The Fethering Mysteries 06; The Witness at the Wedding tfm-6

by Simon Brett

  Jude was waiting for them at the North Terminal. Carole had driven her up from Fethering in the Renault, but, with characteristic economy, had avoided the cost of parking and just dropped her at Departures.

  Stephen kissed his fiancée an anxious goodbye, and returned to his latest work crisis. Neither of the women needed to check bags in. They only had hand luggage: a neat executive rectangle for Gaby, and a squashy patterned fabric bag for Jude. The plan was only to be away two nights. Gaby had booked them in to the small hotel in Villeneuve-sur-Lotthat the Martins always used during their visits to Grand’mère.

  They sat down for a coffee and waited for their flight to board.

  “God,” said Gaby. “I cannot wait to be on that plane. It’ll be the first time I’ve felt really safe for ages.”

  The flight time was only an hour and thirty-five minutes, but quite a lot was achieved in that time. Though, apart from their therapy session, Gaby had only met Jude once – the evening in the Crown and Anchor when they had been joined by Phil and Bazza – there was no reticence between them. As ever, Jude’s easy presence elicited confidences. (The knowledge of this was one of the reasons why Carole had decided that her neighbour should take on the role of minder for the trip.) In spite of the age difference, Gaby soon found herself talking as though to a contemporary she had known since childhood.

  “The back’s been all right, has it, during all the nightmares of the last few weeks?”

  “Yes. It’s amazing, isn’t it, Jude? When I was under minimal stress, my back packed in. Now I’m facing real disasters, real threats, I haven’t got a twinge.”

  “I don’t find that at all amazing. Your body, or your mind, or the two of them working as a conspiracy, have decided that you need all your strength. Your being incapacitated at the moment wouldn’t serve any useful purpose. It wouldn’t remove the stress.”

  “No, that’s only going to happen when Michael Brewer’s been caught.”

  “And when the stress is removed, that’s when you’re going to have to be careful.”

  “About my back?”

  “About your back or any number of other physical symptoms which may try and get at you. If you think about it, Gaby, for the last few weeks, you’ve been putting so much energy into just keeping going, you’ve shut out all kinds of negative thoughts simply in the cause of survival. When the pressure’s off, you’ll be very vulnerable.”

  “I know what you mean. Sometimes in the past, after a sustained period of pressure, I’ve gone down with a fluey cold.”

  “And you’ve rather enjoyed that, haven’t you?”

  Gaby grinned, acknowledging Jude’s intuition. “Yes, it’s been very welcome. Snuffling round the flat, watching daytime television and endless mushy DVDs.”

  “But you only got ill when you’d completed the project in question, didn’t you? Illness has never stopped you from doing some work you had to, has it?”

  “No.” Gaby chuckled. “Why are we such idiots? Why do we let our bodies play these tricks on us? We should be able to recognize their little games. Yes, I’ve been stressed. When the stress is off, I will be ill. And yet, every time it happens, it’s like a big surprise. Same as when there’s snow in England. Everyone has always known it’s a possibility, but there’s still total shockwhen it happens, and the whole country grinds to a halt.”

  “Illness is often a very good medicine, Gaby.”

  “Mm.” The girl was thoughtful. “Maybe Mum needs a nice comfortable little illness, to make her less uptight.”

  Jude shook her head. “From what I hear of your mother, she controls things by being uptight, by being publicly uptight.”

  “I know what you mean. Everyone knows she’s nervy. You only have to meet her to know that.”

  “So instantly you have less expectation of her. I think that’s how your mother has insulated herself from the unpleasantnesses of life.”

  “You’re right. She seems very self-effacing and unassertive.”

  “But in fact the entire life of her family revolves around her.”

  Gaby nodded, as if at the confirmation of something she had always suspected.

  “Power,” Jude continued, “comes in different packages.”

  There was a silence. They both looked out of the plane window. The wide green fields of northern France – so different from the greens of England – rolled away below them. Both felt that little burst of liberation that flying can bring.

