by Simon Brett
‘Right, so what do we do? One person closes their eyes and counts to a hundred?’
‘I can’t count to a hundred. I can only count to twenty. So we count to twenty. And then we say “Coming, ready or not”. And then we have to find Woolly Monkey. And the person who’s hidden him has to say “warm” if you’re near him.’
‘All right, I think I understand the rules. And do we just do it in this room?’
‘No, in this room and the hall and the sitting room.’
‘So who’s going to hide Woolly Monkey first?’
‘You do, because you’re a guest,’ said Mabel, who had clearly studied protocol. ‘So I close my eyes and you hide Woolly Monkey. One . . . two . . . three . . .’
Fortunately, Mabel counted slowly. Jude decided that her best policy might be to hide Woolly Monkey in full sight, so she put him in a different position amongst the toys on the windowsill.
‘Twenty!’ Mabel crowed. ‘Coming, ready or not!’ She looked at Jude, sitting innocently on the sofa. ‘I wonder if it’s in this room or—’
‘Yes, it’s—’
‘No, you mustn’t make clues. You just say if I’m warm.’
Mabel set off towards the hall. ‘You’re getting colder.’ She came back into the room. ‘You’re getting warmer.’ To the toy cupboard. ‘Colder again.’ Towards Jude. ‘Still cold.’ Then in the direction of the window. ‘Warm. Warmer. Ooh, very warm. You’re going to burn your fingers.’
Triumphantly, Mabel picked Woolly Monkey off the windowsill. Then, patiently, she explained to Jude, ‘He doesn’t go there. His place is between Fluffy Ted and Pollyanna.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘He doesn’t like sitting anywhere else.’
‘I’m doubly sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mabel magnanimously. ‘You didn’t know. Now it’s my turn to do Hiding Things.’
‘I’ll stay here and close my eyes and count up to twenty.’
‘Don’t do it fast. Daddy sometimes does it too fast, and that’s cheating.’
‘I won’t do it too fast.’ Jude closed her eyes and started to count, very slowly. She heard Mabel’s footsteps scampering off into the hall. When she reached twenty, Jude shouted, ‘Coming, ready or not!’
She made a great play of walking around the playroom, saying, ‘Ooh, I wonder if Woolly Monkey could be under the sofa . . . or could he be in the toy cupboard?’
Mabel appeared in the doorway. ‘He’s not in here,’ she announced.
‘I thought he might be.’
‘I’m not in here. Daddy says there’s a clue in where the person who’s hidden Woolly Monkey is when you stop counting.’
‘I see. Because they might have only just hidden him and not had time to go anywhere else?’
Mabel nodded gravely. ‘Yes. So I was in the sitting room. That’s a clue.’
Taking the hint that had been proffered, Jude went through into the sitting room. In the crush of the party the night before she hadn’t taken in its full splendour. It was a tall room, panelled and roofed in old, dark oak, which was studded with carved wooden roses. A large fireplace in what looked like Cotswold stone dominated the space. Huge logs flared in the grate, in front of which stood a fire guard with the dimensions of a portcullis.
As Jude moved towards the fire, Mabel said, ‘Warm . . . warmer . . . very warm . . .’
‘Well, I know that, because the fire’s warm.’
The child didn’t approve of any part of her game being treated with such levity. ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean, you’re warmer because you’re near Woolly Monkey.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry.’ The heat from the fire was intense. Jude made a cursory examination of the log basket and the coal scuttle, but there was no sign of the hidden toy.
She moved away from the fireplace. ‘Colder, colder,’ crowed Mabel.
‘Well, I can’t think where . . . You didn’t throw Woolly Monkey on the fire, did you?’
‘No, I didn’t. I love Woolly Monkey.’
‘Then I’ve no idea . . .’
‘It’s a very good Hiding Things place. A special Hiding Things place. Daddy’s used it.’
‘What, when Daddy was playing Hiding Things with you?’
‘No, we weren’t playing the game.’
‘Oh?’ Jude was suddenly alert.
