by Simon Brett
‘Denzil and Philomena were very close, texting each other every day. More like lovers than mother and son. He’ll be pretty cut up about it.’
‘Maybe,’ suggested Jude, ‘that’s the explanation for his behaviour to other women. None of them could ever match up to his mother.’
‘That’s one explanation for it,’ said Nikki Green, ‘though I favour the view that he behaves like that because he’s basically just a little shit.’
‘And how well do you know him?’ asked Carole in a manner that she couldn’t prevent from sounding old-fashioned.
‘Ah, yes. Well, a legitimate question, I suppose. Given the fact that I was introduced to you in Fethering as Giles Green’s wife and here you find me in flagrante with Denzil.’
‘Well, hardly in flagrante.’
‘To all intents and purposes. I did spend the night with him. I’m not pretending otherwise. I don’t know the simplest way to explain that. It’s all rather complicated.’ Nikki Green swept the long highlighted hair back off her forehead. Carole and Jude were again reminded of her likeness to Chervil Whittaker.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I married Giles because he asked me to. It seemed to matter to him in a way that kind of thing has never mattered to me. Maybe because he lost his own father so young, he always dreamed of some kind of stability. A kind of family life; though not with children, not if I was going to be involved. I made it clear from the start there wouldn’t be any of them.’
‘Because you couldn’t have children?’ asked Carole.
‘No. Because I didn’t want them. So far as I know, I’ve got no malfunction in my apparatus for the manufacture of sprogs, I’ve just never fancied them. At the core of my being there’s a strong spine of selfishness. I enjoy life. I look after number one, and I’m quite good at being independent.’
‘But you still married Giles,’ Jude pointed out.
‘Yes, and that, as I said, was because he asked me to. I had no idea whether it would last or not. I knew neither of us would be faithful. It’s not in our nature.’
‘So you fully expected your husband to have affairs?’
‘Yes. Just as I fully anticipated having a good few myself. Over the years I’ve probably seen more action in that respect than Giles has. When he had his job in the City he worked much longer hours than I did. So I had more time to stray.’ Nikki Green grinned wolfishly.
‘What do you do?’ asked Carole.
‘I’m an artist’s agent.’
‘Oh, my daughter-in-law’s in a theatrical agency for—’
‘No, artists, not artistes. I represent people in the visual arts.’
‘Painters and people? Like Denzil?’ asked Jude.
‘Precisely.’
‘So you met him first as an artist?’
‘Yes. And he introduced me to Giles.’
‘From what Denzil was saying this morning, he and Giles had quite a few girlfriends in common.’ The old-fashioned quality remained in Carole’s voice.
‘Yes. So Denzil and I had been having a thing for a while before I hooked up with Giles.’
‘An affair that continued?’
‘On and off. For someone so self-centred and up himself, Denzil is a surprisingly generous lover. Very good in bed – and I speak as a connoisseur.’
‘And would you say the two of you are “an item” now?’ asked Carole.
‘We never were an item. It’s some months since Giles and I have been living together. I have quite a strong sex drive, but I don’t want to go through all that rigmarole of online dating and . . . It’s better to hook up again with someone you know well. So when Denzil and I are both free . . . like last night . . . we get together.’
Nikki Green spoke with no embarrassment and with absolute certainty about what she wanted from life. Carole could not imagine anyone conducting sexual relationships on such a casual basis. But at the same time a bit of her did find the idea rather appealing. ‘So don’t you ever feel jealous?’ she asked.
Nikki Green grinned. ‘Haven’t for a long, long time. Maybe all it means is that I’ve never properly fallen in love. Well, if that’s the case, fine by me. Imagine what it would be like actually worrying about what some little shit like Denzil – or Giles, come to that – was up to every minute of the day.’ She shook her head and chuckled. ‘Give me the quiet life.’
‘So,’ Carole went on, still intrigued by the woman’s attitudes, ‘it doesn’t worry you when you see Giles with Chervil, like you did at the Private View?’
