‘No worries about that,’ she replied. ‘Lennie worked in advertising. Respectable job, mortgage, married. Probably drank too much, but in a nice middle-class way. Then his wife died, I don’t know, five years ago perhaps. That’s when he really started hitting the bottle. Soon wasn’t turning up for work, lost his job. Couldn’t pay the mortgage, the house was repossessed. Within a year, he was on the streets.’
‘Was it responsible, giving him the bottle of vodka?’
Karla’s massive shoulders shrugged. ‘Stopped him from thieving to get some. And if you wanted the information …’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve registered him on any number of alcohol-dependency courses. He goes to a couple of sessions, then gives up. The trouble is with all those programmes – AA, the lot – the individual has to have the will to give up the booze. Lennie hasn’t got the will. He doesn’t want to change. So, I give him what support I can, get him to a doctor if he’s actually ill, sort out accommodation, but he never stays anywhere long.’
‘He’s got a death wish?’
Karla nodded grimly. ‘Since his wife died, he doesn’t want to live.’
‘So there’s nothing you can do about him?’
‘I can keep trying.’ But Karla didn’t sound hopeful.
‘And then one day he’ll just be found on the street, dead?’
‘Yes. There are some cases like that.’
Jude agreed. She’d had clients who were the same, people she just couldn’t help. Not many, but she remembered them all very clearly, remembered them as failures on her part. Any kind of healing must have some input from the person being healed.
There was silence in the car until they reached Woodside Cottage.
She was pleased later that evening to have a call from Oliver Parsons. Particularly pleased because rather than going straight to the subject of the murder, he first chatted inconsequentially about the weather and the government’s latest idiocy. It revived in Jude the thought that he might be interested in her as more than a fellow investigator.
But of course, in time he did get round to Burton St Clair’s death. ‘Just wondered if you’d heard anything new?’ he asked, characteristically casual. ‘Are you still the Number One Suspect?’
‘Well, I thought for a moment I was off the hook.’ And she quickly brought him up to speed with the lack of evidence on the wine bottle fragments and the new interest in Burton’s hipflask.
‘Ah, that’s a turn-up,’ Oliver commented slowly.
‘So, the police are now looking for people who knew about his habit of taking a hipflask wherever he went. Which unfortunately doesn’t get me out of the picture.’
‘Oh?’
‘Megan says I brought up the subject when we met for lunch on Thursday. Which isn’t true. She brought it into the conversation. But I can’t deny it was mentioned.’
‘Megan seems to have got it in for you, doesn’t she, Jude? Insisting you had an affair with Burton, an affair which broke up her marriage. Now insisting you mentioned the hipflask. Any idea why she’s so violently anti you?’
‘I just think she’s mentally unbalanced.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Why, what are you thinking?’
‘Well, Jude, if this were one of those Golden Age crime novels I used to spend a lot of time reading …’
‘Yes?’
‘Megan would be focusing suspicion on you to divert it away from herself.’
‘But she couldn’t have had anything to do with Burton’s death. As we’ve established, on the relevant evening she was staying with her friend in Scarborough.’
‘Yes, but if this were a Golden Age crime novel, she would have masterminded the murder and actually got someone else to do the poisoning.’
‘Like who?’
‘My suspicions keep coming back to Steve Chasen.’
‘Why particularly?’
‘Ever since I first met him, at the Fethering Library Writers’ Group, I had the feeling I’d seen him before somewhere. And it’s only recently I’ve worked it out.’
‘You had met him before?’
‘Not met, no. Seen.’
‘I’m not with you?’
‘Friend of mine from way back, guy called Rodge, was also a television director. Used to work on BBC arts programmes – back when the BBC did arts programmes. And there was one he did about the Wordway Trust.’
‘The what?’
‘The Wordway Trust. It’s an organization that runs week-long residential courses for aspiring writers.’
‘Oh.’
‘They’re tutored by professionals. There are a lot of charlatans out in the creative writing course business, but the Wordway Trust ones have quite a good reputation. Anyway, I was talking to Rodge a couple of days ago and he mentioned this film he’d made at a place called Blester Combe in Wiltshire – gosh, got to be fifteen years ago, probably more – and I realized that’s where I recognized Steve Chasen from.’
‘He was tutoring the course?’
‘No, no, the tutors are all published authors. Steve was on the course as a participant.’
‘An aspiring writer?’
‘Exactly. Which is what, I’m sure he’d be very sorry to admit, he still is.’
‘OK, so that’s where you’d seen him before, but why is this relevant to the investigation?’
‘It’s relevant, Jude, because another aspiring writer on the same course – and Rodge just confirmed this to me – was called Al Sinclair.’
Di Thompson agreed to see Jude the following morning, the Tuesday. ‘Come at nine. I’ll be there, though we don’t open till ten. Used to be nine to seven every day, but the hours have been cut back. And I’m sure they’ll soon be cut back further. Money, as ever.’
Jude asked if Carole wanted to come along with her to the library, but got a frosty response. Her neighbour said she’d already spoken to Di, the implication being that fault was being found with the way she’d conducted the bit of the investigation she’d done on her own. Jude also suspected she acted that way because the impetus for the next stage of their enquiry had come from Oliver Parsons. Carole could be so Carole at times.
Being back at Fethering Library gave Jude both a literal and a metaphorical frisson. The weather seemed colder than ever, one of those cloud-compressed days when it would never be properly light and when the wind would continue to scythe its relentless way up from the beach. She could not help herself from wondering, a little guiltily, where Lennie had spent the night.
And being back at the library for the first time since she’d stormed away from Burton’s car the previous week brought a chill to her soul as well.
When Di opened the door for her, it was almost as cold inside as out. ‘Central heating takes quite a while to heat up,’ the librarian explained. ‘One of the other things in this place that should have been replaced long ago.’ She had kept on her outside coat. Jude did the same.
‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to follow me around,’ said Di. As she had when Carole talked to her, she was working with a trolley of books, but on this occasion she was wheeling it round the stacks, replacing returned books in their proper places.
‘Can I help?’ asked Jude.
‘Probably simpler if I do it. I know where everything goes.’
Jude was surprised that someone of Di Thompson’s status was doing such a seemingly menial task. ‘I suppose all of your staff have to do a bit of everything …?’ she ventured.
‘“All my staff”?’ she echoed ironically. ‘That doesn’t amount to very many, I’m afraid. A bunch of part-timers, only one permanent, apart from me.’
‘Was that the girl who was helping last week? Is she the full-time one?’
‘Yes, Vix … though her definition of full-time and my own are rather at variance.’