The Corpse on the Court (15 page)

The door opened. And when Jude said, ‘Good afternoon,' the expression of Piers Targett's face was one which she had not previously seen during what she now realized had been a very brief relationship.

Piers was extremely fluent in his explanations. No surprise there, he'd always been good with words.

No, he hadn't lied to her about going to Paris. He had caught the Eurostar from Ebbsfleet as planned on the Thursday morning. But the business he was due to do in France hadn't taken as long as anticipated, so he'd returned to England on the Friday afternoon.

They were sitting in the kitchen. Jude had refused his offer of ‘tea, coffee or maybe something stronger . . .?' She was struck again by how shabby the place looked. The interior matched the exterior – not squalid but with an air of neglect. Though it was starting to get dark outside, she could still see the dust and cobwebs on the windows. The mess of the house was in such sharp contrast to the antiseptic neatness of his Bayswater flat that Jude couldn't help feeling that the difference must express something in Piers Targett's personality. Another secret perhaps, something else that would require explanation.

In spite of the circumstances, she hadn't stopped finding Piers attractive. There was something impossibly engaging, almost vulnerable, about the way his white hair flopped down over his ears. The temptation had been strong when she first arrived to throw herself into his arms, listen to whatever he said, believe whatever he said. But she had confined their contact to a chaste kiss on the lips. She forced herself not to succumb to his charms until she had heard what he had to say for himself.

‘So this business you were conducting in Paris?' she asked. ‘Am I allowed to know what it was?'

‘Oh, just . . . stuff.' He shrugged airily. ‘To do with money. Boring but necessary.'

‘Oenone Playfair said you had “fingers in many pies”.'

‘Did she? Well, as ever, Oenone was spot on. And, given the current economic situation, it looks like I'm going to have to find a lot more pies to dig my grubby little fingers into.'

‘Hm,' was all that Jude said. There were so many questions that she wanted to ask, she didn't know where to start. And the tone of too many of them would sound like the peevish huffiness of a woman scorned. Which was not an image that Jude had ever wanted to present.

Fortunately Piers took the initiative, divining the thought that was uppermost in her mind. ‘What you want to know, I dare say, Jude, is why I didn't tell you I was going to come back earlier.'

‘The thought had crossed my mind.' Keep it light, keep it at the level of banter.

‘The fact is –' he looked awkward – ‘there were one of two things I needed to sort out down here, so I wanted to get those sorted and then pick up where I left off with you . . . sort of, with a clear mind.'

‘Are you sure you don't mean a clear conscience?'

‘Absolutely bloody sure! Look, Jude, if you think I'm trying to keep something from you, if you're even suggesting that I might have something going on with another woman, well, you're totally barking up the wrong tree.'

‘I'm glad to hear it. But you must see why, if I were the kind of woman who's prone to paranoia, a few anxieties might be kicking in.'

‘Why?'

‘Oh, come on, Piers. Don't pretend to be more naive than you really are. Everything you do is shrouded in such secrecy.'

‘I thought we'd talked about this, Jude, about not wanting to live in each other's pockets. If I could quote your own words back to you, I seem to remember your saying, “I don't want to be part of one of those couples where each of them knows exactly what the other's doing every minute of the day.”'

She couldn't deny it. She had said that. ‘All right, all right, take your point. And I don't want to be like that. But I still can't help finding it odd that you didn't tell me that you were going to come back from Paris two days earlier than you'd intended.'

‘I told you. I had stuff to do here.'

‘What kind of stuff?' Jude hated herself for asking the question.

‘Just stuff. Nothing that would interest you.'

‘If it wouldn't interest me, then there's no reason why you shouldn't tell me about it.'

‘One thing I've never wanted to do in our relationship, Jude, is to bore you.'

‘Oh, very slick.' Jude grinned. ‘The old silver tongue working overtime again.' Her expression changed. ‘What was this “stuff” that was so important you couldn't ring me or text me to say that you'd come back from Paris early?'

