Death under the Dryer

Three

“So what’s the word on the street?”

“How should I know?” Ted Crisp replied gruffly. “I never go out on the street if I can help it.”

“All right,” said Jude patiently. “What’s the word in the Crown and Anchor?”

“Ah, that’s a different matter entirely.” Irregular teeth showed through the thicket of his beard in a broad grin. “What happens in the pub I do know about. In fact, not a lot goes on in here that I don’t know about. And there’s not a lot said in here that I don’t hear either.”

“Well then,” said Carole with less patience than her neighbour, “what is being said in here about the strangling in Connie’s Clip Joint?”

Deliberately delaying his reply, the landlord took a long swallow from his beer mug. It was near closing time, the only part of the day when he allowed himself any alcohol. He’d watched too many landlords drink away their health and profits to start any earlier. “There is a general consensus,” Ted began slowly, “that the girl’s boyfriend dunnit.”

“And is that based on anything more substantial than speculation?”

“Well, Carole, speculation is obviously the biggest part of what people are thinking, but there are a few other details that might point in the same direction.”

“Like what?” asked Jude. “We know nothing about the boyfriend, not even his name.”

“That I can supply. Nathan Locke. Sixteen…seventeen. Still at college, somewhere in Chichester. Parents live here in Fethering. I’ve seen him in the pub.”

“With Kyra?”

“Really can’t remember. Those students tend to come in mob-handed, hard to tell which one’s which or who belongs to who. And I’m so busy watching out for which ones of them are underage that I’m not concentrating on much else. The photo of the girl they showed on the television news looked vaguely familiar, but whether I’d seen her with anyone particular, I couldn’t say. Certainly not as part of a regular couple.”

“She looked rather different from the photo on the news. She’d had some piercing done oh her lips and eyebrows,” said Carole, for whom the image was uncomfortably recent. There was always something poignant about photographs of young murder victims – particularly girls – when they appeared in the media. Frequently they were out of date, posed school pictures of children who didn’t look old enough to inspire adult passions. Which only seemed to make their fate more painful.

“What was her surname?” asked Ted. “I must’ve heard it on the news, but it was in one ear, out the other.”

“Bartos,” Jude supplied.

“Oh yes, I knew it was something foreign. ‘Bartos’…now where do you reckon that would come from? Spain perhaps…? South America…?”

“Originally maybe, but there’s such a variety of surnames in this country, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s ‘foreign’.”

Ted took Jude’s reproof on board. “Yeah, OK, but it is an unusual name.”

“So’s Crisp.”

“Nonsense. There’s Crisps everywhere. Behind this bar here I’ve got salt and vinegar, cheese and onion, barbecue, smoky bacon – ”

The two women groaned as one, both aware of the huge blessing the world had received when Ted Crisp gave up being a stand-up comedian.

Carole was quick to put such frivolity in its proper place. “Bartos still sounds a foreign name to me.”

“Everything sounds foreign to you, Carole.” It was an uncharacteristically sharp response from Jude. Usually she let her neighbour’s prejudices pass without comment.

“Well, it’s true. Bartos doesn’t sound English.”

Jude couldn’t resist the tease. “And does Seddon?”

And Carole couldn’t resist the affronted knee-jerk reaction. “Seddon is very definitely an old English name. It’s been around since at least the fourteenth century. And it’s common in Lancashire.”

“I thought you thought everything in Lancashire was common.”

“Jude! If you – ”

Ted Crisp was forced into the unusual role of peacemaker. “Don’t know what’s got into you two tonight. Can we just leave it that ‘Bartos’ is a slightly unusual surname and could possibly be of foreign origin?”

“Very well,” said Carole huffily.

Jude just smiled.

“Anyway, Ted…” Carole reasserted her position as a serious investigator. “You said you knew something about the boyfriend…? Nathan Locke.”

“Only, as I say, that he did come in here sometimes.”

“He must have been quite a regular for you to know his name,” Jude observed.

“No, but one of my regulars does know him fairly well. Lives down the street from his family.”

“Who is the regular?”

