Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer

by Simon Brett

  During the summer season (which was coming to an end) tables and chairs spilled out of the Seaview Cafe onto Fethering Beach. Carole, arriving with Gulliver early as ever, took one of the seats furthest away from the self-service counter. She didn’t go up there to order anything. She’d wait till Rowley Locke came and see how their meeting panned out. Her position, she reckoned, was well chosen. In sight of a lot of people, but good for a quick getaway. And also far enough away from the curious ears of Fethering for their conversation to be confidential.

  Rowley Locke arrived on the dot of four. This time he wasn’t heading a large family contingent. Only his brother Arnold, who was immediately despatched to fetch tea. Just tea. Carole had declined the offer of sandwiches and sticky cakes.

  Rowley turned his innocent blue eyes on her. “I assume it was you.”

  “What was me?”

  “Yesterday two women, matching descriptions of you and your friend Jude, abducted Nathan from our holiday cottage in Cornwall.”

  “I’m afraid I take issue with the word ‘abducted’. It might be used more accurately to describe the means by which he was taken to Treboddick in the first place.”

  “Carole, you don’t know the background to what you’re talking about. This is a family thing.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do know—and that is that Nathan was being held down there against his will.”

  Rowley Locke was unworried by the accusation. He shrugged and said, “Sometimes young people don’t know what’s best for them. Then someone else has to take decisions on their behalf.”

  “And if it’s anything to do with the Locke family, then you’re the person who takes those decisions.”

  “Someone has to be a leader,” he said almost smugly.

  “A leader like Prince Fimbador is a leader?”

  She had managed to embarrass him. He looked away as he said, “The Wheal Quest is a family game. You wouldn’t understand it.”

  At this moment Arnold arrived with the tea. After it had been poured, Carole turned her pale blue eyes on the weaker brother. “You and Eithne must be very glad to hear that your son has been found.” He didn’t respond. “Or perhaps not, since you both connived at his imprisonment.”

  “I think ‘imprisonment’ is rather a strong word,” said Arnold feebly.

  “Strong maybe, but it’s accurate.” She turned back to Rowley. “What on earth did you think hiding the boy away was going to achieve?”

  “I hoped it would keep him safe until the police found out who really killed the girl.”

  “Wouldn’t it have helped the police more if they could have talked to Nathan? So that he could tell them what he saw that night, and help them to sort out a timetable of events?”

  “I didn’t want him to get into the hands of the police. Our fine boys in blue don’t have a great track record when it comes to—”

  And he was off again on his hobby horse. Carole couldn’t stand any more of this tired old leftie agenda. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You were deliberately perverting the course of justice. And I would imagine you’ll be looking at a hefty prison sentence for what you’ve done.”

  From his expression of dismay, this was clearly a possibility Rowley Locke had not considered. Like most control freaks, he was quickly vulnerable when threatened.

  “I assume you’ve heard from the police in Littlehampton?” She addressed this question to the boy’s father.

  “Yes, they told me they were holding Nathan. He’s ‘helping them with their enquiries’. Eithne and I are going to visit him this evening.”

  That would be an interesting encounter to witness. What do parents say to a son who knows that they’ve connived in having him imprisoned for three weeks? But that wasn’t Carole’s business. She moved on. “Presumably you both know that Nathan didn’t commit the murder?”

  The look Arnold referred to his brother suggested that at least one of them wasn’t entirely convinced on the subject.

  “Well, he didn’t,” Carole continued. “As I’m sure the police will find out in the course of their enquiries.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. The British police only want to get a conviction and they—”

  “Oh, shut up, Rowley!” Carole was surprised by her own vehemence. So was its recipient. But she went on in similarly forceful vein. “Listen, your ill-considered actions have wasted a lot of time. They’ve wasted police time, and they’ve certainly wasted time for me and my friend Jude.” In the magnificence of her flow neither man thought to question exactly what right she and Jude had to be involved in the investigation. “What I suggest you do now, to make some kind of amends, is to tell me anything you know that might have a bearing on the case. Anything that you may have been holding back.”

