The Corpse on the Court

by Simon Brett

  ‘I’ll give you all the information of which I’m certain.’

  And that was it. Carole tried pushing for more, but got nothing. Jude essayed a gentler approach, but also drew a blank. Some inbuilt sense of honour would not allow Oenone Playfair to give the name of the woman whom she suspected had caused her so much unhappiness.

  ‘If we do pursue the investigation you want us to,’ said Carole, ‘it’s inevitable that we’re going to be asking questions of quite a lot of the Lockleigh House club members.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And do you want us to tell them that we’re doing it on your behalf?’

  Oenone Playfair winced at the idea. ‘I’d rather you didn’t . . . if you can avoid it,’ she pleaded.

  ‘We’ll do our best,’ said Jude.

  Though Oenone wouldn’t reveal the names of the women she suspected of being loved by her husband, to all the other questions Carole and Jude asked she was extremely forthcoming.

  An interesting moment occurred when Carole asked whether Oenone had noticed any differences in her husband’s behaviour recently. ‘Well, yes,’ she replied. ‘There was one thing . . .’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He’d got very interested in . . .’ Once again she was embarrassed. ‘I suppose I’d have to call it “the occult”.’

  ‘Seances and that kind of thing?’ asked Jude.

  ‘That kind of thing, certainly, though I don’t know whether he actually ever attended a seance. It was more kind of . . . ghosts and things that intrigued him.’

  ‘Ghosts?’ Carole echoed with knee-jerk scepticism. ‘Did he actually believe in ghosts?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he found the possibility of there being ghosts sufficiently fascinating to do some research on the subject. Which I can see from your expression that you find unlikely, and I agree with you it was. Reggie of all people! I say this as someone who loves him deeply, but the one thing he never had much of was imagination. Wonderful practical skills, very talented with money, but Reggie hadn’t much time for anything off the straight and narrow. The books he read – and he only tended to do that when we were on holiday – were all blokeish thrillers. Loved James Bond and other writers of a previous generation – Hammond Innes, Alastair MacLean. I think his favourite book was probably Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea. God knows how many times he read that.

  ‘So Reggie was a very straightforward “man’s man”, I suppose you’d call him. No time for self-questioning, no interest in religion beyond putting in a well-oiled appearance at Midnight Mass every Christmas. The idea that someone with his head screwed on that firmly would believe in ghosts is incongruous. And it was an interest that seemed to grow as he got older. Anyone new he’d met he’d ask if they’d ever had any experience of ghosts. Surprising how many had . . . usually nothing very convincing. Strange noise at night, closed doors being found open, objects moved from where they had last been seen. Nothing to convince the sceptic and yet Reggie always listened with deep attention. It was strange, something happened to him when he was listening to a ghost story. His eyes started to water, almost like tears but without spilling out. I’ve no idea what caused that.’

  ‘Can you think of any reason,’ asked Jude, ‘why he was interested in ghosts?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ But the way Oenone said it made Jude realize that she did. ‘Why does anyone believe in ghosts?’

  ‘Because they’re deluded,’ said Carole characteristically. ‘There is no such thing as a ghost and there never has been.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not so sure,’ Jude countered.

  ‘What, have you ever seen a ghost?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What do you mean – you don’t think so? Either you have or you haven’t.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen one, but I’ve met people who say they have and I’ve believed them.’

  ‘Jude, there are no ghosts. When people die, they die and that’s all there is to it.’

  Her neighbour might have been about to take issue with Carole’s blanket scepticism but, realizing where they were, thought better of it and asked Oenone, ‘When I asked you what made Reggie believe in ghosts, you said you didn’t know, but I got the impression perhaps you do have some idea.’

  The older woman grinned wryly. ‘You’re very perceptive, Jude. All right, I’ll tell you. It’s not something I often talk about because, well, it’s not something I often talk about. The fact is that Reggie and I haven’t got any children, which was something we rarely talked about but which hurt us both very deeply. Oh, we went on through life, we kept busy, we became serial godparents. We went to some wonderful places, we did some wonderful things. But I always carried the sadness with me, and it was only in recent years that I realized how much it had affected Reggie too.

