Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve suddenly done something to my back. I don’t know if you do backs. Maybe I should be talking to an osteopath?”

  “I do backs.”

  “Well, mine’s suddenly gone and—”

  “Gone in what way?”

  “Sort of seized up down in the small of my back, but the pain comes all over the place, if I try to turn my head round or lift my legs in a certain way.”

  “Mmm. Lower back pain. So you’d like to make an appointment?”

  “Please.”

  “Well, I live in Fethering, just on the High Street. I’m fairly free at the moment, so if you name a time when—”

  “Ah. The trouble is, I can’t drive. I mean, I can drive normally, but at the moment I can hardly move off my bed, and even just lying there’s terribly painful. I certainly can’t bend my body to get into the car. It’s agony. Look, I’m sorry, but would it be possible for you to come and see me?”

  Jude needed no second invitation. She had heard enough from Carole about the Lockes’ set-up to want to see it at first hand. If she could cure Bridget Locke’s back pain—and she had a high success rate in such cases—then good. And if she could find out any more about Kyra Bartos’s murder and the disappearance of Nathan Locke, then even better.

  “Yes, of course I could come to you. Where do you live?” she asked, knowing the answer full well.

  NINETEEN

  Jude fixed to go to Chichester that afternoon. After four, when the younger girls were back from school and could let her in. She could do the journey by rail. The coastal trains on the Brighton to Portsmouth Harbour line were slow and kept stopping in the middle of the bungaloid sprawl at numerous stations with ‘wick’ in their names, but they’d get her there eventually. Then a taxi from Chichester Station to Summersdale.

  She knew Carole would have driven her, but Jude didn’t want that, for a couple of reasons. First, the Lockes were presumably unaware of the connection between the two women. The sight of Carole’s Renault outside their house could ruin that. Then again, when she was going to do a healing session, Jude needed some quiet time to build up her concentration and focus her energies. That would be difficult to achieve in a car full of Carole’s scepticism.

  Anyway, as it turned out, she couldn’t have got a lift from her neighbour. The immaculate Renault and its owner were elsewhere.

  Carole wasn’t at home because she was on a mission of her own. An only child of borderline paranoid tendencies, she had never been good at sharing. Her relationship with Jude was one of the easiest and least judgemental of her life, but Carole still sometimes felt the necessity for secrets. Particularly in connection with their murder investigations. She could never quite suppress the pleasing fantasy of her doing something very successful on her own; of her finding the link of logic that brought together two apparently unrelated elements in a case. And the fantasy always concluded with the image of her casually presenting the vital new development as a rich gift to Jude.

  For nearly twenty-four hours an idea had been simmering in Carole’s mind. A piece of the investigation that she could do completely on her own. Indeed, it made sense that she should do it on her own. She was, after all, the one with the car.

  The germ of the idea had come to her on the previous day when she had driven out of the Yeomansdyke car park, only to discover that Theo in his shiny BMW had vanished. When Jude had told her about his two o’clock appointment for the Tuesday afternoon, she knew exactly what she should do.

  Carole Seddon’s experience of stake-out work was limited. Though there were undoubtedly people connected with the Home Office who had honed such skills by long practice, it was not something that had ever come up in her own professional duties. She had spent most of her time writing and reading interminable reports. So her knowledge of surveillance techniques was based only on what she had seen at the cinema and on television.

  The first important prerequisite, she knew, was an unobtrusive vehicle, and here she already scored highly. In Fethering a Renault like hers automatically became part of the landscape. The streets were full of such elderly but beautifully nurtured old cars. Nobody would ever give it a second glance.

  The second essential was that the driver should also be unobtrusive, and in this respect she was not so well placed. Though she had few friends in Fethering, everybody in the village knew exactly who she was (just as she knew a great deal about all of the people she never spoke to). Anonymity is only granted to people who live in cities; in the country it is impossible to attain.

  Balancing this in her favour was the fact that her quarry didn’t know either her or her car well. Theo’s behaviour the previous day suggested that he’d been completely unaware of the Renault tailing him.

  Fortunately, at the end of Fethering High Street there was a small car park for people using the beach. Carole settled the Renault into a bay from which she had a perfect view of Theo’s Fabia, parked more or less exactly where it had been the previous day. Having never undergone the procedure, she didn’t know exactly how long a cut and highlights would take, but she reckoned it had to be at least an hour. Theo’s appointment, she knew, was for two o’clock. Being, however, a person paranoid-about being late, she was in her surveillance position by half-past two.

  She hoped she didn’t look too obtrusive. It was quite common for people—particularly old people—to sit in their vehicles in that particular car park, but the favoured way was facing the sea. To have one’s back to the view was unusual but, to Carole’s relief, did not attract any curious looks from passers-by. And she did have the Times crossword there as a smokescreen.

