Читать книгу Blood at the Bookies - Simon Brett - Страница 8

Jude had rung Carole on the mobile to say she would be delayed in bringing her shopping back, though she didn’t specify the reason. And when she finally got back to Woodside Cottage after being questioned by the police, she rang again on the landline. They had long ago exchanged spare keys, but Jude knew that her neighbour never liked being surprised by an unannounced visit, even from her. Carole Seddon endeavoured to organize her life so that it involved the minimum of surprises. The slipping in and out of people’s houses in which some people indulged was anathema to her. It was one of those habits for which Carole reserved one of her adjectives expressing major disapprobation: northern.

Inside High Tor, Jude, having served Gulliver a large helping of his long-wished-for Pedigree Chum, went upstairs to see the invalid.

It was a measure of the severity of Carole’s flu that, having granted permission for the visit, she hadn’t got out of bed to greet her guest. And in her reduced state even the news of a suspicious death in Fethering High Street didn’t bring the animation it usually would have done. The questions she asked were listless, and Jude almost had to insist on telling her the known details of what had happened.

‘As ever, the police didn’t volunteer much information, but then I don’t think they had much information to volunteer. Until they’ve established the identity of the dead man, they haven’t really got anything to go on. I can tell you, though, that he wasn’t a regular at the betting shop.’

Jude waited to be asked how she knew that, but with no question forthcoming, continued her monologue. ‘The detectives took me back into the shop after I’d shown them the body, and they asked general questions to everyone who was there. Most of the punters hadn’t even noticed the guy, but Ryan the Manager – who I guess makes it his business to clock everyone who comes in – said he’d never seen him before.’

She waited for a further prompt, but didn’t get one. ‘Obviously, having only seen him in the overcoat, I don’t know which part of his body the blood was coming from, and it could be something natural … a haemorrhage of some kind … but I’m afraid my first thought was murder.’

This word did bring a small spark to Carole’s pale blue eyes. Probably the activity she’d most enjoyed since her retirement to Fethering had been the investigation of murders with Jude.

‘If it was murder,’ her neighbour went on, ‘then the most obvious thought would be that it was a stabbing. I suppose it could also be a gunshot wound … Either way, the actual attack didn’t happen in the betting shop.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Carole, intrigued in spite of herself.

‘Positive. He came in through the front door.’

‘Is it just the one room?’ asked Carole, who prided herself on never having been inside a betting shop.

‘Well, there are offices behind the counter … and there are the toilets … and presumably there is a back entrance,’ Jude added thoughtfully. ‘But he definitely came in at the front. It was as if he was looking for something … Or maybe someone.’ The skin around her brown eyes tightened as she tried to work it out. ‘And I’m pretty sure he must have put the overcoat on after he was stabbed – or shot or whatever it was.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The lack of visible blood. It was a thick coat. If he’d put it on after he’d been wounded, then it would have taken a while for the blood to seep through.’

‘There’s one odd thing …’ mused Carole, now firmly hooked in spite of her illness.

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t he ask for help?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Here’s this man, seriously wounded – mortally wounded, as it turned out – and he must know that he’s hurt … and he staggers into a public place, the betting shop, surrounded by people … and he doesn’t say a thing. You’d have thought, in those circumstances, almost anyone would have said something … would have asked for a doctor to be called, or an ambulance … But he didn’t say anything. Or did he, Jude? Did he say anything to you?’

‘Not in the betting shop, no. He just smiled.’ And the image of that weak smile brought home to her the horror of what she had witnessed. An involuntary shiver ran through her plump body.

‘Well,’ Carole continued, joining the links in her chain of logic, ‘the fact that he didn’t say anything … didn’t draw attention to himself, even though he was dying … suggests, wouldn’t you say, that the man had something to hide?’

‘Yes,’ said Jude, ‘I suppose it could.’

‘And if we find out what he was trying to hide, then we’ll probably be a good way to finding out why he was killed.’

