The Killer in the Choir

by Simon Brett

  ‘And it is good,’ Bet went on, ‘to know when you go to a new place, there’ll be a church, where you can quickly find a group of like-minded people.’

  Carole shuddered inwardly at the idea. She thought, for herself, the prospect of finding ‘like-minded people’ anywhere was pretty distant. She treasured her anonymity and exclusivity. When she’d moved permanently to Fethering, raw after her divorce and premature retirement from the Home Office, she hadn’t wanted to make contact with anyone. She’d only bought Gulliver because she didn’t wish to appear lonely when she walked on the beach. And if she’d had a neighbour with a less outgoing and persistent personality than Jude, that relationship wouldn’t have flourished either.

  ‘Of course, normally you’d hope to make friends at the school gate, too,’ Bet went on. Jude was beginning to wonder whether she was usually this forthcoming, or if the drink had relaxed her. ‘But my son Rory goes to the comprehensive in Clincham, so he gets a bus there and back. It’s been difficult for him starting there in the middle of term, but that’s just down to the logistics of when we could move. The English system of house purchase doesn’t take notice of details like school terms.’

  ‘Have you moved down from London?’ asked Jude. Most of the people who ended up in Fethering had.

  ‘No. Evesham. That’s where Rory was born and brought up, but then my marriage broke down and … well, I wanted to get as far away from the place as possible. But, you know, house purchase … you think you’ve got somewhere sorted, then the chain breaks down, and … quite frankly, it’s been a nightmare.’

  Carole was beginning to think that they were being granted too much information. Was the woman going to provide her entire life story within minutes of meeting complete strangers? Was she equally revealing with everyone she met? Such behaviour went against Carole’s every instinct.

  Fortunately, at this moment Ruskin Dewitt re-entered the conversation. ‘Did you know Leonard Mallett well, Carole?’ he asked.

  ‘Hardly at all.’ And she mentioned the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m on that.’ He screwed up his eyes and inspected her. ‘Oh, I do recognize you now.’

  ‘Good,’ said Carole, with some acidity.

  ‘And were you at the church hall earlier in the afternoon when things got rather ugly?’

  ‘I heard Alice Mallett having a bit of a go at her stepmother.’

  ‘“Having a bit of a go”? You have an enviable talent for understatement, Carole.’

  ‘Yes, being new to the area,’ said Bet, ‘I was quite shocked. Are accusations of murder common events in Fethering?’

  The group laughed at the idea. Carole and Jude exchanged covert looks. Each knew that accusations of murder had featured rather more in their lives than they had in that of the average village resident.

  Elizabeth Browning, who hadn’t joined in the communal laughter, said gnomically, ‘Tragedies are not unknown in the village.’ But the other choir members had heard her narratives too often to invite further explanation.

  ‘Does anyone actually know anything about the circumstances of Leonard Mallett’s death?’ asked Carole. ‘We’ve heard that he “had a fall”, but that’s it.’

  Shirley and Veronica Tattersall regretted that they couldn’t provide any more detail, but inevitably Ruskin Dewitt did have a contribution to make. ‘I don’t want to be telling tales out of school, and let me tell you, having spent most of my professional life in schools, I’m fully aware of the meaning of that expression … but I did hear something which might have some bearing on the subject of Leonard Mallett’s death.’

  ‘What was it?’ demanded Carole, irritated at the orotundity of his narrative manner, and wanting to hurry him along a bit.

  He looked a little piqued, as he said, ‘Very well. A couple of months ago, on a Friday … you know, usual choir rehearsal night … Heather had a problem with her car. Should have been back from the garage late afternoon, but there was a part they couldn’t get till the Saturday morning, something like that. So, since I come from Fedborough and virtually drive past the Shorelands Estate, I had a call from her asking if I could pick her up for rehearsal. No problem for me, and I have to confess I was rather intrigued. You know, Heather kept herself so much to herself, and I thought I might get the opportunity, on the car journey, which was only ten minutes, but I thought I might find out a little more about her, get to know her a bit. In a way, though, perhaps I got more than I bargained for.’

