KK pointed her towards a sofa, and made a desultory offer of tea or coffee, which she refused. Then he draped himself over a chair with one leg crooked across the arm, looking almost too elaborately casual. ‘So, what’s all this about?’ he asked.
‘As I said on the phone, it’s about Heather’s death.’
‘What about her death, and why is it any business of yours?’
Carole had thought, during the drive from Fethering, how she might answer this question, so she produced her prepared reply. ‘It’s just, there’s a lot of malicious and uninformed talk about the murder going around Fethering, and I feel I have a community duty to put a stop to it.’
Such a statement might have been plausible coming from the mouth of the Rev. Bob Hinkley, but no one who knew Carole would have thought it genuine coming from her. Using ‘community’ in a positive sense was just not something Carole Seddon did. She reckoned the word was the kiss of death to any project.
KK Rosser, though, didn’t know her, and took her words at face value. Not that that stopped him from sounding suspicious. ‘Very admirable,’ he said, before adding ironically, ‘what lucky dudes we’d be if everyone else showed the same level of public-spiritedness. “Community duty”, eh? Anyway, this “malicious and uninformed talk” you were on about … presumably it concerns me?’
‘A lot of it, yes,’ Carole replied. She had no basis for saying this, really. Her isolation from much of the Fethering ‘community’ meant she was out of the loop on a great deal of village gossip.
‘You don’t have to tell me the kind of things they’re saying.’ KK sighed wearily. ‘I’m already getting great blasts of it on social media.’
Not for the first time, Carole wondered whether she was missing a trick by not indulging in Facebook or Twitter. Not to use socially, of course – the idea appalled her. But for investigative purposes, that might be justified.
‘I think,’ she said boldly, ‘the reason they’re badmouthing you now is because your name came up a lot in discussion around the time of Leonard Mallett’s death.’
‘Because Heather was having a singing lesson with me when it happened?’
‘Exactly.’
He grimaced. ‘You’d think people would have better things to do with their time, wouldn’t you? Except in Fethering, of course, they don’t. You can only spend so long cleaning your car and counting your pension money, can’t you?’
Carole couldn’t decide whether this shift of pronoun from ‘they’ to ‘you’ was deliberately aimed at her or not, but she didn’t react. She just asked, ‘You said on the phone that the police have interviewed you …?’
‘Oh yes, endlessly. The pigs always have a go at anyone who leads an alternative lifestyle.’ Carole looked around the defiantly middle-class sitting room but made no comment. ‘And soon as I say I’m a guitarist, they immediately start accusing me of all kinds of stuff … peddling drugs, you name it. And this time, because I’d also been questioned when Heather’s old man turned his toes up … well, they had a right go at me.’
‘It wasn’t the same policemen, was it?’ Carole was unwilling to have her theory, about only fictional detectives working together all of the time, blown out of the water.
KK reassured her instantly by saying, ‘No. Never seen any of this lot before. Mind you, pigs are hard to tell apart, even at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times, let me tell you.’
‘So, did the police say anything to you about the two cases being connected?’
‘They’re never going to do that, are they? Always going to give you the absolute minimum of information. But the fact that they talked to me again … well, there’s no other reason for them doing that, is there?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, I had nothing to do with Alice’s wedding, did I? I wasn’t in Fethering the day Heather died, was I?’
‘Where were you?’
‘I was doing a gig with Rubber Truncheon over in a pub in Kent, wasn’t I?’
Carole thought about his words. Kent and Sussex weren’t that far apart. Presumably a music gig in a pub wouldn’t go on much beyond closing time. Heather was seen alive by the last guests at the wedding, so was presumably killed some time in the early hours. KK’s alibi didn’t completely rule him out as her potential murderer. But all she said was, ‘I’m sure you know that there’s been much speculation in Fethering about your relationship with Heather.’
‘Tell me about it,’ he groaned. ‘Bloody nosy curtain-twitchers, every last one of them.’
‘Well, given that she was known to be in an unhappy marriage …’
‘Yes, yes, all right. But look, it is possible for a man to spend time with a woman without immediately groping her. All I was doing was giving her singing lessons. Coming on to someone you’re teaching is a sure way of losing the gig. Heather wasn’t my type, anyway. Too quiet, self-effacing for my taste. And deeply neurotic. I always go for the rock chicks. Girls who just wanna have fun. They’re what lights this particular daddy’s fire. They’re what gets my mojo working.’
Carole had great difficulty in not wincing openly when he said this. But she pressed on. ‘The fact remains that someone in Fethering witnessed you coming on to her.’
‘Never!’ He sounded genuinely shocked by the idea. But then that was exactly how he would have sounded if he was lying. ‘When was this?’
‘Monday before last.’ Carole was sure of her facts. ‘After the choir rehearsal. After we’d had drinks in the bar. You went back with Heather to the Function Room. And then she shouted at you to “keep your hands to yourself”.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said, sinking his balding head into his hands. The ponytail dangled hopelessly over his collar.
‘Are you saying Heather didn’t say that?’
‘No, no, she said it. And let me tell you, it was the first time I’d ever touched her. Never once in all the times we’d met for the singing lessons had I even shaken her hand. Then that evening, I wanted to wish her luck for the wedding, and so I tried to give her a hug, just friendly, you know. But the minute I touched her, she bawled me out, just like your local snitch reported. I’ve no idea why. Heather was one confused woman.’
Carole digested this information, then again changed tack. ‘Did the police check your alibi in the pub in Kent, in full detail?’
‘Yes, of course they bloody did!’ Suddenly he shouted off into the flat’s interior. ‘Miff! Miff, come here a minute!’
There was a sound of coughing, which grew closer. The door to the rest of the flat opened to reveal the spidery figure of a middle-aged man in grey hoodie, jogging bottoms and bare feet. He looked as if he’d just been woken up. Carole remembered that when Jude had first introduced her to KK, they’d discussed a mutual friend called Miff. She wondered if this scruffy individual was another of Jude’s lovers. Carole wouldn’t put it past her.
‘Yeah, whassup, KK?’ the man asked blearily.
‘This lady’s called Carole. This is Miff, drummer with Rubber Truncheon, also guy I was working in Holland with a few months back. Miff is currently without a girlfriend, which means he’s been crashing out on my floor for, like, four, five months now, is it?’
‘Yeah, right. I am looking for somewhere, KK.’
‘Never mind that now, Miff. Will you tell this kind but nosy lady what you told the police when they asked you the same questions? Where were you every time Heather came here for singing lessons?’
‘Well, I was here, wasn’t I? I never get up till the afternoon. I’m a drummer, aren’t I?’
‘And where were you on Saturday night, after we got back from the gig in Kent?’