Few of the quiz contestants took any notice of what he'd said. It was lost in the general badinage of disappointment about having another literary question. But the effect of the security officer's words on the quizmaster was astonishing. Reginald Flowers's face went suddenly red and he reached up to loosen his naval-looking tie. For a moment he looked as if he was about to throw up. Dora Pinchbeck stared at him with a mixture of alarm and compassion. When Reginald next spoke there was a distinct wobble in his husky voice.
'Right, have you all got that one? The school in Nicholas Nickleby? And we'll move on. Next question: what is the name of the guitarist brother of the Kinks' main songwriter, who co-wrote and took the vocal on Death of a Clown?'
Carole raised her eyes to heaven. How could any normal human being be expected to answer that?
Jude nudged her and whispered, 'Dave Davies.' Carole wrote it down. But then she'd never thought of Jude as being quite a normal person.
They hadn't won. In fact, when the answers were read out, the combined intellects of Carole, Jude, the Captain of Smalting Golf Club and his silent wife had only managed to beat one other table. Carole left the Crown and Anchor feeling a little disgruntled. Of course, the quiz had been just for fun. It didn't matter who won. But she had rather prided herself on her general knowledge and was disappointed not to have done better. Though she hid it well, Carole Seddon did have a surprisingly competitive instinct.
She and Jude were in the car park on their way home when Carole suddenly remembered she'd left her cardigan in the function room. She went back to fetch it, annoyed at having forgotten it and equally annoyed at having brought it in the first place. Sometimes the instinctive caution in her own nature infuriated Carole. Nobody else had taken a cardigan. Everyone else had trusted the warmth of the June evening, without worries about the fact 'that it might get a bit nippy later'. Sometimes just being Carole Seddon was an extraordinarily exhausting experience.
The lights were off in the function room, but enough illumination came from outside for her to see the way to her table and pick up the offending cardigan from the back of the chair. As she moved towards the main pub she was stopped by the sound of voices she recognized.
Between the function room and the bar ran a narrow corridor that led to the toilets. Carole shrank back into the shadows to listen. The two men, she reckoned, must have just been using the facilities, and fortunately the first words she heard from Kelvin Southwest were exactly the question she would have wished to put to Curt Holderness.
'What was all that about the school? You know, what you shouted out to old Reg?'
'You get a lot of useful information when you work for the police, Kel. Some of it information that people would rather never became public knowledge.'
'Are you saying you've got something on Reg Flowers?'
'You bet I have.'
'Something he'd pay for you to keep quiet about?'
'He's already made one payment, yes. But now he's not quite so forthcoming. So I think I need to have another chat with Mr Flowers rather soon. See if we can sort out some . . . more regular arrangement. I don't think he'll argue. Did you see how he reacted when I mentioned the name of the school?'
'Mm. I'd heard he was a teacher. That where he used to work?'
'Edgington Manor School, yes.'
'I haven't heard of it. Is it local?'
'Oh no. Up in the Midlands. But someone I knew on the force worked up there before he was transferred to West Sussex. And I met the bloke at someone's retirement do, and I told him I'd got this security officer job for the beach huts, and I was telling him about the set-up with the SBHA and what have you, and when by chance I mentioned the name of Reginald Flowers . . . well, he pounced on it and gave me chapter and verse.'
'Yeah? So what had old Reg been up to?'
'Well, let's just say he didn't get to full retirement age at Edgington Manor School. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he left the place under something of a cloud.'
Chapter Thirty
On the way back from the Crown and Anchor to their respective homes, Carole told Jude what she had just overheard.
'So you reckon Curt Holderness is blackmailing Reginald Flowers?'
'I can't put any other interpretation on what he said.'
'But you didn't hear exactly what had happened? Why he'd left the school under a cloud?'
'No, I didn't,' said Carole, before adding darkly, 'but I could make an educated guess. I think we should try to talk to Reginald as soon as possible. Are you free tomorrow morning?'
'Certainly am.'
Carole had reckoned that Reginald Flowers would be an early bird on Smalting Beach. Goodness only knew where he lived, where he spent his nights, but The Bridge was clearly the centre of his daily life. So Carole had decided to get there at half-past seven on the Saturday and give Gulliver his morning walk on Smalting rather than Fethering Beach. Jude, whose body clock favoured a more leisurely getting-up routine, was silent and, by her usually sunny standards, almost grumpy.
Still, both women had the sense that their investigation might finally be getting somewhere. Curt Holderness's admission the night before that he was blackmailing Reginald Flowers offered intriguing revelations.
But nothing, as it turned out, was going to be revealed that morning. The bar and padlocks on the front of The Bridge were locked in place, and there was no sign of the hut's owner.
'Staying in bed with his bronchitis,' Jude suggested. 'He did sound fairly ropey last night.'
'Yes,' Carole agreed glumly.
They took Gulliver for a long walk along Smalting Beach, as far as the headland that separated it from Fethering. But when they returned to the crescent of beach huts, there was still no sign of Reginald Flowers.
Disconsolately, they returned to the Renault, wondering who they knew who might have an address for the chairman of the SBHA.
As soon as she got back to High Tor, Carole checked her copy of The Hut Parade. There was a landline number for Reginald Flowers, but each time she tried it, the phone just rang and rang. Not even an answering machine message.
Carole Seddon took out her frustration by cleaning High Tor to within an inch of its life.
Next door at Woodside Cottage, Jude was equally restless. She tried to read the manuscript of a friend's book about the origins of acupuncture, but interesting though she found the subject, she found her mind kept slipping away from the text.
Till they contacted Reginald Flowers, there was nothing they could do on the Robin Cutter case.
It was early afternoon before she realized that there was still something she could try doing on the Mark Dennis case. She retrieved the phone number Gray Czesky had written down two days earlier, and keyed it into her mobile.
To her astonishment it was answered. By Mark Dennis.
He sounded subdued, but not adversarial. Jude didn't try any subterfuge, no pretence that she was a member of the police force. She just said that she was a friend of Philly's and she remembered meeting him with her. She said that she and her friend Carole would really like to meet up with him. Without demur, Mark suggested a rendezvous at six that evening in the Boatswain's Arms in Littlehampton.
'How did he sound?' asked Carole when Jude came rushing round to High Tor with the news.
'A bit sort of tentative. Vague maybe.'
'But not frightened?' She was remembering Nuala Cullan's description of the last time she saw her husband.
'No, I wouldn't have said frightened.'
Mark Dennis was not there when they got to the Boatswain's Arms. It was a roughish pub, the opposite end of the spectrum from The Crab Inn at Smalting. Littlehampton was like that. Although undergoing selective gentrification by expensive new developments of flats near the sea and the trendy modernity of the East Beach Cafe, parts of the town remained resolutely tacky. When Carole and Jude asked for Chilean Chardonnay at the counter, the Boatswain's Arms barman only offered them 'White Wine'. It was rather too sweet for either of their tastes. Lachrymose country and western music whined away in the background.