Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

  “Ah. Young Kyra’s taste for body piercing. It seems to be her ambition to get more perforations than a tea bag.” Another peeved look at her watch. “Where is the bloody girl? I’ll ring her when I’ve finished with you. Now do you want the cut slightly layered?”

  “No,” Carole countered doggedly. “I want it the same shape, but shorter.”

  “Right.” Whatever reservations Connie might have had to this conservative approach, she kept them to herself, and started cutting.

  At that moment Theo’s nine-thirty skulked into the salon. In spite of the mild September day, she wore a raincoat with the collar turned up, a headscarf and dark glasses.

  “Sheeeeeena!” Theo emoted. “Sheena, my love, how gorgeous to see you.”

  “Not gorgeous at all, Theo darling,” his client drawled. “That’s why I’m here. Morning, Connie,” she said as Theo removed her coat.

  “Morning, Sheena. This is Carole.”

  “Hi. I tell you, Theo, I just need the most total makeover since records began. When I looked at myself in the mirror this morning…well, it took great strength of will not to top myself on the spot.”

  “Oh, come on,” Theo wheedled, “we’ll soon have you looking your beautiful self again. Now let’s take off that scarf and those glasses.”

  “No, no. I’m just not fit to be seen!”

  “You’re amongst friends here, Sheena darling. Nobody’ll breathe a word about what you looked like before…Will you, Carole?”

  Though rather unwilling to pander to the woman’s vanity, Carole agreed that she wouldn’t.

  “And when we get to after, Sheena…after I’ve worked my magic…you’ll look so gorgeous, men in the street will be falling over each other to get at you.”

  “Oh, Theo, you’re so full of nonsense.” But it was clearly nonsense his client liked.

  After further dramatic delays, Sheena was finally settled into the chair, and there followed the great ceremony of removing her scarf and glasses. Carole, squinting at an angle into the adjacent mirror, wondered what horrors were about to be unveiled. What optical disfigurement lay behind the glasses? What trichological disaster beneath the scarf?

  After the build-up, the revelation was a bit of a disappointment. Sheena was a perfectly attractive woman in her late forties—and, what’s more, one whose blonded hair appeared to have been cut quite recently.

  But she had set up her scenario, and was not going to be deterred from playing it out. “There, Theo. Now that’s going to be a challenge, even for you, isn’t it?”

  Her stylist, who must have been through the same scene many times before, knew his lines. “Don’t worry, darling. Remember, Theo is a miracle worker. So what are we going to do?”

  “We are going to make me so attractive, Theo, that I become a positive man-magnet.”

  “Too easy. You’re a man-magnet already.”

  “I wish, I don’t understand.” Sheena let out a long sigh. “There just don’t seem to be any men in Fethering.”

  “Ooh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said coyly.

  “Are you saying you’ve taken them all, Theo? I bet you never have any problem finding men.”

  The stylist let out an enigmatic, silvery laugh.

  Throughout Carole’s haircut, this archness continued. Connie, who had tried commendably hard to keep conversation going with her client, eventually gave up and joined in the false brightness of Sheena and Theo. Carole found it quite wearing. A little too lively for her taste. She wasn’t sure whether Connie’s Clip Joint was going to be a long-term replacement for Graham and the anonymous salon in Worthing.

  On the other hand, Connie did cut hair very well. Though keeping within Carole’s minimal guidelines, she had somehow managed to give a freshness to her client’s traditional style. With glasses restored, Carole couldn’t help admiring the result she saw in the mirror.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” said Connie, “I must just ring Kyra and find out what on earth’s happened to her. Now, I’ve got her mobile number somewhere.” She crossed to the cash register table and started shuffling through papers.

  Carole felt awkward about the business of paying. When booking the appointment, she hadn’t asked how much it would cost and now she was worried it might have been very expensive. Prices varied so much. And then there was the big challenge of tipping. Should she tip and, if so, how much? She’d never tipped Graham—that had been an accepted feature of their austere relationship—but she was in a new salon now and she wasn’t sure of the protocol.

