Guns in the Gallery

TWENTY-THREE

‘I’m afraid my parents always regarded Elvis Presley as rather common,’ said Carole Seddon.

‘Ah,’ said Jude, wondering why somehow she wasn’t surprised, and also trying not to smile.

‘Anyway, I’m rather too young for him to have been a major influence on my life. I’m more of the Beatles generation.’ Though the idea of Carole having been part of the Swinging Sixties was an incongruous one. ‘I don’t think this evening at the Crown and Anchor really sounds my sort of thing.’

‘It may not be your sort of thing, but I think we should be there to support Ted.’

‘Ted can manage perfectly well without me. He won’t notice whether I’m there or not.’

‘That’s not the point. I should think there’s also a strong chance that Bonita Green will be there. Spider works for her, after all. We might get an opportunity to find out more about Fennel Whittaker.’

That argument clinched it, of course. To Carole Seddon’s mind, Elvis Presley would always remain common, but one could even put up with commonness in the cause of an investigation.

There was a surprisingly large turnout in the Crown and Anchor’s function room that Wednesday evening. Elvis Presley had a wider fan-base in Fethering than Carole might have imagined. And Spider’s performance was certainly unlike anything she had ever seen before.

She wasn’t quite sure what she had been expecting, but what impressed her about the framer was his total seriousness. His routine was like some religious rite, an act of transubstantiation whereby he actually became Elvis Presley. Carole had vaguely anticipated that he might sing, but he didn’t. He simply mimed to The King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s songs. And he did do it brilliantly.

He’d got all the gear too. Carole didn’t know it, but Jude recognized that Spider was wearing a perfect facsimile of the white suit with a sunburst motif that Elvis had worn for his final concert at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis on 26 June 1977. And the set he performed included many of the songs that had been sung on that iconic occasion. ‘Jailhouse Rock’ was there, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Teddy Bear, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, along with other classics from the canon: ‘My Way’, ‘Unchained Melody’ and ‘Love Me Tender’.

But Spider had somehow improved on the original. Though he had the physical bulk of the grotesquely bloated Elvis of his later years, the versions he did of the songs, based on the studio recordings, had a musical purity rarely evident onstage at that time. The effect was strangely disconcerting for aficionados of The King, but nonetheless impressive. The Crown and Anchor crowd gave each number an ecstatic reaction and at the end, before his carefully choreographed encores, Spider got a standing ovation.

Clearly every facial tic, every bodily swivel, every hand gesture had been rehearsed in exhaustive detail. Each time the act was performed it would be exactly the same. To Carole and Jude, who had inevitably been preoccupied with such matters, it raised interesting speculations about the nature of art. What Spider did was far from original, and yet it had an integrity of its own. Was a man who duplicated exactly the movements of a long-dead singer any less of an artist than someone who had the idea of sticking photographs of dead black teenagers on to a fibreglass cannon?

The other detail about the evening that surprised them was the involvement of Bonita Green. They had expected her to be there to support her employee, but they didn’t think she’d be part of the act. It was Bonita, however, who controlled the pacing of the show. She was in charge of the CD player from which the Elvis numbers were played. She judged how long the applause after each number should be allowed to continue before she started the next track. She was, in fact, a very efficient stage-manager.

Into both Carole and Jude’s minds came the question as to how close the relationship between gallery-owner and framer actually was. There was between them during the performance a practised ease, but after the final ovation they still seemed very relaxed in each other’s company. Again Spider’s manner was protective, almost proprietorial. Perhaps this was simply the result of the two of them working together in the Cornelian Gallery for so long, but both Carole and Jude suspected there might be something more to it.

After Spider had finished his act, a good convivial atmosphere had built up in the Crown and Anchor. Beneath the beard on Ted Crisp’s face was something that came very close to a beam. Elvis Presley had brought the punters in and the bar takings by the end of the evening would be very healthy. The landlord was clearly thinking that Spider’s routine might become a regular booking.

While Carole queued in the crush at the bar for more Chilean Chardonnay, Jude drifted across to join the congratulatory throng around the star of the evening. Bonita Green, she noticed, sat very close to Spider, almost as if she were acting as his minder.

Among the crowd she was surprised to see Ned Whittaker. She hadn’t noticed him earlier in the evening, but presumably he had been there for the duration. It struck her that she hadn’t actually seen him since the Monday of the previous week when he’d come to Woodside Cottage seeking explanations for his daughter’s death. The millionaire’s face was still very drawn and his eyes were surrounded by dark shadows. He didn’t look as though he had slept much since the loss of Fennel.

Jude wondered why Ned was there. It was of course entirely possible that he was just a big Elvis Presley fan, but it seemed a strange choice of an evening out for someone so clearly still suffering from recent bereavement.

