Guns in the Gallery (15 page)

‘Ah,' said Jude, and then went on. ‘I couldn't help noticing, Giles, as I went past the Cornelian Gallery, that the Denzil Willoughby artwork was no longer on display.'

‘No,' he agreed airily. ‘I'm afraid there was – as so often happens in the art world – a slight difference of opinion between artist and gallery-owner. Denzil had a bit of a row with my mother, I'm afraid, and so he decided to withdraw from the exhibition.'

That wasn't the way things had happened according to what Bonita had told Carole, but Jude didn't argue with the facts. ‘And have you had a row with her too?'

Giles looked at Jude in puzzlement. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, I heard you'd moved out of her flat.'

He grimaced. ‘Not much escapes the gossips of Fethering, does it? There was a social network here long before Facebook and Twitter were invented. Anyway, with regard to my moving, that was always part of the plan. I was only camping with Mother on a temporary basis . . . until I moved in with Chervil.'

‘Which he has now done,' said the girlfriend with considerable satisfaction. ‘We're sharing one of the guest flats at Butterwyke House.'

‘Not one of the yurts at Walden?'

Chervil grinned. ‘No, I think there's a strong argument for us not living over the shop.' She spoke as if the glamping site was already an established business, and one in which she and Giles were equal partners. ‘Besides,' she continued bullishly, ‘we're hoping to have all the yurts full of paying customers. I've a feeling we're going to get a lot of coverage for the launch on Saturday. Gale Mostyn are bloody good at securing column inches. They'll see to it that Walden gets maximum publicity.'

‘But presumably,' suggested Jude, ‘only the right sort of publicity.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I'm sorry, but I can't help observing that you haven't mentioned your sister.'

‘Why should I?'

‘Well, it was only a few days ago that—'

‘Listen, Jude, the fact that I don't mention Fennel doesn't necessarily mean I didn't care about her. I'll find time for my grief, just as my parents will for theirs.'

‘Your father's in a pretty bad state. He came to see me yesterday.'

‘I know. He said. But look, Walden is a business proposition. I've given up a high-paying job in the City to bring my skills to bear on it.'

‘What were you actually doing in the City?'

‘Oh, you know,' replied Chervil with a shrug. ‘Kind of PR.'

Jude got the impression that perhaps Chervil Whittaker's previous career hadn't been as successful as previously implied. Maybe her parents hadn't been so much taking advantage of her skills as bailing her out with the Walden project.

‘Anyway,' the girl went on, ‘I'm going to make this thing work, and I'm not going to let anything – even my sister's suicide – stop me from realizing that dream.

‘I'm very sorry for Fennel, sorry for the illness that she suffered from, and sorry that she couldn't see any other way out of that illness than taking her own life. But I'm not going to let thoughts of her stand in my way. For too long I've had to worry about her, worry what effect anything I did would have on Fennel's –' she put the next two words in quotation marks formed by her fingers – ‘“fragile psyche”. Well, I've had enough of that. From now on I don't have to worry at all what she thinks; and let me tell you, it's a bloody relief. Getting on with my own life from now on will be a lot easier without Fennel around!'

Chervil seemed almost shocked by the vehemence of her own words. In the ensuing silence, Jude heard from the bar the voice of Ted Crisp asking yet another customer, ‘How do you recognize a dyslexic Yorkshireman . . .?'

Then she said to Chervil, ‘Presumably, if you're having the opening on Saturday, the police have finished any searches that they have been making at Walden?'

‘Yes, they've cleared the site.'

Which, Jude reckoned, must mean that they were concluding their investigations; that they had categorized Fennel Whittaker's death as the straightforward suicide it appeared to be.

‘Oh, and incidentally, Jude . . .'

‘Yes.'

‘At the launch on Saturday, no mention of what Fennel did. We don't want that spoiling all the positive publicity we're going to get for Walden.'

‘You mean you're hoping to keep Fennel's death out of the press?'

‘We are not hoping to, Jude. We are definitely going to keep Fennel's death out of the press.'

