Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

  “No, not that one. They might be intrigued, but the question they’d ask is one that you might be more likely to have an answer to.”

  “Which is?”

  Jude looked the woman firmly in the eyes. “Do you have any idea what has happened to Nathan?”

  This time she had no problem in believing the response. A weary shake of the head and, “No, I wish I did. I feel very close to him.”

  “Oh?” As ever the gentle manner promised to elicit confidences. And it did.

  “The fact is, this family…I mean, when I met Rowley, it was him I fell in love with. I didn’t realize to quite what an extent by taking him on, I’d be taking on the rest of the Locke clan too…” Jude stayed silent. She knew more would come. “They are very all-enveloping. They see themselves as a kind of coalition against the world. I think it all started when Rowley and Arnold were boys. They were brought up in Cornwall…”

  “At Treboddick?”

  “Yes. And, you know, they were always playing these fantasy games. There’s one in particular called the Wheel Quest.”

  “Oh?” Jude responded as if she’d never heard of it. She’d admitted knowing Carole, but didn’t want to suggest that they’d discussed the Lockes together.

  “It’s something Rowley devised. Started off as a role-playing thing the boys acted out, then he turned it into a kind of board game. And a family obsession. I expect Chloe and Sylvia are playing it downstairs right now. Anyway, that stuff was all instigated by Rowley. He was the imaginative one, he invented everything, and Arnold was happy to be his acolyte, to go along with whatever Rowley said. Then, when they got married, the wives became part of the…well, it may be overstating it, but you could almost call it ‘the alternative Locke universe’. Eithne was fine about the whole thing, still is, and of course the children love being part of it. Joan—that was Rowley’s first wife—well, the impression I get is that she went along with it quite enthusiastically at first. She’d been an only child and suddenly being part of this huge, hermetically sealed comfort zone…she loved everything about it. But, as the years went on, I think she got a bit disillusioned with the whole set-up. It can be difficult for an outsider.”

  Ignoring the implication about Bridget Locke’s own position, Jude asked, “And was Nathan something of an outsider too?”

  She’d got it right. “Yes. I suppose that’s why I bonded with him. Neither of us swallowed the whole Treboddick and Wheel Quest business quite as much as we should have done. We liked it, we loved the individual members of the family, but both of us I guess had a kind of independence in us…something that meant occasionally we didn’t want to do everything as a pack. At times it could all feel a bit claustrophobic. We both liked some level of solitude, which is very difficult to achieve in this family.”

  “And that’s the bond between you and Nathan?” Jude was rewarded by a nod. “So is it worry about him that has got you in this state…and probably brought on the back trouble?”

  “Maybe. Yes, probably.”

  “Hmm.” Here was a slight dilemma. By asking what she wanted to ask next, Jude would be admitting that Carole had reported back every detail of her visit to the Summersdale house, and there were some people who would find that an invasion of privacy. Still, it was worth the risk. “Another thing my friend said, Bridget…was that, having met you and your husband, and Arnold and Eithne…”

  “Yes?”

  “…you seemed to be the only one genuinely worried by what might have happened to Nathan.”

  There was a silence, and Jude feared she might have made a misjudgement. But Bridget proved to be more concerned about the boy than about having her affairs discussed by total strangers. “I know what you mean, but that’s very much a Locke way of doing things. With their solidarity there also comes a huge confidence, so they really can’t imagine that anything dreadful’s happened to Nathan. He’s a Locke—he’ll be all right.”

  “I don’t suppose you think it’s possible…” Again Jude was treading on potentially dangerous ground, “…that they’re confident because they actually know where he is…they know he’s all right?”

  “No. Absolutely not.” But then came a concession. “I did actually suspect that at first. Not very loyal of me, was it? But straight after the murder was discovered, my immediate thought was that Nathan had taken himself off to Treboddick and was lying low down there. That would have been a very Locke solution to the problem. Whatever goes wrong with anyone in the family, a few days at Treboddick is always reckoned to be what’s required. That’s the universal panacea. So I was suspicious.”

