Meredith nodded. ‘Yes, I felt that very much when I first came back to England permanently after so many years abroad. Odd periods of leave at home aren’t enough.You find you’re operating from a whole different mindset. You feel like a foreigner in your own country. It’s weird. I suppose you mean Fiona felt like a foreigner here in England.’
‘That’s it. She did and so do I. Most of my school friends are married now with kids. I haven’t got much in the way of relatives, none that I can drop in on easily, anyway. People I’ve met in the service and got on well with are scattered round the globe. Fiona was in much the same boat. Her mother’s French. After she and Jeremy split, Chantal, Fiona’s mum, took her back to France. But it wasn’t a settled life, even then. Chantal took up with some bloke who took her and Fiona to live in Belgium. Then that relationship broke up and Chantal brought Fiona back to France, but to a different part. Finally, when Fiona was fourteen, Chantal and Jeremy decided through their lawyers that Fiona should go to boarding school in England and Jeremy foot the bill. So she was sent off to some scholastic institution for young ladies which she hated. She didn’t fit in there. In the holidays she either went back to France or to stay with Jeremy who’d married Alison by then. I think Chantal had a whole string of boyfriends and some of them wanted Fiona there and some didn’t. Whether Fiona went to France depended on whom Chantal was shacked up with at the time. Also,’ Toby pulled a face. ‘Fiona was growing up and she was real stunner, you saw that. I think Chantal didn’t want competition under her own roof. You haven’t met Chantal but Jeremy’s trying to contact her about this and we are expecting her to turn up here as soon as she gets the sad news. She’s – not easy.’
‘That’s sad,’ Meredith said. ‘But I suppose it’s a common enough story.’
Unexpectedly Toby said, ‘I know Fiona gave the impression of being a tough brat but you can see why. Like me, she’d learned young to put up a defence. She wasn’t really that bad but people hadn’t treated her all that well.There was enough money, you see, for both her father and her mother to salve their consciences with expensive school fees and presents.’
‘And all she wanted was love?’ asked Meredith a little drily.
‘I don’t say both Jeremy and Chantal didn’t love her. I know Jeremy did, I don’t doubt it for a minute, but I don’t think he was any good at showing it. I suppose Chantal did. But they both managed to persuade themselves they were doing everything that they needed to do and Fiona was well taken care of.’ Toby paused. ‘Love’s s funny thing,’ he added. ‘Sort of, you know, adjustable. Like a conscience.’
‘Hello, there, Miss Mitchell,’ said a male voice.
They looked up and saw Ted Pritchard standing by them. He wore a washed-out T-shirt with a faded advertisement for a popular lager on it, probably a promotional gift from a brewery. His curly hair was sprinkled with wood dust like a bad case of dandruff.
‘Popped in for my lunch,’ he explained his presence. ‘We take it in turns to go out for a bite to eat, Steve and me.’ He bent an eye on Toby. ‘The other gentleman not with you today, then?’
‘I don’t believe this,’ said Toby.
‘No, Ted, he’s working. We’re both making the most of the Easter holiday break.’
‘Nice for some, eh?’ said Ted amiably and wandered away to the bar.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Toby with deep feeling, ‘that they don’t spend all their time in the country poking their noses into other people’s business. Who is that guy?’
‘He makes garden furniture. Alan and I want him to make some for us, for the vicarage garden when we get round to fixing it up.’
‘I’ve never understood the obsession some people have with gardening,’ said Toby morosely.
‘About Fiona. Did Jeremy give her a lot of money?’ Meredith asked him after a moment’s silence.
Toby shrugged. ‘When she was younger, I think he did. But then, you see, when she was eighteen she came into her own money, from her grandfather. So she was independent.’
This surprised Meredith. It also knocked a plank out of the motive she’d been building for Fiona to be the poison pen letter-writer. It wouldn’t do, she decided, to suggest to Toby that Fiona might have had a hand in the letters. At least not yet.
A hand appeared between them holding an opened wine bottle. ‘The red!’ announced Dolores and vanished.
‘We’re not to get a chance to sample it, then,’ muttered Toby and took hold of the bottle. He released it at once with a yelp. ‘Where the hell has she been storing it? It’s warm!’
