Simon Brett - The Corpse on the Court

‘And you’re afraid,’ said Carole, ‘that your perfect image with the “high-ups in the Conservative Party” might be a little tarnished if they found out you had a living daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who perhaps has gone to the bad?’

‘No!’ Iain Holland blustered. ‘Of course that’s not what I mean.’

But Carole Seddon knew that it was.

‘Anyway, you’ve still said nothing that convinces me you have any proof Marina’s alive.’ He looked at his watch. ‘And unless you do have something new to tell me, I think we should draw this meeting to a close.’

She had been let off the hook once, but she couldn’t see history about to repeat itself. Iain Holland had risen from his chair and was moving towards the door. Carole thought back desperately to her conversation with Donna Grodsky and blurted out, ‘What intrigues me is Marina’s Russian connection.’

It had been a complete shot in the dark, but it found its target. Iain Holland froze, then slowly turned back to face her. The slick confidence of his expression had been replaced by something very close to fear. ‘What do you know about Marina’s Russian connection?’

Absolutely nothing was the answer inside Carole’s head, but what she said was, ‘I know that she suspected her origins to be Russian. I know that she was very much drawn towards the Russian community here in Brighton.’

Iain Holland processed this information for a moment. He was considerably shaken by what she had said. Then he asked, ‘What more do you know?’

The only tenuous piece of information she’d gleaned from all her investigations was one first name. Still, she had nothing to lose by mentioning it. ‘I know about Vladimir.’

His immediate reaction showed Carole that she had hit home, but he quickly covered it up and asked sceptically, ‘Vladimir who?’

It was the question she had been afraid he might ask. And of course the one to which she had no answer. Realizing that, though she’d got Iain Holland on the back foot, her only hope was to bluff her way out, Carole Seddon smiled smugly. ‘I think that’s enough for the time being.’

‘But you’ve told me nothing.’

‘I know about the Russian connection. And Vladimir.’ So confident was she now of the power reversal that had taken place that she rose to her feet. ‘Maybe I should be on my way.’

‘No, no!’ Iain Holland put a hand on her arm to stop her. ‘Just sit down again for a moment. Please.’

Carole did as he requested. He sat too and put his hands flat on the table as if to begin a process of negotiation. ‘Presumably,’ he said, ‘you want money to make you keep quiet about this?’

‘Actually, I-’

‘How much?’

Piers Targett came back to Woodside Cottage after his London meetings and wanted a full debrief on Jude’s experience of a real tennis lesson. It seemed really to matter to him that she should like the game and she found his enthusiasm infectious. If anyone had suggested a month before that she might seriously be about to take up a game she’d hardly heard of, she would have laughed in their faces. But it was strange how quickly things could change when love was involved.

Their relationship took another step forward that evening, in that Jude cooked a meal for Piers. Up until then all their eating had been done out — in fact, Piers always ate out. The idea of his pristine kitchen in Bayswater being sullied by anything other than wine bottles and a corkscrew was unthinkable. Jude wondered if he ever had cooked for himself, whether indeed he had any domestic skills. Maybe when he and Jonquil were cohabiting, they had had a normal home life, but it was a subject she did not yet want to discuss. There’d be time enough for that, particularly since this new domestic phase of their relationship somehow seemed to promise a longer future.

She cooked a Thai green chicken curry, one of her specialities. Jude’s range of cooking was wide and random. She was just as likely to do a fry-up as something more exotic. And whereas in the next-door kitchen at High Tor every ingredient would be weighed out exactly to the last scruple, Jude’s approach was instinctive. She didn’t have a recipe book in the house. On the other hand, she had for a while run a restaurant, so she did possess all of the necessary skills.

They drank a lot of wine with the dinner. Indeed, they always seemed to drink a lot of wine when they were together, Piers probably downing a couple of glasses to every one of hers. But she had never seen him drunk. He just seemed cheerfully to go on topping himself up. And he didn’t go in for any of that what he called ‘nonsense about not drinking and driving’. She’d often seen him take the wheel of the E-Type with a bottle of wine inside him, but she never felt in any danger.

That evening she lit a fire in the Woodside Cottage sitting room. The October night wasn’t really cold enough to justify it, but the warmth and the glow were comforting. After they had eaten (and Jude, with a laxness that would have appalled Carole, had not even thought about taking their dirty plates through to the kitchen), Piers had removed his jacket and they’d slipped naturally down from the sofa to the floor. Equally naturally, snuggling and sipping wine had led to lazy love-making.

Which, later, they continued upstairs. Then, in what was now becoming a jokey ritual for them, Jude asked Piers to explain how a chase was laid on a real tennis court. And she was soon blissfully asleep.

Jude didn’t know what time it was when she woke up. Having someone sharing her bed at Woodside Cottage felt strange. Not unpleasantly strange, just unfamiliar.

She lay there, still, drinking in the welcome unfamiliarity of Piers’ presence, his breathing, steady, deep, just on the edge of a snore. She thought back over the day, particularly the evening, and everything felt good.

But she was wakeful. She knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep for at least half an hour. Had she been on her own, she might have switched on the bedside light and read. Or done some of the personalized stretching exercises that she had developed from yoga. Even gone downstairs and made a cup of herbal tea. But she didn’t want to wake Piers.

Inevitably, as she lay there, she found herself thinking about Reggie Playfair’s funeral in the morning. And from there it didn’t take long for her thoughts to home back in on the circumstances of his death.

That, however, prompted an unwelcome memory, which for the past few days she had been, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, suppressing. The call she’d had from Jonquil Targett about Reggie Playfair’s mobile phone. Probably nothing, probably just an attempt by a severely unstable woman to plant suspicions about her estranged husband. Or was there more to it than that. .?

Jonquil said she’d seen the phone in Piers’ possession. And it had a distinctive cover, specially made in the colours of the Lockleigh House tennis club.

She said she’d seen it in the pocket of Piers’ jacket. And Piers’ jacket was at that moment lying downstairs in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage.

Jude hated the direction in which her thoughts were turning. It went against her every instinct to be suspicious of someone she loved. And particularly now, when she had just regained a feeling of reassurance after her doubts of the weekend. She tried to shift concentration on to some other subject, but still Jonquil Targett’s words sawed away at her mind.

She tried to reason against what the woman had said. Even if Piers had had Reggie’s mobile in his jacket pocket, he was likely to have moved it by now. Or he’d be wearing a different jacket. And even if she did find the mobile, its battery would have run down during the past week, so she wouldn’t be able to gather any information from it.