‘Doesn’t worry me at all. He can work his way through the entire spice rack, so far as I’m concerned.’
‘And what about Giles and Fennel Whittaker?’ asked Jude gently.
For the first time here was something that did give Nikki Green pause. ‘That one I wasn’t so happy about.’
‘You were jealous of her?’
An impatient shake of the head. ‘I wasn’t unhappy from my point of view. But from hers. I knew how vulnerable that girl was. The last thing she needed was Giles and Denzil messing with her head.’
‘Did you talk to Giles about it?’
‘Yes, but he wasn’t listening. It was round the time that his job was on the line. Considering other people’s feelings was never high on my husband’s list of priorities; back then, he was even more blinkered than usual.’
Carole took up the baton of interrogation. ‘Had you met Fennel before the Private View?’
‘I’d met her at other private views, arts functions, gallery openings. It’s a smallish world, you know.’
‘Before your husband started having an affair with her?’
‘Yes, and after.’ Nikki Green grinned again. ‘And I wish you could get that note of shock out of your voice. It really wasn’t such a big deal.’
‘But at the Private View, when she started bawling Denzil out, did that embarrass you?’
‘I was embarrassed for the girl . . . well, no, not embarrassed, sorry for her. She clearly had so much she needed to get off her chest. I wouldn’t be surprised if letting it all out made her feel a whole lot better. You know, like lancing a boil.’
‘You’re right, actually,’ said Jude, not expecting such psychological perspicacity. ‘That’s what she said to me afterwards. She’d planned that public denunciation of Denzil, and letting it all out had been a very positive experience for her. But then within a few hours, she apparently killed herself.’
Nikki shrugged. ‘That’s mental illness for you. Sad, but you can’t do a lot about it, I gather. Just bad luck, like being born ginger.’
‘That’s how Fennel described it to me,’ said Jude.
‘There you are then. Just an incredibly bum deal donated to you by your genes. I’ve been lucky. I may be a selfish cow, but at least, thank God, I’ve never had a negative thought in my life.’
Jude had frequently heard Carole make similar statements – well, without the ‘selfish cow’ bit – and she knew how at odds with the truth they were. And she’d have put money on the fact that Nikki Green’s carapace was equally fragile. But now wasn’t the moment for psychoanalysis.
‘I was just wondering,’ Jude began casually, ‘whether that diatribe of Fennel’s at the Private View was only aimed at Denzil?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it was very public, wasn’t it? I’d assumed the attack was aimed where it seemed to be – at Denzil. But at that stage I didn’t know she had also had an affair with Giles.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. Killing two birds with one stone.’ The idea seemed to amuse Nikki Green. ‘I suppose it’s possible. If so, bad luck for Fennel, if she thought she was going to make either of those bastards feel guilty. Giles and Denzil have two of the thickest skins I have ever encountered.’
Again Jude wondered how true that was. From the intimate communications of her healing sessions, she knew that everyone had their vulnerabilities. She also knew that the more rigidly people tried to deny their fallibility, the more destructive those
vulnerabilities could be.
And the genuine distress shown by Denzil Willoughby at the news of his mother’s death suggested that his skin was far from thick.
‘It’s a thought, though,’ said Carole. ‘Fennel Whittaker did say some pretty odd things that evening.’
‘So? She was mentally ill.’ Nikki Green said these words as though they put an end to the conversation.
‘She talked about someone “causing the death” of another person. If that was addressed to Denzil, do you have any idea what it could have meant?’
‘Pretty straightforward, I would imagine. She was intending to top herself and, when she did, she was saying it would be his fault.’
‘Yes, I suppose she could have meant that.’
‘I can’t see what else she could have meant.’
‘No, maybe not.’
‘Would the words have meant anything different,’ asked Jude, ‘if they’d been addressed to Giles rather than Denzil?’
Nikki Green looked genuinely puzzled by the question. ‘I can’t see how.’
Carole tried another approach. ‘Did you represent Fennel Whittaker as an agent?’
