by Simon Brett
“I know what I heard on Friday,” Jude insisted.
“No. You know what you think you heard on Friday. Different matter altogether.”
He sounded so convincing that for a moment Jude almost believed him. Perhaps she had misheard, or misinterpreted what she heard. She was aware of his hooded eyes lazily watching her, appraising, wondering what she’d do next. And she was aware of the power those eyes could exert over her.
But she resisted them. “I think you’re lying,” she said.
He spread his hands wide in a gesture of harmless self-depreciation. “Do I look like a liar?”
“Oh yes. And if you’re prepared to lie to me about this Joan, then it’s quite possible you lied to me about Tadeusz Jankowski.”
“About who? Ah, the Pole. The one you came enquiring about. The one without whose existence we wouldn’t have met.”
“Yes. Can I ask you again whether you know of any connection between him and Clincham College?”
“You can, my sweet Jude,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’ll get the same answer you got before.” A new idea seemed to come to him. “Though just a minute…I have thought of some other admission files we can check…then we’ll know if he ever did make any application to the college.”
“Where are the files?”
“Over there.” He jerked his head towards the university campus. “Do you want to come with me and look through them, Jude?”
She should at least have thought about her answer, but immediately, instinctively, she said “Yes.”
Twenty-seven
The room into which Carole was ushered was indeed a loft conversion. One wall was a large gable window, which must have provided a wonderful view over the River Fether to the English Channel beyond. But the glass was covered by thick curtains and the stuffiness in the room suggested they had been closed for most of the day.
There was very little light, only what spilled from an Anglepoise whose shade had been pushed down low to a table on which stood an open laptop, its screen idle. But Carole could see enough to recognize that the room was in a mess. As was the woman who faced her. If the descriptions the betting shop regulars had given on how well dressed Melanie Newton was were anything like true, then she’d certainly let herself go.
She was wearing jogging bottoms and a shapeless grey cardigan. There was no make·up; on her haggard face and white showed at the centre of her roughly parted hair where the roots were growing out.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, half defiant, half frightened.
Carole reminded herself that she must be cautious.
She had succeeded in her primary objective, of finding Melanie Newton. Now she mustn’t scare the woman off by clumsy interrogation.
But fortunately, before she could make a gaffe, the woman asked her another question: “Are you from one, of the agencies?”
“Agencies?”
“Debt collectors. Because I can pay it all back and—”
“No, no. Good heavens, no. I’m not a debt collector.” Carole Seddon’s middle·class soul was shaken by the very suggestion.
“Really?” There was anguished pleading in Melanie Newton’s voice.
“Really. I’m a retired civil servant from the Home Office.”
“Home Office?” The idea of contact with any authority seemed to upset the woman.
“Retired, I said. Retired. I don’t mean you any harm at all, Mrs Newton. As I said, all I’m interested in is what you can tell me about Tadeusz Jankowski.”
“You mean the young Polish boy who was killed?”
“Yes.”
She looked puzzled. “Well, I don’t think I can tell you anything about him. Please sit down.” Now her anxieties about debt collection had been allayed, Melanie Newton remembered her manners. But she didn’t make any move to put more lights on in the gloom. Carole noticed one of the Allinstore carrier bags on the table. A sandwich had been torn from its packet and half-eaten, as though its consumer needed fuel rather than food.
She sat on an armchair whose covers felt threadbare under her hands. “But you’re not denying that you met him?” she asked.
“No, I’m not denying that. He came to see me.”
“Here in England?”
“Yes.”
“When you were living in your house in Fedborough?”
Melanie Newton looked suspicious again. “You seem to know rather a lot about me. Are you sure it’s nothing to do with the debts?”
“I can absolutely assure you of that. I didn’t know that you had any debts. The only thing I do know about you is that you used to be a regular in the betting shop here in Fethering and that early last October you were seen to speak to Tadeusz Jankowski in there.”
“Then how did you find me here?”
This was a potentially difficult question to answer. For Carole to describe her surveillance techniques might raise the woman’s paranoia once again. So all she said was, “Somebody told me you lived in Fedborough. I consulted the telephone directory and spoke to the new owner of your house.”
“She didn’t know where I lived, did she?” asked Melanie Newton, once again alarmed. Maybe some of her creditors might go in person to her old address.
“No, she didn’t. But she gave me your husband’s mobile number.”
“I didn’t know Giles knew I was here.” But it didn’t seem to worry her that much. “Not that he’s likely to come looking for me.”
“No, I gathered there had been some…estrangement between you.” Which was an odd word to use, but the one that rose to Carole’s lips at that particular moment.
Melanie Newton let out a bark of contemptuous laughter. “You could say that. I’ve come to the conclusion that for a marriage to have any hope of success a degree of proximity between the participants is required. That’s what Giles and I never had. His work takes him off on contracts for considerable lengths of time. Three months, four months, sometimes six months at a time. Not the best recipe for connubial bliss. Months of loneliness when they’re away, interrupted by weeks of disappointment when they’re home.”
