Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer (3 page)

“You know I prefer to use the word ‘client’,” Jude responded calmly. It wasn’t in her nature to take issue about such matters. She knew that healing worked. Some people shared her opinion; Some were violently opposed to it. Jude was prepared to have her case made by successful results rather than verbal argument. And she knew that depriving Carole of her scepticism about healing would take away one of the pillars of bluster that supported her prickly, fragile personality. “But no,” she went on, “I haven’t treated Connie. I just know her from chatting while I’ve been having my hair done.”

“Well, she volunteered to me that she was divorced—and that the divorce hadn’t taken place under the happiest of circumstances…”

“What divorce does?”

Carole did not pick up on this. Though some ten years old, her own divorce from David was still an area as sensitive as an infected tooth. And lurking at the back of her mind was a new anxiety. Her son Stephen’s wife Gaby was soon to give birth. Grandparenthood might mean that Carole was forced into even more contact with David. Resolutely dispelling such ugly thoughts from her mind, she went on, “And I gather that she and…what was her husband’s name?…Martin, that’s right…used to own Connie’s Clip Joint together, but now he’s got a rather more successful set-up…”

“That’s an understatement. He owns Martin & Martina. You must have seen their salons.”

“Oh, yes, I have. I’d never particularly paid attention to them, but they’ve got that big swirly silver logo, haven’t they? There’s one in Worthing.”

“Worthing, Brighton, Chichester, Horsham, Midhurst, Newhaven, Eastbourne, Hastings. Martin Rutherford seems to have the whole of the South Coast sewn up.”

“So every time Connie sees one of his salons, it must rather rub salt in the wound of the divorce.”

“Yes, Carole. Particularly since the name of the woman he left her for was Martina.”

“Ah. Not so much rubbing salt as rubbing her nose in it.” Carole tapped her chin reflectively. She was relaxing. The Chardonnay and Jude’s calming presence were distancing her from the horrors of the morning. “And has Connie found her equivalent of Martina? Has she got someone else?”

“No one permanent, as far as I know. I think she has had a few tentative encounters, but from what she said, most of them had a lot in common with car crashes. I don’t think Connie’s a great picker when it comes to men.”

“Pity. Because she seems to have a pleasant personality…You know, under the professional hairdresser banter…”

“Yes, she’s a lovely girl. And very pretty. Always beautifully groomed.”

“Well, she wasn’t this morning. No make-up, hair scrunched up any-old-how.”

“Really?” Jude looked thoughtful. “That’s most unlike her. I wonder why…”

“No idea. She implied she would have done her make-up in the salon…you know if Kyra hadn’t been late…”

“Unfortunate choice of words in the circumstances, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” The thought brought Carole up short. The screen of her mind was once again filled by the contorted, immobile face, and she felt the reality of what had happened. Someone had deliberately cut short a young girl’s life.

“Did you know her? Kyra?”

“She washed my hair last time I was in the salon. Didn’t say much. Rather shy, I thought. Or maybe she was concentrating on learning the basics of practical hairdressing before she moved on to the refinements of inane client chatter. So, no, I can’t really say I knew her.”

“Theo mentioned there was a boyfriend. Did Kyra say anything about anyone special in her life?”

Jude shook her head. “Poor boy. I should think the police would be getting very heavy with him.”

“Yes. He’d be the obvious first port of call. And from the look of the back room of the salon, Kyra had been entertaining someone there. Empty bottles, beer cans, you know…”

“Adolescent passions are very confusing…they can so easily get out of hand,” said Jude, with sympathy.

“Yes,” Carole agreed, without any.

“Hm.” Jude refilled their glasses. Still Carole made no demur. “So we’re back in our usual position when faced with a murder…total lack of information.”

“And not much likelihood of getting any,” Carole agreed gloomily.

“Oh, there may be ways…”

“Like…?”

“Well, obviously Connie’s Clip Joint is going to be closed for a few days. It is a Scene of Crime, after all. But, assuming it does reopen…I think I should have a haircut.” Jude shook her precarious topknot; it threatened to unravel, but the knitting needles just managed to keep it in place. “I could certainly do with one.”

“So what’s the word on the street?”

“How should I know?” Ted Crisp replied gruffly. “I never go out on the street if I can help it.”

