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

by Simon Brett

“And how. Big excitement for them. Also rather frightening. A young man killed, possibly murdered, only a few miles away in Fethering. Comes a bit near home for them. Current crop of students have been brought up to be afraid of everything. The Health and Safety Generation, I call the poor saps. All afraid of being attacked, the girls afraid of being raped…Whatever happened to the innocence of youth?”

  “Did it ever exist?” asked Carole.

  “Maybe not, but I think when I was their age I did at least have the illusion of innocence. I kind of trusted the world, was prepared to give it a chance. I wasn’t afraid of everything.”

  “You say they’re afraid of everything,” said Jude, “but you’re talking about a generation who think nothing of shooting off round the world on their gap years.”

  “True. Except that’s just become another form of package tourism these days. For me it takes the excitement out of far-flung places, knowing there’ll be a nice familiar Macdonald’s waiting when you get there.”

  “Maybe.” He had taken over the conversation so effortlessly that Jude wanted to find out more about Andy Constant. “You said you lecture in Drama. Does that mean you used to be an actor?” A theatricality about him made this quite a possibility.

  “Very early in my career. Moved into directing for a while. Since then, teaching. Mind you, that involves a certain amount of directing too. And acting, come to think of it.”

  He had considerable charm, and a strong sexual magnetism. The latter got through to Jude at an instinctive, visceral level, and she wondered whether Carole was aware of it too.

  “Anyway,” Andy went on, “I couldn’t help overhearing what you said to Isobel at Reception. Sorry, I’m afraid she’s not the most imaginative of women. Whatever the question, she always comes up with the party line. But I heard you mentioning the name of Tadeusz Jankowski. I wondered why you were interested. Are you just another pair of Fethering residents fascinated by their proximity to a murder?”

  Carole and Jude exchanged a look. The true answer was probably a yes, but they needed to come up with something a bit better than that. Jude thought of a solution which certainly had elements of truth in it. “The sister of the dead man came to see me. Naturally enough, she’s trying to find out everything she can about her brother. I just thought Carole and I could possibly help her.”

  He nodded, as if he accepted this justification for their presence. “But why have you come here? What reason do you have for connecting the young man with Clincham College?”

  Quickly Jude recounted what she had heard from Harold Peskett, about the young Pole’s earlier visit to the betting shop.

  “Ah. That would explain something else.”

  “What?”

  “The police have been here too.”

  “Asking about Tadeusz Jankowski?”

  “Yes, Carole. Maybe they got the lead from the same source as you did.”

  “When were they here?” asked Jude.

  “Monday.”

  “Then it wasn’t the same source as mine. I only suggested they should contact Harold yesterday – and up to then he said they hadn’t had any contact with him. So they must have heard about the Clincham College connection from someone else.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Andy Constant. Apparently they didn’t seem very focused when they came here, more like it was just a routine enquiry.” Yes, thought Jude, “unfocused’ is a pretty good description of the approach Baines and Yelland had used when they interviewed her.

  “I mean, I suppose it makes sense,” Andy went on. “Young people tend to congregate together. The dead man was young and had been living round here, so there’s quite a reasonable chance that he would have hooked up with some of the students from the college.” Carole noticed he didn’t use the word ‘university’ and wondered whether this was because he hadn’t yet got used to the idea or whether he was as cynical about the place’s status as she was.

  The lecturer took a sip of his espresso and then continued in a different tone. “Anyway, one thing the police did say was that we on the staff here should keep our eyes and ears open for anyone who came here expressing interest in the murder victim…”

  “Oh.”

  “I thought I should warn you.”

  “Why warn us?”

  “Well, I’m sure you don’t want to be questioned by the police, do you? It’s very time-consuming and can, I believe, be quite unpleasant. I mean, you’re fine now. Isobel at Reception won’t say anything – that would involve her using her initiative and she doesn’t do that. And you can rely on me to keep quiet, but I can’t guarantee that the rest of the staff here would be so accommodating.”

  “So what are you actually saying?” asked Carole.

  “I’m saying that we’ve been told to let the police know if anyone comes here enquiring about Tadeusz Jankowski, and so I think there might be an argument for you not taking your investigations at Clincham College much further.”

  “You’re warning us off,” said Jude. He gave a relaxed laugh. “That sounds a little over-dramatic. Let’s just say I’m trying to avoid your being inconvenienced.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you. But the police have already questioned me, and I didn’t find it a particularly inconvenient experience.”

  “Fine.” He shrugged. “Only trying to save you hassle.” Jude felt his grey eyes seeking out her brown ones and saw the half-insolent smile on his face. Andy Constant knew he was attractive and he knew that she was responding to him. He couldn’t know that part of the attraction came from his similarity to Laurence Hawker, another tall academic with whom she had spent time until his premature death a few years before. While she couldn’t deny the pull that Andy Constant exerted, Jude resented feeling it. In spite of the superficial likeness to Laurence, there was something about him that struck warning chords within her, something dangerous. Which of course only served to add to his appeal.

  Carole, who seemed unaware of the subtext between them, took up the conversation. “You said you were Admissions Tutor.”

