by Simon Brett
“But the ones you do know,” asked Carole, “you can organize them to go anywhere you want to, can you?”
“What are you on about?”
He looked so angry that Jude thought she’d better leap in before Carole actually accused him of controlling a Rent-a-Mob operation. “Sorry, could we get back to Viggo,” she said soothingly. “Did he ask you about your time in the army?”
Derren Hart’s anger vanished, and he seemed almost embarrassed as he replied. “Yes, he was interested in that stuff. I told you, he tried to join up.”
“So you talked to him a lot about it?”
“A bit.”
A picture was beginning to emerge for Jude. Here was the ex-soldier, traumatized by his experiences in Iraq, desperate to talk about them, but finding nobody back home was interested. The only audience he could get was the half-crazed fantasist Viggo. Who no doubt lapped up everything he was told. And started to regard Derren Hart as an action hero to match those in his beloved movies.
“You know that Viggo’s stopped dressing as a biker now, do you?” asked Carole.
The man didn’t commit himself to an answer.
“He’s now dressing exactly like you.”
“Is that so?” He couldn’t keep a little tinge of satisfaction out of his words. He wasn’t in a position to be choosy about his sources of hero worship.
“You know how impressionable he is?” said Jude. “He’d do anything you tell him.”
“Really?” Again the small note of satisfaction.
Carole went into full interrogation mode. “Have you told him to do anything?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Viggo talked about hitmen getting instructions by text on mobile phones.”
Derren Hart’s half-smile reappeared, and he chuckled. “Listen, lady, we’ve agreed the guy’s a fantasist. If he wants to believe in a world where assassination orders are issued by text message, we can’t stop him, can we?”
“Did he talk about that kind of thing to you?”
“Look, he lived in a world of his own. A world full of violence and hitmen and Russian roulette and orders given by text message. He talked about lots of stuff, but it wasn’t real, it was all in his head.”
“But you’ve never issued him an order by text-message?”
He held out his mutilated hand. “One of the many things this is not good at is text messaging.”
“And you don’t know of anyone else who might have issued text-message orders to Viggo?”
His shrug told them the unlikeliness of their getting an answer to that question.
“You went to see Viggo at Copsedown Hall…”
“How do you know that?”
“Another of the residents saw you arriving.”
“Who?”
“I don’t think that really matters,” said Jude.
Her words had been designed to protect Kelly-Marie, but the curt nod Derren Hart made suggested that he had probably worked out the identity of the witness and filed away the information.
“But you didn’t give him any orders then?”
The tautness of his ‘No’ suggested he was getting a little weary of their questioning, but Carole pressed on, “And did you ever issue orders to Ray either?”
“I told you – I never met the guy.”
“Are you sure? Because we believe that someone told Ray to substitute a tray of scallops in – ”
The scarred face closed down. Whether that was because the two women had got close to the truth, there was no means of knowing. Without speaking another word, Derren Hart downed the rest of his pint and left the pub.
Twenty-Eight
Carole Seddon was normally very organized about her shopping. Regular trips to Sainsbury’s, avoiding weekends, once a month to stock up on large essentials, once a week for food. Rarely was she in the position, like her less far-sighted neighbour Jude, of having to rush down to Allinstore, Fethering’s only supermarket, for emergency rations. But that Sunday evening she was.
She’d only had a sandwich at lunchtime after Viggo’s visit to Woodside Cottage, and was quite peckish by the time they left the Middy in Fratton. As she drove back to Fethering, she found herself visualizing the ham omelette she would cook when she got back. But on arrival, she found that the High Tor larder was devoid of ham.
Carole fed Gulliver, and checked out the dressing on his injured foot, but the image of what she wanted to eat wouldn’t go away. From what she had in the fridge she could have made a cheese omelette, or a tomato omelette, but by now the image of ham in her head was so strong that she had no alternative but to make a beeline to Allinstore for the missing ingredient.
