‘And with the youngest child off at school. . was there any role left for me in life? Except for being frightfully loyal to Donald and smiling at a lot of people for whom I had no feelings at all? Many women perhaps would have been very happy with that situation. Maybe I should have been. But I can’t pretend. I wasn’t.’
‘And then you have the offer of a jaunt to Paris in Wally Edgington-Bewley’s Road-Eater?’
‘Yes. And the dates just worked for me. And we’d both be there without our spouses. I think we both knew something was going to happen. There was a degree of calculation on both sides.’
‘So his offer to accompany you shopping was pre-planned?’
‘We hadn’t actually talked about it, but we knew it was going to happen.’
‘Did you go back to the Cimarosa Hotel?’
‘God, no. He always had more style than that. He booked us into the Georges V.’
‘And the affair continued after Paris?’
‘Yes. When I was in England. Which wasn’t very often.’
‘And when you were back in England the two of you met at the Lockleigh House tennis court?’
Felicity Budgen arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. ‘You have been doing your research. Yes, we tried hotels at first. But then I nearly bumped into a colleague of Donald’s at The Dorchester and I realized it was just too risky. The one thing I could not allow to happen was for Donald to find out. My husband is an incredibly straight, uncomplicated man, who thinks the world is equally straight and uncomplicated. If he found out that his wife was having an affair, well, it would destroy him.
‘So my lover and I were like two randy adolescents, desperate to find somewhere we could be alone together. And his place was out of the question because of his wife. So yes. . we ended up with squalid encounters in the club room of Lockleigh House tennis court.’
‘You won’t have been the last couple to do that,’ Jude observed.
‘Oh?’
‘Apparently Ned Jackson has been known to take his conquests there.’
As soon as she’d said it, she realized she shouldn’t have done. She was, after all, speaking to the wife of the Lockleigh House club chairman. And she knew from George Hazlitt that Felicity Budgen had a particular concern for the welfare of Tonya Grace. All in all, what Jude had just said was very stupid. Angry though she was at Ned Jackson’s treatment of Tonya Grace, she didn’t actually want to be the cause of his losing his job.
But fortunately Felicity Budgen seemed too caught up in a reverie of the past to have registered what she said. ‘Yes, I suppose to an outsider our encounters would have appeared squalid. Squalid, but marvellous.’
‘And,’ asked Jude, ‘was it for another squalid but marvellous encounter that you asked Reggie to meet you at the court in the early hours of the Wednesday before last?’
For the first time in their encounter Felicity Budgen’s perfect demeanour cracked. Her jaw dropped and she looked totally flabbergasted as she said, ‘Reggie? What’s he got to do with it? It wasn’t Reggie I went off with in Paris. It was Piers.’
THIRTY-ONE
There were so many questions that Jude wanted to ask that for a moment she was too shocked to ask any of them. Finally she managed to blurt out, ‘But why did you text Reggie to meet you at the court?’
‘Ah, the reason for that. .’ Felicity began. Then she seemed to hear something and rose to look out of the front window. ‘It’s Donald. What on earth’s he doing back at this time? Oh dear, he looks as if he’s injured himself. I think you’d better go, Jude.’
The mistress of The Old Manor led her guest to the front door where they met the master of The Old Manor, entering in some discomfort.
‘Ricked my back doing a wedge shot out of a bunker on the eighth, darling.’ he said to his wife. ‘Hurts like buggery. Only just managed to drive back.’
‘You should have called me, darling. I’d have come and picked you up.’
‘No, I was all right,’ he said, though he patently wasn’t.
‘Jude just dropped by for some recipes I promised I’d give her.’ Felicity Budgen dropped effortlessly into lying mode.
For a moment Jude worried that she wasn’t carrying any recipes, but Sir Donald Budgen had no interest in her at all. ‘Look, darling,’ he was saying, ‘could you help me upstairs? If I can get into bed, maybe the pain’ll be better. And then if you can get me some paracetamol. . and probably one of your toddies for me to take it with. . Ooh, God, this hurts. And I was two up in the game when it happened. It’s an absolute bugger.’
Felicity Budgen made polite goodbyeing noises as she helped her crippled husband across the hallway towards the stairs. Jude let herself out, thinking that the ex-ambassador was behaving like a small child. And that perhaps in that dependency lay the secret of the Budgens’ enduring marriage.
Jude walked down the long drive and found herself on another country road miles from anywhere. She’d have to ring for a taxi. If she was going to continue mixing with people from Lockleigh House tennis court she’d have to buy a car.
But at that moment it seemed extremely unlikely that she would continue mixing with people from Lockleigh House tennis court.
There were so many challenging questions with which she needed to confront Piers Targett.
It was when Carole Seddon had said, with unsubstantiated certainty, the she knew Marina Gretchenko to be the daughter of Iain Holland that the girl had started to sound frightened, prompting fears she might just click on a button and end the call. But rather than breaking the connection, she seemed anxious to keep talking. Trying to find out how much Carole actually knew, perhaps. It was Marina who suggested they ought to meet.
The girl certainly didn’t want to let Carole know where she lived. She also rejected the idea of a cafe or pub. The only place she would agree to meet was in a children’s playground.
Carole didn’t know Southampton well, but as the Renault nosed through the traffic following Marina’s instructions it was clear that the girl did not live in one of the more salubrious areas of the city. The playground she had specified was set in an urban wasteland of shabby high rises and low industrial units. Some of the swings were broken, the slide and climbing frame were disfigured by graffiti. The wooden slats of the benches had been burnt. Only the cement uprights remained like forlorn bookends.
Carole had again given the girl her grey hair, rimless glasses and Burberry raincoat as means of identification, but as she approached from the Renault she saw there wasn’t going to be much of a problem about that. The other women present were all a good twenty-five years younger than her, and had about them an air of faded, drab hopelessness.
The one who must be Marina Gretchenko had been looking out for her. As soon as Carole pushed open the rusted wire-netted gate to the playground, she left the child she was pushing on a spring-based wooden horse and walked towards her. ‘Carole?’ she asked.
‘Yes. You must be Marina.’
It was amazing that she was the same age as Donna Grodsky. The girl in the George’s Head at Moulsecoomb may have been overweight, but she had been full of life and vigour. Whereas Marina Gretchenko looked as if all youth and energy had been drained out of her. Carole would never have recognized her from the photographs of the cocky, combative schoolgirl that had been all over the media at the time of her disappearance. Her cheekbones didn’t look fine, merely prominent and the dark hair had no lustre. Marina wore a faded blue raincoat with a scarf wound high around her neck. And in spite of the overcast October day, she had on dark glasses.
A child came running up to her and wrapped itself around her legs. She snapped something at him in Russian and he returned to pushing round the elliptical paint-defaced roundabout.
‘Yours?’ asked Carole.
‘Yes.’ The girl’s voice was hesitant and tentative, as if she hadn’t spoken English for a long time. ‘Four of them are mine. The little one’s over there in the buggy.’
In her drive over to Southampton Carole had been trying to plan how she would get into the forthcoming interview, but she needn’t have worried. Marina Gretchenko immediately asked, ‘Does my father know you’re meeting me?’
