‘Oh?’
‘It was most embarrassing. She was carrying an empty champagne bottle … and from the way she behaved, she might well have drunk all its contents … Anyway, she banged it on the table and announced that she wanted to say a few words. And dear oh dear, the “few words” she said were entirely inappropriate to the occasion.’
‘In what way?’
‘What she said was, basically, that her stepmother, Heather, had ruined her father’s life. She implied that Heather had seduced him away from his first wife, which was totally untrue.’
‘How do you know that, Jonny?’
‘Because Heather and Leonard actually got married at All Saints, and I played the organ at their wedding. I remember it well, because I woke up that morning with a particularly bad migraine, and my mother said I should call in sick, but I said I couldn’t let them down. So, I did play for them, though I was feeling pretty terrible throughout the whole ceremony. And I’d discussed with both Heather and Leonard what hymns they would have, and so I got to know the pair of them a bit. And Leonard told me that his first wife had died some ten years before, and he’d only known Heather for eight months.’
‘So, Alice was lying?’
‘Well … obviously.’
‘Yes.’ Jude was thoughtful. ‘Of course, it is possible that they’d had a secret relationship before, which nobody else knew about, and Alice found out and—’
‘No, Jude. Out of the question.’
‘Oh?’
‘You don’t know Heather, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, she’s the most prim and proper person you could ever meet. The idea of her having a secret relationship with a married man … it just wouldn’t have happened.’
‘If you say so. Which means that Alice was lying.’
‘Must have been. But that wasn’t all she said in the church hall this morning.’ Jude didn’t need to prompt Jonny further; he was caught up in the momentum of his narrative. ‘She said that Heather had made her father’s life a complete misery. Alice said she had only married him for his money – he was quite high up in the insurance world, you know. And Heather had made him change his will, so that she – Alice – was completely cut out of it. Then, as soon as the will had been changed, Heather had no further use for Leonard.’
‘And what sort of state was Alice in while she said all this?’
‘Drunk, like I said. And totally hysterical.’
‘If she’d lied about her father having a relationship with Heather before her mother did, then the rest might all have been lies as well.’
‘Oh, I agree. Alice is a most unreliable witness.’
‘And do we know how Leonard Mallett actually died?’
‘He had a fall, apparently. Fell downstairs.’
‘And he was how old?’
‘Late seventies, I’d say. Maybe early eighties.’
‘So not an unlikely age for him to have had a fall.’
‘No, certainly not. I do worry about something like that happening to me. It’s an issue of balance, I think my internal gyroscope is not working quite as it should. I do sometimes feel very unsteady when I’ve been sitting somewhere for a long time, you know, at the piano or—’
Jude cut through the hypochondria. ‘Do you know if the fall killed him, or if he died in hospital?’
‘Oh, the fall did it. Apparently, Heather came back to the house, from wherever she’d been – shopping, I think – and found his body at the foot of the stairs.’
Jude didn’t think it was the moment to comment that in most crime novels – and many real-life crime scenarios – the person who discovers the body is always the first suspect. Instead, she asked, ‘What did Alice say this afternoon, about the actual death?’
‘She said it wasn’t an accident.’
‘That he was pushed?’
‘Yes.’
‘The oldest question in crime – and in crime fiction, too: “Did he fall or was he pushed?”’
‘That’s the one.’
‘And the pusher was presumably said to be Heather?’
‘Oh yes. Alice said there was no doubt about it. Heather killed her husband for his money. It was definitely murder.’
THREE
After Jonny had left, it was characteristic of Jude that she went straight round to High Tor to propose that, having turned down her neighbour’s suggestion of going to the Crown & Anchor at lunchtime, they should go early evening instead. And it was characteristic of Carole that she hummed and hawed a great deal, as if evaluating other pressing demands on her time, before she agreed to go. And when Jude proposed they go at five, Carole felt a disapproving flutter at the thought of having a drink before the end of the working day (though it was some time since she last had a conventional working day, since she had retired from the Home Office).
At five, they walked together past the parade of shops to Fethering’s only pub.
Ted Crisp, the landlord, was still dressed in his winter uniform of faded sweatshirt and grubby jeans, rather than his summer ensemble of faded T-shirt and grubby jeans. He greeted them with his customary gruffness. ‘So, would I be jumping the gun to pour out two large New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs?’
‘No,’ Jude replied. ‘You would be doing absolutely the right thing, and making us feel like regulars. Which is exactly what we like to think we are.’
‘Good.’ He looked at Carole. ‘You know, I dreamt about you last night.’
‘Did you?’
‘No, you wouldn’t let me.’
Jude giggled. Ted could never quite get away from his past as a stand-up comedian, though the quality of his jokes, as in this case, demonstrated why he never made a go of it.
Carole’s reaction was more complex than her neighbour’s. Though she understood the joke – which was not always the case with her and jokes – the innuendo couldn’t fail to remind her of the unlikely truth that she and the landlord had once had a brief affair. She coloured and looked away.
Serendipitously, further conversation was interrupted by a burst of riotous laughter from the back of the pub near the French windows which, in the summer, were opened out on to the beach. Jude looked at her big round watch. ‘A bit early for that kind of raucousness, isn’t it?’
Ted tutted and raised his eyes to the heavens. ‘That lot’ve been here all afternoon …’
‘Then I think we’ll sit up this end,’ said Carole, whose entire life had been devoted to the avoidance of ‘scenes’.
‘They came on here from some post-funeral drinks do in the church hall,’ he went on.
‘Oh, I think we’ll sit down there,’ said Jude.
In the residual afternoon sunlight, Carole recognized all of the group sitting at a wooden table in the alcove as members of the church choir. The bearded Ruskin Dewitt and the thin-faced woman were there, along with a couple of ladies (definitely, in Fethering, ‘ladies’ rather than ‘women’) in their sixties. These Carole knew to be sisters, called Shirley and Veronica Tattersall, who lived together in a flat near the Fethering Yacht Club. She also knew the name of a tall, thin woman with unlikely long red hair. Elizabeth Browning, who only lacked the ‘Barrett’ to make herself the full Romantic Heroine. She was often to be seen, gliding soulfully along the streets of Fethering, like a lady from Chekhov who’d lost her lapdog. In fine weather during the summer, she frequently leaned against the stone wall which guarded the mouth of the River Fether, gazing soulfully out to sea, and generally doing an impression of the French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Given that he’d shown no sign of recognizing her earlier in the day, Carole thought it unlikely that Ruskin Dewitt would suddenly remember who she was. She’d got the impression, from meeting him on the Preservation of Fethering’s Seafront committee, that he lived in a bubble of his own pomposity and didn’t notice other people much. Since she had never been introduced to the choir members whose names she did know, and since she didn’t know the names of the others, she started towards a table as far away from them as possible.