Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

He sounded bewildered that the question should have been asked, so, without spelling out the other local rumour that the boy had topped himself, Carole moved quickly on. “I don’t quite understand, Mr Locke. What is it you want me to do for you?”

  “Just talk to us about what you saw in the hairdresser’s that morning. I realize that you may think this is a police matter and that you shouldn’t discuss it with anyone else…”

  The priorities of her Home Office past made Carole think exactly that, but on the other hand she was being offered the opportunity to garner more information about people involved in what she and Jude were increasingly thinking of as their next investigation…

  “I have telephoned the two hairdressers who were there that morning, and they have both taken the view that they shouldn’t talk to us…which, as I say, is entirely their prerogative…but I was just wondering, Mrs Seddon, whether you felt the same…?”

  “I can see their point of view completely,” Carole began. “On the other hand, I’m also feeling slightly frustrated by the lack of information I’m receiving from the police, so if we were to pool our knowledge, I think it might be mutually beneficial.”

  “I am so glad to hear you say that.”

  “So what do you want to ask me?”

  “Well, if it’s not inconvenient, I would rather the conversation were conducted face to face than on the phone.”

  “That’s fine by me.”

  “I don’t know how committed your time is…” His phrasing was again scrupulously polite.

  “I’m retired, so I’m…” Carole overstated the truth “…relatively free.”

  “Good. Because, seeing from the phone book where you live, I was wondering whether it might be possible for us to meet up at the house of my brother and sister-in-law…Nathan’s parents…?”

  Better and better, thought Carole.

  §

  As soon as she arrived at Marine Villas that same afternoon, it was clear that, though Arnold Locke owned the house, Rowley was the dominant brother. There was a strong family likeness between them. Both were tall and spare, with thinning straw-coloured hair and large surprised blue eyes, which made them look unworldly almost to the point of vulnerability.

  The front room into which Carole was ushered deliberately showed the Lockes to be an artistic family.

  At the end away from the window stood an upright piano, and beside it a Victorian wooden music stand, which suggested at least one other instrument was played in the house. Nearby shelves held neatly upright books of sheet music. The same tidiness had been brought to bear on the extensive collection of CDs in parallel racks. Carole felt pretty certain they’d all be of classical music. Some tasteful framed prints on the walls and rigidly marshalled bookshelves re-emphasized the Lockes’ rather intense interest in culture.

  Also present in the room were Arnold’s wife Eithne, and Rowley’s daughter Dorcas. The former was a dumpy woman whose ample figure strained against the buttons that ran all the way down her flower-printed cotton dress. She wore her dark grey hair in a generous bun low at the back of her neck. Carole couldn’t help being reminded of the figure from a childhood pack of ‘Happy Families’, Mrs Bun the Baker’s Wife.

  Dorcas, on the other hand, with honey-coloured eyes, long spun-gold corkscrew curls and a tall slender body, was the kind of girl who would have been earnestly pursued as a model by the Pre-Raphaelites. The clothes she affected, long eau-de-nil top over ankle-length pale green skirt, encouraged the impression. Her speech showed the same academic earnestness as the other Lockes’, but with a slight lisp. It made her sound more childish than her age, which Carole estimated at about twenty.

  “My wife Bridget would have liked to be here too,” Rowley apologized, “but sadly she has to work. She’s a teacher in Chichester.” Maybe at the college where Nathan was a pupil?

  Carole was struck by how relatively calm Arnold and Eithne Locke seemed. If her son Stephen had disappeared under suspicion of having committed a murder, she didn’t think she would be behaving with such equanimity. But Nathan’s parents appeared to think that everything was in hand and, from the way they looked at him, that Rowley was the one who had it in hand.

  “I hope you don’t mind meeting us all together, Mrs Seddon.”

  “That’s no problem. Please call me Carole.”

  “Thank you. And I’m Rowley. But this is obviously a family thing we’re talking about. And it’s quite serious.”

  “Particularly because it involves Fimby,” added Dorcas.

  In response to Carole’s look of puzzlement, Rowley explained, “Sorry, Fimby’s a nickname we have for Nathan.”

  “Everyone in the family has a nickname,” said Dorcas.

  Carole hoped she wasn’t about to be told what they all were, and fortunately Rowley continued, “I must tell you, Carole, that our starting point is that Nathan did not kill Kyra Bartos.”

  “Do you have any evidence to support that?”

  “The evidence we have is our knowledge of the boy’s personality. We’ve all watched him grow up. He’s only sixteen, and he does not have a violent nature.”

  “People’s nature can change…under provocation.”

  “Maybe, but I can’t see Nathan’s nature changing that much. He’s a gentle boy. His main interest is English literature.”

  “Rowley…” Carole didn’t find that the name tripped easily off her tongue, “…I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but it is quite possible that someone whose main interest is English literature, who is what one could call ‘bookish’, might have great difficulty in adjusting to the realities of the real world and, you know, particularly in an emotional relationship…” She left them to fill in the rest of the sentence.

  Rowley nodded in acknowledgement of her argument, noting it down as a good debating point. “I agree that is a possible scenario, but not in the case of Nathan.”

