Sophia helped Jude carry the drinks across to her table, where she was introduced to Carole and Zofia. By first names only.
“Excellent music.” Carole had only heard one number, but she knew it was the appropriate thing to say.
“Not much of a turn-out tonight, though.” Sophia Urquhart looked round the room with disappointment. Now she had a chance to study the girl, Jude could see that she looked stressed and tired. The gold-red hair didn’t quite have its usual lustre, and there was a redness around the eyes.
“Our type of music’s not very popular, I’m afraid. Most of the people at uni want stuff they can dance to. Think this could be the last gig we do here.”
“Oh?”
“Landlord said, if we didn’t pull in a bigger crowd, that’d be it.”
“Well, hopefully you’ll be able to get booked in somewhere else.”
“Maybe.” The girl sounded listless, as though the fate of Magic Dragon didn’t matter one way or the other.
Jude decided it was time to move into investigation mode. “Sophia, Zofia is the sister of Tadeusz Jankowski.”
The shock took their suspect’s breath away. She looked at the Polish girl with a mixture of incredulity and fear.
“I think you knew him,” said Jude.
“No. I…don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sophia Urquhart’s hastily scrambled-together defence didn’t sound convincing.
“You met at a music festival in Leipzig last summer.”
In the face of the facts, her resistance crumbled. “Yes,” she admitted apathetically.
Zofia took over the interrogation. “We know you play music together. Pavel has sent me recordings.”
“Pavel,” came the echo.
“I have come from Warsaw to England to find out what happened to Tadek…to my brother.”
“He was killed.”
“I know that. I want to know why he was killed. And who killed him.”
The English girl slumped like a rag doll. Her spirit was broken. “Everyone wants to know that. Everyone always asks the same questions.”
“When you say everyone,” asked Carole, “do you mean the police as well?”
Sophia looked puzzled. “Presumably the police will be asking questions, if they’re investigating Tadek’s death.” She was now making no pretence of not having known the murder victim.
“But have the police questioned you?”
“About Tadek’s death? Why should they?”
“Didn’t they know about him being in love with you?”
“I don’t think so. Nobody knew.”
“We managed to find out about it,” said Carole. “It’s pretty difficult to keep a love affair a complete secret. The participants may think nobody knows, but that’s very rarely true.”
“Where did you meet after he came to England?” asked Jude more gently.
“We went to his room in Littlehampton. First he found me at the college. He had been texting and calling me and sending me songs ever since we met in Leipzig. He kept saying that he would come to England, and I didn’t believe him. Then one day, early in the term, there he was on the campus. And he’s telling me he loves me.”
“Were you pleased?”
“Yes. But it was difficult. I didn’t want people to know about him.”
Zofia was offended by this apparent slight on her brother. “Why you not want people to know about him?”
“Because…” The English girl looked confused. “Because things were more complicated than he thought. Tadek thought if we loved each other, everything would be fine. That was all that mattered. We wouldn’t have to think about practical things. He wanted me to drop out of uni, travel Europe with him, play music. I told him life could not be as simple as that. You have to get qualifications, make a living, get on with things. You can’t just drift.”
As her brother had, Sophia Urquhart sounded as though she were parroting her father’s sentiments. No relationship between the idealistic Pole and this conventional product of the Home Counties could ever have had a long-term future. But would Sophia have regarded the young man as enough of an inconvenience to murder him?
“Tadek thought that was possible,” responded Zofia sadly. “All he wanted to do was just drift. Write his songs, play music and drift.”
“Well, that’s no way to go through life.” Sophia Urquhart was once again her father’s daughter.
“Did you love him?” asked Jude.
“Maybe for a while. I liked him, certainly. In Leipzig it was very romantic. Yes, I think I was in love with him then. It was a kind of unreal time, I was away from home and…yes. But that was an exotic dream, and it’s difficult to recapture that kind of dream in somewhere like Fethering or Clincham. So the relationship had to end.”
“But he still loved you?”
“Probably.” She spoke as though the boy’s continuing adoration had been a minor irritant. “He kept phoning and texting me, and writing the songs. I got sick of it. Every time I heard his voice, saying, ‘Fee this, Fee that’.”
“‘Fee’?”
“It was his nickname for me. He could never pronounce ‘So-fie-ah’. He always said ‘So-fee-ah’. So he called me ‘Fee’.”
“Ah.” Finally Jude had her explanation for Tadeusz Jankowski’s dying words. But she didn’t pursue it at that moment. Who knew how the girl might react on hearing that the boy had died with her name on his lips? Anyway, there were more urgent questions to be asked. “You say you didn’t want anyone to know about the connection between you. Is that why all of his music had to be taken from his room?”
Sophia Urquhart hesitated before replying, as though she needed to prepare her answer. “Yes. Once he’d died, there was bound to be a police investigation. I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that.”
“So what did you do with the CDs and things?”
“I put them in a litter bin-on the street.”
“But not the guitar?”
“No, it wouldn’t fit. I was looking for a skip to dump it in on my way to uni the day after Tadek died. But then I met one of my friends from the Drama set and she asked me what I was doing with the guitar. I remembered that Andy had asked us to bring instruments in, so that’s how I explained it away. I thought it would be safely hidden in the Drama Studio. The police investigation wouldn’t go as far as uni.”
“You mentioned Andy Constant,” said Jude.
“So?” The girl looked defiant, but a blush was spreading up from her neck.
“Might he have been another reason why your relationship with Tadek had to end?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve just come from the hospital where Andy Constant is recovering from being stabbed.”
There was a silence around the table. The raucous-ness of a small group of students round the bar was suddenly loud.
“Andy told me about the affair that you and he had been having,” Jude went on. “He told me about using the nickname ‘Joan’ for you.”
“Which is the name Tadek used,” said Zofia.
“I didn’t know…Andy…had been stabbed.” Sophia spoke haltingly, with great difficulty.
“No?” asked Carole sceptically.
“I thought it possible that someone might have attacked him…but I didn’t know he had been…stabbed,” she said again. “You say he’s in hospital. Is he badly hurt?”
“He’ll survive. Though he was lucky that his attacker was frightened off before more damage could be done.”
“Good,” said Sophia Urquhart softly.
