‘I see. Well, we’ll be able to see her emails when we get in touch with her.’
‘I can show you the text of what I sent right now,’ said Jude, as near to being rattled as her habitually serene temperament allowed.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Detective Inspector Rollins. For the first time, she looked down at her iPhone, woke up the screen and consulted some notes she had written there. ‘Now, according to Vix Winter, the junior librarian who found Mr St Clair’s body in the car park this morning, last night, just as she and her boss were leaving, she saw you getting into Mr St Clair’s car. She also said that, by then, all of the other people who’d attended the talk had gone home.’
‘Yes. That’s what happened. It was pouring with rain. Burton had offered to drive me back here.’
‘But he didn’t drive you back here. The dry patch under his car suggested that it hadn’t moved since he arrived at the library earlier in the evening.’
‘That’s entirely possible, yes.’
‘So why didn’t he drive you home, Jude?’
‘We had an argument.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And could you tell me what that argument was about?’
‘Very well.’
‘In fact, could you tell me exactly what happened last night, from the moment—’ Rollins looked down at her screen to check the name – ‘Di Thompson locked up the library and left in her car with Vix Winter, until you left Burton St Clair in his car … assuming that is what happened?’
The level of scepticism in the Detective Inspector’s attitude and body language did not lessen as Jude began her narrative. If anything, it increased.
Jude was punctiliously accurate in her reconstruction of the events inside Burton’s BMW. They were so recent that she didn’t have to dig too deep into her memory. But as she replayed the awkwardness of the encounter, she was annoyed to find herself blushing. And at the end of her narration, she could sense that Rollins did not believe the truth she had just been told.
Before the Detective Inspector could pass any comment, however, the iPhone on her lap rang. ‘Rollins,’ she said. ‘Ah, Megan Sinclair. Thank you for getting back to me.’
She rose to her feet. ‘I’ll take this in the hall,’ she announced as she left the room.
Detective Sergeant Knight and Jude looked at each other. Neither had much to say. The silence felt heavy between them.
SEVEN
Burton St Clair’s death was reported on Radio 4’s World at One. It was the last item on the bulletin – one of the ‘and we’ve just had a report that …’ ones – so no details were supplied. Nor was there any trailer to say that his work and legacy would be discussed on the evening’s arts programme Front Row. Burton himself would no doubt have reckoned he deserved such a tribute. The producers maybe did not think that one successful novel qualified him for that kind of accolade.
All the one o’clock news report did say was that he had been found dead in his car in Fethering, ‘a village on the South Coast, whose library he had been visiting.’
Jude listened to the bulletin in the irreproachably tidy environs of High Tor’s kitchen. Carole had rung – characteristically, rather than going next door in person – as soon as the Panda car had departed, and invited her neighbour for lunch.
The cottage cheese salad that Carole produced did not really qualify under Jude’s description of ‘lunch’, but she was far too polite to mention the fact. Anyway, she was in no state to be assertive. The shock of Burton’s death, followed so quickly by the interview with the two mistrustful detectives, had shaken Jude’s customary equilibrium.
She felt vulnerable and, in spite of Carole’s assiduous probing, was unwilling to divulge what had been said that morning in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage. After dutifully consuming her cottage cheese salad, she announced that she would go back home to have a sleep.
Carole recognized that this was very unusual behaviour from Jude. She also found it surprisingly difficult to persuade her neighbour that they should meet up later and have an early evening drink at the Crown & Anchor. Which again was most unlike Jude.
Her neighbour’s mood seemed only to have improved a little when they met at six in Fethering’s only pub. Later in the year that might have been the time when Carole would be walking her Labrador, Gulliver, but in January it was virtually dark by four o’clock.
There was no doubt, from the minute the two of them walked in, about what the Crown & Anchor’s main topic of conversation was going to be that evening. The first words they heard from the shaggy-haired and bearded landlord Ted Crisp were, ‘So, either of you two know anything about this stiff up at the library?’
‘Why should we?’ asked Carole.
‘Well, you two are more in the range of literary types than me, aren’t you? Ex-stand-up comics don’t go in so much for the reading lark.’
‘I know no more than what we’ve heard on the radio.’
‘Ah. And does your intonation imply, by any chance, Carole, that, while you know no more, Jude perhaps does know more.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant to imply.’ But Carole still looked at her neighbour expectantly, as if prompting some revelations.
The uncomfortable moment was interrupted by an accented voice saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, Ted. Are you forgetting what a landlord’s job is? You are meant to ask your customers what they would like to drink.’
It was his Polish bar manager Zosia, of permanent blonde pigtails and normally permanent smile. Jude noticed, however, that that evening the girl’s usual sparkle was absent. There was a sadness in her pale blue eyes. Jude, a creature of instant compassion, made a mental note.
Zosia had arrived in Fethering following the murder of her brother Tadeusz, and had become a fixture as bar manager of the Crown & Anchor. It was her efficiency, together with the culinary skills of the chef, Ed Pollack, which had transformed a shabby local into one of the go-to destinations on the South Coast. The hostelry had even been described by some online travel guides, in a term Ted Crisp loathed, as a ‘gastropub’.
‘I don’t have to ask these two what they want to drink,’ the landlord protested. ‘It’ll be a couple of large Sauvignon Blancs, won’t it?’
‘Well, if you know what they’re going to drink, there’s nothing to stop you pouring them out, is there?’ Zosia tutted and sighed in a mock put-upon manner. ‘I’ll do it.’ She reached for a bottle from the ice-filled tub on the counter.
The diversion had given Jude a moment to plan her response. Still feeling the shock of what had happened, she had no desire once again to go through the events of the night before. So, with a convincing giggle, she said, ‘You shouldn’t be asking us, Ted. We are, after all, in the Crown & Anchor, a much more efficient source of rumour and conspiracy theories than Facebook or Twitter. Compared to that, we know nothing. I’m sure you heard a few speculations about the death at lunchtime.’
‘You’re not wrong there. Yes, everyone had their own view of what had happened.’
‘I’m surprised they even knew about it,’ said Carole. ‘We heard the news on The World at One.’
Jude flashed a quick smile of gratitude at her neighbour, who could easily have opened a whole can of worms by saying how the information had come into Woodside Cottage. But Jude knew she only had a brief reprieve before all Fethering would know about her connection to Burton St Clair. The news of the body’s discovery had spread quickly, no doubt originating from Vix Winter, Di Thompson or someone else working at the library. It was only a matter of time before the knowledge of who had joined Burton in his BMW at the end of the evening was also revealed to the village.