Guns in the Gallery

NINE

‘I think we should go glamping,’ Fennel Whittaker announced, as Jude brought the Mini to a neat halt on the gravel in front of Butterwyke House.

‘I think we should get you to bed,’ said Jude, trying not to sound too much like a nanny.

‘Fine, but why not to bed in a yurt?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Go on. I want to.’ It was the urgent pleading of a small child.

‘But Walden opens tomorrow.’ Jude looked at the girl shrewdly. ‘This isn’t a plan to mess up Chervil’s big day, is it?’

‘No, of course it isn’t. I wouldn’t do anything like that. I’ve got nothing against Chervil.’

‘You seemed to have back at the Private View.’

‘What? When I . . .’ Her hand shot up to her mouth in consternation. ‘Oh my God! Did I actually slap her?’

‘Yes, you did. Surely you remember?’

‘It’s all a bit of a haze. I was so determined to be articulate in what I wanted to say to Denzil that I didn’t notice much else that was going on.’

‘You had also had far too much to drink,’ said Jude severely.

‘Yes, you’re right. I had,’ agreed Fennel, for a moment a contrite schoolgirl. But the mood didn’t last for long. Waving the nearly empty bottle she had brought from the Cornelian Gallery, she cried, ‘And now I need some more!’ She opened the passenger door and tottered out on to the gravel. ‘I’ll just go and raid Daddy’s wine cellar . . . and then . . . I’ll go and sleep in a yurt!’

Jude was for a moment uncertain what to do. She knew that, in her current mood, Fennel would not take kindly to being coerced into bed. But she also knew the fragility of the girl’s temperament. The high Fennel was on was a big one and when she came down from it she was going to have a nasty hangover, both alcoholic and emotional.

Jude decided the best thing she could do was to stay with the girl, try to be there to help when the mood changed, as it inevitably would. And if that meant spending a night in a yurt . . . well, she’d never spent a night in a yurt before and Jude was always up for new experiences. She hadn’t got transport back to Fethering, anyway.

She took out her mobile to tell Carole what she was doing, but was prevented by the return from the house of a meandering Fennel, clutching a wine bottle in either hand. It was the same Argentinian Malbec that they’d been drinking at the Private View. Jude got out of the Mini to greet her.

‘Forward!’ cried Fennel in the manner of a valiant crusader. ‘To the yurts!’

Carole got back to High Tor, her mind buzzing with everything that had happened at the Cornelian Gallery. She was very glad she had finally agreed to go to the Private View. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

But while Gulliver welcomed her return with his usual display of undiscriminating affection, there was still something that nagged at Carole. Where was Jude? Landline and mobile were checked, but there was no message or text.

Carole felt sure it was a man. Quite when her neighbour had had the opportunity to meet a man at the Private View and to go through the minimum conversation required before an agreement to sleep together, Carole didn’t know. But that remained her strongest suspicion.

She remembered how bad she had felt the other time when Jude had gone off on a one-night stand, that awful teenage sensation of having been abandoned by a best friend. Carole went to bed that night with a mix of emotions, half disapproval, half envy.

Jude woke with a head as fuzzy as the sheets of felt that covered the lattice framework of the yurt. She was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, but she’d slept deeply and her surroundings were surprisingly comfortable. The thread count of the bedding was luxuriously high and all the other fittings were straight from the top drawer. Since glamping seemed to bear no relationship to the sodden indignities of real camping, Jude thought she could quite get used to the idea.

As consciousness returned, she began to piece together the events of the previous night. She remembered arriving in the yurt with Fennel. She remembered checking whether they should be using the place, with Walden about to open the following day, and the reassurance that only two of the bigger yurts had been booked for the first weekend. ‘And staff’ll come in and clean the place out,’ Fennel had said. ‘Always plenty of staff to do everything at Butterwyke House.’

‘But don’t you think you should tell Chervil you’re here?’

‘Oh, if you insist,’ Fennel had said grudgingly, and dashed off a text to her sister.

Jude also recollected that they had drunk a lot. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see one empty bottle and she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they’d drunk the other one too. Or maybe there had been more. She did have a vague recollection of Fennel having left the yurt at some point in the night. Had that been to get more booze from the house? No, it had been to fetch her latest artwork, the watercolours she’d done in the previous few days. And Jude remembered looking at the pictures, thinking how good they were and how much more serene than the agonized images of earlier in the week.

She also had a recollection of the girl getting a text on her mobile, though quite when that had been she couldn’t be sure.

But through the woolliness of her head, what Jude did remember from her night was how well they had got on together, more like two contemporaries than a pair of women with nearly thirty years between them. And she also recalled how positive Fennel Whittaker had sounded. Yes, she was very drunk, but in a strange way she’d been in control, rational, optimistic about her future. Bawling out Denzil Willoughby in public may not have pleased the guests at the Private View, but it seemed at least to have given Fennel some kind of expiation.

Jude looked across to the other bed, hoping that the girl was safely sleeping off the effects of her prodigious alcohol consumption.

With a shadow of foreboding, she saw that Fennel wasn’t there. Not in the bed, not in the yurt.

Increasingly anxious, Jude slipped on her shoes and hurried outside. She noticed dew on the grass, it was still quite early. Not of course that the glampers of Walden would actually have to step on grass and risk getting their feet wet. Paved pathways linked the yurts.

The door to the one designated as gym and spa was half open. Jude hurried across.

The sight that met her was appalling. Fennel Whittaker was slumped in a chair beside a small table on which stood a half-empty bottle of wine and a Sabatier kitchen knife. On the floor lay her most recent watercolours.

The blood had almost stopped dripping from the girl’s slashed wrists. But it seemed to be everywhere else, splashed and spreading across the white tiles.