The Corpse on the Court (5 page)

Jude might have come in with a follow-up question, but Piers didn't give her time. ‘Since we've got to this confessional moment, I suppose I should check out your marital status too. Are you married?'

‘Not currently.'

‘Suggesting that you have been . . .?'

‘Twice. Two marriages and two neat, matching divorces.'

‘Ah.' Piers Targett nodded. ‘Good. Well, that's cleared the air a bit.'

But as she travelled on the train from Victoria to Fethering, Jude wondered whether it had. She didn't love Piers any the less, she didn't regret a second of the past fortnight's love and love-making. It was just that their relationship had moved up to a different level. A level that was no less serious, but perhaps more grown-up. After two weeks of intense one-on-one, they now had to find out whether their relationship could survive in the wider world, a world of other people and other responsibilities.

And baggage. Nobody could get to the age that she and Piers Targett had reached without accumulating quite a lot of baggage.

When Carole Seddon returned from her walk on Fethering Beach that morning, it was with a new sense of purpose. Though still hurt by what she could only think of as Jude's defection, she'd decided that the only way out of her present doldrums was by being more proactive. She must get something going for herself to fill the days.

And it wasn't going to be salsa classes or Spanish conversation. There was no point in trying to get herself enthused about something in which she had no interest.

But a subject that did intrigue her was the solving of crimes. It was an undertaking on which she had in the past collaborated with Jude. But since that was no longer an option, she would have to proceed on her own. And indeed solving a crime on her own would give her quite a charge, a secret snub to her uncaring neighbour.

Carole Seddon's training in the Home Office had encouraged in her a natural tendency for the efficient organization of information. Her filing systems had always been immaculate, and when she became converted to the wonders of computers that offered even more opportunities for the management of directories and subdirectories.

On the shelves of the spare room where she kept the laptop (still perversely unwilling to acknowledge the machine's portability), Carole also had box-files of neatly catalogued newspaper clippings. Anything to do with murder in the West Sussex area. Occasional extracts from her daily
Times
, more frequent cuttings from the
Fethering Observer
and
West Sussex Gazette
.

Carole knew exactly which file to take down from the shelf and which folder to take out and open on the spare bedroom's table.

It was the dossier she had compiled on the unsolved crime known locally as ‘The Fedborough Lady in the Lake Murder'.

T
he body had been found seven years previously. That summer was an exceptionally dry one, prompting dark mutterings from Fethering locals about global warming. The arid conditions had nearly dried up some of West Sussex's smaller streams. Even the strong tidal flow of the River Fether had been considerably diminished. There were panics about receding reservoirs and many village ponds shrank, exposing their muddy margins.

This had also been the fate of Fedborough Lake. On the outskirts of the town, a large expanse of water only separated from the river by a road, it was popular with tourists and dog walkers. A complete circuit of the lake made a pleasant twenty-minute stroll. Rowing boats and pedalos could be hired from the lakeside café which normally throughout the summer did a roaring trade in ice creams, crisps and Sussex cream teas.

But that year trade had been slack. As Fedborough Lake dried up, weedy mud banks were exposed and, quite frankly, stank.

The human remains that had been found were too degraded to add to the general stink, but they too were revealed by the receding water.

For once it wasn't a dog-walker who found them. That was the local cliché. Whenever a body was found, the report in the
West Sussex Gazette
would always begin: ‘A woman out walking her dog made an unpleasant discovery . . .'

But no, on this occasion it had been one of the men who looked after the Fedborough Lake boats. Business was slack because no one wanted to venture out on to the noisome water, so he used his enforced idleness to clear some of the debris exposed on the muddy banks. He loaded his wheelbarrow with a predictable selection of bottles, polystyrene burger boxes, punctured footballs, slimy plastic toys . . . and then he found what was unmistakably a human femur.

