Death under the Dryer

Four

Jude didn’t make an appointment. From what she’d heard about the commercial health of Connie’s Clip Joint, she didn’t think it’d be necessary – even with the added attraction for Fethering people of having their hair cut at a murder scene.

The salon had reopened on the Friday, eight days after the discovery of Kyra Bartos’s body. Jude reckoned the first few days would have mopped up the locals booking out of prurient curiosity, and it was the following Tuesday morning when she wandered in.

By then very little more had been heard from the police about their investigations. There had been some televised press conferences in the first few days, at which the detective chief inspector in charge of the case had demonstrated a caginess which could have meant he was within minutes of cracking the case wide open, or alternatively that he hadn’t a clue what the hell was going on. Fethering opinion, lavishly expressed in the Crown and Anchor and at church, as well as in Allinstore and the rest of the local shops, continued to cast Nathan Locke as the murderer. There had still been no sign of the boy, and some local Jeremiahs reckoned it was only a matter of time before he turned up as a ‘Fethering Floater’. People who drowned from the seashore or, more frequently, in the fast-running waters of the Fether estuary, tended to be washed up on the beach before too long. But if a remorseful Nathan Locke had committed suicide by jumping into the river on the night of the murder, the sea was slow to return his body. ‘Fethering Floaters’ usually came back within twenty-four – or at the most forty-eight – hours. Jude felt pretty confident that, somewhere, Nathan Locke was still alive.

When she walked into Connie’s Clip Joint, she received a cheery greeting from the owner and a polite nod from Theo. That Tuesday the owner’s hair and make-up were immaculately in place. Both stylists were actually occupied, but Connie said she’d be through in ten minutes, so if Jude would like to wait…?

This suited her purposes very well. Her vision enlarged by the description Carole had given her of the tragic scene in the back room, Jude just wanted a few moments to absorb the atmosphere of the salon. Murder, she had found, left a psychic signature on a setting that was at least as informative as a fingerprint or a bloodstain.

That morning there was no music playing, which again was helpful to her. The less distractions, the better. She disguised her intense concentration on the feeling of the place by flicking idly through the pages of a magazine. Hairdressers always offered a wide selection of reading, though – as was appropriate in Fethering – the magazines in Connie’s Clip Joint favoured a more mature clientele. Apart from the predictable gossip-mongering of OK! and Hello!, also present were Marie Claire, Vogue and even Country Life.

Jude chose a Vogue and, while the surface of her mind was amused by the void between the stage-managed images on its pages and the reality of living women’s looks, at a deeper level she tuned in to the aura of the salon.

There was discord there certainly, and it dated from long before the recent crime. Perhaps the conflict which had soured the atmosphere had been Connie and Martin’s deteriorating relationship, its pressures increased by the necessity of maintaining a front of harmony while they worked together.

It certainly had nothing to do with Theo. Jude could detect an almost tangible warmth between the two stylists. They enjoyed working together; there was no discord there. And yet within each of them she could sense depths of personal conflict, directed at people outside the hermetic world of Connie’s Clip Joint.

Jude hadn’t got far, but she had extracted a sense of the place, a platform on which she could build future conjecture. Since she knew she wasn’t going to get any further that morning in the psychic direction, she concentrated instead on the behaviour of the two clients having their hair done. Which, as things turned out, was a cabaret in itself.

Theo was dealing with the woman’s hair, Connie with the man’s. Theo must have been at work longer, because his client had clearly already gone through a colouring and washing process. Now both had reached the same stage, as though there were a prearranged plan to make the two haircuts finish at the same time.

Theo’s client was a small, sharp-featured elderly woman, whose heavy make-up didn’t quite coincide with the contours of her features. Her hair was newly red, though not a red that featured anywhere in the natural world. It was the defiant red of a burning oil-spill, and Theo was cutting it into the kind of ‘Dutch bob’ favoured by the silent-film star Louise Brooks. From the way he was working, this was clearly not a new style, but one he had been assiduously re-creating for some years.

