by Alice Castle
‘Who’s he?’ asked Beth.
‘Mr Prendergast,’ whispered Katie. ‘He taught at Wyatt’s. Physics, I think.’
Playing opposite them were a brace of Miss Marple lookalikes, from their perms to their woolly outfits, sensible brogue shoes, and battered shopping bags, lumpy with what could easily have been identical sets of knitting. ‘You don’t know them as well, do you?’ Beth hissed.
Katie shrugged. ‘Sorry. But they look very sweet.’
As they watched, one of the inoffensive old dears swooped down and dashed an ace onto the table. Mr and Mrs Prendergast both looked chastened. Maybe not as sweet as they seemed, thought Beth.
They sidled over to the next table, and Katie sketched a little hello wave at the lady sitting in what Beth now knew was the North position.
‘Yoga,’ Katie explained. Indeed, despite being in her seventies at least, with age-mottled hands and a high neckline disguising the depredations of the years, the woman had the supple grace which Beth so envied in Katie – but which seemed to have eluded Beth herself when she’d had a go at yoga. Maybe you needed to do it more than once, said a small voice which she rapidly silenced.
The yoga lady was playing with a substantially less well-toned companion, who appeared younger and also seemed quite smiley. For Beth, this was a welcome change. So far, all the players had seemed as grim-faced as converts to some joyless cult. This woman seemed to be having fun, at any rate. But maybe not for long. ‘Moira,’ tutted her partner, as the woman splashed down a card, and the opposition – two men in their sixties, both buttoned up in cardigans and hidden behind bifocal glasses – looked smug.
‘I think she’s trumped something she shouldn’t have,’ Beth said, glimmerings of those lessons years ago coming back to her. As soon as she spoke, the cardigan men gave her indignant glances, and Katie took her arm and ushered her on.
This time, they came to a stop near to a lady who looked familiar. She had what could only be described as a helmet of hair. It was as sugar-spun as Donald Trump’s, though arranged in a more fetching style often seen on matrons of a certain age in the area. Beth was sure it was the product of many hours under a drier in Dulwich Village’s top salon. Looking round the room, she could see at least a couple more dead ringer ’dos. Add to that, perfect cerise nails, glinting as this particular lady held her cards, and an outfit which seemed to have leapt from the pages of a posh catalogue, and the woman seemed the archetypal SE21 scary gran.
Beth definitely had the disconcerting feeling that she’d met her before. Despite the careful grooming, there was something masculine about her regular features, the very prominent blue eyes… Did she remind Beth of a man she knew, or was she just too familiar with this whole look?
‘Isn’t that…?’ Katie tailed off.
Beth, still wracking her brains, turned to her, just as the woman raised her hand and said loudly, ‘Deirdre, a moment, if you could?’ It was framed as a question, but there was not much doubt that it was a command. She might as well have snapped her fingers.
Deidre plodded over the parquet and came to stand in front of the table. ‘Yes, Mrs Hadley?’
Beth looked over. Now the lady had fixed her pale blue bullfrog eyes on Beth and was muttering to Deidre MacBride. Whatever she was saying, it looked pretty intense. Katie gave Beth a little smile.
Mrs Hadley was now looking right at Beth and yammering away into Deirdre MacBride’s ear. Deidre was starting to look a little pained. She was having to bend down over Mrs Hadley’s chair in a position that ill-suited her rigid, tweed-clad sausage of a torso. The others on the table were also starting to look restive. A thin, nervous-looking man was sitting in the West position, his dry wisps of hair clinging to a shiny pate like the last bits of seaweed trying to resist the tide. Opposite him in the East seat was a rather elegant woman, in an aubergine sweater that Beth quite fancied. Her face was serene, though she was nervously picking at her lower lip when she thought no-one was looking. She had a great hand, or a terrible one, guessed Beth. Either way, she wanted to get on and play it.
In the end, it was Mrs Hadley’s long-suffering partner who called time on her little confab with Deidre MacBride. One of the few women in the room under the age of sixty, and probably round about her own mother’s age, Beth realised (though of course this woman looked much younger), she started off just by drumming her fingers restlessly on the green baize cloth, then cleared her throat a few times.
