Fethering 09 (2008) - Blood at the Bookies (30 page)

“‘Fee’?”

“It was his nickname for me. He could never pronounce ‘So-fie-ah’. He always said ‘So-fee-ah’. So he called me ‘Fee’.”

“Ah.” Finally Jude had her explanation for Tadeusz Jankowski’s dying words. But she didn’t pursue it at that moment. Who knew how the girl might react on hearing that the boy had died with her name on his lips? Anyway, there were more urgent questions to be asked. “You say you didn’t want anyone to know about the connection between you. Is that why all of his music had to be taken from his room?”

Sophia Urquhart hesitated before replying, as though she needed to prepare her answer. “Yes. Once he’d died, there was bound to be a police investigation. I didn’t want to get involved in anything like that.”

“So what did you do with the CDs and things?”

“I put them in a litter bin-on the street.”

“But not the guitar?”

“No, it wouldn’t fit. I was looking for a skip to dump it in on my way to uni the day after Tadek died. But then I met one of my friends from the Drama set and she asked me what I was doing with the guitar. I remembered that Andy had asked us to bring instruments in, so that’s how I explained it away. I thought it would be safely hidden in the Drama Studio. The police investigation wouldn’t go as far as uni.”

“You mentioned Andy Constant,” said Jude.

“So?” The girl looked defiant, but a blush was spreading up from her neck.

“Might he have been another reason why your relationship with Tadek had to end?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve just come from the hospital where Andy Constant is recovering from being stabbed.”

There was a silence around the table. The raucous-ness of a small group of students round the bar was suddenly loud.

“Andy told me about the affair that you and he had been having,” Jude went on. “He told me about using the nickname ‘Joan’ for you.”

“Which is the name Tadek used,” said Zofia.

“I didn’t know…Andy…had been stabbed.” Sophia spoke haltingly, with great difficulty.

“No?” asked Carole sceptically.

“I thought it possible that someone might have attacked him…but I didn’t know he had been…stabbed,” she said again. “You say he’s in hospital. Is he badly hurt?”

“He’ll survive. Though he was lucky that his attacker was frightened off before more damage could be done.”

“Good,” said Sophia Urquhart softly.

“Andy also said,” Jude went on inexorably, “that he recognized the perfume his attacker was wearing.”

“Perfume?” Sophia mouthed, uncomprehending.

“Yes. Andy Constant said his attacker smelt of the perfume that you use.”

The girl looked bewildered, but whether her bewilderment was genuine Carole and Jude could not guess.

Then suddenly a memory came to her, and her hand went up to her mouth. “Oh, my God. My Barbour!”

“What?”

“My Barbour jacket. I couldn’t find it last night. That would smell of my perfume.”

Carole thought this sudden recollection was too neat. She felt sure the girl was just play-acting. “And what time did you go out last night?”

“About eight. I went to meet Daddy in a restaurant for dinner.” Sophia Urquhart caught sight of the other members of Magic Dragon, who were gesturing that they should start playing again. She half-rose from her seat.

“No, you can’t go yet.” Carole said this so fiercely that the girl sat back down again. “Tell me, were you at home before you went out to meet your father?”

“Yes, I’d left uni early. I wasn’t feeling too good. So I got back to Fethering at about four.”

“And didn’t go out again till eight?”

“No, I didn’t.” If that were true, then Sophia Urquhart couldn’t have been in the Drama Studio at the University of Clincham at six, stabbing her lecturer and former lover. “It was when I went out to meet Daddy that I couldn’t find my Barbour.”

“I don’t suppose,” asked Carole cynically, “that anyone could vouch for the fact that you were at home yesterday at the times you say you were?”

“As a matter of fact,” the girl replied almost smugly, “there’s someone who can. It was fairly slack in the office yesterday, so my brother Hamish was home by five. And he was still there when I left.”

With that and a curt nod, Sophia Urquhart went across to join the rest of Magic Dragon. The moment she arrived, the guitars and fiddle started the intro to ‘All My Trials’, and, whatever emotions were going through her mind, they were suppressed as her pure voice took up the song.

Hush little baby don’t you cry
,

You know your mama was born to die
.

All my trials, Lord, soon be over
.

