Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer (19 page)

With difficulty, she curbed her imagination and made a decision. Brighton would be the extent of her surveillance. If he went beyond Brighton, then that was it. End of adventure. She’d go back and feed Gulliver.

The possibility of a destination in Brighton or nearer was boosted by the fact that, after leaving the magnificence of Lancing College to his left and climbing the steep incline above Shoreham-on-Sea, Theo left the A27 in favour of the A2770. While the major road led up through a tunnel to all kinds of distant places, the one he had selected led through a variety of overlapping small towns until it reached Brighton.

The traffic was still heavy and slower on the minor road, so keeping the BMW in sight was again no problem. The two cars stopped and started through the suburban sprawl, then took a right turn down towards Hove. Where the road met the sea, Theo turned left, along the magnificent frontage towards Brighton. Carole knew it didn’t really make sense, but she seemed to feel a relaxation in his driving now, as if he were on the home straight.

And so it proved. Taking his tail by surprise, Theo’s BMW suddenly swung left up into a magnificent Regency square of fine houses frosted like wedding cakes. Carole almost overshot the junction, but, to a chorus of annoyed hooting from behind her, managed to manoeuvre the Renault up the same way.

At the top, on the side facing the sea, Theo bedded the car neatly into a reserved space. The lack of other parking left Carole with no choice but to drive past him. She juddered to a halt on yellow lines beyond the row of residents’ cars and looked ahead, trying to find that rarest of phenomena—a parking space in Brighton.

She was so preoccupied with her search that she didn’t look behind her. The tap on her window took her completely by surprise. She turned in the seat to see Theo looking down at her. Sheepishly, she lowered the window.

“So, Carole…”he asked, “why have you been following me?”

J
ude was let into the Summersdale house by one of the little Locke girls, dressed in a green school jumper and skirt. Whether it was Chloe or Sylvia—or indeed Zebba or Tamil—she had no means of knowing, and the information wasn’t volunteered. All the child did, when the visitor had identified herself, was to say lispingly, “Oh yes, Mummy’s expecting you. She’s upstairs.” Then, turning on her heel and announcing, “I’m playing,” she went back into the sitting room.

As Jude climbed the stairs, she tried to tune in to the atmosphere of the place. Beneath the surface chaos of lovable family life she could feel strong undercurrents of tension and anxiety. Those might be natural, given the Lockes’ current situation, but the impression she got was that they pre-dated the disappearance of Nathan from Marine Villas.

At the top of the stairs she paused, and a weak voice said, “I’m through here.”

Bridget Locke was wearing a plain white nightdress, and was propped up high on pillows in a single bed. But before Jude had a chance to process this information, she was told that this was the spare room. “I’m so uncomfortable in the night that I can’t share a bed with anyone. Rowley wouldn’t get any sleep if I was in our own room.”

Jude, as usual with a new client (she preferred that word to ‘patient’), began by asking a few general questions about Bridget’s medical history. Apparently, back pain was not a recurrent problem for her. This was the first time it had happened, or at least had happened so badly that she needed treatment.

“Why did you come to me? Most people’s first port of call would have been their GP.”

“Yes.” The woman seemed slightly confused by the question. “The fact is, I’ve always favoured alternative therapy over conventional medicine. My experience of doctors has been that, whatever your complaint is, they reckon a drug prescription will sort it out. I’m rather reluctant to cram my body full of chemicals.”

While Jude entirely agreed with the sentiment, she wasn’t convinced that Bridget Locke was telling the truth about her reasons for approaching her. “You said it was Sonia Dalrymple who suggested you call me…?”

“That’s right.”

“How is she?” A bit of general conversation might relax the woman—even, Jude found herself thinking for some reason, put her off her guard.

“She’s fine. Well, I say that…I think the marriage has broken up. Difficult man, Nicky.”

Jude, whose investigations with Carole into a murder at Long Bamber Stables had found out some interesting secrets about Nicky Dalrymple, might have put it more strongly. But she wasn’t about to say more about that. “So, if this is the first time your back’s gone, Bridget, what do you think’s caused it?”

“I don’t know. Lifting something out of the car perhaps? Standing at a funny angle?”

