‘You silver-tongued devil.’
‘I only speak as I find. Anyway, you do have to try real tennis. Anyone who is in a relationship with me has to try real tennis.’ An idea came to him. He grinned. ‘I know what. I’ll get on to the professionals and book a court for later this week. No point in hanging about, you can have your introduction then.’
‘Well, I—’
‘Don’t argue with me, Jude. There is no escape. You are going to have the experience of playing on a real tennis court.’
She grinned. ‘Well, I’ll give it a go.’
‘You won’t regret it. Soon you’ll be laying chases with the best of them.’
‘Sorry. Haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’
‘But I thought I explained the rules to you last night.’
Jude grimaced wryly. ‘I think it’s that word “chase”. The minute I hear it, I feel as if I’ve just been given an overdose of Mogadon.’
‘Ah.’ Piers grinned boyishly. ‘My mistake for trying to explain the rules when you’re sleepy. But now of course you’re wide awake! Well, the thing about laying a chase is that those parallel lines on the court—’
‘No!’ Jude put her hands over her ears in mock-protest. ‘No! No! No!’
At which they both collapsed in giggles. When those had died down, Jude said, ‘On the subject of real tennis . . .’
‘Hm?’
‘One thing struck me . . .’
‘What?’
‘Why do you play at Lockleigh House?’
‘Because I love the game. Surely you must’ve noticed that by now?’
‘Yes, I had noticed it – and I think your love for the game hovers very near the edge of obsession.’
Piers conceded her point with a spread of his hands. ‘Guilty as charged.’
‘But that wasn’t my question. I was asking, given the fact that you live in Bayswater, why do you go all the way down to the south coast to play tennis? You’ve told me there are courts in London . . . at Queen’s Club . . . at Lord’s. Hampton Court’s not that far away.’
‘Oh, it takes ages to get membership at Lord’s.’
There was a note in his voice that Jude hadn’t heard before in their two-week’s acquaintanceship. A note of evasiveness. She pounced on it immediately. ‘What do you really mean?’
Piers didn’t attempt to deny or bluster his way out. He just grinned and said ruefully, ‘Not much gets past you, does it, Jude?’
‘I like to think not.’
‘I used to live near Clincham,’ he said. ‘Little village called Goffham. That’s when I joined the Lockleigh House Club. Only a quarter of an hour away then. I used to play a lot. Three, four times a week, matches against other clubs, even trips to foreign courts. Don’t do it so much now. I’m not down there so often.’
Again Jude was acute to the nuance. ‘Not “so often”? You mean you do still go down there sometimes?’
‘Yes. Occasionally.’ He could tell from her quizzical brown eyes that she wanted more information. ‘I’ve still got a house down there. Where I used to live when I was married.’
Though she knew he must have been married, his words still gave her a little shock, perhaps in anticipation of all the other information they’d have to process through at some point. ‘Are you divorced?’ she asked.
‘No. We just don’t see each other.’
‘Right.’
Jude might have come in with a follow-up question, but Piers didn’t give her time. ‘Since we’ve got to this confessional moment, I suppose I should check out your marital status too. Are you married?’
‘Not currently.’
‘Suggesting that you have been . . .?’
‘Twice. Two marriages and two neat, matching divorces.’
‘Ah.’ Piers Targett nodded. ‘Good. Well, that’s cleared the air a bit.’
But as she travelled on the train from Victoria to Fethering, Jude wondered whether it had. She didn’t love Piers any the less, she didn’t regret a second of the past fortnight’s love and love-making. It was just that their relationship had moved up to a different level. A level that was no less serious, but perhaps more grown-up. After two weeks of intense one-on-one, they now had to find out whether their relationship could survive in the wider world, a world of other people and other responsibilities.
And baggage. Nobody could get to the age that she and Piers Targett had reached without accumulating quite a lot of baggage.
When Carole Seddon returned from her walk on Fethering Beach that morning, it was with a new sense of purpose. Though still hurt by what she could only think of as Jude’s defection, she’d decided that the only way out of her present doldrums was by being more proactive. She must get something going for herself to fill the days.
And it wasn’t going to be salsa classes or Spanish conversation. There was no point in trying to get herself enthused about something in which she had no interest.
But a subject that did intrigue her was the solving of crimes. It was an undertaking on which she had in the past collaborated with Jude. But since that was no longer an option, she would have to proceed on her own. And indeed solving a crime on her own would give her quite a charge, a secret snub to her uncaring neighbour.
Carole Seddon’s training in the Home Office had encouraged in her a natural tendency for the efficient organization of information. Her filing systems had always been immaculate, and when she became converted to the wonders of computers that offered even more opportunities for the management of directories and subdirectories.
On the shelves of the spare room where she kept the laptop (still perversely unwilling to acknowledge the machine’s portability), Carole also had box-files of neatly catalogued newspaper clippings. Anything to do with murder in the West Sussex area. Occasional extracts from her daily Times, more frequent cuttings from the Fethering Observer and West Sussex Gazette.
Carole knew exactly which file to take down from the shelf and which folder to take out and open on the spare bedroom’s table.
It was the dossier she had compiled on the unsolved crime known locally as ‘The Fedborough Lady in the Lake Murder’.
FOUR
The body had been found seven years previously. That summer was an exceptionally dry one, prompting dark mutterings from Fethering locals about global warming. The arid conditions had nearly dried up some of West Sussex’s smaller streams. Even the strong tidal flow of the River Fether had been considerably diminished. There were panics about receding reservoirs and many village ponds shrank, exposing their muddy margins.
This had also been the fate of Fedborough Lake. On the outskirts of the town, a large expanse of water only separated from the river by a road, it was popular with tourists and dog walkers. A complete circuit of the lake made a pleasant twenty-minute stroll. Rowing boats and pedalos could be hired from the lakeside café which normally throughout the summer did a roaring trade in ice creams, crisps and Sussex cream teas.
But that year trade had been slack. As Fedborough Lake dried up, weedy mud banks were exposed and, quite frankly, stank.
The human remains that had been found were too degraded to add to the general stink, but they too were revealed by the receding water.
For once it wasn’t a dog-walker who found them. That was the local cliché. Whenever a body was found, the report in the West Sussex Gazette would always begin: ‘A woman out walking her dog made an unpleasant discovery . . .’
But no, on this occasion it had been one of the men who looked after the Fedborough Lake boats. Business was slack because no one wanted to venture out on to the noisome water, so he used his enforced idleness to clear some of the debris exposed on the muddy banks. He loaded his wheelbarrow with a predictable selection of bottles, polystyrene burger boxes, punctured footballs, slimy plastic toys . . . and then he found what was unmistakably a human femur.