The Fethering Mysteries 08; Death under the Dryer tfm-8

by Simon Brett

  “I hope you don’t mind if I close the door,” said Theo. “I’m not sure what it is you suspect me of, but I don’t in fact have any intention of either raping or murdering you.”

  His words so closely matched the anxieties running through her head that Carole found herself blushing. Theo indicated an armchair for her and sat down opposite, his bright brown eyes fixed on her pale blue ones. She looked away. She got the unpleasant sensation that he was enjoying her discomfiture.

  “So…what’s this all about? You following me two days running? With your chubby friend yesterday…when I managed to give you the slip…and today on your own? As they say in the worst kind of thrillers – what’s your game?”

  Carole decided to brazen it out. “I’ve been following you because I think you have a guilty secret.”

  His hands flew up to his mouth in a theatrical gesture of shock. For the first time that afternoon, she saw some of the high campness he had demonstrated in Connie’s Clip Joint. “I heard you used to be a civil servant. Don’t tell me you’re from the Inland Revenue.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He did an equally elaborate impression of relief. “Thank God for that. If you had been, then I might have had to admit to the odd guilty secret, but then I regard it as a point of honour to deceive the taxman in any way possible. If it’s not tax, though…” he spread his hands wide in a display of innocence, “…my conscience is clear.”

  “It’s nothing to do with tax.” Having started on a course of confrontation, she had to continue. “It’s to do with the murder of Kyra Bartos.”

  “Ah.” The small brown eyes narrowed. “I might have guessed. In a hotbed of gossip like Fethering, I’m sure there are quite a lot of busybodies who have their crackpot theories about that. Yes, I suppose every second pensioner over there sees herself as the reincarnation of Miss Marple.”

  Carole’s first instinct was to be affronted, until she realized that ‘pensioner’ was in fact an entirely accurate definition of her status. She tried being a little less combative. “All right. Everyone is gossiping about the case, I agree. And everyone is making wild conjectures about all the people involved with Connie’s Clip Joint…”

  “Thank you for the ‘wild conjectures’. The use of the expression displays remarkable self-knowledge.”

  “So,” she persevered, “it therefore does become of interest when one of those people turns out to have a guilty secret.”

  Theo looked puzzled. “But I thought we’d established that, apart from a little finessing on my tax returns…” Light dawned. “Ah. You are referring to my habit of changing cars at Yeomansdyke…”

  “Not just cars. Changing personalities too, I’d say.”

  She didn’t know how he was going to react to this, and was surprised to see him laugh. “Well, I can assure you it’s quite legitimate. My membership at Yeomansdyke is fully up to date. And I have special permission to park a car there overnight. I drive to the hotel in the morning, do a work-out in the gym, and then drive on to be a stylist at Connie’s Clip Joint. Anything wrong with that?”

  “You change clothes.”

  “And when you were employed as a civil servant, Carole, didn’t you quite frequently change out of your work clothes at the end of the day?”

  “Maybe. But I didn’t change cars. Changing clothes and cars suggests very definitely to me that you have something to hide.”

  “Perhaps.” But the accusation still seemed to amuse rather than annoy him. “Before we go into that…in your Miss Marple role…” Carole found herself blushing again. “In that role, where do you see me fitting into…‘The Case of Kyra Bartos’?”

  She didn’t enjoy being sent up and came back with some vigour, “I see you as a murder suspect.”

  “Do you?” This amused him even more.

  “Yes, I do. And quite a strong suspect too.”

  “I see. And would you be generous enough to tell me why?”

  “Very well. First, you work at Connie’s Clip Joint, which was the scene of the crime…”

  He slapped the back of his hand on his forehead in a ‘Foiled again!’ gesture. “How on earth did you work that out?”

  Carole wasn’t to be deterred. “What’s more you presumably have keys to the place, so you could get in and out at any time of the day and night…”

  “That too I can’t deny. God, where did you learn to be so devilishly clever?”

  “What is more,” Carole pressed on, “you had a very strong feeling of dislike for Kyra Bartos.”

