Derren Hart’s anger vanished, and he seemed almost embarrassed as he replied. “Yes, he was interested in that stuff. I told you, he tried to join up.”
“So you talked to him a lot about it?”
“A bit.”
A picture was beginning to emerge for Jude. Here was the ex-soldier, traumatized by his experiences in Iraq, desperate to talk about them, but finding nobody back home was interested. The only audience he could get was the half-crazed fantasist Viggo. Who no doubt lapped up everything he was told. And started to regard Derren Hart as an action hero to match those in his beloved movies.
“You know that Viggo’s stopped dressing as a biker now, do you?” asked Carole.
The man didn’t commit himself to an answer.
“He’s now dressing exactly like you.”
“Is that so?” He couldn’t keep a little tinge of satisfaction out of his words. He wasn’t in a position to be choosy about his sources of hero worship.
“You know how impressionable he is?” said Jude. “He’d do anything you tell him.”
“Really?” Again the small note of satisfaction.
Carole went into full interrogation mode. “Have you told him to do anything?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Viggo talked about hitmen getting instructions by text on mobile phones.”
Derren Hart’s half-smile reappeared, and he chuckled. “Listen, lady, we’ve agreed the guy’s a fantasist. If he wants to believe in a world where assassination orders are issued by text message, we can’t stop him, can we?”
“Did he talk about that kind of thing to you?”
“Look, he lived in a world of his own. A world full of violence and hitmen and Russian roulette and orders given by text message. He talked about lots of stuff, but it wasn’t real, it was all in his head.”
“But you’ve never issued him an order by text-message?”
He held out his mutilated hand. “One of the many things this is not good at is text messaging.”
“And you don’t know of anyone else who might have issued text-message orders to Viggo?”
His shrug told them the unlikeliness of their getting an answer to that question.
“You went to see Viggo at Copsedown Hall…”
“How do you know that?”
“Another of the residents saw you arriving.”
“Who?”
“I don’t think that really matters,” said Jude.
Her words had been designed to protect Kelly-Marie, but the curt nod Derren Hart made suggested that he had probably worked out the identity of the witness and filed away the information.
“But you didn’t give him any orders then?”
The tautness of his ‘No’ suggested he was getting a little weary of their questioning, but Carole pressed on, “And did you ever issue orders to Ray either?”
“I told you – I never met the guy.”
“Are you sure? Because we believe that someone told Ray to substitute a tray of scallops in – ”
The scarred face closed down. Whether that was because the two women had got close to the truth, there was no means of knowing. Without speaking another word, Derren Hart downed the rest of his pint and left the pub.
Twenty-Eight
Carole Seddon was normally very organized about her shopping. Regular trips to Sainsbury’s, avoiding weekends, once a month to stock up on large essentials, once a week for food. Rarely was she in the position, like her less far-sighted neighbour Jude, of having to rush down to Allinstore, Fethering’s only supermarket, for emergency rations. But that Sunday evening she was.
She’d only had a sandwich at lunchtime after Viggo’s visit to Woodside Cottage, and was quite peckish by the time they left the Middy in Fratton. As she drove back to Fethering, she found herself visualizing the ham omelette she would cook when she got back. But on arrival, she found that the High Tor larder was devoid of ham.
Carole fed Gulliver, and checked out the dressing on his injured foot, but the image of what she wanted to eat wouldn’t go away. From what she had in the fridge she could have made a cheese omelette, or a tomato omelette, but by now the image of ham in her head was so strong that she had no alternative but to make a beeline to Allinstore for the missing ingredient.
The supermarket, legendary for its lack of stock and the pillars customers had to negotiate in approaching the till, was not full at that time on a summer Sunday evening, and Carole found only one other customer ahead of her in the queue for the only till that was operating. Idly she thought that the Black Watch tartan suit was vaguely familiar, and when the woman turned back with her purchases, Carole recognized the most avid of Greyille Til-brook’s acolytes from his anti-Dan-Poke crusade.
“Oh, hello,” she said instinctively. “I saw you last Sunday.”
“Did you?” asked the woman, a little alarmed.
“Yes. You were with Greville Tilbrook, in the Crown and Anchor car park.”
“Oh,” said the woman, now very alarmed, and she scuttled out of the supermarket.
Carole followed the woman’s departure through Allinstore’s front windows. And she saw the panic-stricken woman get into a silver Smart car.
Back at High Tor, her mind was seething with speculation. She was hardly aware of eating her omelette (which was just as well because Allinstore’s ham was notoriously tasteless).
She had no proof that the Smart car owned by the woman in Black Watch tartan was the same one she and Jude had seen careering over the dunes on the night of Ray Witchett’s death, but it was at the very least a coincidence. And if the car did belong to the woman, who appeared to be the acme of respectability, then why hadn’t she wanted to face the police and made such a hasty getaway? Why, come to that, had she stayed in the car park until after Dan Poke’s act had finished? Had Greville Tilbrook been with her? Were he and his acolytes planning to confront the departing crowd with their anti-blasphemy banners?
The other memory that kept recurring in Carole’s mind was the one that had struck Jude – Greville Tilbrook’s tirade against the wearers of ‘Fancy a Poke?’ T-shirts. Together with that came a vivid image of one such T-shirt, stained by Ray’s lifeblood. Surely Greville Tilbrook’s passionate views couldn’t be so strong that he might have…?
Her conjectures were interrupted by the ringing of her phone. She answered it and felt a sudden chill when the speaker identified himself as Greville Tilbrook. “I gather you spoke to Beryl.” Carole now had a name for the lady in Black Watch tartan. “Are you in?” he asked urgently.
“Given the fact that I’ve just answered my phone, I must be, mustn’t I?” She spoke with an uppity confidence she did not feel.
“Yes, but will you be there in a quarter of an hour?”
“Well, I was thinking of taking my dog out for a – ”
“Don’t leave till I arrive,” said Greville Tilbrook. He sounded very masterful. And even threatening.
Carole reached for the phone to ring Jude, but then remembered that her neighbour was going to see a healer friend that evening. For a moment there was a temptation to drive away somewhere, to let Greville Tilbrook find the house empty. But curiosity overcame Carole’s fear, and she stayed put.
Her work at the Home Office had taught her that the most unlikely people turn out to be murderers. A few are monsters, but most are meek and ordinary. That evening in her sitting room at High Tor Greville Tilbrook looked very ordinary. But not meek. His face was again suffused with the kind of fury that Carole and Jude had witnessed in the Crown and Anchor car park.