The Liar in the Library

by Simon Brett

  Fortunately, before she had time to defend her profession against this predictable flood of scepticism, their conversation was interrupted by the opening of the door to the staff room. An unwilling Steve Chasen was the first to emerge, being pushed out by Di Thompson.

  ‘It wasn’t my bloody fault!’ he was protesting. ‘I didn’t spill it!’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ countered the librarian. ‘And you shouldn’t have been in there, anyway. The staff—’

  ‘You pushed the bottle over! I saw you!’ said Steve Chasen.

  ‘Do you need a hand?’ interposed the urbane voice of Oliver Parsons.

  Di Thompson looked gratefully at her saviour, as Oliver took over her pushing duties. ‘Come on, old chap. You’ve just had a little bit too much to drink and I think it’d be better if—’

  ‘I’m going!’ said Steve Chasen, shaking himself free of his latest ejector and turning to face Burton St Clair. ‘I don’t want to stay in the same room as a bloody liar like you!’ He shook a finger at the more successful author. ‘But don’t worry, you’ll get your comeuppance!’

  Then, with a failed attempt at dignity, Steve Chasen staggered out of the library.

  Burton chose to ignore the interruption and, with a smiling face, turned towards the staff-room door, from which Vix Winter was issuing with his long-awaited glass of wine. She too was serenely pretending the recent scene hadn’t happened, but, as the girl passed, Jude heard her whisper to Di Thompson, ‘I’ll clear it up.’

  ‘Thanks,’ her superior hissed back. ‘Thank God we haven’t got a carpet in there.’

  And Vix Winter scuttled through into the staff room.

  ‘Anyway, cheers!’ Burton St Clair raised his glass to Di. ‘Many thanks for making me so welcome in Fethering Library.’

  He sounded sincere, but Jude knew him well enough to know just how patronizing he was being. ‘Never forget the little people’ – that’s what his mind was saying.

  ‘I think maybe we should call it a day,’ said Di Thompson. It was nearly half an hour later and she looked exhausted. The evening had gone on longer than expected and she had the demeanour of someone who desperately wanted to get home. Through the library windows, a sheet of sudden rain was illuminated by the moonlight.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jude. By then most of the audience had melted away. The only others still there were Burton, Di and Vix. The junior librarian was looking even more keen to get away than her boss, but apparently Di was going to give her a lift home, so she had no alternative but to wait.

  ‘How long will it take you to drive back to London?’ asked Di pointedly.

  ‘Oh, hour and a half I should think, this time of night. Fortunately, Barnes is on the right side of the river. And the Beamer can really open up on the A3.’

  Jude didn’t think it was worth pointing out that Burton had had far too much wine to drive safely, since he was clearly going to do it anyway. He had form on the drinking. She remembered from way back that he always had a hipflask of whisky about his person or in the glove compartment of his car. Defiantly, at the end of a boozy evening, he would take a swig from it before driving home. She wondered whether he still did that, or had life with the saintly Persephone cured him of such antisocial habits?

  She also found it interesting that the financial rewards of bestsellerdom had allowed him to graduate from Morden to the much more fashionable Barnes (and to graduate from Vauxhalls to BMWs). ‘Well, it’s very good to see you again,’ she said. ‘And I look forward to meeting Persephone at some point.’

  He didn’t respond to that suggestion. Instead, he asked, ‘How’re you getting back home?’

  ‘Walk. It’s only half a mile.’

  He looked through the window. ‘In this lot?’

  ‘Won’t take long.’

  ‘Have you got an umbrella? Or a waterproof?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Apart from the rain, it’s bloody cold out there. I’ll give you a lift in the Beamer.’ He seemed very keen to mention his car. Maybe it was a new toy.

  ‘Well, that sounds fine,’ said Di Thompson, whose body language was urging them towards the door. ‘Now if we could …’

  Yes, the car was a new toy. Even in the face of horizontal icy rain, Burton St Clair could not help taking an appreciative look at its sleek lines before zapping the unlock button.