  He took another suspenseful pause. Carole had great difficulty in stopping herself from telling him to get on with it.

  ‘I knocked at the door, expecting Heather to come scuttling out, but it was opened by Leonard. I mean, I knew who he was, I’d seen him around the village, but I wouldn’t say I knew him.

  ‘Anyway, he wasn’t particularly gracious to me … In fact, that’s putting it mildly. He was damned rude – pardon my French. He said, “Oh, you’ve come to take her off for her bloody choir, have you?” And then he called off into the house, “For Christ’s sake, Heather, your lift’s arrived. What are you faffing around at? No amount of titivation is going to make you look any better at your age.” Which I have to say is not the way that I was brought up to speak to a lady.’

  ‘Did Heather say anything back to him,’ asked Jude, ‘you know, when she came to the door?’

  ‘No, she seemed to be completely cowed. Shrank away when she passed him on her way out.’

  Carole was immediately aware of the contrast with the cheerful woman she had seen drinking in the church hall. The woman with new glasses, the woman who’d let her hair grow.

  ‘And did Leonard have any parting shot for her?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Yes. He said, “Off you go to church then. Maybe God can help sort you out. He’s supposed to have a decent record with lost causes, isn’t he?” I remember the words exactly, because … well, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard a husband be so rude to his wife.’

  ‘Makes you understand the level of relief she must have felt …’ said Carole, ‘you know, when he was no longer on the scene. It must’ve been absolutely ghastly for her, the whole marriage.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Jude, who had had a lot of marital secrets shared from her treatment couch. ‘It may have been what worked for them, what turned them on. You can never look inside another marriage.’

  ‘I agree.’ Carole had certainly never wanted anyone looking inside her marriage to David. Or their divorce, come to that. ‘But the way Heather was behaving in the church hall suggested someone who had just had a great burden lifted off her shoulders.’

  ‘And the way she was behaving here,’ Bet Harrison contributed.

  ‘She was here?’ asked Carole, surprised.

  Ruskin Dewitt nodded vigorously, setting a ripple through the foliage of his beard. ‘Yes. As I was leaving the church hall, I said, sort of casually, that some of the choir were going to the Crown & Anchor for a drink, and Heather said, to my amazement, “See you there!” She only left half an hour ago.’

  ‘Goodness.’ Carole and Jude exchanged a look, both regretting that they hadn’t joined the party earlier. Carole looked at her watch. Nearly six. Say formalities in the church hall had finished round two thirty, the session in the pub had been going on for a good three hours. And, until recently, the bereaved widow had been part of it.

  ‘Incidentally,’ said Carole, drawing Ruskin Dewitt back to his earlier conversation, ‘did Heather say anything to you in the car on the way to rehearsal, you know, that day, after her husband had been so rude to her?’

  ‘I didn’t think she was going to. And I didn’t really think it was my place to make any comment, but after a long silence, when we were nearly at the church, Heather did apologize for her husband’s behaviour. She said, “He gets like that. I’m afraid Leonard hasn’t taken very well to retirement.” Something of an understatement, I thought, but I just mumbled a few words about it being very difficul
t for her. And she said – and goodness, I don’t think I’ll ever forget her words …’

  On this occasion, Carole did not allow him to indulge in his full dramatic pause. ‘What did she say?’ she asked testily.

  ‘Heather said,’ Ruskin replied, ‘“Oh, he’ll get his comeuppance. There’s nothing so deadly as a worm that’s turned.”’

  FOUR

  The other drinkers melted away into the late afternoon. Carole and Jude found themselves alone with Bet Harrison. They noticed, when Jude went to get more Sauvignon Blanc, that she was only drinking mineral water (so it hadn’t been alcohol that made her so forthcoming, it was her normal manner). ‘And thanks,’ she said, when offered a top-up, ‘but I don’t need any more.’

  ‘Bit of a bugger,’ she went on to Carole while Jude was at the bar, ‘not drinking on an occasion like this, but Rory needs ferrying somewhere this evening. I’m stuck in the driving years, which seem to be going on for ever, and without having a partner to share the burden, I daren’t risk losing my licence, particularly living down here and … well … Do you have children?’

