The Corpse on the Court

by Simon Brett

  ‘Did Reggie commission it for you?’ asked Jude.

  ‘No, my parents had it done. Before Reggie and I had met. Part of being a debutante.’ She shuddered at the memory. ‘It was a vital ingredient in my parents’ sales pitch to entrap a suitable husband for me.’

  ‘And was Reggie that suitable husband?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. Not in their eyes. My father was an earl, I’m afraid. When I started going round with Reggie, they very definitely thought I was slumming.’

  ‘Was he of very humble origins?’ asked Carole.

  ‘By their standards, not by anybody else’s. No title, you see. And only from a minor public school. Then he was very successful in the City, which they thought was a bit infra dig.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Stockbroker.’

  ‘Was he still . . .?’ asked Jude. ‘I mean, had he retired?’

  ‘Oh yes, in theory he retired about seven years ago. The company was sold off back then. But Reggie still spent a lot of the time studying the markets and dealing. It was his hobby, really. Though he was doing it with our money rather than other people’s.’ As if anticipating a question they were too tactful to ask, she continued. ‘Very successfully. I have no reason to complain.’ She looked around at her beautiful surroundings with some satisfaction.

  Carole and Jude were both struck by how composed she seemed for a woman whose husband had died the previous day. But then British aristocrats were not renowned for wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

  ‘Anyway . . .’ Oenone’s tone changed to a more businesslike one, ‘I told Jude on the phone about the recommendation Suzy Longthorne gave for your investigative skills. I gather up at the Hopwicke you solved a murder for her. Obviously this case is nothing like that –’ Carole and Jude exchanged almost imperceptible looks – ‘but Reggie’s death has left me with some unanswered questions.’

  ‘Including, no doubt,’ said Jude, ‘the one that’s been puzzling me. What was he doing at the tennis court at that time of day?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I mean, that seems to me to be the most obvious thing anyone would have asked. And yet all the time I was there yesterday morning nobody asked it. And I had lunch with some of the members yesterday . . .’

  ‘Really? Who?’

  ‘Wally, who you introduced me to on Sunday, and three others.’

  ‘Oh, the Old Boys. Of course, yes, they do their doubles on a Wednesday morning. So you were at the Lockleigh Arms?’

  ‘Mm. And I kept trying to get on to the subject of what Reggie was doing there, but they kind of avoided answering it, almost as if I was asking something distasteful. Even Piers wasn’t very helpful when I asked him last night.’

  Carole pounced on the little detail. ‘Did Piers stay with you last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jude replied wearily.

  ‘Oh,’ said Carole, as only Carole could say ‘Oh’.

  ‘That in a way,’ said Oenone Playfair, ‘is what worries me about the situation.’

  ‘Sorry? What do you mean?’ asked Jude.

  ‘The way the men are all clamming up. It suggests to me that they probably do know what Reggie was up to, and it’s something he shouldn’t have been up to.’

  ‘Isn’t it also possible,’ suggested Carole, ‘that they don’t know what he was up to, but they’re clamming up because they think he might have been up to something he shouldn’t have been up to?’

  Oenone conceded the possibility. ‘Yes, men do that, don’t they?’

  ‘Let’s work back from when you last saw him,’ said Jude. ‘Did you see him before he left the house yesterday morning?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh?’ Carole was instantly alert.

  ‘No, but I wasn’t expecting to. We’d said our goodbyes, such as they were, the previous day.’ Catching sight of the expression on Carole’s face, she explained, ‘There’s nothing sinister about it. We have a flat in town. On Tuesday evening Reggie was going to a dinner at his livery company. When he does that he leaves the car at Pulborough and takes the train up to London. So he went off after lunch on Tuesday.’ For a brief moment there was a slight tremor in her voice as she said, ‘That was the last time I saw him.’

  ‘And do you know whether he actually made it to the dinner?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Yes, I called a friend who’s a member of the same livery company. Reggie had definitely been there at the dinner – and apparently in raucous good form, as only he can be – could be.’ She made the correction automatically, not wishing to give way again to emotion.