  “No, we really can’t imagine him doing anything like what he’s being publicly accused of,” Arnold contributed, and the ‘we’ he used seemed to encompass not just himself and his wife but the whole family.

  “But you don’t have anything handy like an alibi for him at the time when he was supposed to have been with Kyra?”

  “No.” After his brother’s brief intervention, Rowley once again took up the reins of the conversation. “And, indeed…I’m telling you this, Carole, because I respect the fact that you’ve agreed to come and talk to us this afternoon, and because I trust you not to spread the information around…we are pretty certain that Nathan did actually see Kyra Bartos the evening before she died.”

  “You haven’t heard that from Nathan himself?”

  “We’ve heard nothing from Nathan himself.”

  “And you don’t think he’s just run off, for reasons which have nothing to do with the murder?”

  Rowley was puzzled by the question. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  “Young people do it all the time. You know, if they’re unhappy at home…”

  “Nathan was not unhappy at home,” said Rowley firmly. “We are a very strong family, and he always enjoyed being part of it.”

  This was spoken so much like an article of faith that Carole found herself wondering what it must have been like for any family member who questioned the party line. She knew she’d find such a set-up impossibly claustrophobic. Maybe Nathan did too…

  Eithne Locke, perhaps because she feared being thought unmaternal, interjected at this point. “Of course he wouldn’t want to run off. Listen, we haven’t seen Nathan since he left here early that evening, round seven. Arnold and I are obviously worried sick.” But she didn’t sound worried sick. Still, Carole knew that that meant nothing. The woman’s surface calm might well be a coping mechanism for her anxiety.

  “We are sure he will come home eventually,” the boy’s mother went on, “but he must be aware that he’s a suspect and I’m sure he’s terrified of the police getting hold of him.”

  “Our fine boys in blu
e,” said Rowley Locke, clearly speaking from a long-held agenda, “do not have the best reputation in the world for the way they deal with suspects. Human rights tend to cover only what can be seen; they frequently cease at the door of the interrogation room. We don’t want Nathan to have to go through that.”

  Carole, whose experiences in the Home Office had given her a less cynical attitude to the British police, did not think that this was the moment to take issue. Nor did she think it was the moment to raise the question of suicide with the boy’s parents. It seemed to have entered their thoughts no more than it had Rowley’s, and Carole was not about to create new anxieties for them.

  “Have you any idea how the police’s search for Nathan is going?”

  Rowley Locke shrugged. “As I say, we’re not very high up the distribution list for police information.” Join the club, thought Carole. “They’ve asked us about where he might be, obviously.”

  “They even had the nerve,” said Eithne, “to search this house to see if he was hiding somewhere.”

  “Though they did ask our permission first,” her husband pointed out.

  “Yes, but only because they would have had to get a search warrant otherwise,” Eithne added.

  “And they looked for him in our house as well,” said Rowley. “We too gave permission. We have nothing to hide. They even searched Treboddick.”

  “Treboddick?”

  “Oh, sorry, Carole. It’s a place we have in Cornwall. They thought Nathan might have hidden himself away down there.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s a reasonable suspicion, isn’t it? If it’s a family place?”

  “Huh.” Rowley Locke was not temperamentally inclined to listen to any arguments in favour of ‘our fine boys in blue’. “Anyway,” he went on, “the reason for wanting to talk to you, as I said on the phone, is because the police are telling us nothing. And it’s very difficult for us to get a handle on what Nathan might or might not have done, when we don’t know exactly what it is he’s been accused of.”

  “He hasn’t been accused of anything yet.”

  “All right. What he’s suspected of having done. And I just thought…because you were actually on the scene when the body was discovered, you might know something…well, more than we do, anyway.”

  Carole nodded thoughtfully and looked around the room. She felt justified in taking her time. What the Lockes were asking could be considered as a major intrusion into her privacy. They weren’t to know she was at least as desperate to find out everything about them as they were about her.

  The framed photographs on the mantelpiece and walls corrected an image of the family that she had received. Dorcas’s prissiness had suggested to Carole that she was an only child, but the evidence negated that impression. All the pictures showed lots of children, and both sets of parents, in a variety of relaxed holiday settings. Both Nathan and Dorcas had siblings, one of hers being an identical twin. Carole got the strong impression that the Locke cousins did everything together. And no doubt, she thought with a mental cringe, they all had nicknames like Fimby.

  “I see you’re looking at the photographs,” said Rowley. “That’s Nathan.”

  The boy he pointed out had darker hair, but the same susceptible pale blue eyes. He was good-looking, probably about thirteen when the photograph had been taken. The massed children were on a boat in a creek that looked Cornish, the Helford River maybe. Presumably the setting was somewhere near Treboddick. The other children were taking up nautical poses for the camera, like something out of Swallows and Amazons (a book which Carole suddenly felt certain the Lockes would have read with enormous relish). But Nathan looked detached, almost embarrassed by the play-acting around him. Maybe it had only been a phase, an adolescent grumpiness which had afflicted him that one particular day, but Carole got the impression of the boy as an unwilling outsider in the claustrophobic world of the Locke family.

