Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer (21 page)

“I’m sure there were. And were they homosexuals just like me?”

“Well…”

Her answer was interrupted by the sound of a key in the front door. As soon as it opened, a tornado of two small children and a large Old English Sheepdog thundered into the sitting room and wrapped itself around Theo. Behind them, closing the door, stood a tall slender woman with long black hair. She moved forward and, picking her way between children and dog, planted a large kiss on Theo’s lips.

“You haven’t lost your sense of timing, Zara.” He grinned across at his guest. “Carole—my wife Zara. Our children Joey and Mabel. And our dog, Boofle.”

“Ah.”

“I’m actually tied up for a little while, love.”

“Don’t worry,” said Zara. “The horde needs feeding. Come on, kids. Come on, Boofle. Teatime.” And she led them out into the hall, discreetly closing the door behind her.

Carole was lost for words. All she could come up with was, “That’s an Old English Sheepdog. You said you had a little Westie called Priscilla.”

“Ah—discovered! Mea culpa! Yes, I knew I could not keep my guilty secret from you forever. I do not have a little Westie called Priscilla.”

“Look, what is all this, Theo? Am I to gather that you’re not…homosexual?”

“Once again nothing escapes the eagle eye of Miss Marple. It’s uncanny. How does she do it?”

“But you…I mean, the way you behave at Connie’s Clip Joint…Even when I was there, when you were talking to Sheena, you said things that definitely implied you were…homosexual.”

“I did. I admit it. So far as Connie’s Clip Joint is concerned, I’m as gay as a pair of Elton John’s glasses.”

“But I don’t understand.”

He dropped into his arch hairdresser’s drawl. “Give the customers what they want, darling. Someone like Sheena positively loves having her hair cut by a gay man. She’d be disappointed if she didn’t have a gay man doing it. So, if that’s what she wants…” He gave a helpless, camp shrug.

“There must be more to it than that.”

“Ooh, there is, yes. It’s also self-protection. Let’s take Sheena as an example yet again. Imagine what’d happen with someone like her if she thought I was
available
. She’d be flirting, she’d be all over me. I tell you, behaving the way I do saves me a lot of aggravation. I’m much safer appealing to the fag hag in a harpie like Sheena than I would be if she thought I was hetero.”

Having met the woman in question, and having heard Jude’s account of a lunch with her, Carole could see Theo’s point.

“So did you invent the business for her about fancying Nathan and being jealous of Kyra?”

“I remember hinting at it to Sheena, just as a joke.

“But maybe it got embroidered in her rather over-active imagination.”

“All right, that’s possible. But it still doesn’t explain everything. The changing clothes, the changing cars.”

“In Fethering everyone thinks I’m gay. In Brighton everyone thinks I’m heterosexual. Yeomansdyke is where I change identities, that’s all.”

“That’s not enough. There’s more to it.”

“Oh? Tell me what there is more to it, Miss Marple.”

“Well, it’s an incomplete disguise, for a start. Fethering and Brighton aren’t that far apart. Maybe you don’t see many of your Brighton friends in Fethering, but it must sometimes happen that you meet one of your clients here.”

“Less often than you’d think. And on the few occasions when it does, they see me out of context, with Zara, with the children and they do a sort of take. I can see their minds working. And usually I can see them concluding: I’ve just seen someone who looks extraordinarily like my hairdresser. I promise you, it’s never been a problem.”

“Is that all the explanation I’m getting?”

Still with a glint of mischief in the dark brown eyes, he spread his hands generously wide. “Why? Isn’t that enough?”

“No, Theo. It isn’t.”

“Ah, I see.” He gestured round the lovely sitting room. “You’re telling me that
all this
is a bluff. A cleverly constructed front. The Theo of Connie’s Clip Joint is the real me. I am a closet gay, who fancied Nathan Locke so much that I killed his girlfriend in a fit of jealous homosexual pique.”

Again Carole felt herself blushing under his sardonic gaze.

Theo chuckled. “I’ll tell you the truth, if you like.”

“Would you?” she asked pathetically. “I mean, for a start, is Theo your real name?”

