Blood at the Bookies

Fifteen

Jude heard the sound of crying as soon as she came through the door of Woodside Cottage. Zofia was hunched up on one of the sitting room’s heavily draped sofas, her shoulders shaken by the sobs that ran through her body. On the floor beside her were a battered suitcase and a scruffy backpack. Immediately Jude’s arms were round the girl and her lips were murmuring soothing words.

“I am sorry,” was the first thing that Zofia managed to say. “I hear from the police this morning that I can come and collect Tadek’s things, his possessions, and seeing them…” She indicated the bags “…it makes me realize that he is really gone from me.”

“Do you want me to put them away somewhere, until you are ready to deal with them?”

“No, Jude, thank you.” Zofia wiped the back of her hand against her face to dismiss the tears. “No, I am ready to deal with them now. Maybe there is something in here that tells me what has happened to Tadek. I must not be emotional. I must try to piece together from his possessions what he was doing here in England, and perhaps the reason why someone want to kill him.”

“All right,” said Jude. “I’ll help you. But first let’s have a drink of something. What would you like, Zosia?”

“Coffee, please. Black, that would be good.”

“Don’t start opening the bags until I’m there.” Jude didn’t fool herself that her words were spoken from pure altruism. She was being offered a unique chance to further her investigation into Tadek’s death.

“Did the police say anything,” she called through from the kitchen, “about why they were letting you have his belongings so soon?”

“They just said they’d finished what they needed to do with them, and the landlord wants to rent out the room again as soon as possible so the stuff can’t go back to Littlehampton. Would I like to take it, please?”

“Did you go back to the house?”

“No, I collect from police station.”

“I wonder if their letting you take the stuff suggests the police are winding up their investigation?”

“I do not know.”

“Well, if they’ve made an arrest, we’ll hear pretty soon on the news.”

“Yes.”

When Jude came through with the coffee, Zofia had curbed her tears but she still looked lost and waiflike on the sofa. Her pigtails emphasized her vulnerability. “Come on,” said Jude, once the drinks were poured, “let’s be very unemotional about this; Try to distance yourself from what you’re looking at, Zosia.”

“I will try, but it is not easy.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. But just try to forget it is your brother whose things we are looking at. Imagine it is an assignment you are doing as a journalist. You have to write a story based on the information you can glean from what you find here.”

“Yes, this is a good way. I will try this.” She produced her blue notebook and opened it at a clean page. “I am writing a story about a murder investigation. And I will write my notes in English.”

“Right. Open the suitcase first.”

Zofia did as she was told. The contents of the case were pitifully few, mostly clothes, and fairly worn and threadbare clothes at that. Though they must all have been redolent of memories, the girl was commendably restrained as she neatly piled them up. She made a kind of inventory in her notebook.

“Nothing here that he didn’t have at the time he left Warsaw,” she announced when the suitcase was nearly empty. She picked up the last item, a sponge bag, and unzipped it.

The contents once again were unsurprising. Shaving kit, deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrush, paracetamol. And in one compartment a pack of condoms.

“So it looks like something was happening in his life…” suggested Jude.

“Or just that Tadek was, as he always was, optimistic.” Zofia was making a joke at the expense of her brother’s romantic aspirations, but she could not say it without a tear glinting in her eye.

She moved on to the backpack. This had seen a lot of service. Its fabric was slack and discoloured, covered with a rough patchwork of stickers, old and illegible ones covered over by newer designs whose colours showed up against them.

“Are these all from your brother’s travels?”

“No. He was given the backpack by a friend, who I think himself had bought it second-hand. The only ones Tadek would have put on are those from music festivals he goes to.” She pointed to a bright printed circle. “This one in Leipzig…I remember he goes there after he finish university last summer. A celebration…to play some of his own music, he said, and to listen to people who play music better than he does.”

She pulled the backpack towards her and tackled the buckles. “Maybe here we will find more secrets about what he do in England.”

There was some evidence of Tadek’s activities, but nothing very interesting. Zofia itemized everything in her blue notebook. Programmes and tickets suggested he’d been to a few music gigs, but none further afield than Brighton. Some torn-out newspaper advertisements indicated that his career ambitions might have extended beyond bar work. A well-thumbed dictionary and an old language course on cassette bore witness to a determination to improve his English.

And there was also an English rhyming dictionary. Zofia looked at this with some confusion, before opening it to check the contents. Then she nodded slowly.

“Does that tell you something?” asked Jude.

“I think, yes. It is something Tadek speak of occasionally. He say writing good songs in Polish is good for Poland, but not for the world. To write songs that are very successful, you must write in English – or American.”

“So you think he was writing songs in English?”

“I think he tries, yes.”

“He wanted to be very successful?”

Zofia Jankowska grimaced. “Not exactly that. Tadek did not want a lot of money. Well, we would not have minded, but for him money was a…was what he could do with it…I think there is an expression in English…?”

“‘A means to an end’.”

“Yes, this is good. This is how Tadek see money. It helps him to do things he want to do. For him money is ‘a means to an end’.”

“So writing songs in English would have made him more money? That would be his reason for doing it?”

“Perhaps. More with Tadek, though…” The girl smiled wistfully “…he might want to write songs for English women.”

“What do you mean?”

“I tell you he is romantic. He fall for women who are not right for him…”

“Yes, you said. And often older women.”

