by Simon Brett
When they finally reached the front of the queue, their purchase was quickly completed, though the sharp-suited teenage salesman who served them seemed very disappointed they didn’t want to upgrade anything.
Back at Woodside Cottage Jude intended to plug in the phone charger straight away, but was diverted when she noticed that the indicator light on her answering machine was flickering.
The message was from Ricky Le Bonnier. His voice sounded taut with stress. He asked Jude to ring him as soon as possible.
“I think you’ve got something of mine,” he said when she got through.
“Oh?”
“You know what I mean. Mabel told me you played the Hiding Things game.”
“Ah.”
“I’m going to come round to your place and, when I do, Jude, I think you’d better give me back my property.”
“Are you sure we aren’t talking about your stepdaughter’s property?”
“Don’t split hairs. I’ve got to see someone in Fethering this afternoon, then I’ll come to your place. Half past four, five, I should think it would be. Don’t try and do anything clever with the phone. You’re involved in something much bigger than you realize, Jude.”
She must have looked shaken when she finished the call, because Carole asked if she was all right. Jude repeated what Ricky had said.
“Then I’m going to be here when he comes,” announced Carole.
“I’m sure it’ll be all right.”
“Jude, a person who has killed once to keep something quiet may not be troubled by the thought of killing again for the same reason.”
“I find it hard to think of Ricky as a killer.”
“It’s hard to think of anyone as a killer, but there are still a lot of people who have been sent to prison for murder.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll get us some lunch.”
“Not before you’ve checked that mobile, you won’t.”
The charger was so secure in its packaging that Jude had to take a pair of scissors to the obdurate plastic. When she’d finally freed it, she pushed the three-pin plug into a wall socket and pressed the small connector into the bottom of Polly’s phone. She switched the handset on and navigated through to the voicemail.
Only a couple of messages had been saved. One was from Piers, another from one of Polly’s actress friends. Both dated from before Ricky’s daughter had come down to Fethering, and concerned arrangements for social meetings. It was hard to imagine that either could have any relevance to the girl’s death.
“That’s very disappointing,” said Carole glumly. “I really thought we were going to get a breakthrough there.”
“Don’t give up hope. We haven’t checked her text messages yet.”
These were stored in the in-box with the most recently received message first. That had been sent at 7.29 p.m. on the Sunday before Christmas, the date of Jude’s open house. The message read:
SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT HAS COME UP ABOUT THE BOOK. DON’T GO TO LONDON. MEET ME IN GALLIMAUFRY AT NINE THIS EVENING. DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT YOUR CHANGE OF PLANS UNTIL WE’VE SPOKEN.
Jude checked the number from which the text had been sent against the mobile number on the card Ricky Le Bonnier had given her. They were identical.
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Thirty-Four
Four-thirty passed, so did five and five-thirty, and there was still no sign of Ricky. After six Jude tried ringing his mobile number, but was only asked to leave a message. She didn’t.
They discussed having a drink. Carole was of the opinion that a drink might weaken their defences for the confrontation that lay ahead. Jude reckoned that a drink would strengthen them for the confrontation that lay ahead. Her counsel prevailed. She poured out two large glasses of Chilean Chardonnay. (The booze for the open house still showed no signs of running out.)
Soon after a quarter past eight, Jude’s landline rang. She snatched at the handset, expecting to hear Ricky, but the voice at the other end was a woman’s.
“Jude, I have some news for you, strange news.” The voice sounded so weird and ethereal that Jude took a moment to recognize it as Kath’s. “Do you wish to know where Ricky Le Bonnier is?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I felt his aura. I knew he was coming to Fethering today.”
“He was coming to see me, but he hasn’t arrived.”
“I will tell you where you will find him. He is in his car near the Fethering Yacht Club. He has parked it in the same place as where I saw him the Sunday before Christmas.”