  “Do you know what changed your mother, Gaby?”

  “What do you mean – ‘changed her’?”

  “Carole met someone who’d been at school with her. Apparently, as a teenager, she was an incredibly lively personality, real life and soul of the party.”

  “Mm. I’ve always suspected there was another side to her, but I’ve never seen it.”

  “So what do you think changed her?”

  “I don’t know. Getting married? Having kids?”

  “A lot of people regard getting married and having kids as very positive experiences.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think Mum and Dad really got on very well. I mean, as a kid, you’re really too close to know what’s going on, but it was a very tense atmosphere to grow up in. I don’t know what was wrong between them, but there did seem to be something.”

  “Did your mother ever talk to you about it?”

  A firm shake of the head. “Emotions were a no-go area. Mum just got on with life, though always with the air that the whole business was a major imposition.”

  “Did she ever talk about the time when you were born?”

  “No. But I get the impression it was round then that something changed for her. Maybe it was the worry because I was premature. Maybe she got post-natal depression. I should think that’s the most likely explanation. But of course, it’s something that she would have kept quiet about. And I don’t think Dad would have been aware there was a problem – he was a sweet man, but not very sensitive to the feelings of others. I’m sure Mum would never have gone to a doctor or anyone like that for help. I’ve thought about this quite a lot, Jude, as I’m sure you can imagine, and that’s the best explanation I’ve come up with.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Jude, although she had thoughts of her own on the subject. “And your father – was he a dominant presence around the house?”

  “No. He was very quiet. I mean, he went out to work and came back in the evenings and watched television. But he was kind of…I don’t know. I wasn’t very aware of him when I was growing up.”

  “When you came to see me about your back, you mentioned that your father had had bowel cancer.”

  “Yes. What, eight years ago, I suppose? But he made a complete recovery – survived so that he could be murdered,” Gaby added bitterly.

  “You also told me that when you’d got stomach trouble, you’d been worried that it might be bowel cancer presumably because of the family history of the disease?”

  “Yes, but it was all right. I talked to Mum and – ooh, look at that big lake down there!”

  Jude duly looked in the direction of the pointing finger, wondering whether the interest of the lake was sufficient to justify the change of subject. Anyway, she wasn’t going to be side-tracked so easily.

  “Gaby – sorry to go back over unpleasant memories – but thinking back to when your father’s body was found in Epping Forest…”

  “Yes?”

  “Carole told me everything that happened. It must have been terrible for you when the body had been found, but still not identified.”

  “It was, awful. Because part of me thought, so a body’s been found in Epping Forest. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last. But, because Dad hadn’t gone back home the night before, another part of me was having all these awful fantasies which, sadly, turned out to be true.”

  “Yes. Carole said that initially the police weren’t sure how they were going to identify the body.”

  “True. Talk of DNA matches, which was
another complication, because Phil had gone missing that night, but it turned out all right. They identified Dad from his dental records and the scar where he’d had the cancer surgery.” Gaby shuddered. “Oh God, I never want to live through anything like that time again. The thought of something like that happening to Steve.”

  “It’s not going to happen to Stephen,” said Jude, automatically reassuring, while her mind raced, building up a new edifice of logic which she longed to share with Carole.

  Their conversation broadened and they started to talk about France. Clearly visits to Villeneuve-sur-Lot had featured large in Gaby’s childhood, and she spoke of her Grand’mère with deep affection.

  “How long has she been living there?”

  “She moved fairly soon after Grandpa died. I suppose I was about five or six. I don’t really remember him very well.”

  “But he was English, your grandfather?”

  “Oh yes.” Gaby hugged her knees. “I’ve always loved France. I always feel a part of me belongs here. I’m longing to show my favourite places to Steve.”

  “I’m sure you’ll soon be able to when all this is over.”

  This reminder of her situation cast a slight shadow over Gaby, so she determinedly moved the conversation on. “You said you lived in France for a while, Jude. What were you doing?”