  Though this was, by her standards, a rather over-direct question, Carole could not deny that she had a son Stephen, who was married with two daughters. It was not in her nature to mention to a new acquaintance how much joy her grandchildren had brought into her life.

  ‘Ah, well, you must have done the driving years bit, too.’

  ‘Yes, but we were living in London back then, so it probably wasn’t so bad. Stephen could go most places on public transport.’

  ‘Right. What does your husband do?’

  ‘I’m divorced,’ said Carole, in a tone which she hoped would deter further enquiry.

  It failed. ‘Join the club,’ said Bet. ‘Though if I was still married, I wouldn’t be getting much help with ferrying Rory around. Waste of space, my husband was, when it came to anything practical. Great skill men have, avoiding responsibility, don’t they? Even in this day and age—’

  Fortunately, the arrival of Jude with two large Sauvignon Blancs stemmed the feminist flow. ‘Just talking about children,’ said Bet.

  ‘Ah. I don’t have any.’ Jude was always very easy about getting that bit of information into a conversation. When they first met, Carole thought her neighbour must feel some level of sadness about her childlessness, but now she had come round to the view that it genuinely didn’t worry her. Jude had always been better than Carole at accepting the hand life had dealt her. And, perhaps as a result, in Carole’s view her neighbour always seemed to have better cards.

  ‘Well,’ said Bet, ‘that means you’re missing out on the dubious pleasure of being a glorified taxi service.’ She looked suddenly at Jude. ‘Incidentally, I know you weren’t at the funeral – or the church hall – but do you know Heather Mallett?’ A shake of the head by way of response. ‘I was just interested in what Russ was saying, you know, about when he gave her the lift. Sounds like she was stuck in a really abusive marriage.’

  ‘Hard to be sure without knowing more detail,’ said Jude diplomatically. ‘Verbal abuse doesn’t definitely mean there’s also physical abuse. Some couples just are combative. They seem to get off on it.’

  ‘Well, he was combative, we know that. Doesn’t sound like Heather did much in the way of getting back at him.’

  ‘Who can say?’

  ‘Unless, of course, she actually did help him on his way down those stairs.’

  ‘We have no means of knowing—’

  ‘If she did,’ Bet interrupted, ‘I’d say good for her. Women have been victims of male aggression for far too long. Do you know, it wasn’t until the 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act that women in this country could seek legal separation from an abusive husband. Up until then they were just chattels. It’s amazing how today’s women suffer from that legacy of discrimination. And there are still …’

  Maybe it was Carole’s discreet throat-clearing that got her down off her soapbox, or just a glance at her watch. ‘God! I must go. Get back to Rory. I’ve left him on his own for quite long enough.’

  ‘He’s not at school?’ asked Jude.

  ‘No, I got him out for the funeral.’

  ‘But surely he didn’t know Leonard Mallett?’

  ‘No, no, of course he didn’t. Oh, you weren’t there, so you wouldn’t have seen him. Rory sings in the church choir with me, and I thought it was better for him to miss a day’s school and get some social interaction locally.’ She giggled guiltily. ‘I just said to the school that he had to go to a funeral, and they assumed it must’ve been someone close, so there were no problems about it. I took the day off, too.’ She took another look at her watch. ‘And now my small window of freedom is about to close again.’

  ‘Where do you work?’ asked Carole.

  The thin face grimaced. ‘Starbucks on the Parade.’

  ‘Oh?’ This was another of Carole’s deeply layered monosyllables. She didn’t approve of Starbucks, or any other international chain. She had preferred it when the café on the Parade had been Polly’s Cake Shop. She was generally suspicious of change.

  Possibly prompted by Carole’s disapproval, Bet felt the need to apologize for her job. ‘It’s only temporary, until I get something better, but it’s difficult in a place like this. The trouble is, I got married too young, you know, before I had any qualifications. It didn’t seem important at the time, but back then, of course, I thought the marriage was going to be for life. It didn’t occur to me that my bastard husband …’

  Maybe she caught the exasperated look that Carole flicked at Jude, or maybe she just recollected that she was up against time, but Bet Harrison stopped herself there. She made a big deal of saying how much she’d enjoyed meeting them, and how much she looked forward to seeing them again.

