Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

  “What was her surname?” asked Ted. “I must’ve heard it on the news, but it was in one ear, out the other.”

  “Bartos,” Jude supplied.

  “Oh yes, I knew it was something foreign. ‘Bartos’…now where do you reckon that would come from? Spain perhaps…? South America…?”

  “Originally maybe, but there’s such a variety of surnames in this country, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s ‘foreign’.”

  Ted took Jude’s reproof on board. “Yeah, OK, but it is an unusual name.”

  “So’s Crisp.”

  “Nonsense. There’s Crisps everywhere. Behind this bar here I’ve got salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, barbecue, smoky bacon—”

  The two women groaned as one, both aware of the huge blessing the world had received when Ted Crisp gave up being a stand-up comedian.

  Carole was quick to put such frivolity in its proper place. “Bartos still sounds a foreign name to me.”

  “Everything sounds foreign to you, Carole.” It was an uncharacteristically sharp response from Jude. Usually she let her neighbour’s prejudices pass without comment.

  “Well, it’s true. Bartos doesn’t sound English.”

  Jude couldn’t resist the tease. “And does Seddon?”

  And Carole couldn’t resist the affronted knee-jerk reaction. “Seddon is very definitely an old English name. It’s been around since at least the fourteenth century. And it’s common in Lancashire.”

  “I thought you thought everything in Lancashire was common.”

  “Jude! If you—”

  Ted Crisp was forced into the unusual role of peacemaker. “Don’t know what’s got into you two tonight. Can we just leave it that ‘Bartos’ is a slightly unusual surname and could possibly be of foreign origin?”

  “Very well,” said Carole huffily.

  Jude just smiled.

  “Anyway, Ted…” Carole reasserted her position as a serious investigator. “You said you knew something about the boyfriend…? Nathan Locke.”

  “Only, as I say, that he did come in here sometimes.”

  “He must have been quite a regular for you to know his name,” Jude observed.

  “No, but one of my regulars does know him fairly well. Lives down the street from his family.”

  “Who is the regular?”

  Ted Crisp gestured over towards one of the pub’s booths, in which an old man mournfully faced the last few centimetres of his beer. “Les Constantine. Holds the Crown and Anchor All-Comers Record for the longest time making a pint last.”

  “Could you introduce him?” asked Jude.

  “He may not want to talk to us,” said Carole, her natural distrust of strangers asserting itself.

  “You buy him a pint and he’ll want to talk to you all right. Buy him a pint and he’ll tell you anything you want.”

  “Haven’t you called ‘Time’, though, Ted? You can’t serve him, can you?”

  “Listen, Carole, I’m landlord of the Crown and Anchor. I can do what I like.” He lumbered across towards the booth. “Oy, Les, couple of ladies want to buy you a drink.”

  The old man looked up lugubriously. “They’re probably only after my body.”

  “Do you find that’s what it usually is with women?”

  “Oh yes.”

  He moved daintily towards them. He was quite short and his long-lasting pints of beer hadn’t put any flesh on his thin bones. He wore a dark grey suit which shone here and there from too much ironing, and a broad sixties flowered tie in a neat Windsor knot under a frayed collar. But though the clothes had seen better days, everything was spotlessly clean.

  Ted made the introductions and set a full pint in Les’s hand. Carole waited for a grateful mouthful to be downed before asking, “So you actually know Nathan Locke?”

  The old man looked disappointed. “Oh, so you mean it wasn’t my body you were after?”

  “Just a few questions first, then we’ll get on to the sex. What do you fancy—a threesome with the two of us?”

  Carole was appalled by the suggestion, but once again was forced to admire Jude’s uncanny skill of hitting the right note with people. That kind of outrageous badinage was the response Les Constantine wanted; she had instantly tuned in to his wavelength.

  “All right,” he wheezed. “We’ll sort out the fine-tuning later…you know, “Your place or mine?” How’s that?”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “Sounds perfect to me too, Jude.” He relished the taste of her name on his lips. “So what can I do you for? Presumably you’re interested in the boy because of what happened down the hairdresser’s?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You and everyone else in Fethering. Yes, suddenly—just thanks to a geographical accident, living down the road from the boy—I’m very popular.” He took another swig of beer. “Not the first free pint I’ve got this evening for my…inside knowledge, is it, Ted?”