“That is what Tadek does, very often. And because he is romantic, and because he does not have much money to buy presents for the women he loves…”

“He used to write songs for them?”

Zofia nodded. “That is what he always does.” She picked up the rhyming dictionary again. “So perhaps this means he had fallen in love with an Englishwoman.”

She pulled a small pile of songbooks out of the backpack. They were mostly much-used copies of folk and protest songs from the nineteen-sixties, songs made popular by artistes like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan and the Byrds.

“Your brother had rather old-fashioned tastes.”

“Yes, this is the music he likes. He plays a lot of these. Not electric guitar. The songs he write are in this style too. Perhaps that is why he does not make money from his songs, in any language. As you say, they are old-fashioned.” Emotion threatened for a moment, as she realized that she had heard the last of her brother’s songs, but she controlled it. “Right, that is nearly everything. Just a few more bits.”

She took out the remaining contents of the backpack, again arranging them neatly in piles on the floor. She made more notes in the little blue book. A couple of novels in Polish, a crucifix, other small ornaments. There was nothing that seemed out of place to Jude, but Zofia sat there for a long time saying, “It is strange, it is very strange.”

“What’s strange? Is there something there that shouldn’t be?”

“No,” the girl replied. “It is the other way round. There is things not here that should be here.”

“What?”

The pained hazel eyes fixed on Jude’s. “Tadek lived for his music. There is nothing of that here, except for the sheet music. No notebooks with songs written out, no lyrics, no cassettes, no CDs. Most of all, there is not his guitar.”

“What was the guitar like?”

“It was not electrical. It was…I don’t know the word.”

“Acoustic.”

“Yes, it was acoustic. An acoustic guitar.” Zofia seemed to savour the adjective on her lips. “Tadek would never give his guitar away. Where is it? It is such a special guitar.”

“Special meaning valuable?”

“No, no, probably after what Tadek has done to it, it is less valuable. He painted it red and he paint two eyes on the front, you know, like the hole behind the strings is the mouth, so the guitar has a face. In the band he play with with his friends, they all paint faces on their instruments. It is something they do, so that always people recognize them. And they call the band ‘Twarz’. That means ‘face’ in Polish.”

“Did you ask the police about the guitar when you picked up this lot?”

“I wasn’t thinking. But they tell me here is everything they find in his room.”

“It might be worth checking. They could still be doing forensic tests on the guitar. Have you got a number for them?”

Zofia Jankowska had. She rang through and spoke to the officer from whom she had picked up the bags that morning. He told her everything was there except for the clothes her brother had been wearing at the time of his death. There had been no sign of a guitar amongst his belongings.

Being told this prompted another question from Jude. “That overcoat he was wearing, was that his?”

Zofia nodded. “I was with him when he bought it. In a street market in Warsaw for old clothes. It was from Russian navy. A lot of clothes like that are for sale in Roland.” Jude remembered thinking at the time that the coat had looked naval.

“You don’t think he might have sold the guitar? If he needed the money?”

“Tadek would never do that. He might sell anything else, he might go without food, he would never sell his guitar. That was like part of him. Besides…” She picked up something that looked like a polished wooden cigar-box, turned it over and clicked a secret catch that revealed a false bottom. Inside was probably two hundred pounds in English notes. “You see, Tadek had money.”

Zofia squatted back on her haunches in something like despair. “So where do we find his guitar?”

“And where,” asked Jude thoughtfully, “do we find the English woman to whom he was writing love songs?”

On her walk with Gulliver late that afternoon, Carole found herself passing Fethering’s parade of shops and felt a very uncharacteristic urge to go into the bookie’s. She managed to curb it and keep walking, but the strength of the impulse surprised her.

She knew it was partly to do with Gerald Hume. She didn’t know whether she was attracted to him – she’d hardly been in the man’s company long enough to form an opinion – but she was still warmed by the impression that she’d received of his being very definitely attracted to her. She wasn’t convinced that the attraction was sexual, but they had definitely clicked at some level. The knowledge gave her a slightly heady feeling of power.

But Gerald Hume wasn’t the only cause of her urge to go in. The betting shop remained the focus of the enquiry into Tadek’s death. Perhaps it was no longer the focus for the official investigation – the police no doubt had new avenues to explore – but for Carole and Jude everything still came back to the betting shop.

Not for the first time Carole tried to guess at the young man’s movements in the moments before he entered the place the previous week. That was the big question: where had he actually been when he was attacked? His thick coat could only have served as a temporary barrier to the flow of blood, so the scene of the stabbing could not have been very far away. Had the confrontation taken place on the beach or in one of the nearby houses or shops? Surely if it had happened in public there would have been some witnesses? And yet the powerful news-gathering agency of Fethering gossip had produced not a single clue even as to the direction from which the dying man had entered the betting shop.

Then Carole remembered the hailstorm. Under her duvet, drowned in flu, she had only been aware of the rattling of the icy downpour against her windows, but from Jude’s description it had been really ferocious, obliterating all of the town’s familiar landmarks. That was why no one had witnessed Tadek’s approach to the betting shop.

Carole looked again along the parade. Allinstore, Mamie’s Hairdressing, Polly’s Cake Shop, the estate agents, the charity shops. It seemed unlikely that the young Pole had come out of one of them and yet what other explanation was there for his sudden appearance?

At that moment a car drawing up alongside her reminded Carole of another possibility. The young Pole could have arrived at the parade by car. But if he did, where had he come from? And who with?