by Simon Brett
‘The loss of your daughter?’
‘Exactly. And if that situation changes, well, yes, obviously there’d be some adjustments.’
‘You mean you might lose some people’s sympathy?’
‘No. Not exactly that. Look, Carole, the fact is that I’m increasingly interested in politics, hoping to spend more of my time, you know, doing some good, helping people out.’
‘Do you mean on the national stage?’
‘It’s not impossible. Some high-ups in the Conservative Party have been quite impressed by the difference I’ve been making down here in Brighton. It’s not impossible that I might be short-listed as a candidate at the next election.’ He couldn’t keep the note of pride out of his voice.
‘And you’re afraid,’ said Carole, ‘that your perfect image with the “high-ups in the Conservative Party” might be a little tarnished if they found out you had a living daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who perhaps has gone to the bad?’
‘No!’ Iain Holland blustered. ‘Of course that’s not what I mean.’
But Carole Seddon knew that it was.
‘Anyway, you’ve still said nothing that convinces me you have any proof Marina’s alive.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And unless you do have something new to tell me, I think we should draw this meeting to a close.’
She had been let off the hook once, but she couldn’t see history about to repeat itself. Iain Holland had risen from his chair and was moving towards the door. Carole thought back desperately to her conversation with Donna Grodsky and blurted out, ‘What intrigues me is Marina’s Russian connection.’
It had been a complete shot in the dark, but it found its target. Iain Holland froze, then slowly turned back to face her. The slick confidence of his expression had been replaced by something very close to fear. ‘What do you know about Marina’s Russian connection?’
Absolutely nothing was the answer inside Carole’s head, but what she said was, ‘I know that she suspected her origins to be Russian. I know that she was very much drawn towards the Russian community here in Brighton.’
Iain Holland processed this information for a moment. He was considerably shaken by what she had said. Then he asked, ‘What more do you know?’
The only tenuous piece of information she’d gleaned from all her investigations was one first name. Still, she had nothing to lose by mentioning it. ‘I know about Vladimir.’
His immediate reaction showed Carole that she had hit home, but he quickly covered it up and asked sceptically, ‘Vladimir who?’
It was the question she had been afraid he might ask. And of course the one to which she had no answer. Realizing that, though she’d got Iain Holland on the back foot, her only hope was to bluff her way out, Carole Seddon smiled smugly. ‘I think that’s enough for the time being.’
‘But you’ve told me nothing.’
‘I know about the Russian connection. And Vladimir.’ So confident was she now of the power reversal that had taken place that she rose to her feet. ‘Maybe I should be on my way.’
‘No, no!’ Iain Holland put a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘Just sit down again for a moment. Please.’
Carole did as he requested. He sat too and put his hands flat on the table as if to begin a process of negotiation. ‘Presumably,’ he said, ‘you want money to make you keep quiet about this?’
‘Actually, I-’
‘How much?’
TWENTY-THREE
Piers Targett came back to Woodside Cottage after his London meetings and wanted a full debrief on Jude’s experience of a real tennis lesson. It seemed really to matter to him that she should like the game and she found his enthusiasm infectious. If anyone had suggested a month before that she might seriously be about to take up a game she’d hardly heard of, she would have laughed in their faces. But it was strange how quickly things could change when love was involved.
Their relationship took another step forward that evening, in that Jude cooked a meal for Piers. Up until then all their eating had been done out — in fact, Piers always ate out. The idea of his pristine kitchen in Bayswater being sullied by anything other than wine bottles and a corkscrew was unthinkable. Jude wondered if he ever had cooked for himself, whether indeed he had any domestic skills. Maybe when he and Jonquil were cohabiting, they had had a normal home life, but it was a subject she did not yet want to discuss. There’d be time enough for that, particularly since this new domestic phase of their relationship somehow seemed to promise a longer future.