  “I did, yes.”

  “Then maybe you can at least answer the question we came here to ask.”

  “Try me.”

  “Was Tadeusz Jankowski ever enrolled here as a student?”

  Andy Constant was silent for a moment, as if deliberating over his reply. He took another sip of his espresso, then put the tiny cup down on its tiny saucer. “I can’t actually see what harm my giving you that information can cause. Well, the answer’s no. Tadeusz Jankowski was never enrolled in any course at this university.” It was the first time he had used the word.

  “And had he ever made enquiries about the courses he might have enrolled in?” asked Carole, pushing her luck.

  “Not so far as I know. I suppose he might have made an approach by letter or email, but none of my colleagues has mentioned anything about his doing so. And, needless to say, given the amount of media coverage, people have been talking a lot about him. I think if anyone had had an approach from someone called Tadeusz Jankowski, they’d have said so. It’s not the kind of name you’d forget, is it?”

  Jude joined in. “So you can’t think of any connection he might have had with Clincham College?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if he’d ever even been on the premises?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” replied Andy Constant, and then he gave Jude another of his lazy, but undeniably sexy smiles. “Still, if I hear from anyone that he has been seen here, I’ll let you know.” He smiled again. “Maybe you’d like to give me your number, Jude…?”

  As she was scribbling it out on a scrap of paper, a girl came into the canteen. She was dark and pretty in a Hispanic way, dressed in the typical student uniform of jeans and layers of sweatshirts. Long black hair curtained her face. “Andy,” she said as she approached their table. Her voice sounded slightly Spanish.

  He looked up and seemed pleased with what he saw. “Yes?”

  “Andy, I thought you said
we’d meet up in the Drama Studio at eleven.”

  He looked at his watch. “Oh, sorry. Hadn’t noticed the time.” He turned the full power of his smile on to Carole and Jude. “Ladies, you will excuse me?”

  And, pausing only to snatch up the piece of paper with Jude’s number on it, he walked with long strides out of the café. The dark-haired girl followed, her eyes glowing with puppy love.

  Jude was too old for puppy love, but she couldn’t deny that Andy Constant was a very attractive man.

  ∨ Blood at the Bookies ∧

  Fifteen

  Jude heard the sound of crying as soon as she came through the door of Woodside Cottage. Zofia was hunched up on one of the sitting room’s heavily draped sofas, her shoulders shaken by the sobs that ran through her body. On the floor beside her were a battered suitcase and a scruffy backpack. Immediately Jude’s arms were round the girl and her lips were murmuring soothing words.

  “I am sorry,” was the first thing that Zofia managed to say. “I hear from the police this morning that I can come and collect Tadek’s things, his possessions, and seeing them…” She indicated the bags “…it makes me realize that he is really gone from me.”

  “Do you want me to put them away somewhere, until you are ready to deal with them?”

  “No, Jude, thank you.” Zofia wiped the back of her hand against her face to dismiss the tears. “No, I am ready to deal with them now. Maybe there is something in here that tells me what has happened to Tadek. I must not be emotional. I must try to piece together from his possessions what he was doing here in England, and perhaps the reason why someone want to kill him.”

  “All right,” said Jude. “I’ll help you. But first let’s have a drink of something. What would you like, Zosia?”

  “Coffee, please. Black, that would be good.”

  “Don’t start opening the bags until I’m there.” Jude didn’t fool herself that her words were spoken from pure altruism. She was being offered a unique chance to further her investigation into Tadek’s death.

  “Did the police say anything,” she called through from the kitchen, “about why they were letting you have his belongings so soon?”

  “They just said they’d finished what they needed to do with them, and the landlord wants to rent out the room again as soon as possible so the stuff can’t go back to Littlehampton. Would I like to take it, please?”

  “Did you go back to the house?”

  “No, I collect from police station.”

  “I wonder if their letting you take the stuff suggests the police are winding up their investigation?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Well, if they’ve made an arrest, we’ll hear pretty soon on the news.”

  “Yes.”

  When Jude came through with the coffee, Zofia had curbed her tears but she still looked lost and waiflike on the sofa. Her pigtails emphasized her vulnerability. “Come on,” said Jude, once the drinks were poured, “let’s be very unemotional about this; Try to distance yourself from what you’re looking at, Zosia.”

  “I will try, but it is not easy.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t. But just try to forget it is your brother whose things we are looking at. Imagine it is an assignment you are doing as a journalist. You have to write a story based on the information you can glean from what you find here.”

  “Yes, this is a good way. I will try this.” She produced her blue notebook and opened it at a clean page. “I am writing a story about a murder investigation. And I will write my notes in English.”

  “Right. Open the suitcase first.”

  Zofia did as she was told. The contents of the case were pitifully few, mostly clothes, and fairly worn and threadbare clothes at that. Though they must all have been redolent of memories, the girl was commendably restrained as she neatly piled them up. She made a kind of inventory in her notebook.

  “Nothing here that he didn’t have at the time he left Warsaw,” she announced when the suitcase was nearly empty. She picked up the last item, a sponge bag, and unzipped it.