  Rowley Locke looked genuinely at a loss. “I haven’t been holding anything back. When I heard about Kyra Bartos’s death, my only thought was that Nathan would immediately become a suspect. And that I had to get him to a place of safety.” Again he avoided Carole’s eyes. “I don’t know anything else about the murder.”

  “When I first came to see you, you told me that Eithne had met Kyra Bartos briefly in the street, but neither of you had. Is that still true?”

  Rowley looked perplexed. “Well, of course it’s still true. The girl was already dead when we met you.”

  “Yes. What I’m asking, though, is this. At the time you said you hadn’t met Kyra. Has your recollection maybe changed since then?”

  “Are you accusing us of lying?”

  “After what you said about Nathan’s whereabouts over the past three weeks, don’t you think I might have some justification?”

  “Actually,” said Arnold quietly, “I was lying.”

  The announcement came as much of a shock to his brother as it did to Carole. They both looked at him in amazement as he went on, “I did meet Kyra one evening a few weeks before she died. Eithne and I had gone out to a concert in Brighton. The Monteverdi Vespers, as it happened. Anyway, I had a bit of a stomach upset. My stomach has always been my Achilles heel…” He confided this mixed metaphor to Carole as though it would be of vital interest to her. “So I went back to Marine Villas and found Kyra there with Nathan: Of course, I didn’t mind his being there with the girl—Eithne and I have always made it clear that we have no old-fashioned moral scruples about that kind of thing—but I was a little upset that he’d done it without asking us. You know, choosing an evening when he thought we’d be out…it was all a bit underhand and hole-in-the-corner, if you know what I mean…”

  Yes, I know exactly what you mean, and will you please get on with it, Carole thought.

  “Anyway, when I found Nathan and the girl together that evening…” Arnold’s pale features reddened, “…I must confess I was rather upset by what they were doing.”

  “Do you mean they were having sex?”

  “Oh, good heavens, no!” He dismissed the suggestion almost contemptuously. “That would have been fine. Eithne and I wouldn’t have had any problems about that. We’ve always brought up Diggo and Fimby to believe that sex is a perfectly natural and healthy act between two consenting—”

  “Then what were they doing that you objected to?” demanded Carole, who had had quite enough of this spelling-out of right-on liberal credentials.

  “Oh. Oh, well…they’d…” Arnold looked across at his elder brother, as though afraid of his reaction to the forthcoming revelation. “They’d got out our box of the Wheal Quest.” He turned back to Carole. “The Wheal Quest is a kind of family—”

  “I know exactly what the Wheal Quest is, thank you.”

  “What were they doing with it?” asked Rowley, suddenly alert.

  “They’d got the game spread out on the floor, and I think Nathan must have been explaining to Kyra how it worked, and…and she was laughing at it.”

  An expression of pale fury crossed his brother’s face. “Laughing at it?”

  “Yes. And I think they must have been drinking, because the g
irl went on, saying how silly it was, and she even got Nathan to agree with her.”

  Rowley snorted with anger at this betrayal.

  “And I remember thinking…” Arnold went on quietly, “this girl is not good for Nathan. She’s a disruptive influence. She’s trying to drive a wedge between him and his family. This relationship must be stopped.”

  Carole had heard that cold intensity in a voice only the previous day. And when she looked at Arnold, she could see burning in his eyes the same demented logic that had driven Mopsa.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Though in his eighties, Jiri Bartos was still an impressive man. Well over six foot and hardly stooping at all, he towered over Jude as he rose to shake her hand. There was still a full head of hair, white and cut to about an inch’s length all over. His face was the shape of a shield, concave beneath high cheekbones, and his eyes were still piercingly blue. In the Grenstons’ sitting room he seemed too large an exhibit, amidst the array of awards and the tables littered with tiny objets d’art.