Jude wasn’t really convinced by that line of enquiry. But it was the only one they had.

Both women realized that they had been letting their imaginations run away with them. They didn’t even know that the death had been unnatural, and already they were building up pictures of a man with a guilty secret. Both were sheepish, feeling that the wildness of their conjectures was about to be shown up, as they waited for the early evening television news. Carole had roused her aching limbs and come down to the sitting room to watch. Jude had offered to bring the television upstairs, but her neighbour had been appalled by the idea. For Carole having a television in a bedroom was an unpardonable offence against decency, on the level with actually watching the thing during the daytime (though there was an afternoon chat show to which she was becoming almost addicted, but that was a secret vice).

The killing in Fethering was deemed sufficiently important to make the national news, and the bulletin did at least provide them with some solid information. The dead man had been identified as Tadeusz Jankowski, aged twenty-four. He was a Polish immigrant who had been in Britain less than six months. He had died of stab wounds and the police were launching a murder investigation.

Though it was an awful thing to think, both Carole and Jude would have been terribly disappointed if he’d turned out to have died a natural death.

That evening Jude, still more shaken than she liked to admit to herself, decided that she’d have supper at Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. Before she left High Tor she heated up some soup, but the invalid didn’t seem interested in eating. Carole just sipped a little Lucozade and looked with affronted fascination at the magazines she had been given. Jude had a feeling that the minute she was alone in the house, Carole would pounce on them and start reading. The offer of a hot toddy was refused, but Jude said she’d come in later and maybe make one then. After her surge of excitement over the murder, Carole had now slumped back into total lethargy and voiced no objections to the idea of another visit from her neighbour.

In the Crown and Anchor it didn’t take long for the subject to get round to Fethering’s latest murder. After his usual pleasantries to Jude and the quick provision of her customary large Chilean Chardonnay, the landlord Ted Crisp was on to it straight away. ‘Nasty business down by the betting shop this afternoon.’

‘Tell me about it. I was the one who found the poor soul.’

‘Were you? Blimey, you and your mate Carole certainly have a knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where is she, by the way?’

‘Laid up with flu.’

‘Poor thing. Give her my best.’

‘Will do.’ It was still at times incongruous to Jude that her fastidious neighbour had once had a brief fling with the scruffy bearded landlord of the Crown and Anchor. That evening he was in his habitual faded jeans, though in deference to the cold weather he was wearing a faded zip-up hoodie over his customary faded sweatshirt.

‘Immigrant, I gather from the news,’ he said darkly. In spite of his background as a stand-up comedian, Ted Crisp was capable of being, to Jude’s mind, distressingly right-wing.

His point was quickly taken up by another customer, a man in his fifties, dressed in tweed jacket, salmon pink corduroy trousers and a tie that looked as if it should have been regimental but probably wasn’t. He was thick-set, but in quite good condition. His receding hair was sandy, freckled with grey. He was accompanied by a younger, similarly dressed version of himself, who had to be his son. The boy was probably mid-twenties, large and slightly ungainly, with a thick crest of auburn hair. What might once have been a well-muscled body was on the verge of giving way to fat.

Jude knew the older man by sight. He worked in one of Fethering’s estate agencies on the parade (however small the town in West Sussex, there always seemed to be business for more than one estate agent). The agency was called Urquhart & Pease, though whether the man had one of those as his surname Jude didn’t know.

‘Been only a matter of time before something like this happened,’ he announced in a voice that had been to all the right schools. ‘Ever since the wretched EU opened up our boundaries to all and sundry, it’s been an accident waiting to happen. I mean, I’m the last person to be racist …’ Wasn’t it strange, Jude reflected, how people who started sentences like that always ended up being exactly what they denied they were ‘… but I do think we ought to have a bit of a say in who we let into our country. We are islanders, after all, with everything that goes with that … and we have a long history of doing things our way. And I’m not saying all immigration is bad. I’m as tolerant as the next man …’ Which in West Sussex, thought Jude, wasn’t saying a lot ‘… and I’ve got friends and colleagues who … What are you allowed to say now? Have different ethnic backgrounds …? Pakistani chap works as our accountant, and he fits in, you’d never know … Doesn’t he, Hamish?’

