She had the flattened face characteristic of Down’s Syndrome. Her hair was reddish-brown. Through her thick glasses blue eyes were set in distinctive rounded lids. She transferred her beam to the visitor and announced, “I’m Kelly-Marie.” Her speech was a little hesitant and childlike. It was hard to assess her precise age, though Jude, who had encountered other people with the same condition, would have said late twenties.
“As I say, I’m Jude.”
There was a comfortable silence as they both beamed at each other. Then the girl said, “Ken’s not here. He’s never here at weekends.”
Jude assumed she was referring to the social worker who was responsible for keeping an eye on Copsedown Hall. “It’s not Ken I’ve come to see. I’m looking for Ray.”
“Oh, Ray.” The girl’s smile grew bigger. She certainly recognized the name, but she didn’t volunteer any other information.
“Is Ray here?” Jude prompted.
“Yes. He came back.”
“Could I see him?”
Kelly-Marie hesitated. “He’s in his flat.”
“Could you show me where it is?”
The girl was silent for a moment. Then she said slowly, “Ray doesn’t like…people in his flat.”
“Ah.” Jude tried another big smile. Kelly-Marie smiled back. But she didn’t move. She was still inside the door, and Jude outside.
“Do you think Ray might see me in one of the communal rooms?”
Kelly-Marie considered the proposition. At length she conceded that he might.
“Well, would you mind asking him if he’d come down to see me?” Jude was assuming that all the flats were up the stairs down which Kelly-Marie had come.
After further deliberation, the decision was made. “Yes.” She drew back to let Jude into the hall and turned towards the stairs.
“Where shall I go?”
This answer again required thought. “Do you want to see Ray on his own?”
“It would be better, yes.”
“Well, there’ll be people in the television room.” Kelly-Marie giggled and said in a child’s version of a woman- of-the-world manner, “Men and their sport.” She limped across to open a door. “Be better in the kitchen.”
As Jude walked past her, the girl giggled again and asked, rather daringly, “Are you Ray’s girlfriend?”
“Just a friend.” It was a lie, but a fairly white one.
“I’ll see if he’ll come down.” And Kelly-Marie crossed slowly towards the stairs.
The kitchen in which Jude found herself was large. The size of the range, the number of fridges and the extent of the cupboard space suggested that this was where all the cooking in Copsedown Hall was done. The residents did not have their own kitchens in their flats. Whether this was because they could not be trusted to cook unsupervised Jude did not know, but she suspected that it might be the case.
Stuck on the fridge doors were handwritten names on green fluorescent labels. Four fridges, two names on each, suggesting that Copsedown Hall contained eight residents, presumably each in a different self-contained flat. Kelly-Marie shared her fridge with another girl. Ray shared his with someone called ‘Viggo’.
Whoever did the cooking, there was clearly a strict tidiness regime enforced. The draining boards were bare, and every surface gleamed. There were two large bins, sternly marked FOR RECYCLING and NOT FOR RECYCLING. The functional, institutional space gave Jude the feeling of an army kitchen. Not that she’d ever seen an army kitchen except on film or television.
The table at which she sat was surrounded by eight chairs, suggesting that at least sometimes the residents ate communally. She waited nearly five minutes before Ray appeared in the doorway.
? The Poisoning in the Pub ?
Nine
He was slight and very short, not much more than five foot. He couldn’t have been much use at the Crown and Anchor when it came to heavy lifting, but then Jude had already decided that Ted Crisp’s support for the man was pure – if embarrassed – philanthropy. It was difficult to estimate Ray’s age. There was a boyishness about his reddish hair, but the pale skin of his face was etched with a tracery of deep lines. And his eyes looked older than the rest of his body. Older and slightly disengaged. It was from the eyes that one might deduce that he had mental problems.
He wore grubby black jeans and a thin green cotton blouson, over a T-shirt for a tour of some female singer Jude didn’t recognize. His expression was cautious, but not unwelcoming.
“Hello, I’m Jude.”
“That’s what Kelly-Marie said you was.” He lingered in the doorway, not yet certain about entering the kitchen. “She also said,” he went on, “that you was my girlfriend. But I know that’s not true. Because if I had a girlfriend, I’d have seen her before, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”
He spoke this long speech cautiously, as though he were speaking in a language that was unfamiliar to him.
“You might have seen me in the street,” Jude suggested. “I do live in Fethering.”
Ray considered this proposition for a moment, then advanced a little way into the room. “Kelly-Marie didn’t really think you was my girlfriend. She was joking. She makes lots of jokes at me.” But he spoke without rancour. And a broad smile spread across his face, completely transforming his appearance. Smiling seemed to come naturally to him. It was expressing other moods that he found difficult.
He seemed by now to have made the decision that Jude did not represent a threat, so he moved right into the room and put his hand on the back of the chair next to hers. “Would you like tea or coffee? I can make tea or coffee,” he added with a vestige of pride in his voice. He moved towards the fridge he shared with Viggo.
“Are you having some?”
Her question prompted another moment of deliberation before Ray decided that he wasn’t.
“Then I won’t bother. Do please sit down.”
He did as he was told, seeming almost relieved that someone was making a decision for him. He sat quietly, not looking at Jude, just straight ahead, the smile still playing around the corners of his lips.
The silence, the lack of explanation for Jude’s appearance, did not seem to worry him.
She wondered whether his response would be equally calm when she mentioned the poisoning at the Crown and Anchor. Still, that was why she had come to see him. No point in beating around the bush. “Ray,” she began, “I’m a friend of Ted Crisp’s.”
“He’s a nice man.” Ray nodded vigorously to emphasize the point. “A nice man.” His smile grew broader.
“Yes. And I gather you sometimes help him at the pub…”
Another enthusiastic nod. “He lets me. People think I can’t do things. Ted Crisp thinks I can.”
“And you were helping at the Crown and Anchor on Monday?”
Only after he had keenly agreed to this did a slight caution come into his vague eyes. “Yes, on Monday,” he agreed with a little less confidence.
“But you haven’t been back there since?”
“No.”
“Are you going to go back?”
“Well, I don’t know…” Then, unexpectedly, the wide smile returned. “I’ll have to be there on Sunday.”
“Why?”
“They’ve got this man from the telly there on Sunday.”
“Dan Poke.”
“Yes, I’ll have to see him. I’ve only seen two people from off the telly before. One was Lyra Mackenzie.”
He spoke the name with such reverence that Jude tried to avoid showing it meant nothing to her. But she must have failed, because Ray felt he had to explain. He pulled back the sides of his blouson to reveal the picture on
