Though she had not invited the choir to the reception, Heather had demonstrated her loyalty by offering them a glass of champagne in the church hall straight after the ceremony. The same invitation had been offered to Bob Hinkley, and when all of the other guests were milling outside the church waiting for the bride and groom to be photographed, Heather whispered to her fellow singers, ‘Come on, quick! I’ll get you sorted out with a drink before I’m needed in the pics.’
The choir appreciated this priority treatment and were soon all equipped with champagne glasses. They looked around in amazement at the transformation of the church hall. The florists who had done such wonders in the church itself, had also worked their magic here. The tables laid for the wedding breakfast sparkled with gold and silver. Jude couldn’t help wondering who had actually bought the decorations. She knew they hadn’t been purchased by the bride on the day of her father’s death. And once again she felt a pang about the difficulty of keeping secrets from the terrier-like Carole.
‘Listen,’ said Heather. ‘I can’t stay, but I did just want to say thank you enormously for all your hard work. You really brought up the standards of the church choir, and showed what we could do when we really set our minds to it.’
‘I hope,’ said Bob Hinkley, ‘that now you’ve proved how good you can be, you’ll aim for the same quality every Sunday at All Saints.’
‘That might be tough,’ said Heather. ‘We put in a lot of extra rehearsal. And, of course,’ she gestured towards Toby the tenor, ‘we did have professional help.’
‘Something I could have provided,’ Elizabeth Browning reminded them, ‘in my Glyndebourne days. Before the nodules.’
‘But,’ Bob went on, ‘we should aim for those standards all the time. We do want everyone to do their best in the service of Our Lord.’
As the vicar remonstrated, he reached out a hand to touch Heather’s arm. She recoiled as if she’d received an electric shock and turned on him, ‘I’m not sure that everyone, Bob,’ she almost spat the words out, ‘thinks that the church choir is as important as you do!’
Jude was amazed by this sudden outburst, and Bob Hinkley looked shocked too. Heather tried to make up for lost ground too. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
Further apology was prevented by the arrival of Jonny Virgo and his mother, whose wheelchair meant they had made slower progress from the church than the others. Her friend, whose services as a pusher were no longer required, had presumably gone home. The old lady looked completely relaxed now she was once again with her son, and Jude was reminded of her level of dependence. The pressure on Jonny, as her sole carer, must have been enormous.
Heather grinned, her recent retort to the vicar forgotten, as she welcomed the new arrivals. ‘But here’s the man we really have to thank,’ she said, all charm. ‘Mrs Virgo, you must be so proud of your son.’
The old lady smiled a benign but unfocused smile.
‘And, Jonny, thanks so much for recommending Toby. He’s a star! You can keep your Blake Woodruffs, can’t you?’
Jonny Virgo smiled awkwardly.
‘Well done, Toby,’ Heather went on. ‘Alice was very impressed, I could see she was. She’s the one who knows all about Blake Woodruff, of course. I introduced them. I used to know him very well at one stage in my life and …’
She seemed to pull back on what she was saying, and continued, ‘That is to say, he’s really Alice’s friend. She actually invited him to the wedding, but unfortunately, he couldn’t come. Touring Australia, which, as excuses go, is a pretty good one. Blake and Alice are very close. He confides everything in her. All his guilty secrets, all about everyone who’s ever been in love with him. I think he’s always found it easier to attract love than to give it.’ Heather chuckled. ‘But if he’d been in All Saints today, he would have witnessed the work of a serious rival. Toby, you’re at least as talented as Blake Woodruff!’
‘Thank you,’ said the tenor wryly. ‘I don’t know about his talent, but I wouldn’t mind having a share of his royalties.’
All of the choir members giggled, except for Jonny Virgo, who looked distant and abstracted. Heather’s attention was drawn by someone waving to her from the doorway. ‘Sorry, I’m needed for the photos. Permanent records of this wonderful day. And thanks again to all of you, whose singing was such an important contribution to the day’s wonderfulness.’
Once the main body of wedding guests came into the church hall, the choir dispersed. Jude didn’t contact Carole to tell her how the event had gone, and Carole resolutely pretended that she wasn’t interested, so the phone in Woodside Cottage did not ring for the rest of the day.
On the next day, the Sunday, though, it did ring, soon after nine o’clock. A bleary Jude answered.
‘Did you hear what happened?’ Carole was high with incredulous excitement.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘A body’s been found, washed up on Fethering Beach.’
‘When?’
‘Earlier this morning. I took Gulliver out for his walk, and there was an area of the beach screened off by the police.’
‘Could you see what had happened?’
‘No.’ There was a wistfulness in Carole’s voice, as she said, ‘They wouldn’t let me close enough.’ She soon regained momentum. ‘But I met another dog walker and she’d met the person who actually found the body.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Jude, with a level of scepticism. She could hear the wheels of Fethering gossip clicking into motion.
‘No, really! And she recognized the body.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Heather Mallett.’
THIRTEEN
‘Another Fethering Floater,’ said one of the sages who always propped up the Crown & Anchor bar on a Sunday lunchtime. His name was Barney Poulton; he was invariably dressed in a thick-knitted fuzzy jumper, and was assumed by non-locals – particularly American visitors – to have been a fixture in the pub from the time when it was built. He represented the salt of the earth, the old village values of a Fethering long gone. (Though he had, in fact, retired to the area only four years before, from Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, whence he had commuted for nearly forty years to a solicitors’ practice in Holborn. His habit of installing himself, as a guru of local affairs, in the same bar seat most days of the week caused the Crown & Anchor’s landlord considerable irritation.)
‘You reckon?’ asked that same landlord, wearily, from the depths of his scruffy beard.
‘Bound to be, Ted,’ the sage nodded, secure that no one could question his authority on local matters.
A ‘Fethering Floater’ was the name given to a body found on the beach there. But not just any body. A corpse washed in from the English Channel would not qualify. The ‘Floaters’ were ones who’d fallen into the Fether. The river was still tidal as it entered the sea at Fethering and the flow could be ferociously strong. By some bizarre combination of currents and tides, the body of someone who had fallen into the Fether would always turn up within twenty-four hours on Fethering Beach. And that, the Crown & Anchor sage assured his audience at the bar, was what had happened to Heather Mallett.
‘How can you be certain?’ asked Jude, who had come to the pub in the hope of getting more details of what had happened (though she was fully aware that the accuracy of such details could be extremely suspect). Carole wasn’t with her, because she had been asked if the police could visit her to tell them anything she might have seen on Fethering Beach that morning. She claimed the intrusion was a great nuisance, but had been clearly excited by the prospect of giving her testimony.
‘You take my word for it,’ said Barney Poulton. ‘I know about these things.’