“Theo is my real name. I started off as an actor. And at one point I got involved in a production with one of those self-obsessed, power-crazed directors who builds up a show from months of improvisation.”

“Oh?” Carole didn’t know a lot about the theatre. She hadn’t heard of such a technique.

“Well, I was supposed to be playing a hairdresser in this show and so the director, true to his principles, sent me off to research my part by working in a real hairdresser’s. I did three months. It could have been worse. I was lucky—one of the other actors had been cast as a cess-pool emptier’s mate. Anyway, the usual thing—three months in the salon, three months of self-indulgent improvisation in the rehearsal room, and you end up with a show that would have been a lot better if the director had got a writer in in the first place.

“But after the run finished—and maybe because of what the show had been like—I go through a very bad patch work-wise. You couldn’t give me away with soap. And after a long time sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, I think: well, I’m going to have to get an income from somewhere…and I quite enjoyed that three months I spent in the hairdressing salon…so…”

“You became a hairdresser?”

“Exactly. I joined another salon, trained properly, and suddenly I was a stylist. Money’s not great, but compared to being an out-of-work actor, anything’s better.”

“And did you develop the, er…homosexual mask from the start?”

“Yes. As a joke at first. But then I saw the advantages. As I said, the customers like it, and it keeps them from prying into my private life. And there’s a third big benefit—
they confide in me
. Things they’d certainly never tell their husbands or lovers, and a lot that they wouldn’t even tell their girlfriends. You wouldn’t believe the things a gay hairdresser hears about female behaviour.”

“Hmm.” Carole found she was beginning to relax, recognizing that Theo’s sending her up was teasing rather than malicious. She gestured round the room. “That still doesn’t explain all this. I’m sure there are hairdressers who make a huge amount of money, but I’d have thought they’re the ones with chains of salons and their own ranges of hair-care products. I can’t think you make that much renting a chair at Connie’s Clip Joint in Fethering.”

Theo grinned. “Zara might have a lot of money.”

“Yes, I suppose she might.”

“But in fact she hasn’t. Or she hadn’t when I married her.” He stood up. “Do you want to know the last part of my secret, Carole?”

“Please.”

“I’ll tell you, but I really do want you to keep this to yourself. You’re not to pass it on to anyone else.”

Not even Jude, was her first thought. Then she decided she’d wait to see what the last part of the secret was. If it involved illegality, then she might have to break the promise of confidentiality she gave to Theo.

He led her to a door on the left-hand side of the sitting room. With his family in the house, Carole now had no anxiety in following Theo anywhere. He ushered her into a beautifully designed office. On a desk in a window overlooking the sea stood a lone state-of-the-art laptop. Other purpose-built surfaces held the armoury of more electronic equipment without which no business can now flourish. On specially designed shelves on the back wall stood rows of new-looking books—hardbacks, paperbacks, many in foreign editions.

“Come on, has your brilliant sleuthing mind worked it out yet?”

The reluctant Miss Marple was forced to admit that it hadn’t.

Theo took a hardback book from the shelf and held it across to her. On the jacket a determined-looking girl in a red dress stood on an outcrop of rock looking out at a departing steamship. The title was
The Sorrowful Sea
.

“Are you familiar with the
oeuvre
of Tamsin Elderfield?”

“No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

“Well, fortunately…” Theo gestured to the rows of shelves, “…lots of other people are.”

“You mean…you…?”

“Yes.” He grinned. “A third identity to confuse you, Carole. Theo the hairdresser in Fethering, Theo the family man in Brighton, and now—Tamsin Elderfield in virtually every bookshop in the world.”

“But…But…it’s romantic fiction, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is.”

“And you’re a man.”

“Spot on. Can’t pull the wool over your eyes, Miss Marple.”

“But, if you’re such a successful writer, why on earth do you still bother with a day job as a hairdresser?”

“Because, Carole, that is
why
I am a successful writer. A lot of authors have difficulty answering the inevitable question: where do you get your ideas from? I don’t,” he said smugly.

“You get them from Connie’s Clip Joint.”

“Of course I do. I actually quite enjoy hairdressing, but that’s not why I keep on doing it. No, Connie’s Clip Joint is the rich seam of experience which furnishes me with my plots. I don’t want to boast, but I think there are few men who have the depth of understanding of women’s romantic aspirations and frustrations that I do…or indeed that any other gay hairdresser does.