  ‘I said – quite carefully – that Reggie and I “haven’t got” children. But briefly, very briefly we did have a child. About six months into our marriage, in a very predictable middle-class way, I became pregnant. All seemed fine, normal pregnancy. Went into labour, taken to a nursing home . . . where things didn’t work out as they should have done. Difficult birth, cord round the baby’s neck, she was stillborn. And the process had made such a mess of my insides that the doctor decided on an emergency hysterectomy.’ The very matter-of-factness with which she spoke the words made them all the more moving.

  ‘Well, I suppose we could have adopted, but . . . and nowadays I read in the papers that there’s surrogacy and . . . But there wasn’t back then. The simple facts were that I had lost a child and there would never be another one. I was soon fit and healthy again and Reggie just . . . didn’t want to talk about it, really. He did say how much simpler our life would be, how much more we’d be able to travel and . . . I was very hurt by his attitude at the time, but . . .’ Oenone Playfair sighed. Although she wasn’t showing much emotion, the narrative was taking its toll on her.

  ‘Anyway, as I say, in a very British way Reggie shut things in, continued to make lots of money, continued to play lots of real tennis, but all the time the sadness was niggling away inside him. And then, about eight years ago I suppose, he told me that he’d seen Flora’s ghost.’

  ‘Flora?’ prompted Jude.

  ‘Our daughter’s name. She didn’t live long enough to be christened or anything, but to us she was Flora.’

  ‘And where did he see the ghost?’ asked Carole.

  ‘Everywhere. He said he kept seeing her. Not as the baby that we saw for such a short time, but as a grown woman. I told him that it was just imagination, that I’d experienced something similar. It’s inevitable. You see a girl whose hair’s the same colour as yours and you think, maybe that’s what my daughter would look like if she were still alive. She’d be over fifty now if she’d lived, but I still see women who make me think of Flora.

  ‘Anyway, I put that to Reggie, but he said no. He pointed out that I kept telling him he had no imagination, so his mind wasn’t going to invent things like that. What he was seeing must be Flora. Or rather Flora’s ghost. To cut a long story short, that got him into reading books about ghosts and . . . he sort of became obsessed by the idea.’

  ‘Well, the obvious question to ask,’ said Carole, ‘is: are there any ghosts connected with the Lockleigh House tennis court? Might ghost-hunting explain your husband’s appearance there the night before last?’

  ‘That’s a thought.’ Oenone was clearly taken with the idea. Perhaps simply because it was more palatable than her other imaginings. ‘Somewhere in the back of my mind that does ring a bell. A story going back a long way . . . to when the Wardock family owned Lockleigh House. Now when did I hear that?’ She tapped at her chin in frustration. ‘Oh, when was it? It’ll come to me. I must have heard it from one of the members of the tennis club. Who was it?’ She waved her hands hopelessly. ‘I’ll wake up at three a.m. and remember it.’

  Oenone Playfair smiled, obscurely comforted. ‘It would make sense, though. Much more lik
ely that Reggie had gone to the court on a ghost-hunting search than that he had fixed to meet someone there.’

  Neither Carole nor Jude was about to point out the inaccuracy of this assessment. If he was interested in its connections with ghosts Reggie Playfair could have inspected the Lockleigh House tennis court on many occasions. His presence there two nights before was much more likely due to an arrangement to meet someone.

  And both Carole and Jude knew that the words she had just articulated would only give Oenone a brief respite. Her worries about her husband betraying her would soon return.

  Which gave an extra urgency to their mission to find out precisely what had drawn Reggie Playfair to the tennis court that night.

  It was Carole who had asked permission to check out the BMW. Oenone admitted that she hadn’t had the strength to look inside it. ‘So much Reggie’s car – it’ll still smell of him, like he’s popped out and is just about to come back in. But you two do look in it by all means.’