“All right,” said Jude patiently. “What’s the word in the Crown and Anchor?”

“Ah, that’s a different matter entirely.” Irregular teeth showed through the thicket of his beard in a broad grin. “What happens in the pub I
do
know about. In fact, not a lot goes on in here that I don’t know about. And there’s not a lot said in here that I don’t hear either.”

“Well then,” said Carole with less patience than her neighbour, “what is being said in here about the strangling in Connie’s Clip Joint?”

Deliberately delaying his reply, the landlord took a long swallow from his beer mug. It was near closing time, the only part of the day when he allowed himself any alcohol. He’d watched too many landlords drink away their health and profits to start any earlier. “There is a general consensus,” Ted began slowly, “that the girl’s boyfriend dunnit.”

“And is that based on anything more substantial than speculation?”

“Well, Carole, speculation is obviously the biggest part of what people are thinking, but there are a few other details that might point in the same direction.”

“Like what?” asked Jude. “We know nothing about the boyfriend, not even his name.”

“That I can supply. Nathan Locke. Sixteen…seventeen. Still at college, somewhere in Chichester. Parents live here in Fethering. I’ve seen him in the pub.”

“With Kyra?”

“Really can’t remember. Those students tend to come in mob-handed, hard to tell which one’s which or who belongs to who. And I’m so busy watching out for which ones of them are underage that I’m not concentrating on much else. The photo of the girl they showed on the television news looked vaguely familiar, but whether I’d seen her with anyone particular, I couldn’t say. Certainly not as part of a regular couple.”

“She looked rather different from the photo on the news. She’d had some piercing done oh her lips and eyebrows,” said Carole, for whom the image was uncomfortably recent. There was always something poignant about photographs of young murder victims—particularly girls—when they appeared in the media. Frequently they were out of date, posed school pictures of children who didn’t look old enough to inspire adult passions. Which only seemed to make their fate more painful.

“What was her surname?” asked Ted. “I must’ve heard it on the news, but it was in one ear, out the other.”

“Bartos,” Jude supplied.

“Oh yes, I knew it was something foreign. ‘Bartos’…now where do you reckon that would come from? Spain perhaps…? South America…?”

“Originally maybe, but there’s such a variety of surnames in this country, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s ‘foreign’.”

Ted took Jude’s reproof on board. “Yeah, OK, but it is an unusual name.”

“So’s Crisp.”

“Nonsense. There’s Crisps everywhere. Behind this bar here I’ve got salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, barbecue, smoky bacon—”

The two women groaned as one, both aware of the huge blessing the world had received when Ted Crisp gave up being a stand-up comedian.

Carole was quick to put such frivolity in its proper place. “Bartos still sounds a foreign name to me.”

“Everything sounds foreign to you, Carole.” It was an uncharacteristically sharp response from Jude. Usually she let her neighbour’s prejudices pass without comment.

“Well, it’s true. Bartos doesn’t sound English.”

Jude couldn’t resist the tease. “And does Seddon?”

And Carole couldn’t resist the affronted knee-jerk reaction. “Seddon is very definitely an old English name. It’s been around since at least the fourteenth century. And it’s common in Lancashire.”

“I thought you thought everything in Lancashire was common.”

“Jude! If you—”

Ted Crisp was forced into the unusual role of peacemaker. “Don’t know what’s got into you two tonight. Can we just leave it that ‘Bartos’ is a slightly unusual surname and could possibly be of foreign origin?”

“Very well,” said Carole huffily.

Jude just smiled.

“Anyway, Ted…” Carole reasserted her position as a serious investigator. “You said you knew something about the boyfriend…? Nathan Locke.”

“Only, as I say, that he did come in here sometimes.”

“He must have been quite a regular for you to know his name,” Jude observed.

“No, but one of my regulars does know him fairly well. Lives down the street from his family.”

“Who is the regular?”

Ted Crisp gestured over towards one of the pub’s booths, in which an old man mournfully faced the last few centimetres of his beer. “Les Constantine. Holds the Crown and Anchor All-Comers Record for the longest time making a pint last.”

“Could you introduce him?” asked Jude.

“He may not want to talk to us,” said Carole, her natural distrust of strangers asserting itself.