Immediately, Jude had a vision of Ricky once again taking risks to see Anna. “Is he alone?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” replied Kath with considerable satisfaction. “He is alone. The Devil Women have no power over him anymore. Their power is broken. I am the only one who now has power over Ricky.”
The woman was beginning to sound as nutty as an entire fruit cake factory, but there was something in her words that disturbed Jude. She felt a sudden urgency to find Ricky Le Bonnier, to check that he wasn’t in danger. She ended the phone call.
Walking to the Yacht Club would not have taken long, but they went in the car. Jude’s sense of emergency had communicated itself to Carole and neither of them spoke as the Renault hurtled through Fethering.
The Mercedes 4x4 was exactly where Kath had said it would be. Parked facing the sea between the end of the shopping parade and the entrance to Fethering Yacht Club. Its lights were on, sending strips of brightness out across the shingle of the beach until their glare faded into darkness.
Carole parked the Renault, and Jude was first to the Mercedes. She could see Ricky Le Bonnier slumped in the driver’s seat.
The door was unlocked and when Jude opened it the interior light went on. There was no sign of any injury on Ricky’s body, no blood, no evidence of a weapon.
And yet neither Jude nor Carole had any doubt that he was dead.
∨ The Shooting in the Shop ∧
Thirty-Five
“I just don’t know what to tell Mabel. She adored Ricky. He was her Daddy and nobody could replace him. I haven’t told her about Polly yet, but she didn’t see Polly that often, so I can break that to her gently. But Ricky…”
Lola was very near to tears. Jude had rung through to Fedingham Court House on Saturday morning. Her motive had little to do with criminal investigation. She just knew from previous encounters how fragile Lola was beneath her glamorous carapace.
“Mabel will survive,” she said. “Children are very resilient. But what about you, Lola? How are you feeling?”
“Numb at the moment. Every now and then I almost forget what’s happened, my imagination can’t cope with the idea of it being true. But then the reality crashes back in with a hideous thump and I’m left winded and weepy and…Ricky was the love of my life, Jude. There’ll never be anyone else. I daren’t think what the future’s going to be like.”
“Like Mabel, you will survive. It’ll be grim, but you will come through this.”
“It’s hard to believe that at the moment.”
“I’m sure it is, but what I say is true. And, in the meantime, you’ll have a lot of practical things to do…”
“Yes. Arranging the funeral.” A sob caught Lola unawares. “I suppose I always knew that I’d outlive Ricky, that at some point I would have to face life without him. But not so soon. Not so soon.”
“Presumably, you’ll have to wait a bit before fixing a date for the funeral, won’t you?” asked Jude, with all the delicacy of which she was capable.
“Why?”
“Well, until the police allow you to have Ricky’s body.”
“What have the police got to do with it?” Lola sounded appalled at the idea of their being involved.
“When there’s a suspicious death…”
“There’s nothing suspicious about Ricky’s death. There’ll have to be a post mortem, yes…” The image of her husband’s body being carved up shook her for a m
oment. “But all that the post mortem will find is that he died of a heart attack.”
“Oh?”
“There’d always been a risk of that happening. Before we got married, Ricky told me that he’d had a couple of minor heart attacks, that his heart was weak. He was very honest with me, he didn’t want me to go into the marriage not knowing everything about him.”
“So he had congenital heart disease, did he?”
“No, not congenital. Again, he was very honest. There was one stage in his life when Ricky did a lot of drugs. Heroin, mostly. And I think there’s medical evidence – there’s certainly anecdotal evidence – that heroin buggers up the system, particularly the heart. There are plenty of examples of rock stars dying of heart attacks in their late fifties, early sixties. So Ricky’s heart was fatally damaged by his early excesses. It was a time-bomb ticking away. Then with all the stress he’s been under since Polly’s death – and his bloody mother being as demanding as ever, putting pressure on him every way she knew how – which is quite a lot of ways…” The last sentence was spoken with deep bitterness.