Meredith touched it. It was certainly alarmingly warm. ‘By a radiator or the oven?’ she suggested. ‘Under those electric lights always on in the bar? There are some bottles up there like this one.’
‘Right!’ said Toby grimly, gripping the offending bottle by the neck. ‘I’m not paying for this. I’m resigned to paying over the odds for a bottle of plonk but not for a bottle of hot plonk!’ He strode towards the bar.
Meredith watched with interest as an animated conversation took place at the bar. Dolores flung back her blond locks and placed her hands on her hips. Toby’s gestures grew ever more Mediterranean. Ted, leaning on the bar with cigarette smoke swirling around his head and consuming an apparently all-liquid lunch, was watching with interest. At the instant Meredith was about to jump up and intervene before it came to violence, Dolores grabbed the bottle and, looking even more like the figurehead on a galleon, surged out of the bar and through the kitchen door.
Toby returned looking flushed, baffled and disconcerted.
‘Well?’ Meredith asked him.
‘I said I it was warm,’ Toby informed her. ‘And she said it was room temperature which it ought to be. I said only if the room was a sauna. I told her I wanted another one. She said they were all the same. I said I wasn’t going to pay for a bottle of warm wine and was prepared to argue my case before the magistrates. She offered to put it in the fridge for a bit.’
By this time Meredith had buried her face in her hands and was helpless with laughter.
‘It will be undrinkable!’ growled Toby at her shaking shoulders. ‘But arguing with that woman is like arguing with a tank!’
Meredith wiped her eyes. ‘That’s Dolores, for you.’
A small depressed-looking man emerged furtively from the kitchens bearing two plates on which stood brown glazed terrines. He placed these before them. ‘The lasagne,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll bring your wine in a minute. I’ve popped it in the freezer for a couple of minutes.’
‘Look forward to it,’ murmured Toby. He picked up a fork and plunged it into the lasagne. ‘I wonder what’s in here.’
‘It looks all right. I’ll have to tell Alan about Fiona being seen here. You’re right. It’s not her sort of place and I can’t believe she came here for a night out. Do you reckon she was meeting someone? Did she know anyone local?’
Toby shrugged. ‘Search me. She didn’t say.’ He tasted the lasagne cautiously. ‘Edible,’ he said. ‘Something, I suppose.’ He put down his fork again. ‘Meredith, I’ve got a sort of confession. Fiona and I weren’t in love in the way I suppose you and Alan must be, but we were good friends, and I was getting round to asking her if she’d marry me:
Meredith was startled into silence. Eventually she asked simply, ‘Why?’
‘Why are you and Alan getting married? No, don’t answer that. Ignore it. Forget I asked. I know why you two are getting married. Anyone seeing the pair of you together would know why. In my case, I just thought I’d like to be married. Fiona seemed to me a person I’d like to be married to. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I’d been thinking it over for a few weeks.’
‘You’re not going to tell me you were considering a marriage of convenience?’
He had the grace to blush. ‘You could call it that. You see, over the last couple of years I’ve discovered I’ve turned into the embassy bachelor. It’s not a role I’m that keen to play. Fiona, well, she was livi
ng in that flat of hers in Docklands and coming down here occasionally for a few days with Jeremy and Alison. It seemed to me she didn’t have much of a life, not really. People always thought, because she was so good-looking, she must be out every night painting the town red. But the way she talked, it wasn’t like that. I knew she wasn’t working now, so she didn’t have colleagues she could have a drink with, nothing like that. But as a diplomatic wife, she’d have had a ready-made role to play, a social life, chance to travel. She had no proper roots in England. We got on OK. It might have worked.’
His manner had grown steadily more defensive as he spoke. ‘All right, I admit it, now I’m telling you about it, sitting here, it sounds pretty stupid. But when I just thought about it by myself, it didn’t.You’ll say that no man in his right mind would consider asking a girl he’d never even kissed to marry him.’
‘I’m not saying that, Toby. I’m just wondering whether she’d ever, you know, given you any encouragement. Did you get the impression she’d quite like to be married to you?’