  The landlord guffawed agreement, and for a moment Carole wondered whether they had been seduced into a handy little scam between publican and customer. Then, with a wink, Ted Crisp wandered off to collect up glasses from the slowly emptying tables.

  “I live in Marine Villas,” Les went on. “You know where I mean?”

  “Parallel to Beach Road, running down to the Fether.”

  “That’s it. I been there nearly forty years now. With the wife Iris I was, till she passed away…1999 that was.” The recollection still caused him a pang. “Anyway, the Lockes moved in about a year after that. Nathan was, I don’t know, ten, maybe younger. Nice kid, not one of these that’s always causing trouble and nicking your dustbins and throwing McDonald wrappers in your front garden and that. More interested in books and schoolwork, I gather. Whole family’s a bit arty-farty, from what I hear.”

  “So do you actually know Nathan?”

  “Just to say hello to. Not bosom pals, but in a street like Marine Villas…well, you hear a bit about everyone’s business. Like, I suppose, most of them know about everything I get up to…that is, except for the Torture Chamber in the cellar and the Dominatrix, obviously.”

  “Oh, I’d heard rumours about her,” said Jude, again finding exactly the right level.

  “Blimey O’Reilly! You can’t keep anything secret in a place like this, can you?” He shook his head at the prurience of Fethering residents.

  “Anyway,” Carole pressed on, “do you know anything about Nathan Locke’s relationship with Kyra Bartos?”

  “She’s the dead girl, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  This time the headshake was more measured and regretful. “Heartbreaking, isn’t it? Kid like that. Got everything ahead of her…you know, could have been a mum, had lots of kiddies…and this, it kind of all stops it, doesn’t it? I saw that photo of her they had on the telly…just a little girl. Reminded me a bit of my Iris when I first met her…We used to do our courting in Brighton…nice dance hall there was there then…” With a more resolute shake of his head, he jolted himself out of maudlin reminiscence. “Anyway, what was the question? Did I know anything about Nathan’s ‘relationship’ with the dead girl? Not really. Just heard along the old Marine Villas bush telegraph that he’d got this girlfriend who worked up the hairdresser’s…General feeling was that it was good news, because he’d always had a reputation of being a bit bookish, you know, coming from an arty-farty family, apparently hoping to go to university and that…and I think everyone thought he deserved a bit of fun, like. ‘All work and no play’…you know what they say.”

  “Do you know what he’s hoping to read at university?” asked Carole.

  “Read? I’ve no idea. I told you I didn’t know him that well, so I don’t know what books he reads.”

  “Carole meant: what does he want to study at university?” Jude explained.

  “Ah. Right. I don’t know…language or something like that. Not anything useful.”

  “What do you mean by ‘useful’?”

  “
Well, it’s not something that might’ve, like, taught him a trade. Just all to do with books. That’s all any of them seem to learn these days. I mean, when I was young, boys of that age done an apprenticeship. You know, learned something that might be useful in later life.”

  “Is that what you did?” asked Jude gently.

  “Too right. Couldn’t wait to get out of school. My dad worked in boat-building…pleasure boats, yachts, you know. Got me an apprenticeship at the yard where he worked in Littlehampton, Collier & Brompton. I loved the work. My dad thought it’d last for ever.”

  “You imply that it didn’t?”

  “No, but at least my old man never knew that. When he passed away, I was…what, early twenties? Just met Iris, we was courting, but me old dad never saw us married. Never saw what happened to the leisure boatbuilding industry either.”

  “What did happen?”

  “Fibreglass, that’s what happened. Started in the fifties, then more and more in the sixties. And suddenly the skills I had…you know, woodworking skills, suddenly there’s not so much demand from them down the boatyards. Oh, a few keep going with the old methods, some adapt. Collier & Brompton, yard I worked in, they did. They ask me if I want to retrain, but putting fibreglass in moulds, that wasn’t my idea of boat-building. And I was in my forties by then…old dogs and new tricks, you know. So I give up the boats.”