“Anyway…” At the end of the line Jude could hear Lola take a deep breath as she struggled for control. “What’s heartbreaking about it is that Ricky had really changed. He hasn’t touched any kind of drug for eleven years, he’s clean. Even the drinking, even though he talks it up a lot, he’s cut back hugely on that. And then marrying me, and having Mabel and Henry. It was a new start…it was…” Emotion robbed her of speech.
“Well, look, Lola, if there’s anything I can do…Are you on your own there? Because I could come up and – ”
“I’m fine, thank you, Jude. Varya’s looking after the kids. And Piers is here again…though that is something of a mixed blessing.”
“Oh?”
“Piers has always had a tendency to self-dramatize. And he’s overreacting like mad to Ricky’s death. In a way, that’s almost helping me. Seeing how ridiculous Piers looks being all weepy and hysterical is stopping me from going down the same route.”
“OK, well, you’ve got my number, Lola. If there’s anything I can do…”
“I’ll let you know.”
“And when you’ve got details of the funeral sorted…”
“I’ll see to it you’re informed. Everything should be pretty straightforward once the post mortem’s been done. It’s tragic and it’s heartbreaking, but it was a natural death.”
Jude wasn’t quite as convinced as Lola about that.
♦
On the spur of the moment – which was rare, Carole Seddon was very wary of anything that happened on the spur of the moment – she invited Jude round for lunch. She was keen to use up the remains of the Christmas Day turkey which she’d frozen. The old year had passed and Carole wanted to tidy things up by removing all traces of it.
She did the turkey in a white sauce, served up with mashed potatoes and peas. Though she said it herself, it did taste rather good. And there was still a bottle of the Christmas Chilean Chardonnay left to accompany the meal.
Inevitably the women’s conversation soon moved to the murder – or what both of them felt convinced now was a double murder.
“The main question,” said Carole, “is who Ricky was coming to see in Fethering before he came to see us.”
Jude nodded. “Well, the two obvious contenders are his ex-wife and his lover. Kath and Anna.”
“And don’t forget Rupert Sonning. He clearly had had some dealings with Ricky…well, Rupert jumped when Ricky told him to.”
“Yes. I take it we’re assuming a connection between the two deaths?”
“We have to, Jude. Otherwise the coincidence is just too great. And I think we can also assume that Ricky was killed to stop him from divulging what he knew about Polly’s death to us, or to the police, or indeed to anyone else.”
“That’s certainly the most likely scenario. Pity, I was absolutely convinced he was our murderer – particularly after we found that text from him on Polly’s mobile.”
“You say ‘text from him’, Carole. But, in fact, we should be saying ‘text from his mobile’. We don’t know who pressed the buttons.”
“No. Say he’d left it at Fedingham Court House when he went to take Polly to Fedborough Station, then it could have been used by Lola…or Flora…or Varya, come to that.”
“What about Piers, though, Carole?”
“Piers sending the text? How on earth would he have got hold of Ricky’s mobile? He claims to have been in his London flat that evening, waiting for Polly to join him.”
“He also says he spent the night with his new girlfriend.”
“Yes, I’m not certain that we can accept everything said by Piers Duncton as gospel truth.”
Jude took a pensive mouthful of turkey, then said, “If Ricky isn’t guilty of killing Polly, he’s still in the frame for torching Gallimaufry.”
“More than in the frame. He did it. Rupert Sonning witnessed him doing it.”
“Assuming Rupert Sonning’s telling the truth.”
“Yes, he’s an odd man, spending the declining years of his life masquerading as a beachcomber. And he has a very strange sense of morality. He apparently doesn’t see anything wrong with burning down a business to claim on the insurance. He called it ‘a victimless crime’.”
“All right, Carole. So, moving on from the hypothesis that Ricky didn’t kill his stepdaughter, but did start the fire…he did that because he found Polly in the shop dead, and he set the shop alight in the hope of protecting the person who he knew had killed her.”
