‘Hello, it’s Oenone Playfair.’
Jude was taken aback by the unexpected phone call and hastened to assemble some appropriate words of condolence but Oenone briskly cut through them. ‘Yes, well, it was bound to happen one day.’ As Piers had said, she wasn’t the type to let anyone see her suffering.
‘Listen, Jude, the reason I’m calling you is that a great friend of mine is Suzy Longthorne. . you know, who runs the Hopwicke Country House Hotel.’
‘Oh yes?’ Jude knew exactly who was being referred to. Suzy, a former model, had been a friend for a long time.
‘Well, Suzy told me that you were very helpful to her when she had an awkward situation of a young man being found hanged in her hotel.’ Jude remembered the circumstances vividly. What had looked like a suicide had been proved to be murder.
‘She said you and your friend — Carole, is it? — found out the truth of what had really happened.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose we did.’
‘And I wondered if I could enlist your help. . ideally yours and Carole’s?’
‘Of course. But can I ask what for?’
‘To find out what actually happened to Reggie.’
Jude was very relieved that Carole had been included in Oenone Playfair’s request for a meeting. She was aware of her neighbour’s continuing unspoken resentment of the new relationship with Piers Targett. The fact that he had stayed over at Woodside Cottage on the Wednesday night would not have lessened that resentment.
Anyway, Piers had set off after breakfast in the E-Type on his way to Ebbsfleet where he would take the Eurostar to Paris.
So Jude had the perfect opportunity to do a little fence-mending. No peace offering to Carole Seddon could have been more seductive than an invitation to join in another murder investigation.
‘I think you should be careful about the words you use,’ said Carole when the situation had been explained to her.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, Oenone Playfair didn’t use the word “murder”, did she?’
‘No, she just said she wanted to find out what had happened to Reggie, but surely that must mean. .?’
‘Not necessarily. I don’t think we should mention the possibility that he was murdered until she does.’
It was a wise caution, because as soon as Carole and Jude started talking to Oenone Playfair, it was clear that the recent widow had no suspicions of foul play.
They had agreed to go to her house, Winnows. Though reacting with apparent stoicism to her husband’s death, Oenone confessed that she didn’t really feel up to going out yet. On the way over in Carole’s immaculate Renault, Jude brought her neighbour up to date with the events of the previous day at Lockleigh House tennis court.
Winnows was a large detached dwelling about midway between Lockleigh and Fedborough. Flint-faced like many West Sussex buildings, its size suggested that it had probably once been a farmhouse, which over the years had been expensively refurbished. The whole place breathed money. The garden was immaculately maintained. On the gravel in front of a flint-faced outhouse converted into a double garage stood two BMWs, including the one Jude had last seen outside the Lockleigh House tennis court.
The interior of the house was equally perfect, not flashy in any way but with the kind of antique furniture, upholstery and curtains that didn’t come cheap. Like the garden, everything was irreproachably tidy, suggesting perhaps that the Playfairs had live-in staff.
While Oenone went through to the kitchen to make coffee, the two visitors were seated on the large cushions of a sofa whose box-like back and sides were tied at the top with silken ropes. They looked round at the effortless elegance of the recessed fireplace and the grand piano. Jude noted that the only photographs on display, except for some black and white ones of presumably deceased relatives, were of Oenone and Reggie. It confirmed the impression she had somehow received on the Sunday, that the Playfairs didn’t have children.
Over the fireplace hung a portrait of a young woman in a green ball dress. The fashion of the gown and a residual likeness declared it to be of Oenone in her twenties.
Entering with the coffee, she saw that they were looking at the painting and grimaced. ‘A lot to be said for putting that in the attic,’ she commented. ‘A bit masochistic to have such a constant reminder of the ravages of age.’
‘Did Reggie commission it for you?’ asked Jude.
‘No, my parents had it done. Before Reggie and I had met. Part of being a debutante.’ She shuddered at the memory. ‘It was a vital ingredient in my parents’ sales pitch to entrap a suitable husband for me.’
‘And was Reggie that suitable husband?’
‘Good heavens, no. Not in their eyes. My father was an earl, I’m afraid. When I started going round with Reggie, they very definitely thought I was slumming.’
‘Was he of very humble origins?’ asked Carole.
‘By their standards, not by anybody else’s. No title, you see. And only from a minor public school. Then he was very successful in the City, which they thought was a bit infra dig.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Stockbroker.’
‘Was he still. .?’ asked Jude. ‘I mean, had he retired?’