  “But the police were also suspicious and they went down to Treboddick…searched all the cottages and found nothing.”

  “You’ve got a lot of cottages down there?”

  “A sort of terrace of four. Old miners’ cottages. Rowley’s parents used to own all of them. Now one of them’s permanently for the family, the other three are let.”

  “During the summer holidays?”

  “And any other time of year anyone’ll take them. Mopsa lives down there and she’s supposedly in charge of organizing the lets.” She didn’t sound over-confident of her stepdaughter’s organizational skills. “Anyway, once I knew that the police had searched Treboddick, I stopped being suspicious of the rest of the family. They don’t know where Nathan is. They’ve just convinced themselves that, because he’s a Locke, nothing bad can happen to him.”

  “It must be rather wonderful to have that kind of confidence.”

  Bridget Locke grinned wryly. “Well, it is…and it isn’t. Rowley and Arnold feel more secure in the family circle, being judged by family standards, than they do in the real world. So, if something goes wrong, like say when Rowley lost his teaching job, rather than going out into the competitive marketplace trying to get another one, he shrinks into himself. The world of Treboddick and the Wheel Quest is more benign than the real one.”

  “Hmm.” Time, Jude decided, to get back to the purported reason for her visit. “Well, let’s have a look at this back, shall we?”

  Obediently, Bridget Locke rolled back the duvet and lay on her front. Jude removed the pillows and began very gently to pass her hands up the line of the woman’s vertebrae. Not actually touching the skin, she waited to feel the angry energy of pain rising from the body. After the scan, she asked Bridget to perform various movements and tell her which ones hurt. Then, rolling up the nightdress and anointing the shapely back with some aromatic oil she had brought with her, Jude started to do a deep hands-on massage.

  The effect was almost immediate. Bridget Locke’s body relaxed, and her breathing settled into a slow, regular rhythm. Her limbs twitched and, within minutes, she was fast asleep. She really had been exhausted.

  As Jude tiptoed out onto the landing, her mind was full. She’d dealt with a lot of lower back pain, and this was the first sufferer she’d seen who was more comfortable propped up on pillows than lying flat. Nor had she seen many who could shake their heads and throw off duvets with quite such abandon.

  Whatever Bridget Locke’s reason had been for calling Jude to the house, there certainly was nothing wrong with her back.

  TWENTY-ONE

  To leave while a client was asleep would not be the proper professional procedure, and yet to wake her seemed unnecessarily cruel. Bridget Locke’s main problem was exhaustion, and the best remedy for that was a large dose of rest. Besides, Jude could hear the excited sounds of the two girls playing in the sitting room. She had been granted more information than she had ever anticipated from their stepmother. Maybe there was more to come from Chloe and Sylvia.

  “Your mother’s asleep. I’ll just wait here until she wakes up.”

  The girls hardly reacted to Jude’s words as she settled herself into an armchair. They seemed to share the Locke lack of interest in people outside the charmed circle of their own family. And, as their stepmother had predicted, they were deeply absorbed in their game. Jude sat back to watch and listen to
the two little, uniformed Pre-Raphaelites. From their conversation she deduced that the one who had let her in was Chloe (aka Zebba) and the smaller one Sylvia (aka Tamil).

  Carole’s description left her in no doubt that they were once again playing the Wheel Quest, and she found the mechanics of the game quite as puzzling as her neighbour had. The action still took place between the Kingdom of Verendia and the Forest of Black Fangdar, but, with more time to look at the board, Jude could now see that the main port of Verendia appeared to be Karmenka, over which loomed an extensive castle called ‘Biddet Rock’.

  Though she could not possibly understand the detail of what was happening, she did after a while work out that the game concerned a battle between Verendia and Black Fangdar and that the two powers represented—surprise, surprise—Good and Evil. Chloe was playing for Verendia and Sylvia for Black Fangdar. They moved their cardboard figurines around the map with great speed and no discernible logic. And they talked in the incomprehensible language Carole had described. ‘The Ordeal of Furminal’ was again referred to, as were ‘the Vales of Aspinglad’ and ‘the blood of Merkerin’. And there was a lot more where that came from.