She seemed to be in confessional mode, so Carole made no attempt to interrupt the flow. “I think there were probably things wrong with the marriage from the start, if we could but have recognized them. But the separations certainly didn’t make it any easier. God knows what Giles got up to while he was away. I think there may have been other women. In fact, I found proof that there was at least one other woman when he was out in Mexico. And when I did find out, do you know…it hardly worried me at all. I think that was when I realized that the marriage was dead in the water.”
Melanie Newton, who had been standing up until that point, slumped into a chair, drained by her revelations. Her movement must have jolted the laptop, because the screen came to life, displaying a highly coloured roulette wheel and board. The woman’s eyes could not help but look at it, and her hand moved involuntarily towards the keyboard.
“Your husband implied,” said Carole tentatively, “when I spoke to hirri on the phone, that you had got into financial problems.”
“That was an understatement,” came the listless reply.
“And is it the gambling?”
Melanie Newton sighed a huge sigh, which seemed to encompass a whole world of troubles. “Yes. I started…I don’t know, a couple of years ago. It was at a time when Giles was away on one of his really extended trips, and I was feeling low. I think I’d just found out about the woman in Mexico, and that hadn’t done a lot for my self-esteem. Then I went for a day’s racing at Ascot. It was a corporate freebie. I work for a PR agency, get offered lots of stuff like that. Well,” she corrected herself, “I say I work for them. What I mean is, I did work for them. Anyway, up until that point I’d never thought much about horse racing. Might put a small bet on the Derby or Grand National, join in the office sweepstake, you know…like most people, I could take it or leave it.”
“But that day at Ascot I really enjoyed myse
lf. I had a good day, I was with nice people. There was even a man there who made me think I might not be a totally unattractive has-been as a woman. And also, when it came to backing horses that day, I couldn’t do anything wrong. First horse that won I remember was called Mel’s Melon. And I backed it for purely sentimental reasons, because my friends call me ‘Mel’…well, used to call me ‘Mel’. That romped home at twelve to one. And for the rest of that day it didn’t matter what method I used, the form book, a horse’s name that appealed to me, just sticking a pin in the paper…I was invincible. Came home more than five hundred pounds to the good.”
“I didn’t think any more about it for a few weeks, but then I had a rather upsetting phone conversation with Giles, who told me his contract had been extended by two months and he basically couldn’t be bothered to come home for a break which he could easily have arranged. A bit of a slap in the face for me, as you can imagine…and I was feeling bad again. So at lunchtime that day I went out to the betting shop near where I used to work and…well, I had some good days and some bad days and…” She seemed to run out of words.
“It became a habit?” suggested Carole.
“Yes. Very good way of putting it. It became a habit. Though I think ‘habit’ is too mild a word. ‘Obsession’ might be nearer the mark. “Obsession’ as in ‘love’. I came to love the thrill of gambling. It replaced ordinary love for me. Giles was out of my life, so far as I was concerned. Whether he was abroad or at home, he wasn’t part of me or anything to do with me. He had stopped loving me. Perhaps he never loved me. But I could close my mind to that. Gambling gave me hope, offered me the chance of making a new life for myself.”
“How?” asked Carole, incredulous.
“Because I’d win!” replied Melanie Newton, as if speaking to an idiot. “I’d win a lot of money and then have the freedom to do what I wanted.”
“But did you win a lot of money?”
“Sometimes,” came the defiant reply.
“Did you need a lot of money, though? If you had a good job in PR, and your husband must have been earning quite a bit in oil exploration…”
“I didn’t need money then. And soon I won’t need it again.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she explained patiently, “I’ll soon have a big win. Soon I’ll pay off all the debts, on all the credit cards. And then I’ll get my life back on track.”
Carole indicated the computer screen. “Through roulette?”
“I’m playing roulette at the moment. I’m on a winning streak on the roulette. You have to be sensible, you know. When you’re on a losing’ streak, you must change games. Then your luck will change.”
“And does your luck often change?”
All that got was another recalcitrant “Sometimes.”
“Melanie, have you ever asked for help?”
“Help? I don’t need help. I can gamble perfectly adequately on my own, thank you.”
“I meant help with stopping gambling.”
This sparked another paranoia of suspicion. “Has someone sent you? Is Giles behind this?”
“No, I have come completely of my own accord. I’m nothing to do with your debts or your gambling problem. I’m—”
“I don’t have a gambling problem,” Melanie Newton insisted. “When I get the big win, everything’ll be sorted out.”
“All right.” Carole held her hands out in a pacifying gesture. “Then I’ll just ask you what I came to ask you.”
“What was that?” The woman sounded distracted now. Her eyes kept darting to the laptop screen and her hand was itching for the keyboard.
“About Tadeusz Jankowski…”
“The boy. Oh yes.”