  ‘Would there have been anyone at your flat, who might have seen when he left there – or indeed if he arrived there?’

  Oenone Playfair shook her head. ‘No, there’s no concierge or anyone there. And we hardly know the owners of the other flats. I suppose it’s possible that someone might have seen Reggie arrive or leave, but it’s unlikely.’

  ‘What about the clothes he was wearing? Had he changed after the dinner?’

  ‘No, he hadn’t. I . . .’ Again the slightest of tremors. ‘I saw him at the hospital yesterday. And they . . . gave me his clothes. The shirt he was wearing was the one he’d worn to the dinner. Reggie always insists on wearing a clean shirt every day. And clean boxer shorts.’

  ‘So the implication,’ said Carole, ‘is that he perhaps didn’t go to your London flat.’

  ‘He may have gone there. But he certainly didn’t sleep there.’

  ‘So he could have gone down to the court any time after the dinner ended,’ suggested Jude.

  ‘Well, just a minute, no,’ Carole objected. ‘Remember he’d left his car at Pulborough Station. Assuming the livery dinner ended too late for him to have got the last train back from Victoria . . .’

  ‘Which it certainly would have done,’ Oenone confirmed. ‘I’ve been to those dinners when they have ladies’ nights and, God, do they go on? Also, the friend I spoke to said that when he left, round eleven thirty, Reggie was very much still there, in his customary role as the life and soul of the party.’ Some slight nuance in her voice suggested that that was one aspect of her late husband’s character she wouldn’t miss too much.

  ‘So . . .’ Carole pieced things together slowly, ‘unless for some reason your husband got a taxi or a lift from someone down to Pulborough, he couldn’t have picked up his car until the first train of the morning had got there. If I had my laptop here, I could check what time that is.’

  Except of course, thought Jude, you never move the laptop out of the spare room at High Tor, do you?

  Oenone Playfair, however, had the relevant information locked into her memory. ‘There’s a five fifteen train from Victoria – I’ve had to catch it on a few occasions. Gets into Pulborough at six thirty-four.’

  ‘And how long would it have taken your husband to get from the station to the tennis court?’ asked Carole.

  ‘A quarter of an hour, if that.’

  ‘So he could have been there round ten to seven,’ said Jude, ‘which would be about three-quarters of an hour before Piers and I got there.’

  ‘Did Piers and you arrive together?’ asked Carole with some sharpness.

  ‘No, he was there when the taxi dropped me.’

  ‘And how long had he been there?’

  ‘I assumed he’d just arrived.’

  ‘But you don’t know that?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Jude looked at her neighbour with slight puzzlement. She knew that Carole resented the appearance of Piers Targett in her life, but surely she wouldn’t be crass enough deliberately to build up suspicion of him?

  Carole seemed to read her thoughts and said, ‘I’m sorry, but these are the kind of questions we’d be asking if there was nobody we knew involved.’

  Jude nodded, accepting the point. ‘Yes, all right, I don’t know how long Piers had been there.’

  ‘But you can ask him,’ said Oenone.

  ‘Of course.’ But Jude wondered if that was another s
ubject on which she might find her lover evasive.

  ‘Presumably,’ said Carole, ‘if your husband had caught the train from Victoria, there’d be CCTV footage of him at the station. That could be checked.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Oenone.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, who would check it?’

  ‘The police, presumably.’

  The older woman sat back in astonishment. ‘The police? Why on earth should it have anything to do with the police?’

  ‘Well, they—’

  ‘There’s no crime involved here. Reggie died of a heart attack, there’s not much doubt about that, after a dinner where he, typically, over-indulged himself. God knows he’d had enough warnings. Saw the quack only last week and had another lecture about changing his lifestyle.’

  ‘So if he’s seen the doctor that recently,’ said Carole, ‘there won’t have to be an inquest.’ She was good at details like that.

