Free Fethering 08 (2007) - Death under the Dryer by Simon Brett, Prefers to remain anonymous Page B

her, and said she must leave.
    “Yes. I am sorry it cannot be for longer. I would like to play you some other tunes. I always like playing tunes for a beautiful lady.” But even as he spoke the words of flirtation, he looked worried. From seeing the two of them in Connie’s Clip Joint, Jude had got the impression that Wally wasn’t genuinely henpecked, that his subservient behaviour to Mim was part of a public double act. But his current anxiety made her question that assumption. Maybe he really was afraid of his wife.
    Still he kept up his facade of roguish gallantry. “It is a pity that you do not wear make-up, that you could not have left the tell-tale trace on the coffee cup…”
    Jude grinned at him and, reaching down into the bottom of her capacious African straw basket, produced a battered lipstick. She painted her lips, and then deliberately picked up her cup and pretended to drink. A very satisfactory smudge of pink appeared on the gold rim of the china.
    Wally smiled, absolutely delighted. “Oh, that is good, very good.” But his eyes could not stay long away from his watch. “I think perhaps though, the time has come…”
    “Of course.”
    “Would you mind,” he asked nervously, “going down the back way, through the garden? There is a gate at the end that only opens from this side. It leads directly on to the beach path.”
    “No, that’s fine. It’s a nicer walk back.”
    So that was the route by which she left, clandestinely, like a spy or a lover. When she reached the gate to the beach, Jude looked back. She could see the huge wide window of the sitting room. Next to it was a smaller one, clearly belonging to the kitchen. In front of this, Wally Grenston, unaware of her scrutiny, was carefully washing both coffee cups.

EIGHT
    J ude looked up Jiri Bartos’s number as soon as she got back to Woodside Cottage. She rang it straight away and he answered. But before she had finished saying, “Mr Bartos, I wanted to talk to you about your daughter,” he had put the phone down.
    §
    Carole and Jude had agreed to meet for lunch in the Crown and Anchor that Thursday. They both ordered Ted Crisp’s recommendation of Local Pork and Leek Sausages with Mash and Onion Gravy and, while they waited for them to appear, sipped their Chilean Chardonnays and brought each other up to date on their investigations.
    What Jude had found out from Wally Grenston seemed pathetically little in the retelling. “Couldn’t be more contrast between the two families,” Carole observed when her friend had finished. “Joe Bartos is very closed in, just him and his daughter…though now of course just him…and it doesn’t sound as though Kyra had many friends…whereas the Lockes seem to do everything as a pack.”
    “Did you find out how many children there were there?”
    “The way they talked there seemed to be hundreds. Nathan’s certainly got at least one brother, and Dorcas has an identical twin sister. Mind you, it’s doubly confusing because they’ve all got nicknames. And they have that quality close families often have, of assuming that everyone knows all about them, so it wasn’t easy to work out who was who.”
    “Did you discover whether the Lockes had actually met Kyra Bartos?”
    “Eithne had, but only by accident. And, given how his parents kept going on about how liberal they are, and how they wouldn’t mind him having a girlfriend in his room…well, that might suggest the boy deliberately kept them apart.”
    “He wouldn’t have been the first young man to have done that,” Jude mused. “A new relationship being seen as a new beginning…particularly if it represented getting away from a family where he wasn’t happy.”
    “The Lockes would have denied stoutly that Nathan wasn’t happy. They seemed to have this…I’m not quite sure how to explain it…pride, I suppose. Pride in themselves as a family unit…as if being a Locke was the highest achievement anyone could hope for. And