  Connie listened impatiently to the phone. “Well, she’s not answering.”

  She was poised to end the call, when suddenly they were all aware of a new noise, cutting through the harmonies of Abba. The insistent jangle of a phone ringing.

  Carole and Connie exchanged looks. The hairdresser huffed in exasperation, “Oh, don’t say the bloody girl’s left her mobile here.”

  As Connie moved towards the source of the sound, Carole, curiosity overcoming her natural reticence, found herself following.

  A door led through to the back area, storeroom, kitchenette and lavatory. As Connie opened it, there was a smell of stale alcohol and cigarette smoke. Beer cans and a vodka bottle on its side lay on a low table. On the work surface beside the sink stood a vase containing twelve red roses.

  But it wasn’t those that prompted the involuntary scream from Connie’s lips. It was what she could see—and Carole could see over her shoulder—slumped in a chair over which loomed the dome of a spare dryer.

  The girl’s clothes were torn. There were scratches on her metal-studded face.

  And, tight as a garrotte, around the neck of her slumped body was the lead from the unplugged dryer.

  TWO

  “Drink this.” Jude placed a large glass of Chilean Chardonnay on the table in front of her neighbour. “You look as though you need it.”

  The extent of Carole’s trauma could be judged from the fact that she didn’t look at her watch and ask, “Isn’t it a bit early in the day…?” It was in fact only two-thirty in the afternoon, but a lifetime seemed to have elapsed since she had entered Connie’s Clip Joint that morning. She hadn’t felt it proper to leave until the police had arrived and, once they were there, she couldn’t leave until she had submitted to some polite, though persistent, questioning. Her training in the Home Office told her that they were only doing their job, and she knew that they were starting from an empty knowledge base, but she did feel frustrated by the depth of information they seemed to require. Though she kept reiterating that it was the first time she had ever entered the salon, the police still wanted her to fill in far more of her personal background than she thought entirely necessary. What business of theirs was it that she was divorced? Surely, rather than following up such fruitless blind alleys, they ought to have been out there finding the murderer. Again she reminded herself of the huge mosaic of facts from which a successful conviction was built up, and managed to endure the questioning with the appearance of cooperation. But she hadn’t enjoyed the experience.

  And it had all been made considerably worse by the presence of Sheena. Theo’s client had taken the discovery of the girl’s body as a cue for a full operatic mix of posturing and hysterics. “Something like this was bound to happen!” she had wailed. “I knew when I got up, this was an inauspicious day. I shouldn’t have left the house. I should have stayed in bed. It’s horrible! Though the poor girl may have deserved something, she didn’t deserve this!” But through the woman’s tears and screams, Carole could detect a real relish for the drama of the situation. Kyra’s murder was the most exciting thing that had happened in Sheena’s life for a long time.

  Eventually Carole had managed to escape. While the Scene of Crime Officers embarked on their painstaking scrutiny of the premises, the detectives told her they were from the Major Crime Branch, and would be working from the Major Crime Unit in Littlehampton police station. They gave her a list of contact numbers, and urged her to get in to
uch if she thought of or heard anything which might have relevance to the investigation.

  “I’ve done a bacon and avocado salad,” said Jude, and went off to the kitchen to fetch it. That was quick, thought Carole. But then perhaps more time had elapsed from the moment when she had knocked on her neighbour’s door at the end of the interrogation and the moment she had come back to Woodside Cottage. Her recollection was a bit hazy. She had gone to High Tor and taken Gulliver out to do his business on the rough ground behind the house. And she had stood for a moment of abstraction, from which his barking had roused her. Maybe it had been a longer moment than she thought. Maybe that too was a measure of the shock she had suffered.

  “So…” said Jude, finally nestled into one of the shapeless armchairs in her untidy front room, “tell me exactly what happened.”

  And Carole did. Unaware of the speed at which she was sinking the Chilean Chardonnay, or the readiness with which Jude was replenishing her glass, she told everything. Dealing with unpleasant subject matter during her Home Office days had taught her the value of drily marshalling facts and investing a report with the objective anonymity that made its horror containable.