  ‘Won’t there? Thank God for small mercies. Anyway, for heaven’s sake, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to involve you two in a criminal investigation. I’m just – as any widow would be – curious about how my husband spent his last hours. And I thought maybe you could help me out on that.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Jude, as she and Carole exchanged covert looks, realizing how much they had let their instincts to see any suspicious death as a potential murder run away with them.

  Carole moved into practical mode. ‘I suppose an obvious starting question might be whether your husband had any tennis-related reason to be on the court at that time in the morning.’

  ‘How do you mean – tennis-related?’

  ‘I know nothing about real tennis – even less than Jude does, but I imagine, because it’s a competitive sport, people do train for it. So is it possible that your husband was there so early to do some kind of training session?’

  ‘Reggie? Training?’ Oenone Playfair’s grief was not so deep that she couldn’t still see the incongruity of the idea. ‘For a start there’s very little training you can do on a real tennis court on your own. You could practise a few serves, I suppose, that’s about it. But the idea of Reggie doing any kind of training is just too incongruous for words. There was a time when he was younger, maybe, when he used to do a bit of running and what-have-you, but back then most of his training just came from playing the game. He’d be up at the court three, four times a week.’

  ‘With Piers?’ asked Jude, remembering what her lover had said about a similar period of intense real tennis.

  ‘With Piers, yes. There was a whole bunch of them, all incredibly keen, all incredibly fit. Wally Edgington-Bewley, though a decade or so older than the others, was part of the group. They lived for real tennis, used to go off on jaunts to foreign courts . . . Bordeaux, New York, a couple in Australia. But that’s a long time ago. So no, Carole, there is absolutely no chance that Reggie was on the court for training purposes. Apart from anything else, his kit had been in the wash since Sunday and our help doesn’t do the ironing till Friday.’

  ‘Right. I see,’ said Carole, who couldn’t help feeling that she had received something of a put-down.

  Jude picked up the investigation. ‘Well, if we can also rule out the possibility that Reggie had simply gone back to the court because there was something he had left there on Sunday . . .’

  ‘Which we can,’ asserted Oenone. ‘You may remember I helped him get his stuff together on Sunday. I made sure he’d got everything.’

  ‘That being the case, the only other reason I can think of for Reggie to be there was because he had arranged to meet someone.’

  ‘Yes, Jude,’ said Oenone Playfair wretchedly, ‘that’s what I’m afraid of.’

  TEN

  Carole instantly picked up on the implication. ‘You mean there’s someone you know who Reggie might have been meeting?’

  For the first time in their encounter Oenone Playfair looked embarrassed. Up to that point she had been keeping good control of her emotions, the strongest of which seemed, not surprisingly, to be grief. Embarrassment was new.

  ‘Would you like more coffee?’ she asked, playing for time.

  They both said that they would like their cups refilled. After Oenone had poured for them and placed the silver pot back down on the silver tray, she began, ‘Look, this probably sounds silly and perhaps I am just an old woman maundering on, but although generally speaking Reggie and I had a very happy marriage, there was one time, many years ago, when he hurt me very much.’

  ‘Are you talking about an affair?’ asked Jude, always sensitive to that kind of hidden implication.

  ‘Yes. Well, I don’t know how far the relationship ever went, but Reggie certainly did fall in love with another woman and it did have a profound effect on us . . . on me, certainly.’

  ‘The trust issue?’

  ‘Exactly that, Jude. The relationship, affair, infatuation, whatever it was, didn’t last very long. I think it may have started when they were both on some trip to Paris, but I really don’t know. And I don’t believe Reggie was ever actually thinking of leaving. He said he’d never stopped loving me, he’d just been surprised by his capacity to love two women at the same time.’

  ‘Men often say that in such circumstances,’ Carole observed drily.

  ‘Maybe. I’m sorry, this sounds ridiculous – a woman in her seventies being as jealous of a man as a schoolgirl protecting her first boyfriend from her predatory friends.’

  ‘It’s not ridiculous at all,’ said Jude. ‘The capacity to fall in love – and to be hurt by the people one loves – that’s nothing to do with age. It’s just something we’re stuck with all the way through our lives. Betrayal doesn’t hurt any less in your nineties than it did in your teens.’