  ‘Huh,’ said Carole, when the woman was out of earshot. ‘I do resent people who feel that they have to spill out their entire life history the moment you meet them.’

  Jude knew this was just one of many things her neighbour resented, but all she said, very casually, was, ‘She’s just lonely. Coming to a new place, not knowing anyone, she’s only trying to make contact.’

  ‘Well,’ said Carole beadily, ‘you’ve always had a more generous view of humanity than I have.’

  This was so self-evidently true as to require no comment.

  As they walked through the interior of the pub, it was still fairly empty. Ted Crisp often bemoaned the fact that there were fewer casual drinkers than there used to be. ‘Never been the same since breathalyser came in,’ he frequently stated. ‘Lovely girl, Breath Eliza, she had this way of blowing in your ear, you know,’ he always added, demonstrating once again why his career in stand-up had struggled to get off the ground.

  Perhaps one of the reasons for the dearth of casual drinkers was that the identity of the Crown & Anchor had changed since Ted engaged a chef called Ed Pollack, whose cooking had raised the profile of the pub’s restaurant considerably. In fact, the place was now frequently referred to – in an expression the landlord loathed – as a ‘gastropub’. In its new incarnation, booking was essential, and the busy time had shifted from early evening to dinner. A lot of the local drinkers felt it was no longer the place for a quiet pint.

  With Ed in the kitchen, and the bars under the expert management of the pigtailed Polish Zosia, the Crown & Anchor had undoubtedly become ‘a success’. But Ted Crisp didn’t let a detail like that alter his customary lugubrious demeanour. And he would never let the pub’s gentrification affect his wardrobe choices.

  As Carole and Jude passed, he was leaning over the bar, talking to a fiftyish man, whose thinning hair was pulled back into a sparse ponytail. The man wore a pale denim jacket, shirt and jeans, clasped with a broad brown leather belt, and scuffed cowboy boots. There was a half-empty pint glass of Guinness in front of him.

  ‘Ah. Carole,’ said Ted, ‘I don’t think you’ve met …’

  ‘Hello, KK,’ said Jude.

  A little tug of annoyan
ce pulled at Carole’s lower lip. This happened far too often in Fethering, she thought, Jude knowing more people than she did. And Carole had lived there longer. Registering the man’s scruffiness, she reckoned he must be one of the flaky types her neighbour had met through the healing practice.

  ‘Hi, Jude.’ He got off his bar stool and enveloped her in a huge hug.

  ‘Good to see you.’ The hug was returned with reciprocal warmth. Carole’s first thought was that this must be another of Jude’s lovers. There had certainly been a good few of them (though not nearly as many as there were in Carole’s imagination).

  When she had disengaged herself from the bear hug, Jude said, ‘This is Carole, my neighbour.’

  ‘Hi.’ The denim-clad creature extended the monosyllable into something long and languid.

  ‘Oh, I thought you’d know each other,’ said Ted.

  ‘No, said Carole frostily.

  ‘KK’s a musician,’ said Jude.

  ‘Ah,’ said Carole, as if that explained everything.

  ‘“A wandering minstrel, I …”’ The words, spoken rather than sung, were a surprise. KK’s image was more Bruce Springsteen than Gilbert & Sullivan.

  Ted Crisp picked up his cue, ‘Available for every kind of function – birthdays, christenings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, divorces … You name it, KK’s up for the gig.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the musician agreed. ‘Up for anything that pays the bills … Though there’s not much work around at the minute.’

  ‘Never is, is there?’ Ted sympathized, perhaps thinking back to his stand-up days.

  ‘I’m based in Worthing,’ KK went on, ‘and I used to do a lot of gigs round all the pubs in the area, into Hampshire, Kent even. My band’s called Rubber Truncheon.’ He paused for a nanosecond, like all performers do, but receiving no flicker of name recognition, went on, ‘I used to do regular gigs here, didn’t I, Ted?’