Eventually, Carole announced, “So Sylvia has won. She’ll get her divorce settlement – half the proceeds of the sale of the Crown and Anchor or whatever it is – and she’ll be able to marry the odiously boorish Matt, and live happily ever after.”
“Whereas poor old Ted…” Jude didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“Hm. I wonder if Sylvia knows yet about her good fortune…” Carole was thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Maybe I should tell her. Could I borrow your mobile, Jude?”
Her neighbour looked on in astonishment as Carole focused her memory to recall the relevant number and keyed it in.
“Ah, hello, Sylvia. This is Carole Seddon speaking.”
“Carole Seddon?” asked the puzzled, nasal voice.
“The Carole Seddon whom you believe to be the current girlfriend of your ex-husband.”
“Oh yes.” Sylvia contrived to get a lot of contempt into the two syllables.
“I just wondered whether you had heard from Ted.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that he’s decided to sell the Crown and Anchor.”
“Yess!” came the ecstatic hiss from the other end. “A result – hooray! I must tell my solicitor. She’ll be as chuffed as I am.”
“About your solicitor…” Carole began.
“Yes?”
“How did you find her? Personal recommendation? Just going through the Yellow Pages?”
“No. It was a bit of luck, actually. I just had a flyer through my letterbox, saying that there was this solicitor who specialized in divorce where the participants in the marriage have been apart for a long time and, basically, screwing money out of ex-husbands. It came at a time when things were a bit tight financially…”
“When you’d just been kicked out by your double-glazing salesman,” Carole suggested tartly.
“Look, if you’ve only rung up to bitch at me – ”
Carole realized that she should have restrained herself from making the dig, and quickly said, “No, no, no. All I was ringing to say was…well, I suppose to congratulate you…You’ve got what you wanted.”
“I certainly have.”
“Your solicitor sounds quite a powerful person.”
“She certainly is. Really tough. I didn’t reckon I would ever get much out of Ted, but she amazed me with the sort of sums she was talking about. And she’s pretty sure she can run circles round the kind of solicitor Ted’s going to find. She’s very high-powered.”
“She sounds it. A useful contact to have. By the way, for future reference, what’s her name?”
Sylvia Crisp replied, “Melissa Keats.”
Thirty-Eight
“God, is there no end to their dirty tricks?” asked Carole. “They deliberately targeted Sylvia to put even more pressure on Ted. A flyer through the letterbox – I bet hers was the only house in the street that received that delivery. Why would a hot-shot lawyer like Melissa Keats, who’s probably exclusively retained by Home Hostelries, bother with a sordid little divorce case?”
“In the cause of feminist solidarity?” Jude suggested.
“I’m sure that’s how she presented it to Sylvia, but come on, you don’t believe that’s true, do you?”
Jude admitted that she didn’t really, no.
“Ooh, this is so frustrating!” Carole pressed her knuckles hard against her forehead. “We’ve now got yet another definite link between Home Hostelries and the harassment of Ted Crisp, and yet we still don’t have a shred of proof! I just can’t think of anything else we can do. I suppose we could try to find Derren Hart again, see if we can get anything more out of him, though I very much doubt if he’ll talk to us. He certainly won’t if he’s had a warning call from Will Maples or Dan Poke. But what else can we do?”
“One thing I could do,” said Jude, “is to have a word with Kelly-Marie. I haven’t talked to her since the day Viggo died. She might have some news from Copsedown Hall. I mean, the police must’ve been there investigating Viggo’s death, apart from anything else. It’s worth trying.”
She rang through. Kelly-Marie had done a morning shift at the retirement home that day. She was back at home. And she’d love to see Jude.
“The policemen talked to me a lot about Viggo,” said the girl. They were once again in her neat flat with all its dog pictures and figurines.
Jude had noticed on the landing that the young man’s room was still sealed off with scene-of-crime tape. “Did the police let you stay here while they were investigating?”
“They said it’d be better if I went to my parents. Then they called this morning to say I could come back if I wanted to. And I did want to. I like it here. I like it at Mummy and Daddy’s too, but here I’m more independent.”
Jude was amazed by the girl’s calm. Here she was in a flat right next door to the scene of a particularly messy death, and yet she seemed to have a method of processing shock that would be the envy of other, more traditionally ‘normal’ people.
“Did you get any impression of what the police thought about Viggo’s death?”
“They thought he was playing a game of Russian roulette.” She spoke the words carefully, as if she had only recently learned them.
“But they didn’t say whether they thought he’d been playing it on his own?”
“I didn’t know more than one person could play Russian roulette.” The girl’s broad earnest face looked puzzled. Clearly the idea hadn’t entered her head that anyone else might have been involved in Viggo’s death.
“Did you tell the police about the man with the scarred face coming to see Viggo?”
“Oh yes. I told them about both times he came.”
“Both times? You told me he came here before Ray died, but when was the other time?”
“He came that evening, the evening Viggo died.”
Jude’s brown eyes sparkled with amazement. “Really? And was he still here when you heard the shot?”
Kelly-Marie shook her head. “No, he had left about half an hour earlier. I was in the kitchen when he went. He talked to me.”
Jude’s mind was racing as she pieced the scenario together. Derren Hart had come to see Viggo, primed him with beer and put the suggestion of Russian roulette into that most suggestible of minds. He had also perhaps loaded the revolver, telling the poor deluded victim that Russian roulette should be played with all the chambers full, or maybe only one empty. The ex-soldier hadn’t actually done the killing, but he had set it up.
But surely he hadn’t done it off his own bat? Derren Hart must have been obeying orders, just as surely as Viggo had obeyed orders to kill Ray. A trail of orders which had to lead back – though probably not in a way that could be traced – to Will Maples at Home Hostelries.
Suddenly Jude remembered details of Viggo’s rambling fantasies, tough-guy talk about orders arriving by text on a mobile phone, the mobile phone being jettisoned and the job done. Was that how he had received the order to kill Ray? And maybe, after Derren Hart’s visit, it had been another text message that had finally persuaded him to pull the trigger of the revolver pointing at his temple?
Hard on the heels of that came another recollection, of something Kelly-Marie had said, about how Viggo had always been throwing away perfectly good stuff, clothes and things, as he underwent his latest makeover. And how the girl had salvaged some of his cast-offs and taken them to the Oxfam shop.
Scarcely daring to hope that her intuition was right, and yet at the same time robustly confident, Jude asked, “Kelly-Marie, did you ever see Viggo throw away a mobile phone?”
“Yes, I did,” came the most welcome of replies.