The younger man agreed that their Pakistani accountant did fit in, and listened dutifully as the estate agent pontificated on. ‘But I still do think you have to draw the line somewhere … or we’ll see more things happening like we did today.’

Jude didn’t want to get drawn into the conversation – she knew she’d be on a hiding to nothing – but she couldn’t help asking, ‘So you think this man was murdered because he was an immigrant?’

‘Obviously.’ He flashed her an urbane and slightly patronizing smile. ‘I’m sorry, we don’t know each other. Ewan Urquhart.’ So he was one of the partners in the agency. ‘And my son Hamish.’

‘This is Jude,’ said Ted Crisp, as though he’d been remiss in not making the introduction before.

‘I’ve seen you walking along the High Street,’ said the estate agent. ‘Never fail to notice an attractive woman, you know.’ It was a knee-jerk compliment, a little too smoothly delivered. Jude decided she would not buy a house from this man.

‘But, Mr Urquhart, you were saying—’

‘Ewan, please.’

‘Ewan. You seemed to be making the assumption that this man’s death must have happened because he was an immigrant …?’

‘Well, my dear, in a situation like this the law of probability kicks in, doesn’t it? Get the country full of foreigners and they bring their own ways with them. So you get welfare scroungers, gangs, people traffickers …’ He seemed to be picking randomly at Daily Mail headlines. ‘And then with the ones from the Indian subcontinent you get these so-called “honour killings”. Bumping your sister off because you don’t like her choice of boyfriend. I mean, what kind of behaviour is that?’

‘Barbaric,’ his son supplied.

‘You’re right, Hamish. It’s barbaric. A culture of violence. We never used to have a culture of violence in this country.’

‘No? What about our good old traditional soccer hooligans …?’ Jude was tempted to add, ‘or our good old traditional public schools …?’, but didn’t.

Ewan Urquhart smiled blandly. He was clearly a man who thought he had a way with women and knew how to deal with their little foibles. ‘Ah, now I think you’re just being perverse, Jude. Much as we’d all like to believe there’s no connection between increased immigration and the crime statistics, I’m afraid the facts don’t leave much room for doubt. If you leave your borders open, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get a lot of riff-raff coming in. For me, I’m afraid, it all goes back to joining the Common Market. Worst move this country ever made.’

He was clearly preaching to the converted as far as Ted Crisp was concerned. ‘Couldn’t agree with you more, Ewan. I don’t want to be ordered about by bloody Brussels.’

‘Nor me,’ Hamish managed to slip in before his father continued. ‘Being British used to be a cause for pride. Not showing-off pride like some other countries are so fond of. Not standing up and saying “Aren’t I wonderful?” pride. But that quiet British pride that just does the right thing without crowing about it. And where’s that gone, I ask you? God knows. Now our bloody politicians seem to be apologizing all the time … desperate not to offend anyone “of a different ethnic background”. Margaret Thatcher never used to apologize for being British.’

Surely Ted was going to take issue with that? In his stand-up days Thatcher-bashing had been a major ingredient of his material. But he said nothing, as Ewan Urquhart steamrollered on. ‘Things like this murder should be a wake-up call, you know. Get people to stop and think what we’re actually doing to this country by allowing uncontrolled immigration. As I say, I’m not a racist, but I do think there comes a point when you have to recognize that enough is enough.’

‘You’re too right, Dad,’ said Hamish.

Jude had intended to have supper in the Crown and Anchor. But as Ewan Urquhart continued his tub-thumping, and as Ted Crisp and Hamish continued to agree with him, the prospect became less attractive. When she’d finished the one Chilean Chardonnay, she went back to Woodside Cottage. She’d find something in the fridge.