  She had also explained to them how the car had got back to Winnows. ‘George Hazlitt – you know, the pro – he drove it over. With his junior, Ned, following in another car to take them back.’

  She gave them the keys, saying, ‘Obviously if you find anything of interest, let me know. Otherwise, just drop the keys back through the letterbox. I think I might go and put my feet up for a while.’

  And they both realized how desperately exhausted Oenone Playfair was. In spite of her overt stoicism, the events of the past days had taken a heavy toll on her. And the long conversation with Carole and Jude couldn’t have made her any less tired.

  She saw them to the door and added, ‘Oh, and by the way, do let me know if you find Reggie’s mobile phone in the car. I couldn’t find it in the clothes that came back from the hospital . . . not that I really looked that hard. I was . . .’ The strain was beginning to show more forcibly now. ‘As I say, I’m just going to put my feet up for a while. Then I’ll have to address myself to the subject of funeral arrangements.’

  They could both tell that she was now just desperate to be on her own, so they said their hasty goodbyes. And as soon as Oenone had closed the front door, they started their inspection of the BMW.

  ‘Be very handy,’ said Carole, ‘if we did find his mobile phone, with a text on it from someone arranging to meet him at the tennis court.’

  ‘Well, don’t hold your breath,’ said Jude. ‘The business of investigation, as we have found out, is seldom quite as simple as that.’

  And so it proved. The BMW did not contain a revelatory mobile phone. Nor a note setting up an assignation with an old flame. Nor indeed anything else that one wouldn’t have expected to find in the car of a wealthy married man in his seventies.

  As she sedately drove her sedate Renault back to Fethering, Carole Seddon observed, ‘There’s one thing that’s struck me as particularly odd in everything I’ve heard today.’

  ‘Something Oenone said?’

  ‘No. Something you said.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘When we were driving over to Winnows. You said when you arrived at the tennis court yesterday morning Piers Targett was standing beside his Jaguar . . .’

  ‘The E-Type, yes.’

  ‘And where was Reggie Playfair’s BMW?’

  ‘Parked by the wall of the tennis court, a little bit further along.’

  ‘But Piers didn’t refer to it before he went into the court?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You said they were great friends, though, didn’t you?’ Jude nodded. ‘So Piers would have recognized Reggie’s car?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jude agreed unwillingly.

  ‘Which must mean that Piers knew Reggie was at the court before you found his body.’ There was a silence. ‘Mustn’t it?’

  Jude felt very wretched.

  ELEVEN

  When Carole Seddon got back to High Tor, her Labrador, Gulliver, looked extremely reproachful. She hadn’t been out long, but his expression was that of a child whose mother had abandoned him at birth. Though he’d had his normal early-morning walk, Carole couldn’t resist the baleful pressure to take him out for another blow on Fethering Beach.

  So it was only after she’d done that that she checked her emails on the laptop incarcerated in her spare bedroom. And found one from the Susan Holland she had contacted about the Lady in the Lake case.

  Yes, the woman would be happy to meet. She lived in Brighton, had a part-time job and no car, so it would be easier if they could meet there. She worked afternoon and evening shifts at a nursing home, but was free most mornings. There was a coffee shop in Brighton called Bean in Love that would be a good place to meet.

  The email gave no impression of the kind of woman Susan Holland was. It was properly spelled and punctuated, but offered no indication of age, social standing or any other details of her life.

  Seizing the moment before her mind started to dither and equivocate, Carole sent back an email wondering whether Susan Holland might be free to meet at Bean in Love the following morning at, say, eleven o’clock . . .?

  She was gratified to receive a reply within minutes, assenting to the rendezvous. It had been sent from a Blackberry. For a moment Carole considered the possibility that this meant Susan Holland was rich. But only for a moment. Everybody has Blackberries these days.

