little while, to see if it did lead to any revelations. So all she said was, “He’s not here.”
“Where do you live?” asked Sylvia brusquely.
“If you’re so capable with phone books,” Carole responded frostily, “I’d have thought you would notice that they contain addresses as well as numbers.”
“Yes, all right, I know your address, but I don’t know where it is. I’m not a Fethering resident. Are you near the Crown and Anchor?”
“About a five-minute walk. The High Street leads away from the sea, you know, it’s where the parade of shops is.”
“I know it. I think it would save time, Carole, if you and I had a little talk.”
“By all means.”
“I’m in Worthing. I’ll be with you in as long as it takes.” And the phone was put down.
Carole Seddon was affronted by the woman’s rudeness, but also intrigued. Just when most avenues of investigation seemed to be closing, here was a potential new one opening up. She dialled 1471 and took a note of Sylvia’s mobile number. Then she committed it to her memory – she had a photographic memory for phone numbers. You never knew when something like that would come in handy.
¦
They sat in the garden. Even there the air moved very little. Gulliver panted pathetically in the inadequate shade of the green table, and tried unsuccessfully to chew off the bandaging round his leg.
Sylvia was wearing clothes which, though perfectly acceptable for the beach, looked out of place in the austere environment of High Tor. Another pair of microshorts – pale blue this time – and plastic flip-flops. Above the waist nothing but a red bikini top, which did nothing to disguise the ampleness of her charms. Carole was already disposed against Ted Crisp’s ex-wife, and the way the woman dressed for her visit did nothing to dilute the strength of that disapproval. Yes, the weather was hot, but standards still had to be maintained. A scarf over the bare shoulders might seem to be a minimum requirement. Carole thought her own ensemble of grey linen trousers and a short-sleeved white blouse went quite as far as casual needed to go.
But clearly, not upsetting her hostess was low among Sylvia Crisp’s priorities. As soon as, having turned down offers of tea and coffee, she had been furnished with a glass of mineral water, she launched straight into the purpose of her visit. “Come on, I want to know where Ted is.”
“So far as I know, he’s at the pub. It has reopened. I was there at lunchtime.”
“Did Ted mention I’d been trying to contact him?”
“He wasn’t there. He had a meeting at the bank.”
“But you’ll be seeing him soon?”
“Possibly.” Then Carole remembered she was trying to maintain the illusion that she and Ted were ‘an item’. “Certainly.”
“Well, when you do see him, will you tell him to answer my bloody phone calls. Not to mention the phone calls from my solicitor.”
“I’ll ask him,” said Carole, “but I can’t guarantee that he’ll do it. As you must know, when Ted doesn’t want to do something, he can be very bloody-minded about not doing it.”
“Look, this is a legal matter. It’s not down to what Ted wants or doesn’t want to do. I need a divorce, and to get that my solicitor and I have to talk to him.”
“Maybe your solicitor could talk to his solicitor?” suggested Carole.
“Yes, fine. That’d be a start. Except Ted won’t give me a name for his solicitor.”
“I will try and find that out for you.”
But her magnanimity didn’t get any gratitude from Sylvia. “Do that. Then I can get things bloody moving.”
“You’re so keen to get a divorce because you want to marry Matt?”
“Not
“Congratulations,” said Carole drily.
There was an unpleasant light of mischief in Sylvia’s eyes as she went on, “And of course once the divorce has happened, there’ll be nothing to stop you and Ted getting married.”
“Thank you. But I don’t think that’s a very likely scenario.”
“No, I wouldn’t have thought so.” The woman looked Carole up and down in a disparaging manner.
“Why should he bother with a piece of paper when he can get what he wants for free?”
It was with great difficulty that her hostess bit back a response to this. Carole had suffered from more in- your-face insults since she’d met Sylvia than she had in all the rest of her nice middle-class life.
She channelled her anger into a polite but direct question. “Sylvia, do you want Ted to sell the Crown and Anchor?”
“Yes,” she replied, “unless he’s got some other loot stashed away that I don’t know about.”
“You want the proceeds of the Crown and Anchor to fund your divorce settlement?”
“Of course. It’s quite common when a divorce happens, the assets of the couple are divided up. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“But when you and Ted split up, he had no assets.”
“He does now. There’s got to be a hell of a lot of money tied up in that pub.”
“It’s a business he built up on his own, though. You had nothing to do with it. You didn’t even meet during all the years he was getting the Crown and Anchor going. You don’t have any rights to the money he’s made there.”
Sylvia smiled smugly. “My solicitor says I do.”
“Well, your solicitor is wrong.”
“I would think that my solicitor knows rather more about divorce law than you do, Carole.”
“That’s quite possibly true. But Ted’s solicitor will no doubt be at least as well informed as yours is.”
Even as she said the words, Carole wished she believed them. Ted’s casual mention of the man who had ‘dealt with the purchase of the Crown and Anchor’ did not inspire confidence in the arrival of a new Perry Mason on to his team.
“Maybe, but if led won’t tell me or my solicitor who his solicitor is, the whole situation becomes rather complicated. My solicitor says that there are legal sanctions that can be brought to bear on people who don’t respond to solicitors’ letters.” Sylvia was clearly parroting the words of her adviser as she voiced this threat. “And I’m sure Ted wouldn’t want to be in any more trouble with the law than he is already.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t.” Carole took a sip of mineral water before moving into more investigative mode. “With regard to his being in trouble with the law…”
“Hm?” Sylvia didn’t look very interested in pursuing the conversation.
“…he does seem to have had a sequence of bad luck, doesn’t he?”
Sylvia shrugged her tanned shoulders. “Bad luck or inefficiency.”
“Where would you say he’s been inefficient?”
“Well, that food-poisoning outbreak…got to be down to slack standards in the kitchen, hasn’t it?”
Carole restrained herself from a detailed defence of Ted and Ed Pollack’s standards of hygiene, instead suggesting, “Or down to sabotage?”
Sylvia’s puzzled reaction suggested that this was an idea which had genuinely not occurred to her before. And Carole didn’t think she was a good enough actress to make such a pretence. Her reactive question also implied she had just been given a new thought. “But who’d want to sabotage the Crown and Anchor?”
“Someone who wanted to make life tough for Ted. Someone who wanted him to have to sell up.” Carole decided to be bold. “Someone like you.”
The response to this too showed real bewilderment. “Me?”
“You want Ted to sell up, don’t you?”
“I want a proper divorce settlement. If he’s got other money stashed away with which he can fund that, well and good. If he hasn’t, then my solicitor says he’ll have to sell the pub to pay me off…” Every mention of her solicitor seemed to give the woman more confidence.
But Carole’s confidence was building too. In authoritative tones she announced, “The food poisoning was definitely caused by sabotage. Before he died, Ray Witchett admitted that he had changed round a tray of fresh scallops in the kitchen of the Crown and Anchor for some dodgy ones that he had been given.”