When even that didn’t get Mrs Hadley’s attention, she announced loudly, ‘Rosemarie, I really feel we’ve held people up long enough. Maybe you could continue your little chat with Deidre during the break?’
The tones were dulcet, but the subtext was dripping with acid. Mrs Hadley raked her partner with a suspicious glance but turned to Deidre and dismissed her with a little nod of the head, which did not dislodge a single hair of her coiffure.
Deidre, whom Beth would never have marked down as meek, was surprisingly accepting of this high-handed behaviour, all but bobbing a little curtsey. She scurried back to where Beth and Katie were standing, seeming glad to have got away, Beth thought. And that was certainly fair enough.
‘What was all that about?’ Beth asked out of the corner of her mouth, but Rosemarie Hadley somehow heard her and raised her head, yet again, from the game. The bulbous blue eyes were not friendly. Her partner tutted loudly and Rosemarie played a card, but Beth sensed her ears were out on stalks.
‘Is there somewhere we could go to talk?’
Deidre shook her head at Beth. ‘I’m afraid not. I need to be here, in case of difficulties. And you can see how things can arise. By the way, where did your mother go?’ Deidre looked over at Wendy’s table, where her opponents seemed to be managing fine without her mother’s input, thanks to another player who’d stepped in and was sitting where poor Alfie must once have been.
‘Oh, erm, she had to just step out… she said you’d be fine about it…’ Beth began.
‘She did say something a bit rude about someone being a, um, dummy?’ Katie added, seeming worried about giving offence.
But Deidre only chuckled drily. ‘Ah, so Wendy would have been sitting out at this point last week, and Alfie must have played the contract – that means, played her cards for her. So the same will happen today. We allow dummies to move away from the table, unlike the English Bridge Union. We’re lucky we’ve got Mrs Greaves to help out,’ she added.
Beth looked more closely and realised that Alfie’s replacement was the tiny and redoubtable Mrs Greaves whom she’d met yesterday in Belair Park.
Katie was a bit at sea. ‘Isn’t it rather mean to call someone “dummy”?’
‘It might be frowned on if they were actually playing at the time. Yes, that could be a little bit pointed,’ said Deidre with a bark of a laugh. ‘But in fact, they’re only called that when they’re not playing. They just lay out their hand on the table, and their partner plays the cards for them. Often, it’s the partner who ends up being a bit of a dummy.’ Deidre chuckled to herself again.
Bridge humour was an acquired taste, Beth decided.
But wait a minute. If whoever was playing dummy sat out the hand, then they would be in an ideal position to wander off and kill someone while everyone else was busy, wouldn’t they? ‘Can we work out who was dummy at the time that Alfie, ahem, died?’ she asked Deidre.
‘Of course,’ said Deidre. ‘But most people would be dummy at some point. And with six tables going, there’d be one from each table.’
For a moment, Beth was downcast. But then she perked up. Six potential suspects were a lot fewer than twenty-four. And in fact, it was only five, as one of the dummies had been Alfie himself. That was why he hadn’t been missed more quickly when he’d wandered outside to the bench.
‘Although…’ Deirdre carried on inexorably. ‘People play the hands at different speeds. Sometimes one table is much faster or slower than another. So there could be more than six dummies around, or there could be fewer.’
Beth was starting to feel that the first promising chink of light that had been shed on the mystery was on the verge of getting blotted out.
‘All the same, Mrs McBride. A list of all the dummies round about the crucial time would be brilliant.’
‘I can’t promise anything. But I’ll do my best, I’ll email it to you,’ said the director, turning back to the rest of the room determinedly. She clearly felt she’d spent more than enough time chatting.
Beth’s sense of unease was growing. Wendy had been gone for quite a while. How long, exactly? Beth struggled to think. She and Katie had been watching hands for what now seemed like ages. Bridge was a bit too soothing – if you were just looking on, at any rate. It was definitely time that she moved on to phase two of the plan.
‘I’m a bit concerned about my mother. She’s been away from her table for quite a while. Maybe some of us should go out and see what she’s up to?’ Beth spoke quite loudly.
