Guilt at the Garage

TWENTY-TWO

Jude was still deeply asleep the following morning when her neighbour and Gulliver strode past Woodside Cottage on their way to Fethering Beach. Carole was limping more. Perhaps it was the angle at which she’d slept. Oh dear, she’d hoped she was too young to have arthritis.

Jude didn’t have any clients booked in for the morning, so she made her getting-up routine more elaborate than usual. The eight o’clock cup of tea under the duvet was followed by half an hour’s meditation before a bath with essential oils and scented candles. Then breakfast of coffee and toast slathered with butter and honey.

But this was not mere self-indulgence. Jude needed her mind to be relaxed and ready. That morning she knew she had to think.

She wanted to have clarified her own ideas on the case before Carole joined her.

To aid concentration, Jude made green tea. Then she sat down on the sofa, which was covered by a variegation of throws. She took up a cross-legged yoga position and focused her mind on Bill Shefford’s death.

Jude felt as she did when there was a tune she couldn’t quite remember. All its elements were there, every note and phrase. She just had to join the fragments of memory together in the right order. Then all would be complete. And it would sing in her mind.

She thought of the various people who had surrounded Bill Shefford. Malee, Billy, Shannon, Rhona, Frankie. All with their own agendas. Was it one of them who was being paid from his secret bank account? What secret did they know that he would be so desperate to keep hidden?

She extended the range of characters. Not people who’d had direct contact with Bill Shefford, but people she had seen over the previous weeks who had discussed the death. She felt sure things had been said which were relevant if only she could work out why. She scoured her memory for snatches of conversation in the Crown and Anchor, observations from Ted Crisp or even the odious Barney Poulton. She tried to read between the lines of Tom Kendrick’s responses.

Then of course there were the people who she hadn’t seen much of but Carole had. That bizarre couple, Adrian and Gwyneth Greenford. There was enough going on in their lives, Jude felt certain, to fill a good few psychological case studies. But could any connection be made between them and Bill Shefford?

Thinking of the Greenfords made her also remember Karen and Chrissie and the Ilkley tie-in. She was sure something pertinent had been said that Saturday evening in Leeds, but again she couldn’t drag it up to the surface of her recollections.

And then, of course, there were a couple of other names in the equation. Was it possible that Jeremiah had had anything to do with Bill Shefford? He certainly knew Dr Rawley, the man who Carole had met and Jude hadn’t. The man who had apparently been treating the garage owner, and who had signed his death certificate.

Jude decided it was time to take a closer look at the battered green diary.

The process was a frustrating one. Convinced that the book did have secrets to yield, she went through the entries in much more detail than the night before. Starting at the point where she and Carole had begun to flick through the pages to pick up again in October, she checked out everything in the intervening months. But it was all more of the same. Records of cars due to be picked up for service, with little notes like ‘brakes making a clicking noise’, ‘smell of oil’ and so on. Reminders of parts to be ordered, upcoming MOTs, dates of VAT quarters, invoices to slow payers that had to be chased up.

There were a few notes taken of web addresses, but those Jude checked out on her laptop were all garage-related, dealers of cars and parts for them.

Still, the only entries that didn’t conform remained the timed references to ‘H’ and the one timed MOT. Though she was coming round to Carole’s view that there was nothing sinister about the latter.

Jude checked her watch. Twenty-five past ten. She had heard the Renault arrive next door some quarter of an hour before, but knew that Carole wouldn’t arrive until the dot of the appointed hour. That was just how Carole Seddon worked.

Oh, well, might be worth having another look at the entries right at the beginning of the diary. They’d flicked fairly randomly through February and March, at that stage just trying to establish how Bill had organized the contents.

On the first page she saw something that hadn’t caught their attention before. Through the crossing-out, it read: ‘Organize insurance on SAAB for M.’

Car-related yes – that’s why it hadn’t registered – but personal too. He must have started this particular diary almost immediately after he’d come back from Thailand with his new bride-to-be. And he needed to add her to the insurance so that she could drive his car. Presumably until he’d organized another vehicle for her personal use.

OK, not of major importance but intriguing. Jude looked with renewed interest at the next couple of pages.

And she saw another entry that wasn’t work-related. Scratched through with a dash of biro, it still read quite clearly, ‘Get bait for Sunday.’

Just at that moment, the front doorbell rang and she let Carole in. Before even offering coffee, she pointed out her discovery.

‘I don’t see why that’s so important,’ said Carole, a little sniffily.

‘It’s important because I remember Rhona telling me that every Sunday Bill used to go fishing with his mate Red.’

‘Oh, really?’

Jude couldn’t imagine why her neighbour was looking so uncomfortable.

‘But Rhona,’ she went on, ‘said that Malee put paid to those fishing trips. She wouldn’t allow Bill to go. And yet, here he is, after getting back from Thailand with Malee, and he’s reminding himself that he needs to get bait for the Sunday.’

‘Maybe it was after that that Malee put her foot down.’

‘Maybe, Carole. But it’s still worth investigating. This guy Red had known Bill all his life. He might be able to give us some useful background on him.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Now, I wonder how we can get in touch with him. Billy or Shannon will probably have a contact number.’

‘Actually,’ said Carole in a small voice, ‘I know where you can find him.’

Jude went on her own to search out Red. Carole, still embarrassed by her failed encounter, had said, ‘I’m sure you’re more likely to get through to him with your natural empathy.’ Only Carole Seddon could make those two words sound like an accusation.

It was sunny for February but nippy. Still only three boats were moored in the so-called marina. Jude was very aware of the smell: salt sea with undertones of diesel oil and rotting vegetation.

Red was once again sitting there, on the transom box by the outboard, going through the elaborate process of rolling a matchstick-thin cigarette. He had clocked Jude’s arrival on the pontoon but did not look up until he’d put the fag in his mouth and lit it with a disposable lighter. His expression was as unwelcoming as Carole had led her to expect.