  Jude, protected only by her patchwork jacket, needed no invitation to leap in through the passenger door. The seat where she found herself was reassuringly plush in its leather upholstery, and the interior was redolent of that ‘new car’ smell.

  ‘So you live right here in Fethering?’ asked Burton as he closed his door. The howling of the wind and rain dropped in volume. When he turned the ignition key, cool jazz filled the space around them.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It’s not far. I’ll give you directions.’

  ‘With you, Jude, I don’t need any directions.’

  His left arm was suddenly around her shoulders. His right had found its way under the jacket to her breasts.

  ‘God, Jude, how I’ve longed to do this,’ he murmured as he pressed his face forward towards hers. ‘It was agony for me every time I was with you and Megan, because you were the one I really fancied and—’

  Fortunately, Jude had not had time to do up her seatbelt, which meant that her left hand was free to administer a stinging slap to Burton’s cheek.

  ‘What was that for?’ he asked, aggrieved. ‘Don’t play hard to get. You know you’ve always fancied me.’

  ‘Really? What the hell are you playing at, Al? You’ve just told your entire audience how perfect your life is with the sainted Persephone and now—’

  ‘Ah, Persephone understands.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Yes, she knows I have a more powerful sex drive than she does; she understands that I’m attractive to other women. She wouldn’t make any fuss about—’

  ‘She might not make any fuss, but I would! And if you think, just because you’ve got a book in the bestseller list, that gives you some kind of droit de seigneur over any woman who you—’

  ‘Come on, Jude, be grown-up! You know you’ve always fancied me.’

  ‘I know many things,’ she responded, with uncharacteristic hauteur. ‘That I fancy you is not among them!’

  She found the door handle and let herself out into the maelstrom of wind and rain. ‘Goodbye, Al,’ she said. ‘You get back home to Persephone.’

  She slammed the door of his ‘Beamer’ and set off resolutely towards the seafront. Long before she reached it, the rain had seeped through her patchwork jacket and was trickling down her back and between her breasts. The cold penetrated to the very core of her being.

  Before going left along the promenade, Jude turned back to look at Fethering Library. The BMW was still where it was when she had left it, with no exterior or interior lights on. As she turned towards the sea, there was no sign of activity from the glass-shattered shelter.

  By the time she got back to Woodside Cottage, she was in desperate need of a hot shower to bring some warmth back into her frozen body.

  She also needed the shower because she felt soiled by her encounter with Burton St Clair’s wandering hands.

  FIVE

  After the shower, Jude still felt restless and wakeful. Uncharacteristically, she poured herself a large Scotch and took it to bed with her laptop. To her surprise, she found she still had Megan Sinclair’s email address. There’d been no contact between them for more than fifteen years. Quite possibly Megan’s email had changed in that time, but, though she wasn’t about to write, ‘Your ex-husband came on to me this evening’, Jude did feel the need to be in touch with her old friend.

  They had been very close at one time, even talked of sharing a flat together, though that never happened. But as girls to giggle with and shoulders to cry on, they had supported each other through a variety of dating disasters and false dawns of love. Jude felt confident that, if they did meet, the old rappor
t would be quickly re-established.

  The email message she composed ran: ‘Seeing Al strutting his stuff in our local library this evening made me think about you. And when I say “local”, perhaps I should point out that I’m now living on the South Coast not far from Worthing in a village called Fethering. No idea where you are – still Morden? – or indeed what’s happening in your life. Be nice to meet and catch up some time. Oh, and by the way, when Al self-published those early books, did he use the pseudonym “Seth Marston”? Love, Jude.’

  She swallowed down the remains of the Scotch, switched off the light and, after about an hour, sank into a troubled sleep.

  The next morning, when Carole came round to Woodside Cottage for coffee, Jude didn’t mention the unpleasant ending to her evening at the library. She had found in the years of their acquaintance that her neighbour was inhibited in talking about sex. And for Jude to have raised the subject, even after such an unwelcome and unpleasant encounter as the night before’s, would have made Carole think she was boasting about her comparative attractiveness. Jude, in Carole’s view, was the kind of woman men came on to. She herself wasn’t.