At the time the discovery had caused a huge media furore, which had subsequently died away from lack of information. According to Carole's archive, the identity of the Lady in the Lake had never been established. Which made finding out what had happened to her an almost impossible task.

And Carole Seddon couldn't think of anything better to shake her out of her current torpor than an impossible task.

She also realized that she had collected her clippings on the case back in the now-unimaginable days when she hadn't had a laptop. She had never even Googled the Fedborough Lady in the Lake. How times had changed. Carole, for many years having pooh-poohed the very idea of computers, had now become addicted to the new technology. There was in her personality an obsessive strand – some people who knew her might even have described it as obsessive-compulsive. Along with her paranoia about dirt and untidiness, she suffered from a meticulous attention to detail . . . except of course, being Carole Seddon, she wouldn't have seen it as suffering.

She had entered the words ‘Fedborough Lady in the Lake' into the search engine without much optimism. The trail must long have gone cold. She anticipated finding a few references to old newspaper reports, the clippings she already had in hard copy form, but not a lot else.

She had, however, underestimated the tenacity of the curious. It soon became apparent that, to a lot of people, the Lady in the Lake case was still very much alive. And if she herself had obsessive tendencies, they paled into insignificance when compared to some of the people out in the blogosphere.

It took some time before Carole got to the personal stuff. As she had expected, the first few hundred entries in Google were just newspaper reportage of the case. But eventually she reached the postings of unqualified individuals, and it soon became clear that some of the more extreme views had to be discounted. Venting their opinions online offered a wonderful new platform to the kind of letter-writers who used to use green ink with a lot of capital letters and exclamation marks. But once Carole had weeded out the seriously unhinged, she found some ideas that were worthy of consideration.

A lot of the postings were very sad. As she read them, Carole became aware of how dreadful it must be when a family member or friend simply vanishes without a trace. In some of the online writers there was a desperation. The hope of seeing the missing person alive again was long gone, all the bereaved asked for was a kind of closure, the confirmation of their worst fears. A surprising number of people wanted to claim the Lady in the Lake as their own.

Carole had opened up a Word file and was starting to make some notes on her findings when she heard the front doorbell ring. She consulted her watch and was surprised to see that nearly three hours had passed since she first sat down in front of the laptop. And that meant three hours during which she had avoided self-pity and recrimination.

Those two emotions, however, returned forcibly when Carole Seddon opened the front door of High Tor. Because standing in front of it was Jude.

‘Oh, I hadn't really noticed you'd been away,' said Carole with studied insouciance.

They were sitting in the bar of the Crown and Anchor. In one of the alcoves, each facing a large glass of Chilean Chardonnay. At first Carole had demurred at the suggestion of going for a late lunch at the pub, but Jude had been at her persuasive best and, besides, Carole was desperately curious to know where her neighbour had been for the previous two weeks.

As she was travelling down on the train from Victoria, Jude had decided that her approach would be very simple. It wasn't in her nature to play games. She would tell Carole straight away about her new relationship, and resign herself to whatever fence-mending and bridge-building efforts then became necessary.

But actually being with Carole didn't make it easy to carry out that plan. Jude felt an uncharacteristic upsurge of guilt. Now she was away from Piers Targett, it seemed inconceivable that during the last two weeks she hadn't found a moment to pick up her mobile and call her neighbour. Where had the time gone?

‘And you've been all right, have you, Carole?' she asked. ‘You know, since I last saw you?'

‘Oh yes, never anything wrong with me,' came the brisk, lying reply. ‘You know how it is. I've been busy, busy, busy.'

Someone else might have asked what she'd been busy doing, but Jude was too sensitive to do that. She knew about the deep-frozen loneliness that lay at the centre of her neighbour's heart. ‘Have you seen Stephen and family?'

‘No, I told you,' Carole replied sharply. ‘They're in California.'

‘Oh yes, sorry, I forgot.'