A few heads bobbed up nearby, and Deidre immediately turned back to shush her. ‘We don’t want to disturb anyone. It’s a game that requires a lot of concentration.’ Even her tweed jacket seemed to bristle with disapproval.
‘Well, I understand, but this could be an emergency…’ Beth said. Their plan aside, it now really did feel like time they checked on Wendy.
Katie gave Beth a look that was full of misgivings, but she seconded her friend. ‘Wendy’s been gone ages…’
Deidre looked at her watch. ‘People are taking forever to play this hand. Especially considering they’ve done it all before,’ she conceded. ‘But we can’t just stop in the middle, you know. That would never do. You’ll just have to wait for the break.’
‘How long will that be?’ asked Beth, no longer having to feign urgency. It had been at least twenty minutes since Wendy had slipped out. Maybe more.
Deidre pursed her lips, looking disconcertingly like a back view of Magpie. Beth looked away quickly. ‘Just a few minutes more. But there’s nothing stopping you from having a look around yourself, if you’re really anxious.’
Beth didn’t need telling twice. ‘Come on,’ she said to Katie, and they made for the door. They were surprised when Jules and Miriam abruptly pushed their chairs back and joined them. Mrs Greaves was left at the table, taking her time about moving as usual.
‘Do you know where Wendy’s gone?’ Miriam asked, pushing her soft grey bob out of her eyes in a worried gesture. ‘She just disappeared off, didn’t even really say where she was going. I thought she was heading for a, you know, loo break,’ she said in a discreetly lowered voice.
Heaven forfend that a Dulwich lady might need the facilities, thought Beth.
‘But then she didn’t come back.’ Miriam’s faded blue eyes were wide and even Jules, her partner, looked concerned.
‘We’re just off to have a look. You’re very welcome to join us,’ said Beth. ‘Do you know where she usually goes at break time?’ she asked cunningly.
‘Well, only to get a cup of tea, of course,’ said Miriam, as though Beth had taken leave of her senses.
Beth remembered. Wendy had been quite grumpy with poor old Alfie for breaking away from the mould. ‘Um, yes. I wonder if she’s… trying something different today,’ Beth said. Everyone looked at her as though she’d grown an extra head. But when Katie popped into the loos to check, and came out shaking her head, they all trooped down the sweeping stairs thoughtfully. At the bottom, Beth clutched her forehead and said, ‘I just wonder if she’s gone to see where, where Alfie was, you know?’
Again, came the suspicious little glance from Katie, who said nothing but mutely followed as the group trundled outside. The air was crisp, and Beth automatically did up the buttons on her jacket. The lunchtime traffic rolled by on South Circular, but the park was quiet.
‘Now, where was Alfie exactly? You know, when he was… found?’
Jules and Miriam turned automatically towards Belair Park. Beyond the fence, there was a bench. And on the bench, as they could all see, was a small figure moving around.
‘Is that her? Is it Wendy?’ asked Jules, her deep voice just tinged with alarm.
‘I think it is,’ said Miriam, galloping off towards the little form. Beth looked on, her forehead pleated under her fringe.
Katie took her arm. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked in a low voice. ‘What are you up to?’
But there wasn’t time to explain. Something about the way Wendy was moving was wrong. Her mother always fidgeted with her scarves and beads, and it drove Beth mad. But now she was positively throwing herself about on the bench. It was as though she were being plagued by a swarm of bees, and was trying to fend them off.
As Beth watched, her mother’s arms jerked about. Beth felt terror shoot through her body, an adrenaline surge that had her racing past Jules and overtaking Miriam. Ben would have been astonished. Over the years, they’d both grown used to Beth being effortlessly outpaced by Belinda MacKenzie every time there was a parents’ egg-and-spoon race at sports day. Today, she would have left Belinda on the starting line. But when she reached the bench, she knew that, even at full pelt, she’d been too slow.
Wendy was now bolt upright. From behind, it looked as though she must be staring straight ahead. From the front, though, her eyes were half-shut, ominously glazed, while her mouth was slack. A string of saliva was unspooling horribly onto the front of her coat. Her upright posture was completely misleading. The lights weren’t on, and Beth was terribly afraid there was no longer anyone at home.