  “Did I? And where did that come from?”

  “It arose, because she was the one who had got Nathan Locke to fall in love with her, and you loved him.”

  Her previous statements had tickled his sense of humour, but this one reduced him to uncontrollable hysterics. Carole sat rigidly still and deeply embarrassed until the paroxysms died down.

  “Oh, that is wonderful!” said Theo, wiping the tears from his eyes. “That is so brilliant! Thank you, Carole. We all need a good laugh, and that is the funniest thing anyone has said to me for years and years. “I killed Kyra because she had stolen the affections of the man I love…” Too wonderful.” Relishing the idea brought on another spasm of laughter.

  When the last ripples had died down, Carole said, “I don’t know that it’s such a ridiculous idea. I’ve seen photographs of Nathan – he’s a very attractive young man. Just the sort who would appeal to a…” she couldn’t bring herself to say ‘gay man’ “…to a homosexual.”

  “A homosexual like me, you mean? How many gays – how many homosexuals do you actually know, Carole?”

  “Erm…” Her knowledge wasn’t that extensive. There were one or two men in Fethering who everyone said were, but she didn’t actually know any of them to speak to. “There were quite a few in the Home Office,” she concluded lamely.

  “I’m sure there were. And were they homosexuals just like me?”

  “Well…”

  Her answer was interrupted by the sound of a key in the front door. As soon as it opened, a tornado of two small children and a large Old English Sheepdog thundered into the sitting room and wrapped itself around Theo. Behind them, closing the door, stood a tall slender woman with long black hair. She moved forward and, picking her way between children and dog, planted a large kiss on Theo’s lips.

  “You haven’t lost your sense of timing, Zara.” He grinned across at his guest. “Carole – my wife Zara. Our children Joey and Mabel. And our dog, Boofle.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m actually tied up for a little while, love.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Zara. “The horde needs feeding. Come on, kids. Come on, Boofle. Teatime.” And she led them out into the hall, discreetly closing the door behind her.

  Carole was lost for words. All she could come up with was, “That’s an Old English Sheepdog. You said you had a little Westie called Priscilla.”

  “Ah – discovered! Mea culpa! Yes, I knew I could not keep my guilty secret from you forever. I do not have a little Westie called Priscilla.”

  “Look, what is all this, Theo? Am I to gather that you’re not…homosexual?”

  “Once again nothing escapes the eagle eye of Miss Marple. It’s uncanny. How does she do it?”

  “But you…I mean, the way you behave at Connie’s Clip Joint…Even when I was there, when you were talking to Sheena, you said things that definitely implied you were…homosexual.”

  “I did. I admit it. So far as Connie’s Clip Joint is concerned, I’m as gay as a pair of Elton John’s glasses.”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  He dropped into his arch hairdresser’s drawl. “Give the customers what they want, darling. Someone like Sheena positively loves having her hair cut by a gay man. She’d be disappointed if she didn’t have a gay man doing it. So, if that’s what she wants…” He gave a helpless, camp shrug.

  “There must be more to it than that.”

  “Ooh, there is, yes.
It’s also self-protection. Let’s take Sheena as an example yet again. Imagine what’d happen with someone like her if she thought I was available. She’d be flirting, she’d be all over me. I tell you, behaving the way I do saves me a lot of aggravation. I’m much safer appealing to the fag hag in a harpie like Sheena than I would be if she thought I was hetero.”

  Having met the woman in question, and having heard Jude’s account of a lunch with her, Carole could see Theo’s point.

  “So did you invent the business for her about fancying Nathan and being jealous of Kyra?”

  “I remember hinting at it to Sheena, just as a joke.

  “But maybe it got embroidered in her rather over-active imagination.”

  “All right, that’s possible. But it still doesn’t explain everything. The changing clothes, the changing cars.”

  “In Fethering everyone thinks I’m gay. In Brighton everyone thinks I’m heterosexual. Yeomansdyke is where I change identities, that’s all.”

  “That’s not enough. There’s more to it.”

  “Oh? Tell me what there is more to it, Miss Marple.”

