The Shooting in the Shop (7 page)

‘Have you finished it?’

‘A couple of times.’ Carole looked at her curiously,
so the girl explained, ‘I mean I’ve got to the end a
couple of times. I’ve finished two drafts.’

‘Have you shown it to anyone?’

‘To Piers. He says he thinks it’s terrific. But then
he would say that, wouldn’t he? Mind you, unwilling
as ever to give me unqualified praise, he says he
doesn’t think it’d have much chance of getting published.
But I’ve also shown the manuscript to a friend
who works in a literary agency. She was quite flattering
about it, though I’m not sure . . . Oh, I’ll finish
another draft – which I nearly have done – then see
what happens. And in the meantime keep looking for
acting work.’

‘Well, I wish you a lot of luck with the book.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Is it fact or fiction?’

Polly responded with a wry smile. ‘Bit of each,
perhaps.’

‘Ah. Contemporary setting?’

‘No, I suppose I’d have to say it’s historical. About
the past, anyway, and about how people reinvent
their pasts. Most of us do that to some extent.’

‘Do we?’ Carole thought about whether she’d ever
done it, and decided that yes, she had. ‘I suppose
you’re right.’

‘I don’t have to look far for people who’ve reinvented
their past,’ said Polly.

‘Are you talking about your father?’

‘Him, and others.’ She gave a sardonic grin.
‘Anyway, I’m getting quite intrigued by history, you
know. Digging back into the mix of truth and fantasy,
finding out where things went wrong.’

‘Went wrong for you, do you mean?’

‘Good heavens no.’ The girl laughed at the idea,
then wryness returned to her voice as she went on,
‘I know where things went wrong for me.’

She didn’t let the thought linger or leave time for
a supplementary question. ‘So maybe the book will
make my fortune, change my life around. Huh, I
should be so lucky. Anyway, for the time being, Piers
is the only writer in our household. He’s starting
to do quite well,’ the girl said wistfully. ‘He’s had a
few credits on television sketch shows. You may have
seen the name Piers Duncton scrolling down at the
end. And now a television sitcom of his looks like
it might get commissioned. You know, he’s got very
good contacts. He was in the Footlights at Cambridge,
and that kind of network counts for a lot in show business.’

Carole made a possible connection. ‘So when he
was at Cambridge, did he know Lola?’

Polly nodded. ‘Yes, they were in revues and things
together. Did the Edinburgh Fringe, all that stuff.’

‘Did you meet Piers through her?’

The girl shook her head. ‘Other way round. I’d
met Piers before he went to Cambridge. In the
National Youth Theatre. And somehow our relationship
survived the three years he was up there.’ She
made it sound as if the process hadn’t all been plain
sailing. ‘So I met all his Footlights mates, including
Lola.’

‘And was it through you that your father – or,
rather, your stepfather – met Lola? You introduced
them?’

Polly twisted her lips into an expression of mock
ruefulness as she echoed her father’s words of a few
moments before. ‘Guilty as charged.’

Carole was surprised how long she stayed at Jude’s
open house. She was so busy nibbling Zosia’s exquisite
nibbles, drinking more white wine and, to her
amazement, chatting away easily to people (some of
whom she even hadn’t met before), that she didn’t
notice the passage of time. Only at the end of a long
conversation with a retired geophysicist about the
semantic history of the word ‘serendipity’ did she
finally take a look at her watch. She was astonished to
see that it was nearly five o’clock. The booze showed
no signs of running out, and the crowd of guests
hadn’t dwindled by much, but Carole thought it was
probably time she left.

Her circuit of goodbyes took a gratifyingly long
time and it was nearly six by the time she was sitting
by the Aga in the High Tor kitchen. Gulliver looked
up at her pathetically, hoping for an after-dark walk,
but Carole was feeling selfish. She’d do the
Sunday
Times
crossword first, and then take him out just
on the rough ground behind the house to do his business.
The dog couldn’t really complain; he’d had an
hour’s thorough workout that morning on Fethering
Beach.