  So Jude, sitting in the throw-covered clutter of her sitting room, let Carole initiate the conversation, which that morning – as on many other mornings – centred on the doings of her granddaughters. ‘Gaby and Stephen are getting really worried about schools for Lily.’

  ‘Surely they don’t have to think about that for a couple of years.’

  ‘Oh, but they do. Living where they are – in Fulham – you have to think a long way ahead. They’ve got to get Lily into the right nursery to ensure that she goes to the right junior school, because a lot of those are feeders if they want to get into somewhere really good for the next stage – and obviously that’s what’s really important.’

  ‘Are we talking state education here?’ asked Jude, only for the benefit of the reaction she knew she’d get.

  Which duly arrived. ‘Good heavens, no!’ screeched Carole. ‘State education is a very dangerous course to embark on if you live in London. State secondary schools are full of drugs and violence and teenage pregnancies. The thought of either of my two granddaughters going to a place like—’

  The diatribe might have continued for some time, had it not been interrupted by the ringing of Jude’s doorbell.

  When she opened her front door and felt the clutch of cold air, she found herself confronted by two people. The woman was dressed in a smart trouser suit, the man more casual in a red zip-up fleece. The woman was carrying a large-screened iPhone. Behind them in the street was parked a police Panda car.

  ‘Good morning,’ said the woman. ‘Are you Jude Nicholls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Rollins, and this is Detective Sergeant Knight. We would like to talk to you about the death of Burton St Clair.’

  SIX

  Though she was being interviewed in her own home (Carole had conveniently remembered something she had to do back at High Tor), Jude was left in no doubt that her police interrogation was a serious matter.

  Once they were seated on the sagging, throw-covered sofa and armchairs of her sitting room, the first thing Detective Inspector Rollins said was, ‘You reacted with surprise, Mrs Nicholls, when—’

  ‘Call me “Jude”. Everyone calls me “Jude”.’

  A slight wrinkle of the woman’s nose showed that she didn’t warm to such intimacy, but all she said was, ‘Very well, Jude. You reacted with surprise when I mentioned Burton St Clair’s death. Does that mean you didn’t know he was dead?’

  ‘Of course that’s what it means!’ The delayed shock of the news suddenly caught up with her. ‘But I can’t believe that Al … Burton’s dead. I was with him only yesterday evening.’

  ‘We know you were,’ said Rollins. ‘And we think it’s possible that you were the last person to see him alive.’

  ‘Which is why we’re talking to you,’ added Detective Sergeant Knight, perhaps unnecessarily. Through the confusion of her thoughts, Jude got the impression that the junior officer needed to assert himself, to demonstrate that he wasn’t just a weak male sidekick to a female boss.

  ‘Did Burton die at home?’ asked Jude. ‘He was about to drive there when I left him.’

  ‘No,’ the Detective Inspector replied. ‘His body was found in his car this morning in the Fethering Library car park.’

  Jude was bewildered. ‘But that’s where I last saw him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rollins confirmed.

  ‘Which is also why we’re talking to you.’ This second intervention by Knight prompted the tiniest wrinkling of his superior’s brow. He had overstepped some mark in their professional relationship. The Detective Inspector’s iPhone lay on her lap. Jude assumed it might contain notes about the beginning of their investigation, but Rollins gave no sign that she would be writing anything down during their interview.

  ‘Well, how did he die?’ asked Jude. ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ replied the Detective Inspector, all police formality. ‘We will have more information when a post-mortem has been conducted.’

  ‘And forensic investigations,’ Knight contributed.

  This again prompted a moue of annoyance from Rollins. Jude thought she knew why, as she asked the obvious question. ‘Forensic? Does that mean there’s a suspicion of foul play?’

