“Which, given who he’s married to, may well be true.”
It was an uncharacteristically bitchy line for Jude. And also risky. If Fiona Lister turned out to be Joke Burnethorpe’s closest friend, the remark wouldn’t be conducive to increased intimacy.
But, as was so often the case, Jude had judged her effect exactly right. The Dutchwoman’s face broke into a wide grin, revealing perfectly schooled teeth. “Yes, I’m afraid the Listers aren’t our favourite people. He spends all his time ogling me and she’s just malicious.”
“So you’re not on their Friday-night dinner-party list?”
“No.” She shook her head firmly. “I think Alan maybe was before he and I got together, but not now.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Fiona Lister invited him once when we were just going round together, before we got married. And Alan said, fine, could he bring me? Fiona said no, she didn’t think it would be suitable to invite servants to her dinner parties.”
“Ah.”
“The sheer arrogance. I was very angry. If my parents in Naaldwijk had ever heard about it, they would have been furious. Fiona Lister is only a butcher’s wife, after all, not a member of the Royal Family.”
Jude giggled. “I did recently hear another story, the kind of mirror-image of that one.”
“Really?”
“About Virginia Hargreaves…”
At the mention of the name, a shadow of caution came into Joke’s blue eyes. “Oh?”
“You used to work for her. Perhaps you can tell me if it’s true or not. That Fiona Lister invited Virginia Hargreaves to one of her soirées, and Virginia turned her down flat like a bedspread, on the ground that it wasn’t her sort of thing.”
Now Joke saw the funny side. “I don’t actually know if that’s true, but it would have been in character. Just the sort of thing Virginia would do. She never did anything she didn’t want to – and she didn’t…what’s the expression you have? ‘Suffer idiots gladly’…?”
“‘Suffer fools gladly’.”
“Right. Well, that’s it. She didn’t.”
Jude made as if to laugh again, but stopped herself. “Terrible, what happened to her, wasn’t it?”
“Virginia? Yes, awful.”
“Must be ghastly for you, having actually lived in the same house as them.”
“Well, it is ghastly now, now I know what happened. At the time I wasn’t aware of what was going on, so it didn’t really worry me.”
“But you must have noticed that there were tensions in the marriage?”
Joke shrugged. “Yes, but I put that down to what was happening with Mr Hargreaves’s business and, you know, how much he drank, which was a result of the same thing. But they led fairly separate lives. I don’t think Virginia was too worried, so long as she could do her own thing.”
“And what was her own thing?”
“Going up to London a lot, you know, to do her charity work.” The words were spoken without irony. Virginia Hargreaves’s housekeeper had been as incurious as the rest of Fedborough about what her employer got up to in London. Jude had the feeling that Alan Burnethorpe’s secret past was safe.
“Tell me,” she began, but she was interrupted by a clattering thump from another part of the house, followed almost immediately by anguished childish screams. “Should you go and do something about that? I’ll keep an eye on things here if you – ”
“No,” said Joke sleekly. “I have an au pair to do that kind of thing for me. That’s what she’s paid for.”
The words were spoken with enormous satisfaction and Jude thought what an unattractive role being an au pair for Joke Burnethorpe would be. There is no worse employer than the one who previously suffered the indignities of your job.
Yes, thought Jude, as she looked around the splendour of the sitting room. However high up Joke’s parents might be in the society of ‘Gnarled-vague’ (wherever that might be), their daughter had still come a long way to be queening it in Pelling Street, Fedborough. She had a very nice standard of living for a girl not yet thirty. And she had it because she was married to Alan. Jude wondered about what she’d overheard in the Crown and Anchor, how he’d bemoaned his new wife’s ‘old-fashioned’ attitude to adultery. Now she’d seen the house, she reckoned Joke might be unlikely to put all that at risk, even if it did mean turning a blind eye to her husband’s occasional sexual peccadilloes.
Still, time enough for such thoughts. Jude knew she mustn’t waste this opportunity to tap into the memory of the garrulous Joke.
“Did the police talk to you?” she asked.
“About what?”
“Virginia Hargreaves’s disappearance.”
“No. At the time no one knew she had disappeared. Everyone here in Fedborough thought she had just walked out on Mr Hargreaves – and very few people blamed her for that. He didn’t report her missing, or make any attempt to find her…”
“Which, if he had killed her, is hardly surprising.”
“No.”
“What kind of state was he in after she’d disappeared?”
“I didn’t see much of him. It was just round that time, you see, that Alan and I were getting together. I was going to move in with him to his house. Karen, his wife, had gone off to her mother’s with the children. I’d given in my notice to Virginia.”
“So when were you actually going to leave Pelling House?”
“That Friday of the weekend she disappeared. That’s what I did.”
“So you didn’t see her over that weekend?”
“No. Alan suddenly surprised me with a trip to Paris. He arranged that I should be at Waterloo on the Saturday morning. I had no idea what was happening, and then suddenly he showed me the Eurostar tickets. It was fabulous. We had a wonderful romantic time.”
A second alibi in France, thought Jude. Not that Joke really seemed to need an alibi. On the other hand, she’d raised the possibility that Alan might not have an alibi for the Friday night. Jude would check that in a moment, but needed to ask other questions first.
“So you didn’t see whether or not Virginia Hargreaves had packed up all her belongings when she moved out?”
The blonde head shook. “I didn’t go back to the house after that.”
“So the last time you saw her was the Friday?”
“I have just told you that.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. And you spent the Friday night with Alan?”
“In his house. Alan himself had to be in London that night but, as I say, we met at Waterloo on the Saturday morning.”
Jude quietly filed away this information. “And you and Virginia parted on good terms?”
Joke’s lips twisted negatively. “She had rather got up my nose just before I went. I was trying to move my stuff out, get it to Alan’s place, and she kept insisting I should stay and look after her.”
“Oh yes, of course, she was ill.”
“Not very ill,” said Joke dismissively. “Only a tummy bug. Something she had eaten – and of course she blamed me, because I did the cooking. But Virginia was always a terrible invalid, make a fuss about everything, had to be waited on hand and foot all the time. She was a very selfish woman.”
Another infant wail erupted from the interior of the house. This time it sounded as though the child in question was being impaled.
“I’d better go and do something about that,” said Joke peevishly, and went to the door. “The girl has no idea how to deal with Linus when he gets hysterical. If you wouldn’t mind staying just till I come back…in case anyone comes in to see the drawings?”
“No problem.”
Since she could no longer pursue her investigation, Jude did what she was meant to be in the house for, and took a look at Alan Burnethorpe’s drawings. From somewhere in the house, she could hear Joke berating the inadequacies of her luckless au pair.