Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer (18 page)

“You mean he is?”

He caught the eagerness in her voice. “Yes, he is going. And no, Jude, there is no chance that you could go there too to meet him. The club is Members Only.”

“Ah,” she said, disappointed. “And what do you do when you’re there?”

“We sit and drink.” He smiled fondly. “Some drink beer, some slivovitz. I drink Becherovka. And we talk about times…” There was a catch in his voice. “…about times that will never come back.”

“Does the club have its own premises?”

“No, no. We meet sometimes in a hotel room, a pub, sometimes at the house of one of the members. Two times a year we have big dinners, socials…with food from Czechoslovakia. Mmm, carp…” He smacked his lips nostalgically. “Guests come then, to those dinners. They are good evenings.”

“Maybe you’d invite me to one, one day…?” Jude joked.

Wally Grenston chuckled. “Nothing that I would like more. Nothing, though, that Mim would like less.”

“Ah.”

He smiled and lightly whistled a couple of bars of a lilting but melancholy tune, almost definitely one of his own. Then he announced, “I think it is good that Jiri rang me…”

“In what way?”

“It means perhaps he is coming out of his grief a little. Since Krystina died, so far as I can tell, he has hardly left the house.”

“Bereavement is a terrible thing.” Suddenly Jude had an idea for another approach to the old man. “I have actually done work with the bereaved.”

“Work? How do you mean?”

“I do healing…you know, like counselling. It has proved very effective. Maybe Joe Bartos would—”

But her suggestion was cut short by a wry laugh. “You couldn’t have chosen a worse idea for Jiri. He does not believe in asking help from anyone, and certainly not help of the kind that might be called ‘psychological’. Joe is very much of the old ‘suffer in silence’ school. He has never talked about his emotions to me—or, I’m sure, anyone else. No, he will sort himself out. And, in fact, that he is talking of going to the Czech Club, this I think is good news. He is, as you say, ‘coming out of himself’.”

“Do you think that means he’s more likely to talk to me?”

The old man shrugged. “Who knows? It’s quite possible that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone about Krystina, that the reason he wants to go to the club is to talk about other things. I will only know when I see him.”

“Well, if he does want to talk…”

“Yes, yes. I have your number. I will tell him.” But Wally Grenston didn’t sound optimistic.

“I don’t want to put pressure on him to—”

But Wally was frantically shaking his head and gesturing for her to leave. He had seen something through the chiropodist’s window. Jude moved off just as she heard the door opening. By the time Mim had emerged on to the pavement, Jude was twenty yards away. Once again Wally Grenston had lived dangerously and survived.

§

The landline was ringing when she returned to Woodside Cottage after her walk. “Hello?”

“Is your name Jude?” A woman’s voice, cultured, confident.

“Yes.”

“My name’s Bridget Locke.”

“Ah.” A coincidence? Except Jude didn’t really believe in coincidences. There was an intention and synchronicity to everything that happened. Nor had she any doubt that the Bridget Locke on the phone was the one married to Rowley Locke.

“I was given your name by a friend called Sonia Dalrymple.” A horse-owning client with whom Jude had had some recent dealings. “She said you do healing and stuff…”

“Yes.”

“I’ve suddenly done something to my back. I don’t know if you do backs. Maybe I should be talking to an osteopath?”

“I do backs.”

“Well, mine’s suddenly gone and—”

“Gone in what way?”

“Sort of seized up down in the small of my back, but the pain comes all over the place, if I try to turn my head round or lift my legs in a certain way.”

“Mmm. Lower back pain. So you’d like to make an appointment?”

“Please.”

“Well, I live in Fethering, just on the High Street. I’m fairly free at the moment, so if you name a time when—”

“Ah. The trouble is, I can’t drive. I mean, I can drive normally, but at the moment I can hardly move off my bed, and even just lying there’s terribly painful. I certainly can’t bend my body to get into the car. It’s agony. Look, I’m sorry, but would it be possible for you to come and see me?”