“Was there any moment when you suddenly felt it go?”

“No, it sort of happened gradually.”

“Hmm. You know, a lot of back pain isn’t primarily physical.”

“Are you saying it’s psychosomatic?” The reaction was a common one. No one wanted to have their suffering diminished by being told it was ‘all in the mind’.

“That’s a word you can use, if you want to,” Jude replied soothingly. “The mind and the body are very deeply interrelated. And whether the cause is something mental or something physical, it doesn’t make any difference to how much your back hurts.”

“No.” Bridget Locke sounded mollified.

“What are your normal stress reactions?”

“Sorry?”

“Most of us have some kind of physical response to stress. With some people it’s headaches…stomach upsets…insomnia…”

Bridget Locke seized on the last word. “I don’t sleep that well. I suppose that is my normal stress reaction, yes.”

“And presumably, with your back like this, you’re sleeping even less?”

The woman nodded. She did look exhausted. Under the neatly cut hair, the skin of her face was tight with tiredness and there were dark hollows beneath her eyes.

“You’re worried about Nathan?”

“Oh, you’ve heard about that?” Again something didn’t ring true with Jude. Bridget knew she lived in Fethering, she must have known the level of village gossip that an event like Kyra Bartos’s murder would generate in a place like that. Surely she would have assumed that Jude knew about it.

But this was not the moment for a challenge. “Yes, dreadful business. It must be hard on you…”

“Quite tough.”

“…and of course the rest of the family.” Though from what Carole had said, Bridget was the only one who seemed worried about the boy.

“Yes.”

“Hmm. I gather, Bridget, you’re not Rowland’s first wife?”

“No. How did you know that?”

No point in lying. “A friend of mine told me. Someone you’ve met. Her name’s Carole Seddon.”

“Ah, yes.” Was Jude wrong to detect a note of satisfaction in the response?

“Can I ask you…I’m sorry, you may think it’s being nosy, but it’s a question anyone from Fethering would ask you…”

“Because everyone from Fethering has now become an amateur detective?”

“If you like.”

“Including you and your friend Carole?”

“Maybe. We can’t help being interested.”

“No, only natural. So what was this question that everyone in Fethering would ask me? Do I know who killed Kyra Bartos?”

“No, not that one. They might be intrigued, but the question they’d ask is one that you might be more likely to have an answer to.”

“Which is?”

Jude looked the woman firmly in the eyes. “Do you have any idea what has happened to Nathan?”

This time she had no problem in believing the response. A weary shake of the head and, “No, I wish I did. I feel very close to him.”

“Oh?” As ever the gentle manner promised to elicit confidences. And it did.

“The fact is, this family…I mean, when I met Rowley, it was him I fell in love with. I didn’t realize to quite what an extent by taking him on, I’d be taking on the rest of the Locke clan too…” Jude stayed silent. She knew more would come. “They are very all-enveloping. They see themselves as a kind of coalition against the world. I think it all started when Rowley and Arnold were boys. They were brought up in Cornwall…”

“At Treboddick?”

“Yes. And, you know, they were always playing these fantasy games. There’s one in particular called the Wheel Quest.”

“Oh?” Jude responded as if she’d never heard of it. She’d admitted knowing Carole, but didn’t want to suggest that they’d discussed the Lockes together.

“It’s something Rowley devised. Started off as a role-playing thing the boys acted out, then he turned it into a kind of board game. And a family obsession. I expect Chloe and Sylvia are playing it downstairs right now. Anyway, that stuff was all instigated by Rowley. He was the imaginative one, he invented everything, and Arnold was happy to be his acolyte, to go along with whatever Rowley said. Then, when they got married, the wives became part of the…well, it may be overstating it, but you could almost call it ‘the alternative Locke universe’. Eithne was fine about the whole thing, still is, and of course the children love being part of it. Joan—that was Rowley’s first wife—well, the impression I get is that she went along with it quite enthusiastically at first. She’d been an only child and suddenly being part of this huge, hermetically sealed comfort zone…she loved everything about it. But, as the years went on, I think she got a bit disillusioned with the whole set-up. It can be difficult for an outsider.”

Ignoring the implication about Bridget Locke’s own position, Jude asked, “And was Nathan something of an outsider too?”