“You buy him a pint and he’ll want to talk to you all right. Buy him a pint and he’ll tell you anything you want.”

“Haven’t you called ‘Time’, though, Ted? You can’t serve him, can you?”

“Listen, Carole, I’m landlord of the Crown and Anchor. I can do what I like.” He lumbered across towards the booth. “Oy, Les, couple of ladies want to buy you a drink.”

The old man looked up lugubriously. “They’re probably only after my body.”

“Do you find that’s what it usually is with women?”

“Oh yes.”

He moved daintily towards them. He was quite short and his long-lasting pints of beer hadn’t put any flesh on his thin bones. He wore a dark grey suit which shone here and there from too much ironing, and a broad sixties flowered tie in a neat Windsor knot under a frayed collar. But though the clothes had seen better days, everything was spotlessly clean.

Ted made the introductions and set a full pint in Les’s hand. Carole waited for a grateful mouthful to be downed before asking, “So you actually know Nathan Locke?”

The old man looked disappointed. “Oh, so you mean it wasn’t my body you were after?”

“Just a few questions first, then we’ll get on to the sex. What do you fancy—a threesome with the two of us?”

Carole was appalled by the suggestion, but once again was forced to admire Jude’s uncanny skill of hitting the right note with people. That kind of outrageous badinage was the response Les Constantine wanted; she had instantly tuned in to his wavelength.

“All right,” he wheezed. “We’ll sort out the fine-tuning later…you know, “Your place or mine?” How’s that?”

“Sounds perfect.”

“Sounds perfect to me too, Jude.” He relished the taste of her name on his lips. “So what can I do you for? Presumably you’re interested in the boy because of what happened down the hairdresser’s?”

“Well, yes.”

“You and everyone else in Fethering. Yes, suddenly—just thanks to a geographical accident, living down the road from the boy—I’m very popular.” He took another swig of beer. “Not the first free pint I’ve got this evening for my…inside knowledge, is it, Ted?”

The landlord guffawed agreement, and for a moment Carole wondered whether they had been seduced into a handy little scam between publican and customer. Then, with a wink, Ted Crisp wandered off to collect up glasses from the slowly emptying tables.

“I live in Marine Villas,” Les went on. “You know where I mean?”

“Parallel to Beach Road, running down to the Fether.”

“That’s it. I been there nearly forty years now. With the wife Iris I was, till she passed away…1999 that was.” The recollection still caused him a pang. “Anyway, the Lockes moved in about a year after that. Nathan was, I don’t know, ten, maybe younger. Nice kid, not one of these that’s always causing trouble and nicking your dustbins and throwing McDonald wrappers in your front garden and that. More interested in books and schoolwork, I gather. Whole family’s a bit arty-farty, from what I hear.”

“So do you actually know Nathan?”

“Just to say hello to. Not bosom pals, but in a street like Marine Villas…well, you hear a bit about everyone’s business. Like, I suppose, most of them know about everything I get up to…that is, except for the Torture Chamber in the cellar and the Dominatrix, obviously.”

“Oh, I’d heard rumours about her,” said Jude, again finding exactly the right level.

“Blimey O’Reilly! You can’t keep anything secret in a place like this, can you?” He shook his head at the prurience of Fethering residents.

“Anyway,” Carole pressed on, “do you know anything about Nathan Locke’s relationship with Kyra Bartos?”

“She’s the dead girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

This time the headshake was more measured and regretful. “Heartbreaking, isn’t it? Kid like that. Got everything ahead of her…you know, could have been a mum, had lots of kiddies…and this, it kind of all stops it, doesn’t it? I saw that photo of her they had on the telly…just a little girl. Reminded me a bit of my Iris when I first met her…We used to do our courting in Brighton…nice dance hall there was there then…” With a more resolute shake of his head, he jolted himself out of maudlin reminiscence. “Anyway, what was the question? Did I know anything about Nathan’s ‘relationship’ with the dead girl? Not really. Just heard along the old Marine Villas bush telegraph that he’d got this girlfriend who worked up the hairdresser’s…General feeling was that it was good news, because he’d always had a reputation of being a bit bookish, you know, coming from an arty-farty family, apparently hoping to go to university and that…and I think everyone thought he deserved a bit of fun, like. ‘All work and no play’…you know what they say.”