‘Right.’
Jude might have come in with a follow-up question, but Piers didn’t give her time. ‘Since we’ve got to this confessional moment, I suppose I should check out your marital status too. Are you married?’
‘Not currently.’
‘Suggesting that you have been. .?’
‘Twice. Two marriages and two neat, matching divorces.’
‘Ah.’ Piers Targett nodded. ‘Good. Well, that’s cleared the air a bit.’
But as she travelled on the train from Victoria to Fethering, Jude wondered whether it had. She didn’t love Piers any the less, she didn’t regret a second of the past fortnight’s love and love-making. It was just that their relationship had moved up to a different level. A level that was no less serious, but perhaps more grown-up. After two weeks of intense one-on-one, they now had to find out whether their relationship could survive in the wider world, a world of other people and other responsibilities.
And baggage. Nobody could get to the age that she and Piers Targett had reached without accumulating quite a lot of baggage.
When Carole Seddon returned from her walk on Fethering Beach that morning, it was with a new sense of purpose. Though still hurt by what she could only think of as Jude’s defection, she’d decided that the only way out of her present doldrums was by being more proactive. She must get something going for herself to fill the days.
And it wasn’t going to be salsa classes or Spanish conversation. There was no point in trying to get herself enthused about something in which she had no interest.
But a subject that did intrigue her was the solving of crimes. It was an undertaking on which she had in the past collaborated with Jude. But since that was no longer an option, she would have to proceed on her own. And indeed solving a crime on her own would give her quite a charge, a secret snub to her uncaring neighbour.
Carole Seddon’s training in the Home Office had encouraged in her a natural tendency for the efficient organization of information. Her filing systems had always been immaculate, and when she became converted to the wonders of computers that offered even more opportunities for the management of directories and subdirectories.
On the shelves of the spare room where she kept the laptop (still perversely unwilling to acknowledge the machine’s portability), Carole also had box-files of neatly catalogued newspaper clippings. Anything to do with murder in the West Sussex area. Occasional extracts from her daily
Carole knew exactly which file to take down from the shelf and which folder to take out and open on the spare bedroom’s table.
It was the dossier she had compiled on the unsolved crime known locally as ‘The Fedborough Lady in the Lake Murder’.
FOUR
The body had been found seven years previously. That summer was an exceptionally dry one, prompting dark mutterings from Fethering locals about global warming. The arid conditions had nearly dried up some of West Sussex’s smaller streams. Even the strong tidal flow of the River Fether had been considerably diminished. There were panics about receding reservoirs and many village ponds shrank, exposing their muddy margins.
This had also been the fate of Fedborough Lake. On the outskirts of the town, a large expanse of water only separated from the river by a road, it was popular with tourists and dog walkers. A complete circuit of the lake made a pleasant twenty-minute stroll. Rowing boats and pedalos could be hired from the lakeside cafe which normally throughout the summer did a roaring trade in ice creams, crisps and Sussex cream teas.
But that year trade had been slack. As Fedborough Lake dried up, weedy mud banks were exposed and, quite frankly, stank.
The human remains that had been found were too degraded to add to the general stink, but they too were revealed by the receding water.
For once it wasn’t a dog-walker who found them. That was the local cliche. Whenever a body was found, the report in the
But no, on this occasion it had been one of the men who looked after the Fedborough Lake boats. Business was slack because no one wanted to venture out on to the noisome water, so he used his enforced idleness to clear some of the debris exposed on the muddy banks. He loaded his wheelbarrow with a predictable selection of bottles, polystyrene burger boxes, punctured footballs, slimy plastic toys. . and then he found what was unmistakably a human femur.
At the time the discovery had caused a huge media furore, which had subsequently died away from lack of information. According to Carole’s archive, the identity of the Lady in the Lake had never been established. Which made finding out what had happened to her an almost impossible task.
And Carole Seddon couldn’t think of anything better to shake her out of her current torpor than an impossible task.
She also realized that she had collected her clippings on the case back in the now-unimaginable days when she hadn’t had a laptop. She had never even Googled the Fedborough Lady in the Lake. How times had changed. Carole, for many years having pooh-poohed the very idea of computers, had now become addicted to the new technology. There was in her personality an obsessive strand — some people who knew her might even have described it as obsessive-compulsive. Along with her paranoia about dirt and untidiness, she suffered from a meticulous attention to detail. . except of course, being Carole Seddon, she wouldn’t have seen it as suffering.
She had entered the words ‘Fedborough Lady in the Lake’ into the search engine without much optimism. The trail must long have gone cold. She anticipated finding a few references to old newspaper reports, the clippings she already had in hard copy form, but not a lot else.
She had, however, underestimated the tenacity of the curious. It soon became apparent that, to a lot of people, the Lady in the Lake case was still very much alive. And if she herself had obsessive tendencies, they paled into insignificance when compared to some of the people out in the blogosphere.
It took some time before Carole got to the personal stuff. As she had expected, the first few hundred entries in Google were just newspaper reportage of the case. But eventually she reached the postings of unqualified individuals, and it soon became clear that some of the more extreme views had to be discounted. Venting their opinions online offered a wonderful new platform to the kind of letter-writers who used to use green ink with a lot of capital letters and exclamation marks. But once Carole had weeded out the seriously unhinged, she found some ideas that were worthy of consideration.
A lot of the postings were very sad. As she read them, Carole became aware of how dreadful it must be when a family member or friend simply vanishes without a trace. In some of the online writers there was a desperation. The hope of seeing the missing person alive again was long gone, all the bereaved asked for was a kind of closure, the confirmation of their worst fears. A surprising number of people wanted to claim the Lady in the Lake as their own.
Carole had opened up a Word file and was starting to make some notes on her findings when she heard the front doorbell ring. She consulted her watch and was surprised to see that nearly three hours had passed since she first sat down in front of the laptop. And that meant three hours during which she had avoided self-pity and recrimination.
Those two emotions, however, returned forcibly when Carole Seddon opened the front door of High Tor. Because standing in front of it was Jude.
‘Oh, I hadn’t really noticed you’d been away,’ said Carole with studied insouciance.
They were sitting in the bar of the Crown and Anchor. In one of the alcoves, each facing a large glass of Chilean Chardonnay. At first Carole had demurred at the suggestion of going for a late lunch at the pub, but Jude had been at her persuasive best and, besides, Carole was desperately curious to know where her neighbour had