Though
The Times
crossword was an essential
part of Carole Seddon’s daily routine, she very rarely
did the
Sunday Times
version, and its quirks were
unfamiliar to her. She found her mind kept sliding
away from the clues and her vision kept wandering
abstractedly into the middle distance. It took quite a
while for her to conclude that she was a little drunk.

But this realization did not generate the guilt
which would usually accompany it. Instead, Carole
felt rather mellow. In spite of her misgivings, she had
really enjoyed the open house. She hadn’t had to
explain herself, she hadn’t had to apologize, she had
just chatted away to people. Not like Carole Seddon at
all. Just like a normal person, in fact.

The mellow feeling stayed with her for the rest of
the evening. She took Gulliver out for his necessary
visit, and ignored the reproachful plea in his dark
Labrador eyes for a longer walk. She had eaten so
many nibbles that she only required a single slice of
cheese on toast for supper. Then she watched some
mindless medical drama on television (not feeling
her customary guilt for watching something mindless)
and caught up with the news headlines. She was
in bed by half past ten.

Waking at about three with a raging thirst, Carole
Seddon felt rather less mellow and started worrying
again about Stephen and his family’s forthcoming
Christmas visit. She was awake for over an hour.

As she lay there, willing sleep to return, she
became aware of a light visible through her curtains.
A strange, almost pinkish glow. Carole wondered if it
presaged snow, and went back to sleep, dreaming of a
White Christmas.

But the strange glow she had seen had another
cause. The next morning Carole Seddon heard that
there had been a fire on Fethering High Street Parade.
Gallimaufry had burnt down.

Jude had heard the news in a phone call from one
of her clients, and straight away rushed round to
High Tor. Carole was miffed at not having been first
with the information. Her head still a little fuzzy
from the day before, she had taken Gulliver out for
his walk before seven that Monday morning, and it
was only by bad luck that she had chosen the route to
the beach down by the Fethering Yacht Club and the
Fether estuary. Nine times out of ten her walk would
have taken her past the shops on the High Street, so
she would have been able to see the destruction for
herself. And also to spread the news.

As they sat down to coffee at the High Tor kitchen
table, it turned out that Jude had little detail, except
for the fact that the fire had taken place. ‘There’ll
probably be something on the local news at lunchtime,’
she concluded.

‘I could check the BBC Southern Counties website,’
said Carole, and scurried off to do so. Jude was
amused by the way her neighbour, for so long a
technophobe, had suddenly become hooked on computer
technology. It was also characteristic of Carole
that she kept her laptop permanently on a table in a
spare bedroom upstairs, as if she were unable to
acknowledge its portability.

Jude didn’t bother following, she just sat and
enjoyed her coffee. She wasn’t expecting there to be
any new information on the BBC website yet, and so
it proved. ‘We’ll have to wait for the next bulletin,’
said Carole disconsolately. ‘No other way of finding
anything out.’

‘We could visit the scene of the incident,’ suggested
Jude.

‘What, you mean actually go down to the parade
and have a look?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, we couldn’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, there’ll be lots of other prurient ghouls
down there, you know, like people who slow down to
look at car crashes.’

‘They’re probably not prurient ghouls. They’re
just curious.’

‘Huh.’

‘Are you saying you’re not curious, Carole?’

‘Well, I . . . Well, I . . . I suppose it’s only natural
to want to know what’s happened locally, particularly
when it involves people one knows, or rather people
one has met . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘And there could possibly be something one could
do to help.’

‘Yes, there could. Come on, Carole, get your coat
on.’

‘I’ll take my basket, so that it’ll look as if I’ve gone
out shopping.’

‘If you want to.’

‘And if I have Gulliver with me, it’ll look as if I’m
taking him for a walk too, rather than just being . . .’

‘A prurient ghoul?’

‘Exactly.’

They could smell the fire long before they could see
anything. In fact, Carole was amazed she hadn’t smelt
it during her earlier excursion with Gulliver. Though
no smoke was visible, their nostrils were filled with
the stench soon after they stepped out of High Tor.
Acrid, redolent of the harsh tang of burning plastic.