  “And haven’t you worked since?”

  “Oh, blimey, yes. Got a job putting in fitted kitchens. Bit overqualified I reckoned I was—a trained shipwright trimming edges off MDF shelf units, but…well, can’t be too choosy when you haven’t got no income. Did that till I was sixty-five, but by then the old hands were getting a bit shaky and I wasn’t finding it so easy to lug all them units around, so…heigh-ho for a happy retirement. Which it was…till…” He didn’t need to complete the sentence.

  Carole broke the ensuing, silence. “So you can’t tell us any more about Nathan Locke…?”

  “Well, no. Except that everyone in Fethering reckons he topped that poor kid.”

  “And have they any reason for saying that?” asked Jude.

  “He was definitely due to meet up with her the evening before she was found dead.”

  “Do you know where they were due to meet?”

  “Certainly not her place, I’ll tell you that for free. Apparently her old man didn’t approve of Nathan…or any other young man who come sniffing round his daughter. No, the Fethering view is that, since Kyra had got the keys to the salon—you know, because she was due to open up the next morning—she entertained her boyfriend there.”

  “Ah.” Carole nodded. The theory fitted in with the empty bottles she had seen in the back room of Connie’s Clip Joint. And perhaps the red roses. “Well, presumably, as we speak, the police are questioning Nathan Locke about just that.”

  “I’m sure they would be,” said the old man, “but they can’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because nothing has been seen of the boy since he left his home in Marine Villas’at seven o’clock that evening.”

  “Oh.”

  “Which is another reason why all of Fethering have got him down for the job of murderer.” Wistfully, Les Constantine drained the last dregs of his pint. “Oh well, I’d better be off.” He lowered his thin limbs gingerly down from his bar stool.

  “Aren’t we coming with you?” asked Jude, with a look of innocent sultriness.

  “What for?”

  Carole found herself blushing as her neighbour replied, “For that threesome.”

  “Ooh yes,” said the old man. “Yes, I’d really like to do that. Trouble is,” he added with an apologetic smile, “today I’ve got a bit of a cold.”

  FOUR

  Jude didn’t make an appointment. From what she’d heard about the commercial health of Connie’s Clip Joint, she didn’t think it’d be necessary—even with the added attraction for Fethering people of having their hair cut at a murder scene.

  The salon had reopened on the Friday, eight days after the discovery of Kyra Bartos’s body. Jude reckoned the first few days would have mopped up the locals booking out of prurient curiosity, and it was the following Tuesday morning when she wandered in.

  By then very little more had been heard from the police about their investigations. There had been some televised press conferences in the first few days, at which the detective chief inspector in charge of the case had demonstrated a caginess which could have meant he was within minutes of cracking the case wide open, or alternatively that he hadn’t a clue what the hell was going on. Fethering opinion, lavishly expressed in the Crown and Anchor and at church, as well as in Allinstore and the rest of the local shops, continued to cast Nathan Locke as the murderer. There had still been no sign of the boy, and some local Jeremiahs reckoned it was only a matter of time before he turned up as a ‘Fethering Floater’. People who drowned from the seashore or, more frequently, in the fast-running waters of the Fether estuary, tended to be washed up on the beach before too long. But if a remorseful Nathan Locke had committed suicide by jumping into the river on the night of the murder, the sea was slow to return his body. ‘Fethering Floaters’ usually came back within twenty-four—or at the most forty-eight—hours. Jude felt pretty confident that, somewhere, Nathan Locke was still alive.

  When she walked into Connie’s Clip Joint, she received a cheery greeting from the owner and a polite nod from Theo. That Tuesday the owner’s hair and make-up were immaculately in place. Both stylists were actually occupied, but Connie said she’d be through in ten minutes, so if Jude would like to wait…?

  This suited her purposes very well. Her vision enlarged by the description Carole had given her of the tragic scene in the back room, Jude just wanted a few moments to absorb the atmosphere of the salon. Murder, she had found, left a psychic signature on a setting that was at least as informative as a fingerprint or a bloodstain.