  It was a particularly recalcitrant puzzle that day. Tuesdays, Carole knew from long experience, could be tricky. Mondays and Fridays were always easy. She felt sure that this was a deliberate policy on behalf of the newspaper. The pains of returning to work after the weekend, like end-of-the-week exhaustion, could be eased by an unchallenging crossword. Completing it quickly could give a disproportionate lift to the spirits of the weary commuter. But midweek was a different matter altogether; then the clues could be much more arduous. And Carole had a feeling The Times had taken on a new setter. Over the years she had become skilled at reading the minds of the people devising the crosswords, but some of the clues that had been cropping up recently seemed to express a whole new attitude to the English language. Carole found the newcomer’s work both satisfying and frustrating—satisfying when she could get an answer right, frustrating when she couldn’t. It would take time to find out precisely how the new mind worked.

  That Tuesday’s crossword was definitely one of his. Very unusually for her, Carole had to look at the clues for nearly ten minutes before she could get her first solution. Normally, even on a difficult day, she could get a couple straight away and then slowly grind through the others. And there were some magical occasions when the whole crossword opened up like a book and the answers came as quickly as she could write them down. Then, by simply narrowing her eyes, she could instantly pick out the anagram from a jumble of words. At such gilded moments she felt omniscient, there was nothing in the world she could not cope with. Such gilded moments, however, were rare.

  Doing the crossword was meant to stave off the advance of Alzheimer’s, but that afternoon she could feel it encroaching at a rate of knots. Even as she had the thought, though, she knew what was really to blame was her concentration. Constantly flicking her eyes away from the page towards the immobile green Fabia was not conducive to effective clue-solving.

  She had a long wait and filled in very few more answers. A cut and highlights clearly took a lot longer than her estimate. She was beginning to think that Theo must’ve had some other customers booked in, when finally she saw a woman with newly highlighted hair emerge from Connie’s Clip Joint. Only moments later Theo came out, and swanned along the High Street towards his car. It was just after four o’clock.

  Once again Theo was dressed in his black livery. Once again
his movements were light and mildly effeminate. Once again he got into the Fabia and drove out of Fethering in a westerly direction.

  And once again Carole Seddon’s Renault tailed him.

  The previous day’s history repeated itself. The Fabia stopped in the Yeomansdyke car park, and the hairdresser, looking neither left nor right, again went into the hotel’s spa entrance.

  No swim or workout on the Tuesday either. Within five minutes Theo was out again in his other persona. The day’s clothes for this character were jeans and an oatmeal-coloured linen jacket. Without even a look at the Fabia, he got into the BMW and drove off.

  This time Carole was ready for him: The Renault’s engine was on before he was out of the car park, and she was in time to see him turn right out of the entrance. She followed. He was going north, through Yapton and past Fontwell Racecourse towards the A27, the major road that runs parallel to the South Coast. The BMW turned right, rejecting the delights of Chichester, Portsmouth and Southampton in favour of Arundel, Worthing and Brighton.

  On the minor roads, there had been little traffic and Carole had had no difficulty keeping within sight of Theo’s car. Indeed, her only worry had been that her trailing him was too obvious. On the A27 the problem was different. There were many more vehicles and an open stretch of road would give a car like the BMW opportunities to let rip and lose the more sedate Renault (not to mention the even more sedate Renault’s owner).

  But Theo proved to be a very law-abiding driver. He rarely took the car above fifty and Carole had little difficulty in keeping no more than one or two cars away from him. Where the traffic slowed to a crawl through the outskirts of Worthing, she found she was directly behind. Rather belatedly, she put on a pair of dark glasses from the Renault’s neat glove compartment. It was unlikely that Theo would show any interest in the driver of the car behind—he was probably lost in a radio programme or music CD—but Carole still thought putting the glasses on was a prudent move. The action also gave her a frisson; she was behaving like a real private investigator.

  Worthing left behind, the BMW showed no signs of stopping. It didn’t take long before Carole started to feel less like a real private investigator and more like the middle-aged owner of a dog who would soon be needing a meal and a walk. She had no idea how far Theo was going. His destination could be anywhere—London, Canterbury, Folkestone. Yes, he might even be going through the Channel Tunnel. Paris? Lille? He could be going to any place in Europe or beyond.

  With difficulty, she curbed her imagination and made a decision. Brighton would be the extent of her surveillance. If he went beyond Brighton, then that was it. End of adventure. She’d go back and feed Gulliver.

  The possibility of a destination in Brighton or nearer was boosted by the fact that, after leaving the magnificence of Lancing College to his left and climbing the steep incline above Shoreham-on-Sea, Theo left the A27 in favour of the A2770. While the major road led up through a tunnel to all kinds of distant places, the one he had selected led through a variety of overlapping small towns until it reached Brighton.

  The traffic was still heavy and slower on the minor road, so keeping the BMW in sight was again no problem. The two cars stopped and started through the suburban sprawl, then took a right turn down towards Hove. Where the road met the sea, Theo turned left, along the magnificent frontage towards Brighton. Carole knew it didn’t really make sense, but she seemed to feel a relaxation in his driving now, as if he were on the home straight.

  And so it proved. Taking his tail by surprise, Theo’s BMW suddenly swung left up into a magnificent Regency square of fine houses frosted like wedding cakes. Carole almost overshot the junction, but, to a chorus of annoyed hooting from behind her, managed to manoeuvre the Renault up the same way.