  While Wally made the introductions, Mim fluttered around over her tea tray, on which lay an unbelievable array of Victoria sponge, fairy cakes, tiny eclairs, coconut kisses and other fancies that Jude remembered from her childhood. There were even some slices of chequered Battenberg, which her father had always called ‘stained-glass window cake’.

  But Jiri Bartos did not appear interested in the spread of goodies. As soon as he sat down, he took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter out of his pocket.

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” said Mim, “but we don’t smoke in the house.”

  “I do,” he replied, lighting up. His voice was deep, like the creaking of old timber, and heavily accented.

  “It isn’t nice when we are eating food,” Mim protested.

  “I will not eat food.”

  “But I’ve prepared all this—”

  “Walter…” He spoke it in the German way. “We will have drink. Where is drink? Where is slivovitz? Where do you hide Becherovka?”

  Mim tried again. “Um, Wally doesn’t drink in the afternoon.”

  “Yes, he does. When with me he drink and smoke in afternoon.”

  Mim turned to her husband, who studiously looked out of the window towards the sea. Then she turned back to Jiri Bartos. “Listen, Joe, this is our house and—”

  “Go. Leave us to talk. This is not wife’s subject we talk of.”

  She tried one more appeal to Wally, whose eyes still managed to evade hers, and then, with as much dignity as she could muster, left the room. As soon as her back was to him, her husband watched her go with a kind of wistfulness. Maybe he should have tried the Jiri Bartos approach a lot earlier in his marriage.

  To Jude the exchange between Jiri and Mim had sounded unusual. Although his words were rude, he had not come across as ill-mannered. It had been a clash of wills rather than of words, and there had been no doubt whose will was the stronger.

  Silently, Wally Grenston rose from his chair and went to a glass corner cupboard, from which he extracted a tall green bottle. He looked at Jude. “You join us?”

  “Please. I love Becherovka.”

  Wally picked up three small glasses with a whirly design of red and gold on them. He put them on the table, unscrewed the Becherovka and after pouring about an inch into the bottom of each glass, handed them round.

  He and his old friend looked into each other’s eyes as they raised their glasses and in unison said, “Na Zdravi!”

  Jiri made no attempt to include Jude in the toast, but again for some strange reason this did not feel offensive. She took a sip of her drink, anyway, remembering and relishing the stickiness on her lips and the herbal, almost medicinal, glow that filled her mouth.

  “I am very sorry about what happened to your daughter,” she said.

  “Thank you.” Jiri Bartos left it at that. Jude did not imagine there were many circumstances in which he would let his emotions show. “You find boy who police think killed her?”

  “Yes. Yes, a friend and I went down to Cornwall and…we found him.”

  Jude didn’t particularly want to go into the details, but the old man insisted. Though hardened against showing any emotion about his daughter’s death, he wanted to find out everything that might have some connection to it.

  So Jude told him how Carole and she had tracked down the boy to Treboddick. She did not spell out the fact that he had not been hiding there voluntarily. At the end of her narrative, there was a silence. Then Jiri Bartos asked, “You think he kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “For a start, I don’t think it’s in his nature to kill anyone.”

  The old man let out a guttural hawk of dissent. “It’s in all men’s nature to kill when they have to. We know that—yes, Walter?”

  Wally nodded uncomfortably. Jude wondered what secrets the two men shared, and reckoned it was pretty unlikely that they’d ever share them with her.

  “So, if not boy, who you think kill Krystina?”

  Jude was forced to admit she didn’t have an answer. “But there are quite a few suspects.”

  Jiri Bartos shrugged at the inadequacy of her reply. “Boy was there. Boy have motive.”

  “What motive?”

  “He want make love Krystina. She good girl, no want to. He lose control. He kill her.”

  Jude would have liked to reveal the true nature of Nathan and Kyra’s sexual encounter, if only to exonerate the boy, but she realized she would be betraying a confidence. So instead she said, “You didn’t approve of Kyra—Krystina seeing Nathan, did you?”