Ted Crisp gestured over towards one of the pub’s booths, in which an old man mournfully faced the last few centimetres of his beer. “Les Constantine. Holds the Crown and Anchor All-Comers Record for the longest time making a pint last.”

“Could you introduce him?” asked Jude.

“He may not want to talk to us,” said Carole, her natural distrust of strangers asserting itself.

“You buy him a pint and he’ll want to talk to you all right. Buy him a pint and he’ll tell you anything you want.”

“Haven’t you called ‘Time’, though, Ted? You can’t serve him, can you?”

“Listen, Carole, I’m landlord of the Crown and Anchor. I can do what I like.” He lumbered across towards the booth. “Oy, Les, couple of ladies want to buy you a drink.”

The old man looked up lugubriously. “They’re probably only after my body.”

“Do you find that’s what it usually is with women?”

“Oh yes.”

He moved daintily towards them. He was quite short and his long-lasting pints of beer hadn’t put any flesh on his thin bones. He wore a dark grey suit which shone here and there from too much ironing, and a broad sixties flowered tie in a neat Windsor knot under a frayed collar. But though the clothes had seen better days, everything was spotlessly clean.

Ted made the introductions and set a full pint in Les’s hand. Carole waited for a grateful mouthful to be downed before asking, “So you actually know Nathan Locke?”

The old man looked disappointed. “Oh, so you mean it wasn’t my body you were after?”

“Just a few questions first, then we’ll get on to the sex. What do you fancy – a threesome with the two of us?”

Carole was appalled by the suggestion, but once again was forced to admire Jude’s uncanny skill of hitting the right note with people. That kind of outrageous badinage was the response Les Constantine wanted; she had instantly tuned in to his wavelength.

“All right,” he wheezed. “We’ll sort out the fine-tuning later…you know, “Your place or mine?” How’s that?”

“Sounds perfect.”

“Sounds perfect to me too, Jude.” He relished the taste of her name on his lips. “So what can I do you for? Presumably you’re interested in the boy because of what happened down the hairdresser’s?”

“Well, yes.”

“You and everyone else in Fethering. Yes, suddenly – just thanks to a geographical accident, living down the road from the boy – I’m very popular.” He took another swig of beer. “Not the first free pint I’ve got this evening for my…inside knowledge, is it, Ted?”

The landlord guffawed agreement, and for a moment Carole wondered whether they had been seduced into a handy little scam between publican and customer. Then, with a wink, Ted Crisp wandered off to collect up glasses from the slowly emptying tables.

“I live in Marine Villas,” Les went on. “You know where I mean?”

“Parallel to Beach Road, running down to the Fether.”

“That’s it. I been there nearly forty years now. With the wife Iris I was, till she passed away…1999 that was.” The recollection still caused him a pang. “Anyway, the Lockes moved in about a year after that. Nathan was, I don’t know, ten, maybe younger. Nice kid, not one of these that’s always causing trouble and nicking your dustbins and throwing McDonald wrappers in your front garden and that. More interested in books and schoolwork, I gather. Whole family’s a bit arty-farty, from what I hear.”

“So do you actually know Nathan?”

“Just to say hello to. Not bosom pals, but in a street like Marine Villas…well, you hear a bit about everyone’s business. Like, I suppose, most of them know about everything I get up to…that is, except for the Torture Chamber in the cellar and the Dominatrix, obviously.”

“Oh, I’d heard rumours about her,” said Jude, again finding exactly the right level.

“Blimey O’Reilly! You can’t keep anything secret in a place like this, can you?” He shook his head at the prurience of Fethering residents.

“Anyway,” Carole pressed on, “do you know anything about Nathan Locke’s relationship with Kyra Bartos?”

