Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

  “Yes.”

  “Well, would you say that Kyra Bartos’s threat to bring a charge of sexual harassment against Martin Rutherford constituted new information?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose I would.”

  The Lockes liked working on their home ground. In some families that might have been from a sense of insecurity, but in their case it was the opposite impulse, a desire to impress visitors with their united-front solidity. That was the impression Carole got as Dorcas Locke led her into her parents’ house in Chichester on the Saturday morning. The day before Rowley had said on the phone that meeting at their house would be simplest, ‘if you’re likely to be in the Chichester area’. Carole had immediately remembered the half-truth that she needed to buy some dog food in bulk for Gulliver, and replied that by chance she did have some shopping to do in the city’s Salisbury’s the following morning. Though making no claims to aura-detecting antennae like Jude’s, Carole still recognized the value of the information that an environment could impart.

  The Lockes’ lack of insecurity was emphasized by the fact that Rowley and his wife were not at home when Carole arrived at the agreed hour of eleven-thirty on the Saturday morning. The house was a substantial one—probably five bedrooms—out in Summersdale, beyond the Festival Theatre to the north of the city. It was one of the most sought-after suburbs of Chichester, with house prices to match, so there was money somewhere in the Locke family. Or at least there had been money at one time. The weeds poking up through the gravel of the drive, the blistered paint on the fascia boards and sagging window frames suggested that no routine maintenance had been done for some years. Or maybe the priorities of an artistic family like the Lockes lay elsewhere.

  “Mummy and Daddy won’t be long,” said Dorcas. She was dressed in a long skirt and top of pale coral cotton, which again emphasized the red-gold of her outward-spiralling hair. Although she recognized Carole, her manner was distant, her patent lack of interest just the right side of bad manners. “Come through.”

  The room into which Carole was led was larger and less cluttered than Arnold and Eithne Lockes’, but its bookshelves, piano and artlessly abandoned guitar put across the same message: “You are in the home of cultured people.” Like the exterior of the house, the decor could have done with a bit of attention, and the sofa and armchairs were worn and frayed. Here too the walls were adorned with photographs of the massed Locke family, siblings and cousins mixed together in a variety of settings. Fancy dress featured a lot, and there was more Swallows and Amazons-style posturing in boats. Again the background scenery looked Cornish. Mementos of more family holidays at Treboddick.

  By a low table on the floor sat two girls, probably about fourteen and twelve. They had the same hair as Dorcas and their clothes, in pale tones of respectively raspberry and blue-grey, made them look as though they had been cloned from her. Had they not been so thin, the three diminishing sizes of sisters could have emerged from the same Russian doll.

  The younger girls hardly looked up at the visitor’s arrival. They were engrossed with some game laid out on the table. But it was not a commercially manufactured game. The map, which acted as a board, was hand-drawn and painted in coloured inks. The manikins were two-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs on cardboard stands: knights, heraldic beasts, dwarves and goblins. Open exercise books beside the map were covered with densely handwritten text, which swirled around embedded hand-drawn illustrations.

  But everything was worn and faded. The map was criss-crossed with parallel lines from much folding. The paint on the figures was smudged and dull, and it was impossible to tell the original colour of the now-beige exercise book covers. On the map the words ‘Kingdom of Verendia’ and ‘Forest of Black Fangdar’ could be read. Oh no, thought Carole, we’re not into Tolkien country, are we? (Such things did not appeal to her. She was of the view that coping with a single universe was quite enough of a challenge, without creating any parallel ones.)

  Indicating an armchair for Carole, Dorcas had made no attempt to introduce her sisters, but instead joined them on the floor and continued with the game, as if there was no one else in the room. When they spoke, the younger girls had a lisp just like hers. Carole wondered idly whether it was caused by a genetic physical abnormality, or had been learned. Maybe the as-yet-unmet Bridget Locke would turn out to have the mother of all lisps, which had been passed down to her daughters…?

