“What was it you wanted to ask about?” said the girl as she sat down easily between them.
“Well, I know Andy Constant, and I just wondered how closely you worked with him on the production? You know, as his assistant?”
She grimaced. “Not very closely at all, really. I mean, like, I had this title of assistant director, but really Andy did everything himself. I don’t think he’s very good at delegating.” No, I can believe that, thought Jude. “Andy had all the ideas, he wasn’t really interested in what I had to say.”
“But did you work with him on the improvisations?”
“Well, yes, but they were pretty useless. I mean, we all did improvisations, but Andy didn’t use much of our stuff. It was like he had the whole thing planned from the start, almost like he was working from a script that was already written.”
“Something he’d done before?”
“It felt like that at times.” Which didn’t surprise Jude one bit. She could imagine Andy Constant bringing out some long-written script, dusting it down, slotting in a few contemporary references and making his students think that they had worked it out through their own improvisation. That would be typical of his controlfreak approach to his work. And would also explain why
“You imply that being assistant director to Andy Constant wasn’t the most rewarding creative experience of your life.”
“No way. He just used me as cheap labour. Photocopying, typing up rehearsal schedules – that was the extent of my creative input.”
“So was that why you didn’t let them put your name on the programme?”
The girl’s forehead wrinkled with bewilderment. “My name was on the programme.”
“But I thought your first name was Joan.”
The bewilderment increased. “I’m not called Joan.”
¦
Her name, it turned out, was Ines Ribeiro. Her parents were part of the Portuguese community in Littlehampton. She had never been nicknamed ‘Joan’ by anyone. She didn’t know anyone in the Drama set who was called or nicknamed ‘Joan’. She had never met Tadeusz Jankowski. And, in spite of the insinuations of her friends, the suggestion that she might have been having an affair with Andy Constant shocked her to the core of her Portuguese Catholic being.
It was not Carole and Jude’s finest hour. After a very offended Ines Ribeiro had left them, they hastily finished their drinks and beat an ignominious retreat back to Fethering.
? Blood at the Bookies ?
Thirty-One
That evening Jude was getting ready for bed when Zofia returned from her shift at the Crown and Anchor. “Please, I am sorry for intrusion,” said the girl. “May I just check the email on the laptop?”
“Of course you can. But actually it’s not here. I took it downstairs, so that you’d be able to get at it. It’s on the kitchen table.”
“Oh, I am sorry. I did not look down there.”
“No reason why you should have done.” Jude belted her dressing-gown around her substantial waist. “I’ll come down and see if anything’s come through.”
“I just wish to see if there is anything more from Pavel,” said Zofia, as they made their way down to the kitchen. “I asked him if he knew about Tadek’s Joan.”
“Well, let’s hope he knows more than I thought I did.” And, while Zofia got to work on the keyboard, Jude spelt out the failure of her trip with Carole to the Bull.
“Ah yes, there is a reply from Pavel,” said the girl excitedly. “Quite a long one. And look – he has attached another song as well.”
Jude looked at the lines of incomprehensible words on the screen. “So what does it mean? What does he say?”
“I’ll tell you. First I get out my notebook, make some notes.” She opened the blue book on the kitchen table. Then, as her eyes scanned down the text, the girl translated from the Polish. “He say yes, Tadek did meet the English woman at the festival in Leipzig last summer. He say Tadek did call her ‘Joan’, but he think perhaps it is a nickname. The girl come up on stage and sing with the band one evening when they are in a club. That is how my brother meet her. And Tadek is in love…yes, yes, like he has never been in love before. Always the same with my brother. And Pavel says the woman is very beautiful.”
“What does she look like?”
“He does not say. Maybe later. It is a long email, and Pavel writes like he talks, all out of order, just thoughts as they come to him. Ah, and then he says the songs he is attaching are ones Tadek recorded in Leipzig with the girl, her singing to his accompaniment…Now he says why Tadek call her ‘Joan’. He think her voice like one of his favourite singers, Joan Baez.”
“Of course. His other song was called ‘Just Like Joan’. We got it wrong. The girl’s name wasn’t Joan, she was like Joan.” Jude was pretty sure now that she knew the mystery woman’s identity. “Can we hear the song?”
Zofia’s nimble fingers set up the playback. Again it was an amateur recording. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’. Another Joan Baez standard. With Tadek’s acoustic guitar accompanying the pure soprano that Jude had last heard in the theatre at Clincham College singing ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
? Blood at the Bookies ?
Thirty-Two
Jude grinned with satisfaction. “I think we’re looking at an old·fashioned love triangle,” she told Zofia. “Sophia Urquhart is loved by two men. Your brother Tadek who we now know met her in Leipzig during her gap year, and Andy Constant who came on to her once she became enrolled in his Drama course.”
“OK, let me write this down,” the girl responded excitedly. She took a biro, opened a clean page of her notebook and drew three separate crosses. “Here are the corners of our triangle. We have Sophia Urquhart…” She wrote the names as she spoke them. “Tadek…and Andy Constant…We draw a line here…Tadek to Sophia…” She scribbled down, “He loves her.”
“And the same thing from Andy Constant to Sophia…” She wrote that down too, and nodded with satisfaction. “It’s beginning to make sense.”
“Yes. Of course, the one side of the triangle you haven’t filled in is the relationship between Andy Constant and your brother.”
“You think…it is hatred perhaps? Hatred enough to kill someone?”
“It’s possible, Zosia. At last we’re getting somewhere.” Jude beamed. “I think this deserves a celebration. How about a glass of wine before we go to bed?”
“I would like that very much.”
¦
The buoyant certainty Jude had felt the night before received a predictable inundation of cold water the next morning. “I don’t see how you can be sure she’d even been to Leipzig,” said Carole, reverting to her customary wet blanket role.
“Carole, of course she was there. She was the woman Tadek talked to his friend Pavel about, the one he followed to England.”
“I don’t understand how you can make that assumption.”
“I can make it because I heard Sophia sing in
“You’d put money on anything.”
Jude grinned. She reckoned her neighbour was behaving like this because it was not she who had made this latest leap of logic. Carole could be very competitive at times and that quality, coupled with her recurrent paranoia,
