Simon Brett - The Corpse on the Court

The pro looked at his watch. ‘I must go, got some calls to make. But I’ll guarantee you one thing. .’

‘What?’ asked Jude.

‘That sometime during the next hour and a quarter Jonty Westmacott will summon me out of the pro’s office because there’s something wrong with the court.’

‘And will there be something wrong with the court?’

George Hazlitt shook his head wryly. ‘Will there hell? But I will have to take the complaint seriously because I’m afraid that’s part of what the job of being a pro is about. And also. . I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for old Jonty. I mean, he was a really good player. Handicap down in the twenties in his prime. Even then he wasn’t above a bit of gamesmanship. But now. . it’s frustration because he can’t play like he used to, that’s what makes him do all this stuff. Age, the dreaded age. Heigh-ho, it’ll come to us all.’ He moved towards the walkway. ‘Anyway, I’ll see you, Jude.’

‘Yes. Just one thing, George. .’

But Wally Edgington-Bewley, Tom Ruthven and Rod Farrar had just arrived. The window during which Jude might have pursued her enquiry had closed.

She was glowing with health after she had showered and changed, but she also knew that the following day she would feel all the bending and stretching she had done. Particularly in her knees and the back of her calves. She hoped, though, that this wouldn’t be her last time on a real tennis court. The bug had begun to bite.

Remembering the etiquette of the game, she waited in the dedans until such time as the players had to change ends. She watched Rod Farrar serve to Jonty Westmacott, who hit his return into the net. ‘Thirty-love,’ said Tom Ruthven.

Rod Farrar served again, with exactly the same result. ‘Oh, this is ridiculous!’ spluttered Jonty Westmacott.

‘What’s the trouble this time?’ asked his partner, a very patient Wally Edgington-Bewley.

‘Well, it’s the height of the net, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t normally put that many into the top of it.’

‘The rest of us seem to be getting the balls over all right,’ observed Tom Ruthven.

‘Yes, but you’ve always tended to sky them rather,’ said Jonty. ‘My game’s always depended on my returns going very low over the net.’

‘So what do you want to do about it?’ Wally looked resigned. This ritual — or something very similar to it — had been carried out every Wednesday morning for eleven years.

‘I’ll have to have a word with George,’ replied Jonty Westmacott and bustled off the court towards the pros’ office. The three men left on court sighed and raised their eyes to the heavens.

Because there was a break in play Jude could have left straight away, but she lingered to see how this little scene would play itself out. George Hazlitt, looking suitably serious, came out of his office, carrying a marked stick. Jonty Westmacott followed.

The pro solemnly set the stick upright against the lowest point of the net’s sag. Even from the dedans Jude could see that the height was perfectly correct. Three foot. But rather than pointing that out, George Hazlitt went to the side of the court, reached into one of the galleries nearest the net and pulled out a metal bar. It was about a foot long with a square hole in one end. He fitted this over a metal nub sticking out of the pillar supporting the net and cranked it up a couple of notches. ‘Oh, I’ve done it a bit too far,’ he announced, and then cranked back the other way exactly the same number of turns.

Ceremoniously, he went back to the centre of the net and checked its height against his measuring stick. ‘There, I think you’ll find that better, Jonty.’

‘Thank you so much, George. Sorry to be a bother, but that kind of thing can make quite a big difference to my kind of game.’

‘Of course. No problem.’

George Hazlitt turned on his way back to the office just as Jude was passing along the walkway. Catching her eye, he winked. And she realized that being a real tennis pro was as much about public relations as it was about sport.

Carole Seddon had an email back from Iain Holland around five on the Wednesday afternoon, with text at the bottom reading: ‘Sent from my iPad.’

The message read: ‘I don’t know who you are and since my daughter disappeared I’ve been contacted by a lot of cranks. But if you genuinely do have information about Marina’s whereabouts, then we should meet and talk about it.’ There was a mobile phone number.

Carole was shocked by the speed of the response. Not expecting it, she hadn’t prepared her next step in the investigation. She felt a little frightened, too. Iain Holland had interpreted her message to mean that she actually had information about his daughter. How would he react when he discovered she knew nothing?

For a moment she was tempted to put the whole thing on hold. It had been a stupid idea to become involved in the Lady in the Lake mystery, and she was getting out of her depth. Better to pull the plug on the whole operation.

On the other hand. . Jude was getting ever more deeply entangled with Piers Targett and the affairs of Lockleigh House tennis court, and though she’d done her best to get Carole participating in that enquiry, it was Jude who had the contacts. She was the one who would be going the following day to Reggie Playfair’s funeral; there was no justifiable reason why Carole should attend. And funerals are traditionally fruitful hunting grounds for both police and amateur investigators. Overheard conversations, family rows, revelatory body language from suspects. . how many times had those been used as stepping stones towards the solution of a case?

So no, Carole Seddon couldn’t deny that her nose was a little out of joint. She’d started the Lady in the Lake investigation intentionally as something she was doing on her own. Without Jude. She’d just been offered an open door to the next stage. She couldn’t give up now.

Carole decided that she’d make the call from a public phone box. There seemed now to be infinite numbers of ways to track people down through their phone numbers and she didn’t want Iain Holland to know where she lived.

A few years before there had been a row of red telephone boxes on the parade at Fethering. Now, with the growth of mobile-phone usage, there was just one. And that wasn’t in a proper box. Only in a three-sided screen which, in the event of bad weather, depending on which way the wind was blowing, might protect someone from the waist upwards. Soon, Carole reckoned, that booth too would disappear.

It was with considerable trepidation that she dialled the number from the email. It was answered immediately. ‘Hello. Iain Holland.’

There was a brashness in his tone, but also a wariness. It was a confident voice, with no taint of public school, the proper voice for a man of the people.

‘Hello. I’ve just received your email.’

‘In what connection is this?’

‘About Marina’s whereabouts.’

That had its effect. Carole heard him raise his voice and call, ‘Sorry, got to take this in the other room.’ Presumably that was addressed to his new squeaky-clean wife and his new squeaky-clean children.

There was a silence, the sound of a door closing, and his voice was more urgent when he came back on the line. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

She had thought about her answer to this. She had no intention of giving her second name, but nor was she going to go down complicated routes of inventing a pseudonym or answering with something like ‘a well-wisher’. ‘My name’s Carole,’ she replied.

‘And you know something about Marina?’

‘I know that she disappeared eight years ago.’

‘Everyone knows that. It was all over the media. You implied that you had some new information.’