‘Some of these invites are just for the evening do.’ When Maggie turned to face Jack, she had a few stray scone crumbs on her cheek held in place by a tiny bit of jam. ‘And Elliot Wetlock will more than likely say no. He’s still got his hands full with Tania, but currently he’s my boss, so I’m inviting him.’
Jack moved to Maggie’s side, brushing his hand across Hannah’s hair as he passed. He stood close to Maggie, leant in, making her pucker in expectation — then licked the jammy crumbs from her face. He followed this up with a kiss, so she knew that he still loved her, regardless of how much money she was spending on their wedding.
After dinner, Jack and Maggie retreated to the lounge with a plate full of cakes to sample and a bottle of red wine, whilst Penny headed upstairs to bath Hannah and put her to bed. ‘There’s a guy at work — Josh — he’s from Alabama. I’ve invited him for dinner one night.’ Maggie said this was fine by her and asked if Jack wanted everyone to be in or out when he came. ‘In. He’s on his own. He’s missing some home comforts.’
‘Saturday would be good, then. And Sunday’s my hen night, don’t forget.’ Jack stared at her with a blank expression. ‘I did tell you, Jack. Penny is with me, Hannah’s with you. And next weekend is your stag night.’
‘What stag night?’
‘Well, I don’t know. That’s Simon’s job. But the date for it is next weekend.’
‘Oh my, God Maggie, why didn’t you remind me that the best man does the stag night before I asked Ridley!’ Jack threw his head back onto the sofa in total dismay. ‘We’ll end up at a museum!’
By 7 a.m. Jack was on the road to Hove. Ridley had given him the clear instruction to find Adam Border and so Jack was heading back to Hester Mancroft as she was the only point of contact they had for him.
As he drove, Jack tried to contact Ridley, but he wasn’t answering — yet another thing that Ridley never did before his decision to retire — so Jack called Laura instead and asked her to tell Ridley that he’d be back for the afternoon briefing, hopefully with a solid lead on Adam Border. She was pissed off that he was heading to interview someone she’d already spoken to: if he’d found additional information or evidence that warranted a second interview, she would have accepted that, but he hadn’t. ‘Repeating my work makes me look stupid if you have no good reason to do it, other than you think you can do a better job.’
‘Nah, I just want a day at the beach.’ Jack tried to be flippant but Laura’s silence told him that he had genuinely offended her. He was about to try and placate her when a call from Josh appeared on his mobile screen waiting to be either accepted or rejected. Jack spoke fast. ‘I have a hunch, Laura, and I need to follow it up face to face. What I’m doing says nothing about the quality of your initial interview. But, if you’re pissed off, take it up with Ridley. He’s the one who told me to find Adam Border.’ Then he hung up and pressed accepton Josh’s call. Too late.
A text from Josh quickly followed:
Hurry up and invite me already! I’m starving!
Within a couple of text exchanges, it was settled that Josh would come to dinner on Saturday night.
Jack could see Hester Mancroft approaching the front door through the pane of frosted glass. She took forever but, with the sound of the sea behind him, he really didn’t mind waiting.
Hester pressed her face to the glass and asked who it was. Jack shouted his name and said that he was a police officer, but she couldn’t hear him, so he had to shout again. In the end, she opened the door anyway, on the assumption that a doorstep conman would not draw attention to himself by shouting his name numerous times in the street.
Hester took Jack directly into the kitchen and set about making a cup of tea. It was a lengthy operation and Jack doubted that it would be ready by the time he had to leave. She put a rusty old stove-top kettle on the gas, washed two of her best china mugs, then spent the first five minutes of their conversation trying to find a clean tea towel. She was a good-looking woman who, in her day, must have been very attractive. She was dressed smartly and had done her hair and make-up regardless of the fact that, until Jack turned up, no one would have witnessed the effort she’d made.
‘Have you been to Hove before, Mr Warr?’ Her voice was low and aristocratic, matching her smart appearance, but Jack wasn’t at all sure she had the upbringing to back it up. ‘The name is rarely heard without the words “Brighton and” before it, but I think we have the better esplanade. That lovely expanse of greenery in front of the beach is the perfect place to sit and watch the world go by as you eat fish and chips. It takes away all your worries and sorrows. Do you work with that lady who came to see me last week?’
‘Yes, I do. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions about Adam Border if you don’t mind. To see if we can figure out what happened to him.’
‘I’ll try to help if I can, yes. He rented a room from me when I ran a little B&B in Chelsea. I eventually sold it for far less than it was worth and moved here. My ex-husband was furious that I was offered three quarters of the asking price, which I found delightful, so I accepted. And it was enough to buy this place outright, which is all I really wanted to do. It was my mid-life crisis, I think. But you’ll know this already from your lady friend, won’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’ Jack smiled to indicate that Hester’s waffling wasn’t a problem, then he guided her back to the subject he needed her to talk about. ‘Adam was a friend of your son’s, who’s now deceased? I was sorry to hear that, Mrs Mancroft.’
‘Thank you.’ An old yet still poignant sadness spread across Hester’s face. It seemed to Jack that the passing decades had not helped her to get over the death of her son. ‘Adam and Julian were quite similar, so they got on. Adam only lived with us for a few months. He was charming, handsome, helpful around the house. He was a decent young man, I’d say. I took several students in over the years — on one occasion, don’t ask me the date because I won’t know — Julian had gone into one of the girl’s bedrooms. She kicked up a stink as you might expect, and Adam calmed things down for me. Julian was a little worse for wear at the time. Her parents arrived the following morning to take her home and Adam helped me to dissuade them from calling the police.’
The screech from the kettle’s whistle brought a pause to the conversation and Hester hit the side of a bag of sugar on the kitchen worktop to break up the solidified grains inside. Jack said he didn’t take sugar, and when she sniffed the milk from the fridge, he quickly said he didn’t take that either. Hester made a pot of tea, placed a hand-knitted cosy on top and joined Jack at the table.
‘Julian’s drug-taking was awful,’ she continued. ‘I felt so helpless. And stupid for not seeing it happening until it was far too late. At first, he just smoked weed... well, they all did at the time. I think Adam was a sensible boy, but when he moved to Amsterdam, that worried me. It’s all legal over there, isn’t it?’
‘What can you tell me about Avril Jenkins?’ Jack asked.
‘Oh, Avril and I go way back. To a housing estate in Leeds. We were always in trouble. Well, she was, and I followed.’ Jack hadn’t known the connection between these two older ladies, but somehow wasn’t surprised that, once again, Adam linked two disparate parts of this investigation. ‘Avril was a real daredevil, although most of the adults would have just called her a devil. We’d spend hours trying to copy the hair and make-up in magazines.’ Sadness descended once again. ‘When she was 16, she ran off with a much older man. I think he was a carpet salesman. Those years without Avril felt... hopeless. But then she came back, without her carpet salesman. And she whisked me off to London! Oh, they were my best days, Mr Warr. I lived! She was doing photographic work and I got a job as a receptionist. Now, I never saw any of her photographs, but I expect you know what they were. She had lots of male friends swooning over her — she was exciting, you see. She felt dangerous.’