back feel?”
“Amazing. I don’t know what you did to it, but it feels completely back to normal.” Hardly surprising, since there was never anything wrong with it. “Now tell me – what do I owe you?”
Jude’s charges for her healing services were very flexible. Some people she treated free; those who she thought could afford it, she billed for whatever figure came into her head. Even though the Lockes were not well- heeled, she charged Bridget at something near her highest rate. Jude was very sympathetic to psychosomatic sufferings, but not to non-existent ones.
She called on her mobile for a taxi, and exchanged conversation of little consequence with Bridget until it arrived. The two girls sat silently on the floor, in suspended animation until they could resume their game. A stranger’s presence hadn’t inhibited them at all; but their stepmother’s did. Jude wondered how they’d react had it been Rowley who came into the room. She got the feeling the Wheel Quest would have continued uninterrupted.
When the cab arrived, Bridget Locke escorted her to the door. Her farewell words were: “Do give my good wishes to Carole.” This possibly answered the question that had been building in Jude’s mind since she arrived at the house: why had Bridget summoned her there? Could it be that all the Lockes had wanted to do was confirm that there was a connection between Carole and Jude? Were they aware of the two neighbours’ interest in the circumstances of Kyra Bartos’s death?
Jude couldn’t be sure, but in the taxi back to Chichester Station, she certainly felt more that, rather than investigating at the Summersdale house, she herself had been being investigated.
? Death under the Dryer ?
Twenty-Two
“This is where I live. Since you’ve come all the way from Fethering, can I invite you in?”
Carole had never felt so foolish in her life. To have failed so dismally at surveillance was bad enough, but to be patronized by the person she was supposedly tailing added insult to injury. Her first instinct was to drive off immediately, to slog shamefacedly back to High Tor and give Gulliver his supper and a nice walk.
But another part of her demanded that, having come so far, she had to see the thing through. She hadn’t worked out precisely what she was going to do when Theo reached his destination, but she had prepared herself for the possibility that, if he did see her, he would tell her to get lost. Instead, she was being invited inside his home. Surely, for someone who occasionally dared to think of herself as an investigator, that was too good an invitation to turn down.
On the other hand, what she was investigating was a murder and Theo’s odd behaviour suggested that at the very least he had something to hide. He was quite possibly in the frame as a suspect. To go into the house or flat of such a person could be risky to the point of recklessness.
Theo himself interrupted her indecision. “Make your mind up. I’m going in. You can come with me or not. But I’m not likely to ask you again.”
“I’ll come in,” she said with a boldness she didn’t feel.
“Fine.” He showed his beautifully veneered teeth in a smile that looked just sardonic, but could easily have been evil.
The BMW turned out to be parked exactly in front of his home. He used a key to let himself in through the heavy black door with fine brass trimmings, and summoned an old brass-gated lift – or, when inspected more closely, a reproduction of an old brass-gated lift. Inside, the control panel was all high-tec and computerized. Politely he gestured Carole to go in before him, and pressed the button for the third floor. Nothing was said as the lift moved smoothly upwards.
The silence continued as he led her out and moved straight ahead to open his flat. There were no other doors on the landing, indicating that Theo owned the whole of one floor. Carole just had time to register that hairdressers must make a lot more money than she had previously thought before he ushered her into the flat itself. There her impression was confirmed. Through the open hall door, she could see that the huge sitting room, its tall windows looking down over the square to the sea, was exquisitely and lavishly appointed. Sunlight glinted on the deep dark patina of fine furniture, and the paintings on the walls looked as if they were the work of artists Carole had heard of. If all of this came from hairdressing, Theo’s prices must be absolutely astronomical.
“I hope you don’t mind if I close the door,” said Theo. “I’m not sure what it is you suspect me of, but I don’t in fact have any intention of either raping or murdering you.”
His words so closely matched the anxieties running through her head that Carole found herself blushing. Theo indicated an armchair for her and sat down opposite, his bright brown eyes fixed on her pale blue ones. She looked away. She got the unpleasant sensation that he was enjoying her discomfiture.
“So…what’s this all about? You following me two days running? With your chubby friend yesterday…when I managed to give you the slip…and today on your own? As they say in the worst kind of thrillers – what’s your game?”
Carole decided to brazen it out. “I’ve been following you because I think you have a guilty secret.”
His hands flew up to his mouth in a theatrical gesture of shock. For the first time that afternoon, she saw some of the high campness he had demonstrated in Connie’s Clip Joint. “I heard you used to be a civil servant. Don’t tell me you’re from the Inland Revenue.”
“No, I’m not.”
He did an equally elaborate impression of relief. “Thank God for that. If you had been, then I might have had to admit to the odd guilty secret, but then I regard it as a point of honour to deceive the taxman in any way possible. If it’s not tax, though…” he spread his hands wide in a display of innocence, “…my conscience is clear.”
“It’s nothing to do with tax.” Having started on a course of confrontation, she had to continue. “It’s to do with the murder of Kyra Bartos.”
“Ah.” The small brown eyes narrowed. “I might have guessed. In a hotbed of gossip like Fethering, I’m sure there are quite a lot of busybodies who have their crackpot theories about that. Yes, I suppose every second pensioner over there sees herself as the reincarnation of Miss Marple.”
Carole’s first instinct was to be affronted, until she realized that ‘pensioner’ was in fact an entirely accurate definition of her status. She tried being a little less combative. “All right. Everyone is gossiping about the case, I agree. And everyone is making wild conjectures about all the people involved with Connie’s Clip Joint…”
“Thank you for the ‘wild conjectures’. The use of the expression displays remarkable self-knowledge.”
“So,” she persevered, “it therefore does become of interest when one of those people turns out to have a guilty secret.”
Theo looked puzzled. “But I thought we’d established that, apart from a little finessing on my tax returns…” Light dawned. “Ah. You are referring to my habit of changing cars at Yeomansdyke…”
“Not just cars. Changing personalities too, I’d say.”
She didn’t know how he was going to react to this, and was surprised to see him laugh. “Well, I can assure you it’s quite legitimate. My membership at Yeomansdyke is fully up to date. And I have special permission to park a car there overnight. I drive to the hotel in the morning, do a work-out in the gym, and then drive on to be a stylist at Connie’s Clip Joint. Anything wrong with that?”
“You change clothes.”
“And when you were employed as a civil servant, Carole, didn’t you quite frequently change out of your work clothes at the end of the day?”
“Maybe. But I didn’t change cars. Changing clothes and cars suggests very definitely to me that you have something to hide.”
“Perhaps.” But the accusation still seemed to amuse rather than annoy him. “Before we go into that…in your Miss Marple role…” Carole found herself blushing again. “In that role, where do you see me fitting into…‘The Case of Kyra Bartos’?”
She didn’t enjoy being sent up and came back with some vigour, “I see you as a murder suspect.”
“Do you?” This amused him even more.