  So far as the confused spectator could piece together the action, the forces of Good, in the person of Prince Fimbador, were being pursued by the evil hordes of Gadrath Pezzekan, who of course represented Evil. Prince Fimbador had suffered a heavy defeat at the Battle of Edras Helford, and was now being hounded by the enemy army of gedros, jarks, monitewks and various other monsters. He, cut off from his comrades, had retreated to the stronghold of Biddet Rock. His ghastly opponents were at the gates of the castle and about to break them down.

  “Yield, Prince Fimbador!” lisped Sylvia. “You cannot resist Gadrath Pezzekan and the power of Black Fangdar! Hand over the Grail and your life will be spared!”

  “My life is worthless,” Chloe lisped back, “if the Grail ends up in the evil hands of the Merkerin! I defy you and your false accusations! You have not yet defeated me, Gadrath Pezzekan!”

  “Oh no? You are alone. Your army is vanquished. You are outnumbered by thousands to one. And now you are cornered in the Castle of Biddet Rock like a rat in a trap. There is no possible escape for you, Prince Fimbador. Yield the Grail to me!”

  “Never! Biddet Rock still has its secrets. Pursue me if you will, but you will never find me in the labyrinth of the Wheel Path. No one has ever found anyone in the Wheel Path. No one has even found the Key of Clove’s Halo nor used it to open Face-Peril Gate, which is the secret entrance to the Wheel Chamber. There I will go, carrying the Grail with me for safe-keeping. And from there I will escape, and come back to vanquish you another day, Gadrath Pezzekan!”

  “You’re bluffing, Prince Fimbador. Already my jarks have broken through the flimsy gates of—”

  Quite how that particular Grail-quest might have ended Jude never found out, because at that moment Bridget Locke, yawning and with a towelling robe wrapped around her, entered the sitting room. As if a switch had been flicked, Chloe and Sylvia were instantly silent.

  “Sorry, Jude,” said their stepmother. “I do hope the girls have been keeping you amused.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I’m so sorry, though. I just passed out.”

  “The best thing that could have happened to you. Lots of sleep, that’s what you need, Bridget. How does the back feel?”

  “Amazing. I don’t know what you did to it, but it feels completely back to normal.” Hardly surprising, since there was never anything wrong with it. “Now tell me—what do I owe you?”

  Jude’s charges for her healing services were very flexible. Some people she treated free; those who she thought could afford it, she billed for whatever figure came into her head. Even though the Lockes were not well-heeled, she charged Bridget at something near her highest rate. Jude was very sympathetic to psychosomatic sufferings, but not to non-existent ones.

  She called on her mobile for a taxi, and exchanged conversation of little consequence with Bridget until it arrived. The two girls sat silently on the floor, in suspended animation until they could resume their game. A stranger’s presence hadn’t inhibited them at all; but their stepmother’s did. Jude wondered how they’d react had it been Rowley who came into the room. She got the feeling the Wheel Quest would have continued uninterrupted.

  When the cab arrived, Bridget Locke escorted her to the door. Her farewell words were: “Do give my good wishes to Carole.” This possibly answered the question that had been building in Jude’s mind since she arrived at the house: why had Bridget summoned her there? Could it be that all the Lockes had wanted to do was confirm that there was a connection between Carole and Jude? Were they aware of the two neighbours’ interest in the circumstances of Kyra Bartos’s death?

  Jude couldn’t be sure, but in the taxi back to Chichester Station, she certainly felt more that, rather than investigating at the Summersdale house, she herself had been being investigated.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “This is where I live. Since you’ve come all the way from Fethering, can I invite you in?”

  Carole had never felt so foolish in her life. To have failed so dismally at surveillance was bad enough, but to be patronized by the person she was supposedly tailing added insult to injury. Her first instinct was to drive off immediately, to slog shamefacedly back to High Tor and give Gulliver his supper and a nice walk.