  ‘We’re at a very early stage of our enquiries. At this point any suggestions as to the cause of Mr St Clair’s death would be nothing more than speculation.’

  Jude felt appropriately deterred from asking further questions. The ball was still in the Detective Inspector’s court. ‘But, obviously, Jude, we are trying to get as exact a picture as we can of his movements during the last twenty-four hours. We’ve spoken to his wife …’

  ‘And to his ex-wife?’

  ‘Yes, we know he was married twice.’ Rollins’s tone was testy, as though Jude had been picking her up on some lapse in her investigative method. ‘We’ve left a message with Megan Sinclair, as she still calls herself, but she hasn’t got back to us yet.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘One of her neighbours,’ Knight contributed, ‘believes she’s visiting an actress friend in Scarborough.’

  Again, Detective Inspector Rollins’s expression suggested that her junior’s intervention was unwelcome. She turned back to her interviewee. ‘Persephone St Clair, the deceased’s widow, said you used to spend a lot of time with him and his former wife …?’

  ‘Yes, there was a stage when we used to see quite a lot of each other. We’re talking some years ago.’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘Fifteen … twenty …’

  Detective Sergeant Knight thought he had been silent for too long. ‘And, back then, were you close to Mr St Clair?’

  Again, Rollins looked peeved by the intervention. Maybe that was the very question she had been about to ask.

  ‘I knew Megan before I knew him. She was my friend. When she got married, it was natural that I met up with them as a couple.’

  ‘But as you got to know him,’ Knight persisted, ‘did you become closer to Mr St Clair?’

  ‘If you’re asking if we had an affair, the answer is very definitely no.’

  ‘That wasn’t what the Sergeant was asking,’ said Rollins in a manner that was definitely a put-down to him. ‘We are merely trying to get as much background to the case as we can.’

  ‘“Case”?’ echoed Jude. ‘Then you do think there was something suspicious about—’

  ‘I was guilty of using the wrong word,’ responded the Detective Inspector blandly. ‘I should not have said “case”, I should have said “incident”.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So. Background,’ Rollins went on. ‘Had you kept in touch with Burton St Clair since the days when you spent time with him and his wife … some fifteen or twenty years ago?’ The way she echoed the words seemed to carry the implication that Jude was not
necessarily a very reliable witness.

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean that I haven’t been regularly in touch with him. I heard a bit about what he was up to from mutual friends …’

  ‘Did you know that his first marriage had broken down?’ asked Detective Sergeant Knight.

  ‘I heard about that, yes. Then, obviously, I saw media coverage of the success of Stray Leaves in Autumn …’

  Rollins picked up the conversational baton. ‘And was that why you decided you would go and hear him speaking last night at Fethering Library? You saw in the local paper that he would be there and you thought you’d go and re-establish contact with an old friend?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly like that.’

  ‘Oh?’ The Detective Inspector’s manner made it very difficult for Jude not to sound guilty. Though, of course, she told herself, there was nothing that she needed to sound guilty for.

  ‘Burton contacted me, said he’d be in Fethering, and suggested I might like to come along to the library.’

  ‘So you had kept in regular touch?’ said Detective Sergeant Knight accusingly.

  ‘No. He contacted me through Facebook. I don’t use it a lot, but I do have an account. For some of my clients it’s their preferred means of communication.’

  ‘Clients?’ Rollins reminded herself. ‘Oh yes, of course. You’re a healer, aren’t you?’

  Jude was well used to the layers of scepticism that could be lathered on to that particular word. ‘Yes, that’s what I do.’

  ‘So … until this approach through Facebook, you hadn’t had direct contact from either Burton or his first wife Megan for fifteen … twenty years …?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you hadn’t made contact with them?’

  ‘No.’ Jude suddenly remembered the previous evening. ‘Well, that is to say …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I did send an email to Megan yesterday.’

  ‘Oh?’ Detective Inspector Rollins’s tone made this sound like a major revelation. ‘Was that after you had left Fethering Library?’

  ‘Yes, when I got back here.’