The supermarket, legendary for its lack of stock and the pillars customers had to negotiate in approaching the till, was not full at that time on a summer Sunday evening, and Carole found only one other customer ahead of her in the queue for the only till that was operating. Idly she thought that the Black Watch tartan suit was vaguely familiar, and when the woman turned back with her purchases, Carole recognized the most avid of Greyille Til-brook’s acolytes from his anti-Dan-Poke crusade.
“Oh, hello,” she said instinctively. “I saw you last Sunday.”
“Did you?” asked the woman, a little alarmed.
“Yes. You were with Greville Tilbrook, in the Crown and Anchor car park.”
“Oh,” said the woman, now very alarmed, and she scuttled out of the supermarket.
Carole followed the woman’s departure through Allinstore’s front windows. And she saw the panic-stricken woman get into a silver Smart car.
♦
Back at High Tor, her mind was seething with speculation. She was hardly aware of eating her omelette (which was just as well because Allinstore’s ham was notoriously tasteless).
She had no proof that the Smart car owned by the woman in Black Watch tartan was the same one she and Jude had seen careering over the dunes on the night of Ray Witchett’s death, but it was at the very least a coincidence. And if the car did belong to the woman, who appeared to be the acme of respectability, then why hadn’t she wanted to face the police and made such a hasty getaway? Why, come to that, had she stayed in the car park until after Dan Poke’s act had finished? Had Greville Tilbrook been with her? Were he and his acolytes planning to confront the departing crowd with their anti-blasphemy banners?
The other memory that kept recurring in Carole’s mind was the one that had struck Jude – Greville Tilbrook’s tirade against the wearers of ‘Fancy a Poke?’ T-shirts. Together with that came a vivid image of one such T-shirt, stained by Ray’s lifeblood. Surely Greville Tilbrook’s passionate views couldn’t be so strong that he might have…?
Her conjectures were interrupted by the ringing of her phone. She answered it and felt a sudden chill when the speaker identified himself as Greville Tilbrook. “I gather you spoke to Beryl.” Carole now had a name for the lady in Black Watch tartan. “Are you in?” he asked urgently.
“Given the fact that I’ve just answered my phone, I must be, mustn’t I?” She spoke with an uppity confidence she did not feel.
“Yes, but will you be there in a quarter of an hour?”
“Well, I was thinking of taking my dog out for a – ”
“Don’t leave till I arrive,” said Greville Tilbrook. He sounded very masterful. And even threatening.
Carole reached for the phone to ring Jude, but then remembered that her neighbour was going to see a healer friend that evening. For a moment there was a temptation to drive away somewhere, to let Greville Tilbrook find the house empty. But curiosity overcame Carole’s fear, and she stayed put.
♦
Her work at the Home Office had taught her that the most unlikely people turn out to be murderers. A few are monsters, but most are meek and ordinary. That evening in her sitting room at High Tor Greville Tilbrook looked very ordinary. But not meek. His face was again suffused with the kind of fury that Carole and Jude had witnessed in the Crown an
d Anchor car park.
“You have made me very angry, Mrs Seddon,” he announced through clenched teeth.
“I regret that, Mr Tilbrook,” she said, trying to sound cool, “but since I don’t know why I’ve made you angry, I’m not in a position to apologize.”
“You know things about me which I have worked very hard to keep secret.” Hardly surprising, thought Carole, if you did actually murder Ray. “Mrs Seddon, you’ve been spying on me. And you know what happens to spies when they’re caught, don’t you?”
Carole couldn’t fully understand her reactions. At one level, she could observe the scene and see what a ridiculous pompous little man Greville Tilbrook was. But another part of her was all too aware of the manic light in his eye, and the danger that lay within his anger.
“Are you threatening me, Mr Tilbrook?”
“It rather depends on what you do, Mrs Seddon. How you plan to use the information you have about me.”
“You’ll have to explain what you mean.”
