“Ah.”
“And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that my nephew is currently the subject of a lot of local gossip.”
“No. It’s hard to escape it.”
“The fact is that, without any evidence, without any trial, Nathan is being spoken of as the murderer of that poor girl in the hairdresser’s.”
“I had heard that suggestion, yes.”
“Well, I apologize for troubling you, Mrs Seddon…” He was extremely polite in his approach “…but, from the perspective of our family, this is very distressing…”
“I’m sure it is.”
“And…I hesitate to ask you this, but I understand you were at the hairdresser’s when the murder victim was discovered…?”
Carole confirmed that she had been.
“Look, you may think this is an awful cheek…and I will fully understand if that is your view…but I wondered if we could talk to you about what you saw…?” Carole wondered who the ‘we’ was. “The fact is, Mrs Seddon, that, apart from constantly questioning us about Nathan’s whereabouts, the police are giving us nothing in the way of information about what happened…which makes it very difficult for us to build up a defence for the poor boy…when he finally does turn up again.”
“You are confident that he will turn up again?”
“Yes, of course.”
He sounded bewildered that the question should have been asked, so, without spelling out the other local rumour that the boy had topped himself, Carole moved quickly on. “I don’t quite understand, Mr Locke. What is it you want me to do for you?”
“Just talk to us about what you saw in the hairdresser’s that morning. I realize that you may think this is a police matter and that you shouldn’t discuss it with anyone else…”
The priorities of her Home Office past made Carole think exactly that, but on the other hand she was being offered the opportunity to garner more information about people involved in what she and Jude were increasingly thinking of as
“I have telephoned the two hairdressers who were there that morning, and they have both taken the view that they shouldn’t talk to us…which, as I say, is entirely their prerogative…but I was just wondering, Mrs Seddon, whether you felt the same…?”
“I can see their point of view completely,” Carole began. “On the other hand, I’m also feeling slightly frustrated by the lack of information I’m receiving from the police, so if we were to pool our knowledge, I think it might be mutually beneficial.”
“I am so glad to hear you say that.”
“So what do you want to ask me?”
“Well, if it’s not inconvenient, I would rather the conversation were conducted face to face than on the phone.”
“That’s fine by me.”
“I don’t know how committed your time is…” His phrasing was again scrupulously polite.
“I’m retired, so I’m…” Carole overstated the truth “…relatively free.”
“Good. Because, seeing from the phone book where you live, I was wondering whether it might be possible for us to meet up at the house of my brother and sister-in-law…Nathan’s parents…?”
Better and better, thought Carole.
¦
As soon as she arrived at Marine Villas that same afternoon, it was clear that, though Arnold Locke owned the house, Rowley was the dominant brother. There was a strong family likeness between them. Both were tall and spare, with thinning straw-coloured hair and large surprised blue eyes, which made them look unworldly almost to the point of vulnerability.
The front room into which Carole was ushered deliberately showed the Lockes to be an artistic family.
At the end away from the window stood an upright piano, and beside it a Victorian wooden music stand, which suggested at least one other instrument was played in the house. Nearby shelves held neatly upright books of sheet music. The same tidiness had been brought to bear on the extensive collection of CDs in parallel racks. Carole felt pretty certain they’d all be of classical music. Some tasteful framed prints on the walls and rigidly marshalled bookshelves re-emphasized the Lockes’ rather intense interest in culture.
Also present in the room were Arnold’s wife Eithne, and Rowley’s daughter Dorcas. The former was a dumpy woman whose ample figure strained against the buttons that ran all the way down her flower-printed cotton dress. She wore her dark grey hair in a generous bun low at the back of her neck. Carole couldn’t help being reminded of the figure from a childhood pack of ‘Happy Families’, Mrs Bun the Baker’s Wife.
Dorcas, on the other hand, with honey-coloured eyes, long spun-gold corkscrew curls and a tall slender body, was the kind of girl who would have been earnestly pursued as a model by the Pre-Raphaelites. The clothes she affected, long eau-de-nil top over ankle-length pale green skirt, encouraged the impression. Her speech showed the same academic earnestness as the other Lockes’, but with a slight lisp. It made her sound more childish than her age, which Carole estimated at about twenty.
“My wife Bridget would have liked to be here too,” Rowley apologized, “but sadly she has to work. She’s a teacher in Chichester.” Maybe at the college where Nathan was a pupil?
Carole was struck by how relatively calm Arnold and Eithne Locke seemed. If her son Stephen had disappeared under suspicion of having committed a murder, she didn’t think she would be behaving with such equanimity. But Nathan’s parents appeared to think that everything was in hand and, from the way they looked at him, that Rowley was the one who had it in hand.
“I hope you don’t mind meeting us all together, Mrs Seddon.”
“That’s no problem. Please call me Carole.”
“Thank you. And I’m Rowley. But this is obviously a family thing we’re talking about. And it’s quite serious.”
“Particularly because it involves Fimby,” added Dorcas.
In response to Carole’s look of puzzlement, Rowley explained, “Sorry, Fimby’s a nickname we have for Nathan.”
“Everyone in the family has a nickname,” said Dorcas.
Carole hoped she wasn’t about to be told what they all were, and fortunately Rowley continued, “I must tell you, Carole, that our starting point is that Nathan did not kill Kyra Bartos.”
“Do you have any evidence to support that?”
“The evidence we have is our knowledge of the boy’s personality. We’ve all watched him grow up. He’s only sixteen, and he does not have a violent nature.”
“People’s nature can change…under provocation.”
“Maybe, but I can’t see Nathan’s nature changing that much. He’s a gentle boy. His main interest is English literature.”
“Rowley…” Carole didn’t find that the name tripped easily off her tongue, “…I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but it is quite possible that someone whose main interest is English literature, who is what one could call ‘bookish’, might have great difficulty in adjusting to the realities of the real world and, you know, particularly in an emotional relationship…” She left them to fill in the rest of the sentence.
Rowley nodded in acknowledgement of her argument, noting it down as a good debating point. “I agree that is a possible scenario, but not in the case of Nathan.”
“No, we really can’t imagine him doing anything like what he’s being publicly accused of,” Arnold contributed, and the ‘we’ he used seemed to encompass not just himself and his wife but the whole family.
“But you don’t have anything handy like an alibi for him at the time when he was supposed to have been with Kyra?”
“No.” After his brother’s brief intervention, Rowley once again took up the reins of the conversation. “And, indeed…I’m telling you this, Carole, because I respect the fact that you’ve agreed to come and talk to us this afternoon, and because I trust you not to spread the information around…we are pretty certain that Nathan did actually see Kyra Bartos the evening before she died.”