  Having set up the meeting gave her a warm glow. This was an investigation she was doing without Jude. And though she had been included in the request for help from Oenone Playfair, Carole was still feeling a little resentful towards her neighbour. Not only was Jude getting into far too serious a relationship with Piers Targett, she was also bound to be the major player in any investigation into Reggie Playfair’s last hours. It was Jude, after all, who had found the body, Jude who had the contacts at Lockleigh House tennis court.

  All in all, Carole Seddon was quite glad she had a case of her own to investigate.

  It was the following morning, the Friday, that a call came through to Woodside Cottage.

  ‘Hello, it that Jude?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Oenone Playfair.’

  ‘Oh, how good to hear you. How are you bearing up?’

  ‘I’m fine. The only possible thing to be said in favour of organizing a funeral is that at least it keeps you so busy that you can’t think about other things. No time to brood.’ She was in a more forceful, less twittery mood that morning, though Jude rather doubted whether she was feeling any better deep down.

  ‘Also I’ve had so many letters and cards and what-have-you. I had no idea what a lot of people were fond of the old bugger.’

  ‘Well, on very brief acquaintance, I can see why everyone would have like Reggie. He seemed very straight, very honest.’

  ‘Yes.’ Was there a slight hesitation in the monosyllable? Had ‘honest’ not been the right word to use in the circumstances? Whether it was or not, Oenone did not allow anything to stop her flow for long. ‘Anyway, in the middle of the night I suddenly remembered.’

  ‘Remembered what?’

  ‘What we talked about yesterday morning. You know, your friend Carole asked if there were any ghost stories attached to Lockleigh House and I said it did ring a vague bell, but I couldn’t remember who I’d heard it from. Well, in the middle of last night I did remember.’

  ‘Oh, well done.’

  ‘I knew it was one of the tennis club members and I suddenly recalled a conversation from . . . ooh, way back, and it was Tom who mentioned something about some old rumour.’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Tom Ruthven.’

  ‘The one who plays in the Old Boys’ Wednesday doubles?’

  ‘That’s the lad. I can’t remember any details, but I know it was he who mentioned it. He’s got some family connection with the Wardocks . . . you know, the ones who used to own Lockleigh House. Anyway, if you want to follow up, Tom’s your man.’

  ‘Do you have a number for him?’

  ‘Oh, just a minute, Reggie’s membersh
ip list is around here somewhere. God, he was so untidy.’ Not, thought Jude, from what she had seen of the interior of Winnows. Or indeed his car. But then maybe his wife had always followed round tidying up after him.

  ‘Ah, here it is,’ announced Oenone triumphantly from the other end of the phone. And she gave the number. ‘Tom’s retired, so he’s around a lot of the time. You shouldn’t have any problem making contact. Unless, of course, he’s out playing golf.’

  ‘Well, thank you very much for the information. I’ll certainly talk to him.’

  ‘Oh, and incidentally, Jude . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t feel you have to come to the funeral.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, you hardly knew Reggie. Piers obviously will be there, but don’t feel you have to tag along.’

  ‘I won’t, unless Piers specifically asks me to do so.’

  ‘Good wheeze. Where is Piers at the moment?’

  ‘He’s in Paris, got some business there.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Fingers in many pies, as usual, our Piers.’

  In different circumstances Jude would have asked for elucidation of that enigmatic remark, but it didn’t seem to be the moment, as Oenone went on, ‘It’s on Thursday, by the way, the funeral. A week today. I could have arranged it for Wednesday – the vicar would have preferred that – but I didn’t want the Old Boys to miss their doubles.’

  TWELVE

  Carole Seddon arrived at Bean in Love before Susan Holland. It was one of those laid-back coffee shops with lots of sofas and an air of aggressive informality that always made Carole feel tense. Service seemed to happen from the counter rather than from waitresses. As she approached, she looked up at the infinite variety of coffee types and cup sizes on the chalkboards.

  ‘Good morning. What can I get you?’ asked a girl with a butterfly tattooed on the side of her neck and a badge reading ‘Barista Celine’.

  ‘Just a black coffee, please?’

  ‘Would that be an Americano, espresso or filter?’