He looked up and seemed pleased with what he saw. “Yes?”
“Andy, I thought you said we’d meet up in the Drama Studio at eleven.”
He looked at his watch. “Oh, sorry. Hadn’t noticed the time.” He turned the full power of his smile on to Carole and Jude. “Ladies, you will excuse me?”
And, pausing only to snatch up the piece of paper with Jude’s number on it, he walked with long strides out of the café. The dark-haired girl followed, her eyes glowing with puppy love.
Jude was too old for puppy love, but she couldn’t deny that Andy Constant was a very attractive man.
Fifteen
Jude heard the sound of crying as soon as she came through the door of Woodside Cottage. Zofia was hunched up on one of the sitting room’s heavily draped sofas, her shoulders shaken by the sobs that ran through her body. On the floor beside her were a battered suitcase and a scruffy backpack. Immediately Jude’s arms were round the girl and her lips were murmuring soothing words.
“I am sorry,” was the first thing that Zofia managed to say. “I hear from the police this morning that I can come and collect Tadek’s things, his possessions, and seeing them…” She indicated the bags “…it makes me realize that he is really gone from me.”
“Do you want me to put them away somewhere, until you are ready to deal with them?”
“No, Jude, thank you.” Zofia wiped the back of her hand against her face to dismiss the tears. “No, I am ready to deal with them now. Maybe there is something in here that tells me what has happened to Tadek. I must not be emotional. I must try to piece together from his possessions what he was doing here in England, and perhaps the reason why someone want to kill him.”
“All right,” said Jude. “I’ll help you. But first let’s have a drink of something. What would you like, Zosia?”
“Coffee, please. Black, that would be good.”
“Don’t start opening the bags until I’m there.” Jude didn’t fool herself that her words were spoken from pure altruism. She was being offered a unique chance to further her investigation into Tadek’s death.
“Did the police say anything,” she called through from the kitchen, “about why they were letting you have his belongings so soon?”
“They just said they’d finished what they needed to do with them, and the landlord wants to rent out the room again as soon as possible so the stuff can’t go back to Littlehampton. Would I like to take it, please?”
“Did you go back to the house?”
“No, I collect from police station.”
“I wonder if their letting you take the stuff suggests the police are winding up their investigation?”
“I do not know.”
“Well, if they’ve made an arrest, we’ll hear pretty soon on the news.”
“Yes.”
When Jude came through with the coffee, Zofia had curbed her tears but she still looked lost and waiflike on the sofa. Her pigtails emphasized her vulnerability. “Come on,” said Jude, once the drinks were poured, “let’s be very unemotional about this; Try to distance yourself from what you’re looking at, Zosia.”
“I will try, but it is not easy.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. But just try to forget it is your brother whose things we are looking at. Imagine it is an assignment you are doing as a journalist. You have to write a story based on the information you can glean from what you find here.”
“Yes, this is a good way. I will try this.” She produced her blue notebook and opened it at a clean page. “I am writing a story about a murder investigation. And I will write my notes in English.”
“Right. Open the suitcase first.”
Zofia did as she was told. The contents of the case were pitifully few, mostly clothes, and fairly worn and threadbare clothes at that. Though they must all have been redolent of memories, the girl was commendably restrained as she neatly piled them up. She made a kind of inventory in her notebook.
“Nothing here that he didn’t have at the time he left Warsaw,” she announced when the suitcase was nearly empty. She picked up the last item, a sponge bag, and unzipped it.
The contents once again were unsurprising. Shaving kit, deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush, paracetamol. And in one compartment a pack of condoms.
“So it looks like something was happening in his life…” suggested Jude.
“Or just that Tadek was, as he always was, optimistic.” Zofia was making a joke at the expense of her brother’s romantic aspirations, but she could not say it without a tear glinting in her eye.
She moved on to the backpack. This had seen a lot of service. Its fabric was slack and discoloured, covered with a rough patchwork of stickers, old and illegible ones covered over by newer designs whose colours showed up against them.
“Are these all from your brother’s travels?”
“No. He was given the backpack by a friend, who I think himself had bought it second-hand. The only ones Tadek would have put on are those from music festivals he goes to.” She pointed to a bright printed circle. “This one in Leipzig…I remember he goes there after he finish university last summer. A celebration…to play some of his own music, he said, and to listen to people who play music better than he does.”
She pulled the backpack towards her and tackled the buckles. “Maybe here we will find more secrets about what he do in England.”
There was some evidence of Tadek’s activities, but nothing very interesting. Zofia itemized everything in her blue notebook. Programmes and tickets suggested he’d been to a few music gigs, but none further afield than Brighton. Some torn-out newspaper advertisements indicated that his career ambitions might have extended beyond bar work. A well-thumbed dictionary and an old language course on cassette bore witness to a determination to improve his English.
And there was also an English rhyming dictionary. Zofia looked at this with some confusion, before opening it to check the contents. Then she nodded slowly.
“Does that tell you something?” asked Jude.
“I think, yes. It is something Tadek speak of occasionally. He say writing good songs in Polish is good for Poland, but not for the world. To write songs that are very successful, you must write in English – or American.”
“So you think he was writing songs in English?”
“I think he tries, yes.”
“He wanted to be very successful?”
Zofia Jankowska grimaced. “Not exactly that. Tadek did not want a lot of money. Well, we would not have minded, but for him money was a…was what he could do with it…I think there is an expression in English…?”
“‘A means to an end’.”
“Yes, this is good. This is how Tadek see money. It helps him to do things he want to do. For him money is ‘a means to an end’.”
“So writing songs in English would have made him more money? That would be his reason for doing it?”
“Perhaps. More with Tadek, though…” The girl smiled wistfully “…he might want to write songs for English women.”
“What do you mean?”
“I tell you he is romantic. He fall for women who are not right for him…”
“Yes, you said. And often older women.”
“That is what Tadek does, very often. And because he is romantic, and because he does not have much money to buy presents for the women he loves…”
“He used to write songs for them?”
Zofia nodded. “That is what he always does.” She picked up the rhyming dictionary again. “So perhaps this means he had fallen in love with an Englishwoman.”