The Fethering Mysteries 09; Blood at the Bookies tfm-9

by Simon Brett

  “Not in the betting shop, no. He just smiled.” And the image of that weak smile brought home to her the horror of what she had witnessed. An involuntary shiver ran through her plump body.

  “Well,” Carole continued, joining the links in her chain of logic, “the fact that he didn’t say anything…didn’t draw attention to himself, even though he was dying…suggests, wouldn’t you say, that the man had something to hide?”

  “Yes,” said Jude, “I suppose it could.”

  “And if we find out what he was trying to hide, then we’ll probably be a good way to finding out why he was killed.”

  Jude wasn’t really convinced by that line of enquiry. But it was the only one they had.

  ♦

  Both women realized that they had been letting their imaginations run away with them. They didn’t even know that the death had been unnatural, and already they were building up pictures of a man with a guilty secret. Both were sheepish, feeling that the wildness of their conjectures was about to be shown up; as they waited for the early evening television news. Carole had roused her aching limbs and come down to the sitting room to watch. Jude had offered to bring the television upstairs, but her neighbour had been appalled by the idea. For Carole having a television in a bedroom was an unpardonable offence against decency, on the level with actually watching the thing during the daytime (though there was an afternoon chat show to which she was becoming almost addicted, but that was a secret vice).

  The killing in Fethering was deemed sufficiently important to make the national news, and the bulletin did at least provide them with some solid information. The dead man had been identified as Tadeusz Jankowski, aged twenty-four. He was a Polish immigrant who had been in Britain less than six months. He had died of stab wounds and the police were launching a murder investigation.

  Though it was an awful thing to think, both Carole and Jude would have been terribly disappointed if he’d turned out to have died a natural death.

  ♦

  That evening Jude, still more shaken than she liked to admit to herself, decided that she’d have supper at Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. Before she left High Tor she heated up some soup, but the invalid didn’t seem interested in eating. Carole just sipped a little Lucozade and looked with affronted fascination at the magazines she had been given’. Jude had a feeling that the minute she was alone in the house, Carole would pounce on them and start reading. The offer of a hot toddy was refused, but Jude said she’d come in later and maybe make one then. After her surge of excitement over the murder, Carole had now slumped back into total lethargy and voiced no objections to the idea of another visit from her neighbour.

  In the Crown and Anchor it didn’t take long for the subject to get round to Fethering’s latest murder. After his usual pleasantries to Jude and the quick provision of her customary large Chilean Chardonnay, the landlord Ted Crisp was on to it straight away. “Nasty business down by the betting shop this afternoon.”

  “Tell me about it. I was the one who found the poor soul.”

  “Were you? Blimey, you and your mate Carole certainly have a knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where is she, by the way?”

  “Laid up with flu.”

  “Poor thing. Give her my best.”

  “Will do.” It was still at times incongruous to Jude that her fastidious neighbour had once had a brief fling with the scruffy bearded landlord of the Crown and Anchor. That evening he was in his habitual faded jeans, though in deference to the cold weather he was wearing a faded zip-up hoodie over his customary faded sweatshirt.

  “Immigrant, I gather from the news,” he said darkly. In spite of his background as a stand-up comedian, Ted Crisp was capable of being, to Jude’s mind, distressingly right-wing.

  His point was quickly taken up by another customer, a man in his fifties, dressed in tweed jacket, salmon pink corduroy trousers and a tie that looked as if it should have been regimental but probably wasn’t. He was thick-set, but in quite good condition. His receding hair was sandy, freckled with grey. He was accompanied by a younger, similarly dressed version of himself, who had to be his son. The boy was probably mid-twenties, large and slightly ungainly, with a thick crest of auburn hair. What might once have been a well-muscled body was on the verge of giving way to fat.

  Jude knew the older man by sight. He worked in one of Fethering’s estate agencies on the parade (however small the town in West Sussex, there always seemed to be business for more than one estate agent). The agency was called Urquhart & Pease, though whether the man had one of those as his surname Jude didn’t know.

  “Been only a matter of time before something like this happened,” he announced in a voice that had been to all the right schools. “Ever since the wretched EU opened up our boundaries to all and sundry, it’s been an accident waiting to happen. I mean, I’m the last person to be racist…” Wasn’t it strange, Jude reflected, how people who started sentences like that always ended up being exactly what they denied they were “…but I do think we ought to have a bit of a say in who we let into our country. We are islanders, after all, with everything that goes with that…and we have a long history of doing things our way. And I’m not saying all immigration is bad. I’m as tolerant as the next man…” Which in West Sussex, thought Jude, wasn’t saying a lot “…and I’ve got friends and colleagues who…What are you allowed to say now? Have different ethnic backgrounds…? Pakistani chap works as our accountant, and he fits in, you’d never know…Doesn’t he, Hamish?”

  The younger man agreed that their Pakistani accountant did fit in, and listened dutifully as the estate agent pontificated on. “But I still do think you have to draw the line somewhere…or we’ll see more things happening like we did today.”

  Jude didn’t want to get drawn into the conversation – she knew she’d be on a hiding to nothing – but she couldn’t help asking, “So you think this man was murdered because he was an immigrant?”