The male client had broad amiable features gathered round a large squashed-in nose. Thinning a little on the crown, his remaining hair was thick and steel grey, with a corrugated effect, as though its natural curl had been subdued by a lifetime of brushing back.

Jude was very soon left in no doubt that the pair were married. The woman seemed much more interested in what was happening to her husband’s hair than her own.

“No, shorter over the ears, Connie. You like it shorter over the ears, don’t you, Wally?”

Wally, who appeared to have lived a life of listening to rhetorical questions from his wife, did not bother to reply.

“We don’t want him walking round Fethering like some beatnik, do we, Theo?”

Theo agreed that that wouldn’t be the thing at all.

“Do you know,” the woman went on, “I can’t believe the behaviour of young people these days, the sort of things they’re always doing.” She almost dropped the final ‘g’ from the last word, a little giveaway that perhaps her origins weren’t quite as refined as the voice she now used. “I went into Allinstore only last week, just to buy some kippers…because you like a kipper, don’t you, Wally?” Again her husband did not feel he had to confirm this self-evident truth. “And of course it came from the freezer. I’d rather buy kippers, you know, like, fresh, but where’m I to do that since the fishmonger closed? I ask you, we’ve still got fishermen working out of Fethering, but if you want to buy fresh fish, you got to go all the way to Worthing…Not of course that a kipper is strictly fresh, because it’s been kippered, but one from the fishmonger does look better than something out of the freezer that comes sealed in a bag with a little flower-shaped dab of butter on it. You say you can tell the difference in the taste, don’t you, Wally?” With no pretence at waiting for a response, she went on, “Anyway, I take the kipper up to the checkout and the girl behind takes it, and I give her the money, and she doesn’t say a word. Not one word. It was like I was putting my money in a slot machine. So, as she gives me my change, I say to her, ‘Aren’t you girls taught to say ‘Thank you’ any more?’ And she says, ‘No, it’s printed on the till receipt.’ Ooh, I was so angry when I got home. I was that angry, wasn’t I, Wally? Yes, I was.”

She paused for breath, and her husband ventured, “Similar thing happened to me as happened to Mim when I went to Tesco’s in – ”

“Don’t talk while she’s cutting your hair, Wally.”

He was obediently silent again. But in the few words he had spoken Jude was aware of a long-buried accent. The ‘w’ of ‘went’ had contained undertones of a ‘v’.

“I don’t know what young people are coming to today,” Mim went on. “Makes me glad Wally and I was never blessed with children…well, though I don’t think ‘blessed’ is probably the right word. ‘Cursed’ with children might be a better word, the way some of them behave these days. Because, of course, you had that terrible business here, didn’t you, Connie?”

“Yes.”

If Mim was surprised by someone actually responding to one of her rhetorical appeals, she didn’t show it. “Drugs at the back of it,” she announced knowingly. “Drugs at the back of most of this stuff, you know.”

“I don’t actually think Kyra ever had anything to do with drugs, Mim,” said Connie.

“No, her old man wouldn’t let her do anything like that,” Wally agreed. “Was very angry when she had her ears and nose pierced. He always had standards, Joe.”

Mim looked a little miffed, as though allowing her husband space to inject three sentences into the conversation was somehow a failing on her part, and quickly resumed her monologue. “Yes, more parents should have standards, and they don’t. What are kids brought up on these days? Fast food, discotheques and video games…that’s what they’re brought up on, aren’t they, Wally?”

Her husband, still basking in the glow of his recent conversational triumph, didn’t feel the need to respond.

“I think bringing back National Service would do them all a lot of good. Your time in the Army didn’t do you any harm, did it, Wally? Then these kids wouldn’t go round smoking stuff and sticking needles in themselves and stuffing substances up their noses. Me and Wally worked in the music industry, where there was supposed to be lots of drugs going round, and we never saw any of them, did we, Wally? No…whereas these days the kids can buy drugs as easy as ice lollies – and they don’t think no more of taking them than they would of eating an ice lolly. No wonder it all ends up with violence and murder.”