  And, because Gaby had asked a direct question, Jude told her. She was still telling her when they arrived at Bordeaux Airport. Carole would have killed to have been there.

  ∨ The Witness at the Wedding ∧

  Thirty-Two

  You’re being stupid, Carole Seddon told herself. It was something she had told herself many times over the years. Indeed much of the interior duologue of her entire life had been castigating herself for some real or imagined lapse. Such was the penalty of being a postwar middle-class woman.

  But that morning on Fethering Beach, Carole wondered whether she really was being stupid. She had picked up Gulliver as soon as she got back to High Tor from Gatwick, and taken him straight out for his walk. He was, as ever on the beach, in canine nirvana. He scuttled around on missions of desperate urgency, whose purposes he kept forgetting. He faced up to the threats of weed-fringed plastic bottles, and boldly challenged strips of khaki bladderwrack to single combat.

  The day was sunny, June getting seriously warm as July approached.

  And Carole Seddon could not get out of her head the feeling that she was being watched.

  Stephen’s PA had arranged a hire car for Gaby and Jude to pick up at Bordeaux Airport. Gaby drove. She knew the way to Villeneuve-sur-Lot; it was a route she had followed many times before. And, besides, Jude had not been behind the wheel of a car for a long time.

  The first part of the journey was motorway, not that different from a motorway in any other part of the world. The service stations, stacked with knick-knacks and souvenirs, were different from English ones, but not as different as when Jude had last been in France. She regretted the homogenization of Europe. How far would you have to go at the beginning of the twenty-first century to find somewhere that felt foreign?

  Things improved when they left the motorway and pottered through small towns, past distant vineyards and dusty fields of tobacco. Painted signs to restaurants offered untold gastronomic delights. But even in the countryside, the multinational logos on petrol pumps and hoardings diluted the sense of being abroad. Jude thought back wistfully to her first visit to France as a teenager, when everything, from the bedclothes to the taps, to the sugar-lumps, to the bitter black chocolate, to the previously unheard-of yoghourt, to the corrugated iron cars, breathed the excitement of foreignness.

  Conversation with Gaby continued to flow. They didn’t talk of anything momentous, just their shared love of France and the uncompromising arrogance of the French.

  They stopped in Villeneuve-sur-Lot to pick up some fruit as a gift for Grand’mère, and found they had arrived on a busy market day. This felt more authentic, the profusion of fruits and vegetables on the stalls, the variegated beans and greens, the strings of plump purple garlic. Huge slabs of unknown cheeses were on offer, giant skin-straining sausages, olive oil in plastic mineral water bottles, infinite arrays of herbs and nuts. Yet even these were not as exotic as they once had been. Most of the goods would be available in any large English Sainsbury’s.

  There were a few individual touches. Live chickens with trussed legs, and rabbits shut in tiny boxes defied English sensibilities. A few ancient crones sat over trays offering handfuls of meagre root vegetables. But set against these survivals of peasant tradition were the omnipresent stalls selling replica designer T-shirts, CDs, DVDs and the other initialized technology of the twenty-first century. The music that blared from the speakers was American.

  Nor could the crowd of sellers and buyers be characterized as uniquely French. The ethnic mix was much more varied since the last time Jude had been at a French country market. Tall deep black North Africans and women in saris mingled with the locals. In the crowd, bright Romany skirts balanced the severity of Muslim headgear.

  Jude knew the development was good, that the only future for the world lay in the celebration of its diversity. But she could not suppress a slight nostalgia for the days when countries felt different, when you could recognize a person’s nationality by theirfootwear, before the ubiquitous trainer achieved world domination.

  As she had the thought, she smiled inwardly, thinking of the robustness and lack of political correctness with which Carole would undoubtedly have expressed not dissimilar views.

  The retirement home was an old farmhouse, most of whose land had been long sold off, one of those four-square symmetrical buildings with tall windows flanked by neat white shutters. This, at least, thought Jude, as Gaby brought the car to rest in the visitors’ car park, is archetypally French.