  Though incomprehensible to an outsider, the rules of the game the girls were playing made sense to them and there was a high level of excitement in their playing. For a few minutes Carole tried to follow what was happening, but soon gave up. After a time she almost got used to cries from the floor of ‘I challenge thee to the Ordeal of Furminal, vile Tritchbacker’, “Your Eagrant magic has not power in the Vales of Aspihglad’ or ‘Let not the valiant offspring of Leomon cross swords with one of the blood of Merkerin.”

  She was just sneaking a look at her watch to discover that the Locke parents were nearly a quarter of an hour late, when Dorcas clapped her hands and said, “One last sortie, girls. Then you must do your music practice.”

  Though deeply engrossed in the game, her sisters did not complain. They each had a ‘sortie’, which so far as Carole could tell was like a roll of the dice in any other game. But there was nothing looking like a dice in evidence and she had no idea what force dictated where on the map one of the figures should move next. When their ‘sortie’ was finished, both girls obediently rose to their feet. “Will you leave it out, so’s we can have another Grail-search tonight?” asked the younger one.

  “No, sorry, Tamil. Daddy says it must always be put away, so that each Grail-search starts anew.”

  “Tamil!” thought Carole. It must be another of those wretched nicknames, like Fimby and Diggo. But then again, parents who called their eldest daughter ‘Dorcas’ were quite capable of having another one actually christened ‘Tamil’.

  The two smaller girls made no further argument, but left the room. Carole heard their footsteps clumping up the stairs and, later, the sounds of distant music wafting from their bedrooms. One appeared to be learning the oboe, the other the clarinet.

  As she gathered up the pieces of the game and placed them, in long-remembered sequence, into an old flat biscuit tin, Dorcas felt no need to apologize for her parents’ lateness—or indeed to say anything else.

  Carole, inept as ever at making small talk, asked what the girls’ names were.

  “Their real names are Chloe and Sylvia, but they’re called Zebba and Tamil.”

  The assertiveness of Dorcas’s tone put Carole off asking the obvious question: Why? Instead she observed that the girls had been playing what looked like an interesting game. Dorcas did not think the comment worthy of response.

  “Is it something you’re going to develop commercially?”

  “What?” The girl stopped packing the game away and for the first time looked directly at her visitor. The eyes, which Carole had previously noted as ‘honey-coloured’, were, close to, more complex than that, a very pale hazel flecked with black.

  “Well,” Carole explained, “you keep reading in the papers of people who’ve made huge fortunes from devising computer and—”

  “This is not a computer game!” Dorcas snapped. “It’s a board game. Daddy wouldn’t have a computer game in the house.”

  “No, but hearing you playing it, it sounds very similar to a computer game.”

  “It is nothing like a computer game!” The girl’s pale face was now red with anger.

  “All I’m saying is that that kind of game can be very lucrative. If it’s a good idea you’ve got there, you could—”

  “Nobody wants to make money out of the Wheel Quest.”

  “But just think about it. You know, when all that fantasy stuff is being so successful…Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Harry Potter, there could be quite a demand for—”

  Dorcas Locke was deeply affronted by the suggestion. “We don’t want to have other people pl
aying it.”

  Her indignation was so strong that she might have said a lot more, had she not heard the sound of a car scrunching to a halt on the weedy gravel outside. Carole turned to the window to see a beat-up Volvo estate, out of which Rowley Locke and his wife were emerging.

  Bridget Locke was a good-looking woman, nearly as tall as her husband. Her hair was shoulder-length ash-blonde, with a well-cut fringe. The dark trouser suit gave her an aura of efficiency, separating her from the feyness of her daughters. Indeed, they didn’t appear to have inherited any of her genetic make-up. She unloaded Waitrose carrier bags from the back of the estate, while her husband came straight through into the sitting room to greet Carole.

  “Good of you to come,” he said, with no apology for his lateness. “Has Dorcas offered you coffee?”

  The girl gave her father a look which implied that was the last thing she’d have done.

  “No, but it’s fine. I don’t want anything, thank you.”