‘Mum! Mum!’ she shouted, grabbing Wendy by the shoulders and shaking her.
To her horror, her action nearly lifted the slight woman from the bench. Wendy, who’d been so agitated only minutes before, was now rigid as a plank of wood. And her face still registered nothing.
Katie, who’d just caught up and was gasping for breath, already had her phone out. ‘Emergency services? Send an ambulance. Now, right away. Dulwich. Belair Park.’
Chapter Eleven
It was a depressingly familiar scene for Beth. The faded blue coverlet, close in colour to Miriam the bridge player’s eyes. The still form lying beneath. The wall of dark windows, beyond which the trains whizzed unseen back and forth to Denmark Hill and Loughborough Junction. The cruelty of the neon lights, leaching all warmth from the room. And the reflection on those blank windows of the sad scene within.
Except that, thank God, all was not quite lost.
‘You were in the nick of time, I don’t mind telling you,’ the tired-looking doctor had told Beth and Katie, his face as crumpled as yesterday’s newspaper and about the same colour. ‘If you’d got there any later, even five minutes…’ he trailed off, and Beth grew pale herself at the thought of what might have been.
She reproached herself for the millionth time. She’d dangled herself as bait a few times in the course of her career as an accident-prone yet surprisingly effective sleuth. That was fair enough. But going along with her mother’s batty suggestion? That had just been plain madness. Wendy wasn’t fit to be walking the streets unaccompanied half the time, let alone trying to lure a killer into the open.
She didn’t want to replay the grisly scene, but her head had other ideas. She was back in the park, peering at Wendy’s still form, when suddenly her mother had started to twitch and flail again like a mannequin being electrocuted. It had been utterly terrifying. Beth had tried her best to get her arms around the semi-conscious but struggling Wendy, while Katie had looked on helplessly. God knew, the Haldane family were not big huggers. This was the closest she’d been to her mother for years, an irony which didn’t escape her even as she sought to contain her mother’s lashing arms.
As Wendy lurched and shivered, the familiarly cloying scent she used, Je Reviens, rose up around them. Usually, Beth found it a threat rather than a promise – from the perfume itself to the menacing name, which always reminded her of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ponderous line, ‘I’ll be back.’ This time, she could only hope fervently that
her mother would stop throwing herself around and would, indeed, return to her. Any of even the most annoying Wendyisms – her fluttering scarves, her jingling beads, her constant put-downs, the mean asides about Beth’s cooking, or the way Ben was shaping up; anything, anything at all – would have been so welcome then.
Just as she was despairing that help would ever come, she’d caught sight of activity at the perimeter of the park. Thank God, it was a police car in its garish livery of blue and yellow rectangles on white, like a Battenberg cake concocted by a blind chef with a grudge against his customers. It was quickly joined by another and, at last, an ambulance. It wasn’t until the sirens had been cut off and peace had briefly descended that Beth realised how hard her heart had been beating.
Wendy had quietened in her embrace. Beth hadn’t been sure that was a good sign. But there were people pelting towards her now. And amongst them, the familiar figure of someone who instantly made her feel simultaneously calmer, and braced for a blistering row.
It was Harry, striding across the grass. He came to a stop right in front of her, seeming to take the situation in at a glance. Instantly, he was directing paramedics, getting a PC to unwind incident tape, directing another to start combing the area, though for what, Beth wasn’t quite sure. All she did know was that, within seconds of his arrival, everything had started coming back into focus. Nightmare and panic began to recede.
The paramedics approached the bench quite gingerly. Beth’s arms were prised gently from around her mother, a sedative was briskly administered, and Wendy’s limbs stopped their last bits of twitching and thrashing.
As her mother was lifted onto a stretcher, Beth, to her own horror and astonishment, had burst into noisy sobs and had buried them, not for the first time, in the rough and familiar texture of Harry’s navy-blue pea coat. Even as she’d wiped her nose surreptitiously on his sleeve, she’d thought that it was high time she bought him another jacket. He’d had this one for maybe an adventure too long.