  “Obviously.” He flashed her an urbane and slightly patronizing smile. “I’m sorry, we don’t know each other. Ewan Urquhart.” So he was one of the partners in the agency. “And my son Hamish.”

  “This is Jude,” said Ted Crisp, as though he’d been remiss in not making the introduction before.

  “I’ve seen you walking along the High Street,” said the estate agent. “Never fail to notice an attractive woman, you know.” It was a knee-jerk compliment, a little too smoothly delivered. Jude decided she would not buy a house from this man.

  “But, Mr Urquhart, you were saying – ”

  “Ewan, please.”

  “Ewan. You seemed to be making the assumption that this man’s death must have happened because he was an immigrant…?”

  “Well, my dear, in a situation like this the law of probability kicks in, doesn’t it? Get the country full of foreigners and they bring their own ways with them. So you get welfare scroungers, gangs, people traffickers…” He seemed to be picking randomly at Daily Mail headlines. “And then with the ones from the Indian subcontinent you get these so-called ‘honour killings’. Bumping your sister off because you don’t like her choice of boyfriend. I mean, what kind of behaviour is that?”

  “Barbaric,” his son supplied.

  “You’re right, Hamish. It’s barbaric. A culture of violence. We never used to have a culture of violence in this country.”

  “No? What about our good old traditional soccer hooligans…?” Jude was tempted to add, “or our good old traditional public schools…?”, but didn’t.

  Ewan Urquhart smiled blandly. He was clearly a man who thought he had a way with women and knew how to deal with their little foibles. “Ah, now I think you’re just being perverse, Jude. Much as we’d all like to believe there’s no connection between increased immigration and the crime statistics, I’m afraid the facts don’t leave much room for doubt. If you leave your borders open, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get a lot of riff-raff coming in. For me, I’m af
raid, it all goes back to joining the Common Market. Worst move this country ever made.”

  He was clearly preaching to the converted as far as Ted Crisp was concerned. “Couldn’t agree with you more, Ewan. I don’t want to be ordered about by bloody Brussels.”

  “Nor me,” Hamish managed to slip in before his father continued. “Being British used to be a cause for pride. Not showing-off pride like some other countries are so fond of. Not standing up and saying ‘Aren’t I wonderful?’ pride. But that quiet British pride that just does the right thing without crowing about it. And where’s that gone, I ask you? God knows. Now our bloody politicians seem to be apologizing all the time…desperate not to offend anyone ‘of a different ethnic background’. Margaret Thatcher never used to apologize for being British.”

  Surely Ted was going to take issue with that? In his stand-up days Thatcher-bashing had been a major ingredient of his material. But he said nothing, as Ewan Urquhart steamrollered on. “Things like this murder should be a wake-up call, you know. Get people to stop and think what we’re actually doing to this country by allowing uncontrolled immigration. As I say, I’m not a racist, but I do think there comes a point when you have to recognize that enough is enough.”

  “You’re too right, Dad,” said Hamish.

  Jude had intended to have supper in the Crown and Anchor. But as Ewan Urquhart continued his tub-thumping, and as Ted Crisp and Hamish continued to agree with him, the prospect became less attractive. When she’d finished the one Chilean Chardonnay, she went back to Woodside Cottage. She’d find something in the fridge.

  ∨ Blood at the Bookies ∧

  Four

  Carole Seddon’s flu was slow to shift, but after the weekend the prospect of life continuing in some form did once again seem a possibility. She was pleased to feel better, but also guiltily relieved that it had lasted as long as it did. The weekend had been one she was dreading, and she was glad that the flu had prevented her from participating in it. Being Carole Seddon, she was also worried about the extent to which she had used the illness as an excuse.

  The event she had avoided was a meeting with her son Stephen, his wife Gaby and their four-month-old daughter Lily. But it wasn’t them Carole didn’t want to see. Since the baby’s birth she had actually bonded more with the young couple, happy on occasions to go and help her daughter-in-law out at their Fulham house. And she found Lily a miracle. That something so tiny and so perfect could suddenly exist was a source of constant amazement to her. Though she was the last person to go all gooey in public about babies, Carole did find she was suffering from considerable internal gooeyness. Of course she didn’t vocalize such self-indulgent thoughts, but they did give her a warm glow.

  It was all so different from when she’d had Stephen. Then she’d been in such turmoil, finding herself in the one state she had tried to avoid all her life – out of control. The strange things that had happened to her body, the demanding new presence in her life, the realignment of her relationship with her husband…everything conspired to make her feel threatened and useless. Had she gone to a doctor about her feeling, there might have been a diagnosis of mild post-natal depression, but Carole Seddon had always believed that doctors were there to deal with physical problems, not feelings. And depression was something that happened to other people.

  So she hadn’t been worried about seeing Lily and her parents at the weekend. In fact she longed to witness her granddaughter’s every tiny development. But Stephen had included another person in the proposed visit to Fethering.