Just like Joan.

Carole and Jude looked at each other. And the identical logical progress was going through both their minds.

T
here was no difficulty the next morning in making an appointment with Ewan Urquhart. Though it was a Saturday, business in the offices of Urquhart & Pease remained slack. “Won’t really pick up again till the spring, when the sun comes out,” he had told Jude when she rang through. He sounded, as ever, urbane, the Old Carthusian to the last polished vowel.

If he thought it strange that Jude arrived with a friend to discuss the valuation of Woodside Cottage, he was too well bred to articulate his feelings. He and Hamish were both in the outer office when the women arrived. The younger man sat at a desk, looking blank. Despite the potential seriousness of the situation, Jude couldn’t help being reminded of the old joke:

Why don’t estate agents look out of the window in the morning?

Because it gives them nothing to do in the afternoon
.

There appeared to be no other staff on duty that morning. Maybe ‘in the spring, when the sun comes out’, there would be more. Ewan Urquhart offered them coffee, but Carole and Jude said they’d just had some. He then invited them to join him in his back office. “You hold the fort out here, Hamish. Fight off the hordes of eager purchasers, eh?”

His office gave the impression of the library of a gentlemen’s club. There were shelves showing the leather spines of unopened books, and the intervening areas of wall were dark green, with a couple of framed sporting prints. In pride of place was an etching of the neo-Gothic splendour of Charterhouse school. The desk was reproduction mahogany, the chairs were reproduction leather. And Ewan Urquhart’s vowels were reproduction upper-class.

He gestured them to chairs and said, “Now do tell me what I can do for you, ladies? I didn’t gather, Mrs Seddon, do you actually live at Woodside Cottage with, er…Jude?”

“Good heavens, no.” She didn’t know whether he actually was making a suggestion of lesbianism, but it was a notion she wanted to dispel as quickly as possible. “I live next door. High Tor.”

“I know it well. Part of my business to know the names of all the houses in the immediate vicinity. Never know when one might come up for sale, and one likes to keep a step ahead of the opposition. A highly competitive business, ours, you know.”

“I’m sure it is.” There was a silence. Having built themselves up to the confrontation, neither of the women was sure how next to proceed. They should have planned what to say.

“So, Mrs Seddon, am I to gather that you are also thinking of putting High Tor on the market? I would be more than happy to arrange a valuation for you too if—”

“No, no. I’m quite settled there at the moment, thank you.”

“Good.” As another silence extended itself, Ewan Urquhart pushed his fingers through the greying hair of his temples. “So, please tell me. What can I do for you?”

Jude had had enough of prevarication.

“We’ve come to talk to you about Tadeusz Jankowski.” He looked surprised. “Don’t pretend you don’t know the name.”

“I am making no such pretence. I read the newspapers and watch television. I know that Tadeusz Jankowski was the name of the young man stabbed here in Fethering a couple of weeks ago. But I don’t know what he has to do with me.”

“He has to do with you the fact that he was in love with your daughter Sophia.”

Ewan Urquhart chuckled lightly. “My dear Jude, I’m sure there are a lot of young men who have been in love with my daughter. She is an exceptionally beautiful and talented young woman. It is inevitable that she attracts the interest of the opposite sex. Whether she would give any encouragement to a Polish immigrant, though, is another matter.”

“Your daughter met Tadeusz Jankowski at a music festival in Leipzig last summer,” Carole announced. “While she was InterRailing in Europe.”

He did look shaken by this revelation, but they couldn’t tell why. It could have been new information to him, or he could have been surprised by how much detail they knew of his daughter’s life.

“They had an affair out in Germany,” Carole went on, “and then Tadeusz Jankowski came over to England to look for her.”

For the first time Ewan Urquhart began to lose his cool. “My daughter would not have a relationship with a foreigner!”

“What you mean, Ewan,” said Jude, “is that you wouldn’t like your daughter to have a relationship with a foreigner. I don’t have children, but I’ve seen often enough that they do not always turn out as their parents Want them to.”

“Sophia is an intelligent girl. She wouldn’t mix with people who’re unworthy of her.”

“And what makes you think Tadeusz Jankowski was unworthy of her?”