She cooked a Thai green chicken curry, one of her specialities. Jude’s range of cooking was wide and random. She was just as likely to do a fry-up as something more exotic. And whereas in the next-door kitchen at High Tor every ingredient would be weighed out exactly to the last scruple, Jude’s approach was instinctive. She didn’t have a recipe book in the house. On the other hand, she had for a while run a restaurant, so she did possess all of the necessary skills.
They drank a lot of wine with the dinner. Indeed, they always seemed to drink a lot of wine when they were together, Piers probably downing a couple of glasses to every one of hers. But she had never seen him drunk. He just seemed cheerfully to go on topping himself up. And he didn’t go in for any of that what he called ‘nonsense about not drinking and driving’. She’d often seen him take the wheel of the E-Type with a bottle of wine inside him, but she never felt in any danger.
That evening she lit a fire in the Woodside Cottage sitting room. The October night wasn’t really cold enough to justify it, but the warmth and the glow were comforting. After they had eaten (and Jude, with a laxness that would have appalled Carole, had not even thought about taking their dirty plates through to the kitchen), Piers had removed his jacket and they’d slipped naturally down from the sofa to the floor. Equally naturally, snuggling and sipping wine had led to lazy love-making.
Which, later, they continued upstairs. Then, in what was now becoming a jokey ritual for them, Jude asked Piers to explain how a chase was laid on a real tennis court. And she was soon blissfully asleep.
Jude didn’t know what time it was when she woke up. Having someone sharing her bed at Woodside Cottage felt strange. Not unpleasantly strange, just unfamiliar.
She lay there, still, drinking in the welcome unfamiliarity of Piers’ presence, his breathing, steady, deep, just on the edge of a snore. She thought back over the day, particularly the evening, and everything felt good.
But she was wakeful. She knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep for at least half an hour. Had she been on her own, she might have switched on the bedside light and read. Or done some of the personalized stretching exercises that she had developed from yoga. Even gone downstairs and made a cup of herbal tea. But she didn’t want to wake Piers.
Inevitably, as she lay there, she found herself thinking about Reggie Playfair’s funeral in the morning. And from there it didn’t take long for her thoughts to home back in on the circumstances of his death.
That, however, prompted an unwelcome memory, which for the past few days she had been, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, suppressing. The call she’d had from Jonquil Targett about Reggie Playfair’s mobile phone. Probably nothing, probably just an attempt by a severely unstable woman to plant suspicions about her estranged husband. Or was there more to it than that. .?
Jonquil said she’d seen the phone in Piers’ possession. And it had a distinctive cover, specially made in the colours of the Lockleigh House tennis club.
She said she’d seen it in the pocket of Piers’ jacket. And Piers’ jacket was at that moment lying downstairs in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage.
Jude hated the direction in which her thoughts were turning. It went against her every instinct to be suspicious of someone she loved. And particularly now, when she had just regained a feeling of reassurance after her doubts of the weekend. She tried to shift concentration on to some other subject, but still Jonquil Targett’s words sawed away at her mind.
She tried to reason against what the woman had said. Even if Piers had had Reggie’s mobile in his jacket pocket, he was likely to have moved it by now. Or he’d be wearing a different jacket. And even if she did find the mobile, its battery would have run down during the past week, so she wouldn’t be able to gather any information from it.
Jude now knew that she would have no peace until she had behaved like some archetype of the jealous lover, till she had gone downstairs and checked through Piers Targett’s jacket pockets. Hating herself for what she was doing, she edged out from under the duvet. When she was standing by the side of the bed, she froze for a moment, but there was no interruption to the easy regularity of her lover’s breathing.
She slipped on a towelling dressing gown and crept from the bedroom, knowing how to move the half-open door without making it squeak, knowing which creaking step to avoid on the staircase.
The last embers of the fire still cast a meagre glow around her sitting room. Jude moved straight to the sofa on the arm of which Piers’ jacket had been casually abandoned. Now she had made the decision of what she was about to do, there was no point in delaying the inevitable.