  His father. Carole’s ex-husband David. Stephen was still under the illusion that, because he’d seen his estranged parents together at social events – like his wedding – when they hadn’t actually come to blows, a new rapprochement between them was possible. With a wistful innocence that made Carole feel even guiltier, her son was desperate to be part of a happy family. And, now Lily was on the scene, of a happy extended family.

  It was an ambition that Carole couldn’t share. Getting over the divorce had taken a good few years and at times it still felt like an open wound. But one of the important components of rehabilitation into her new single life had been not seeing David. Even the sound of his voice on the phone could upset her hard-won equilibrium for days on end.

  As a result of this, she had bought a new telephone with a Caller Display facility. If David were to ring her, she could then identify his number and choose whether or not to take the call. So far he hadn’t called – and in fact David’s was the one set of digits where Carole’s usual facility for remembering phone numbers failed (a psychological block no doubt, though she would never have recognized it as such). But the Caller Display did give her a sense of security.

  The thought of seeing David in Fethering made Carole feel even more unsettled. High Tor had been bought as a weekend retreat for both of them in happier times, when the marriage was still more or less ticking over. Under the terms of the divorce settlement, Carole had taken sole possession, and had managed over the years to expunge all memories of their shared occupation. Seeing David back on the premises would stir up a hornets’ nest of unwanted recollection.

  As soon as she’d made the arrangement for the weekend, Carole had regretted it. Stephen had caught her in an unguarded moment, when she had been cuddling Lily, and at such times all the world seemed benign and she hadn’t been able to refuse him. So the fated weekend had continued to loom ever larger on her horizon until the threat was removed by the mercy of her flu.

  She felt deeply relieved that the encounter hadn’t happened. But she was sorry not to have seen Lily.

  Still, now she was feeling better, she could begin to focus her mind on the death of Tadeusz Jankowski. With the return of her health came a prurient wistfulness, almost a jealousy, prompted by the fact that Jude had witnessed the young man’s dying moments. If there was to be an investigation, Carole wanted to be part of it. So she sought through the weekend papers and cut out all the coverage of the murder, anything that might have relevance to the case. She found quite a lot of material. Immigration, particularly from Poland, was a topical issue, and the murder had unleashed pages and pages of ill-informed speculation.

  ♦

  Jude was surprised it took till the Monday for the police to contact her again. They’d taken all her details when they’d questioned her on the Thursday, saying they’d be in touch. And on the old principle that the first suspect in a murder investigation tends to be the person who finds the body, she had expected them to show more interest in her.

  But the two young detectives who came to Woodside Cottage seemed very relaxed. They certainly didn’t give her the impression that she was a suspect and, given her previous experience of dealing with the police, were surprisingly generous with information.

  “We’re pretty sure,” said the one who was called Detective Sergeant Baines, “that the victim had nothing to do with anyone in the betting shop that afternoon.”

  “No one in there knew him?”

  “No. We took statements from them all, you know, after you’d gone. None of them knew him from Adam. The manager, who makes it his business to see who comes in and out, had never seen him before.”

  “So why did he go into the betting shop?”

  “No idea. Maybe he was walking past and, feeling weak after being stabbed, just went in there to sit down. Or to get some shelter from the hailstorm.”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd he didn’t ask for help?” asked Jude, reiterating Carole’s point.

  Baines shrugged. “Perhaps he didn’t know how badly injured he was. Perhaps he was already too weak to speak. Or he could have been in shock. I don’t know.”

  “And do you know where he actually was when he was stabbed?”

  The other one, Detective Sergeant Yelland, exchanged a grin with Baines and said, “If we knew that, we’d be well on the way to solving the case, wouldn’t we?”

  “But it can’t have been far away, can it? Or there would have been
more blood at the bookie’s, wouldn’t there?”

  Unlike previous detectives Jude had met, these two didn’t seem to object to her working out her own theories. “Maybe,” said Baines. “They won’t really know till they get the detailed post-mortem report. It could have been an injury that didn’t bleed much at first, but then got worse. In fact, that must have been the case, because there was no trail of blood leading towards the betting shop, only away from it.”

  Jude found his use of the personal pronoun interesting. ‘They’ would get the post-mortem report, not ‘we’. The main part of the investigation was going on elsewhere. Baines and Yelland were juniors, minor players in the game. Realizing this encouraged her to ask more questions.

  “I just heard the man’s name on the television. And they said he was Polish. Have you been able to find out much more about him?”

  Baines showed no reticence in answering. “He was from Warsaw. Finished at university there last year. Been doing casual bar work over here.”

  “Do you know where he lived?”

  “Rented room in Littlehampton.”

  “Not far away…” Jude looked thoughtful. “Have his family in Poland been contacted?”

  Detective Sergeant Yelland seemed suddenly aware of the incongruity of the situation. “Just a minute. Aren’t we the ones who’re meant to be asking you the questions?” But he sounded amused rather than resentful.

  “I agree that’s traditional,” said Jude with a winning smile. “But you haven’t asked many, and we don’t want to sit here in silence, do we?”

  Both men grinned. “Yes, his family have been told,” Baines replied. “And there’s been contact with the Polish police authorities.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, makes sense. Most likely the reason he was attacked is something to do with his own community. Probably goes back to some rivalry back home.”