“You’ve no idea who might have killed him, have you?”
“No. And I’ll be surprised if we ever find out.”
This seemed an unusually incurious response. “But presumably the police are on the case,” said Jude. “They’ll be investigating.”
“Yes.” But Nell Witchett didn’t sound very interested in the subject. “Yes. I doubt if they’ll find the killer, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it sounds like there was a riot down at the Crown and Anchor. Lots of people caught up in the fighting. When you get a mob like that, anything can happen. Poor Ray just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not for the first time, either,” she added, but still with pity rather than grief.
“Have the police talked to you, Nell?”
“Oh yes. First a couple of them came in the early hours of Monday morning to tell me what had happened. Young they were, a boy and a girl. I felt sorry for them. Must be a dreadful part of the job for kids that age, telling people their relations have died.” All her sympathy was for the police officers, none for herself. “And then they came again yesterday. Another two. These weren’t in uniform, the second lot. Detectives, I think they said they were. They asked me lots of questions about Ray, and I told them what I could. But of course I didn’t know anything about what happened Sunday night.”
“Did they seem to have any suspicions about who might have killed him?”
It was a question unlikely to get an answer, and Nell Witchett batted it away pretty quickly. “If they did, they didn’t share them with me.”
“No, I bet they didn’t,” said Jude. Throughout her experience as an amateur sleuth she had been constantly disappointed in how unwilling the police were to share details of their investigations.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?” Nell seemed genuinely confused by the question.
“Do you have any thoughts about who might have killed Ray?”
“One of the people in the fight.” The way she spoke, the answer was self-evident.
“You don’t think Ray was deliberately targeted?”
“No. That’s just how Ray was. I always worried that something like that would happen. He trusted people and I kept trying to tell him that some people were bad, that some people shouldn’t be trusted. But he never really took it in.”
Jude thought how he must have trusted the person who told him to switch the trays of scallops, and felt another pang of frustration about how close she’d got to finding the identity of that person.
“So you think Ray just wandered into the fight and that’s how he got killed?”
Nell Witchett nodded. “The police said it must have been very quick. He wouldn’t have suffered much. So that was good.”
She spoke with real satisfaction, and Jude could still find no explanation for the old woman’s behaviour. Nell had lost the son round whom her whole life had revolved, and yet she seemed to feel no pain. Jude still didn’t think it was the moment to reveal that Ray had been found at some distance from the fighting. Instead, she decided to go for a bit more background information.
“Is Ray’s father alive?” she asked.
“I’ve no idea,” the old woman replied without interest. “I haven’t seen him since Ray was tiny. As soon as it was clear the boy wasn’t going to be normal, my loving husband upped and slung his hook.”
“Did Ray remember him?”
“Don’t think so. There was always just the two of us.”
Then why, Jude desperately wanted to ask, aren’t you more upset by his death? But she continued to hold the question back, instead asking, “And do you know if Ray had any enemies?”
The idea was so incongruous that Nell Witchett laughed out loud. “How could someone like Ray have enemies? All he wanted to do all his life was to please people. That’s why he got so upset if anyone shouted at him. Ray never knowingly hurt a soul. Oh, maybe there were people who he got the wrong side of, or who took him the wrong way, but that was never his fault.”
“Was he ever bullied?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Well, people like him, people who are different from the rest of the world…sometimes they get victimized.”
The old woman was silent as she thought about this. Jude was aware of the rasping of her breath, and the thinness of her body under the layers of clothes. At last Nell Witchett said, “Yes, he did get bullied. Does still. I reckon the way Viggo treats him is a kind of bullying. And Ray’s suffered that all his life. When they tried him at ordinary school, there was a lot of kids who picked on him, because…well, because, like you say, he was different. And the same at some of the special schools he went to. There’s always someone out there who’s going to take it out on a boy like Ray.” A gleam of anger came into the faded eyes as she said, “It made me mad. I could protect him when I was with him, but at those schools he was on his own. However much I wanted to be there for him, I couldn’t be.”
Jude was now even more confused. Nell had the natural instinct of a mother to protect her child, possibly, because of the circumstances, stronger in her than other mothers, and yet she appeared to show no desire to find out how her precious son had died.
“So,” asked Jude, almost depairing now of getting any useful information out of the old woman, “you can’t think of anyone who would have wanted Ray dead?”
“No. But he is dead. And I’ve got my memories.” Again there was a note of satisfaction as she looked round the cluttered room, taking in all the photographs of Ray, the insubstantial record of his sad, short life. “He’ll be all right. Now he won’t need looking after no more.”
And finally Jude understood. At one level Nell Witchett was relieved by her son’s death. She no longer had to hold herself together for him. The problem that she had agonized over for decades, of who would care for Ray after she was gone, no longer existed. And that brought her a kind of peace.
Seventeen
Carole and Jude didn’t see each other on the Wednesday. At Woodside Cottage there was a full appointment book for clients requiring healing, and at High Tor there was a bit of a panic about Gulliver. The dog had cut his foot on some rusty metal during his morning walk on Fethering Beach. Fortunately the wound was on his shin rather than the soft pads, but it still bled a lot and Carole rushed to the vet’s, where she had to wait about an hour to get him patched up and given an antibiotic injection. So great had been her hurry that she’d not put a rug on the back seat and so spent a long time in the afternoon scrubbing canine blood out of the usually immaculate upholstery of her Renault.
Then when she finished that, she had a call from Gaby, who was again talking about her mother-in-law looking after Lily while she and Stephen went away for a weekend. That left Carole both excited and unsettled. All the old doubts about her maternal skills resurfaced.
One good thing did happen that day, though. Jude got a call from Zosia in the evening to say that the police had finished their investigations of the scene of the crime, and the Crown and Anchor would be opening again on the Thursday. Jude rang Carole and they agreed to meet there for lunch. Apart from the opportunity for a bit of snooping, they had to show their support for Ted.
As it had done a week before, the pub’s reopening coincided with the publication day of the Fethering Observer. And, of course, this time they had an even bigger story to splash over the front page: MAN KILLED IN CROWN AND ANCHOR BRAWL. There followed an overexcited article by the same junior reporter, who had read too much about Watergate. And it ended once again with the news that, due to the police murder investigation, the Crown and Anchor would be closed ‘until further notice’.