The Fethering Mysteries 11; The Shooting in the Shop

her. Carole would undoubtedly say that they should hand it straight over to the police. Jude was quite prepared to do that…eventually…but certainly not until she had checked out the phone for any information it could provide. The odds are always so heavily stacked in favour of the police over the amateur investigator that she was not about to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

She tried switching it on, but the battery had run down. So, having put the phone and its sock safely into her handbag, Jude did as Lola had suggested and poured herself a glass of white wine from the well-stocked fridge. Then she sat in front of the open fire in the sitting room, very near to the hidden drawer, and tried to control the excesses of her speculation until the Le Bonniers returned home.

At about eight she had a phone call from Lola, apologizing that they were only just then leaving St John’s Wood. Flora had been “at her most demanding. I had to unpack for her. She claims she can’t do that with her hands in the state they are. And then she found plenty of small jobs for Ricky, which, of course, he did for her without complaint.”

Lola sounded pretty fed up. Then she asked after the kids, and was relieved to hear that bath and bedtime had gone without a hitch. She said she and Ricky would get back as quickly as they could, but it was unlikely to be before ten. The fridge, though, was full of food left over from the party and Jude was encouraged to help herself to anything she wanted.

In fact, the babysitting vigil didn’t last as long as it might have done. At about twenty to nine, just when Jude was thinking of making a foraging raid on the fridge, the au pair Varya arrived back at Fedingham Court House. She looked pretty wan – the vodka in Southampton had evidently flowed with Russian generosity – but she was quite capable of taking over the babysitting duties. So Jude rang for a cab to take her home.

¦

When she got back to High Tor after her encounter with Rupert Sonning, Carole had started googling. She still hadn’t got far with the thousands of references to Flora Le Bonnier, and going through all of them in search of one particular article would be a deterrently laborious process. So, instead, she typed in the name Biff Carpenter.

For him, too, there was a surprisingly large number of entries. Clearly, though few of the names he wrote about meant anything to Carole, he had been quite a significant commentator on popular music in the sixties and seventies. ‘Had been’ were the operative words, according to his very brief Wikipedia entry. Born in 1941, Biff Carpenter had died in 1977.

There was very little other information. Carole wondered whether life was actually long enough for her to trawl through endless articles about Jethro Tull and Procul Harum and King Crimson.

Then she had the thought of googling Biff Carpenter and Flora Le Bonnier together. No relevant references. (Well, she didn’t think a nineteenth-century family tree from Ontario featuring a ‘Biff ‘ and a ‘Flora’ was relevant.)

Carole then tried Biff Carpenter and Ricky Le Bonnier together, and that did produce a result. She was directed to the blog of someone who’d clearly been a drummer with various bands in the early seventies. The rambling style suggested that most of his writing was done under the influence of some powerful narcotic.

She was about to give up on the blogger’s turgid and misspelt prose when she spotted Ricky Le Bonnier’s name. She read the pertinent paragraph:

…Like back then we was getting the Cameleon Haze album together and we was working with Rickie Le Bonier as producer and having some great all-niters kind of open party scene in the studio while we was recording and doing a lot of, like, wacky backy and a lot of real heavy stuff too. And Biff Carpenter who was, like, the journo for our kind of music used to hang out at the studio which was good cos if he wrote about a band well you knew that like ment youd made it. Biff was writing for NME and all over including a new magasine called Prog Printz and he said he was going to do somthing about us for that which would have been like great. And Biff was good mates with all of us especially Rickie and they were smoking some seriously good shit together and injecting too but then, like, they had some bust-up which was bad karma for us because, like, suddenly Biff ‘s off writing a peace for Prog Printz that is not about the band but is, like, rubbishing Rickie Le Bonier, not only Ricky but his mother whose, like, some actress or somthing. And Biff really has a go and when the magasine comes out Rickie really loses his cool and suddenly he’s not producing our album anymore and we’re halfway thro and the bread’s running out and we’re totally buggerred. And then later we hear Prog Printz has folded and Biff Carpenter’s snuffed it o/ded on the old horse and I’m not talking geegees here and were well up shit creak with no sign of any like padels…

Thereafter, the blog seemed to maunder off into incoherent self-pity. Carole thought it reasonable to assume that Biff Carpenter’s expose of Flora Le Bonnier’s past was included in the article he wrote attacking Ricky, but she wasn’t optimistic about tracking it down. She googled up a couple of references to Prog Printz, but they weren’t very helpful. The magazine had only run for three editions, and copies were now valuable collector’s items. There was no means of accessing their content online.

Carole was thoughtful as she closed down her laptop. Suddenly there were two drug-related deaths in Ricky Le Bonnier’s life – Polly’s mother and now Biff Carpenter. Of course, it could just be coincidence, a reflection of the lifestyle that Ricky indulged in at that time.

But Carole, being Carole, as she went next door to share her findings with Jude, wondered whether there was more to it than that.

¦

Of course there was still no display on the screen of the mobile. Assuming it was Polly’s – and every indication supported that idea – the phone hadn’t been used for nearly a fortnight. Its battery was extremely dead. And, frustratingly, neither Jude nor Carole had a charger that fitted it.

They would have to wait till the morning. Fethering didn’t boast a mobile phone shop. It was even doubtful whether there was one in Fedborough. Unlocking the secrets held in Polly’s mobile might require a trip to Worthing or Chichester. It was profoundly annoying, but there was nothing else they could do but wait.

And what Carole had found out about Ricky Le Bonnier and Biff Carpenter was also frustratingly incomplete. Neither woman slept well that night.

¦

Worthing was marginally closer than Chichester, so on Friday morning they made it their destination. Even though Carole had pinpointed the phone shop they wanted to go to from researches on the Internet, their purchase took them a long time. Worthing was extremely full of people who, released from the chore of being nice to relatives over Christmas, were desperate for retail therapy. And most of the residents of Worthing seemed to be in that one phone shop. Those who didn’t want to change the mobile they’d been given as a Christmas present were bent on upgrading their handset to the latest model which offered even more technological bells and whistles than their previous one. Transactions like that with the sharp-suited teenage salesmen took an inordinately long time and, though all Carole and Jude wanted to buy was a charger, they had to wait in a queue which threatened to redefine the concept of eternity.

They hadn’t risked just memorizing the details of the phone’s make and model; they actually took the handset with them to ensure that there should be no mistake in the charger they bought.

When they finally reached the front of the queue, their purchase was quickly completed, though the sharp- suited teenage salesman who served them seemed very disappointed they didn’t want to upgrade anything.

Back at Woodside Cottage Jude intended to plug in the phone charger straight away, but was diverted when she noticed that the indicator light on her answering machine was flickering.

The message was from Ricky Le Bonnier. His voice sounded taut with stress. He asked Jude to ring him as soon as possible.

“I think you’ve got something of mine,” he said when she got through.

“Oh?”

“You know what I mean. Mabel told me you played the Hiding Things game.”

“Ah.”

“I’m going to come round to your place and, when I do, Jude, I think you’d better give me back my property.”

“Are you sure we aren’t talking about your stepdaughter’s property?”

“Don’t split hairs. I’ve got to see someone in Fethering this afternoon, then I’ll come to your place. Half past four, five, I should think it would be. Don’t try and do anything clever with the phone. You’re involved in something