‘You'll be lucky in a place like—'

Chervil Whittaker smoothly rode over her words. ‘We are going to keep it out of the press. Gale Mostyn are very good at that sort of thing, you know.'

SIXTEEN

‘
S
o they're just trying to airbrush Fennel's death out of history, are they?' asked Carole.

‘Seems that way,' said Jude.

‘But can they? I'd have thought, given the amount of gossip there is around an area like this, the news'll get out, won't it?'

‘They can't stop people talking, no, but they can keep the story out of the media.'

‘By using the Gale Mostyn company?'

‘Certainly. Privacy may come expensive, but it can usually be bought. Think of all those footballers taking out super-injunctions to keep the press away from their mistresses.'

‘Huh. And we're supposed to be living in a society that prides itself on the rights of free speech.' Carole turned a beady eye on her neighbour. ‘You don't seem too worried about it, Jude.'

‘No, I'm not really. Having talked to Ned on Monday and seen the state he's in, I'm in no hurry to make things worse for him. He can do without having reporters camping on his front doorstep.'

‘I can see that, but, on the other hand, if Fennel Whittaker was actually murdered . . .'

Jude screwed up her face wryly. ‘And what are we basing that supposition on?'

Carole was affronted. ‘We're basing it on what you told me. You said that Fennel was so positive on the night she's supposed to have killed herself that she couldn't possibly have done it.'

‘Yes . . .' Jude looked uncharacteristically dubious. ‘But now I'm beginning to wonder about that. I told you what Detective Inspector Hodgkinson said about depressives often doing it when their mood begins to lift.'

‘You did.'

‘The trouble is, Fennel would fit that profile exactly. She'd been through a really bad depression. Bawling Denzil Willoughby out had lifted her out of it. In a more positive mood she says to herself, well, I'm never going to go through that again, she laces a bottle of wine with liquid paracetamol, she secretes a knife from the kitchen, she . . .' Jude's open-handed gesture showed that she didn't need to complete the sentence.

‘Is that really what you think?'

‘Well . . .'

‘Jude, are you saying you really think Fennel Whittaker committed suicide?' A silence. ‘Or do you think she was murdered?'

There was another silence before Jude conceded, ‘I think she was murdered.'

‘And what do you base that conclusion on?'

Jude replied apologetically, ‘Instinct.'

‘Well, that's good enough for me.'

The following day, the Wednesday, Carole was surprised to get an email from Chervil Whittaker, inviting her to attend the launch of Walden. ‘Since you've expressed interest in making a booking, we thought you might like to have a look at the facilities on offer.'

Of course, she was delighted and had no hesitation in accepting. Jude was going to be there and Carole would much rather share the occasion than rely on a report from her neighbour. And any opportunity to snoop round the environs of Butterwyke House could only be helpful in their ongoing investigation.

But the invitation still sounded a strange chord with her. After all, she had already had ‘a look at the facilities on offer.' Chervil Whittaker herself had shown Carole and Jude round the weekend before last. Surely the girl would have remembered that. She had registered that they'd already met when they'd spoken on the telephone about the potential Walden booking.

Carole got the uneasy feeling that, however much she was keen to snoop on Chervil Whittaker, the girl was at least as keen to snoop on her.

SEVENTEEN

T
he weather couldn't have been better for the press launch of Walden on the Saturday. A perfect West Sussex early-May day, not a cloud in the sky, the Downs rolling opulently to the north, and the other way the glint of the English Channel. Maybe perfect weather was just another luxury service laid on by Gale Mostyn.

They certainly seemed to have arranged everything else with exemplary efficiency. Their greatest achievement – given how loath local reporters usually are to attend any function, least of all at a weekend – was the number of press representatives they had managed to drum up. There were some very young ones, presumably working on local papers, who looked tentative and nervous, perhaps wondering how much longer there would be any local papers for them to work on. But there were also some older, hard-bitten-looking journalists from the nationals, with matching older, hard-bitten-looking photographers.

It was soon obvious to Carole and Jude that the press hadn't just come to look at yurts, however well appointed they might be. They had come for the famous faces.