  The contents once again were unsurprising. Shaving kit, deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush, paracetamol. And in one compartment a pack of condoms.

  “So it looks like something was happening in his life…” suggested Jude.

  “Or just that Tadek was, as he always was, optimistic.” Zofia was making a joke at the expense of her brother’s romantic aspirations, but she could not say it without a tear glinting in her eye.

  She moved on to the backpack. This had seen a lot of service. Its fabric was slack and discoloured, covered with a rough patchwork of stickers, old and illegible ones covered over by newer designs whose colours showed up against them.

  “Are these all from your brother’s travels?”

  “No. He was given the backpack by a friend, who I think himself had bought it second-hand. The only ones Tadek would have put on are those from music festivals he goes to.” She pointed to a bright printed circle. “This one in Leipzig…I remember he goes there after he finish university last summer. A celebration…to play some of his own music, he said, and to listen to people who play music better than he does.”

  She pulled the backpack towards her and tackled the buckles. “Maybe here we will find more secrets about what he do in England.”

  There was some evidence of Tadek’s activities, but nothing very interesting. Zofia itemized everything in her blue notebook. Programmes and tickets suggested he’d been to a few music gigs, but none further afield than Brighton. Some torn-out newspaper advertisements indicated that his career ambitions might have extended beyond bar work. A well-thumbed dictionary and an old language course on cassette bore witness to a determination to improve his English.

  And there was also an English rhyming dictionary. Zofia looked at this with some confusion, before opening it to check the contents. Then she nodded slowly.

  “Does that tell you something?” asked Jude.

  “I think, yes. It is something Tadek speak of occasionally. He say writing good songs in Polish is good for Poland, but not for the world. To write songs that are very successful, you must write in English – or American.”

  “So you think he was writing songs in English?”

  “I think he tries, yes.”

  “He wanted to be very successful?”

  Zofia Jankowska grimaced. “Not exactly that. Tadek did not want a lot of money. Well, we would not have minded, but for him money was a…was what he could do with it…I think there is an expression in English…?”

  “‘A means to an end’.”

  “Yes, this is good. This is how Tadek see money. It helps him to do things he want to do. For him money is ‘a means to an end’.”

  “So writing songs in English would have made him more money? That would be his reason for doing it?”

  “Perhaps. More with Tadek, though…” The girl smiled wistfully “…he might want to write songs for English women.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I tell you he is romantic. He fall for women who are not right for him…”

  “Yes, you said. And often older women.”

  “That is what Tadek does, very often. And because he is romantic, and because he does not have much money to buy presents for the women he loves…”

  “He used to write songs for them?”

  Zofia nodded. “That is what he always does.” She picked up the rhyming dictionary again. “So perhaps this means he had fallen in love with an Englishwoman.”

  She pulled a small pile of songbooks out of the backpack. They were mostly much-used copies of folk and protest songs from the nineteen-sixties, songs made popular by artistes like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan and the Byrds.

  “Your brother had rather old·fashioned tastes.”

  “Yes, this is the music he likes. He plays a lot of these. Not electric guitar. The songs he write are in this style too. Perhaps that is why he does not make money from his songs, in any language.
As you say, they are old·fashioned.” Emotion threatened for a moment, as she realized that she had heard the last of her brother’s songs, but she controlled it. “Right, that is nearly everything. Just a few more bits.”

  She took out the remaining contents of the backpack, again arranging them neatly in piles on the floor. She made more notes in the little blue book. A couple of novels in Polish, a crucifix, other small ornaments. There was nothing that seemed out of place to Jude, but Zofia sat there for a long time saying, “It is strange, it is very strange.”

  “What’s strange? Is there something there that shouldn’t be?”

  “No,” the girl replied. “It is the other way round. There is things not here that should be here.”

  “What?”

  The pained hazel eyes fixed on Jude’s. “Tadek lived for his music. There is nothing of that here, except for the sheet music. No notebooks with songs written out, no lyrics, no cassettes, no CDs. Most of all, there is not his guitar.”

  “What was the guitar like?”

  “It was not electrical. It was…I don’t know the word.”

  “Acoustic.”

  “Yes, it was acoustic. An acoustic guitar.” Zofia seemed to savour the adjective on her lips. “Tadek would never give his guitar away. Where is it? It is such a special guitar.”

  “Special meaning valuable?”

  “No, no, probably after what Tadek has done to it, it is less valuable. He painted it red and he paint two eyes on the front, you know, like the hole behind the strings is the mouth, so the guitar has a face. In the band he play with with his friends, they all paint faces on their instruments. It is something they do, so that always people recognize them. And they call the band ‘Twarz’. That means ‘face’ in Polish.”

  “Did you ask the police about the guitar when you picked up this lot?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. But they tell me here is everything they find in his room.”

  “It might be worth checking. They could still be doing forensic tests on the guitar. Have you got a number for them?”

  Zofia Jankowska had. She rang through and spoke to the officer from whom she had picked up the bags that morning. He told her everything was there except for the clothes her brother had been wearing at the time of his death. There had been no sign of a guitar amongst his belongings.