‘Yes, I would like to. The trouble is, I don’t know anyone—’
‘Nonsense. You know Brenda. Have a word with her. She’ll see you’re put on our table.’ He decided this was perhaps more than he could promise on his wife’s behalf. ‘Or at least on a table with a nice bunch of people.’
‘I’ll give her a call about it.’
‘Good. Good.’ He looked out at the sea through his office window. ‘Never tire of that view, you know. Lovely, isn’t it? The sea. Never still, always changing.’
This moment of poetry from the solicitor was unexpected, until Carole realized he was just playing for time. Donald Chew was tense. There was something he needed to say to her, and he was having difficulty getting round to it.
She agreed the view was lovely, and waited.
‘You remember last time you were here, Mrs Seddon . . . we discussed the young man who used to work here. Nigel Ackford, you know, who was up at the hotel.’
‘Oh yes,’ Carole recalled, as if she hadn’t heard the name since Donald Chew last mentioned it.
‘There was an announcement of his death in the Fethering Observer.’
‘Really? I haven’t seen it yet.’
‘No mention of the cause of death.’
‘Presumably there’ll be an inquest?’
‘There has been a preliminary one; adjourned until there’s more evidence,’ said the solicitor, confirming what Jude had heard from Inspector Goodchild. ‘Postmortems, that kind of thing I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
Donald Chew sighed wearily. ‘I feel rather bad about it.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because I was actually at the hotel the night he died. You know, you always have the feeling perhaps there was something you could have done. Probably not true, but . . . And those Pillars of Sussex dinners can get a bit rowdy and I’m afraid too much gets drunk and . . . I don’t know. Always a tendency to feel guilty after someone’s died. I’m sure I’ll get over it.’
Carole felt certain he had not yet unburdened himself of everything he needed to, and sure enough, after a silence, Donald Chew continued, his eyes still fixed on the sea. ‘I suppose I feel guilty because I’d drunk more than I intended that evening. In fact, I’d intended to drink virtually nothing, but . . . the road to hell and all that.’
Carole let him run on. ‘I even went on drinking after we’d left the bar. Bob Hartson offered to share a bottle of whisky with me up in his room, and I’m afraid I succumbed to that temptation too. Must have been up there for an hour, drinking with Bob – and his daughter Kerry. Goodness, for a child of her age, can she put the drink away?’ He chuckled, but still hadn’t finished what he had to say. ‘So, do you know, it was about quarter past three by the time I actually fell into my bed. Bob and I staggered downstairs to say goodnight to Kerry. She had a room in the stable block out the back, staff quarters, same place the chef and Bob’s chauffeur spent the night. And then I tottered off to bed.’
He shook his head; his eyes were full of self-loathing. ‘Dear oh dear. Don’t we ever learn? Why is alcohol so seductive while we’re drinking the stuff, and why does it make us feel so – uncomfortable afterwards.’ He had nearly let out a stronger adjective, but bowdlerized for Carole’s benefit.
From that point the conversation moved away from Nigel Ackford. Donald Chew talked further about the auction of promises. Carole said how much she was looking forward to it. Their meeting ended with great apparent cordiality.
And it left Carole feeling exactly as Jude had felt after her conversation with Max Townley in the Crown and Anchor. Someone was very deliberately orchestrating the alibis of the people present at Hopwicke House on the night Nigel Ackford died.
That afternoon Carole and Jude went for a stroll on Fethering beach. It was such a beautiful day – April coyly demonstrating how lovely an English spring can be – that Gulliver got the bonus of a second walk among the infinitely intriguing smells of seaweed, salt and tar.
‘Rick Hendry’s got to be behind it,’ Jude announced. ‘He’s the only one who benefits from this new scenario that’s been spoon-fed to us. And the alibis he’s set up have nothing to do with the murder. They’re just to cover any time he might possibly have been alone with Kerry.’
‘Suggesting that he did spend some time alone with Kerry that night?’
‘I’d say almost definitely, yes. And if news of that got out, with the current interest in Rick and underage girls, the tabloids’d go into a feeding frenzy.’
‘Yes, Jude, but what if Kerry herself talks?’
‘She’s been very effectively bribed to maintain her silence. Coincidence of timing, don’t you think, that she suddenly passes an audition to be on Pop Crop?’
‘Rick Hendry using his media power?’
‘Exactly. Just as he did with Max Townley. Amazing what people will do for the promise of television fame.’
‘But how did he persuade Donald Chew to fall in line?’
‘No idea, but he did somehow. The coincidence is too great for it to be above board. Just think of the unnecessary detail Donald gave you. He was fulfilling his part of an agreement to back up what Max told me.’
Carole nodded and looked thoughtfully out over the sea. ‘Yes, it all makes sense. But I’m sure Bob Hartson’s involved somewhere.’
‘Not in this alibi business. Rick, Suzy, Kerry and Max are in the clear, but Bob Hartson – and Donald Chew – are left wandering around the hotel just at the time when Nigel Ackford was most likely killed. Neither one of them has any alibi at all.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Jude had just parted from Carole and entered Woodside Cottage when her mobile rang. ‘It’s Wendy Fullerton.’
‘Oh, hello. How are you?’
‘Fine,’ the girl said shortly. She didn’t want to dwell on how she was. ‘Listen, you know you asked me to ring if anything else came up about Nigel.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, there is something. I don’t know whether it’s important or not, but it’s . . . odd. I don’t know if you remember, but I was using Nigel’s mobile.’
Jude had forgotten, but said, ‘Yes.’
‘His latest bill arrived yesterday. He must’ve given a change of address to the phone company when he moved in with me, and then forgotten to say he’d moved out, and then of course . . .’
The sentence died away, and Jude was aware of the tension in the girl’s manner. ‘So what’s odd about it, Wendy? Presumably you opened the bill?’
‘Yes. Like I said, I’d been using the phone, so a lot of the calls – particularly the later ones – were mine, but it was the ones before that seemed odd.’
She ran out of steam again. ‘How, odd?’ Jude prompted.
‘In the itemized listing there were some numbers I recognized. A lot of calls to me obviously, and some to Renton and Chew and . . .’
‘Yes?’
Wendy Fullerton took the bull by the horns. ‘There were also a lot to a number I didn’t recognize.’
‘A local number?’
‘Yes. 01903 prefix. I just—’ She was getting quite emotional now. ‘It’s not a number I know and—’
‘You haven’t rung it, have you, Wendy?’
‘No, I kind of want to, but . . .’
Jude understood completely. Wendy Fullerton had taken comfort in the news that Nigel Ackford had wanted to marry her. Maybe the knowledge was helping her cope with the complexities of bereavement. Now she was faced with the evidence, from his telephone bill, that Nigel had been ringing someone else a lot in the last weeks of his life. Wendy’s comforting image was threatened. Maybe she wasn’t the woman he had loved.