“She’s the dead girl, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

This time the headshake was more measured and regretful. “Heartbreaking, isn’t it? Kid like that. Got everything ahead of her…you know, could have been a mum, had lots of kiddies…and this, it kind of all stops it, doesn’t it? I saw that photo of her they had on the telly…just a little girl. Reminded me a bit of my Iris when I first met her…We used to do our courting in Brighton…nice dance hall there was there then…” With a more resolute shake of his head, he jolted himself out of maudlin reminiscence. “Anyway, what was the question? Did I know anything about Nathan’s ‘relationship’ with the dead girl? Not really. Just heard along the old Marine Villas bush telegraph that he’d got this girlfriend who worked up the hairdresser’s…General feeling was that it was good news, because he’d always had a reputation of being a bit bookish, you know, coming from an arty-farty family, apparently hoping to go to university and that…and I think everyone thought he deserved a bit of fun, like. ‘All work and no play’…you know what they say.”

“Do you know what he’s hoping to read at university?” asked Carole.

“Read? I’ve no idea. I told you I didn’t know him that well, so I don’t know what books he reads.”

“Carole meant: what does he want to study at university?” Jude explained.

“Ah. Right. I don’t know…language or something like that. Not anything useful.”

“What do you mean by ‘useful’?”

“Well, it’s not something that might’ve, like, taught him a trade. Just all to do with books. That’s all any of them seem to learn these days. I mean, when I was young, boys of that age done an apprenticeship. You know, learned something that might be useful in later life.”

“Is that what you did?” asked Jude gently.

“Too right. Couldn’t wait to get out of school. My dad worked in boat-building…pleasure boats, yachts, you know. Got me an apprenticeship at the yard where he worked in Littlehampton, Collier & Brompton. I loved the work. My dad thought it’d last for ever.”

“You imply that it didn’t?”

“No, but at least my old man never knew that. When he passed away, I was…what, early twenties? Just met Iris, we was courting, but me old dad never saw us married. Never saw what happened to the leisure boatbuilding industry either.”

“What did happen?”

“Fibreglass, that’s what happened. Started in the fifties, then more and more in the sixties. And suddenly the skills I had…you know, woodworking skills, suddenly there’s not so much demand from them down the boatyards. Oh, a few keep going with the old methods, some adapt. Collier & Brompton, yard I worked in, they did. They ask me if I want to retrain, but putting fibreglass in moulds, that wasn’t my idea of boat-building. And I was in my forties by then…old dogs and new tricks, you know. So I give up the boats.”

“And haven’t you worked since?”

“Oh, blimey, yes. Got a job putting in fitted kitchens. Bit overqualified I reckoned I was – a trained shipwright trimming edges off MDF shelf units, but…well, can’t be too choosy when you haven’t got no income. Did that till I was sixty-five, but by then the old hands were getting a bit shaky and I wasn’t finding it so easy to lug all them units around, so…heigh-ho for a happy retirement. Which it was…till…” He didn’t need to complete the sentence.

Carole broke the ensuing, silence. “So you can’t tell us any more about Nathan Locke…?”

“Well, no. Except that everyone in Fethering reckons he topped that poor kid.”

“And have they any reason for saying that?” asked Jude.

“He was definitely due to meet up with her the evening before she was found dead.”

“Do you know where they were due to meet?”

“Certainly not her place, I’ll tell you that for free. Apparently her old man didn’t approve of Nathan…or any other young man who come sniffing round his daughter. No, the Fethering view is that, since Kyra had got the keys to the salon – you know, because she was due to open up the next morning – she entertained her boyfriend there.”

“Ah.” Carole nodded. The theory fitted in with the empty bottles she had seen in the back room of Connie’s Clip Joint. And perhaps the red roses. “Well, presumably, as we speak, the police are questioning Nathan Locke about just that.”

“I’m sure they would be,” said the old man, “but they can’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because nothing has been seen of the boy since he left his home in Marine Villas’at seven o’clock that evening.”

“Oh.”

“Which is another reason why all of Fethering have got him down for the job of murderer.” Wistfully, Les Constantine drained the last dregs of his pint. “Oh well, I’d better be off.” He lowered his thin limbs gingerly down from his bar stool.

“Aren’t we coming with you?” asked Jude, with a look of innocent sultriness.

“What for?”

Carole found herself blushing as her neighbour replied, “For that threesome.”

“Ooh yes,” said the old man. “Yes, I’d really like to do that. Trouble is,” he added with an apologetic smile, “today I’ve got a bit of a cold.”