The Stabbing in the Stables (9 page)

“Well, I can't prove that, Nicky, but—”

“I think that Donal was full of blarney and Jameson's. I told him so at the time. Just a bloody snake-oil salesman, getting money out of gullible housewives for his so-called healing. Do you believe in all that mumbo jumbo, Jude?”

She could feel focussed pleading from Sonia's eyes, and replied sedately, “One does hear remarkable instances of alternative therapies working.”

“Huh. Mind you, there's usually another explanation for whatever's happened. A lot of injuries and illnesses just clear up under their own steam.”

Nicky Dalrymple was clearly not used to being contradicted. In other circumstances Jude would have happily introduced him to the concept, but for his wife's sake she knew this wasn't the moment. “Well, thank you so much for the tea. I'd really better be off.”

“But you haven't talked about your charity thing to Sonia yet.”

For a moment Jude was thrown, having forgotten the lie she had told. Then hastily she said, “We can do that another time.”

“No, tell me what the charity is. We always try to do our bit, don't we, Sonia? We're personally major contributors to the I.L.P.H.”

“I'm sorry, I don't know what that is.”

Sonia supplied the information. “I.L.P.H.” stood for “The International League for the Protection of Horses.”

“So what is the charity you're working for?” Nicky Dalrymple insisted.

“Erm…well…It's the N.S.P.C.C.” The only one she could think of on the spur of the moment. But a perfectly admirable charity. And it did help humans rather than animals, which Jude—unlike most residents of West Sussex—always thought was the greater priority.

“Let me give you a contribution then.” And Nicky Dalrymple's cheque book was out of the pocket of his jacket. “Now who should I make it payable to?”

Jude looked across at Sonia, who made an imperceptible shrug. If Jude's lie was going to bring benefit to some suffering children, then what harm was done? It wasn't as if Nicky couldn't afford it.

“Just to the N.S.P.C.C. then, please.”

Nicky filled in the cheque, pulled it out of the book and handed it across with a flourish. “But don't you want to talk about the details of the event…because I've got some papers I should be going through, so if you want to be on your own…?”

“No, really. I'd better be on my way.” Jude had an instinct that, even if he were not in the same room, her husband's presence in the house might inhibit Sonia from saying what she really wanted to.

“Well, I'll say good-bye then. Pleasure to meet you, Jude. Jude…what? I don't know your surname.”

“Everyone just calls me Jude.”

Nicky stayed in the sitting room, and Sonia closed the door against the potential draught as she led the way to the front door.

“What did you want to see me about?” Jude whispered.

“I just wondered if you'd heard anything from the police…you know, about what evidence they have against Donal?”

“No more than anyone else has. What I've heard on the news bulletins.”

Sonia looked disappointed, but not surprised at being disappointed. “You haven't any idea what he's said to them…?”

“How could I? I'm afraid it's only in crime fiction that the police share all the latest developments on a case with nosey local spinsters.”

She'd said it as a joke, but Sonia didn't smile. Instead, she whispered, “But if you do hear anything about what Donal's said, you will let me know, won't you, Jude?”

Odd. Two women, thought Jude as she walked along the towpath towards Fethering, both deeply concerned about a vagrant Irishman. For the same reason? Or for different reasons? More important, for what reason?

The weather had suddenly turned very cold. After a few mild days that had held the promise of spring, winter had reasserted its icy grip. The waters of the Fether, rushing fast past the towpath, looked icily uninviting, and the leaden sea beyond held no element of welcome. Jude's hand, nestling for warmth into the pocket of her fleece, encountered something unexpected, and closed around Nicky Dalrymple's cheque. She looked at it. A hundred pounds for the N.S.P.C.C. Oh well, it's an ill wind. Who was it who had ever said that lying was a bad thing?

T
HE
S
EAVIEW
C
AFÉ
on Fethering Beach was, surprisingly, open all the year round. In the summer, the tall windows at the front were concertina-ed back and the concrete floor was so covered with sand that it seemed like a continuation of the beach. The café was open from eight in the morning till eight at night. Then the space was loud with the shrieks of children, and the blue-overalled women behind the counter were kept busy all day supplying pots of tea, fizzy drinks, hamburgers, chips, crisps and ice creams.

In the winter everything was different. All the windows were shut, and the place steamed up like a huge terrarium. Wind wheezed through ventilation grills and the odd cracked pane. Opening hours were eleven to five, and the average age of the winter population trebled that of the summer. The occasional child whose route from school passed the beach might drop in for a Coke and a bag of crisps, but generally speaking, the customers were well past seventy, and usually sitting on their own. The women behind the counter had plenty of time to peruse their
Sun
s and
Daily Mail
s, and amongst the clientele pots of tea were made to last a very long time.

