“Zosia, have you got somewhere to stay while you’re here?” Jude asked gently. “Where did you spend last night?”
“Last night I was fine.” She clearly didn’t want to give details. Jude wondered if the girl had slept rough. Not very pleasant when the weather was cold.
“And what about tonight?”
“I will find somewhere.” The girl dismissed the question as if it wasn’t a problem. “Somewhere cheap. A pension, a…what is it called in England? A Bed and Breakfast?”
“That’s what it’s called, yes. But if you’d like to, Zosia, you could stay here with me.”
“Oh; but I couldn’t. No, I don’t want to be trouble to anyone. I can do on my own.”
It took a bit of cajoling; not much, though. The girl’s pride obliged her to put up some resistance, but Jude’s arguments soon blew it away. There was a spare bedroom in Woodside Cottage; it made sense that it should be used. Jude didn’t mention money, but she couldn’t imagine that Zofia had much with her. The cost of living in Poland was a lot lower than in England, and even in the off-season B and Bs along the South Coast eould be quite pricey. She was pleased when the girl gratefully accepted her offer, and suggested she should come straight from Littlehampton to Woodside Cottage.
By the time she arrived, the spare room would be made up for her.
As she put the phone down, Jude felt a double glow of satisfaction. Part came from the altruism of doing something that would be of help to someone in need. The other part was more selfish. Having the victim’s sister on the premises might well prove very useful in the murder enquiry on which she and Carole had embarked.
Her recapitulation of what Harold Peskett had said about Clincham College prompted a new question. Had the old boy told the police what he had overheard Tadek say in the betting shop? Were they aware of the Clincham College connection?
She rang through to Harold. No, he hadn’t been contacted by the police. Why should he have been, Jude reflected. He hadn’t been in the betting shop on the relevant afternoon.
Jude was now faced with a moral dilemma. She had information which the police might not have. And her sense of duty told her that she should immediately share it with them. She felt certain that was the course Carole, with her Home Office background, would have recommended. An immediate call to the police was required, to alert them to Tadek’s connection with Clincham College.
On the other hand…The police might have heard about the young man’s enquiry from another of the betting shop regulars…There was a very strong temptation to leave them in ignorance…
No, she should do the right thing. Unfair though it was – because she knew there was no chance of the police reciprocating by sharing their findings with an amateur detective – she should let them know what she’d heard.
Reluctantly, Jude rang the number Detective Sergeant Baines had given her. She got his voicemail. She didn’t give details of what she knew, merely said that there was another regular of the betting shop whom it might be worth their contacting for information in connection with the case of Tadeusz Jankowski. And gave Harold Peskett’s number.
She put the phone down with mixed feelings. Her sense of virtue at having done the right thing was transient. Stronger was the hope that the police might classify her message as just the witterings of a middle-aged woman, over-excited by her proximity to a criminal investigation. That, in fact, they would ignore it.
Zofia Jankowska had very few belongings with her, and the clothes she unpacked looked pitifully cheap. But she was extremely grateful to her hostess. “Please, I pay you money…?”
“No need,” said Jude.
“But for food? Already you cook me one meal.”
“All right. If that happens more often, you can make a contribution.”
“Please. You not ask how long I stay?”
“It’s not a problem.”
“No, but I not be trouble you long. I go when I find out all I can find out. I just want to know why my brother died.”
“Which is exactly what I want to know,” said Jude.
Ryan the betting shop manager looked more nervous than ever when he appeared in the Crown and Anchor very soon after five-thirty that evening. He wore a fur-hooded anorak over his uniform, but made no attempt to remove or even unzip it when he sat down in the booth opposite Carole and Jude. The latter introduced the former. He told Carole his name was Ryan Masterson and accepted Jude’s offer of a drink, asking for “A double Smirnoff, please, just with some ice.”
The two women had planned the way they wanted the conversation to go. From her snatched exchange with him in the morning, Jude had concluded that Ryan thought she knew something discreditable about him. She reckoned that was probably the fact that he had denied ever seeing Tadek in the betting shop before the afternoon of his death, but it might be something else, possibly something he thought she’d witnessed that morning. So she and Carole had decided to keep the one bit of information they did have on hold, and see if the manager had anything else to reveal.
“Busy day?” asked Carole uncontroversially.
“All right. Not too frantic this time of year.” The answer was automatic; there was tension in his voice.
“Do you know,” said Carole, uncharacteristically winsome, “today was the first day I’d ever been into a betting shop.”
“Yes, I saw you come in.”
“You take note of everyone who enters the premises, do you?”
“Have to. There are a lot of villains around.”
“What, they’re likely to cause fights, are they?”
“Not that. Some shops, maybe. Not in Fethering.”
“So what kind of villains are they?”
“Crooked punters. There are some who’ve got systems going. Multiple bets on fixed races, gangs of them going into a lot of different betting shops. We have to watch out for them.”
“Ah.” There was a silence. The question about his taking note of everyone who came into the shop had brought Carole the perfect cue to ask Ryan about Tadek’s former appearance, but that was the one thing she didn’t want to raise yet. And she couldn’t think of anything else to ask him about.
Fortunately, Jude arrived at that moment with their interviewee’s large vodka. As ever, her presence relaxed the atmosphere, though Ryan remained taut and watchful.
“Have the police been back to the shop since the weekend?” He shook his head and took a swig of vodka so urgent that it might have been some life-saving medicine. “So you don’t know what their current thinking on the murder is…?”
He shrugged. “That the bloke was stabbed somewhere else and just came into the shop to sit down.”
“But he didn’t sit down.”
“No. Thank goodness for that. If he’d actually died on the premises, I’d have had even more hassle.”
“You didn’t see which direction he came from, did you?” asked Carole.
“No. The way that hailstorm was coming down, you couldn’t see anything outside. I was only aware of him when he was actually inside the door.”
“And did you think anything particular when you saw him? Was there anything odd about him?”
“Well, he was swaying about a bit. I thought he might be trouble because he’d been on the booze.”
“Do people on the booze often cause trouble in betting shops?”
Ryan looked up sharply at Jude’s question, then mumbled, “Can happen.”
“And watching out for that kind of thing is part of your job?”
“Yes, we’re trained to stop trouble before it starts.”
“Hm.” Jude twisted a tendril of hair around one of her fingers. “And do you think the same as the police do, Ryan – that the young man came into the betting shop by chance?”