After the customary pleasantries, she said, “So Mim’s let you out on your own, has she?”
The grizzled head turned nervously at the suggestion and nodded towards the building outside which he was parked. “She’s in at the chiropodist. A martyr to her feet, Mim. I tell her it’s down to all those ridiculous stiletto things she wore when she was a singer. If God had intended women to walk like that He’d have put prongs on their heels. You don’t go for shoes like that, do you?”
Jude laughed and lifted up one brown sandaled foot.
“Very sensible. If Mim’d worn shoes like that all her life, she wouldn’t have her current trouble.”
“I haven’t worn shoes like this all my life, Wally. I’ve had my time in stilettos.”
“Well, clearly not as much time as Mim.” Again he looked with some anxiety at the chiropodist’s door, but he was all right. She hadn’t come out yet. “And are you still doing the amateur sleuthing, Jude?”
“Still trying to work out how Kyra Bartos died, yes.”
He nodded, mulling over an idea, then said, “I had a call from her father yesterday.”
“Joe?”
“Jiri, yes. There is a meeting of the Czech Club in Brighton tomorrow night. He asked me if I was going.”
“You mean he is?”
He caught the eagerness in her voice. “Yes, he is going. And no, Jude, there is no chance that you could go there too to meet him. The club is Members Only.”
“Ah,” she said, disappointed. “And what do you do when you’re there?”
“We sit and drink.” He smiled fondly. “Some drink beer, some slivovitz. I drink Becherovka. And we talk about times…” There was a catch in his voice. “…about times that will never come back.”
“Does the club have its own premises?”
“No, no. We meet sometimes in a hotel room, a pub, sometimes at the house of one of the members. Two times a year we have big dinners, socials…with food from Czechoslovakia. Mmm, carp…” He smacked his lips nostalgically. “Guests come then, to those dinners. They are good evenings.”
“Maybe you’d invite me to one, one day…?” Jude joked.
Wally Grenston chuckled. “Nothing that I would like more. Nothing, though, that Mim would like less.”
“Ah.”
He smiled and lightly whistled a couple of bars of a lilting but melancholy tune, almost definitely one of his own. Then he announced, “I think it is good that Jiri rang me…”
“In what way?”
“It means perhaps he is coming out of his grief a little. Since Krystina died, so far as I can tell, he has hardly left the house.”
“Bereavement is a terrible thing.” Suddenly Jude had an idea for another approach to the old man. “I have actually done work with the bereaved.”
“Work? How do you mean?”
“I do healing…you know, like counselling. It has proved very effective. Maybe Joe Bartos would – ”
But her suggestion was cut short by a wry laugh. “You couldn’t have chosen a worse idea for Jiri. He does not believe in asking help from anyone, and certainly not help of the kind that might be called ‘psychological’. Joe is very much of the old ‘suffer in silence’ school. He has never talked about his emotions to me – or, I’m sure, anyone else. No, he will sort himself out. And, in fact, that he is talking of going to the Czech Club, this I think is good news. He is, as you say, ‘coming out of himself’.”
“Do you think that means he’s more likely to talk to me?”
The old man shrugged. “Who knows? It’s quite possible that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone about Krystina, that the reason he wants to go to the club is to talk about other things. I will only know when I see him.”
“Well, if he does want to talk…”
“Yes, yes. I have your number. I will tell him.” But Wally Grenston didn’t sound optimistic.
“I don’t want to put pressure on him to – ”
But Wally was frantically shaking his head and gesturing for her to leave. He had seen something through the chiropodist’s window. Jude moved off just as she heard the door opening. By the time Mim had emerged on to the pavement, Jude was twenty yards away. Once again Wally Grenston had lived dangerously and survived.
The landline was ringing when she returned to Woodside Cottage after her walk. “Hello?”
“Is your name Jude?” A woman’s voice, cultured, confident.
“Yes.”
“My name’s Bridget Locke.”
“Ah.” A coincidence? Except Jude didn’t really believe in coincidences. There was an intention and synchronicity to everything that happened. Nor had she any doubt that the Bridget Locke on the phone was the one married to Rowley Locke.
“I was given your name by a friend called Sonia Dalrymple.” A horse-owning client with whom Jude had had some recent dealings. “She said you do healing and stuff…”
“Yes.”
“I’ve suddenly done something to my back. I don’t know if you do backs. Maybe I should be talking to an osteopath?”
“I do backs.”
“Well, mine’s suddenly gone and – ”
“Gone in what way?”
“Sort of seized up down in the small of my back, but the pain comes all over the place, if I try to turn my head round or lift my legs in a certain way.”
“Mmm. Lower back pain. So you’d like to make an appointment?”
“Please.”
“Well, I live in Fethering, just on the High Street. I’m fairly free at the moment, so if you name a time when – ”
“Ah. The trouble is, I can’t drive. I mean, I can drive normally, but at the moment I can hardly move off my bed, and even just lying there’s terribly painful. I certainly can’t bend my body to get into the car. It’s agony. Look, I’m sorry, but would it be possible for you to come and see me?”
Jude needed no second invitation. She had heard enough from Carole about the Lockes’ set-up to want to see it at first hand. If she could cure Bridget Locke’s back pain – and she had a high success rate in such cases – then good. And if she could find out any more about Kyra Bartos’s murder and the disappearance of Nathan Locke, then even better.
“Yes, of course I could come to you. Where do you live?” she asked, knowing the answer full well.
Nineteen
Jude fixed to go to Chichester that afternoon. After four, when the younger girls were back from school and could let her in. She could do the journey by rail. The coastal trains on the Brighton to Portsmouth Harbour line were slow and kept stopping in the middle of the bungaloid sprawl at numerous stations with ‘wick’ in their names, but they’d get her there eventually. Then a taxi from Chichester Station to Summersdale.
She knew Carole would have driven her, but Jude didn’t want that, for a couple of reasons. First, the Lockes were presumably unaware of the connection between the two women. The sight of Carole’s Renault outside their house could ruin that. Then again, when she was going to do a healing session, Jude needed some quiet time to build up her concentration and focus her energies. That would be difficult to achieve in a car full of Carole’s scepticism.
Anyway, as it turned out, she couldn’t have got a lift from her neighbour. The immaculate Renault and its owner were elsewhere.
Carole wasn’t at home because she was on a mission of her own. An only child of borderline paranoid tendencies, she had never been good at sharing. Her relationship with Jude was one of the easiest and least judgemental of her life, but Carole still sometimes felt the necessity for secrets. Particularly in connection with their murder investigations. She could never quite suppress the pleasing fantasy of her doing something very successful on her own; of her finding the link of logic that brought together two apparently unrelated elements in a case. And the fantasy always concluded with the image of her casually presenting the vital new development as a rich gift to Jude.