She’d got it right. “Yes. I suppose that’s why I bonded with him. Neither of us swallowed the whole Treboddick and Wheel Quest business quite as much as we should have done. We liked it, we loved the individual members of the family, but both of us I guess had a kind of independence in us…something that meant occasionally we didn’t want to do everything as a pack. At times it could all feel a bit claustrophobic. We both liked some level of solitude, which is very difficult to achieve in this family.”

“And that’s the bond between you and Nathan?” Jude was rewarded by a nod. “So is it worry about him that has got you in this state…and probably brought on the back trouble?”

“Maybe. Yes, probably.”

“Hmm.” Here was a slight dilemma. By asking what she wanted to ask next, Jude would be admitting that Carole had reported back every detail of her visit to the Summersdale house, and there were some people who would find that an invasion of privacy. Still, it was worth the risk. “Another thing my friend said, Bridget…was that, having met you and your husband, and Arnold and Eithne…”

“Yes?”

“…you seemed to be the only one genuinely worried by what might have happened to Nathan.”

There was a silence, and Jude feared she might have made a misjudgement. But Bridget proved to be more concerned about the boy than about having her affairs discussed by total strangers. “I know what you mean, but that’s very much a Locke way of doing things. With their solidarity there also comes a huge confidence, so they really can’t imagine that anything dreadful’s happened to Nathan. He’s a Locke—he’ll be all right.”

“I don’t suppose you think it’s possible…” Again Jude was treading on potentially dangerous ground, “…that they’re confident because they actually know where he is…they know he’s all right?”

“No. Absolutely not.” But then came a concession. “I did actually suspect that at first. Not very loyal of me, was it? But straight after the murder was discovered, my immediate thought was that Nathan had taken himself off to Treboddick and was lying low down there. That would have been a very Locke solution to the problem. Whatever goes wrong with anyone in the family, a few days at Treboddick is always reckoned to be what’s required. That’s the universal
panacea
. So I was suspicious.”

“But the police were also suspicious and they went down to Treboddick…searched all the cottages and found nothing.”

“You’ve got a lot of cottages down there?”

“A sort of terrace of four. Old miners’ cottages. Rowley’s parents used to own all of them. Now one of them’s permanently for the family, the other three are let.”

“During the summer holidays?”

“And any other time of year anyone’ll take them. Mopsa lives down there and she’s supposedly in charge of organizing the lets.” She didn’t sound over-confident of her stepdaughter’s organizational skills. “Anyway, once I knew that the police had searched Treboddick, I stopped being suspicious of the rest of the family. They don’t know where Nathan is. They’ve just convinced themselves that, because he’s a Locke, nothing bad can happen to him.”

“It must be rather wonderful to have that kind of confidence.”

Bridget Locke grinned wryly. “Well, it is…and it isn’t. Rowley and Arnold feel more secure in the family circle, being judged by family standards, than they do in the real world. So, if something goes wrong, like say when Rowley lost his teaching job, rather than going out into the competitive marketplace trying to get another one, he shrinks into himself. The world of Treboddick and the Wheel Quest is more benign than the real one.”

“Hmm.” Time, Jude decided, to get back to the purported reason for her visit. “Well, let’s have a look at this back, shall we?”

Obediently, Bridget Locke rolled back the duvet and lay on her front. Jude removed the pillows and began very gently to pass her hands up the line of the woman’s vertebrae. Not actually touching the skin, she waited to feel the angry energy of pain rising from the body. After the scan, she asked Bridget to perform various movements and tell her which ones hurt. Then, rolling up the nightdress and anointing the shapely back with some aromatic oil she had brought with her, Jude started to do a deep hands-on massage.

The effect was almost immediate. Bridget Locke’s body relaxed, and her breathing settled into a slow, regular rhythm. Her limbs twitched and, within minutes, she was fast asleep. She really had been exhausted.

As Jude tiptoed out onto the landing, her mind was full. She’d dealt with a lot of lower back pain, and this was the first sufferer she’d seen who was more comfortable propped up on pillows than lying flat. Nor had she seen many who could shake their heads and throw off duvets with quite such abandon.