  Dorcas put the biscuit tin containing the Wheel Quest in its regular place on the shelf and announced, “I’m going to read.”

  “All right, Doone,” said her father. Oh God, another nickname, thought Carole.

  Bridget Locke had by now come in through the front door and was presumably taking her shopping to the kitchen.

  “How old is Dorcas?” asked Carole.

  “She’s twenty-one, just finished at uni.” It was a surprise to hear the abbreviation from a man of Rowley’s age.

  “Has she got a job lined up?”

  He shook his head. “No, she needs a bit of time to chill out. She’s worked hard the last three years.”

  “What was she studying?”

  “English with drama.” That figures, thought Carole. “At Reading.”

  “So you just have the three girls?”

  “No, there’s a fourth. Doone—Dorcas—has a twin. Mopsa. She’s, erm, working in Cornwall at the moment, arranging holiday lets.”

  “Ah.” Mopsa! You wouldn’t need a silly nickname if you were called that. Though in the Locke family, Carole would have put money on the fact that Mopsa had one. “Is that near your own place?”

  “Sorry?”

  “When we met before, you said you had a family place in Cornwall, called Treboddick.”

  “Well remembered, Carole.” His tone was patronizing, the omniscient teacher to the aspiring student. “Yes, the cottages are in Treboddick. Mopsa’s staying down there for the duration.”

  “So you have four girls.”

  “Yes,” said Rowley with pride. “I do girls. Arnold and Eithne do boys.”

  “How many have they got, apart from Nathan?” She thought it might be intrusive to call him ‘Fimby’. And she couldn’t have brought herself to do so, anyway.

  “Just the one. His older brother Julian.”

  Diggo, thought Carole. I’m getting the hang of this.

  “Arnold never had my sticking power.” It was delivered as a joke, but Carole got the feeling that there was some truth behind it as well. Seeing the two brothers together, she had been left in no doubt that Rowley was the dominant one. And he, rather than the boy’s father, was very definitely leading the family investigation into Nathan’s disappearance.

  Further revelations of sibling rivalry were prevented by the arrival of Bridget Locke from the kitchen. Carole was immediately impressed by how sensible she seemed, a beacon of sanity in the midst of her flaky family. Maybe, to allow the family to be as flaky as they appeared, someone had to be in touch with the real world.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to meet you the other day in Fethering,” Bridget apologized. “One of us has to work, I’m afraid.”

  The words weren’t spoken viciously, but there was no doubt they represented a dig at her husband. Carole wondered what Rowley Locke did for a living. Not a lot, was the answer implicit in his wife’s remark.

  “Don’t worry. I did seem to meet quite a lot of the family.”

  “That’s always the case when you mix with the Lockes.” Rowley Locke spoke as if Carole were the recipient of a privilege, but his wife’s ‘Yes’ again suggested less than full-bodied support for his view.

  “Have you come here because you know something about Nathan’s whereabouts?” Carole realized that this was the first time she had heard anxiety about the boy’s fate from any member of the family. Bridget Locke was not the sort to give in to panic, but she was obviously deeply worried about Nathan.

  “No, sadly, I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Bridget. The boy’s just lying low for a while,” Rowley said.

  “And where does a boy of sixteen lie low for more than a fortnight? What does he live on? Eithne says he hasn’t drawn any money out of his account.”

  Carole felt this gave her an opportunity to mention the unmentionable. “The gossip around Fethering is that the boy might have committed suicide.”

  “Well, that’s nonsense!” said Rowley forcibly. “Like all gossip it’s totally unsubstantiated.” His wife was not so sure. “Oh, come on, Bridget, you’ve known Nathan for ten years. He’s not the kind to harm himself.”

  “Not under normal circumstances, no. But who knows how any of us would react to being the prime suspect in a murder investigation?”

  “We’d do what Nathan has done. Go underground until it all blows over.”

  “You make it sound so easy, Rowley. You can’t just disappear in a country like this. And also the idea that a police investigation is just going to ‘blow over’ is, I would say, at the very least naive.”

