Jude smiled inwardly at this latest of her neighbour’s neuroses as she said, “The other thing we can do is try to find Old Garge again.”
Twenty-Seven
The Wednesday morning was not so cold. The entire country was still in its state of holiday torpor, but for Carole Seddon Christmas seemed a distant memory. She had survived – even enjoyed – the day itself, but now normal life had to continue. She wanted to put the last week behind her. Going to the Le Bonniers’ New Year’s Eve Party would be an incongruous reminder of the season.
Gulliver, who appeared to have suffered no ill effects from his surgery, watched the well-practised preparations for a walk with tremendous tail-wagging enthusiasm. When they reached Fethering Beach, Carole didn’t have the heart not to let him roam free. The tide was low. Gulliver lolloped off to practise emergency stops in the sand. Carole sat in the shelter where she had last talked with Anna, and waited. Her timing was precise again; it was twenty past seven.
And this time she got a result. Anna must have started her walk a little earlier than usual, because she and her Westie appeared round the corner of a weed-covered wooden groyne way down on the beach. Gulliver gambolled towards them, had a momentary exchange of sniffs with the other dog and then returned to his high-speed braking exercises. What a useful herald he is, thought his mistress, alerting Anna to my presence.
It seemed quite natural for Carole to rise from the shelter and walk down across the shingle towards her dog, and what she could almost call her dog-walking friend. Except that what she had to talk to Anna about might put a severe strain on their embryonic friendship.
After mutual greetings and an exchange of very English sentences about the comparative mildness of the weather, Carole decided she had to leap straight in. “You remember last time we met, we talked about the fire at Gallimaufry…?”
“Yes.”
“Have the police talked to you about it?”
“They asked me about security arrangements at the shop.”
“Not about anything else?”
“Why on earth should they ask me about anything else?”
“Just because you were seen with Ricky in his car near Fethering Yacht Club earlier that evening.”
The approach had been clumsy, but Carole couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic reaction. All the colour left Anna’s cheeks, making the red of her lipstick, by contrast, brighter than ever. She swayed as if she might be about to faint, and Carole reached out a hand to steady her. As soon as Anna felt the touch on her sleeve, she burst into tears. Not slow tears, but hysterical ones that shook her entire body as though electric shocks were coursing through her veins.
“Come on,” said Carole, uncharacteristically gentle. “Come and sit down.”
Leading the way up to the shelter on the Promenade with an arm over Anna’s shoulders, she could feel her body’s uncontrollable shuddering. Blackie, her West Highland terrier, uninterested in human suffering, trotted off to nose his way through piles of seaweed.
It took a while before Anna was calm enough to speak coherently, and her first intelligible words were: “I’ve been terrified of this happening. I knew it’d all come out one day.”
“All what?” asked Carole. Feeling awkward, she detached her arm from Anna’s shoulders.
“About me and Ricky. Why would the police want to know about us being there?”
“They are investigating a suspicious death. They’re bound to be checking everyone who has a connection with Gallimaufry.”
“God, then it’ll all come out.”
Patiently, Carole repeated, “All what?” There was a silence, broken only by Anna’s rasping breaths. “You don’t deny you were in the Mercedes with Ricky?”
“I don’t deny anything. I knew it’d all end in disaster. But I do love him.” That prompted a renewed burst of weeping.
As it subsided, Carole asked, “Are you saying that you and Ricky Le Bonnier were having an affair?” Anna nodded miserably. “Had it been going on for long?”
“A couple of months. No, nearly three. I started working at Gallimaufry as soon as the place opened in September. I was there on the first day at the gala celebration. And it was early October when…” The memory was too painful for her to supply more details. “Oh, I was very stupid, I know, but very vulnerable. It had been so long since any man had shown any interest in me, in that way…I thought, coming here to Fethering, I could make a fresh start, be someone new. But you can never get away from who you really are.”
“And the hair and the make-up,” asked Carole gently, “was that part of being someone new?”
Another sad nod. “Yes, and that probably just made me look ridiculous. But it gave me confidence for a time when I first came here. I thought I’d really got away from…the situation I was in before. But then the first thing I do when I arrive in Fethering is to screw up totally and start having an affair with a married man.”
Carole couldn’t stop herself from saying, “In this case, a much-married man.”
“Yes, but it seemed to work,” Anna protested. “Ricky and me. I mean, he was totally upfront. It’s not like he pretended that he wasn’t married.”
“Be rather difficult to do that, wouldn’t it,” Carole observed tartly, “given the fact that you were working for his wife, and she presumably introduced you to him?”
Anna nodded abjectly. Carole felt some pity for her, but stronger than that – in fact, she was surprised by its strength – was the anger she felt towards Ricky Le Bonnier. Why was it that some men were incapable of fidelity? There he was, settled with a new glamorous young wife, two small children, idyllic life, and he still couldn’t stop himself from groping any other woman who looked like she was available.
“Did Lola know what was going on?”
“No, no. We were very discreet.”
“So discreet that you were spotted in a car together the evening before Gallimaufry burnt down.”
“That was unusual. Nobody would have thought twice about it, if ghastly things hadn’t happened afterwards. Otherwise it could have been completely innocent – the owner’s husband giving a staff member a lift back after work.”
“On a Sunday?”
Hearing the scepticism in Carole’s voice, Anna buried her head in her hands, quietly sobbing.
“And was it at the shop that you and Ricky had your assignations?”
An almost inaudible “Yes.”
“Why not at your place?”
“I’m in rented rooms. The landlady lives on the premises. She’s a nosy cow.”
“Right. And of course there was a furnished flat upstairs at Gallimaufry, wasn’t there? Which no doubt had a convenient bed available. Oh yes, I remember. Lola had wanted to rent out the flat, but Ricky wasn’t keen on the idea. Now we know why, don’t we?” Carole couldn’t keep the scorn out of her voice. “Didn’t you ever stop and think what you were doing to Lola? Didn’t you think you had any loyalty to her?”
“Nothing we were doing was hurting Lola.”
“Only because she didn’t know.”
“Ricky would never do anything to threaten his marriage.”
“Oh no?”
“No. He’s just one of those men who’s capable of loving two women at the same time.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Carole snorted. “And no doubt he told you that he was like that because he was a creative person, and creative people have to be judged by different moral standards from the rest of the world?” The way Anna evaded her eye told Carole that her conjecture had been correct. She felt even more furious with Ricky Le Bonnier, and her anger spilled over towards Anna. “Well, you’ll have to find somewhere else for your trysts now. Your little love-nest had sadly been burnt down, hasn’t it?”