  But another part of her demanded that, having come so far, she had to see the thing through. She hadn’t worked out precisely what she was going to do when Theo reached his destination, but she had prepared herself for the possibility that, if he did see her, he would tell her to get lost. Instead, she was being invited inside his home. Surely, for someone who occasionally dared to think of herself as an investigator, that was too good an invitation to turn down.

  On the other hand, what she was investigating was a murder and Theo’s odd behaviour suggested that at the very least he had something to hide. He was quite possibly in the frame as a suspect. To go into the house or flat of such a person could be risky to the point of recklessness.

  Theo himself interrupted her indecision. “Make your mind up. I’m going in. You can come with me or not. But I’m not likely to ask you again.”

  “I’ll come in,” she said with a boldness she didn’t feel.

  “Fine.” He showed his beautifully veneered teeth in a smile that looked just sardonic, but could easily have been evil.

  The BMW turned out to be parked exactly in front of his home. He used a key to let himself in through the heavy black door with fine brass trimmings, and summoned an old brass-gated lift—or, when inspected more closely, a reproduction of an old brass-gated lift. Inside, the control panel was all high-tec and computerized. Politely he gestured Carole to go in before him, and pressed the button for the third floor. Nothing was said as the lift moved smoothly upwards.

  The silence continued as he led her out and moved straight ahead to open his flat. There were no other doors on the landing, indicating that Theo owned the whole of one floor. Carole just had time to register that hairdressers must make a lot more money than she had previously thought before he ushered her into the flat itself. There her impression was confirmed. Through the open hall door, she could see that the huge sitting room, its tall windows looking down over the square to the sea, was exquisitely and lavishly appointed. Sunlight glinted on the deep dark patina of fine furniture, and the paintings on the walls looked as if they were the work of artists Carole had heard of. If all of this came from hairdressing, Theo’s prices must be absolutely astronomical.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I close the door,” said Theo. “I’m not sure what it is you suspect me of, but I don’t in fact have any intention of either raping or murdering you.”

  His words so closely matched the anxieties running through her head that Carole found herself blushing. Theo indicated an armchair for her and sat down opposite, his bright brown eyes fixed on her pale blue ones
. She looked away. She got the unpleasant sensation that he was enjoying her discomfiture.

  “So…what’s this all about? You following me two days running? With your chubby friend yesterday…when I managed to give you the slip…and today on your own? As they say in the worst kind of thrillers—what’s your game?”

  Carole decided to brazen it out. “I’ve been following you because I think you have a guilty secret.”

  His hands flew up to his mouth in a theatrical gesture of shock. For the first time that afternoon, she saw some of the high campness he had demonstrated in Connie’s Clip Joint. “I heard you used to be a civil servant. Don’t tell me you’re from the Inland Revenue.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He did an equally elaborate impression of relief. “Thank God for that. If you had been, then I might have had to admit to the odd guilty secret, but then I regard it as a point of honour to deceive the taxman in any way possible. If it’s not tax, though…” he spread his hands wide in a display of innocence, “…my conscience is clear.”

  “It’s nothing to do with tax.” Having started on a course of confrontation, she had to continue. “It’s to do with the murder of Kyra Bartos.”

  “Ah.” The small brown eyes narrowed. “I might have guessed. In a hotbed of gossip like Fethering, I’m sure there are quite a lot of busybodies who have their crackpot theories about that. Yes, I suppose every second pensioner over there sees herself as the reincarnation of Miss Marple.”

  Carole’s first instinct was to be affronted, until she realized that ‘pensioner’ was in fact an entirely accurate definition of her status. She tried being a little less combative. “All right. Everyone is gossiping about the case, I agree. And everyone is making wild conjectures about all the people involved with Connie’s Clip Joint…”

  “Thank you for the ‘wild conjectures’. The use of the expression displays remarkable self-knowledge.”

  “So,” she persevered, “it therefore does become of interest when one of those people turns out to have a guilty secret.”