It seemed pretty clear to Carole that Marina Gretchenko had no resources of potential sympathy. There was no one she could turn to. And yet at that very moment in Brighton there was a woman whose only dream in life was to be reunited with her daughter.
‘Marina,’ said Carole, ‘you got in touch with your father . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Didn’t you ever try to get in touch with your mother?’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t you ever think of it?’
‘Yes, I did. When I ran away from home I was very angry with her. I didn’t think she understood me. And when I started living with Vladimir, he said I should shut myself off from her. It was what I wanted to do too, so I did. But then when I got in touch with Daddy . . .’ It was the first time she had used the word. Carole remembered Susan Holland talking about the enduring bond between daughters and fathers.
‘Did you ask him about your mother?’
‘Yes, I thought maybe enough time had passed. So I knew Daddy was still in contact with her, and I asked him to ask her if she’d like me to give her a call.’
Carole was bewildered. If that conversation had ever taken place, there would never have been any cause for her to contact Susan Holland about the Lady in the Lake. ‘But he never asked her, did he?’
‘Yes, he did. Daddy told me he’d asked her. But she’d replied that I’d hurt her so much, she never wanted to hear from me again.’
Carole Seddon’s fury knew no bounds. In the annals of divorce he knew how vindictive ex-partners could be towards each other, but she’d never before heard of callousness to match that of Iain Holland.
THIRTY-TWO
Now she knew about Piers Targett’s ongoing affair with Felicity Budgen, Jude could no longer keep out the flood of other suspicions about him that had been building up inside her. Had anything he had told her over the last few weeks been true?
She thought back to her first acquaintance with Lockleigh House tennis court, at the Sec’s Cup a couple of Sundays back. And very clearly she remembered what Reggie Playfair had said after his collapse on the court, which in retrospect seemed like a dress rehearsal for the more serious one he was to suffer three days later. When he had interpreted Henry the doctor’s suggestion that he might be about to ‘pop his clogs’, Reggie had announced, ‘I’m not the kind of person who believes in the idea of carrying secrets to the grave. No, my instinct has always been to come clean and confront people.’
At the time it had just sounded like bluster. But, given events that had happened since, Jude could see that his words could have been heard by a guilty person as a threat. What secrets was Reggie Playfair ready to reveal? Might one of them be about the affair between Piers Targett and Felicity Budgen?
If that were the case, then someone might have felt the need for Reggie to be silenced before he made his revelation. Piers’ account of Jonquil setting up the scenario of herself dressed as Agnes Wardock’s ghost was so bizarre that Jude thought it could be true. And she felt pretty certain that the sight of that filmy white figure had caused Reggie Playfair’s fatal heart attack.
Jonquil Targett was sufficiently weird to have thought up the charade for herself. But she was also suggestible enough to have someone plant the idea in her head. And who was more likely to have planted it than her estranged husband?
Jude felt profoundly miserable.
Carole, on the other hand, as she drove back from Southampton, felt very nearly smug. She hadn’t found out the solution to the mission on which she had first embarked – she had no idea who Fedborough’s Lady in the Lake was – but she had solved the problem set by Susan Holland. She now had some wonderful news to impart to that desperate woman. She just had to decide on the best way to break it to her.
The other achievement that made her glow with pride was that she had conducted the investigation on her own. She had set out to unravel a mystery completely independent of Jude, and she had solved it. While her neighbour had been preoccupied with what might have been – but probably wasn’t – a murder at Lockleigh House tennis court. And also preoccupied – not to say distracted – by her new lover, Piers Targett.
Carole Seddon decided she would keep her successful investigation secret a little longer. When she’d actually contacted Susan Holland, when mother and daughter were finally reunited, that would be the time to tell Jude what she’d been doing.
Jude was not a woman without resources. She had a wide circle of friends, particularly from the alternative-therapy world, but none of them did she want to speak to that afternoon.
Nor, despite her customary enthusiasm for direct confrontation and getting things out in the open, did she want to speak to Piers Targett. Their next encounter was not going to be an easy one, and Jude also had the sick feeling that it would probably be their last. She wished she could go back to the airy, confident Piers she had first met, before his image became sullied with doubt and suspicion. But she knew such hopes were pointless and vain.
She wanted to talk to somebody, though. And it was with some surprise that she realized only one person would fit the bill. Someone who wouldn’t offer too much easy sympathy, or alternative therapies to ease her pain. Someone who would talk to her directly and without sentiment.
For possibly the first time in their friendship, Jude really needed the company of Carole Seddon.
So she was relieved that Friday afternoon when she saw the neat Renault come back to the garage next door, and within five minutes of her neighbour’s return Jude was ringing at the front door of High Tor.
As Jude knew she wouldn’t, Carole didn’t mention the emotional dimension in her suspicions of Piers Targett. None of that ‘Ooh, it must be making you feel awful to have someone you love involved in . . .’ that she would have got from her friends in the healing world. Instead, Carole first made a pot of strong coffee. Then, as she listened to Jude spell out the progress her investigation had made, she just treated Piers as another suspect in a list of suspects.
And there was quite a lot to spell out. The two women hadn’t spoken about the case for nearly a week. In fact they hadn’t spoken at all since Carole had brought Jude back from their visit to Cecil Wardock in Lockleigh House the previous Saturday.
Jude gave her neighbour the edited version of what she had found out, not detailing every cul-de-sac and double-back that her suspicions had followed. Nor did she describe each member of the Lockleigh House tennis court she had encountered, merely the principle players in the mystery of Reggie Playfair’s death.
‘So . . .’ said Carole after the silence that followed Jude’s exposition, ‘at the moment the thinking is that he was killed deliberately. The Agnes Wardock ghost scenario was set up on the confident assumption that seeing it would cause Reggie Playfair to have a fatal heart attack?’
‘Yes.’
Carole grimaced ruefully. ‘Good luck to the barrister who stands up in court and tries to get a conviction on that.’
‘I’m not so concerned about a conviction in court. I just want to know who set Reggie up for that rather macabre death and why.’
‘Well, the information you have is that he went to the court following a text-message summons from Felicity Budgen?’
‘Yes.’
‘So did he actually meet her there?’
‘I can only assume so.’
‘This tennis court,’ Carole observed, ‘is getting rather full, isn’t it, on the night in question? Felicity Budgen, Piers, the demented Jonquil in a wedding dress, and then poor Reggie Playfair.’