  The smartly suited woman on reception instantly recognized Gaby, and, once her travelling companion had been introduced, a flurry of voluble greetings ensued. Jude was pleasantly surprised by how readily her understanding of French returned, though she feared fluency of speech might take longer. Despite the unhappiness in which her two-year sojourn in France had ended, she still felt a charge to be back among French speakers.

  The receptionist said she’d better show them the way to Gaby’s ‘belle Grand’mère’, because she had changed rooms since the girl’s last visit, “now she cannot move around so well.” Gaby would probably see a change in the old lady, “But she still manages, and is grateful for every day she remains with us.”

  The room was at the back of the building. The bed was empty, a wheelchair stood by the French windows, and a blanket-wrapped Grand’mère was propped up in a lounger on a small balcony that looked over fields to the dark green edge of a forest. The balcony could be completely glassed in, but that warm June day one window was open and the room was full of the smells of outdoors.

  “Your visitor has arrived, Madame Coleman,” said the receptionist, as Gaby rushed forward to greet her grandmother, wrapping the frail body in her plump arms. After much excited banter and the ceremonious handover of the fruit from Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Jude was introduced. There seemed no problem in her being there. No explanation of her presence was requested or given.

  When she got a chance to look at the old lady, she was struck by the family likeness, emphasized by Grand’mère’s fragility. Marie’s prematurely pinched face was uncannily reflected in the old lady’s age-eroded features. The short-sighted vagueness in the faded eyes was also reminiscent of her daughter. And the tight perm – she was evidently very well soignée by the staff at the home – echoed her granddaughter’s bubbly curls.

  Grand’mère and Gaby spoke instinctively in French, but Jude did not have too much difficulty in keeping up. She was surprised by how on the ball the old lady seemed. From what Carole had passed on of Marie and Robert’s opinions, she had been expecting someone totally blind and in the last stages of Alzheimer’s. But, though physically very frail and with
limited vision, there seemed to be nothing wrong with the old lady’s mental processes.

  And for her, there was no question of hergranddaughter being called ‘Gaby’. Her birth name was Pascale, and that is what she was called. Gaby did not argue; she had learnt over the years not to challenge the old lady’s formidable will.

  After the initial affectionate greetings, Grand’mère said how shocked she had been to hear of Howard Martin’s death. “It is terrible that once again the happiness of our family should be darkened by the shadow of murder.”

  “Yes.” As she agreed, Gaby looked straight at Jude. There was a lot of meaning in her look. Although they had never discussed the subject, the girl knew that Carole and Jude had taken more than a casual interest in the two recent murders and were desperate for explanations. Part of Carole’s motivation for the trip had been removing the threat to her future daughter-in-law, but the two neighbours were also caught up in the fascination of the puzzle for its own sake. Gaby’s look at Jude seemed to say that she knew all that, and that she too wanted to use the visit to find out a few basic truths about her tainted family history.

  “You know, Grand’mère,” she said firmly, “that the police believe Michael Brewer killed Dad.”

  “That is the way the police think, in every country. Here in France too. The person who has committed one murder is the first suspect when another murder occurs.” She sighed. “Yes. It is thirty years. He has served his sentence for his wickedness, and now is the time for the next stage of the process. Evil cannot be hidden for ever. He caused so much pain to our family.”

  “Did you know Michael Brewer well?” The question was instinctive; only once she’d spoken did Jude realize that her interposition into a family discussion might be out of place. But Grand’mère seemed either not to notice or, if she did, not to mind.

  “Oh yes. My husband was very keen on shooting. Mick was a gamekeeper. They would shoot together. Often they would make a night of it, drive round, I think, in Land Rovers with big lights, you know, to shoot rabbits. And then they would go off somewhere to drink. Mick had drink stashed away somewhere on the estate. Always, after my husband went off shooting at night with Mick Brewer, he came back drunk. I did not approve of this.” The asperity in the last line reminded Jude of the old lady’s reputation for strictness on moral matters.