late…”
“Unfortunate choice of words in the circumstances, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it is.” The thought brought Carole up short. The screen of her mind was once again filled by the contorted, immobile face, and she felt the reality of what had happened. Someone had deliberately cut short a young girl’s life.
“Did you know her? Kyra?”
“She washed my hair last time I was in the salon. Didn’t say much. Rather shy, I thought. Or maybe she was concentrating on learning the basics of practical hairdressing before she moved on to the refinements of inane client chatter. So, no, I can’t really say I knew her.”
“Theo mentioned there was a boyfriend. Did Kyra say anything about anyone special in her life?”
Jude shook her head. “Poor boy. I should think the police would be getting very heavy with him.”
“Yes. He’d be the obvious first port of call. And from the look of the back room of the salon, Kyra had been entertaining someone there. Empty bottles, beer cans, you know…”
“Adolescent passions are very confusing…they can so easily get out of hand,” said Jude, with sympathy.
“Yes,” Carole agreed, without any.
“Hm.” Jude refilled their glasses. Still Carole made no demur. “So we’re back in our usual position when faced with a murder…total lack of information.”
“And not much likelihood of getting any,” Carole agreed gloomily.
“Oh, there may be ways…”
“Like…?”
“Well, obviously Connie’s Clip Joint is going to be closed for a few days. It is a Scene of Crime, after all. But, assuming it does reopen…I think I should have a haircut.” Jude shook her precarious topknot; it threatened to unravel, but the knitting needles just managed to keep it in place. “I could certainly do with one.”
? Death under the Dryer ?
Three
“So what’s the word on the street?”
“How should I know?” Ted Crisp replied gruffly. “I never go out on the street if I can help it.”
“All right,” said Jude patiently. “What’s the word in the Crown and Anchor?”
“Ah, that’s a different matter entirely.” Irregular teeth showed through the thicket of his beard in a broad grin. “What happens in the pub I
“Well then,” said Carole with less patience than her neighbour, “what is being said in here about the strangling in Connie’s Clip Joint?”
Deliberately delaying his reply, the landlord took a long swallow from his beer mug. It was near closing time, the only part of the day when he allowed himself any alcohol. He’d watched too many landlords drink away their health and profits to start any earlier. “There is a general consensus,” Ted began slowly, “that the girl’s boyfriend dunnit.”
“And is that based on anything more substantial than speculation?”
“Well, Carole, speculation is obviously the biggest part of what people are thinking, but there are a few other details that might point in the same direction.”
“Like what?” asked Jude. “We know nothing about the boyfriend, not even his name.”
“That I can supply. Nathan Locke. Sixteen…seventeen. Still at college, somewhere in Chichester. Parents live here in Fethering. I’ve seen him in the pub.”
“With Kyra?”
“Really can’t remember. Those students tend to come in mob-handed, hard to tell which one’s which or who belongs to who. And I’m so busy watching out for which ones of them are underage that I’m not concentrating on much else. The photo of the girl they showed on the television news looked vaguely familiar, but whether I’d seen her with anyone particular, I couldn’t say. Certainly not as part of a regular couple.”
“She looked rather different from the photo on the news. She’d had some piercing done oh her lips and eyebrows,” said Carole, for whom the image was uncomfortably recent. There was always something poignant about photographs of young murder victims – particularly girls – when they appeared in the media. Frequently they were out of date, posed school pictures of children who didn’t look old enough to inspire adult passions. Which only seemed to make their fate more painful.
“What was her surname?” asked Ted. “I must’ve heard it on the news, but it was in one ear, out the other.”
“Bartos,” Jude supplied.
“Oh yes, I knew it was something foreign. ‘Bartos’…now where do you reckon that would come from? Spain perhaps…? South America…?”
“Originally maybe, but there’s such a variety of surnames in this country, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s ‘foreign’.”
Ted took Jude’s reproof on board. “Yeah, OK, but it is an unusual name.”
“So’s Crisp.”
“Nonsense. There’s Crisps everywhere. Behind this bar here I’ve got salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, barbecue, smoky bacon – ”
The two women groaned as one, both aware of the huge blessing the world had received when Ted Crisp gave up being a stand-up comedian.
Carole was quick to put such frivolity in its proper place. “Bartos still sounds a foreign name to me.”
“Everything sounds foreign to you, Carole.” It was an uncharacteristically sharp response from Jude. Usually she let her neighbour’s prejudices pass without comment.
“Well, it’s true. Bartos doesn’t sound English.”
Jude couldn’t resist the tease. “And does Seddon?”
And Carole couldn’t resist the affronted knee-jerk reaction. “Seddon is very definitely an old English name. It’s been around since at least the fourteenth century. And it’s common in Lancashire.”
“I thought you thought everything in Lancashire was common.”
“Jude! If you – ”
Ted Crisp was forced into the unusual role of peacemaker. “Don’t know what’s got into you two tonight. Can we just leave it that ‘Bartos’ is a slightly unusual surname and could possibly be of foreign origin?”
“Very well,” said Carole huffily.
Jude just smiled.
“Anyway, Ted…” Carole reasserted her position as a serious investigator. “You said you knew something about the boyfriend…? Nathan Locke.”
“Only, as I say, that he did come in here sometimes.”
“He must have been quite a regular for you to know his name,” Jude observed.
“No, but one of my regulars does know him fairly well. Lives down the street from his family.”
“Who is the regular?”
Ted Crisp gestured over towards one of the pub’s booths, in which an old man mournfully faced the last few centimetres of his beer. “Les Constantine. Holds the Crown and Anchor All-Comers Record for the longest time making a pint last.”
“Could you introduce him?” asked Jude.
“He may not want to talk to us,” said Carole, her natural distrust of strangers asserting itself.
“You buy him a pint and he’ll want to talk to you all right. Buy him a pint and he’ll tell you anything you want.”
“Haven’t you called ‘Time’, though, Ted? You can’t serve him, can you?”
“Listen, Carole, I’m landlord of the Crown and Anchor. I can do what I like.” He lumbered across towards the booth. “Oy, Les, couple of ladies want to buy you a drink.”
The old man looked up lugubriously. “They’re probably only after my body.”