  “Well, it’s an incomplete disguise, for a start. Fethering and Brighton aren’t that far apart. Maybe you don’t see many of your Brighton friends in Fethering, but it must sometimes happen that you meet one of your clients here.”

  “Less often than you’d think. And on the few occasions when it does, they see me out of context, with Zara, with the children and they do a sort of take. I can see their minds working. And usually I can see them concluding: I’ve just seen someone who looks extraordinarily like my hairdresser. I promise you, it’s never been a problem.”

  “Is that all the explanation I’m getting?”

  Still with a glint of mischief in the dark brown eyes, he spread his hands generously wide. “Why? Isn’t that enough?”

  “No, Theo. It isn’t.”

  “Ah, I see.” He gestured round the lovely sitting room. “You’re telling me that all this is a bluff. A cleverly constructed front. The Theo of Connie’s Clip Joint is the real me. I am a closet gay, who fancied Nathan Locke so much that I killed his girlfriend in a fit of jealous homosexual pique.”

  Again Carole felt herself blushing under his sardonic gaze.

  Theo chuckled. “I’ll tell you the truth, if you like.”

  “Would you?” she asked pathetically. “I mean, for a start, is Theo your real name?”

  “Theo is my real name. I started off as an actor. And at one point I got involved in a production with one of those self-obsessed, power-crazed directors who builds up a show from months of improvisation.”

  “Oh?” Carole didn’t know a lot about the theatre. She hadn’t heard of such a technique.

  “Well, I was supposed to be playing a hairdresser in this show and so the director, true to his principles, sent me off to research my part by working in a real hairdresser’s. I did three months. It could have been worse. I was lucky – one of the other actors had been cast as a cess-pool emptier’s mate. Anyway, the usual thing – three months in the salon, three months of self-indulgent improvisation in the rehearsal room, and you end up with a show that would have been a lot better if the director had got a writer in in the first place.

  “But after the run finished – and maybe because of what the show had been like – I go through a very bad patch work-wise. You couldn’t give me away with soap. And after a long time sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, I think: well, I’m going to have to get an income from somewhere…and I quite enjoyed that three months I spent in the hairdressing salon…so…”

  “You became a hairdresser?”

  “Exactly. I joined another salon, trained properly, and suddenly I was a stylist. Money’s not great, but compared to being an out-of-work actor, anything’s better.”

  “And did you develop the, er…homosexual mask from the start?”

  “Yes. As a joke at first. But then I saw the advantages. As I said, the customers like it, and it keeps them from prying into my private life. And there’s a third big benefit – they confide in me. Things they’d certainly never tell their husbands or lovers, and a lot that they wouldn’t even tell their girlfriends. You wouldn’t believe the things a gay hairdresser hears about female behaviour.”

  “Hmm.” Carole found she was beginning to relax, recognizing that Theo’s sending her up was teasing rather than malicious. She gestured round the room. “That still doesn’t explain all this. I’m sure there are hairdressers who make a huge amount of money, but I’d have thought they’re the ones with chains of salons and their own ranges of hair-care products. I can’t think you make that much renting a chair at Connie’s Clip Joint in Fethering.”

  Theo grinned. “Zara might have a lot of money.”

  “Yes, I suppose she might.”

  “But in fact she hasn’t. Or she hadn’t when I married her.” He stood up. “Do you want to know the last part of my secret, Carole?”

  “Please.”

  “I’ll tell you, but I really do want you to keep this to yourself. You’re not to pass it on to anyone else.”

  Not even Jude, was her first thought. Then she decided she’d wait to see what the last part of the secret was. If it involved illegality, then she might have to break the promise of confidentiality she gave to Theo.

  He led her to a door on the left-hand side of the sitting room. With his family in the house, Carole now had no anxiety in following Theo anywhere. He ushered her into a beautifully designed office. On a desk in a window overlooking the sea stood a lone state-of-the-art laptop. Other purpose-built surfaces held the armoury of more electronic equipment without which no business can now flourish. On specially designed shelves on the back wall stood rows of new-looking books – hardbacks, paperbacks, many in foreign editions.