Toby looked uncomfortable. ‘To be honest, no. She was always very friendly. I think she liked talking to me. Although, now I think about it, I did most of the talking. She didn’t tell me much about herself. I didn’t ask personal questions because I thought I knew her and because something in her manner didn’t encourage it. One does think one knows relatives. I suppose I was making assumptions. Right or wrong, I’d made up my mind to put the idea to her.’
‘But you hadn’t actually asked her?’
‘No. I was hoping to work my way round to it this weekend.’
Impulsively Meredith put out her hand and covered his which rested on the table top. ‘Oh, poor Toby. What can I say?’
‘Harr-um!’ A throat was noisily cleared above their heads.‘Sorry to disturb you, I’m sure,’ said Dolores Forbes. A bottle was set down between them with a thump. ‘Your chilled wine!’
Jess Campbell got back to regional HQ at midday and was rummaging in a drawer of her desk when she became aware someone had entered her office and was standing by the door.
‘Just a sec!’ she called. ‘Be with you in a jiff.’
‘No hurry,’ said a pleasant male voice.
Jess jumped and spun round. ‘Oh, sorry, sir. Didn’t see it was you.’
‘I came to see how you got on at Overvale,’ Alan Markby said.
‘I turned up a few things, one of them a bit of a surprise. I was just about to write out a report,’ Jess added quickly.
He nodded. ‘About this time of day, in these circumstances, if it had been Dave Pearce still in this office, I’d be offering to stand him a pint in the pub on the corner.’
‘Oh,’ said Jess. At the mention of her predecessor’s name she’d felt herself bristle but the follow-up was totally unexpected. ‘I don’t know about a pint,’ she ventured. ‘I might manage half a cider.’
Unexpectedly he gave a broad smile. ‘Meredith, my fiancée, is a cider-drinker. Come on, then. You can tell me what you found out this morning in rather more comfortable surroundings than these.’
The pub Jess found herself in was quite unlike the one in which Toby and Meredith were sharing an indifferent bottle of wine. The Feathers, with all its faults, was genuinely old. This was a fairly new building furnished in a way to suggest ‘character’. Bookcases along the walls were filled with a motley selection of second-hand volumes. Whatever the overhead beams were made of, it wasn’t wood. There was a fire burning in the hearth but it was gas-powered.
‘Sorry about the kitsch.’ Markby had noted her critical study of their surroundings. ‘They do a good ham baguette if you’re hungry. That’s what I’m having.’
‘Oh, right, sir.’
Somehow Jess felt that Markby being friendly in a relaxed way was more alarming than Markby being professionally courteous. What was this supposed to achieve? That she, Jess, would blurt out her innermost secrets? I haven’t got any! she thought crossly. Yes, you do, replied that inner voice which delights in disconcerting us. Everyone does.
He had returned holding the cider in one hand and a pint in the other. ‘The baguettes are coming,’ he informed her. ‘Cheers!’
She raised her glass cautiously. ‘Cheers, sir.’
‘What did you make of the Kemp case?’ He put down his glass. At least he wasn’t going to beat about the bush.
Jess felt he expected her to be equally to the point. She began, trying not to let a nervous tremor invade her voice. ‘It does seem too much of a coincidence that Fiona Jenner should be found dead in a way which suggests the death of Freda Kemp. At the very least, the murderer knew about the Kemp case. That, in turn, suggests the killer might be the poison pen sender. That’s what Jeremy Jenner thinks and he might be right. Or, we might all be thinking along lines suggested by the killer to throw us off the scent. The killer might not be the writer, but he or she knows about the letters and wants to point us in the direction of the letter-writer.
‘As for the Kemp case.’ Here Jess faltered but controlled the moment’s weakness and went on firmly, ‘The original investigation seems to have been botched. Either there wasn’t enough evidence and the case shouldn’t have come to court, or there was evidence, but it wasn’t properly checked. The inspiration for the letters may lie in the mistakes which were made then.’