But he seemed pleased to see her; in fact he positively sought her out. ‘Could I have a word, Jude?’

‘Sure.’

He looked uneasily around the crowded pub. ‘I meant somewhere a bit more private. I’ve got the car parked outside. It’ll only take a minute if you . . .?’

‘Of course.’ Jude semaphored across to the bar that she’d be back shortly. Carole started to semaphore back a supplementary question, but Jude and Ned Whittaker had already gone.

They sat in another of the Butterwyke House fleet of Prius hybrids. With the moon nearly full, it was a surprisingly clear night.

‘Fennel’s funeral is set for Wednesday week,’ Ned announced.

‘Yes, I heard that from Kier. I’ll try and make it.’

‘Don’t. It’s just going to be family. We’ll probably do a party for her later at Butterwyke, a kind of celebration of her life.’

‘That’d be good. Let me know when.’

‘Of course.’ There was a silence. Jude felt pretty sure that the funeral wasn’t what he really wanted to talk to her about. ‘Listen, Jude, you keep your ear pretty close to the ground round Fethering, don’t you?’

‘I hear things, yes. It’s a small community.’

‘Mm.’ Ned still wasn’t finding it easy to broach his subject. Then he leapt in. ‘Look, have you heard any people saying that Fennel was murdered?’

Inexplicably – and uncharacteristically – Jude felt guilty. She tried to think to whom, apart from Carole, she had confided her suspicion. Sam Torino, maybe . . . Except really it had been Sam who had raised the topic, rather than her.

She fell back on a platitude about people gossiping more than was good for them.

‘And what about you, Jude? Has the thought crossed your mind?’

Again this was awkward. ‘Ned, we’ve had this conversation before. When you came to see me at Woodside Cottage the Monday after Fennel’s death. We went through the whole thing.’

‘Yes, but I just wondered whether your thoughts on the subject had changed since then . . .?’

‘Not a lot, Ned. All I keep coming back to is the fact that when I last saw her, Fennel wasn’t behaving in the manner of someone about to kill herself. She positively said to do so would be a waste. And then again there was the matter of her missing mobile. Did you hear any more from the police about that?’

Ned Whittaker shook his head. ‘The police seem to have given up on the case. Apparently a suicide verdict suits them very well. Less paperwork, I guess. And they’ve released Fennel’s body for the funeral. So I would assume that means any investigations they’re undertaking are at an end. Probably just as well. The last thing I need at the moment is the cops trampling over my family with their insensitive hobnail boots.’

Jude thought back to her encounter with Detective Inspector Hodgkinson. ‘Insensitive hobnail boots’ was the last attribute she would have applied to that particular member of the police force. And in fact, if she were ever to find proof that Fennel Whittaker had been murdered, she would have had no hesitation in re-contacting Carmen Hodgkinson. Which had to be a first in Jude’s dealings with the police.

‘Anyway, Jude,’ Ned continued awkwardly, I guess why I wanted to talk to you was to ask . . . if you do have any further thoughts about Fennel having been murdered . . . could you keep them to yourself?’

Finally he’d come out with it. That had been the reason why he’d wanted to talk to her on her own, perhaps the only reason why he’d come over to the Crown and Anchor to witness Spider’s Elvis Presley act.

‘But I haven’t been spreading any rumours like that,’ Jude protested. ‘Who did you hear that from? Was it Sam Torino?’

Ned denied the allegation hotly, but Jude didn’t believe him. She couldn’t think of any other person he might know with whom she’d shared her suspicions. And she began to wonder even whether Ned had set up Sam Torino deliberately to sound out her views of Fennel’s death. She remembered the card the supermodel had given her. A call to that private mobile number at some point might be in order.

‘I’m not just saying this on my own behalf,’ Ned Whittaker volunteered. ‘I’m speaking for the whole family. We don’t want any gossip. Sheena’s particularly insistent on that.’

‘So is it Sheena who’s put you up to this – you know, warning me off?’

That suggestion was denied with equal vehemence, but again Jude got the feeling that she might have stumbled on the truth. Sheena Whittaker remained enigmatic, her only identifiable emotion seeming to be relief at her daughter’s death. Jude reckoned she and Carole should try to find out more about the dead girl’s mother.

She tried to get more out of Ned Whittaker, but without success. From his point of view, discouraging her from suggesting his daughter might have been murdered was the sole aim of their meeting. Why he was so worried about that happening he did not reveal. But, given the fact that the police had concluded their investigation, he seemed disproportionately anxious about the matter.

Which suggested to Jude that Ned had suspicions that someone he knew might be implicated in his daughter’s death. But who that person was, she had no idea.