“His nationality, apart from anything else. All right, I know we have reason to thank some Polish airmen for the help they gave us against Hitler, but as a race they’re not to be trusted. Sophia has been brought up to keep foreigners at a healthy distance.”

“Didn’t it occur to you,” asked Carole, “that if she went InterRailing round Europe, she might meet some foreigners?”

“Yes. I wasn’t keen on the whole idea of a gap year, but Sophia managed to persuade me. She went against my better judgement. But I can assure you you’ve got the wrong end of the stick if you think she’s been having affairs with foreigners. When Sophia does get to the point of having affairs, I’m sure she will be very selective in her choice of men.”

“‘When she gets to the point of having affairs’?” Jude echoed. “How old is your daughter, Ewan?”

“Nineteen, nearly twenty.”

“Well, surely you know from the media that these days most young women of nearly twenty have been sexually active for some years.”

“Most young women, maybe,” he snapped. “Not Sophia!”

For the first time they realized the depth of his obsession with his daughter, and his obsession with her purity. In her father’s eyes, no man would ever be good enough for Sophia Urquhart. He had built up an image of her as untouchable, and what he might do to anyone who threatened that image was terrifying.

“If you claim not to know about her affair with Tadeusz Jankowski, then presumably the same goes for her relationship with Andy Constant.”

“Andy Constant?”

“You know the name?”

“Of course. I’ve met the man. He’s Sophia’s Drama tutor at the university.” He was now very angry. “Look, what is this? What are you two up to? I don’t have to listen to malicious slander of my daughter from smalltown gossips.”

“It is not malicious slander. It is the truth. Andy Constant was, until recently, your daughter’s lover.”

“No! He couldn’t…Sophia wouldn’t…Not with a man of that age…She’s not like her mother. Her mother was little better than a tart, who’d open her legs for any man who offered her a smile and a kind word.” Gifts of which, both women imagined, she hadn’t received many at home. “Sophia’s not like that. She wouldn’t…She hasn’t been brought up like that!” Now he was really losing control. His face was growing red and congested. “God, if I thought a man like that Andy Constant had touched my daughter, I’d kill him!”

He seemed then to realize what he’d said, and opened and closed his mouth, as if trying to take the words back.

“Which,” said Carole calmly, “is what you failed to do last night.”

“What?”

“You stabbed Andy Constant,” said Jude, “but you didn’t kill him.”

“I’m sorry? Where is this supposed to have happened?”

“In the Drama Studio at Clincham College. You waited for Andy Constant in the lighting box. When he came in, you stabbed him. You would have stabbed him more than once, but you heard someone arriving. It was me, actually. You passed me in the lobby, I think, when you made your escape.”

“You’re saying I stabbed Andy Constant?” His eyes were wild now, darting about from one of the women to the other.

“Yes. For some reason—maybe to disguise yourself—you wore your daughter’s Barbour when you committed the crime. You couldn’t stand the thought of anyone touching Sophia, so you tried to kill Andy Constant—just as you had killed Tadeusz Jankowski.”

He shook his head wordlessly, a pathetic figure now. His urbanity had deserted him, leaving a shell of a man, a husk wearing an Old Carthusian tie.

“Maybe you stabbed the young man here in this office,” said Carole. “It was somewhere near the betting shop, somewhere along this parade probably. Or maybe the attack took place in your car. You’d managed to get him into it on some pretext.”

“I can’t stand this,” Ewan Urquhart moaned feebly. “What on earth is going on?”

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll deal with it.”

They hadn’t heard the door from the outer office open. Carole and Jude both looked round at the same time to the source of the new voice.

And saw Hamish Urquhart standing in the doorway. With a long kitchen knife in his hand.

“H
amish, call the police,” said Ewan Urquhart. “These two women are mad and dangerous.”

“They’re certainly dangerous,” his son agreed, “but I don’t think the police are the right people to deal with them.”

“I don’t understand. I’ve hardly understood anything that’s happened for the last half-hour.”

“Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’m in control of the situation.” And, for the first time in Jude’s dealings with him, Hamish Urquhart did seem to be in control. There was now a dignity about him which she had not seen before. She was aware of the power in his stocky body and the cold menace in his eyes.