“Ah, Jude, isn’t it? I thought I saw you in there. So, what did you think of my little Sophia, eh?”
“I thought there was a lot of talent there,” she said tactfully.
“Yes. Bloody stupid thing for a girl to do, though, isn’t it? No security in acting. Hope she’ll see the light soon and start doing something sensible. Mind you,” he couldn’t help saying, with a father’s pride, “she is rather gifted, and she’s pretty enough to make a go of it.”
“Let’s hope so. Her singing is really excellent.” No need to say anything about the acting.
“Yes. Hamish, you get them in, will you?” Ewan Urquhart’s son obediently scuttled into the melee around the bar. “No, she’s a good little singer, my Soph. You can catch her singing in here most Friday nights.”
“Really?”
He pointed to a poster pinned on to a board nearby. It had been printed up on a home computer by someone who had only just discovered how many fonts and colours it was possible to use, and advertised ‘MAGIC DRAGON, Clincham Uni’s Number One Folk?Rock Band’. A rather smudged photograph showed a longhaired figure who was recognizably Sophia Urquhart fronting two guitarists and a fiddler.
“Obviously they’re not doing it tonight because of the show. But most other Fridays during term-time you’ll find her in here singing her little heart out.”
“I must try and catch them one day. As I say, she has got an exceptional voice.”
“Yes.” Ewan Urquhart agreed in a voice that mixed pride with scepticism. “Trouble is, if she goes into that kind of business – singing, acting – God knows what kind of riff-raff she’s going to mix with. Funny lot, actors, aren’t they?”
“Some of them. So there isn’t any showbiz in your family?”
“Good God, no. I went to Charterhouse, spent all my time doing sport. No time for bloody acting.” Ewan Urquhart seemed to need to shoehorn his status as an Old Carthusian into every conversation.
“I thought maybe Sophia’s mother…”
“Sophia’s mother and I parted company some years ago,” he responded with some asperity. “And if you’re wondering whether Sophia got her acting or singing talent from that source, let me tell you my ex-wife had no talent of any description.”
Jude deduced from the vehemence of this response that it was Mrs Urquhart who had left her husband, rather than vice versa. And she didn’t blame her.
She noticed that Andy Constant had just entered the pub and so, with an ‘Excuse me’, edged her way towards a table for two she’d just seen vacated.
He flopped down in front of his pint, long limbs drooping in a parody of exhaustion. “God, I’m wiped out. I find directing takes more out of me than acting ever did. Particularly with these kids…you never quite know what they’re going to do from minute to minute.”
“They seemed very disciplined to me, from what I saw on stage.”
“Yes, but it takes a while to get into their heads what acting’s about. Very few of them understand the concept of an ensemble. They don’t know that acting’s not about the individual, it’s about everyone working together.” Which Jude understood as ‘everyone doing what I tell them’.
“Still, the show played pretty well tonight,” Andy Constant went on complacently. “I like it when the audience gasps.” The audience had indeed gasped, but only at the crowbarring-in of a few four-letter words, which Jude hadn’t reckoned added anything.
“I’m intrigued that the show was worked out through improvisation,” said Jude. “It all felt very structured.”
He grinned, as if she had given him a compliment. “Yes, well, the ideas the kids come up with are not always very practical. You have to have someone there who’s shaping the thing.”
“And in this case that person was you?”
He acknowledged the fact with a nod, took a long sip of his lager and then looked at Jude through narrowed eyes. She guessed that at some stage he had been told he looked sexy doing that, and was annoyed with herself for actually finding it sexy.
“So…Jude…I don’t know much about you.”
“No.” That was, generally speaking, the way she liked things to stay. “Well, I live in Fethering. Is that enough information?”
“I’d like to know whether you’re married?”
“No.”
“In a long-term relationship?”
“No.”
“I’m surprised. You’re an attractive woman.”
“Thank you.” Jude had never been coy about accepting compliments. “And what about you…in the marital stakes?”
He ran his fingers through his long grey hair, flattening it either side of the central parting. “I am technically married, in that my wife and I haven’t bothered to divorce, but we haven’t really been married for sixteen years…no, I tell a lie, it’s seventeen now.”
“Children?”
“A couple.”
“How old?”
“Oh, finished with education. Off our hands.” The answer was airy and, to Jude’s mind, calculatedly vague. He didn’t want her to know exactly how old he was, which probably meant he was older than he looked.
This impression was confirmed by the way he immediately moved the conversation on. “You haven’t got any further in your search for the killer of Tadeusz Jankowski?”
“No further progress. Nor in finding a connection between him and Clincham College.”
That caught him on the hop. A momentary expression of anxiety was quickly quelled as he said, “Well, I think you’re very unlikely to find one.”
“Carole and I can keep looking.”
“Of course you can. It’s a free country. Though, with the current government, I’m beginning to wonder…” It was a line he had to say, to maintain his pose as the free-thinking outsider.
Their exchange of information was still incomplete, so Jude asked, “And are you in a relationship at the moment?”
He did the narrowed eyes routine again. “Nothing I couldn’t get out of if something better came along,” he murmured. God, the arrogance of the man.
“I think we should meet again,” he announced suddenly. “When we have more time to…appreciate each other.”
“It’s a thought,” said Jude, against her better judgement.
“A good thought.” He smiled lazily. “I’d suggest extending, this evening’s encounter, but…” He shrugged “… I’m afraid there’s some stuff I’ve still got to sort out back at the college.”
Jude didn’t say anything. The bar was quieter now. The first rush of students had gone back to the campus. Her hand was lying on the table. Andy Constant moved his forward as if to touch it, then abruptly changed his mind as he caught sight of the approaching Sophia Urquhart.
“Andy, bit of a problem.”
He looked shaken and turned to face the girl. “Something to do with the show?”
“No. A message from Joan.” She looked piercingly at Jude, not recognizing her but perhaps with a degree of suspicion. “If I could just have a quick word, Andy…”
“Excuse me.” He shrugged, as if to apologize for the bad timing of all young people, and uncoiled his lanky body from the chair.
There was a short exchange between him and Sophia, then he ambled back to the table with a magnanimous smile. “Sorry, she was just picking up on a note I gave her about tonight’s performance.”
Which was a perfectly reasonable explanation for what had happened. But for the fact that Jude had exceptionally good hearing and had caught the words the two of them had whispered to each other.
Sophia had said, “Joan thought her father would have gone straight after the show, but he’s just offered her a lift home. So she can’t come back with you tonight. She says she probably could tomorrow.”
“Tell her she’d better be able to,” Andy Constant had hissed. “I want her.”