‘But Daddy used it as a Hiding Things place. I don’t think he knew I was watching. I think he thought I was asleep on the sofa. Mummy had brought me down to sleep on the sofa, because I was uncomfy in my bed. And I was asleep, but I kept waking up, because I was hot and my head hurt.’
‘When was this, Mabel?’
‘It was when I had my ear infection.’ As before, she said the words correctly, and with pride. ‘Before the doctor gave me the . . . anti-things.’
‘Which day? Do you remember which day it was?’
‘It was before Christmas Day.’
‘Do you remember anything about the day? Did Mummy and Daddy go to a party that day?’ asked Jude, trying to keep the tension she was feeling out of her voice.
Mabel shook her head. ‘No, they didn’t go to a party.’ Jude’s level of excitement plummeted, but Mabel continued solemnly, ‘Daddy went to an open house. But Mummy didn’t go to the open house because I had an ear infection.’
‘So it was the evening after he’d been to the open house,’ said Jude, keeping her voice as even as she could, ‘and you saw Daddy come and use his special Hiding Things place?’ The girl nodded deliberately. ‘Can you show me where it is, Mabel?’
‘You give up?’
‘Yes, I give up. You’ve won this game. You’ll have to show me where you’ve hidden Woolly Monkey.’
‘All right. That means I’ve won twice. Because I found Woolly Monkey where you’d hidden him in the playroom.’
‘Yes, you did, Mabel.’ Jude was having great difficulty in not trying to speed up the child’s revelation. ‘Well done. And where is he now?’
Mabel pointed to the panelling to the right of the fireplace. ‘The rose there. That rose. No, the one under.’
Jude touched the smooth old wood of the carved Tudor rose. ‘This one?’
‘Yes. Daddy turned it and there was a little Hiding Things place.’
Jude turned it. The mechanism moved smoothly. A section of dark skirting board projected into the room, revealing a drawer about the size of a shoebox.
Inside, as anticipated, was Woolly Monkey.
But beneath him was something Jude could not have anticipated – a fluorescent pink mobile phone sock.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Carole had dropped Jude a little way up the road from the Le Bonniers’ house. She didn’t want to be seen as she delivered their babysitter. Driving back to Fethering in the Renault she was weighed down by a deep sense of frustration. She felt sure the secrets that might unlock the case lay with the inhabitants of Fedingham Court House, and she feared she was being excluded from a vital stage of the investigation.
Back at High Tor Gulliver, the eternal optimist, looked up at her in hope of a walk, but he was unlucky. His mistress didn’t seem even to see him as she sat with a coffee at the kitchen table, her brows furrowed with concentration.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have another lead to follow up. Jude’s conjecture in the car meant that the next port of call had to be Kath. The idea that Ricky’s loopy ex-wife was harbouring Old Garge in her flat might be nonsense, but all other investigative routes passed through Fedingham Court House. Jude might well be making great advances there, but, for Carole, Kath offered the only way forward.
Short of sitting in the Crown and Anchor every lunchtime on the off-chance that the woman might turn up, the only potential contact they had was through Kath’s work at Ayland’s. And was there anyone in this idle and benighted country, thought Carole, who still worked on New Year’s Day?
On the other hand, though very few people worked between Christmas and New Year, Ayland’s bookkeeper had
been there on the Monday. Keen sailors would need access to the boatyard on New Year’s Day – indeed, it might be quite busy on a public holiday – so there was a reasonable chance that Kath might be on duty again. The problem was: what cover story could Carole invent to justify her enquiries? This worried her, because the only solutions she could think of involved lying, and Carole Seddon didn’t have her neighbour’s glib facility in that dark art.
Still, if it came to a choice between lying and making no further progress on the case . . . All she needed was the woman’s address. Carole picked up the phone.
Her luck was in, at first. The phone at Ayland’s was answered, and it was answered by a woman. We haven’t talked to each other, so she won’t recognize my voice, Carole reassured herself. A ‘Kath’ must be short for Katherine, mustn’t it? But it might not be, so safer not to take the risk. From Jude’s reports of the woman’s continuing attachment to her ex-husband, she was bound to have kept his surname. Carole took a deep breath and went into unfamiliar lying mode.
