“Does the club have its own premises?”
“No, no. We meet sometimes in a hotel room, a pub, sometimes at the house of one of the members. Two times a year we have big dinners, socials…with food from Czechoslovakia. Mmm, carp…” He smacked his lips nostalgically. “Guests come then, to those dinners. They are good evenings.”
“Maybe you’d invite me to one, one day…?” Jude joked.
Wally Grenston chuckled. “Nothing that I would like more. Nothing, though, that Mim would like less.”
“Ah.”
He smiled and lightly whistled a couple of bars of a lilting but melancholy tune, almost definitely one of his own. Then he announced, “I think it is good that Jiri rang me…”
“In what way?”
“It means perhaps he is coming out of his grief a little. Since Krystina died, so far as I can tell, he has hardly left the house.”
“Bereavement is a terrible thing.” Suddenly Jude had an idea for another approach to the old man. “I have actually done work with the bereaved.”
“Work? How do you mean?”
“I do healing…you know, like counselling. It has proved very effective. Maybe Joe Bartos would – ”
But her suggestion was cut short by a wry laugh. “You couldn’t have chosen a worse idea for Jiri. He does not believe in asking help from anyone, and certainly not help of the kind that might be called ‘psychological’. Joe is very much of the old ‘suffer in silence’ school. He has never talked about his emotions to me – or, I’m sure, anyone else. No, he will sort himself out. And, in fact, that he is talking of going to the Czech Club, this I think is good news. He is, as you say, ‘coming out of himself’.”
“Do you think that means he’s more likely to talk to me?”
The old man shrugged. “Who knows? It’s quite possible that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone about Krystina, that the reason he wants to go to the club is to talk about other things. I will only know when I see him.”
“Well, if he does want to talk…”
“Yes, yes. I have your number. I will tell him.” But Wally Grenston didn’t sound optimistic.
“I don’t want to put pressure on him to – ”
But Wally was frantically shaking his head and gesturing for her to leave. He had seen something through the chiropodist’s window. Jude moved off just as she heard the door opening. By the time Mim had emerged on to the pavement, Jude was twenty yards away. Once again Wally Grenston had lived dangerously and survived.
¦
The landline was ringing when she returned to Woodside Cottage after her walk. “Hello?”
“Is your name Jude?” A woman’s voice, cultured, confident.
“Yes.”
“My name’s Bridget Locke.”
“Ah.” A coincidence? Except Jude didn’t really believe in coincidences. There was an intention and synchronicity to everything that happened. Nor had she any doubt that the Bridget Locke on the phone was the one married to Rowley Locke.
“I was given your name by a friend called Sonia Dalrymple.” A horse-owning client with whom Jude had had some recent dealings. “She said you do healing and stuff…”
“Yes.”
“I’ve suddenly done something to my back. I don’t know if you do backs. Maybe I should be talking to an osteopath?”
“I do backs.”
“Well, mine’s suddenly gone and – ”
“Gone in what way?”
“Sort of seized up down in the small of my back, but the pain comes all over the place, if I try to turn my head round or lift my legs in a certain way.”
“Mmm. Lower back pain. So you’d like to make an appointment?”
“Please.”
“Well, I live in Fethering, just on the High Street. I’m fairly free at the moment, so if you name a time when – ”
“Ah. The trouble is, I can’t drive. I mean, I can drive normally, but at the moment I can hardly move off my bed, and even just lying there’s terribly painful. I certainly can’t bend my body to get into the car. It’s agony. Look, I’m sorry, but would it be possible for you to come and see me?”
Jude needed no second invitation. She had heard enough from Carole about the Lockes’ set-up to want to see it at first hand. If she could cure Bridget Locke’s back pain – and she had a high success rate in such cases – then good. And if she could find out any more about Kyra Bartos’s murder and the disappearance of Nathan Locke, then even better.
“Yes, of course I could come to you. Where do you live?” she asked, knowing the answer full well.
? Death under the Dryer ?
Nineteen
Jude fixed to go to Chichester that afternoon. After four, when the younger girls were back from school and could let her in. She could do the journey by rail. The coastal trains on the Brighton to Portsmouth Harbour line were slow and kept stopping in the middle of the bungaloid sprawl at numerous stations with ‘wick’ in their names, but they’d get her there eventually. Then a taxi from Chichester Station to Summersdale.
She knew Carole would have driven her, but Jude didn’t want that, for a couple of reasons. First, the Lockes were presumably unaware of the connection between the two women. The sight of Carole’s Renault outside their house could ruin that. Then again, when she was going to do a healing session, Jude needed some quiet time to build up her concentration and focus her energies. That would be difficult to achieve in a car full of Carole’s scepticism.
Anyway, as it turned out, she couldn’t have got a lift from her neighbour. The immaculate Renault and its owner were elsewhere.
Carole wasn’t at home because she was on a mission of her own. An only child of borderline paranoid tendencies, she had never been good at sharing. Her relationship with Jude was one of the easiest and least judgemental of her life, but Carole still sometimes felt the necessity for secrets. Particularly in connection with their murder investigations. She could never quite suppress the pleasing fantasy of her doing something very successful on her own; of her finding the link of logic that brought together two apparently unrelated elements in a case. And the fantasy always concluded with the image of her casually presenting the vital new development as a rich gift to Jude.
For nearly twenty-four hours an idea had been simmering in Carole’s mind. A piece of the investigation that she could do completely on her own. Indeed, it made sense that she should do it on her own. She was, after all, the one with the car.
The germ of the idea had come to her on the previous day when she had driven out of the Yeomansdyke car park, only to discover that Theo in his shiny BMW had vanished. When Jude had told her about his two o’clock appointment for the Tuesday afternoon, she knew exactly what she should do.
Carole Seddon’s experience of stake-out work was limited. Though there were undoubtedly people connected with the Home Office who had honed such skills by long practice, it was not something that had ever come up in her own professional duties. She had spent most of her time writing and reading interminable reports. So her knowledge of surveillance techniques was based only on what she had seen at the cinema and on television.
The first important prerequisite, she knew, was an unobtrusive vehicle, and here she already scored highly. In Fethering a Renault like hers automatically became part of the landscape. The streets were full of such elderly but beautifully nurtured old cars. Nobody would ever give it a second glance.
The second essential was that the driver should also be unobtrusive, and in this respect she was not so well
