Simon Brett - The Corpse on the Court

Jude now knew that she would have no peace until she had behaved like some archetype of the jealous lover, till she had gone downstairs and checked through Piers Targett’s jacket pockets. Hating herself for what she was doing, she edged out from under the duvet. When she was standing by the side of the bed, she froze for a moment, but there was no interruption to the easy regularity of her lover’s breathing.

She slipped on a towelling dressing gown and crept from the bedroom, knowing how to move the half-open door without making it squeak, knowing which creaking step to avoid on the staircase.

The last embers of the fire still cast a meagre glow around her sitting room. Jude moved straight to the sofa on the arm of which Piers’ jacket had been casually abandoned. Now she had made the decision of what she was about to do, there was no point in delaying the inevitable.

She felt in one pocket and her hand closed on the hard rectangle of a mobile. Extracting it, she was relieved to recognize the counters of Piers’ iPhone.

She replaced that and felt in the other jacket pocket. There too she felt a familiar shape and weight. She took it out. The dying glow of the fire gave enough light for her to see the coloured stripes of the cover.

While Piers Targett had sent her on an errand to his E-Type outside the tennis court, he’d taken Reggie Playfair’s mobile.

Jude put the light on and inspected the phone. Switched it on, nothing happened. Of course it would have run out of power. She almost didn’t want to find out that the mobile was a Nokia, like her own. And that her charger would fit it. But it did.

Grimly she plugged the charger in. The screen took a moment to come to life. No password was required, she just had to press a function key to unlock the phone.

She went straight to Messaging, and opened the in-box. The last text Reggie Playfair had received was sent at 12.37 am on the day of his death.

It read: ‘Something important’s come up. Meet me on the court as soon as you can, like we used to.’

The sender had not identified him- or herself. Nor did the number the text had been sent from mean anything to Jude. But she made a note of it.

As she was scribbling the number down on the back of an Allinstore receipt, she looked up to see Piers standing the doorway from the hall. He had thrown on an orange silk dressing gown of hers. Far too small, it made him look faintly ridiculous.

‘Ah. So you found the phone,’ he said.

‘You hadn’t made much attempt to hide it.’

‘True.’ He sounded weary as he came across to sit at one end of the sofa. She sat at the other end. The void between them seemed incongruous after the intimacy they had shared there only a few hours earlier.

‘I suppose you want some explanations,’ said Piers Targett.

‘Wouldn’t hurt.’

‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I took it from Reggie’s pocket when I sent you out to get my mobile from the E-Type.’

‘I assumed that was what had happened.’

‘But of course you want to know why.’

‘Wouldn’t hurt either.’

‘I did it to protect Reggie.’

‘Bit late for that. He was already dead.’

‘True. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I did it to protect Oenone.’

‘Oh?’

‘If the mobile had come back to her and she had found the text message which had summoned him to the court. .’ He grimaced at the thought of the consequences.

‘On the other hand, Piers, you could simply have erased the text message before the phone got back to Oenone, and your problem would have been solved.’

‘Yes, I can see that now. At the time I wasn’t thinking very straight. The urgent thing seemed to be to prevent Oenone from getting the phone.’

‘Hm.’ Jude didn’t disbelieve him. His behaviour was consistent with the kind of messy, illogical ways people react in a crisis. ‘You’ve presumably read the text message that summoned Reggie down to the court?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you presumably know who it was from?’

‘Yes.’ He gave her a shrewd look. ‘Why, don’t you?’

‘There was no name, the number didn’t mean anything to me and I hadn’t had a chance to check through the phone’s address book before you came down.’

‘Right.’ Slowly, with deliberation, Piers Targett rose from the sofa. He unplugged the stripy-jacketed mobile and put it back into the jacket pocket whence Jude had taken it.

‘The text message,’ he said slowly, ‘was from Jonquil.’

‘Really?’ Jude hadn’t been expecting that.

‘So she told me.’ Piers spread his hands against his forehead and pressed them sideways as if trying to wipe away some memory. ‘Look, as I’ve said before, Jonquil is never the most rational of beings. In her down periods she’s almost catatonic. When she’s up, she’s capable of all kinds of bizarre behaviour.’

‘I thought you said the medication controls that.’

‘It does — providing she takes it. But she always thinks the time will come when she doesn’t need any medication. So when she’s feeling good, like when she’s at the beginning of a new relationship — like she has been recently — she won’t touch the stuff.’

‘And that makes her behaviour even more bizarre?’

‘Precisely. Anyway, there’s a bit of history between Jonquil and Reggie.’

‘Oh?’

‘I told you fidelity was never her strong suit. And after the few months of honeymoon period after we got married. . well, her promiscuous side took over.’

‘So she and Reggie. .?’ Some people might have thought the idea of the fat man in his seventies having an affair incongruous, but Reggie Playfair had been young once. And Jude knew that passion was not always diminished by age.

‘I don’t actually know for a fact that they did. But Jonquil certainly slept with other members of the club round that time. And I think she wanted to add Reggie to the list. Whether he was strong enough to resist her, I’m not sure. I’ve a feeling Reggie was one of those old-fashioned chaps who genuinely believed in the sanctity of the marriage vows. But one thing I know for a fact — if he did resist Jonquil’s advances that would have made her absolutely furious. She liked getting her own way — particularly when it came to men.’

‘You and Reggie never discussed it?’

‘No. Very British of us, wasn’t it? He knew — and Oenone knew — that Jonquil was making a fool of me with other men, but the subject was never mentioned. So, needless to say, the subject of whether Reggie himself was actually one of her conquests. . well, that wasn’t mentioned either.’

Jude felt a surge of pity for Piers, being saddled with Jonquil, the kind of woman who would never be completely out of his life. She felt pity for Jonquil too, as she would for anyone suffering from mental illness, but not as much as she did for Piers.

‘If Jonquil sent the text message,’ she began slowly, ‘and Reggie reacted instantly, in the middle of the night, that must suggest quite regular contact between them, since the time that they. . well, if they did have an affair.’

Piers shrugged. He looked almost pathetic, inadequately wrapped in orange silk. His deep blue eyes were tight with pain. ‘Jonquil was strange about keeping in touch with people. Suddenly someone’d be her new best friend and she’d be phoning and texting them all the time. Equally suddenly, they’d drop out of favour. Or she might, out of the blue, one day call someone she hadn’t spoken to for years. Just another example of her volatility. Trying to second-guess what Jonquil is about to do next is a very exhausting business — as I know to my cost,’ he concluded with feeling.