As predicted, there was a substantial crowd
gathered in front of the High Street Parade. The
antennae of Fethering residents had always been
finely tuned to catastrophe. But none of the prurient
ghouls could get very close to what had once been
Gallimaufry. The whole parade had been cordoned
off by police tape. There were still two fire engines at
the front, and maybe more at the back, the side that
faced towards the sea, but the main fury of the flames
appeared to have been subdued. A few sparks could
be seen in the interior, and some exposed beams still
steamed from their recent immersion by the firemen’s
hoses.

Basically the building had been gutted, the roof
had collapsed, and it stood like a blackened empty
box between the adjacent shops which, to the uninformed
observer, did not seem to have suffered much
damage.

Carole and Jude recognized quite a few of the
locals. They also registered the presence of the small,
thin, long-haired woman they’d seen in the Crown
and Anchor last Friday. She was dressed in a faded
green velvet coat over scruffy jeans, and was looking
at the wreckage of Gallimaufry with something
approaching satisfaction.

They might have commented on the woman’s
reaction, had Gerald Hume not come bustling
towards them out of the watching crowd. He opined,
with all the certainty which he had brought to his
career in accountancy, that the fire had been started
by an electrical fault. ‘That’s what it usually is,’ he
said.

‘Do you have any proof that that’s what caused it?’
asked Jude.

‘That’s what it usually is,’ he reasserted.

Nobody else seemed to have any more reliably
authenticated information, but that had never
stopped the residents of Fethering from expressing
their opinions. There was an atmosphere almost of
bonhomie about the gathering. Christmas was only
days away, and the burning down of a shop served as
a pleasant diversion. It would have been different had
it been one of the long-established businesses on the
parade. But Lola Le Bonnier was a recent incomer,
she lived near Fedborough rather than actually in
Fethering, and she had been a bit too flashy for the
taste of most locals. The same went for her shop.
There was something hubristic in the whole enterprise
of Gallimaufry. Even the name was a bit fancy
and clever-clever. Did Fethering really need somewhere
selling overpriced knick-knacks? Nobody
actually used the expression ‘Serve her right’, but
that was the dominant feeling amongst many of the
crowd.

Jude, who knew and cared for Lola, didn’t share
this view. But Carole wouldn’t have taken much convincing
to side with the sceptics. ‘The trouble is,’ she
said, ‘when you’re running something like a shop,
it’s all very fine to make the place look exotic and
trendy, but you can’t ignore basic Health and Safety
procedures.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Jude, uncharacteristically
combative.

‘I mean, having all those candles and fairy lights
with stuff draped all over them . . . well, it was just
asking for trouble, wasn’t it?’

‘We don’t know that’s what caused the fire,’ said
Jude doggedly.

‘No, but we can make a pretty well-informed
guess that—’

Carole didn’t get to finish her sentence. A policeman
with a loudhailer started asking the crowd to
move along, telling them there was nothing to see,
that there was a danger they might get in the way of
the firemen’s work, and that they would be informed
when it would be safe for the other shops on the
parade to reopen.

Many of the spectators were unwilling to leave,
but Carole and Jude separated themselves from the
throng and went back home.

‘Or the shop could have been torched for insurance
reasons.’

‘Oh, come on, Carole. What have you been reading?’

‘It’s quite a common crime. Particularly in recessionary
times. People borrow too much, can’t pay
the mortgage . . . they see a fire as a way out of their
liabilities.’

‘We don’t know that Ricky Le Bonnier had any
money problems.’

‘No, but he’s the kind of man who probably has.’

Jude grinned at her friend. ‘You clearly didn’t take
a shine to him, did you?’

‘I thought he was a show-off.’ In Carole Seddon’s
lexicon of bad behaviour there were few more damning
descriptions. She had been brought up by her
meek and frightened parents to believe that, if you
raised your head above the parapet, then getting shot
down was completely your own fault.

‘We don’t know anything about Ricky’s finances.’

‘Well, I didn’t trust him. People who draw attention
to themselves like that . . . He’s all talk, so far as
I’m concerned.’