  At the end of the narrative Jude let out a long sigh and sat for a moment with her round face cupped in her chubby hands. As ever, she was swathed in many layers of floaty fabric, which blurred the substantial outlines of her welcoming body. Her blonde hair, which had been innocent of the attentions of a hairdresser for some time, was twisted up into an unlikely topknot, held in place by what looked like a pair of knitting needles.

  “So you didn’t get any insight into who might have killed the girl?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Jude. This morning was the first time I’ve even stepped inside that place. I don’t know anything about any of the people involved.”

  “I wasn’t meaning that. I thought perhaps the police might’ve let something slip about the direction in which their suspicions are moving.”

  “So far as I could tell, they’re clueless. When they arrived, they had as little information as I had. Besides, you may recall from past experience that even when the police do start having theories about the identity of a murderer, people like us are the last they’re going to share them with.”

  Jude nodded ruefully. “True.”

  “In fact, you’re probably a more useful source than I am.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you actually know all the people involved. You’re a regular at Connie’s Clip Joint.”

  “Hardly a regular, but I suppose you’re right.”

  “And,” Carole went on, unable to keep out of her voice the note of envy that such thoughts usually prompted, “people always confide in you, so probably you actually know a great deal about Connie Rutherford and her set-up.”

  “A certain amount, yes.”

  “. She isn’t one of your patients, is she?” This word too had a special recurrent intonation for Carole. Jude worked as a healer, which to Carole still meant that she operated in the world of mumbo-jumbo. And the people who believed that such ministrations could do them any good were, to Carole’s mind, gullible neurotics.

  “You know I prefer to use the word ‘client’,” Jude responded calmly. It wasn’t in her nature to take issue about such matters. She knew that healing worked. Some people shared her opinion; Some were violently opposed to it. Jude was prepared to have her case made by successful results rather than verbal argument. And she knew that depriving Carole of her scepticism about healing would take away one of the pillars of bluster that supported her prickly, fragile personality. “But no,” she went on, “I haven’t treated Connie. I just know her from chatting while I’ve been having my hair done.”

  “Well, she volunteered to me that she was divorced—and that the divorce hadn’t taken place under the happiest of circumstances…”

  “What divorce does?”

  Carole did not pick up on this. Though some ten years old, her own divorce from David was still an area as sensitive as an infected tooth. And lurking at the back of her mind was a new anxiety. Her son Stephen’s wife Gaby was soon to give birth. Grandparenthood might mean that Carole was forced into even more contact with David. Resolutely dispelling such ugly thoughts from her mind, she went on, “And I gather that she and…what was her husband’s name?…Martin, that’s right…used to own Connie’s Clip Joint together, but now he’s got a rather more successful set-up…”

  “That’s an understatement. He owns Martin & Martina. You must have seen their salons.”

  “Oh, yes, I have. I’d never particularly paid attention to them, but they’ve got that big swirly silver logo, haven’t they? There’s one in Worthing.”

  “Worthing, Brighton, Chichester, Horsham, Midhurst, Newhaven, Eastbourne, Hastings. Martin Rutherford seems to have the whole of the South Coast sewn up.”

  “So every time Connie sees one of his salons, it must rather rub salt in the wound of the divorce.”

  “Yes, Carole. Particularly since the name of the woman he left her for was Martina.”

  “Ah. Not so much rubbing salt as rubbing her nose in it.” Carole tapped her chin reflectively. She was relaxing. The Chardonnay and Jude’s calming presence were distancing her from the horrors of the morning. “And has Connie found her equivalent of Martina? Has she got someone else?”

  “No one permanent, as far as I know. I think she has had a few tentative encounters, but from what she said, most of them had a lot in common with car crashes. I don’t think Connie’s a great picker when it comes to men.”