“So, Carole, now you know everything—as do the police, incidentally. I’ve been quite open with them about my different identities and apparently I’m not breaking any laws. So I’m sorry—none of what I’ve done is even vaguely immoral. Well, except possibly for my lying to you about owning a little Westie called Priscilla.”

There was a long silence, as Carole tried to balance her feelings of surprise and embarrassment. Finally, rather feebly, she asked, “So there’s nothing you can tell me that’ll help me find out who killed Kyra Bartos?”

“Sorry.” He too was silent for a moment, before saying, “Well, there is just one thing…I don’t know whether Nathan Locke killed the girl or not, but I would think finding the boy alive and talking to him might be the best way of getting to the truth.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No. But I did overhear him once saying something to Kyra when he came to pick her up…something that might be relevant…”

“What was it?”

“I also told the police this, so it’s no great secret. Whether they acted on what I said, I’ve no idea. It’s just…I was in the back room at the salon one evening tidying up, and Nathan came in to fetch Kyra, and she was getting her stuff together and he was talking, rather romantically, of how he’d like to take her away some time, spend a few days with just the two of them. And he said he knew a lovely place, a secret place he’d been longing to show her ever since they met.”

“Where was it?” breathed Carole.

“In Cornwall.”

§

She still felt sheepish when she got back to the Renault. Theo had compounded the impression that he was patronizing her by giving her a copy of one of Tamsin Elderfield’s paperbacks:
The Roundabout of Love
. With some force Carole threw it onto the back seat, before starting on the rush-hour crawl back to Fethering.

J
ude was round at the front door as soon as she saw the Renault slide neatly into the High Tor garage. Unaware of how Carole had spent the afternoon, she had her own news to impart.

So while her neighbour dropped her Times on the table and tried to regain favour with an aggrieved Gulliver by feeding him, Jude opened a bottle of wine and supplied edited highlights of her visit to the house in Summersdale. “But,” she concluded, “I still don’t know why I was summoned there. Bridget Locke had nothing wrong with her, but she was very determined that I should go over. I wonder what she wanted…?”

“I should think it was more a matter of what her husband wanted. Even though Bridget seems to be a strong woman, I get the impression Rowley dictates what happens in that household—and in the whole family, come to that. He’s used to getting his own way and he’ll use any means—even throwing tantrums—to ensure that that state of affairs continues.”

“All right, say she was only following orders…what was Bridget trying to find out? I imagine she must have got what she wanted before she fell asleep, because she didn’t ask me any supplementary questions afterwards.”

Carole was practical as ever. “Just go through everything she said to you again. There must’ve been something that had a special meaning for her.”

Screwing up her face with the effort of recollection, Jude reassembled the conversation that had taken place in Bridget Locke’s spare bedroom. At one point Carole interrupted her. “Well, that’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“She effectively asked you whether you and I were investigating the case.”

“I suppose she did.”

“I think that’s all she wanted—or all Rowley wanted. Confirmation that you and I were working together trying to find out who killed Kyra. And it would also tie in with the way Rowley’s kept insisting that I should tell him any new developments I’ve found out about.”

“You reckon he’s monitoring the progress of our investigation into the murder?”

“I would say that’s exactly what he’s doing, Jude. Which could mean quite a lot of things…”

“The most obvious being that he knows the truth of what happened and doesn’t want us to get too close to it.”

They were both silent as the implications of this sank in.

“I also,” said Jude eventually, “witnessed the two little Pre-Raphaelite models playing that ridiculous game.”

“Oh, God. The Wheel Quest.”

“Yes. What on earth is all that about? I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.”

“I agree. Tolkien’s got a lot to answer for,” said Carole darkly.

“You can say that again. But the girls were so caught up in the whole thing. I’m afraid I’ve never seen the attraction of all that Dungeons and Dragons nonsense or any of those fantasy computer games.”

“Be careful, Jude. Never compare the Wheel Quest to a computer game when Dorcas Locke is present. She’ll bite your head off. She did mine.”