‘Oh yes, in theory he retired about seven years ago. The company was sold off back then. But Reggie still spent a lot of the time studying the markets and dealing. It was his hobby, really. Though he was doing it with our money rather than other people’s.’ As if anticipating a question they were too tactful to ask, she continued. ‘Very successfully. I have no reason to complain.’ She looked around at her beautiful surroundings with some satisfaction.
Carole and Jude were both struck by how composed she seemed for a woman whose husband had died the previous day. But then British aristocrats were not renowned for wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
‘Anyway. .’ Oenone’s tone changed to a more businesslike one, ‘I told Jude on the phone about the recommendation Suzy Longthorne gave for your investigative skills. I gather up at the Hopwicke you solved a murder for her. Obviously this case is nothing like that — ’ Carole and Jude exchanged almost imperceptible looks — ‘but Reggie’s death has left me with some unanswered questions.’
‘Including, no doubt,’ said Jude, ‘the one that’s been puzzling me. What was he doing at the tennis court at that time of day?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I mean, that seems to me to be the most obvious thing anyone would have asked. And yet all the time I was there yesterday morning nobody asked it. And I had lunch with some of the members yesterday. .’
‘Really? Who?’
‘Wally, who you introduced me to on Sunday, and three others.’
‘Oh, the Old Boys. Of course, yes, they do their doubles on a Wednesday morning. So you were at the Lockleigh Arms?’
‘Mm. And I kept trying to get on to the subject of what Reggie was doing there, but they kind of avoided answering it, almost as if I was asking something distasteful. Even Piers wasn’t very helpful when I asked him last night.’
Carole pounced on the little detail. ‘Did Piers stay with you last night?’
‘Yes,’ Jude replied wearily.
‘Oh,’ said Carole, as only Carole could say ‘Oh’.
‘That in a way,’ said Oenone Playfair, ‘is what worries me about the situation.’
‘Sorry? What do you mean?’ asked Jude.
‘The way the men are all clamming up. It suggests to me that they probably do know what Reggie was up to, and it’s something he shouldn’t have been up to.’
‘Isn’t it also possible,’ suggested Carole, ‘that they don’t know what he was up to, but they’re clamming up because they think he might have been up to something he shouldn’t have been up to?’
Oenone conceded the possibility. ‘Yes, men do that, don’t they?’
‘Let’s work back from when you last saw him,’ said Jude. ‘Did you see him before he left the house yesterday morning?’
‘No.’
‘Oh?’ Carole was instantly alert.
‘No, but I wasn’t expecting to. We’d said our goodbyes, such as they were, the previous day.’ Catching sight of the expression on Carole’s face, she explained, ‘There’s nothing sinister about it. We have a flat in town. On Tuesday evening Reggie was going to a dinner at his livery company. When he does that he leaves the car at Pulborough and takes the train up to London. So he went off after lunch on Tuesday.’ For a brief moment there was a slight tremor in her voice as she said, ‘That was the last time I saw him.’
‘And do you know whether he actually made it to the dinner?’ asked Carole.
‘Yes, I called a friend who’s a member of the same livery company. Reggie had definitely been there at the dinner — and apparently in raucous good form, as only he can be — could be.’ She made the correction automatically, not wishing to give way again to emotion.
‘Would there have been anyone at your flat, who might have seen when he left there — or indeed if he arrived there?’
Oenone Playfair shook her head. ‘No, there’s no concierge or anyone there. And we hardly know the owners of the other flats. I suppose it’s possible that someone might have seen Reggie arrive or leave, but it’s unlikely.’
‘What about the clothes he was wearing? Had he changed after the dinner?’
‘No, he hadn’t. I. .’ Again the slightest of tremors. ‘I saw him at the hospital yesterday. And they. . gave me his clothes. The shirt he was wearing was the one he’d worn to the dinner. Reggie always insists on wearing a clean shirt every day. And clean boxer shorts.’
‘So the implication,’ said Carole, ‘is that he perhaps didn’t go to your London flat.’
‘He may have gone there. But he certainly didn’t sleep there.’
‘So he could have gone down to the court any time after the dinner ended,’ suggested Jude.
‘Well, just a minute, no,’ Carole objected. ‘Remember he’d left his car at Pulborough Station. Assuming the livery dinner ended too late for him to have got the last train back from Victoria. .’
‘Which it certainly would have done,’ Oenone confirmed. ‘I’ve been to those dinners when they have ladies’ nights and, God, do they go on? Also, the friend I spoke to said that when he left, round eleven thirty, Reggie was very much still there, in his customary role as the life and soul of the party.’ Some slight nuance in her voice suggested that that was one aspect of her late husband’s character she wouldn’t miss too much.