She felt in one pocket and her hand closed on the hard rectangle of a mobile. Extracting it, she was relieved to recognize the counters of Piers’ iPhone.
She replaced that and felt in the other jacket pocket. There too she felt a familiar shape and weight. She took it out. The dying glow of the fire gave enough light for her to see the coloured stripes of the cover.
While Piers Targett had sent her on an errand to his E-Type outside the tennis court, he’d taken Reggie Playfair’s mobile.
TWENTY-FOUR
Jude put the light on and inspected the phone. Switched it on, nothing happened. Of course it would have run out of power. She almost didn’t want to find out that the mobile was a Nokia, like her own. And that her charger would fit it. But it did.
Grimly she plugged the charger in. The screen took a moment to come to life. No password was required, she just had to press a function key to unlock the phone.
She went straight to Messaging, and opened the in-box. The last text Reggie Playfair had received was sent at 12.37 am on the day of his death.
It read: ‘Something important’s come up. Meet me on the court as soon as you can, like we used to.’
The sender had not identified him- or herself. Nor did the number the text had been sent from mean anything to Jude. But she made a note of it.
As she was scribbling the number down on the back of an Allinstore receipt, she looked up to see Piers standing the doorway from the hall. He had thrown on an orange silk dressing gown of hers. Far too small, it made him look faintly ridiculous.
‘Ah. So you found the phone,’ he said.
‘You hadn’t made much attempt to hide it.’
‘True.’ He sounded weary as he came across to sit at one end of the sofa. She sat at the other end. The void between them seemed incongruous after the intimacy they had shared there only a few hours earlier.
‘I suppose you want some explanations,’ said Piers Targett.
‘Wouldn’t hurt.’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I took it from Reggie’s pocket when I sent you out to get my mobile from the E-Type.’
‘I assumed that was what had happened.’
‘But of course you want to know why.’
‘Wouldn’t hurt either.’
‘I did it to protect Reggie.’
‘Bit late for that. He was already dead.’
‘True. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I did it to protect Oenone.’
‘Oh?’
‘If the mobile had come back to her and she had found the text message which had summoned him to the court. .’ He grimaced at the thought of the consequences.
‘On the other hand, Piers, you could simply have erased the text message before the phone got back to Oenone, and your problem would have been solved.’
‘Yes, I can see that now. At the time I wasn’t thinking very straight. The urgent thing seemed to be to prevent Oenone from getting the phone.’
‘Hm.’ Jude didn’t disbelieve him. His behaviour was consistent with the kind of messy, illogical ways people react in a crisis. ‘You’ve presumably read the text message that summoned Reggie down to the court?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you presumably know who it was from?’
‘Yes.’ He gave her a shrewd look. ‘Why, don’t you?’
‘There was no name, the number didn’t mean anything to me and I hadn’t had a chance to check through the phone’s address book before you came down.’
‘Right.’ Slowly, with deliberation, Piers Targett rose from the sofa. He unplugged the stripy-jacketed mobile and put it back into the jacket pocket whence Jude had taken it.
‘The text message,’ he said slowly, ‘was from Jonquil.’
‘Really?’ Jude hadn’t been expecting that.
‘So she told me.’ Piers spread his hands against his forehead and pressed them sideways as if trying to wipe away some memory. ‘Look, as I’ve said before, Jonquil is never the most rational of beings. In her down periods she’s almost catatonic. When she’s up, she’s capable of all kinds of bizarre behaviour.’
‘I thought you said the medication controls that.’
‘It does — providing she takes it. But she always thinks the time will come when she doesn’t need any medication. So when she’s feeling good, like when she’s at the beginning of a new relationship — like she has been recently — she won’t touch the stuff.’
‘And that makes her behaviour even more bizarre?’
‘Precisely. Anyway, there’s a bit of history between Jonquil and Reggie.’
‘Oh?’