  “Thank you. I haven’t met him obviously,” she said. “And I’m afraid I don’t know much about the background or the history at Connie’s Clip Joint. That morning was the first time I had been in the salon.”

  “It must have been a terrible shock for you. But do you mind telling us what you actually saw?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “And is it all right if I take notes?”

  Carole shrugged permission. Rowley Locke took a small plain leatherbound notebook out of his jacket pocket, and then unscrewed a large fountain pen. He opened a page on which she could see neat italic writing in brown ink. She had a feeling that everything Rowley Locke did in his life would be balanced on that fine line between individuality and pretension.

  Her description of what she had seen in the back room at Connie’s Clip Joint was delivered as impassively as she could make it. When she had finished, Rowley Locke completed his last note with a neat full stop.

  “Thank you so much, Carole. There were quite a lot of details there we didn’t know about.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, we knew how the girl had been strangled, and what had been used to do the deed, but we didn’t know anything about the vodka bottle and beer cans. Or the red roses.”

  “Those all seem to suggest that Kyra had been entertaining someone in the salon that evening. She had the keys, you see, so that she could open up the following morning.” Carole remembered something Les Constantine had told her, and could see no harm in passing it on. “I gather that Kyra’s father was very protective of her, wouldn’t have liked the idea of her having boyfriends around at home. So I suppose, if the girl wanted to be alone with Nathan, Connie’s Clip Joint was the obvious place for them to go.”

  Eithne Locke, interpreting this as some obscure slight on her as a parent, insisted that Nathan had always been welcome to bring Kyra to Marine Villas. “We made that very clear to him. Arnold and I have very liberal attitudes to that kind of thing. Diggo had one girlfriend virtually living here just before he went to university.”

  Carole assumed this was another of the ghastly Locke nicknames, probably for Nathan’s older brother, but she didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead she went on, “I haven’t heard it as a fact from the police, but I had assumed that the vodka bottle and beer cans might have given them a direct link to Nathan. You know, through his DNA or fingerprints.”

  “Yes, except that they don’t have his DNA or fingerprints on file—and we refused to let them take any samples from the house. We know our rights.” Rowley Locke was mounting another of his human rights hobby horses. “I am aware that this government would like to have everyone’s details on file from birth, but at the moment they can only keep such records for people who have actually been found guilty of a crime. And I am glad to say that my nephew has never fitted into that category.”

  “But you’re not denying,” asked Carole, “that it does look likely that Nathan spent some time with Kyra in the salon the evening before she was found dead?”

  “No, none of us is denying that. We think it very likely that he did spend time with her. What happened while they were together…” For the first time he looked embarrassed. “Carole, you didn’t gather from the police whether there had been any sign of…sexual activity…on the girl’s body?”

  “They’re no more likely to have told me that than they are you.”

  “No, I suppose not. I wasn’t suggesting rape or…I was thinking of consensual sex.”

  “Do you know whether Nathan and Kyra were sleeping together?”

  Instinctively Rowley looked to the boy’s mother to answer this question. “I can’t actually be sure,” said Eithne Locke, “but I would have thought it likely. According to everything one reads in the newspapers, young people seem to be sexually active from about the age of fourteen these days. And certainly Nathan would have encountered no disapproval of such behaviour in this house, would he Arnold?”

  Her husband concurred. “No, we’re not prudish at all.” But he contrived to sound prudish as he said it.

  “Had y
ou actually met Kyra?”

  Arnold looked to his wife for consent before saying, “Not really. Well, that is to say, Nathan never brought her back here to introduce us, did he, Eithne?”

  “No. Which one might have thought was rather odd.”

  Carole didn’t find it at all odd. “You said ‘Not really’, Arnold…”

  “Yes. Well, Eithne did once meet them together in Fethering High Street, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. And it was a situation where Nathan couldn’t avoid introducing the girl to me. Though he didn’t do it with very good grace…almost as though he were ashamed of her.”

  Much more likely that he was ashamed of you, Carole thought. “And neither of you ever met Kyra’s father?”

  “Oh no,” said Arnold.

  “Right.” Carole turned back to the dominant—not to say controlling—brother. “So, Rowley, your view would be that Nathan did spend some time with Kyra in the salon that evening, then, after he’d left, someone else came along and murdered her?”

  “That seems to me to be the most likely scenario, yes.”

  “Well, it looks as though all such speculations are going to be no more than speculations until the boy reappears and gives an account of himself.”

  Rowley Locke agreed.

  “And presumably…I’m sorry to ask you this, but I feel I have to…none of you have any idea where Nathan might have gone?”

  They all confirmed that they hadn’t. So, with assurances on both sides that they’d get in touch to share any further information that might come up, Carole left the house in Marine Villas and walked back the short way to High Tor—with an uncomfortable feeling that she had just been interrogated.

  SEVEN

  Jude had borne Connie Rutherford’s advice in mind, and waited till the Thursday morning to contact Wally Grenston. She had been through various possible excuses for her call, but, not being by nature a devious person, had opted finally for the truth. “I was in Connie’s Clip Joint on Tuesday morning when you and your wife were having your hair done…”

  “Oh yes. You were waiting. Blonde lady, am I right?”