“There must be more to it than that.”
“Ooh, there is, yes. It’s also self-protection. Let’s take Sheena as an example yet again. Imagine what’d happen with someone like her if she thought I was available. She’d be flirting, she’d be all over me. I tell you, behaving the way I do saves me a lot of aggravation. I’m much safer appealing to the fag hag in a harpie like Sheena than I would be if she thought I was hetero.”
Having met the woman in question, and having heard Jude’s account of a lunch with her, Carole could see Theo’s point.
“So did you invent the business for her about fancying Nathan and being jealous of Kyra?”
“I remember hinting at it to Sheena, just as a joke.
“But maybe it got embroidered in her rather over-active imagination.”
“All right, that’s possible. But it still doesn’t explain everything. The changing clothes, the changing cars.”
“In Fethering everyone thinks I’m gay. In Brighton everyone thinks I’m heterosexual. Yeomansdyke is where I change identities, that’s all.”
“That’s not enough. There’s more to it.”
“Oh? Tell me what there is more to it, Miss Marple.”
“Well, it’s an incomplete disguise, for a start. Fethering and Brighton aren’t that far apart. Maybe you don’t see many of your Brighton friends in Fethering, but it must sometimes happen that you meet one of your clients here.”
“Less often than you’d think. And on the few occasions when it does, they see me out of context, with Zara, with the children and they do a sort of take. I can see their minds working. And usually I can see them concluding: I’ve just seen someone who looks extraordinarily like my hairdresser. I promise you, it’s never been a problem.”
“Is that all the explanation I’m getting?”
Still with a glint of mischief in the dark brown eyes, he spread his hands generously wide. “Why? Isn’t that enough?”
“No, Theo. It isn’t.”
“Ah, I see.” He gestured round the lovely sitting room. “You’re telling me that all this is a bluff. A cleverly constructed front. The Theo of Connie’s Clip Joint is the real me. I am a closet gay, who fancied Nathan Locke so much that I killed his girlfriend in a fit of jealous homosexual pique.”
Again Carole felt herself blushing under his sardonic gaze.
Theo chuckled. “I’ll tell you the truth, if you like.”
“Would you?” she asked pathetically. “I mean, for a start, is Theo your real name?”
“Theo is my real name. I started off as an actor. And at one point I got involved in a production with one of those self-obsessed, power-crazed directors who builds up a show from months of improvisation.”
“Oh?” Carole didn’t know a lot about the theatre. She hadn’t heard of such a technique.
“Well, I was supposed to be playing a hairdresser in this show and so the director, true to his principles, sent me off to research my part by working in a real hairdresser’s. I did three months. It could have been worse. I was lucky – one of the other actors had been cast as a cess-pool emptier’s mate. Anyway, the usual thing – three months in the salon, three months of self-indulgent improvisation in the rehearsal room, and you end up with a show that would have been a lot better if the director had got a writer in in the first place.
“But after the run finished – and maybe because of what the show had been like – I go through a very bad patch work-wise. You couldn’t give me away with soap. And after a long time sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, I think: well, I’m going to have to get an income from somewhere…and I quite enjoyed that three months I spent in the hairdressing salon…so…”
“You became a hairdresser?”
“Exactly. I joined another salon, trained properly, and suddenly I was a stylist. Money’s not great, but compared to being an out-of-work actor, anything’s better.”
“And did you develop the, er…homosexual mask from the start?”
“Yes. As a joke at first. But then I saw the advantages. As I said, the customers like it, and it keeps them from prying into my private life. And there’s a third big benefit – they confide in me. Things they’d certainly never tell their husbands or lovers, and a lot that they wouldn’t even tell their girlfriends. You wouldn’t believe the things a gay hairdresser hears about female behaviour.”
“Hmm.” Carole found she was beginning to relax, recognizing that Theo’s sending her up was teasing rather than malicious. She gestured round the room. “That still doesn’t explain all this. I’m sure there are hairdressers who make a huge amount of money, but I’d have thought they’re the ones with chains of salons and their own ranges of hair-care products. I can’t think you make that much renting a chair at Connie’s Clip Joint in Fethering.”
Theo grinned. “Zara might have a lot of money.”
“Yes, I suppose she might.”
“But in fact she hasn’t. Or she hadn’t when I married her.” He stood up. “Do you want to know the last part of my secret, Carole?”
“Please.”
“I’ll tell you, but I really do want you to keep this to yourself. You’re not to pass it on to anyone else.”
Not even Jude, was her first thought. Then she decided she’d wait to see what the last part of the secret was. If it involved illegality, then she might have to break the promise of confidentiality she gave to Theo.
He led her to a door on the left-hand side of the sitting room. With his family in the house, Carole now had no anxiety in following Theo anywhere. He ushered her into a beautifully designed office. On a desk in a window overlooking the sea stood a lone state-of-the-art laptop. Other purpose-built surfaces held the armoury of more electronic equipment without which no business can now flourish. On specially designed shelves on the back wall stood rows of new-looking books – hardbacks, paperbacks, many in foreign editions.
“Come on, has your brilliant sleuthing mind worked it out yet?”
The reluctant Miss Marple was forced to admit that it hadn’t.
Theo took a hardback book from the shelf and held it across to her. On the jacket a determined-looking girl in a red dress stood on an outcrop of rock looking out at a departing steamship. The title was The Sorrowful Sea.
“Are you familiar with the oeuvre of Tamsin Elderfield?”
“No, I’m afraid I’m not.”
“Well, fortunately…” Theo gestured to the rows of shelves, “…lots of other people are.”
“You mean…you…?”
“Yes.” He grinned. “A third identity to confuse you, Carole. Theo the hairdresser in Fethering, Theo the family man in Brighton, and now – Tamsin Elderfield in virtually every bookshop in the world.”
“But…But…it’s romantic fiction, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is.”
“And you’re a man.”
“Spot on. Can’t pull the wool over your eyes, Miss Marple.”
“But, if you’re such a successful writer, why on earth do you still bother with a day job as a hairdresser?”
“Because, Carole, that is why I am a successful writer. A lot of authors have difficulty answering the inevitable question: where do you get your ideas from? I don’t,” he said smugly.
“You get them from Connie’s Clip Joint.”
“Of course I do. I actually quite enjoy hairdressing, but that’s not why I keep on doing it. No, Connie’s Clip Joint is the rich seam of experience which furnishes me with my plots. I don’t want to boast, but I think there are few men who have the depth of understanding of women’s romantic aspirations and frustrations that I do…or indeed that any other gay hairdresser does.