“I mean – are you proposing to blackmail me?”
“Certainly not! I might consider passing on the information that I have about you to the police.”
“The police?” He looked almost relieved at the idea. “But this is not a police matter. I meant – are you proposing to pass the information on to my wife?”
“Your wife?” Carole hadn’t the beginning of an idea of what he was talking about. “Perhaps I should explain…?”
“I think perhaps you should, Mr Tilbrook.” So he did. And, needless to say, given who was talking, the explanation was not a short one. “The fact is that, without wishing in any way to mislead or give a false impression, I do find myself in a slightly delicate situation vis-a-vis the situation in which I find myself…if you get my drift…?”
Carole didn’t get his drift at all, but somehow there was no longer any menace in his manner, just acute embarrassment. And she found that watching Greville Tilbrook squirm was a most enjoyable spectator sport.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Mrs Seddon, and without wishing to cause any hurt to any individual – most particularly not to my lady wife, a very fine woman who has been more than a helpmeet to me in the many and varied guises – or, if you will, hats – under which I conduct my life, the main inspiration of which, I may say without fear of contradiction, has always been a sense of civic responsibility, I would be very unwilling to have jeopardized a more than satisfactory status quo by any negative or counterproductive dissemination of information into the wrong ears. Fethering, by its nature, being, as it is, a village – a fact wherein, for many people, lies much of its charm – can at times, however, suffer from that natural propensity within village communities – and indeed many other small, tight-knit communities – for the business of any one individual to be regarded as the business of everyone. I refer, of course, to the proclivity amongst the mature citizens of an environment – ”
“Mr Tilbrook,” said Carole patiently, “what on earth are you talking about?”
He looked aggrieved to be interrupted. “I am talking about, as it were, what happened at the Crown and Anchor a week ago today.”
“Yes, it was very regrettable.”
“It certainly was. And I really do feel, without putting too fine a point on it, that the best solution, from the point of view of all concerned, would be that the whole incident should be forgotten.”
“You’ve rather changed your tune.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“On Sunday you were carrying placards saying Dan Poke shouldn’t be allowed to perform. Now you’re saying the whole thing should be forgotten.”
“It was not the, for want of a better word, performance by Dan Poke, to which I was, by the same token, referring.”
“Then, to what were you, ‘by the same token, referring’?”
Carole couldn’t resist quoting Greville Tilbrook back at himself, but he didn’t seem to notice her mockery as he replied, “I am referring to something which, by any stretch of the imagination, and when all’s said and done, is undoubtedly more important than that.”
“Ah, you mean the murder?”
“No, Mrs Seddon! Are you being deliberately obtuse?”
“I have never been deliberately obtuse in my life!”
“I am referring, Mrs Seddon, to what you told Beryl you had seen!” Carole could only look bewildered. She wasn’t aware of having told Beryl she’d seen anything. Greville Tilbrook went on, “Listen, none of us is, as it were, perfect. And, for my sins, I am not excluding myself, to be quite honest, from that category. The fact is that Margaret, my wife, whom I do not believe you have, up until this moment in time, had the pleasure of meeting…?”
Carole confirmed that she hadn’t.
“Well, Margaret is a very fine woman. Had we had any children, though we were not blessed in that way, she would undoubtedly have been an excellent mother to them. She is universally acknowledged to be, and this is something I can vouch for myself, a very fine housekeeper – or even, as I believe the popular phrase is these days, ‘homemaker’. She also has a commendable sense of civic responsibility. Margaret and I have, hitherto, lived a life of few arguments and, one cannot avoid the phrase, considerable domestic happiness. But, if I were to venture a criticism of my lovely wife – which I am only doing now, because of the gravity of the current situation – it might be that she is less affectionate than others of her sex – or should one say ‘gender’ nowadays – might, in the final analysis, be.”