‘I told you fidelity was never her strong suit. And after the few months of honeymoon period after we got married. . well, her promiscuous side took over.’
‘So she and Reggie. .?’ Some people might have thought the idea of the fat man in his seventies having an affair incongruous, but Reggie Playfair had been young once. And Jude knew that passion was not always diminished by age.
‘I don’t actually know for a fact that they did. But Jonquil certainly slept with other members of the club round that time. And I think she wanted to add Reggie to the list. Whether he was strong enough to resist her, I’m not sure. I’ve a feeling Reggie was one of those old-fashioned chaps who genuinely believed in the sanctity of the marriage vows. But one thing I know for a fact — if he did resist Jonquil’s advances that would have made her absolutely furious. She liked getting her own way — particularly when it came to men.’
‘You and Reggie never discussed it?’
‘No. Very British of us, wasn’t it? He knew — and Oenone knew — that Jonquil was making a fool of me with other men, but the subject was never mentioned. So, needless to say, the subject of whether Reggie himself was actually one of her conquests. . well, that wasn’t mentioned either.’
Jude felt a surge of pity for Piers, being saddled with Jonquil, the kind of woman who would never be completely out of his life. She felt pity for Jonquil too, as she would for anyone suffering from mental illness, but not as much as she did for Piers.
‘If Jonquil sent the text message,’ she began slowly, ‘and Reggie reacted instantly, in the middle of the night, that must suggest quite regular contact between them, since the time that they. . well, if they did have an affair.’
Piers shrugged. He looked almost pathetic, inadequately wrapped in orange silk. His deep blue eyes were tight with pain. ‘Jonquil was strange about keeping in touch with people. Suddenly someone’d be her new best friend and she’d be phoning and texting them all the time. Equally suddenly, they’d drop out of favour. Or she might, out of the blue, one day call someone she hadn’t spoken to for years. Just another example of her volatility. Trying to second-guess what Jonquil is about to do next is a very exhausting business — as I know to my cost,’ he concluded with
feeling.
‘And do you know whether she had been in touch with Reggie recently?’
He nodded. ‘They never really lost touch. There was a professional relationship, apart from anything else.’
‘Reggie acting for her as a stockbroker?’
‘That’s it. As I mentioned, Jonquil’s always been pretty well heeled, and she came into a lot when her parents died. Reggie looked after her portfolio, did very well for her in fact. But, according to Jonquil, they’d recently found another interest in common.’
‘Oh?’
‘She picks up new fads and ideas with the same randomness that she does people. None of them last very long. But her latest obsession is with ghosts.’
‘Ah.’ Now, Jude felt, they were getting somewhere. ‘Which of course is a subject that Reggie was very much into.’
‘How did you know that? You only met him once.’
‘Oenone told me.’
‘Really?’ Piers didn’t ask why Jude had been in contact with Reggie’s widow, but he was clearly puzzled by the idea. Still, he moved on. ‘Well, there is a ghost story attached to Lockleigh House tennis court.’
‘Agnes Wardock,’ said Jude.
That really did shake him. ‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘I was told about it by Cecil Wardock.’
‘And who’s he?’
‘Relative of Tom Ruthven. Tom introduced me to him.’
‘And he told you the Agnes Wardock story? Goodness, Jude, you seem to know everything.’ He gave a shudder that was only half in jest. ‘Being with you is like spending time with an amateur detective. I feel as if you’re constantly investigating me.’
She added no comment to that. Instead she asked, ‘So do you think that Jonquil summoned Reggie down to the court on a ghost-hunting mission?’
‘I’m rather afraid she did. When she’s in one of her manic moods Jonquil’s sense of humour is sometimes totally inappropriate.’
‘Sense of humour?’ Suddenly something slotted into place in Jude’s mind. Something she’d seen in Jonquil Targett’s car outside the house at Goffham. ‘Oh, she didn’t. .? It wasn’t the wedding dress, was it?’