“But as I said,” Connie repeated patiently, “Kyra didn’t have anything to do with drugs.”

“I’m not saying she did. But the boy…the boy must’ve done. People don’t go round strangling people for no reason. The boy must’ve been on drugs.”

“We have no means of knowing that,” said Connie, trying to bring a little rationality into the conversation. “And nor, indeed, do we know that Kyra’s boyfriend is the guilty party.”

But Mim’s prejudices weren’t so easily shifted. “Oh, come on, if he didn’t do it, why’s he disappeared? If he’s innocent, if he’s got an alibi, why doesn’t he come forward and tell the police about it? No, I’m sure he was on drugs.”

“Now let’s blow it into shape, shall we?” said Theo, and started fluttering around Mim with the hairdryer.

“On drugs,” said Wally, taking advantage of the diversion to continue dramatically, “or in the grip of a passion that he could not control.”

Mim once again seemed to regret the lapse that had allowed her husband to get a word in. “Don’t talk, Wally. You always move your head when you talk, and that makes it very difficult for Connie to cut your hair. Doesn’t it, Connie? You come out of here with a cut on your ear, Wally, and it’ll be your fault, not Connie’s. Won’t it, Connie? Incidentally, Connie, did you know the boy…you know, this Nathan, the one who killed the girl?”

Jude, who’d been taking in everything, listened with even greater attention.

“Yes, I had met him,” the hairdresser replied, “and you really must stop saying that he killed her.”

“That’s what everyone else in Fethering is saying.”

“I know, Mim, but in this country everyone is innocent until they’re proven guilty.”

“That’s nonsense. Was Hitler innocent? He never went to trial, he was never proved guilty, but are you telling me he wasn’t?”

“No, I’m not. But that wasn’t in this country and – ”

“I think it’s rubbish, that business about people being innocent until proven guilty. There’s some people who should be locked away from birth. Paedophiles, and some of those illegal immigrants.”

Realizing that she wasn’t participating in the most rational of arguments, Connie contented herself with saying, “Well, as I told you, I did meet Nathan a few times. He’d sometimes pick Kyra up after work, and to me he seemed a very nice boy. Shy, not very sure of himself – only sixteen, I think – but I wouldn’t have said he had a violent bone in his body.”

“It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.” Mim pronounced the words as if they were an incontrovertible truth that clinched her argument.

“There,” said Theo, showing off his handiwork to his client in the mirror. “That’s how we like it, isn’t it?”

She responded admiringly. “Back to my natural look, yes.”

“Just a little whoosh of spray to fix it, and we can unleash you onto the streets of Fethering to break all the men’s hearts, eh?”

“Yes.” Mim preened in the mirror. “I could do with a few compliments. Never get any compliments from you, do I, Wally?”

“There – you’re done too.” Connie stood back from her client, the coordinated timing of the haircuts having worked to perfection. “Look all right, does it?”

The question had, inevitably, been put to Mim rather than Wally. She looked appraisingly at her husband’s hair. “Little more off the back. Don’t want it trailing over his collar like some errand boy.”

While Theo made a big production of the final primping of his client, Connie duly did as she was told to hers. The couple were pampered into their coats. They paid their money, with Mim duly tipping both stylists. (Jude wondered whether Wally was allowed to carry any money of his own.) Then Connie crossed to the appointments book. “Usual five weeks, shall we say? The Tuesday again. Same time?”

“Oh yes.”

“So that’ll be nine-thirty for you, and the ten forty-five slot for the gentleman.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll come at the same time, and you’ll sit and wait, won’t you, Wally?”

Once again long experience told her husband that no response was required.

“Grenston’s their surname,” said Connie. “Wally and Mim Grenston. He was quite a successful musician – had his own band and did a lot of arranging, I believe. And she was a singer – also a very good career, but she gave it up when they got married…as women often did in those days.”

“But she said they didn’t have children.”

“Maybe she didn’t need them, the way she treats Wally. They’re absolutely devoted to each other, you know.”

“I could see that,” said Jude thoughtfully. “And Wally implied that he knew Kyra’s father…”