Markby said quietly, ‘We are not investigating the Kemp murder. That’s for others to do if the case is ever reopened. Alison Harris, as she then was, was found Not Guilty. I should tell you that Alison doesn’t think Freda Kemp was murdered.’ He repeated Alison’s explanation of her aunt’s death.
‘It would make sense, I suppose.’ Jess was unable to keep the doubt from her voice. ‘I wasn’t intending to question Alison Jenner about the earlier case. I just thought we ought to keep it in mind.’
‘I quite agree. The senior investigating officer in the case was a chap called Barnes-Wakefield. He’ll be retired now but I thought I might get in touch with him and hear what he’s got to say. The roots of the murder of Fiona Jenner may indeed lie in the distant past. I can be getting on with that while you’re concentrating on what’s happening at this end of things. I’ll be tactful. I won’t suggest he botched things.’ Markby smiled.
‘No, sir. I wouldn’t say it to him directly, either.’
‘I’m not suggesting you would. But it’s best I get in touch with him. He might be happier chatting to a serving officer of the rank of superintendent—’
‘- And male,’ said Jess, before she could stop herself.
‘Quite so.’ Markby raised his glass to her.
Jess laughed ruefully. It was true the old fellow, as Barnes-Wakefield must now be, probably wouldn’t be so forthcoming with a young female inspector of the type virtually unknown when he’d been an active police officer.
‘I’ll dig him out,’ said Markby affably. ‘These old fellows usually jump at a chance to reminisce.’
The baguettes arrived and there was a pause while both of them ate.
‘So,’ the superintendent asked after a while. ‘How about this morning?’
‘I spoke to Jenner and his wife. Smythe wasn’t there. He’d gone off to lunch with a friend.’
Markby nodded. ‘He’s lunching somewhere with Meredith. I dare say I’ll get the breakdown on that later. If anything of interest came up, I’ll pass it on.’
Jess took her time replying to this. To have the superintendent’s fiancée a close friend of one of the suspects didn’t help. No wonder he’d invited her to this pub with its off-duty atmosphere. He had a good reason to want to know what she was thinking. If things got awkward, he’d want to extricate his fiancee, Meredith, was it? Yes, he’d want to get her out of an embarrassing situation.
‘One thing to come out of the interview was that Fiona Jenner was financially independent,’ she explained.
Markby nodded thoughtfully. ‘That would certainly prove significant. I wonder if she’d made a will? Being so young, she might not have done.’
‘If she hasn’t,’ Jess observed, ‘then Jenner would have a claim on the estate and so would her mother, who is French. Her first name is Chantal but I don’t know her present surname. I don’t know where she is, here or in France. I don’t think Jenner is sure of her whereabouts, either. He told me he was still trying to get in touch with her.’
‘I had Fiona down as possibly the letter-writer,’ Markby said thoughtfully. ‘So did Meredith. That now looks highly unlikely.’
‘What did you think of her, sir?The dead girl?You met her and I didn’t.’
‘I only met her once. Self-assured and pretty hard-boiled was the impression I got. It might have been a false impression. Why don’t you talk to Meredith? She might have more insight. She’s pretty good at judging people’s characters. It’s that consular training. That’s what she used to be, a British consul, dealing with all sorts of odd bods with British passports and unlikely yarns of mishaps abroad.’
‘I’d like to talk to her,’ Jess said.
‘Fine, I’ll tell her. She ought to go back to work tomorrow but perhaps she could take a morning off. I’ll ask. What else did you find out this morning?’
‘The housekeeper saw Fiona at about a quarter past eight, jogging past the window. That supports Smythe’s story that he saw her leaving the house at about ten past eight. One detail: she says Fiona’s hair was tied back with a red satin scrunchy.’ Helpfully Jess began to explain what this hair adornment was. ‘It’s an elastic—’
‘I know what they are,’ he said. ‘My niece has one. I don’t have any children but my sister has four and they keep me up to speed.’
‘Oh, right, sir. Well, there wasn’t any sign of it by the lake. She might have lost it jogging.’ Jess paused. ‘Quite possibly she wasn’t killed at the lake. There’s that tyre track. She could have been attacked somewhere on the estate and the body driven to the lake. In that case, she could have lost the hair band at the time of the attack.’
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