  “Girl too young. One day she meet right boy. Now she too busy with job, look after house. Both too young.”

  She decided to take a risk. “You had another family once, didn’t you? Another wife and children, in Czechoslovakia?”

  Wally didn’t like the direction of the conversation. “Jude, I don’t think—”

  “No. She ask me. I answer. Yes, I have other family. Not in Czechoslovakia. Well, first in Czechoslovakia. Then the name changed. Then it called ‘Protectorate of Bohemia ⁄ Moravia’.”

  “That was when the Nazis took over?”

  “Of course.”

  “What happened to your other family?”

  The old man shook his head. “They do not exist.” That was all she was going to get out of him on the subject. “I come to England.”

  “Do you think it was because of what happened to your other family that you were so protective of Krystina?”

  The blue eyes looked at her bleakly. That question wasn’t going to get any kind of answer. Someone like Jiri Bartos did not have time for psychology; his only imperative was survival. Jude tried another tack. “Do you know Connie Rutherford…the one who runs the salon?”

  “I meet. Pick up Krystina from work one day. Also she live near.”

  “Near your house?”

  “Yes. Two gardens meet at back, only fence between.”

  Distantly this rang a bell with something she had heard from Carole. “And did Krystina like Connie?”

  “I think. Krystina happy in job.”

  “But she wasn’t happy in her previous job?”

  Puzzlement etched new lines in his craggy brow. “Not happy? This I not know.”

  “She worked at Martin &Martina in Worthing. But not for long. Then she went to Connie’s Clip Joint. Why?”

  “Better job, she tell me.”

  “No other reason?”

  He shook his massive head.

  “Did she say whether she got on with her boss at the Worthing salon? His name was Martin.”

  “I know who you mean, yes. I’ve seen him around. Krystina say she like him very much.”

  It made sense. If her father was so protective, Kyra wouldn’t have told him about Martin Rutherford coming on to her. It could have made for rather an ugly confrontation.

  Jude sighed and went back to the most basic of questions. “Can you think of any reason why someo
ne would want to kill your daughter?”

  “If not boy, no.”

  “I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t Nathan.”

  He shrugged. Tell me why, he seemed to be saying, you still haven’t convinced me.

  “Look, you disapproved of their relationship, Nathan and K—Krystina.”

  “Yes, I disapprove. That not mean I kill my own daughter.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that. But can you think of anyone else who might have disapproved of their relationship?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know boy at all. Maybe he have other girlfriend not happy.”

  “From what I can find out, Krystina was his first girlfriend.”

  “Then I not know. Unless his parents disapprove of my daughter.”

  “Did you ever meet his parents?”

  “Of course, no. I only meet boy once. But his parents…maybe rich. Maybe think they important family. Maybe not think daughter of Czech electrician good enough for boy.” He looked at her, challenging, almost amused through his pain. “Maybe they kill her…?”

  It’s a possibility, thought Jude, that I certainly haven’t ruled out.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Rowiey Locke had been just as shocked as Carole by the sudden change in his brother’s manner. “Arnold, what are you saying?”

  “I am saying that that girl Kyra was not worthy of Nathan. We can’t allow anyone into the Locke family who thinks that the Wheal Quest is funny. That girl would only have been a disruptive influence.”

  Rowley now looked positively worried. “I agree, it’s a family thing, and it should be kept within the family.” And then he said something so out of keeping with his usual attitude that it showed the extent of his anxiety. “But we shouldn’t take it too seriously. The Wheal Quest is only a game.”

  “No, it’s more than that! It’s a philosophy, it’s a life system!” The sudden vehemence with which Arnold spoke drew disturbed glances from people at adjacent tables. The serenity of Fethering Beach on a September afternoon was rarely broken by shouting.

  But if the geriatric onlookers had been shocked by Arnold’s outburst, they were about to get more free entertainment. Before he could say more, the group at Carole’s table was joined by a fast-striding Bridget Locke, with an embarrassed Eithne in her wake.