Carole Seddon usually avoided the place. In the summer it was too noisy, in the winter too dispiriting. But that Wednesday afternoon she'd had no choice. She'd got delayed shopping and, as a result, started late for Gulliver's afternoon walk. Because of her rush, she had omitted to have a pee when she got back to High Tor, and on the beach, feeling the sudden drop in the temperature, she found herself desperate for a restroom. The toilets on the front were locked against vandals throughout the winter, so the Seaview Café was her only option. Also, dogs were allowed in there.

Carole was by nature a law-abiding soul, and she could no more have gone into the café to use its facilities without making a purchase than she could have dismembered someone with a chainsaw. So, with mounting discomfort, she ordered a pot of tea at the counter and waited while it was prepared. She then took the tray with obsessive concentration across to a table and tied Gulliver's lead to a convenient radiator pipe, before rushing off to the ladies'.

When Carole returned, considerably relieved, she noticed a woman she vaguely recognised, zipped up into an anorak and sitting at an adjacent table. Whether she had been there earlier, Carole couldn't say—taking in the other customers had not been her primary priority—but the laying out of her tea things and the half-eaten doughnut suggested she had.

“Looked like you were in rather a hurry. It's the cold weather.”

The woman's smile identified her to Carole, and allayed any resentment she might have felt about public discussion of her bladder. It was Hilary Potton, who clearly didn't think Carole remembered their previous encounter. “We talked in Allinstore. I was on the till.”

“I recognised you.”

“I do four to eight every weekday except Wednesday. This is my day off.”

“Not a very nice one. Freezing out there, isn't it?”

“Certainly is. Handsome-looking dog. Labrador?”

“Mm. Called Gulliver. Extremely good-natured, but not very bright.”

“Oh, they're good family dogs. We had one…in happier times.” Hilary sighed rather dramatically. She indicated the plastic seat opposite her. “If you'd like to join me…?”

It went against Carole's every instinct to start fraternising with people she didn't know. But this was different. She had been trying to find out more about Hilary Potton, she had made the initial contact, and now she was being offered a second opportunity on a plate. “Well, if you don't mind,” said Carole, moving her tray across to the other table.

“I'm just here waiting for my daughter. She's at the house with her father. Things are easier at the moment if we don't meet.”

“Yes, I gathered from what you said at Allinstore that all was not well.”

Hilary Potton snorted at the inadequacy of this description. “All not well? What we're actually talking about here is a state of total war. I'm afraid my husband and I just do not communicate. I've tried to build bridges, but he's tried even harder to destroy them. Are you married?”

“I'm not wearing a wedding ring.”

“Doesn't mean anything these days.”

“All right. I'm not married. I'm divorced.” Carole still had difficulty in saying the words.

“So will I be soon—thank God!”

“Oh yes,” said Carole, casually probing, “you implied when we spoke in Allinstore that all wasn't well with your marriage.”

“You have a gift for understatement…I'm sorry, I don't know your name.”

They quickly established their identities and addresses. Carole was cautious not to reveal that she already knew Hilary's details. She thought further prompting might be needed to get back to the subject of the Pottons' failing marriage, but it proved unnecessary.

“So was your story the same as mine? Husband couldn't keep his hand out of other women's knickers?”

“No. No.” David may have had many shortcomings, but that wasn't one of them.

“Well, in my case, Alec—that's my husband—so far as I can gather, he'd been at it with various women virtually from the moment we got married. And I, trusting little domestic idiot that I was, never suspected a thing. He's always travelled a lot—he's a salesman, so I believed all his stories about having to work late, having to stay over for conferences…and all the time…” She seethed like a kettle boiling dry. “Let me tell you, it's going to be along time before I ever trust a man again. I think most women would be a darned sight better off without a man in their life.”

“I agree.” Carole nodded towards Gulliver, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “Dogs are much more reliable.”

“What really humiliates me is the sense that everyone else probably knew about it. All the fine folks of Fethering sniggering at me behind their hands and saying, ‘Oh, Hilary's such a meek little fool. She hasn't a clue what's going on.'”

“They always say the wife's the last one to know.”

“That's not much comfort!” This outburst prompted a ripple of geriatric interest in the Seaview Café. In a lower voice, Hilary Potton apologised. “Sorry. As you may have observed, it still rather gets to me.”

The geriatrics returned to contemplating their cooling and dwindling cups of tea.

“I'm not surprised, Hilary. If it's any comfort—and I know ‘Time is a great healer' is a peculiarly unhelpful comment—but things do get better eventually.”

“Thanks for the ‘eventually'—that's really cheered me up.”

“Sorry.”

“No, Carole. I do appreciate it. I'm sorry. At the moment I'm still just so…blindingly angry.”

“Maybe part of that never does go away.” Carole thought of the way David's voice, his constant “erms” could drive her into unreasoning fury.