  ‘Mm. Anyway, Reggie and I settled down, got back on an even keel. And he was very good to me – he was always very good to me, even when the . . . relationship was going on. And I suppose the whole thing lasted . . . well, I don’t believe it was more than three months, which in retrospect seems a tiny portion of time.’

  ‘But felt longer while you were living through it.’

  ‘Exactly, Jude. Anyway, at the time, when my head was buzzing with ever more destructive thoughts and imaginings, I became obsessed with the question of where Reggie was managing to meet this woman. I’m sure he’d never have brought her here – I was around most of the time, apart from anything else – and this was before we’d bought the flat in London, so that wouldn’t have been available for them. Reggie had let slip that the other woman was married, so I’d have thought it unlikely they’d meet at her place . . . though I suppose it is possible.’

  ‘Hotels are traditional places for illicit assignations,’ Carole pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but . . . well, I suppose he could have afforded it. Reggie was already doing very well by then. But – oh God, I feel dreadful saying this, particularly in the current circumstances. I went through Reggie’s credit card receipts. It’s something I’d never have dreamed of doing before. It’s amazing how corrosive suspicion can be, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to become – or thought you ever would become. Anyway, there was nothing. No receipts from stays in hotels that I didn’t know about. I felt guilty for being so untrusting, but . . . Anyway, as I say, I just became obsessed with the question.

  ‘All kinds of silly ideas were going through my head. I knew the local young people who lacked tolerant parents tended to conduct their sex lives in cars . . . or there was a favoured wooded area on the local golf course, but I thought Reggie would have a bit more sophistication than that. And then the thought came to me . . . that maybe they met at Lockleigh House tennis court.’

  ‘Really?’ said Carole, immediately intrigued.

  ‘Back then the booking hours were much the same as they are now. No one there between, say, ten o’clock at night and seven thirty the next morning. They didn’t have the electronic keypad entry system – eac
h member had their own key, so there was no problem about gaining access. And of course,’ she concluded sardonically, ‘the club room, then as now, does boast those large, extremely accommodating sofas.’

  ‘Are you suggesting,’ asked Carole, ‘that the woman with whom your husband had an affair was also a member of the real tennis club?’

  Once again Oenone Playfair was drowned in embarrassment. ‘I think, I mean . . . I couldn’t be sure, but . . . yes, I think it could have been.’

  ‘There aren’t that many woman members, are there?’ asked Jude.

  ‘There are quite a few, but not as many as the men, no.’

  ‘So you must have had a pretty shrewd idea of who Reggie’s lover was.’

  Oenone winced at the word ‘lover’. ‘As I say, I’m not sure how far the relationship went. He was certainly infatuated with her, but whether they actually . . .’ Her words petered out.

  ‘From what you say,’ said Carole firmly, ‘you know exactly who the woman was.’

  But the widow didn’t want to go that far. ‘There were one or two lady members who possibly . . . I couldn’t be sure. It was a very difficult time for me. My mind was so confused with lots of different anxieties and suspicions. Sometimes I’d been playing a ladies’ doubles and think it could be any one of the other three. I wasn’t very rational.’

  ‘But basically,’ said Jude, ‘you are worried that Reggie might have gone to the court the night before last to meet up with his former –’ she avoided the word lover this time – ‘infatuation?’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of, yes. That’s what I’d like you to try and find out.’

  ‘If you don’t tell us the name of the woman who you think your husband may have been meeting,’ Carole contributed tartly, ‘you are rather hobbling any investigation we may try to make.’

  ‘I can see that. But I’m sorry, I can’t voice my suspicions, in case I’m wrong. It would be awful, particularly with Reggie just dead, for me to go accusing someone completely innocent. They’d think grief had really unhinged me.’

  ‘Mm.’ Carole Seddon sniffed. ‘Well, if you don’t give all the information you have, it is going to make our job very difficult.’