

She nodded agreement, as Carole went on, “You really think Nathan might have killed the girl?”

“Without further information, what else is there to think?”

“And that he might have killed himself too?”

Bridget Locke sighed. “Again, there is a logic to the idea. He’s certainly disappeared off the face of the earth. If he had somehow killed the girl, I hate to think of the kind of state he’d have been in.”

“But you think he’d be capable of killing himself?”

“Yes. I’ve got to know Nathan quite well. He has dark moods, and sixteen isn’t the easiest age for a boy. He could have done it…done both perhaps, I mean. The murder and the suicide.” Carole had a mental image of the photograph she’d seen at his parents’ house, of the brooding figure amongst all the extrovert children on the boat.

She nodded, then said, “You’re not Rowley’s first wife, are you?”

“No. Sorry. Should have made that clear. His first wife, who was called Joan…went off with someone.”

“So the girls…?”

“Are hers. All of them. Not that she’s ever in touch. Rowley used to teach at a local girls’ school. I met him when I got a job there.”

“But I gather he’s no longer teaching…?”

“No.” Bridget Locke chose her words with delicacy. “Rowley’s always had a problem with authority. He’s one of those teachers who’d rather make a lasting impression on his students than guide them through the required curriculum.” Her mouth set in a rueful expression. “Just coming up for our tenth wedding anniversary.” She looked pleadingly at Carole. “I’m sorry, he doesn’t often behave like he did this morning. There’s much more to him than he sometimes shows to strangers.”

There would need to be, thought Garole.

“Do you think he will go to the police about what I told him? Because I’m not sure that that would be wise.”

“I’ll see to it that he doesn’t.” Bridget Locke spoke with assurance. Her husband might never encounter any opposition from the other members of the family, but when necessary his wife could stand up to him. “The way he’s behaving at the moment is because he’s really worried about Nathan. It’s his way of showing it. Quite exhausting though.” Bridget Locke wrinkled up her nose in wry amusement. “Being part of the Locke Family Roadshow can sometimes be very wearing.”

J
ude had been lucky to get an appointment at the Worthing Martin & Martina. When she rang the day before they’d just had a cancellation. Saturday was the busiest day of the week in any provincial hairdresser’s, and Jude seemed to be in the town’s most popular one. The decor was in marked contrast to that of Connie’s Clip Joint. Everything looked gleaming new. There was a lot of black glass with trim in brushed aluminium. And the silver ‘Martin & Martina’ logo was omnipresent. Looking round the salon, Jude saw a scene of almost manic activity. With all the chairs full, twelve stylists were snipping away, while clients sat under dryers or sipped coffee in the waiting area. There was a buzz about the place, an air of deliberately orchestrated chaos.