Piers Targett looked at her ruefully, then sighed. ‘All right.' He gestured round the kitchen. ‘It's this place. I want to put it on the market. Which means contacting estate agents, sorting out a cleaner to do a basic tidy-up, a gardener to make the outside look vaguely presentable. That's what I've been doing this morning . . . well, most of the day, actually. All that stuff . . . which, as I say, is not very interesting.'

‘And none of this was to do with Reggie Playfair's death?'

He looked totally shocked by the question. ‘No. Why should my putting this place on the market have anything to do with poor old Reggie?'

‘I didn't mean that. I meant has any of the other “stuff” you've been doing had anything to do with his death?'

Piers Targett shook his head in a manner that contained puzzlement and also some other emotion that Jude could not quite identify.

‘Sorry about that,' she said. ‘Going up a blind alley. But there is one thing I do want to ask.'

‘Ask away.'

‘Why have you suddenly decided you want to put this house on the market? From all accounts, you've owned it for quite a while, not used it much, spent an increasing amount of time in London. So why now? Why do you suddenly want to sell now?'

He grinned wryly. ‘Partly it's financial. Some of my investments – some of my “pies” as Oenone calls them – have proved to have less filling in them than I'd hoped. So realizing a bit of capital and then going off to find more lucrative pies to dip my fingers into, well, that's part of the reason.

‘The other bit –' he turned the full beam of his deep blue eyes on her – ‘is to do with you.'

‘In what way to do with me?'

‘Look, Jude, this place represents a different part of my life. This is where I lived when . . .' The supremely articulate Piers Targett seemed to run out of words.

‘When you were married?' Jude suggested.

‘Yes. And well, as I told you, I still am technically married. Not divorced, anyway. But I couldn't move on. I couldn't get rid of this place, even though I was hardly ever here, even though I've let it become such a tip. Every time I considered doing something about the place, inertia overcame me. It was all too much effort. Then I met you, and suddenly I had a reason for wanting to close that chapter of my life. Suddenly I had a reason to want to move on. And I felt I had to set that whole process in motion before I could get back in touch with you. Does that make any kind of sense, Jude?'

‘Yes,' she said, her voice thick with emotion. ‘Yes, it does, Piers.'

Their eyes interlocked and they were drawn ineluctably towards each other. But before they touched, they both froze at the sound of the front door clattering open and shut.

A woman with long blonded hair appeared in the kitchen doorway.

‘Ah,' she said. ‘So this is the new one, Piers?' She looked Jude appraisingly up and down. ‘First time you've gone for bulk.' And almost before the insult had had time to sink in, she announced, ‘I'm Jonquil Targett. Piers' wife.'

‘S
o what's he told you about me?' demanded Jonquil Targett. ‘Nothing, if I know Piers. Presenting himself as the poor, suffering divorcé, finally having got over the trauma of the relationship in which he'd invested so much emotional capital and at last ready to take the first stumbling steps towards a new one? Only needing the love of a good woman? Is that the image he's projected to you?'

‘No,' replied Jude with more coolness than she felt. ‘Piers has not told me he's divorced. He's made no secret of the fact that he's still technically married.'

‘Technically? Huh, I like that. Reducing me to a small technicality in his life. I hope he hasn't pretended to you that you're the first of his girlfriends.'

‘No, he's never suggested that.'

‘Though I think you're the first he's brought back to this house, the house that we jointly own.'

Jude tried to think back to what Piers had actually said about his emotional history and realized that it had been very little. They'd been so caught up in the happiness they'd found in each other that most other things had seemed irrelevant. They'd both known that there were big subjects that they would have to deal with eventually if their relationship progressed. But shelving such discussions for the time being had suited both of them.

‘Jonquil, just leave her alone,' said Piers in a voice Jude hadn't heard from him before. There was a note of despair in it. Gone was the urbane articulacy. In his wife's presence Piers Targett seemed immobilized, struck down by the same inertia that he had said prevented him from selling the house.