Clearly Gale Mostyn had pulled out all the stops for the launch. A few of the famous faces were familiar to Carole, though she couldn't put names to them. Jude recognized more and, chatting to other people (how was it she always started so easily chatting to other people, Carole wondered plaintively for the millionth time), managed to get the identities of the others. Though Walden hadn't justified the appearance of any A-list celebrities, those who had turned up were definitely towards the beginning of the alphabet and would deserve inclusion in most of the national gossip columns.

They included, Carole was informed, a lingerie model who had just dumped a Premiership footballer after tabloid ‘love rat' allegations, a singer predicted to go Top Hundred on iTunes within the next week, a stand-up comic who had recently become the voice of a smoothie-maker in a new ad campaign, and a girl from Rochdale whose dance act with her Siamese cat was tipped to win a major television talent show. It may not have been the Great and Good of West Sussex, but then the Great and Good of West Sussex wouldn't even have got the local newspapers to turn out at a weekend. Gale Mostyn had, however, produced a guest list to set contemporary journalists slavering.

And there was one person there whom even Carole Seddon recognized. Sam Torino. Well over six foot tall, leggy, long black hair, hazel eyes with glints of green in them. Canadian by birth, international model, former lover of a good few of rock's royalty, she was present with the three children born of her three most famous liaisons. She and they were dressed in the kind of casual wear which looked wonderful on them, but which would never look the same on ordinary people who bought the identical garments.

Sam Torino was a woman with a Teflon reputation. Affairs, marriages and divorces came and went, but her serenity seemed undiminished. In spite of her jet-set lifestyle, she had a core of domestic ordinariness which earned her the respect of the wives whose husbands fancied her, both in her adopted British home and in the States, where she still frequently flew for her most lucrative fashion shoots. To have got Sam Torino to Chervil Whittaker's launch, Gale Mostyn must have had considerable muscle.

And it soon became clear that she wasn't just there for the Saturday. She and her family were tasting the Walden experience to the full, staying overnight in one of the yurts, and going to be photographed over breakfast the following morning. The column inches for Butterwyke House's new venture would be gratifyingly long. Carole and Jude wondered whether Sam Torino had been lined up for the previous weekend and then agreed to the postponement following Fennel's death. Somehow they thought not. They got the impression Chervil and Giles had been telling the truth and the initiative for the launch had been conceived within the last few days.

The one person who wasn't present that afternoon was Ned Whittaker. His wife Sheena was there, more relaxed than Carole and Jude had seen her before, drinking and chatting cheerfully with anyone and everyone. Carole thought her husband's absence was odd. Jude, who knew the depth of Ned's grief over his daughter's death, was less surprised. To both of them Sheena's apparent insouciance seemed in the circumstances bizarre.

The whole of the Walden site was
en fête
for the occasion. Bunting hung from the trees and, rather incongruously, a maypole stood one side of the central area, with a bonfire on the other. The yurts themselves were garlanded with coloured cloth and their doorways hung with bright curtains. Every viewpoint offered a photo opportunity.

And the assembled
paparazzi
were not wasting those opportunities. Smartly-suited girls from Gale Mostyn, looking impossibly cool in the warm sunshine, choreographed the photographs, lining up the assembled celebrities in one setting after another, all the time working in close consultation with Chervil Whittaker and Giles Green. Meanwhile black-trousered waitresses moved among the guests with trays of champagne, Pimm's and fruit juices.

Sam Torino and her family had their own minder who organized the photos they were required for. Dressed in an oatmeal-coloured linen suit with an open-necked blue shirt, he was introduced to Carole and Jude as Nigel Mostyn. Clearly Sam Torino's stature required the personal attentions of one of Gale Mostyn's partners.

A lifetime's modelling had given her grace and patience. She made no fuss as the photographers posed and reposed her; and the less-experienced ones from the local papers seemed to need a lot of reposing. If any of her children showed signs of boredom or restlessness, she reprimanded them in a manner that was old-fashioned almost to the point of being schoolmarmish.