  Carole did not get the impression that the Lockes normally argued like this. Maybe her presence in connection with Nathan’s disappearance was the catalyst that enabled Bridget to unburden herself of what she was really feeling.

  “And I wonder whether what Carole calls ‘Fethering gossip’ may not have some truth in it. Particularly if…”

  “Particularly if what?” asked her husband sharply.

  Bridget Locke took a deep breath. She knew he wasn’t going to like what she was about to say. “Look, Nathan’s at a difficult age and he was in the throes of his first big love affair. That’s confusing enough for anyone. Particularly for someone who’s never really engaged with the real world.”

  “That’s a very unfair description of him.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s accurate. So there’s Nathan, facing the conflicting pressures of love and lust and the girl’s demands and his parents’ disapproval and—”

  “Now that’s unfair, Bridget. Arnold and Eithne are the most tolerant parents in the world. They wouldn’t mind Nathan bringing a girl home and going to bed with her. They didn’t mind when Diggo had—”

  “No, they wouldn’t disapprove of Nathan having sex, but they would disapprove of the girl he was having sex with.”

  “They never really met Kyra.”

  “I’m not talking about Kyra. They’d disapprove of anyone who Nathan fancied. No girl would be good enough for the Lockes.”

  “Now you’re just being silly.”

  “No, I’m…” But she didn’t continue. It was an old argument, not worth reviving in the presence of a stranger. “All I’m saying is that we should at least entertain the possibility that Nathan might have…harmed himself.” As her husband snorted disagreement, Bridget Locke chose her next words very carefully. “Particularly if he was actually responsible for the girl’s death.”

  Rowley was appalled. “You can’t say that! You’re talking about your nephew. You can’t say he’s a murderer.”

  “Until it has been proved otherwise, you must at least acknowledge why the police see him as a major suspect.”

  “No. The police have got it wrong,” he insisted, before appealing to Carole. “Come on, you’ve got something new to tell us. You said on the phone there was someone else who had a motive to kill Kyra Bartos.”

  Carole quickly recapped what Jude had heard from Connie Rutherford about her ex-husband. Rowley L
ocke seized on the information avidly. “Well, there you are, you see! This Martin Rutherford, he wanted to stop Kyra Bartos shopping him about the sexual harassment. He must have killed her. It was nothing to do with Nathan.”

  Bridget looked at Carole. “Do the police know about this? Did Connie tell them?”

  “I didn’t actually ask her, but I think we can safely assume she did.”

  “Hmm.”

  “If we don’t know for certain that they have been told, then we must see to it that they are,” Rowley announced.

  “How?” asked his wife.

  “I’ll tell them.”

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

  “No,” Carole agreed. “Going round scattering murder accusations at people can get you into serious trouble.”

  “I’m not suggesting that I’ll tell the police in person. I’ll just see that they get the information.”

  “What will it be, Rowley? An anonymous letter? A call from a phone box with you holding a handkerchief over the receiver?”

  Rowley Locke didn’t enjoy his wife sending him up like this. With a rather petulant cry of “I’ve got to sort out some stuff,” he left the room, and Carole heard his footsteps stomping upstairs.

  “I’m sorry.” Bridget Locke sighed. “He can be very childish at times.”

  “I’m sure you’re all under a lot of stress at the moment.”

  She nodded agreement, as Carole went on, “You really think Nathan might have killed the girl?”

  “Without further information, what else is there to think?”

  “And that he might have killed himself too?”

  Bridget Locke sighed. “Again, there is a logic to the idea. He’s certainly disappeared off the face of the earth. If he had somehow killed the girl, I hate to think of the kind of state he’d have been in.”

  “But you think he’d be capable of killing himself?”

  “Yes. I’ve got to know Nathan quite well. He has dark moods, and sixteen isn’t the easiest age for a boy. He could have done it…done both perhaps, I mean. The murder and the suicide.” Carole had a mental image of the photograph she’d seen at his parents’ house, of the brooding figure amongst all the extrovert children on the boat.