‘No. I wouldn’t have minded doing so. She was undoubtedly talented. But unreliable. It’s difficult to represent an artist who’s liable suddenly to destroy all her best work.’
Jude nodded, recalling what the girl had said about her violent reactions against her own paintings. Not to mention the torn-up watercolours by her body in the yurt. ‘Going back to what you were saying about Denzil’s mother . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘He seemed terribly shocked by the news of her death. Had she been ill?’
‘Hard to tell. Philomena was always a terrible hypochondriac.’
‘But did she live with Denzil’s father?’
Nikki Green let out a snort of laughter. ‘Not for a long time. Addison Willoughby has always been totally preoccupied with his work.’
‘Like his son?’
‘I suppose so, but in a different way. Addison’s full of bitterness.’
‘Denzil said that was because he’d never fulfilled himself as an artist, taken the easy commercial route.’
‘Yes, I know he always says that. And there may be a bit of truth in it. But I don’t think Addison’s route has been easy. That’s the last word I’d choose. He’s worked unbelievably hard to make a success of the advertising agency.’
‘And was it because he was a workaholic that the marriage didn’t work out?’ asked Jude.
‘Probably that had something to do with it. Philomena has lived apart from him for years. He’s got a big place in the Boltons. She has – or she had – a nice flat of her own in Highgate. And she was always telling Denzil how ill she was. I thought it was just her way of keeping control over him . . . but now she seems to have been proved right.’ The woman chuckled. ‘She’ll have to have the Hypochondriac’s Epitaph on her tombstone: “I told you I was ill”.’
‘You don’t seem very upset by the news of her death.’
Once again, Nikki Green was completely unembarrassed as she said, ‘I’m not. I never liked her. And I think maybe now she’s gone, it’ll be a good thing for Denzil. Not straight away, of course. He’ll be very cut up. But in a few years I think he’ll realize that she was an impossible woman to please and he no longer has to expend so much effort trying to please her.’
‘Did Denzil talk to you about us?’ asked Carole suddenly.
Nikki Green looked astonished at the question. ‘No. Why the hell should he? He hardly knows you. He didn’t know you were going to appear on his doorstep this morning.’
‘Well, he seemed to know about us, even seemed to be expecting us. He’d somehow got the impression from Giles’s mother that we were showing too much interest in Fennel Whittaker’s death.’
‘How do you mean, “too much interest”?’
‘Denzil had got the idea we might have thought Fennel’s death wasn’t suicide at all.’
‘Well, if it wasn’t, it was a pretty unusual accident.’
‘Not an accident. Murder.’
That did stop Nikki Green in her tracks. Her eyes widened as she looked from one woman to the other. ‘And is that what you think? That Fennel was murdered?’
‘We think it’s a possibility,’ said Jude.
Nikki didn’t ask why they thought that. She was silent while she assessed the idea, mentally testing it for feasibility. Then she asked, ‘If you’re talking about murder, then that means that you must have cast someone in the role of murderer.’
‘We haven’t quite got that far,’ said Jude. ‘We are still kind of considering the possibilities.’
‘And Denzil was one of them?’
‘He was the person Fennel bawled out at the Private View.’
‘Yes, but for someone like Denzil that was just water off a duck’s back. It didn’t get to him at all. He’d regard it just as an endorsement of his self-image as the Great Lover.’
‘There was something else,’ said Carole. ‘We also heard a rumour that Denzil had a habit of being violent towards his girlfriends.’
She didn’t attribute the rumour to Sam Torino, but it had a strong effect on Nikki Green. For the first time in their conversation she was really angry. ‘That is complete nonsense!’ she snapped. ‘Denzil may be capable of all kinds of mental cruelty – he’s totally self-centred – but there’s no way he’d ever physically hurt anyone. Now, if you were talking about Giles, that would be a different matter altogether . . .’
On the train back to Fethering, Carole and Jude were as puzzled as each other. ‘I was inclined to believe Nikki,’ said Jude.