‘Taking Lily to various Disney theme parks.' She couldn't keep the disapproval out of her voice. Nor could she prevent herself from adding, ‘For which I'm sure she'll be far too young. But then, of course, children aren't allowed to have a proper childhood any more, are they?'

There were some pronouncements from Carole with which, Jude had learned over the years of their friendship, it was just not worth taking issue. So she just said, ‘No.'

A silence was suspended between them. Which was unusual. Though Carole could be spiky at times, they rarely had a problem finding things to talk about.

Eventually Jude said, ‘I was introduced to real tennis on Sunday.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Real tennis. The game. Precursor of lawn tennis. Been around for centuries. You know, Hampton Court . . . saggy net . . . King Henry VIII . . .'

‘Oh yes, I've heard of it. How on earth did you get involved?' Carole looked beadily at her neighbour. ‘Was it because of some man?'

There was never going to be a better cue than that and Jude was about to explain everything when she was interrupted by the arrival of the Crown and Anchor's landlord, Ted Crisp, bearing the piled-up plates of their lunch. Both had ordered the dish of the day, smoked haddock with bubble and squeak and a poached egg on top.

Unkempt as ever, bearded, haystack-haired, Ted put the plates down in front of them. ‘You'll like this,' he said. ‘Chef's best. Haven't seen you two for a while.'

‘Jude's been away,' Carole responded tartly. ‘Somewhere.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Well, I . . .' Jude found herself blushing. And she never blushed.

‘Never mind, your secret's safe with me. Anyway, just heard this new joke . . .'

‘Oh dear,' said Carole.

‘What's E.T. short for?'

‘I don't know,' Jude came back at him in music hall style. ‘What is E.T. short for?'

‘Because he's got little legs!' Ted Crisp replied with a loud guffaw, and then went off to serve at the bar.

Jude laughed and then explained the joke to Carole, who didn't find it funny even when she understood it.

Then they got involved in eating their lunch, which was excellent. Ed Pollack, the Crown and Anchor's chef, really was going from strength to strength.

The two women ate in silence, which was not unusual but was uncomfortable for Jude. She normally felt so serene, so secure in her own skin, that she wasn't used to the sensations of a simpering schoolgirl. She found herself wishing that when their conversation did finally resume, Carole would have forgotten the point where it had broken off.

It was, however, evident as her neighbour finished the last scrapings of her lunch, laid knife and fork strictly parallel on her plate, dabbed at her mouth with her paper napkin and asked pointedly, ‘So who was it who introduced you to real tennis?'

‘Well, it was—'

At that moment Jude's mobile rang. She snatched it out of her pocket and saw that the call came from Piers Targett. ‘I must just get this,' she said, abruptly standing up and moving towards the pub door.

‘There's a perfectly good signal in here,' Carole called after her, and as Jude moved outside she could feel her neighbour's reproachful eyes boring into her back.

‘H
ello, Jude love. I've missed you,' said Piers' voice. ‘We've been apart now for . . . what? Getting on for four hours, got to be. Don't you ever leave me for so long again.'

‘You are such a smoothie, Piers. And your chat-up lines are cheesier than a month-old Gorgonzola.'

‘I know. Amazing that they still work, isn't it?'

‘Amazing.' Jude giggled. ‘I've missed you too.'

‘Well, don't worry. I have arranged our next encounter.'

‘Oh, really?'

‘Yes. We will meet next on Wednesday morning.'

‘Will we?' Jude was quite relieved. She would have liked to see him sooner, but she really needed the next day to get some kind of normality back into her life. Though the cleaning regime she imposed on Woodside Cottage was minimal – certainly compared to the scouring to which Carole subjected High Tor on a daily basis – it still had to be done. And there were messages on her answering machine that needed responses. Clients who depended on her, needed her services.

‘So where are we going to meet?' she asked.

‘Lockleigh House tennis court.'

‘Oh?'

‘I am continuing your education, Jude. Yesterday you saw real tennis for the first time. On Wednesday you're going to play real tennis for the first time.'