“No.” After his brother’s brief intervention, Rowley once again took up the reins of the conversation. “And, indeed…I’m telling you this, Carole, because I respect the fact that you’ve agreed to come and talk to us this afternoon, and because I trust you not to spread the information around…we are pretty certain that Nathan did actually see Kyra Bartos the evening before she died.”
“You haven’t heard that from Nathan himself?”
“We’ve heard nothing from Nathan himself.”
“And you don’t think he’s just run off, for reasons which have nothing to do with the murder?”
Rowley was puzzled by the question. “Why on earth would he do that?”
“Young people do it all the time. You know, if they’re unhappy at home…”
“Nathan was not unhappy at home,” said Rowley firmly. “We are a very strong family, and he always enjoyed being part of it.”
This was spoken so much like an article of faith that Carole found herself wondering what it must have been like for any family member who questioned the party line. She knew she’d find such a set-up impossibly claustrophobic. Maybe Nathan did too…
Eithne Locke, perhaps because she feared being thought unmaternal, interjected at this point. “Of course he wouldn’t want to run off. Listen, we haven’t seen Nathan since he left here early that evening, round seven. Arnold and I are obviously worried sick.” But she didn’t sound worried sick. Still, Carole knew that that meant nothing. The woman’s surface calm might well be a coping mechanism for her anxiety.
“We are sure he will come home eventually,” the boy’s mother went on, “but he must be aware that he’s a suspect and I’m sure he’s terrified of the police getting hold of him.”
“Our fine boys in blue,” said Rowley Locke, clearly speaking from a long-held agenda, “do not have the best reputation in the world for the way they deal with suspects. Human rights tend to cover only what can be seen; they frequently cease at the door of the interrogation room. We don’t want Nathan to have to go through that.”
Carole, whose experiences in the Home Office had given her a less cynical attitude to the British police, did not think that this was the moment to take issue. Nor did she think it was the moment to raise the question of suicide with the boy’s parents. It seemed to have entered their thoughts no more than it had Rowley’s, and Carole was not about to create new anxieties for them.
“Have you any idea how the police’s search for Nathan is going?”
Rowley Locke shrugged. “As I say, we’re not very high up the distribution list for police information.” Join the club, thought Carole. “They’ve asked us about where he might be, obviously.”
“They even had the nerve,” said Eithne, “to search this house to see if he was hiding somewhere.”
“Though they did ask our permission first,” her husband pointed out.
“Yes, but only because they would have had to get a search warrant otherwise,” Eithne added.
“And they looked for him in our house as well,” said Rowley. “We too gave permission. We have nothing to hide. They even searched Treboddick.”
“Treboddick?”
“Oh, sorry, Carole. It’s a place we have in Cornwall. They thought Nathan might have hidden himself away down there.”
“Well, I suppose that’s a reasonable suspicion, isn’t it? If it’s a family place?”
“Huh.” Rowley Locke was not temperamentally inclined to listen to any arguments in favour of ‘our fine boys in blue’. “Anyway,” he went on, “the reason for wanting to talk to you, as I said on the phone, is because the police are telling us nothing. And it’s very difficult for us to get a handle on what Nathan might or might not have done, when we don’t know exactly what it is he’s been accused of.”
“He hasn’t been accused of anything yet.”
“All right. What he’s suspected of having done. And I just thought…because you were actually on the scene when the body was discovered, you might know something…well, more than we do, anyway.”
Carole nodded thoughtfully and looked around the room. She felt justified in taking her time. What the Lockes were asking could be considered as a major intrusion into her privacy. They weren’t to know she was at least as desperate to find out everything about them as they were about her.
The framed photographs on the mantelpiece and walls corrected an image of the family that she had received. Dorcas’s prissiness had suggested to Carole that she was an only child, but the evidence negated that impression. All the pictures showed lots of children, and both sets of parents, in a variety of relaxed holiday settings. Both Nathan and Dorcas had siblings, one of hers being an identical twin. Carole got the strong impression that the Locke cousins did everything together. And no doubt, she thought with a mental cringe, they all had nicknames like Fimby.
“I see you’re looking at the photographs,” said Rowley. “That’s Nathan.”
The boy he pointed out had darker hair, but the same susceptible pale blue eyes. He was good-looking, probably about thirteen when the photograph had been taken. The massed children were on a boat in a creek that looked Cornish, the Helford River maybe. Presumably the setting was somewhere near Treboddick. The other children were taking up nautical poses for the camera, like something out of Swallows and Amazons (a book which Carole suddenly felt certain the Lockes would have read with enormous relish). But Nathan looked detached, almost embarrassed by the play-acting around him. Maybe it had only been a phase, an adolescent grumpiness which had afflicted him that one particular day, but Carole got the impression of the boy as an unwilling outsider in the claustrophobic world of the Locke family.
“Thank you. I haven’t met him obviously,” she said. “And I’m afraid I don’t know much about the background or the history at Connie’s Clip Joint. That morning was the first time I had been in the salon.”
“It must have been a terrible shock for you. But do you mind telling us what you actually saw?”
“No, not at all.”
“And is it all right if I take notes?”
Carole shrugged permission. Rowley Locke took a small plain leatherbound notebook out of his jacket pocket, and then unscrewed a large fountain pen. He opened a page on which she could see neat italic writing in brown ink. She had a feeling that everything Rowley Locke did in his life would be balanced on that fine line between individuality and pretension.
Her description of what she had seen in the back room at Connie’s Clip Joint was delivered as impassively as she could make it. When she had finished, Rowley Locke completed his last note with a neat full stop.
“Thank you so much, Carole. There were quite a lot of details there we didn’t know about.”
“Oh?”
“Well, we knew how the girl had been strangled, and what had been used to do the deed, but we didn’t know anything about the vodka bottle and beer cans. Or the red roses.”
“Those all seem to suggest that Kyra had been entertaining someone in the salon that evening. She had the keys, you see, so that she could open up the following morning.” Carole remembered something Les Constantine had told her, and could see no harm in passing it on. “I gather that Kyra’s father was very protective of her, wouldn’t have liked the idea of her having boyfriends around at home. So I suppose, if the girl wanted to be alone with Nathan, Connie’s Clip Joint was the obvious place for them to go.”
Eithne Locke, interpreting this as some obscure slight on her as a parent, insisted that Nathan had always been welcome to bring Kyra to Marine Villas. “We made that very clear to him. Arnold and I have very liberal attitudes to that kind of thing. Diggo had one girlfriend virtually living here just before he went to university.”