‘About Denzil’s violence towards women?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why would Sam Torino have mentioned it? This friend of hers he was supposed to have beaten up?’
Jude tapped her chin pensively. ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out.’
‘On the other hand, Nikki was pretty categorical about Giles having a tendency towards violence. And with her being married to him, you’d have to believe her on that.’
‘Hm . . . I sort of get the feeling that somebody’s covering up for someone, but I can’t work out who’s covering up for who.’
‘No,’ said Carole thoughtfully. ‘And I keep coming back to that mutual alibi of Denzil and Giles for the night of Fennel’s death. Is that where the cover-up was?’
That evening Carole Seddon sat in front of her laptop and googled ‘Addison Willoughby’. There were plenty of results. His agency’s official website chronicled his phenomenal success, building up a small company by skilful acquisitions into one of the world’s most successful advertising agencies. Their client list embraced a wide range of global companies.
Images of Addison Willoughby showed him to be a handsome man in his sixties, dressed in expensively casual tieless style.
There appeared to be no reference to his private life. Even on Wikipedia his wife Philomena was not mentioned. Nor was there anything about his relationship to challenging contemporary artist Denzil Willoughby.
Carole Seddon found that rather odd.
TWENTY-THREE
‘I’m afraid my parents always regarded Elvis Presley as rather common,’ said Carole Seddon.
‘Ah,’ said Jude, wondering why somehow she wasn’t surprised, and also trying not to smile.
‘Anyway, I’m rather too young for him to have been a major influence on my life. I’m more of the Beatles generation.’ Though the idea of Carole having been part of the Swinging Sixties was an incongruous one. ‘I don’t think this evening at the Crown and Anchor really sounds my sort of thing.’
‘It may not be your sort of thing, but I think we should be there to support Ted.’
‘Ted can manage perfectly well without me. He won’t notice whether I’m there or not.’
‘That’s not the point. I should think there’s also a strong chance that Bonita Green will be there. Spider works for her, after
all. We might get an opportunity to find out more about Fennel Whittaker.’
That argument clinched it, of course. To Carole Seddon’s mind, Elvis Presley would always remain common, but one could even put up with commonness in the cause of an investigation.
There was a surprisingly large turnout in the Crown and Anchor’s function room that Wednesday evening. Elvis Presley had a wider fan-base in Fethering than Carole might have imagined. And Spider’s performance was certainly unlike anything she had ever seen before.
She wasn’t quite sure what she had been expecting, but what impressed her about the framer was his total seriousness. His routine was like some religious rite, an act of transubstantiation whereby he actually became Elvis Presley. Carole had vaguely anticipated that he might sing, but he didn’t. He simply mimed to The King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s songs. And he did do it brilliantly.
He’d got all the gear too. Carole didn’t know it, but Jude recognized that Spider was wearing a perfect facsimile of the white suit with a sunburst motif that Elvis had worn for his final concert at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis on 26 June 1977. And the set he performed included many of the songs that had been sung on that iconic occasion. ‘Jailhouse Rock’ was there, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Teddy Bear, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, along with other classics from the canon: ‘My Way’, ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Love Me Tender’.
But Spider had somehow improved on the original. Though he had the physical bulk of the grotesquely bloated Elvis of his later years, the versions he did of the songs, based on the studio recordings, had a musical purity rarely evident onstage at that time. The effect was strangely disconcerting for aficionados of The King, but nonetheless impressive. The Crown and Anchor crowd gave each number an ecstatic reaction and at the end, before his carefully choreographed encores, Spider got a standing ovation.
Clearly every facial tic, every bodily swivel, every hand gesture had been rehearsed in exhaustive detail. Each time the act was performed it would be exactly the same. To Carole and Jude, who had inevitably been preoccupied with such matters, it raised interesting speculations about the nature of art. What Spider did was far from original, and yet it had an integrity of its own. Was a man who duplicated exactly the movements of a long-dead singer any less of an artist than someone who had the idea of sticking photographs of dead black teenagers on to a fibreglass cannon?
