Jude grinned, knowing how much her answer would annoy Carole. “Synchronicity.”
? The Poisoning in the Pub ?
Twenty-Six
Viggo looked very big amidst the clutter of the Wood-side Cottage sitting room. The loss of his beard and long hair did not seem to have diminished his bulk. His new uniform of camouflage T-shirt and combat trousers made Jude even more aware of his similarity to the scarred man whose photograph she had been looking at so recently. He held his new mobile phone like a badge of office.
Carole had stayed. After all, Jude was not supposed to be expecting her visitor. Besides, she did not particularly want to be alone with Viggo. Though Sally Monks had thought it unlikely that he would be violent, there was still something threatening in his demeanour.
He refused the offer of a drink, and there was a long silence after he sat down. It seemed as though he had only planned as far as getting to Woodside Cottage. What he did when he got there was still being processed in his slow brain.
Eventually he said to Jude, “You came to Copse-down Hall. To see Kelly-Marie.” The accent he used was strange, with a slight American twang, as though it had been borrowed from one of his favourite action movies. It certainly wasn’t the voice he had used when Jude had first met him with Ray in the Copse-down Hall kitchen.
“Yes, I did.”
“You shouldn’t take advantage of her. She’s not very bright.”
Jude was affronted. “I have not taken advantage of her.”
“Then why did you come to see her?”
“Why shouldn’t I come to see her?”
“Was it to talk about Ray?”
“It might have been,” said Jude with an unhelpful smile. She was unwilling to give out any information until she had worked out what had brought him to Woodside Cottage.
“You know Ray died?” said Viggo.
“I don’t think anyone in Fethering could avoid knowing that, Viggo.”
He raised his hand in a gesture borrowed from some movie. “Not Viggo. Call me ‘Chuck’.”
Jude pretended she hadn’t seen the look of exasperation on Carole’s face, as she said, “Very well, Chuck.” She reckoned the new name had probably been lifted from Chuck Norris, star of many martial arts movies.
“Ray had to die,” Viggo?Chuck announced portentously.
“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Carole, who thought she’d been kept out of the conversation far too long.
“Don’t ask questions. Accept reality. Ray’s dead. That’s all there is to it.” His delivery was staccato, but without spontaneity. The words sounded as if they had been practised in front of a mirror.
Carole spoke again. “And do you have any idea who killed him?”
“Lady,” said Viggo, “I told you not to ask questions.”
“Why have you come here?” asked Jude.
“I’ve come to tell you not to meddle in things that don’t concern you.” The menace of what he said was again let down by his delivery. The learned quality of his words diminished the threat they embodied.
“And who’s told you to tell us that?”
“Nobody. Nobody tells Chuck what to do.” He smiled a strange smile which only seemed to work on one side of his face.
“So if you’ve come here on your own initiative, what’s your reason for telling us not to meddle?”
This question patently confused him. Again he gave the impression that he hadn’t prepared fully for this encounter. It was a moment or two before he said, “Don’t meddle. You don’t need to know why.”
“And if we do meddle, as you call it,” asked Carole, “what will happen to us?”
“Don’t go there,” he replied,, “if you want to keep breathing.”
Jude was beginning to have a problem stopping herself from giggling. The young man’s posturing was so inept, his American accent kept slipping and his B-movie dialogue made him almost pathetic. On the other hand, there still was something dangerous about him. Who could say how far he would go in making his fantasies real? It would pay to proceed carefully.
Carole was not held back by any such inhibitions. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she said. “You sound like a hitman from some second-rate thriller.”
The description seemed to flatter him rather than anything. “Hitman? You could be right,” he responded. “Second-rate – never.”
“Are you telling us you are a hitman then?”
He appraised Carole with narrowed eyes, then said, “If I were, I wouldn’t tell you. It’s not a business you brag about. A good hitman doesn’t stand out from the crowd. He takes his instructions, does the job, gets the money and then sinks back into obscurity. All he does then is keep his gun clean and ready.”
“And do you have a gun to keep clean and ready?”
“I wouldn’t tell you that either. Let’s just say, when it becomes necessary, I’ll be tooled up.”
“Where would you get a gun from?” asked Carole with something approaching contempt. “It isn’t the kind of thing that you can just pick up at Fethering Market.”
Her tone annoyed him. “You can get guns if you know the right people. A lot of military stuff got smuggled out of Iraq.”
Carole’s ‘Huh’ showed how unlikely she thought that was.
“What kind of gun have you got?” asked Jude, more gently.
He smiled a strange half-smile, his mouth only curling up one side of his face. “I favour revolvers. With them you can fill your spare time playing Russian roulette.” He laughed as if he’d just made a rather good joke, then looked serious again. “Anyway, like I say, a hitman always sinks back into obscurity. Till the next job comes along.”
“Is that how you operate?” asked Jude.
He gave her a thin smile. “Like I said, hitmen don’t talk about their work. They just hit – hard, efficient, fast.”
“And is it your work as a hitman that makes you worried about my having visited Kelly-Marie yesterday?”
“Just lay off the kid. Ray’s dead. Talking won’t bring him back.”
“No, but it might help find who murdered him.”
He let out a little cynical laugh he’d heard from some film star. “People who try to find murderers often get murdered themselves.”
“Well, I think that’s a risk we might be prepared to take. Are you actually threatening us?”
“Not threatening. Warning.”
“And if we don’t heed your warnings,” said Carole who was getting a bit sick of Viggo’s play-acting, “what are you going to do to us – go into hitman mode, get out your gun – which you have of course been keeping clean and ready – and blow us away?”
“Don’t joke, lady. You could be playing with fire.”
This got the harrumph it deserved from Carole, but Jude started on another line of questioning. “The thing about hitmen is that they work to order…” Viggo nodded in acknowledgement of this self-evident rule of the profession. “Contracts are taken out on people, and the hitmen fulfil the contracts. Is that how you work, Chuck?” She made the name sound as phoney as it was.
“I didn’t say I was a hitman.”
“No, but you’d like to be one, wouldn’t you?”
This question threw him. His facade of cool dropped just for a moment as he hissed, “Yes. I could do it. I could do that kind of stuff. I have done that kind of stuff.”
“Have you?” asked Carole contemptuously.
“I…I…” He looked confused for a moment, then rescued himself with an old line. “If I had, I wouldn’t tell you.
