‘You knew her well, did you?’ Clement asked archly.
‘Ah, not as well as I might have done,’ he admitted, sounding rueful. ‘I wasn’t much into threesomes myself. I like to have a girl’s attention all to myself, sport, know what I mean?’ Rhys said with another knowing grin.
For a moment, Trudy didn’t understand what he’d just said. Then she felt her face flame in embarrassment.
Clement was less taken aback. He was pretty sure he had it now. ‘Trust good old Morty to come up with the goods.’ He forced his voice to come out in a rich purr. ‘I take it his London pals were always appreciative of his efforts?’
Rhys Owen yawned hugely, and again rested his head back against the back of the chair. He was clearly fighting to stay awake now. ‘Oh, no doubt,’ he mumbled.
‘And Iris got what she wanted too?’ Clement pressed.
‘Oh, I can guarantee that,’ the Welshman said with another snort of laughter. ‘She always did all right for herself, never you fear.’
Clement wanted to ask more, like who actually paid the girls – Morty or the gentlemen in question – but realised that, since he was posing as a guest of these parties, he should be in a position to know.
Checkmated, he decided to change tack a little. ‘It was really awful what happened to her, wasn’t it?’
‘Bloody shocking, so it was,’ Rhys said sadly. ‘Why tie the poor girl up to the maypole like that. That showed a nasty mind at work, if you ask me,’ he opined, before giving a huge yawn.
‘I think it’s put the wind up Morty,’ Clement said craftily.
‘Huh?’ The Welshman yawned again. Clearly he was soon going to fall asleep, and Clement wanted to get as much information out of him as he could before that happened. Memories of his own misspent youth told him that once you needed to sleep off a bender, nothing short of an earthquake could wake you.
‘You know, he must have been scared one of the party guests might have …’
Rhys blinked, then – to his credit – looked genuinely appalled. ‘No! You don’t think one of us could have done that to the poor girl?’
Clement shrugged elaborately.
‘No,’ Rhys said again, shaking his head in growing agitation. ‘I just don’t believe it, man. We like to party, but it’s all in good fun.’
But whilst Clement was inclined to accept that this amiable soak truly did believe what he said, he was a long way from accepting his conclusions.
To his mind, men who liked kinky sex at kinky parties were prime candidates for strangling a beautiful playmate before displaying her on the village green for all to see.
Chapter 29
Janet Baines left her house as the grandmother clock in their hall chimed six. She was feeling ever so slightly sick. Ever since Dr Ryder and that young girl had mentioned David’s journal, she had been kicking herself for being so stupid. How was it that it had never once occurred to her that it could possibly be important?
And yet, the more she’d thought about it, the more it had loomed large in her mind until it was almost shrieking at her. Now, as she walked through the village that she’d lived in all her life, blind to the children playing hopscotch in the street, and the gossiping of housewives she’d been polite to for all her life, Janet forced herself to remain calm.
But it wasn’t easy. She couldn’t really make herself believe that she was about to do what she was about to do, so to distract herself from it, she concentrated on something else instead. And pondering the personality of David Finch seemed as good a way of doing that as any.
Right from the start, she’d been a little surprised that Iris had made a play for him. Yes, he was a good enough looking boy, and his family had more money than Iris’s – but then, nearly everyone in the village did! Even so, he’d never really struck her as Iris’s type, somehow. He was too unsophisticated, too clever, maybe. Too ordinary – and most significantly of all – all but useless to her in terms of helping her to get on in life and pursue her dream of ‘making it’ in the big wide world.
But when it became clear that Iris really only wanted him as camouflage, someone to bring out on ‘date nights’ to reassure her parents and distract the village from what she was really up to, it quickly made sense.
However, what neither of them had ever really thought about was what David Finch must have thought about of all of this. Granted, Iris might have pulled the wool over his eyes to begin with, but no matter how infatuated he was by her beauty or feminine wiles, he must eventually have begun to suspect the truth of things? He was, at his core, an intelligent young man and the son of a police officer to boot. So he wasn’t your average, gullible village idiot, like most of the boys she’d grown up with.
Now Janet could scream at how dense she’d been. Of course David wouldn’t have let things rest, with Iris dead and himself standing, if not openly accused, then at least generally suspected of killing her. And with a