Carole didn’t supply any further prompts. She just listened in amazement as Greville Tilbrook continued, “But when I met Beryl, I discovered that I had found a woman of, not to put too fine a point on it, a woman of considerably greater warmth, if you get my drift, than I had hitherto encountered in the marital home. And, though I have used the not inconsiderable powers of prayer and conscience to divert myself from the track on which I had, in a manner of speaking, embarked, I eventually came to the conclusion that I owed it to myself, for a moment not considering anyone else, to take advantage of the little extra happiness that was being offered to me, in the guise of – or, if you prefer, the form of – Beryl.”
Carole gaped. “Are you saying that you and Beryl are having an affair?”
“Of course that’s what I’m saying! And don’t pretend you don’t know, Mrs Seddon! After all, you’re the one who told Beryl that you’d seen us together last Sunday in the Crown and Anchor car park.”
Her knee-jerk reaction was immediately to explain that that hadn’t been what she meant, but she managed to curb the instinct. Having an embarrassed, apologetic Greville Tilbrook on the back foot would be infinitely more useful than facing his normal self-righteous persona. So, in a voice which she thought rather neatly combined pity and disapprobation, she said, “Well, you must understand, Mr Tilbrook, that the situation does put me in something of a quandary…”
“Yes, I can see that, Mrs Seddon.”
“Because, although I obviously have no wish to do harm to any other human being, one cannot forget that there is a moral dimension.”
“Oh, I do so agree.”
“So what would your advice to me be on what to do next?”
“Nothing! Don’t tell anyone!” The verbal simplicity of his answer was a measure of his panic.
Carole let him sweat for a moment before responding. “And that would be my instinctive reaction, Mr Tilbrook. I’m not a busybody. I have no wish to destroy a marriage…”
“Oh, thank you so much, Mrs Seddon.”
“…but, on the other hand, there is more than just a marriage to be considered here.”
He gaped at her. “How do you mean?”
“Like you, I also have a sense of civic responsibility. And unfortunately, the evening which you chose to canoodle with your girlfriend in the Crown and Anchor car park…in your car, was it?”
“Her car.”
The image of the highly respectable Greville Tilbrook and Black Watch Be
ryl grappling in the confined space of a Smart car was irresistibly funny. Carole had difficulty restraining her laughter, as she asked, “And your canoodling took place, I assume, after the two other lady protesters had gone home?” He nodded. “Well, unfortunately, on that very evening there was a fight at the Crown and Anchor, which led to someone being stabbed to death.”
“I know that, Mrs Seddon! That is why I am so concerned that my, as it were, peccadillo should be kept quiet.”
Carole nodded sagely, enjoying her complete control of the situation. “I can see that, yes.” She let him agonize through another silence. “So was it the outbreak of the fight that caused you to leave Beryl’s car?”
“No. I took the view, as it were, that during the fighting, it might be a better plan of action for me to, not to put too fine a point on it, lie low.”
“In Beryl’s car?”
“Yes.”
“With Beryl?”
“Yes.”
“So what did you do when the police arrived?”
“As soon as I heard what can only be described as the sirens, and saw the, as it were, blue lights, I took the decision that discretion was, not for the first time in my life, the better part of valour and, not wishing to beat about the bush, I made my escape.”
“With Beryl? I saw a Smart car driving like crazy across the dunes with all the bikers.”
“No, I thought it might be exacerbating the, as it were, risk, if I were to stay in the car. Beryl drove off on her own.”
Carole was suddenly alert. “So which way did you escape? You didn’t go back along the road into the village?”
“No, I thought that, since that was the direction from which the police were arriving, it might perhaps not be the wisest of courses – and might indeed prompt questioning of a kind that I was anxious to avoid, should I have taken that route…”
Carole couldn’t resist turning the knife in the wound of his embarrassment. “I’m very surprised, Mr Tilbrook, that you, such a stern advocate of civic responsibility, did not stay to offer the police any assistance they might want from you as a witness to what had happened at the Crown and Anchor that night.”
