Moving to the index, she found a mere half-dozen references to ‘Ricky’. None to ‘Richard’, so maybe the child had been christened with the shortened name, or maybe he had just always been called that. The mentions of him in the book were all similar in tone. Ricky was ‘a delightful child’, ‘the greatest joy that life had brought me’, ‘a prodigiously talented musician’. Like the photograph in the garden, there was something posed and sanitized about the references.
Only on one occasion did what could have been genuine emotion break through the carefully written text. Flora Le Bonnier was about to begin a six-month tour to Australia, playing Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan. She wrote:
The thought of leaving three-year-old Ricky for such a long time stabbed through my heart like a sliver of ice. No amount of public adulation from antipodean audiences could make up for the sense of bleak bereavement I felt at that moment.
It sounded heartfelt, but the extravagance of the language still made Jude ambivalent about the sincerity of the sentiments expressed.
She tried to analyse what she knew about the relationship between Ricky and his mother. The only time she had seen them together, at her open house, Flora had seemed almost to worship her son. But then, when she’d talked to Kath, she’d been told: “Ricky was looked after by his aunt, because his mother was always off acting all over the world.” Given the fact that Ricky and Kath had gone to the same village school, that aunt must have lived near to Fethering. Jude wondered idly whether she’d been Flora’s sister. Or indeed whether she was still alive. And, if so, where?
She scoured the index and flicked through the text, but could find no reference in One Classy Lady to Polly Le Bonnier. There was no mention of any of Ricky’s marriages. All Jude could find in the book which related to his adult career was the one sentence: “My son’s artistic talents developed in a different way from my own, and he made a huge success developing new talents in the heady ‘pop music’ scene of the late sixties and early seventies.”
More interesting, from Jude’s point of view, was the fact that there was no mention at all of who Ricky’s father had been. No reference, so far as a fairly exhaustive flick through the pages of One Classy Lady could establish, to any husbands or lovers in the life of Flora Le Bonnier.
Twenty-Three
Carole Seddon woke early the following morning, denying to herself that she was feeling the absence of Gulliver from his usual base in front of the Aga. She washed and dressed briskly, determined to put into action her revolutionary plan of taking a walk on Fethering Beach without the excuse of a dog.
The timing was, of course, pivotal and, being Carole, she reached the Promenade at seven-twenty, even though she knew there was no chance of Anna appearing with her Black-Watch-clad Westie until half past. Risking the ever-present danger of looking like a sad old pensioner, Carole sat in one of the seafront shelters and waited.
It was a cold day, the weather seeming to reflect the general feeling that everyone had had enough of Christmas jollity, and couldn’t wait to get back to the normality of the forthcoming year.
Seven-thirty came and went, and there was no sign of Anna or her dog. Carole recognized that not everyone was such a fetishist about punctuality as she was and gave the woman the benefit of the doubt. She sat waiting in the shelter, willing herself not to look lonely and decrepit, wishing she had brought the Times crossword with her, both to while away the time and also to give the illusion of purpose.
She let eight o’clock pass, but by a quarter past reconciled herself to the fact that she wasn’t going to see Anna that morning. Her first thought was that maybe the woman realized she and Jude were on to her and had taken evasive action, but she soon realized what a ridiculous idea that was. Anna was probably unaware of any interest they might have in her and had changed her morning routine for reasons that they could not begin to guess at.
Carole stood up and stretched her frozen limbs, about to go straight back to High Tor. It would soon be time to get in the Renault and drive to Fedborough. The thought of having Gulliver back brought her a disproportionally warm glow which she tried unsuccessfully to suppress.
But as she started back along the Promenade, she saw coming towards her a woman with a dog. Not Anna, the dog-walker she had been hoping to meet, but a dog-walker nonetheless. The words of Saira Sherjan came back to her. “I know for a fact that dog-walkers constitute one of the most efficient gossip grapevines in the world. Members of the Fethering Beach Dog-walking Mafia exchange all kinds of secrets on their early morning walks.” Carole changed direction and advanced towards the woman.
Her luck was in. The dog the woman was walking – and had just let off the lead – was a Labrador. Younger than Gulliver, but definitely a Labrador. Conversational opening gambits did not come better gift-wrapped than this.
“Good morning. She’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?”
Nothing could go wrong that morning – Carole had got the gender right. “Yes, she’s adorable,” said the woman. “But where’s yours?”
So much for Carole’s image of herself surrounded in a carapace of anonymity. Someone had noticed that she was in the habit of taking Gulliver on to Fethering Beach for a walk every day for the last God-knew-how-many years. Now she looked at the woman, Carole realized that they had passed most mornings with no more than a ‘Fethering nod’.
“Oh, I’m afraid he’s had an accident.” And with no difficulty at all, Carole found herself relating Gulliver’s encounter with the rusty staple, and his hasty removal to the vet’s in Fedborough.
“Saira looked after him, did she? Well, he’s in good hands there. She’s easily the most sympathetic in that surgery. She sorted out Kerry when she had a growth on her leg.”
“My name’s Carole Seddon, by the way.”
“Oh, yes, I know.” Another proof that it was impossible to be anonymous in a village the size of Fethering.
“But I’m afraid I don’t know yours.”
“Ruby. Ruby Tallis. Me and my husband Derek live up on Sea Road.”
“Oh, I’m in the High Street.”
“Yes. High Tor, isn’t it?”
To Carole’s surprise, the fact that everything about her seemed to be public property did not feel like an invasion of privacy. On the contrary, it felt rather comforting, almost as though she were something she never thought she would be – ‘part of the community’. In no time at all, she and Ruby were having quite a voluble conversation about canine ailments and the vagaries of vets. Neither woman suggested sitting down. While Kerry the Labrador snuffled amongst the smells of the shoreline, they just stood and chatted. Yes, chatted. Carole Seddon was actually chatting.
Moving the subject on from vets to recent events at Gallimaufry required no effort at all. Like everyone else in Fethering, Ruby Tallis had plenty of views and opinions about the death of Polly Le Bonnier. Or it might be more accurate to say that her husband Derek had plenty of views and opinions about the death of Polly Le Bonnier, and Ruby just parroted them.
“Derek reckons it was a burglary gone wrong.”
“Oh, does he?”
“Yes, he reckons it was probably a drug addict, keen to get some money for his next fix, and the girl surprised him in the shop and he shot her and then set the place on fire to cover his tracks.”
“But why would Polly have gone there?”
Clearly this was not a subject on which Derek had an opinion. His wife reasserted that he thought the killing had been done by a drug addict, ‘keen to get some money for his next fix’. She seemed to relish saying the phrase.