“You’ll find a way,” said Jude, not for the first time.
“Hope so.” Lola made an attempt to pull herself together. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”
“I wonder…is Piers still there with you?”
“No, he isn’t.”
There was a harshness in Lola’s tone that made Jude ask, “Has he been causing any trouble?”
“You could say that. If you call coming on to a woman who’s been widowed little more than twenty-four hours causing trouble.”
“Piers?”
“Yes. He had the nerve to come into my bedroom last night. I didn’t have much prospect of sleeping anyway, but he ensured my night was completely ruined.”
“What did he do?”
“Oh, he sat on my bed, and he started pawing at me, and he said our time in Edinburgh together was the best bit of his life, and he’d always really loved me, and now Polly and Ricky were out of the way there was no reason why we couldn’t become an item and…It was horrible. I couldn’t believe anyone could be so insensitive, least of all someone who I’ve always thought of as one of my closest friends. It took me hours to persuade him that I didn’t love him, that Ricky was the only man I’d really loved and…and then Piers started hitting me. I actually had to call for Varya and physically push him out of my bedroom.” She sounded perilously close to tears.
“So where is Piers now?” asked Jude.
“At his flat in London, I assume. I sent him off this morning with a flea in his ear.”
“You wouldn’t have his address to hand, would you?”
“Yes, I know it off by heart. Near Warren Street tube. He’s been there a while. I used to spend a lot of time with them there before I met Ricky.” She gave the details.
“What time did Piers leave this morning?”
“Varya drove him to Fedborough Station to catch an early train, the seven-forty-two…leaving me to somehow get across to my children that their father’s dead, let alone start organizing his funeral…”
“You’re allowed to do that, are you? The police have released the body?”
“Yes, they said they’ve had a preliminary report from the surgeon who did Ricky’s post mortem.” She hurried over the words, not wanting to dwell on them. “And I can start making funeral arrangements. Ricky died a natural death.”
In the teeth of the evidence, Carole and Jude were still not convinced about that.
“There’s something I’ve just remembered,” said Jude.
“What?”
“The morning after we heard that a woman’s body had been found in the ashes of Gallimaufry I spoke to Lola on the phone. I asked her if she had any idea who the victim might be. She said she’d checked that Anna and Bex were all right, and that Ricky had checked that Polly was safely in London with Piers…”
“Are you saying that Ricky was lying?”
“No. I’m saying that Piers was.”
The flat off Tottenham Court Road which Piers and Polly had shared showed little signs of a feminine touch. Its aggressive tidiness suggested more the hand of a masculine control freak. Framed on the walls were posters going back to Piers’s Footlights days, and more recent stills for television shows he’d contributed to. Posters of plays that Polly Le Bonnier might have been in did not feature. A smell of Piers’s cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air.
He had sounded unsurprised when Jude had rung to ask if he minded her and Carole coming to see him. They had stayed in the coffee shop flicking through the manuscript for half an hour or so, which had been long enough to form a pretty clear picture of the hatchet job Polly had done on her boyfriend. Then they’d rung Piers.
On arrival at the flat, they were greeted with the minimum of courtesy, no offer of a drink but instead the immediate question, “What’s all this about?”
“We were hoping you might be able to tell us that,” replied Carole.
“We’re interested in the deaths of Polly and Ricky,” said Jude.
“You’re not alone in that. Everyone seems to think it’s their business to speculate on the subject.”
“We particularly wanted to talk to you, Piers, because we’ve just been reading the manuscript of Polly’s book.”
He went pale as he demanded, “Where the hell did you get that?”
“From Serena Fincham.”
“Damn! I should have rung her and told her not to talk to anyone about it.”
“What?” said Carole. “And then you would have suppressed every copy of it, wouldn’t you? Did you know, incidentally, that Ricky had Polly’s flash drive with a copy of the book on it?”
“Ricky’s dead. He’s not going to pass it on to anyone now.”
“Perhaps not. But if it was in his possession when he died – and we have reason to believe it was – then it’s probably now in the hands of the police. They’re going to be very interested in its contents, I would imagine, given that they’re still investigating Polly’s death.”
If he’d looked pale before, a new adjective was required to describe the pallor with which he reacted to this news. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit up.
“Anyway,” said Jude easily, “that character of Edwin in the book doesn’t seem very pleasant, does he? Domestic violence is never very pretty, is it? You always wonder about the personality of someone who gets a thrill out of beating up a woman. If he’s capable of that, what other crime might he be capable of? And of course, if every copy of Polly’s manuscript had been destroyed, the story of your violent behaviour would have died with her, wouldn’t it?”
Piers had by now recovered himself sufficiently to say, “You can’t prove anything. And if there were anything to prove, the one witness who might have testified is sadly dead.”
“Sadly…or conveniently…?” suggested Carole.
“Are you accusing me of killing Polly?”
“Not necessarily. But we would like to know your arguments for why we shouldn’t accuse you of killing Polly.”
“My arguments remain exactly the same as they have always been. I wasn’t in Fethering on the night that Polly died. I was with a woman.”
“Oh yes, the actress from the sitcom.”
“Exactly. And just so’s you know, she has been approached by the police investigating Polly’s death. They wanted to check my alibi. An intrusion into her privacy of which she took a pretty dim view, let me tell you. In fact, it may have ruined what promised to be a very good relationship.”
“Or a good relationship until you started hitting her?” suggested Carole.
“Listen, I don’t care what you say. You’re just two nosy old women who have no authority at all. If the police are satisfied my alibi is true, then I think you should accept it as well.”
“You mean you’re not going to give us a contact for your new girlfriend, so that we can check for ourselves?”
“You are bloody right, Jude. I am not.”
The two women looked at each other. Of course, Piers could be lying – he was quite capable of it – but both had a depressing feeling that he was telling the truth.
“So did you have any contact with Fethering during that time?” asked Carole.
“I spoke to Lola probably about eight.”
“About what?”
“I just told her about the date I’d got set up for the evening. The restaurant we were going to, that kind of stuff.”
“This would be your sitcom actress?”
“Yes. Lola and I always used to confide in each other about our dates…well, we did until she met Ricky. Thereafter, there wasn’t much to say on her side, but I’d still keep her up to date with whom I was seeing.”
“I thought you were cohabiting with Polly, I thought you’d been with her since before Cambridge. So what dates are you talking about?”