‘Yes.’
‘But that was before I knew Roddy didn’t want to see me again.’
‘I’m sure that’s not—’
Alice cut through, with a cold hard edge to her voice. ‘I asked Mr Skelton if Roddy wanted to see me. He said no. All right, I’ve done some humiliating things in my time, but I’m not going on bended knee to beg someone to see me, when they’ve made it perfectly clear they don’t want to.’
‘Alice, you just need time.’
‘Oh yes? I’ve always been told I need time. Time to train to become a better actress. Time for singing lessons to make me a better singer. But there isn’t enough time in the world to prevent me from being what I always have been. A total failure. Someone so broken that I can never be repaired.’
‘Just give it a little time, Alice, and—’
‘“Time” again! Oh, that’s great, coming from you. A healer, and what’s the best you can come up with? “Time is a great healer”? Huh.’
‘Alice, I’m sure I could persuade Roddy to see you.’
‘“Persuade”? That’s great. I do have some pride, Jude. I don’t want to see my husband simply because someone has persuaded him that it’s a good idea.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’ Jude decided she wasn’t getting anywhere on this particular tack. ‘Did you get back to Blake Woodruff?’
‘What?’
‘When I was last here, Blake Woodruff left a message on the machine. I wondered if you’d got back to him.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Because he knew Heather well. He might know something that would help to reveal why someone would want to kill her.’
‘She’s dead,’ Alice responded with complete indifference. ‘Does it really matter who killed her?’
‘I would have thought it very definitely did matter.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter to me. Not now I know that it wasn’t Roddy.’
‘How do you know it wasn’t Roddy?’
‘A couple of the policemen came to see me this morning. To ask more questions.’
‘About what?’
‘Mostly about Mum’s singing lessons with KK Rosser.’
‘Oh?’ So maybe they were beginning to be suspicions about his alibi. But Jude didn’t want to go off in that direction. ‘And they told you they didn’t think Roddy was involved in the murder?’
‘Exactly that. They said they had “eliminated him from their enquiries”. And that gave me a lift. I immediately rang Roddy’s dad … only to get the repeated message that Roddy didn’t want to see me.’ Tears now flowed unchecked over the girl’s smudged mascara.
‘And it hasn’t occurred to you that Roddy might just be embarrassed at the thought of seeing you … given the circumstances under which you last met?’
‘No, I’m sure that’s not it.’ But, even as the words were said, Jude thought she could detect in them a tiny glimmer of hope.
‘Alice … if you’re not going to contact Blake Woodruff, would you mind if I did?’
‘I had no arguments with Heather Mallett about anything,’ said Bet Harrison. ‘When I said I was going to leave the church choir and just concentrate on the Crown & Anchor one, she didn’t try to persuade me otherwise, like some of the rest did. She said she thought she might do the same, once the wedding was over. I didn’t know her well, but there was certainly no animosity between us. Anyway,’ she asked curiously, ‘who started you off on this idea, that Heather and I had argued? It sounds to me like it was just someone who wanted to make mischief.’
For the first time, Carole wondered whether this assessment might be right. Elizabeth Browning was such a strange woman, with such a quirky sense of humour, that she might well feel diverting Carole’s suspicions towards another choir member was a good joke.
‘Go on, who was it?’ Bet repeated.
‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. They’d clearly got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘I’ll say they had.’
They were sitting in Starbucks, the venue where Bet had agreed to meet before her shift there started. Against her better judgement, Carole had been persuaded by the barista to abandon filter coffee and order a black Americano. Against her better judgement, she found she was rather enjoying it.
‘I hadn’t realized until I moved here,’ Bet Harrison observed, ‘the level of gossip you get in a place like Fethering. I mean, obviously there was a lot in Evesham, which is where I used to live, but not on this scale. It seems to me that gossip proliferates in inverse proportion to the size of the place where it originated.’
‘I think there’s a lot of truth in that,’ said Carole.
‘Whereas there is not a lot of truth in the gossip.’
‘Probably not,’ she conceded. ‘Mind you, a murder on our doorstep is bound to set tongues wagging.’
‘So long as they don’t wag about the idea that I might have had anything to do with Heather Mallett’s death …’
‘No, obviously not,’ said Carole, feeling a little guilty about having followed up on Elizabeth Browning’s – probably malicious – hint. But now she’d got Bet Harrison here, she might as well find out what she could from the woman. ‘So,’ she asked, ‘you didn’t really know Heather at all, outside the choir context?’
‘No. She was perfectly pleasant to me and, when I first moved here, I was glad of any kind of social contact. It’s difficult starting from scratch in a new place, which was why I joined the church choir, you know, to meet some people. Then the same with the Crown & Anchor one, which I found worked better for me … you know, with my commitments to Rory.’
‘Yes. Was he part of the pub choir too?’
‘No. I wanted him to join, but his voice has just started breaking and he’s very embarrassed about it. I do want him to keep up his singing when his voice has settled down, though. I’m very worried about him not having a social group down here … with us having moved so recently. You know we moved after my marriage broke up?’
‘Yes, I had heard that.’
‘You’re divorced too, aren’t you, Carole?’
‘Yes,’ came the reply, in a tone that prohibited further discussion of the subject. Carole moved swiftly on. ‘Has Rory always been musical?’
The ploy of getting a mother to talk about the talents of her offspring worked, as it always does. ‘Oh yes, from a child,’ said Bet. ‘He can pick up a tune after one hearing. I think he really could have a future as a professional singer, with the proper training. I asked Jonny Virgo if he would consider giving Rory private lessons, but he said absolutely not. He said he’d taught quite enough singing lessons during his career as a schoolmaster, and he didn’t want to do any more of it. He was surprisingly vehement on the subject.
‘So, then I asked Heather whether she would recommend KK as a teacher. She said yes, he’d be very good, but the more I saw of him at the Crown & Anchor Choir sessions, the less keen I felt on the idea of Rory spending time with him.’
‘Oh?’
‘There’s something very shifty about KK. I don’t trust him. I wouldn’t want to spend time alone with him. And I’m sure there was something going on between him and Heather.’
‘Hard to know,’ suggested Carole, who hadn’t seen the pair together as much as Bet had. But the idea of reviving suspicions of KK in the role of murderer was not an unattractive one.
Bet went on, ‘Rory’s at a very susceptible age. I don’t want him to get into bad habits.’
‘Are you suggesting that KK might have molested him?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ Bet almost laughed at the idea, then said, more seriously, ‘I just don’t want Rory to get into drugs.’
‘Brian, it’s Jude.’