‘Is that Mrs Le Bonnier?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry to trouble you on a public holiday . . .’
‘Don’t worry. As you can gather, I’m in at work.’
‘Yes.’ Time for the big lie (though it was something that had once been true). ‘I’m from the Home Office . . .’ Time for the even bigger lie – ‘and I’m running a check on an asylum seeker.’
‘I don’t know any asylum seekers.’
‘No, I thought you probably wouldn’t, but I’m running this check because the man in question, who comes from Somalia, has given your address as where he will be staying in the UK.’
‘That’s absurd. I’ve never met anyone from Somalia. How on earth would he have got my name and address?’
‘From the phone book. It’s quite a common trick. They just pick a name and address in the area where they hope to settle. Some chancers got away with it a few years back, but we’re wise to them now.’ Carole sighed wearily. ‘But we still have to run these checks. Even on public holidays.’
‘Well, as I say, I have never offered shelter to an asylum seeker – from Somalia or anywhere else. Is that all you need me to say?’
‘Yes, thank you. All I have to do now is confirm your address.’
‘Flat two, seventy-three River Road, Fethering. I can never remember the post code.’
‘Don’t worry. I can check that out to complete the paperwork. Well, thank you very much for your co-operation, Mrs Le Bonnier. And may I wish you a happy New Year.’
She’d done it! She’d lied at least as successfully as Jude would have done. Now a trip to River Road was in order.
Ignoring Gulliver’s pathetic pleas to be taken with her, Carole went into the hall to get her coat. Replacing the handset on the telephone table, she had a thought. If a fictional Somalian asylum seeker could find Kath’s address in the phonebook . . .
‘K Le Bonnier’ and her address were listed in the Worthing telephone directory. As she left High Tor Carole Seddon felt rather sheepish.
River Road, as its name might suggest, ran along the side of the Fether. Though defended by a highly embanked towpath, the roadway occasionally got flooded at times of heavy rain and freak tides. Acknowledging this danger, some of the houses had protective low stone barriers across their front gateways.
Carole eased the Renault into a parking space a little way away from number seventy-three, and looked across at the building. It had a thatched roof, and many layers of whitewash had smoothed the irregularities of what were almost definitely flint walls. The building was very low and Carole was struck by how cramped the two flats into which it had been divided must be. Fine, perhaps, for Kath, who was very short, but less comfortable for people of standard size.
As she had this thought, she saw the shadow of someone cross in front of one of the cottage’s tiny upstairs windows.
The question Carole hadn’t considered was, if Old Garge was in Kath’s flat, was he there of his own volition or was he a prisoner? The windows looked too small to let a grown man’s body through, so maybe he was locked in.
Only one way to find out. She got out of the Renault, wrapped her coat firmly round her, and marched across the road to the entrance of seventy-three River Road. Stepping over the flood defence, she found herself faced by two identical black doors, both with well-polished brass knockers. She raised the one belonging to Flat Two and heard the reverberations of her summons echo through the cottage.
There was a long silence, so long that she thought maybe her quarry had been given instructions to lie low. But then she heard the creaking thud of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. The door opened and Old Garge stood facing her.
‘Carole, we meet again. Am I to assume that you want our conversation to pick up from when we were so rudely interrupted?’
‘If that’s agreeable to you, Rupert,’ she said, deciding that she’d had enough of the Old Garge business.
‘That would rather depend, Carole, on the reason for your interest.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I would be breaking the terms of my residence here if you were anything to do with the police.’
‘I can assure you I have nothing to do with the police.’
‘I was assuming that was the case, but I had to be certain.’ He backed away from the small doorway, through which he could not have passed without stooping, and gestured to Carole to precede him on the way upstairs.