Jude needed no second invitation. She had heard enough from Carole about the Lockes’ set-up to want to see it at first hand. If she could cure Bridget Locke’s back pain—and she had a high success rate in such cases—then good. And if she could find out any more about Kyra Bartos’s murder and the disappearance of Nathan Locke, then even better.

“Yes, of course I could come to you. Where do you live?” she asked, knowing the answer full well.

J
ude fixed to go to Chichester that afternoon. After four, when the younger girls were back from school and could let her in. She could do the journey by rail. The coastal trains on the Brighton to Portsmouth Harbour line were slow and kept stopping in the middle of the bungaloid sprawl at numerous stations with ‘wick’ in their names, but they’d get her there eventually. Then a taxi from Chichester Station to Summersdale.

She knew Carole would have driven her, but Jude didn’t want that, for a couple of reasons. First, the Lockes were presumably unaware of the connection between the two women. The sight of Carole’s Renault outside their house could ruin that. Then again, when she was going to do a healing session, Jude needed some quiet time to build up her concentration and focus her energies. That would be difficult to achieve in a car full of Carole’s scepticism.

Anyway, as it turned out, she couldn’t have got a lift from her neighbour. The immaculate Renault and its owner were elsewhere.

Carole wasn’t at home because she was on a mission of her own. An only child of borderline paranoid tendencies, she had never been good at sharing. Her relationship with Jude was one of the easiest and least judgemental of her life, but Carole still sometimes felt the necessity for secrets. Particularly in connection with their murder investigations. She could never quite suppress the pleasing fantasy of her doing something very successful on her own; of her finding the link of logic that brought together two apparently unrelated elements in a case. And the fantasy always concluded with the image of her casually presenting the vital new development as a rich gift to Jude.

For nearly twenty-four hours an idea had been simmering in Carole’s mind. A piece of the investigation that she could do completely on her own. Indeed, it made sense that she should do it on her own. She was, after all, the one with the car.

The germ of the idea had come to her on the previous day when she had driven out of the Yeomansdyke car park, only to discover that Theo in his shiny BMW had vanished. When Jude had told her about his two o’clock appointment for the Tuesday afternoon, she knew exactly what she should do.

Carole Seddon’s experience of stake-out work was limited. Though there were undoubtedly people connected with the Home Office who had honed such skills by long practice, it was not something that had ever come up in her own professional duties. She had spent most of her time writing and reading interminable reports. So her knowledge of surveillance techniques was based only on what she had seen at the cinema and on television.

The first important prerequisite, she knew, was an unobtrusive vehicle, and here she already scored highly. In Fethering a Renault like hers automatically became part of the landscape. The streets were full of such elderly but beautifully nurtured old cars. Nobody would ever give it a second glance.

The second essential was that the driver should also be unobtrusive, and in this respect she was not so well placed. Though she had few friends in Fethering, everybody in the village knew exactly who she was (just as she knew a great deal about all of the people she never spoke to). Anonymity is only granted to people who live in cities; in the country it is impossible to attain.

Balancing this in her favour was the fact that her quarry didn’t know either her or her car well. Theo’s behaviour the previous day suggested that he’d been completely unaware of the Renault tailing him.

Fortunately, at the end of Fethering High Street there was a small car park for people using the beach. Carole settled the Renault into a bay from which she had a perfect view of Theo’s Fabia, parked more or less exactly where it had been the previous day. Having never undergone the procedure, she didn’t know exactly how long a cut and highlights would take, but she reckoned it had to be at least an hour. Theo’s appointment, she knew, was for two o’clock. Being, however, a person paranoid-about being late, she was in her surveillance position by half-past two.

She hoped she didn’t look too obtrusive. It was quite common for people—particularly old people—to sit in their vehicles in that particular car park, but the favoured way was facing the sea. To have one’s back to the view was unusual but, to Carole’s relief, did not attract any curious looks from passers-by. And she did have the Times crossword there as a smokescreen.