  “Come on, has your brilliant sleuthing mind worked it out yet?”

  The reluctant Miss Marple was forced to admit that it hadn’t.

  Theo took a hardback book from the shelf and held it across to her. On the jacket a determined-looking girl in a red dress stood on an outcrop of rock looking out at a departing steamship. The title was The Sorrowful Sea.

  “Are you familiar with the oeuvre of Tamsin Elderfield?”

  “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “Well, fortunately…” Theo gestured to the rows of shelves, “…lots of other people are.”

  “You mean…you…?”

  “Yes.” He grinned. “A third identity to confuse you, Carole. Theo the hairdresser in Fethering, Theo the family man in Brighton, and now – Tamsin Elderfield in virtually every bookshop in the world.”

  “But…But…it’s romantic fiction, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is.”

  “And you’re a man.”

  “Spot on. Can’t pull the wool over your eyes, Miss Marple.”

  “But, if you’re such a successful writer, why on earth do you still bother with a day job as a hairdresser?”

  “Because, Carole, that is why I am a successful writer. A lot of authors have difficulty answering the inevitable question: where do you get your ideas from? I don’t,” he said smugly.

  “You get them from Connie’s Clip Joint.”

  “Of course I do. I actually quite enjoy hairdressing, but that’s not why I keep on doing it. No, Connie’s Clip Joint is the rich seam of experience which furnishes me with my plots. I don’t want to boast, but I think there are few men who have the depth of understanding of women’s romantic aspirations and frustrations that I do…or indeed that any other gay hairdresser does.

  “So, Carole, now you know everything – as do the police, incidentally. I’ve been quite open with them about my different identities and apparently I’m not breaking any laws. So I’m sorry – none of what I’ve done is even vaguely immoral. Well, except possibly for my lying to you about owning a little Westie called Priscilla.”

  There was a long silence, as Carole tried to balance her feelings of surprise and
embarrassment. Finally, rather feebly, she asked, “So there’s nothing you can tell me that’ll help me find out who killed Kyra Bartos?”

  “Sorry.” He too was silent for a moment, before saying, “Well, there is just one thing…I don’t know whether Nathan Locke killed the girl or not, but I would think finding the boy alive and talking to him might be the best way of getting to the truth.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. But I did overhear him once saying something to Kyra when he came to pick her up…something that might be relevant…”

  “What was it?”

  “I also told the police this, so it’s no great secret. Whether they acted on what I said, I’ve no idea. It’s just…I was in the back room at the salon one evening tidying up, and Nathan came in to fetch Kyra, and she was getting her stuff together and he was talking, rather romantically, of how he’d like to take her away some time, spend a few days with just the two of them. And he said he knew a lovely place, a secret place he’d been longing to show her ever since they met.”

  “Where was it?” breathed Carole.

  “In Cornwall.”

  ♦

  She still felt sheepish when she got back to the Renault. Theo had compounded the impression that he was patronizing her by giving her a copy of one of Tamsin Elderfield’s paperbacks: The Roundabout of Love. With some force Carole threw it onto the back seat, before starting on the rush-hour crawl back to Fethering.

  ∨ Death under the Dryer ∧

  Twenty-Three

  Jude was round at the front door as soon as she saw the Renault slide neatly into the High Tor garage. Unaware of how Carole had spent the afternoon, she had her own news to impart.

  So while her neighbour dropped her Times on the table and tried to regain favour with an aggrieved Gulliver by feeding him, Jude opened a bottle of wine and supplied edited highlights of her visit to the house in Summersdale. “But,” she concluded, “I still don’t know why I was summoned there. Bridget Locke had nothing wrong with her, but she was very determined that I should go over. I wonder what she wanted…?”

  “I should think it was more a matter of what her husband wanted. Even though Bridget seems to be a strong woman, I get the impression Rowley dictates what happens in that household – and in the whole family, come to that. He’s used to getting his own way and he’ll use any means – even throwing tantrums – to ensure that that state of affairs continues.”