‘So. .’ Carole pieced things together slowly, ‘unless for some reason your husband got a taxi or a lift from someone down to Pulborough, he couldn’t have picked up his car until the first train of the morning had got there. If I had my laptop here, I could check what time that is.’
Except of course, thought Jude, you never move the laptop out of the spare room at High Tor, do you?
Oenone Playfair, however, had the relevant information locked into her memory. ‘There’s a five fifteen train from Victoria — I’ve had to catch it on a few occasions. Gets into Pulborough at six thirty-four.’
‘And how long would it have taken your husband to get from the station to the tennis court?’ asked Carole.
‘A quarter of an hour, if that.’
‘So he could have been there round ten to seven,’ said Jude, ‘which would be about three-quarters of an hour before Piers and I got there.’
‘Did Piers and you arrive together?’ asked Carole with some sharpness.
‘No, he was there when the taxi dropped me.’
‘And how long had he been there?’
‘I assumed he’d just arrived.’
‘But you don’t know that?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Jude looked at her neighbour with slight puzzlement. She knew that Carole resented the appearance of Piers Targett in her life, but surely she wouldn’t be crass enough deliberately to build up suspicion of him?
Carole seemed to read her thoughts and said, ‘I’m sorry, but these are the kind of questions we’d be asking if there was nobody we knew involved.’
Jude nodded, accepting the point. ‘Yes, all right, I don’t know how long Piers had been there.’
‘But you can ask him,’ said Oenone.
‘Of course.’ But Jude wondered if that was another subject on which she might find her lover evasive.
‘Presumably,’ said Carole, ‘if your husband had caught the train from Victoria, there’d be CCTV footage of him at the station. That could be checked.’
‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Oenone.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, who would check it?’
‘The police, presumably.’
The older woman sat back in astonishment. ‘The police? Why on earth should it have anything to do with the police?’
‘Well, they-’
‘There’s no crime involved here. Reggie died of a heart attack, there’s not much doubt about that, after a dinner where he, typically, over-indulged himself. God knows he’d had enough warnings. Saw the quack only last week and had another lecture about changing his lifestyle.’
‘So if he’s seen the doctor that recently,’ said Carole, ‘there won’t have to be an inquest.’ She was good at details like that.
‘Won’t there? Thank God for small mercies. Anyway, for heaven’s sake, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to involve you two in a criminal investigation. I’m just — as any widow would be — curious about how my husband spent his last hours. And I thought maybe you could help me out on that.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Jude, as she and Carole exchanged covert looks, realizing how much they had let their instincts to see any suspicious death as a potential murder run away with them.
Carole moved into practical mode. ‘I suppose an obvious starting question might be whether your husband had any tennis-related reason to be on the court at that time in the morning.’
‘How do you mean — tennis-related?’
‘I know nothing about real tennis — even less than Jude does, but I imagine, because it’s a competitive sport, people do train for it. So is it possible that your husband was there so early to do some kind of training session?’
‘Reggie? Training?’ Oenone Playfair’s grief was not so deep that she couldn’t still see the incongruity of the idea. ‘For a start there’s very little training you can do on a real tennis court on your own. You could practise a few serves, I suppose, that’s about it. But the idea of Reggie doing any kind of training is just too incongruous for words. There was a time when he was younger, maybe, when he used to do a bit of running and what-have-you, but back then most of his training just came from playing the game. He’d be up at the court three, four times a week.’
‘With Piers?’ asked Jude, remembering what her lover had said about a similar period of intense real tennis.
‘With Piers, yes. There was a whole bunch of them, all incredibly keen, all incredibly fit. Wally Edgington-Bewley, though a decade or so older than the others, was part of the group. They lived for real tennis, used to go off on jaunts to foreign courts. . Bordeaux, New York, a couple in Australia. But that’s a long time ago. So no, Carole, there is absolutely no chance that Reggie was on the court for training purposes. Apart from anything else, his kit had been in the wash since Sunday and our help doesn’t do the ironing till Friday.’
‘Right. I see,’ said Carole, who couldn’t help feeling that she had received something of a put-down.
Jude picked up the investigation. ‘Well, if we can also rule out the possibility that Reggie had simply gone back to the court because there was something he had left there on Sunday. .’
‘Which we can,’ asserted Oenone. ‘You may remember I helped him get his stuff together on Sunday. I made sure he’d got everything.’
‘That being the case, the only other reason I can think of for Reggie to be there was because he had arranged to meet someone.’
‘Yes, Jude,’ said Oenone Playfair wretchedly, ‘that’s what I’m afraid of.’