Jonquil knew the power she had over him, and gloried in it. She was an attractive woman, probably about the same age as Jude, but thin as a rake. The long blonded hair, though perhaps a bit too young for her, had been expertly done. She was dressed in the kind of tight sweater and jeans that people with her figure could get away with.

‘Piers,' said Jude, ‘I think I'll go now.'

‘No, don't.'

‘I think I should.'

He didn't argue any further. Jonquil had drained the will out of him. ‘Look, I'll give you a call,' he said. ‘I can explain.'

As she went out through the front door, Jude wondered how many men had used that pathetic, hopeless expression over the years. ‘I can explain.' And how many women had accepted those explanations, knowing all the time that they were as false as the lies that had got the man into the position of needing to explain in the first place?

It was nearly dark, but at least the rain from earlier in the afternoon had stopped. Jude didn't know exactly where she was, but she remembered the car going through the small village of Goffham just before they reached their destination. And in that small village there had been a pub. She'd walk back there, have a glass of wine – no, a large Scotch – and phone for a cab to take her back to Fethering.

Untidily parked on the gravel outside the house there was now a Nissan Figaro, presumably the car in which Jonquil Targett had arrived. Its baby-blue paint looked somehow ineffectual beside the classic scarlet of the E-Type. As she walked past, Jude noticed something white draped haphazardly across the Figaro's back seat.

It was a wedding dress.

Mid morning on the Sunday, Carole rang the number Susan Holland had given her for Donna Grodsky. When the phone was answered there was a baby crying in the background. She explained that she was trying to find out what had happened to Marina.

‘Are you police or something?' asked the suspicious voice from the other end of the line.

Carole was only fleetingly tempted to lie. ‘No,' she said.

‘Good. Because they were bloody useless when Marina originally disappeared.'

‘I was wondering if you would be prepared to talk to me about what might have happened to her?'

Donna Grodsky didn't sound keen. ‘What do I get out of it?' she asked.

The only answer Carole could come up with sounded a bit feeble to her. ‘I could buy you lunch.'

As it turned out, that was spot on. ‘Yeah, all right. I never get out of the bloody house these days, what with the baby and everything.'

She gave the name of a pub, the George's Head in the Moulsecoomb area of Brighton, and they agreed that Carole would appear there the following morning at twelve. ‘It's a good time, because sometimes the little bugger has a kip round then.'

As she put the phone down, Carole felt a warm glow. She did get a charge out of conducting an investigation independently of Jude. Yes, they worked very well together, but Carole didn't really need Jude. With her Home Office background, it was Carole Seddon who supplied the intellectual rigour in their investigations. Her neighbour's method had always been based more on intuition and outrageous good luck. Not that she was jealous, of course, but Jude did just swan through life so easily.

Little did Carole suspect that next door at Woodside Cottage her neighbour was still crying.

Jude's mobile rang on the Sunday evening. The number calling was Piers Targett's. She answered it instantly, but it wasn't Piers at the other end.

‘Hello. I'm calling on Piers' mobile. It's Jonquil. We met earlier.'

‘I remember.' What on earth did the woman want? To pour out more poison about her husband? To hurt Jude even more?

‘I gather you were with Piers when he found Reggie Playfair's body at the tennis court . . .'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you see him take the poor old bugger's mobile phone?'

‘What? No, I didn't.'

But the scene came back very vividly. Finding Reggie lying on the court . . . Then Piers sending her off to fetch his iPhone from the car . . . because he wanted a moment alone with the corpse of his old friend . . . If he planned to purloin the dead man's mobile, he'd created the perfect opportunity.

‘Well, Piers has got it. I saw it in his jacket pocket, recognized it straight away – Reggie had this case specially made for it in purple and green stripes – the Lockleigh House club colours.'

And Jonquil Targett echoed Jude's thoughts exactly as she went on, ‘Now, why on earth would Piers want to take Reggie's mobile?'