Going through the open door of the flat and a small hall, she found herself in a low, black-raftered room which seemed to be a shrine to Ricky Le Bonnier. The walls were covered with blown-up photographs of him, but not of the Ricky Le Bonnier of recent years. All of them dated back to the late sixties, the time when he had been married to Kath, the time of her greatest happiness, the time in which she had been stuck ever since. For the first time, as she looked around that room, Carole thought her joking reference to Miss Havisham might not be so far from the truth.
Her entrance into the room was greeted by a low growl, followed by ferocious barking from Rupert Sonning’s Jack Russell.
‘Be quiet, Petrarch,’ said his owner as he closed the door behind him. ‘I’m sorry, Carole. He doesn’t like being cooped up in here, with only Kath’s handkerchief-sized bit of garden to roam around. He misses the freedom of Fethering Beach.’
Carole’s first impression of the room had been of all the Ricky Le Bonnier memorabilia, but now she realized that Rupert Sonning had adapted Kath’s space to recreate as nearly as possible the interior of his hut. On the table next to where he had been sitting stood a pile of poetry books, on top of which an open copy of Dryden’s Poetical Works lay face-down. He’d brought his radio with him and classical music filled the room. So did the aroma from a coffee pot.
He offered her a cup, and she accepted. When they were settled down with their drinks, Rupert Sonning asked how she’d tracked him down. ‘Did Ricky tell you I was here? Or Kath?’
‘I found you through Kath,’ said Carole, congratulating herself on not quite adding to her list of lies. ‘Presumably it was Ricky who organized your being here?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Fixit himself. He saw I was in a spot and he offered to help me out.’
‘In what way were you in a spot?’
‘Oh, come on, Carole, you were there when Piers came in and told me.’
She felt she was being very obtuse. ‘Told you what?’
‘Told me that the police wanted to interview me. Well, I couldn’t be having that, obviously.’
‘Because you knew too much about the murder?’
The old actor gave her a curious look before replying. ‘No, not because I knew too much about the murder. Because I wanted to avoid enquiries about whether I’d been living illegally in Pequod, in my beach hut.’
‘What?’
‘I mentioned this when we spoke before. The Fether District Council are very hot on their Fethering Beach regulations. You’re not al
lowed to stay in a caravan overnight in the Promenade car park, nor are you allowed to sleep overnight in a beach hut. The good folks at the Fedborough offices get very worried about the dangers of Fethering turning into a “shanty town”. They say there is insufficient water supply and toilet facilities for people to live in beach huts.’
‘And that’s what you thought the police wanted to talk to you about?’
‘Of course. Why else would they have wanted to see me?’
‘They might have wanted to ask you about what you witnessed the night Gallimaufry burnt down.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Ricky said he was sure it was about my residency of Pequod. So he arranged for me to be put safely out of the way up here for a while. Just for a few days, until the police lose interest in what hours I spend in my beach hut.’
Carole’s opinion of Ricky Le Bonnier plumbed new depths. Was there any lie the man wasn’t capable of telling?
Rupert Sonning, however, didn’t share her opinion. ‘He’s a good man, Ricky,’ he said. ‘Generous to a fault.’
Carole knew it was the moment for her to take a leap into the unknown. ‘And do you think he gets that characteristic from you?’
‘From me? Why on earth do you think he should get anything from me?’
‘Because,’ said Carole coolly, ‘you are his father.’
The one reaction she hadn’t been expecting was riotous laughter, but that was what she got. Waves of hilarity shuddered through Rupert Sonning’s great frame till he was choking and incoherent. Eventually, he managed to gasp out, ‘His father? Where on earth did you get that idea from?’
Carole was disquieted, but not completely abashed. ‘You don’t deny that you worked with Flora Le Bonnier in Gainsborough films after the war?’
‘No, I don’t, but the theatrical myth that all leading men sleep with all their leading ladies, though perhaps flattering, is just an invention of the gutter press. I can assure you I have never been to bed with Flora Le Bonnier. She may be one of the most beautiful women of her generation, but she’s too much like a piece of Dresden china for my taste. I have always gone for something rather earthier in my women. Dirty knickers, I’m afraid, are my thing. So Flora Le Bonnier has never ticked any boxes for me.’