  At the top, on the side facing the sea, Theo bedded the car neatly into a reserved space. The lack of other parking left Carole with no choice but to drive past him. She juddered to a halt on yellow lines beyond the row of residents’ cars and looked ahead, trying to find that rarest of phenomena—a parking space in Brighton.

  She was so preoccupied with her search that she didn’t look behind her. The tap on her window took her completely by surprise. She turned in the seat to see Theo looking down at her. Sheepishly, she lowered the window.

  “So, Carole…”he asked, “why have you been following me?”

  TWENTY

  Jude was let into the Summersdale house by one of the little Locke girls, dressed in a green school jumper and skirt. Whether it was Chloe or Sylvia—or indeed Zebba or Tamil—she had no means of knowing, and the information wasn’t volunteered. All the child did, when the visitor had identified herself, was to say lispingly, “Oh yes, Mummy’s expecting you. She’s upstairs.” Then, turning on her heel and announcing, “I’m playing,” she went back into the sitting room.

  As Jude climbed the stairs, she tried to tune in to the atmosphere of the place. Beneath the surface chaos of lovable family life she could feel strong undercurrents of tension and anxiety. Those might be natural, given the Lockes’ current situation, but the impression she got was that they pre-dated the disappearance of Nathan from Marine Villas.

  At the top of the stairs she paused, and a weak voice said, “I’m through here.”

  Bridget Locke was wearing a plain white nightdress, and was propped up high on pillows in a single bed. But before Jude had a chance to process this information, she was told that this was the spare room. “I’m so uncomfortable in the night that I can’t share a bed with anyone. Rowley wouldn’t get any sleep if I was in our own room.”

  Jude, as usual with a new client (she preferred that word to ‘patient’), began by asking a few general questions about Bridget’s medical history. Apparently, back pain was not a recurrent problem for her. This was the first time it had happened, or at least had happened so badly that she needed treatment.

  “Why did you come to me? Most people’s first port of call would have been their GP.”

  “Yes.” The woman seemed slightly confused by the question. “The fact is, I’ve always favoured alternative therapy over conventional medicine. My experience of doctors has been that, whatever your complaint is, they reckon a drug prescription will sort it out. I’m rather reluctant to cram my body full of chemicals.”

  While Jude entirely agreed with the sentiment, she wasn’t convinced that Bridget Locke was telling the truth about her reasons for approaching her. “You said it was Sonia Dalrymple who suggested you call me…?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How is she?” A bit of general conversation might relax the woman—even, Jude found herself thinking for some reason, put her off her guard.

  “She’s fine. Well, I say that…I think the marriage has broken up. Difficult man, Nicky.”

  Jude, whose investigations with Carole into a murder at Long Bamber Stables had found out some interesting secrets about Nicky Dalrymple, might have put it more strongly. But she wasn’t about to say more about that. “So, if this is the first time your back’s gone, Bridget, what do you think’s caused it?”

  “I don’t know. Lifting something out of the car perhaps? Standing at a funny angle?”

  “Was there any moment when you suddenly felt it go?”

  “No, it sort of happened gradually.”

  “Hmm. You know, a lot of back pain isn’t primarily physical.”

  “Are you saying it’s psychosomatic?” The reaction was a common one. No one wanted to have their suffering diminished by being told it was ‘all in the mind’.

  “That’s a word you can use, if you want to,” Jude replied soothingly. “The mind and the body are very deeply interrelated. And whether the cause is something mental or something physical, it doesn’t make any difference to how much your back hurts.”

  “No.” Bridget Locke sounded mollified.

  “What are your normal stress reactions?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Most of us have some kind of physical response to s
tress. With some people it’s headaches…stomach upsets…insomnia…”

  Bridget Locke seized on the last word. “I don’t sleep that well. I suppose that is my normal stress reaction, yes.”

  “And presumably, with your back like this, you’re sleeping even less?”

  The woman nodded. She did look exhausted. Under the neatly cut hair, the skin of her face was tight with tiredness and there were dark hollows beneath her eyes.

  “You’re worried about Nathan?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard about that?” Again something didn’t ring true with Jude. Bridget knew she lived in Fethering, she must have known the level of village gossip that an event like Kyra Bartos’s murder would generate in a place like that. Surely she would have assumed that Jude knew about it.

  But this was not the moment for a challenge. “Yes, dreadful business. It must be hard on you…”

  “Quite tough.”

  “…and of course the rest of the family.” Though from what Carole had said, Bridget was the only one who seemed worried about the boy.

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. I gather, Bridget, you’re not Rowland’s first wife?”

  “No. How did you know that?”

  No point in lying. “A friend of mine told me. Someone you’ve met. Her name’s Carole Seddon.”

  “Ah, yes.” Was Jude wrong to detect a note of satisfaction in the response?

  “Can I ask you…I’m sorry, you may think it’s being nosy, but it’s a question anyone from Fethering would ask you…”

  “Because everyone from Fethering has now become an amateur detective?”

  “If you like.”

  “Including you and your friend Carole?”

  “Maybe. We can’t help being interested.”

  “No, only natural. So what was this question that everyone in Fethering would ask me? Do I know who killed Kyra Bartos?”