“How did you come to meet him?”
“He came to the house in Fedborough last autumn.”
“Just out of the blue?”
“No.”
“By arrangement then?”
“Yes.”
“So, after your first meeting in Leipzig you kept—?”
“What?” Melanie Newton asked curiously.
“Your husband told me that you went travelling in Holland and Germany last summer.”
“I wanted to get away. I wanted a clean break. Giles was abroad, as ever. I thought going off on my own might be the answer. It wasn’t. I’d booked a fortnight and I came back after five days.”
“But during those five days you met Tadeusz Jankowski?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. He came to see me in Fedborough in answer to an advertisement.”
“An advertisement for what?”
“I put a card in the newsagent’s window. Advertising a room in the house. I…Well, the fact is…I was rather hard up. Giles was going to be away for four months. He would never know if I got in a lodger—not that I’d have cared much if he did find out. We’d already decided to split up and sell the place. I thought a bit of income would help the interest payments on the credit cards, so I advertised. Tadeusz Jankowski was about the only response I got.”
“But he didn’t take the room?”
“No. He didn’t think he could afford what I was asking. He said he’d look around and get back to me. But he never did.”
“Though you did see him again in the betting shop?”
“Yes. That was while I still used to go in there.”
“Why did you stop going?”
The woman gestured to her laptop as if it were something of exotic and unparalleled value. “Why bother making the effort to go into a betting shop when I can get all this at home?”
Carole found it sad to see how narrow the focus of the woman’s life had become. “So what did you say to Tadeusz Jankowski in the betting shop?”
“I can’t remember. We’re talking about last October. I don’t know. I suppose I said hello, how are you, asked him about how his girlfriend was.”
“His girlfriend?” Carole, who had been about to question Melanie Newton about her affair with the boy, was completely wrong-footed.
“Yes. He mentioned a girlfriend when he came to see the room. He said she was why he had come to England. But that he just wanted the room for himself, they wouldn’t be cohabiting.”
“Did he tell you her name?”
“No.”
“Anything about her?”
“Just that she went to the University of Clincham. He asked me how to get there. I didn’t know where it was, so he asked somebody else. ”
“Ah,” said Carole. “Thank you.”
Twenty-eight
Andy Constant strode through the University of Clincham campus as though he owned the place. And the proprietorial manner was increased when he pulled out a large bunch of keys to open the block marked ‘DRAMA STUDIO AND REHEARSAL ROOMS’.
“Is this where the admissions records are kept?” asked Jude, with some scepticism.
“I keep everything to do with me here.”
“A little empire?”
“Yes, one that has declared UDI from the rest of the university and its policies.” He pushed open the glass door and ushered her into the unlit lobby. As Jude knew he would, he put his arm around her ample waist as he propelled her into the darkness.
He opened another heavy door and she found herself in a space which felt larger, but was totally black. Andy released his hold on her and said, “Just get some light on the situation.”
He seemed to know the way around his empire blindfold. There was a click of another door, then after a few seconds, the space was filled with light. Not bright light, but subtle warming light which seemed to focus on the edges and corners of the room. Jude looked up and saw the source, stage lights hanging from a gantry in the ceiling, their harshness muted by gels of pink and orange.
The space they revealed was painted matt black, a functional studio for drama workshops or even small-scale productions. Folding audience chairs were stacked against the walls. On the floor were large blocks, a free-standing door in a frame, other chairs, a
ll painted matt black. Against the wall were a couple of crestfallen sofas and—surprise, surprise—a double bed mattress covered with black sheets.
Andy Constant appeared from the lighting box, a bottle of whisky and two not very clean glasses in one hand. “Drink?” he asked.
Jude nodded. “You seem to have got yourself very nicely set up here.”
He shrugged as he poured the drinks and gestured to one of the sofas. “Need a versatile space for the kind of stuff I do.”
Jude wondered if the ambiguity was deliberate, and decided it probably was. She sat down on the sofa and he slumped beside her, passing across a glass of Scotch.
“Cheers.”
She echoed the toast and took a long swallow. The whisky burned its comfort down her throat. “So…are you going to have a look through the admissions files…to see if Tadeusz Jankowski ever applied for a place here?”
“I’ll do that in a little while,” he replied. “Let’s just enjoy a drink first. I’ve had a hard day. I need a break.”
They both took a long swallow.
“Workshopping, were you?”
“Yes. Right here. We were doing some role-playing about broken relationships.”
“Which no doubt involved a lot of rolling about on the bed over there?”
“A certain amount, yes.” He read the potential censure in her eye. “Nothing inappropriate, I can assure you. This generation of kids are very hot on what’s appropriate and inappropriate. What they get up to in their own time is not my problem; here on the campus they’re quite sophisticated in their approach to gender politics.”
“And you have a position of trust with them?”
“Very definitely. A duty of responsibility. Which I take very seriously. I wouldn’t last long here if I didn’t.”