  That morning there was no music playing, which again was helpful to her. The less distractions, the better. She disguised her intense concentration on the feeling of the place by flicking idly through the pages of a magazine. Hairdressers always offered a wide selection of reading, though—as was appropriate in Fethering—the magazines in Connie’s Clip Joint favoured a more mature clientele. Apart from the predictable gossip-mongering of OK! and Hello!, also present were Marie Claire, Vogue and even Country Life.

  Jude chose a Vogue and, while the surface of her mind was amused by the void between the stage-managed images on its pages and the reality of living women’s looks, at a deeper level she tuned in to the aura of the salon.

  There was discord there certainly, and it dated from long before the recent crime. Perhaps the conflict which had soured the atmosphere had been Connie and Martin’s deteriorating relationship, its pressures increased by the necessity of maintaining a front of harmony while they worked together.

  It certainly had nothing to do with Theo. Jude could detect an almost tangible warmth between the two stylists. They enjoyed working together; there was no discord there. And yet within each of them she could sense depths of personal conflict, directed at people outside the hermetic world of Connie’s Clip Joint.

  Jude hadn’t got far, but she had extracted a sense of the place, a platform on which she could build future conjecture. Since she knew she wasn’t going to get any further that morning in the psychic direction, she concentrated instead on the behaviour of the two clients having their hair done. Which, as things turned out, was a cabaret in itself.

  Theo was dealing with the woman’s hair, Connie with the man’s. Theo must have been at work longer, because his client had clearly already gone through a colouring and washing process. Now both had reached the same stage, as though there were a prearranged plan to make the two haircuts finish at the same time.

  Theo’s client was a small, sharp-featured elderly woman, whose heavy make-up didn’t quite coincide with the contours of her features. Her hair was newly red, though not a r
ed that featured anywhere in the natural world. It was the defiant red of a burning oil-spill, and Theo was cutting it into the kind of ‘Dutch bob’ favoured by the silent-film star Louise Brooks. From the way he was working, this was clearly not a new style, but one he had been assiduously re-creating for some years.

  The male client had broad amiable features gathered round a large squashed-in nose. Thinning a little on the crown, his remaining hair was thick and steel grey, with a corrugated effect, as though its natural curl had been subdued by a lifetime of brushing back.

  Jude was very soon left in no doubt that the pair were married. The woman seemed much more interested in what was happening to her husband’s hair than her own.

  “No, shorter over the ears, Connie. You like it shorter over the ears, don’t you, Wally?”

  Wally, who appeared to have lived a life of listening to rhetorical questions from his wife, did not bother to reply.

  “We don’t want him walking round Fethering like some beatnik, do we, Theo?”

  Theo agreed that that wouldn’t be the thing at all.

  “Do you know,” the woman went on, “I can’t believe the behaviour of young people these days, the sort of things they’re always doing.” She almost dropped the final ‘g’ from the last word, a little giveaway that perhaps her origins weren’t quite as refined as the voice she now used. “I went into Allinstore only last week, just to buy some kippers…because you like a kipper, don’t you, Wally?” Again her husband did not feel he had to confirm this self-evident truth. “And of course it came from the freezer. I’d rather buy kippers, you know, like, fresh, but where’m I to do that since the fishmonger closed? I ask you, we’ve still got fishermen working out of Fethering, but if you want to buy fresh fish, you got to go all the way to Worthing…Not of course that a kipper is strictly fresh, because it’s been kippered, but one from the fishmonger does look better than something out of the freezer that comes sealed in a bag with a little flower-shaped dab of butter on it. You say you can tell the difference in the taste, don’t you, Wally?” With no pretence at waiting for a response, she went on, “Anyway, I take the kipper up to the checkout and the girl behind takes it, and I give her the money, and she doesn’t say a word. Not one word. It was like I was putting my money in a slot machine. So, as she gives me my change, I say to her, ‘Aren’t you girls taught to say ‘Thank you’ any more?’ And she says, ‘No, it’s printed on the till receipt.’ Ooh, I was so angry when I got home. I was that angry, wasn’t I, Wally? Yes, I was.”