  “Pity. Because she seems to have a pleasant personality…You know, under the professional hairdresser banter…”

  “Yes, she’s a lovely girl. And very pretty. Always beautifully groomed.”

  “Well, she wasn’t this morning. No make-up, hair scrunched up any-old-how.”

  “Really?” Jude looked thoughtful. “That’s most unlike her. I wonder why…”

  “No idea. She implied she would have done her make-up in the salon…you know if Kyra hadn’t been late…”

  “Unfortunate choice of words in the circumstances, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.” The thought brought Carole up short. The screen of her mind was once again filled by the contorted, immobile face, and she felt the reality of what had happened. Someone had deliberately cut short a young girl’s life.

  “Did you know her? Kyra?”

  “She washed my hair last time I was in the salon. Didn’t say much. Rather shy, I thought. Or maybe she was concentrating on learning the basics of practical hairdressing before she moved on to the refinements of inane client chatter. So, no, I can’t really say I knew her.”

  “Theo mentioned there was a boyfriend. Did Kyra say anything about anyone special in her life?”

  Jude shook her head. “Poor boy. I should think the police would be getting very heavy with him.”

  “Yes. He’d be the obvious first port of call. And from the look of the back room of the salon, Kyra had been entertaining someone there. Empty bottles, beer cans, you know…”

  “Adolescent passions are very confusing…they can so easily get out of hand,” said Jude, with sympathy.

  “Yes,” Carole agreed, without any.

  “Hm.” Jude refilled their glasses. Still Carole made no demur. “So we’re back in our usual position when faced with a murder…total lack of information.”

  “And not much likelihood of getting any,” Carole agreed gloomily.

  “Oh, there may be ways…”

  “Like…?”

  “Well, obviously Connie’s Clip Joint is going to be closed for a few days. It is a Scene of Crime, after all. But, assuming it does reopen…I think I should have a haircut.” Jude shook her precarious topknot; it threatened to unravel, but the knitting needles just managed to keep it in place. “I could certainly do with one.”

  THREE

  “So what’s the word on the street?”

  “How should
I know?” Ted Crisp replied gruffly. “I never go out on the street if I can help it.”

  “All right,” said Jude patiently. “What’s the word in the Crown and Anchor?”

  “Ah, that’s a different matter entirely.” Irregular teeth showed through the thicket of his beard in a broad grin. “What happens in the pub I do know about. In fact, not a lot goes on in here that I don’t know about. And there’s not a lot said in here that I don’t hear either.”

  “Well then,” said Carole with less patience than her neighbour, “what is being said in here about the strangling in Connie’s Clip Joint?”

  Deliberately delaying his reply, the landlord took a long swallow from his beer mug. It was near closing time, the only part of the day when he allowed himself any alcohol. He’d watched too many landlords drink away their health and profits to start any earlier. “There is a general consensus,” Ted began slowly, “that the girl’s boyfriend dunnit.”

  “And is that based on anything more substantial than speculation?”

  “Well, Carole, speculation is obviously the biggest part of what people are thinking, but there are a few other details that might point in the same direction.”

  “Like what?” asked Jude. “We know nothing about the boyfriend, not even his name.”

  “That I can supply. Nathan Locke. Sixteen…seventeen. Still at college, somewhere in Chichester. Parents live here in Fethering. I’ve seen him in the pub.”

  “With Kyra?”

  “Really can’t remember. Those students tend to come in mob-handed, hard to tell which one’s which or who belongs to who. And I’m so busy watching out for which ones of them are underage that I’m not concentrating on much else. The photo of the girl they showed on the television news looked vaguely familiar, but whether I’d seen her with anyone particular, I couldn’t say. Certainly not as part of a regular couple.”

  “She looked rather different from the photo on the news. She’d had some piercing done oh her lips and eyebrows,” said Carole, for whom the image was uncomfortably recent. There was always something poignant about photographs of young murder victims—particularly girls—when they appeared in the media. Frequently they were out of date, posed school pictures of children who didn’t look old enough to inspire adult passions. Which only seemed to make their fate more painful.