It was a particularly recalcitrant puzzle that day. Tuesdays, Carole knew from long experience, could be tricky. Mondays and Fridays were always easy. She felt sure that this was a deliberate policy on behalf of the newspaper. The pains of returning to work after the weekend, like end-of-the-week exhaustion, could be eased by an unchallenging crossword. Completing it quickly could give a disproportionate lift to the spirits of the weary commuter. But midweek was a different matter altogether; then the clues could be much more arduous. And Carole had a feeling
The Times
had taken on a new setter. Over the years she had become skilled at reading the minds of the people devising the crosswords, but some of the clues that had been cropping up recently seemed to express a whole new attitude to the English language. Carole found the newcomer’s work both satisfying and frustrating—satisfying when she could get an answer right, frustrating when she couldn’t. It would take time to find out precisely how the new mind worked.

That Tuesday’s crossword was definitely one of his. Very unusually for her, Carole had to look at the clues for nearly ten minutes before she could get her first solution. Normally, even on a difficult day, she could get a couple straight away and then slowly grind through the others. And there were some magical occasions when the whole crossword opened up like a book and the answers came as quickly as she could write them down. Then, by simply narrowing her eyes, she could instantly pick out the anagram from a jumble of words. At such gilded moments she felt omniscient, there was nothing in the world she could not cope with. Such gilded moments, however, were rare.

Doing the crossword was meant to stave off the advance of Alzheimer’s, but that afternoon she could feel it encroaching at a rate of knots. Even as she had the thought, though, she knew what was really to blame was her concentration. Constantly flicking her eyes away from the page towards the immobile green Fabia was not conducive to effective clue-solving.

She had a long wait and filled in very few more answers. A cut and highlights clearly took a lot longer than her estimate. She was beginning to think that Theo must’ve had some other customers booked in, when finally she saw a woman with newly highlighted hair emerge from Connie’s Clip Joint. Only moments later Theo came out, and swanned along the High Street towards his car. It was just after four o’clock.

Once again Theo was dressed in his black livery. Once again his movements were light and mildly effeminate. Once again he got into the Fabia and drove out of Fethering in a westerly direction.

And once again Carole Seddon’s Renault tailed him.

The previous day’s history repeated itself. The Fabia stopped in the Yeomansdyke car park, and the hairdresser, looking neither left nor right, again went into the hotel’s spa entrance.

No swim or workout on the Tuesday either. Within five minutes Theo was out again in his other persona. The day’s clothes for this character were jeans and an oatmeal-coloured linen jacket. Without even a look at the Fabia, he got into the BMW and drove off.

This time Carole was ready for him: The Renault’s engine was on before he was out of the car park, and she was in time to see him turn right out of the entrance. She followed. He was going north, through Yapton and past Fontwell Racecourse towards the A27, the major road that runs parallel to the South Coast. The BMW turned right, rejecting the delights of Chichester, Portsmouth and Southampton in favour of Arundel, Worthing and Brighton.

On the minor roads, there had been little traffic and Carole had had no difficulty keeping within sight of Theo’s car. Indeed, her only worry had been that her trailing him was too obvious. On the A27 the problem was different. There were many more vehicles and an open stretch of road would give a car like the BMW opportunities to let rip and lose the more sedate Renault (not to mention the even more sedate Renault’s owner).

But Theo proved to be a very law-abiding driver. He rarely took the car above fifty and Carole had little difficulty in keeping no more than one or two cars away from him. Where the traffic slowed to a crawl through the outskirts of Worthing, she found she was directly behind. Rather belatedly, she put on a pair of dark glasses from the Renault’s neat glove compartment. It was unlikely that Theo would show any interest in the driver of the car behind—he was probably lost in a radio programme or music CD—but Carole still thought putting the glasses on was a prudent move. The action also gave her a
frisson;
she was behaving like a real private investigator.

Worthing left behind, the BMW showed no signs of stopping. It didn’t take long before Carole started to feel less like a real private investigator and more like the middle-aged owner of a dog who would soon be needing a meal and a walk. She had no idea how far Theo was going. His destination could be anywhere—London, Canterbury, Folkestone. Yes, he might even be going through the Channel Tunnel. Paris? Lille? He could be going to any place in Europe or beyond.