Blood at the Bookies

Twenty-Five

Before she started her shift at the Crown and Anchor, Zofia just had time to send an email to Pavel from the Woodside Cottage laptop. She didn’t know when she was likely to get a response. It would depend on how long he stayed in Krakow.

Jude’s afternoon was committed to a client whose whiplash injuries after a car accident needed massage and healing. Carole said she was going to spend a quiet few hours reading. But in fact she had other plans.

Jude knew she had other plans. Why else would Carole have asked to borrow her mobile? But, as she handed it across, she didn’t ask for any explanation.

The Times crossword was there as an ostensible reason for sitting in the Renault by the towpath at the end of River Road, but Carole had to admit she felt cold. Whenever she’d seen cops doing a stake-out on television, they seemed to have supplied themselves with bottomless hipflasks and a copious supply of cigarettes, and now she could understand why. Surveillance was very boring and unrewarding work.

Nor did her distracted concentration allow her to make much headway on the crossword. She knew Tuesday’s could sometimes be tricky, but her mind that afternoon was not dissecting and analysing words as it should have been. A few clues made sense, and she got them so quickly that she suspected the others were equally easy. But her brain couldn’t see through the verbal obfuscation to the patent truth. She knew if she failed to complete the puzzle, the answers in the next morning’s paper would make her kick herself for her ineptitude.

There was a phone number that could be rung to get answers to the day’s crossword, but Carole Seddon would never resort to that. For a start, calls were priced at the exorbitant rate of seventy-five pence per minute, and then again…well, it just wasn’t the sort of thing she’d do. She felt sure that Gerald Hume would be as much of a purist in such matters as she was.

The road by the River Fether was not busy on a chilly February afternoon. The few people out walking their dogs were what Carole thought of dismissively as ‘pensioners’ (until she realized that she and Gulliver would also fit the description). Between half-past three and four a few schoolchildren, defiantly coatless in the cold weather, returned to their homes. But as the shadows of the encroaching evening closed together and lights came on in the houses before their curtains were closed, the area was deserted.

It was nearly five o’clock and Carole could hardly even see the crossword, though she knew that two corners of clues remained intractable. There was a fifteen-letter word straight down the middle of the grid. She knew if she could get that, all the other answers would fall into place. She also knew that the solution was quite easy, but she could not for the life of her see what it was.

Stuff this for a game of soldiers, thought Carole. It was not an expression that she would ever have spoken out loud, but it was one she had learnt from her father and cherished. Time to get back to High Tor.

Before she turned the key in the ignition, however, movement from one of the houses along the road drew her attention. A woman was coming out of the front door. She moved, in a manner which to Carole’s imagination looked furtive, towards the turning into River Road. In the deepening gloom, Carole couldn’t make out the woman’s face well, nor could she see Gerald Hume’s photograph clearly enough to make comparisons. But the stranger was about the right age.

When the woman was close to her, Carole put the next part of her plan into action. On Jude’s phone she keyed in the number given her by Giles Newton, and pressed the ‘call’ button.

The woman reacted. She didn’t answer the phone, but she definitely reacted to its ringing.

She was Melanie Newton.