Fiona tried to remember. “I don’t know. You wouldn’t go through Matthew’s pockets, would you?”
“I never have.”
“No, and nor do I. I trust Jeff. D’you think I should now? I mean, look in the pockets of the leather jacket?”
“Yes, I do.”
There was nothing helpful, only a pound coin, a supermarket bill for groceries, and a ballpoint pen. Fiona tried the pockets of Jeff’s raincoat. A tube train ticket, a button, a twenty-pence piece. “Where’s his driving license?”
“Where did he usually keep it?”
“I suppose it might be in the car.”
The two women went out to Fiona’s dark blue BMW, which she was obliged to leave parked in the street. Michelle, who was finding it less difficult these days to climb into a car than it had been, got into the back and searched the pockets, while Fiona, in the driver’s seat, examined the glove compartment. A road map, a pair of sunglasses, a comb, all belonging to her. No gloves, of course, there never are. Michelle found another road map, a half-empty box of tissues, a chocolate paper, and a single Polo mint. This might have been a valuable clue for the police if they’d known of it and known how to read it. Fiona dropped it down the drain in the gutter.
Michelle stayed with her, made lunch-salad and cheese and crispbread. Neither felt like eating. At midafternoon Matthew joined them. Michelle had left his lunch on a tray and to please her and divert Fiona, he told her he’d eaten it all, three slices of kiwi fruit, a dozen salted almonds, half a bread roll, and a sprig of watercress. By this time Fiona’s mood had changed. They’d been unable to find Jeff’s driving license, so he must have it on him and if he’d met with an accident could have been identified by it. The anger which had been suspended when she realized all his clothes were in the house, to be replaced by the anxiety of the night before, returned. He’d left her. No doubt he intended to come back one day for his possessions, or he’d even have the nerve to ask her to send them on.
The Evening Standard was delivered to the house in the late afternoon. Matthew heard it drop on to the doormat and went into the hall to fetch it. Fiona was on the sofa with her feet up, Michelle in the kitchen making tea. The newspaper had a big headline: MOVIE MURDER and under that: Man Stabbed in Cinema. A large photograph showed the interior of the theater where the body had been found, though nothing of the body itself, and there was no picture of the dead man. His name wasn’t disclosed. Matthew took the newspaper back into the living room but Fiona was asleep. He showed it to Michelle.
“There’s no possible reason to think it’s Jeff, darling.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Matthew. “He likes the cinema and Fiona doesn’t. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gone in the afternoon on his own.”
“What shall we do?”
“I think I’ll call the police, darling, and see what I can get out of them.”
“Oh, Matthew, what are we going to do if it is Jeff? How terrible for poor Fiona. And why would anyone want to murder him?”
“You can think of a few reasons and so can I.”
Leonardo had returned from his mother’s just as Jims was going out to get his dinner. The two men went to a new and fashionable Tunisian restaurant together, came home again at ten-thirty, and spent the night together in Glebe Terrace. Both were far too discreet to suggest Leonardo accompany Jims to Dorset, so he set off alone at about ten in the morning.
Once it was possible, when driving to the West Country, to stop in some little town of great antiquity and beauty, and there eat lunch in the White Hart or the Black Lion or whatever ancient hostelry graced the place. But since the coming of arterial roads that bypassed every urban habitat this pleasant custom had disappeared, unless you made a twenty-mile detour, and all that now existed to provide refreshment to the traveler were motorway cafés and huge complexes of restaurant, shops, and lavatories. Into one of these Jims was obliged to go, having parked his car among several hundred others, to eat a limp salad, two samosas, and a banana. One good thing: he’d avoided the Merry Cookhouse. By three he was back in Fredington Crucis, where he had a bath and dressed in his country go-to-meetings suit, a well-cut tweed outfit with waistcoat, a tan-colored shirt, and knitted tie. A crowd of antihunt protesters were assembled outside Fredington Episcopi village hall, all carrying banners with words like “barbarians” and “animal tormentors” on them. Dreadful photographs of tortured foxes in their death throes and stags escaping hunters by plunging into the Bristol Channel were set up along the short driveway. A horrible baying sound, not unlike that of hounds in full cry, went up from the protesters as Jims walked in, but inside he was greeted by sustained applause. The place was packed, with chairs in the aisles and people standing at the back.
The chairman of the local branch introduced him and congratulated him on his recent marriage. The audience cheered. Jims addressed them as “Ladies and Gentlemen, friends, Englishmen and Englishwomen, you who uphold our Dorset way of life, you the backbone of our land, this land of such dear souls, this earth, this realm, this England.”
They clapped and cheered. He told them at length what they already knew; what a glorious sport hunting with hounds was, how it had been part of English rural life since time immemorial, that it was a hallowed tradition which preserved the countryside and sustained thousands in employment. Though in fact he rather disliked riding, he went on to say what a pleasure it was for him, toiling all week in the murk and bustle of London, to go out with the South Wessex on a fine Saturday morning. The fresh air, the wonderful countryside, the sight and sound, surely the finest of all rural experiences, of the hounds on the scent. Foxes, he said, suffered very little in the chase. Lamping by night and shooting by the unskilled with a gun was far more cruel. In fact, he corrected himself, hunting wasn’t cruel at all, considering that only six percent of hunted animals were actually killed. The real pain would be suffered by those employed in various ways by the hunt-he quoted the alarming statistics in the notes he’d gone back to London to find-and who stood to lose their livelihoods if this pernicious bill became law.
He continued in this vein, though he was preaching to the converted and had no doubters to persuade. Just before he came to the end he recalled that he hadn’t responded to the chairman’s congratulations on his nuptials, so he finished by thanking him and saying how much he looked forward to setting his two charming stepchildren on horseback and introducing them to the joy of the chase.
The tremendous applause went on for nearly two minutes, with foot-stamping and shouts of approval. People queued up to shake his hand. A woman said she’d nearly not voted for him at the general election but now she thanked God nightly in her prayers that she had. The local branch of the alliance took Jims out to dinner in a horrible little restaurant called the Warming Pan, but he managed to escape at ten and drove himself home to Fredington Crucis House, fearful all the way that due to the amount of a rather disgusting Armenian red he’d drunk he might be over the limit.
Zillah had spent the sort of afternoon that wasn’t at all to her taste, first taking the children to a playground on the south side of Westminster Bridge, then walking them along the South Bank past the London Eye and the National Theatre and the bookstalls, as far as Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe. It was sunny and warm, and it seemed to her as if everyone in London was down there on the traffic-free embankment. Strange, then, that this walk reminded her of life in Long Fredington. The loneliness of it, perhaps, with no one else to talk to but two people under eight, no man in her life, not even Jerry. She hadn’t brought his pushchair, so after a while she had to carry Jordan. She bought ice cream and Jordan’s dripped down onto her Anne Demeulemeister jacket. “Sometimes I think I’ll still be carrying you when you’re eighteen.”