‘What do you want? Are you from the council?’

‘No. My name’s Jude and I—’

‘I don’t care what your name is. Why’re you here?’

Jude had prepared the line she was going to take. ‘I’ve recently been seeing Rhona Hampton.’

The effect of the name instantaneously softened his manner. ‘Oh. You a friend of hers then?’

‘I’ve been treating her for a medical condition.’ She avoided the word ‘healer’, in case he was one of those people who would be put off by it.

‘Oh?’ Alarm wrinkled his face even more. ‘You haven’t come to tell me she’s popped her clogs, have you? I’d heard the old girl was in a bad way, but—’

‘No, no,’ Jude reassured him. ‘She’s still with us, but I’m afraid I don’t think it’ll be long.’

‘I’d heard that, and all.’ He half-rose from the transom box and indicated one of the side benches. ‘Why don’t you come on board?’

As lightly as someone of her bulk could, Jude stepped over the gunwale and sat down.

‘Could I get you a cup of tea or …?’

‘No thanks,’ she said, having caught a glimpse through the hatch of the boat’s chaotically grubby interior.

‘So, what is it you’re doing for Rhona then?’

Now she dared to use the word. ‘I’m a healer. I’m just sort of helping with the palliative care, reducing her pain levels, doing what I can, really.’

‘Oh, right. Bill’s daughter-in-law Shannon, she’s into all that healing stuff, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. It was she who got me in for Rhona.’

‘That would figure. She was always recommending healers for everything. Anyone feeling a bit gippy, Shannon’d be sending them off to a bloody healer.’

‘Anyway, Rhona’s been talking about you.’ Which was true. ‘She told me once how much she misses seeing you.’ Which was also true. ‘Says she’d love it if you came to see her.’ Which was a slight finessing of the truth but, Jude reckoned, justifiable in the circumstances.

‘Yes, I would like to see the old biddy before she … you know. Maybe I’ll give Billy a call and suggest going up to Waggoners.’

‘I’m sure Rhona would appreciate it.’ Preparing to move the subject on, Jude looked across the still water of the marina to where the tidal River Fether rushed towards the English Channel. ‘Lovely spot you’ve got here, haven’t you?’

‘Oh yeah, it looks all right,’ he conceded. ‘Looked a lot better when this was full of boats. When Fethering had a fishing fleet. But that’s all gone now. Bloody EU regulations. Then we get out of the EU and things don’t look any better. And if it’s not the EU harassing us, it’s the bloody council, wanting Fethering to be more developed for holidaymakers. Holidaymakers – huh. More crazy golf and slot machines is what that means. And nobody cares about us lot who’ve worked here all our lives.’

He sighed. ‘I’m the last professional fisherman in Fethering. When I pop my clogs, that’ll be the end of it.’

‘But you still do go out fishing?’

‘Yes, but not so much. I just supply the hut where people buy fresh fish, you know, other side of the yacht club. That’s the only outlet now. Not like it was in the old days. Lorries picking up Fethering fish and supplying the whole bloody country. Exports, and all. Those days are long gone.’

He sighed again, spat the last half-inch of his roll-up out into the water and started the laborious process of assembling another one.

Jude’s perfect opening had arrived. ‘I gather from Rhona that you used to go fishing with Bill Shefford on Sundays …?’

‘Yes. But that all stopped when he married the Chink.’

All too forcibly, Jude realized what Rhona had meant when she said that she and Red thought ‘alike on most things’. She made no comment, however, simply asked, ‘So, it was Malee who put an end to your fishing trips?’

‘She was the cause of it, yes.’

‘You mean she told Bill he couldn’t go out fishing with you?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that so much. When Bill went off to Thailand that New Year, we said cheerio and looked forward to picking up the Sunday fishing when he got back. Then he was away longer than he’d planned but I didn’t think too much about it. Early February I get a text from him. He’s back in England and are we all right for Sunday? I say yes, and he says he’ll pick up the bait.’

This tallied with what Jude had found in the diary.

‘Then, on the Sunday he appears, usual time, pleased as punch – and he’s brought the Chink with him!’

‘What, was he suggesting that she should join you on the fishing trip?’

‘No. He’d just brought her along to introduce her. Well, I was shocked. Beyond shocked, I was. I’d known Valerie – that’s Bill’s first wife – since we was all at school together. And I couldn’t believe that he’d be so disloyal to her.’

‘She had been dead quite a few years,’ said Jude. ‘Seven or eight, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s not the point! I wouldn’t have minded if Bill’d hitched up with some nice English girl, a local from Fethering perhaps. There were plenty of them interested after Valerie died but he didn’t take no notice. That would have been all right, though. But for him to get caught up with a gold-digger … a “Mail Order Bride” … a Chink … I wasn’t standing for that!’

‘So, it was you who called a halt to the fishing trips, not Malee?’

‘Of course it was! What business would it be of hers? You’d have done the same in my position, wouldn’t you?’

Fortunately, the question was rhetorical and Red went straight on, ‘Bill’d betrayed Valerie’s memory – and I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him!’

‘So that was the last time you saw him?’ Carole had reported there had been a more recent encounter, but Jude wanted to see whether Red would volunteer the information again. ‘That Sunday in February?’

‘No, I did see him again. Not a Sunday. Only a few weeks back. He come here to the boat. He was very low, said he didn’t want us to part on bad terms.’

‘Rather a strange thing to say, given you’d parted on bad terms nearly a year ago.’

‘Wasn’t so strange when he told me the reason.’

‘Oh?’

‘That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I heard about his death.’

‘What did he tell you, Red?’

‘Bill said he’d been diagnosed with cancer.’