It was an ambition that Carole couldn’t share. Getting over the divorce had taken a good few years and at times it still felt like an open wound. But one of the important components of rehabilitation into her new single life had been not seeing David. Even the sound of his voice on the phone could upset her hard-won equilibrium for days on end.
As a result of this, she had bought a new telephone with a Caller Display facility. If David were to ring her, she could then identify his number and choose whether or not to take the call. So far he hadn’t called – and in fact David’s was the one set of digits where Carole’s usual facility for remembering phone numbers failed (a psychological block no doubt, though she would never have recognized it as such). But the Caller Display did give her a sense of security.
The thought of seeing David in Fethering made Carole feel even more unsettled. High Tor had been bought as a weekend retreat for both of them in happier times, when the marriage was still more or less ticking over. Under the terms of the divorce settlement, Carole had taken sole possession, and had managed over the years to expunge all memories of their shared occupation. Seeing David back on the premises would stir up a hornets’ nest of unwanted recollection.
As soon as she’d made the arrangement for the weekend, Carole had regretted it. Stephen had caught her in an unguarded moment, when she had been cuddling Lily, and at such times all the world seemed benign and she hadn’t been able to refuse him. So the fated weekend had continued to loom ever larger on her horizon until the threat was removed by the mercy of her flu.
She felt deeply relieved that the encounter hadn’t happened. But she was sorry not to have seen Lily.
Still, now she was feeling better, she could begin to focus her mind on the death of Tadeusz Jankowski. With the return of her health came a prurient wistfulness, almost a jealousy, prompted by the fact that Jude had witnessed the young man’s dying moments. If there was to be an investigation, Carole wanted to be part of it. So she sought through the weekend papers and cut out all the coverage of the murder, anything that might have relevance to the case. She found quite a lot of material. Immigration, particularly from Poland, was a topical issue, and the murder had unleashed pages and pages of ill-informed speculation.
Jude was surprised it took till the Monday for the police to contact her again. They’d taken all her details when they’d questioned her on the Thursday, saying they’d be in touch. And on the old principle that the first suspect in a murder investigation tends to be the person who finds the body, she had expected them to show more interest in her.
But the two young detectives who came to Woodside Cottage seemed very relaxed. They certainly didn’t give her the impression that she was a suspect and, given her previous experience of dealing with the police, were surprisingly generous with information.
“We’re pretty sure,” said the one who was called Detective Sergeant Baines, “that the victim had nothing to do with anyone in the betting shop that afternoon.”
“No one in there knew him?”
“No. We took statements from them all, you know, after you’d gone. None of them knew him from Adam. The manager, who makes it his business to see who comes in and out, had never seen him before.”
“So why did he go into the betting shop?”
“No idea. Maybe he was walking past and, feeling weak after being stabbed, just went in there to sit down. Or to get some shelter from the hailstorm.”
“Don’t you think it’s odd he didn’t ask for help?” asked Jude, reiterating Carole’s point.
Baines shrugged. “Perhaps he didn’t know how badly injured he was. Perhaps he was already too weak to speak. Or he could have been in shock. I don’t know.”
“And do you know where he actually was when he was stabbed?”
The other one, Detective Sergeant Yelland, exchanged a grin with Baines and said, “If we knew that, we’d be well on the way to solving the case, wouldn’t we?”
“But it can’t have been far away, can it? Or there would have been more blood at the bookie’s, wouldn’t there?”
Unlike previous detectives Jude had met, these two didn’t seem to object to her working out her own theories. “Maybe,” said Baines. “They won’t really know till they get the detailed post-mortem report. It could have been an injury that didn’t bleed much at first, but then got worse. In fact, that must have been the case, because there was no trail of blood leading towards the betting shop, only away from it.”
Jude found his use of the personal pronoun interesting. ‘They’ would get the post-mortem report, not ‘we’. The main part of the investigation was going on elsewhere. Baines and Yelland were juniors, minor players in the game. Realizing this encouraged her to ask more questions.
“I just heard the man’s name on the television. And they said he was Polish. Have you been able to find out much more about him?”
Baines showed no reticence in answering. “He was from Warsaw. Finished at university there last year. Been doing casual bar work over here.”
“Do you know where he lived?”
“Rented room in Littlehampton.”
“Not far away…” Jude looked thoughtful. “Have his family in Poland been contacted?”
Detective Sergeant Yelland seemed suddenly aware of the incongruity of the situation. “Just a minute. Aren’t we the ones who’re meant to be asking you the questions?” But he sounded amused rather than resentful.
“I agree that’s traditional,” said Jude with a winning smile. “But you haven’t asked many, and we don’t want to sit here in silence, do we?”
Both men grinned. “Yes, his family have been told,” Baines replied. “And there’s been contact with the Polish police authorities.”
“Oh?”
“Well, makes sense. Most likely the reason he was attacked is something to do with his own community. Probably goes back to some rivalry back home.”
“Can you be sure of that?”
“Can’t be sure of much in our business,” said Yelland.
Jude now understood the explanation for their relaxed demeanour. Neither Baines nor Yelland was particularly interested in the case. They were underlings who did as they were told. They had been told to interview her and they were following their instructions. But they had no expectations that anything she might say would be useful to the investigation. They regarded the murder as a foreign case, which just happened to have taken place on their patch.
Jude decided to test the limits of their goodwill and persist in her questioning. “I just wondered…whether it might be more local…?” Remembering Ewan Urquhart’s pontificating in the Crown and Anchor the previous week, she went on, “There does seem to be quite a lot of resentment of immigrants round here.”
“Not that much,” said Baines. “In some of the inner city areas, yes, there are problems. But down here, it’s not as if they’re taking people’s jobs or anything like that. Maybe a bit of trouble in the bigger cities…Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton. Get a bit of racial conflict at chucking-out time, you know, the odd fight. But not somewhere as small as Fethering. We don’t get called out much on disputes with immigrants, do we?”
Yelland agreed that they didn’t.
“I would just have thought – ”
“I can assure you that they are investigating every possibility.” Again Baines’s tell-tale use of ‘they’. “And if there is someone local involved, I’m sure they’ll find out about it. But the initial enquiries will be focusing on the Polish community.”
“Right.”
“So…” asked Yelland ironically, “is there anything else you want to ask us?”