“It's the selfishness of it that really gets to me. The money, apart from anything else. I mean, I've supported Alec all the way in his career. When I first knew him, he worked in a shop. Then I backed his decision to get a marketing training and become a salesman, which meant ‘good-bye, regular salary and hello, commission.' And I've stood by him when times were hard, been prepared to tighten my belt a bit, put Imogen into the state system, dig into my own savings for her orthodontic work, forgo family holidays, that kind of thing. And now I discover that all the time Alec was spending our money—our money!—on squiring various tarts out for meals and booking them into hotels for sleazy sexual encounters. Ooh, it makes me so furious!”

Carole managed to interject a “Yes,” but that was all she was allowed.

“And the effect it's had on Imogen—that's our daughter—well, I just daren't begin to imagine the harm he's done to her by his selfish and appalling behaviour. I mean, she's at a very difficult stage of any girl's life, and Alec's just adding to the pressure. This is the time when she should be forming her own ideas about the adult world, about how relationships work. What kind of an example is she getting from her father?

“And she's feeling our change of economic circumstances. Imogen's absolutely mad on horses, and we were getting near the point of buying her her own pony. But now, oh no, we haven't got any money for that kind of luxury. We haven't got any money for anything. We've still only got the one car and Alec has first call on that because he has to use it for his work. So that's extremely inconvenient. And now I'm reduced to the indignity of sitting like a dumb teenager behind the till at Allinstore, simply to pay the grocery bills.”

Hilary Potton had to stop, simply to regain her breath, so Carole managed to ask, “And is Imogen as angry with her father as you are?”

“Huh. No. Isn't that bloody typical? In a show of classic adolescent perverseness, she's actually taking Alec's side. She blames me for some reason. Well, I know what the reason is. It's because I'm there all the time. I'm the one who does all the day-to-day looking after Imogen. I'm the one who sees she gets fed, that her washing gets done. I'm the one who tidies up after her and has to listen to her whinging about everything all the time. And Alec—as he always has done—just swans in every now and then, and buys her affection with treats. Even now—even when our financial circumstances are so dire—Alec keeps taking her out for meals. And, of course, because she hardly ever sees him, Imogen worships the ground he walks on. Ooh,” she seethed, “until the last eight months I hadn't realised just how much of a disadvantage it is to be born a woman. We think we've all got liberated, we keep being told we have equal opportunities, but when it comes to the crunch, everything is skewed in favour of men. And we're so powerless to do anything about it. You hear these stories of spurned wives cutting up their husband's suits or spilling all their vintage wines or smashing up their BMWs, and until recently I've thought, Oh, for heaven's sake, how petty! Recent events have changed my mind, though. I'd do anything I could to get revenge on that bastard Alec.”

Carole's wish to find out more about Hilary Potton was certainly being fulfilled. In spades. But she reflected that, to unleash such an outburst on a virtual stranger, the woman must have very few close friends. Or maybe her fury against her husband was just so strong that anyone unwary enough to come within range was liable to get caught in the crossfire.

“You say your daughter's interested in horses…”

“What?” Hilary Potton had to be dragged out of her dreams of vengeance. “Oh, yes.”

“No, I was just thinking…because there was that dreadful business up at Long Bamber Stables. I hope she had nothing to do with that set-up, because it would just be another trauma for the poor girl.”

“That certainly hasn't helped. She's still in a pretty bad state. She seemed to be in total shock when she first heard about it. You see, Long Bamber's the stables where Imogen's had all her riding lessons. She spends quite a lot of time up there, mucking out and what have you. So, yes, she's heard all the gory details about Walter Fleet's death.”

“But—poor child—she wasn't round there at the time of the murder, was she?”

“No, thank goodness.” Hilary Potton looked affronted at the suggestion. “Safely at home with me, I'm glad to say.”

“Good. And I'm sorry, this sounds very prurient, but since everyone in Fethering is discussing the murder, does Imogen have a theory about what happened? Has she said anything to you about—”

“Shall we go then?”

They'd been too absorbed to hear her approach, but suddenly a girl who Carole assumed must be Imogen was standing beside them. She was wearing a school uniform. Perversely, in spite of the cold, she had her fur-trimmed anorak hooked on a finger over her shoulder. A dyed ginger lock flopped over her spotty forehead. Her expression and body language matched perfectly; both bespoke sulky teenage resentment. Whether or not she'd heard the end of their conversation was impossible to know.

“Yes, Imogen. This is Carole Seddon.”

The girl nodded curtly and gestured towards the door. She was damned if she was going to show any interest in her mother's friends. She was damned if she was going to show interest in anything to do with her mother. She hadn't wanted to come to meet her in the Seaview Café, and was not about to start disguising her feelings on the subject.

Experience had taught Hilary Potton that trying to get politeness out of her daughter in this mood was a losing battle, so, with a hurried farewell and vague intentions to phone Carole and meet up again, she followed Imogen out of the Seaview Café.

Leaving Carole frustrated about her last, unanswered question, and pondering guiltily the effects of marriage breakdown on the children involved.

 

On that evening's Radio 4 Six O'Clock News it was announced that the police had released the man they had been questioning about the death of Walter Fleet. Without charge.