given was on the extreme edge of Fethering’s gentility, bordering the less salubrious area of Downside. There would have been no problem walking there in the daylight, but after dark they felt more secure in the car.
The woman who answered the door was presumably the landlady, whom Anna had described as ‘a nosy cow’. When they asked about her tenant, she certainly seemed to know a lot of detail. “She’s been in her room all day today. Hasn’t come out even to get anything to eat. She’s been crying a lot, and all. You can hear it from outside her door. And all over the house,” she added hastily, to cover up her surveillance activities, before continuing, “I think it’s because she heard about that man dying down by the Fethering Yacht Club. She worked for his wife at the shop that burnt down, the one with the silly name. I think there was something going on there.”
“Something going on?” asked Carole.
The landlady very nearly winked as she said, “Something going on between my Miss Carter upstairs and that Mr Le Bonnier. That’s why she’s taking his death so hard.” Again, so much for Anna’s blind faith that no one in Fethering knew of their liaison.
“I wonder if we could see Miss Carter,” said Jude.
“Well, I don’t know that she’d want to see anyone, but I could ask. And then she could come down and talk in my sitting room through there. I’ll leave you on your own, just be through in the kitchen.” A kitchen which no doubt commanded an excellent position for eavesdropping.
“It’s all right. We’ll talk to her in her room,” said Carole.
The landlady looked disgruntled at that. Crying might be audible all over the house, but the intricacies of conversation could not be heard by anyone who wasn’t actually lurking on the landing. And even the most inveterate snoopers have their pride.
She led them upstairs and knocked on the door. They heard a sharp yap from the West Highland terrier. “What is it?” asked a pained voice from inside.
“Two ladies come to see you, Miss Carter.”
The door was opened to reveal a very depleted Anna Carter. The peroxide blond hair was straggly and her face, deprived of make-up, looked sad and old. Her eyes were rimmed with red. She looked at Carole and Jude blankly.
“Thank you very much,” said Carole to the landlady and then, uncharacteristically assertive, she stepped into the room, quickly followed by Jude. Blackie, barking suspiciously, came towards them, but a sniff at their ankles seemed to reassure him and he moved back to his basket.
The room’s furnishings were minimal – a single bed, a dressing table, an armchair and an upright chair, all probably salvaged from the second-hand stores of Worthing. Clearly Anna Carter’s reinvention of herself had been minimally funded.
The glass of water and box of tissues on the table beside the armchair showed where she had been sitting and when she gestured her visitors to sit down, Carole took the hard chair and Jude sat on the edge of the bed.
“What’s all this about?” asked Anna feebly.
Carole didn’t have anything prepared, but she improvised, saying she’d heard about Ricky’s death and knew that Anna would be devastated, and had come along to see if there was anything she could do to help. She explained Jude’s presence by saying she was ‘a friend and a professional counsellor, used to dealing with bereavement’.
“Well, that’s very kind of you, but I don’t think anyone can do anything at the moment. I’ve just got to get through this on my own…though God knows how long that’s going to take.” The thought brought on a new outburst of crying. She rubbed savagely at her eyes with a tissue, careless of the discomfort it might cause.
“When did you last see Ricky?” Jude spoke very gently.
“You mean when did I last see him to talk to?” Anna asked through receding sobs.
“If you like.”
“Well, the time I told you about, Carole. That Sunday just before Christmas.”
“You didn’t see him yesterday?” Anna bowed her head, but didn’t answer Carole’s question. “Did you have a call from him yesterday?” Still silence. “Anna, Ricky was going to come and see Jude and me yesterday afternoon. He said he had to see someone else in Fethering first. Was that someone you?” Nothing. “I ask you again, did you have a call from Ricky yesterday?”
The lack of response continued, so Jude tried another tack. “Old Garge – you know, the one who lives in a beach hut, has a Jack Russell – he overheard a conversation between Ricky and you that Sunday before Christmas, the night of the fire. He said Ricky was threatening to end your relationship, and you threatened to kill him if he did.”
This did finally have an effect. Anna Carter looked up from the tissue in which she had been hiding her face and said, “Oh, so that’s it, is it? I’m now a suspect in some game of murder investigation you’re playing?”
“You can’t blame us for being intrigued,” said Jude.
“I suppose not,” Anna said bitterly. “Nobody has any secrets anymore, do they? Everyone’s common property. All right, I’ll tell you what happened – if only to stop you from adding more lies and insinuations to the Fethering grapevine. I told you about when my affair with Ricky started, Carole, and I’m sure you passed it all on to Jude, didn’t you? And yes, as Old Garge overheard, that Sunday before Christmas Ricky did talk about breaking it off. It was just as we were leaving Gallimaufry. Normally, we’d leave separately to avoid being seen together. That night, just as I’d gone out of the back door, Ricky came after me and we had the conversation Old Garge described to you. I was pretty furious, nearly hysterical, which was why Ricky suggested we talked in the car. I think he was worried about someone hearing the commotion. That was why I was in the Mercedes with him that evening. We never had been at any other time. Anyway, we sat in the car and talked and it seemed to be OK. We kind of realized how much we did mean to each other. Ricky said he’d ring me over the Christmas period, but he never…” Her lower lip wobbled.
“Had he talked about leaving you before?” Jude used the soft voice of a therapist.
“No. Well, only in the way lovers do. He’d say, ‘You know, we shouldn’t be doing this’, but that was more as a come-on than an expression of guilt. It added to the excitement of the times when we were together.”
“And was there anything different about him that Sunday evening? Was he particularly tense or nervous?”
“Yes, he was. He tried to hide it – Ricky never liked showing any weakness – but I could tell he was strung up. And it seemed worse after he had the phone call.”
“Phone call?” Carole repeated, instantly alert. “Did he have his mobile with him?”
“No, he’d forgotten it, left it at home. The call came through on the landline at Gallimaufry. There was a handset in the flat, not in the bedroom, in one of the other rooms. When it rang, I told him to leave it, that it would just be some customer checking our opening hours running up to Christmas or something like that, but he insisted on answering.”
“Did you hear what he said?”
“No. He was in the other room.”
“Did he say who it was on the phone?”
“No, but I would assume it was Lola. Who can’t have been over the moon to find him answering the phone in the shop at that time, anyway. The call unsettled him, though, really put him off his stroke. Straight afterwards he said we should get dressed and get out. And I’m sure it was the phone call that made him suggest we should split up.”
“Why?”
“Well, if Lola had tracked him down to Gallimaufry on a Sunday evening, she must have been suspicious of something, mustn’t she? Why else would she have rung the shop?”
“Maybe. And then yesterday…” Jude prompted. “Tell us what happened yesterday.”
“All right. I hadn’t heard from him since that Sunday, and I was feeling pretty low about it and thinking that he really had dumped me, but hadn’t got the guts to tell me so. And I thought I could see him at their New Year’s Eve party, but when the time came, I hadn’t the nerve to go. Then I had a call from him early yesterday afternoon. He said he wanted to meet. I felt so happy that I…”
The realization of her changed circumstances threatened to overwhelm her again, but she bit her lip and struggled on, her voice taut with the effort of will. “He said we’d meet down by the Fethering Yacht Club, where he