This gave Carole a new idea. Her eyes sparkled with excitement as she announced, “And that person must be his mother. Flora’s such a powerful personality that Ricky would do anything to appease her. Yes, that makes sense. She had some animus against Polly…I don’t know what, but we can work that out later. Ricky left his mobile at home and Flora used it to send the text which lured Polly back to Gallimaufry. Flora met her there and shot her!”
Carole sat back, glowing with the satisfaction of having solved the case. She raised her glass to toast the success, but lowered it when she saw the expression on Jude’s face.
“What’s wrong? I’ve just provided the perfect theory of what happened.”
“It’s a good theory,” said Jude, “but it does suffer from one major flaw.”
“I don’t think it does.” Carole’s confidence began to drain away. “What major flaw?”
“Flora’s hands. You’ve seen how arthritic they are. They’re as useless as flippers. She can’t grip anything. She has to use both hands to hold a wine glass. There’s no way she could send a text message with those hands. And, by the same token, there was no way she could have held a gun to shoot Polly.”
“Oh, damn.” It was very rare for Carole to utter even the mildest swear word, but she had been severely provoked. Her splendid edifice of a solution had been undermined by one tiny detail. What made her even more annoyed was the knowledge that Jude was right.
Her mouth set in an expression of petulance as her friend mused, “I wonder if there’s more than one person involved? Someone sent the text from Ricky’s mobile, someone else met Polly at Gallimaufry and shot her.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, it widens our range of suspects, for one thing. Also, if we’re assuming the text was sent by someone at Fedingham Court House…though it needn’t have been, because somebody might have stolen Ricky’s mobile or he might have given it to someone or – ”
“Just for the moment, Jude,” said Carole tartly, “let’s assume that the text was sent from Fedingham Court House.”
“All right. Well, if that is the case, it wasn’t sent by anyone in Fethering – in other words, it wasn’t sent by any of the three people Ricky might have come here to see yesterday afternoon…”
“Kath, Anna or Rupert Sonning.”
“Exactly.” Jude sipped at her Chardonnay. “The fact that Ricky had Polly’s mobile phone suggests
to me that he definitely did find her dead in the shop. He took it to avoid anyone who was investigating the crime finding the message we found on it.”
“If he knew that message was there.”
“Yes. I wonder if, when he found her body, he also found the gun that had been used to kill her…”
“Well, if he did, he would have left it there.”
“Why?”
“Oh, come on, Jude, keep up. He’d have left it there, so that the police would find it – or at least the charred remains of it – thus supporting the suicide theory that he was so keen to persuade us to accept.”
“I’d forgotten about that. It seems such a long time ago.” Jude finished up the last of her turkey and aligned her knife and fork on the plate.
“If you’d like a sweet, there’s a bit of Christmas pudding left…or some mince pies.”
Jude’s brown eyes gleamed. “Mince pies with brandy butter?” Carole nodded. “Yes, please!”
As they settled down to their final Christmas indulgence, Jude began, “Of the three people Ricky might have been coming to see yesterday…”
“Kath, Anna or Rupert Sonning.”
“Yes. We don’t have an address for Anna…”
“We know her surname. Carter. Maybe she’s in the phone book?” Carole checked and she wasn’t. “Probably moved into the area too recently.”
“Well, you can try another of your dog-walking missions tomorrow morning.”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if she’s heard about Ricky’s death yet. And what effect it’ll have on her when she does. In the long term, I think she’ll probably feel relief. The relationship was never going to go anywhere.”
“From what she said to me, she was quite deeply entangled with him. He meant a lot to her, as part of her reinvention of herself.” But Carole didn’t want to spend long on psychological speculation. “Anyway, we can’t find Anna today, so that leaves Kath and Rupert Sonning.”
“Who may still be living at her place. I suppose we’ll have to try Ayland’s again, though whether Kath’ll be there, who knows? She must take a day off sometime.”
