foreigners?”
“Yes. I wasn’t keen on the whole idea of a gap year, but Sophia managed to persuade me. She went against my better judgement. But I can assure you you’ve got the wrong end of the stick if you think she’s been having affairs with foreigners. When Sophia does get to the point of having affairs, I’m sure she will be very selective in her choice of men.”
“‘When she gets to the point of having affairs’?” Jude echoed. “How old is your daughter, Ewan?”
“Nineteen, nearly twenty.”
“Well, surely you know from the media that these days most young women of nearly twenty have been sexually active for some years.”
“Most young women, maybe,” he snapped. “Not Sophia!”
For the first time they realized the depth of his obsession with his daughter, and his obsession with her purity. In her father’s eyes, no man would ever be good enough for Sophia Urquhart. He had built up an image of her as untouchable, and what he might do to anyone who threatened that image was terrifying.
“If you claim not to know about her affair with Tadeusz Jankowski, then presumably the same goes for her relationship with Andy Constant.”
“Andy Constant?”
“You know the name?”
“Of course. I’ve met the man. He’s Sophia’s Drama tutor at the university.” He was now very angry. “Look, what is this? What are you two up to? I don’t have to listen to malicious slander of my daughter from smalltown gossips.”
“It is not malicious slander. It is the truth. Andy Constant was, until recently, your daughter’s lover.”
“No! He couldn’t…Sophia wouldn’t…Not with a man of that age…She’s not like her mother. Her mother was little better than a tart, who’d open her legs for any man who offered her a smile and a kind word.” Gifts of which, both women imagined, she hadn’t received many at home. “Sophia’s not like that. She wouldn’t…She hasn’t been brought up like that!” Now he was really losing control. His face was growing red and congested. “God, if I thought a man like that Andy Constant had touched my daughter, I’d kill him!”
He seemed then to realize what he’d said, and opened and closed his mouth, as if trying to take the words back.
“Which,” said Carole calmly, “is what you failed to do last night.”
“What?”
“You stabbed Andy Constant,” said Jude, “but you didn’t kill him.”
“I’m sorry? Where is this supposed to have happened?”
“In the Drama Studio at Clincham College. You waited for Andy Constant in the lighting box. When he came in, you stabbed him. You would have stabbed him more than once, but you heard someone arriving. It was me, actually. You passed me in the lobby, I think, when you made your escape.”
“You’re saying I stabbed Andy Constant?” His eyes were wild now, darting about from one of the women to the other.
“Yes. For some reason – maybe to disguise yourself – you wore your daughter’s Barbour when you committed the crime. You couldn’t stand the thought of anyone touching Sophia, so you tried to kill Andy Constant – just as you had killed Tadeusz Jankowski.”
He shook his head wordlessly, a pathetic figure now. His urbanity had deserted him, leaving a shell of a man, a husk wearing an Old Carthusian tie.
“Maybe you stabbed the young man here in this office,” said Carole. “It was somewhere near the betting shop, somewhere along this parade probably. Or maybe the attack took place in your car. You’d managed to get him into it on some pretext.”
“I can’t stand this,” Ewan Urquhart moaned feebly. “What on earth is going on?”
“Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll deal with it.”
They hadn’t heard the door from the outer office open. Carole and Jude both looked round at the same time to the source of the new voice.
And saw Hamish Urquhart standing in the doorway. With a long kitchen knife in his hand.
? Blood at the Bookies ?
Thirty-Eight
“Hamish, call the police,” said Ewan Urquhart. “These two women are mad and dangerous.”
“They’re certainly dangerous,” his son agreed, “but I don’t think the police are the right people to deal with them.”
“I don’t understand. I’ve hardly understood anything that’s happened for the last half-hour.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’m in control of the situation.” And, for the first time in Jude’s dealings with him, Hamish Urquhart did seem to be in control. There was now a dignity about him which she had not seen before. She was aware of the power in his stocky body and the cold menace in his eyes.
Both women made as if to stand up, but were stilled by a wave of the knife.
“I’ll sort this out, Dad,” said Hamish. “Just as I sorted out your other problems.”
“What other problems?”
“I know how you feel about Soph, Dad. I know how you’d feel about her getting into the wrong company. Particularly the wrong male company. So I sorted things out for you.”
“What do you mean, Hamish? I don’t know what you’ve been doing.”
“No, I know you don’t.” There was a quiet smile of pride on the young man’s face. “You didn’t need to know. I did things the way you’ve always said they should be done. The British way. No fuss. No showing off. Not standing up and saying ‘Aren’t I wonderful?’ But that quiet British pride of doing the right thing without crowing about it.”
It was chilling to hear the young man echoing his father’s words. Ewan Urquhart cleared his throat uneasily and said, “What do you mean by doing the right thing, Hamish?”
“Getting rid of the wrong sort of people. People who threaten us Urquharts. I knew what you’d think about Soph going around with a foreigner, so I…dealt with the problem. Never wanted you to know anything about it, but these two busybodies have told you, so you may as well have the details. Soph told me about this chap she was seeing, this Pole, and I knew you’d disapprove. So I thought, ‘No need to get the old man worried about this. Time for me to show a bit of Urquhart initiative and sort the problem out for him.’
“So I got his address from Soph and went round to see him. He wasn’t in, but the door to his room was open. Inside I found…He had written songs about her, songs about Soph. There were tapes, CDs, a guitar. I took them all. I didn’t want any connection ever to be made between my sister and…
“Sophia implied that she’d taken the guitar and things,” said Carole.
“Did she? No, I got them, then I gave them to her to dispose of as she thought fit.”
“So your sister knew what you had done?” asked Jude. “She knew it was you who stabbed Tadek?”
Hamish Urquhart smiled a patronizing smile. “I didn’t tell her. There was no need for her to be involved in anything distasteful. I’ve always tried to protect Sophia from the nasty things in life.”
Just as your father has, thought Jude. She looked across at Ewan Urquhart, whose face registered growing shock and disbelief as Hamish continued to describe his actions.
“Anyway I had just started driving back here, when I saw the Pole walking back to his room. I stopped the car, told him that I was Sophia’s brother and that she was back at the office and wanted to see him. He was over the moon about that and got into the car without a hint of suspicion. So I drove him back here. Knew you’d be off for a couple of hours doing a valuation, Dad, knew it was unlikely there’d be much trade on a Thursday afternoon.
“Anyway, soon as we get back here, his first question is: where’s Sophia? I tell him she must have just slipped out for a minute. Said she was probably shopping along the parade.”
Finally Carole and Jude had the explanation for Tadek’s appearance in the betting shop on the afternoon of
