The Liar in the Library

EIGHT

The wine and the company in the Crown & Anchor had cheered Jude up, but when she said goodnight to Carole at the gate of Woodside Cottage, she felt the darkness closing in again. The reality of Burton’s death and the unpleasant recollection of her police interview in the morning dominated her mind.

It wasn’t yet eight o’clock and she hadn’t had anything to eat since Carole’s cottage cheese salad, so she knew she ought to be assembling some kind of supper. But the urge wasn’t there. She didn’t feel hungry.

Jude opened the laptop to check her emails. There was one from Megan. It read simply: ‘Yes, we should be in touch.’ No ‘Love’. No ‘Good Wishes’. No home address. Just a mobile number.

Jude consulted the large-faced watch fixed to her wrist by a broad ribbon. It was a perfectly reasonable hour to ring someone. She dialled the number.

‘Hello?’ The voice was breathless and slightly actressy. But also guarded, cautious, as if expecting a call it didn’t want to take. Very familiar, though. Though they had been such close friends, Jude remembered the voice’s tautness, its owner’s inability ever quite to relax, her habit of watchfulness, always anticipating some kind of slight.

‘Megan, it’s Jude.’

‘Ah. I thought you’d probably be in touch quite soon.’ Megan made it sound as though Jude’s quick response was in some way shameful.

‘I just wanted to say I heard about Burton … Al.’

‘Well, of course you did. You were there when it happened.’

‘You know that because the police have talked to you?’

‘I was spending a long weekend with a friend in Scarborough.’ So Detective Sergeant Knight’s information had been correct. ‘There was no mobile signal at her place. I only found out they’d been trying to contact me when I got on the train. I rang them as soon as I could. They checked out my alibi with my friend. It was when I was talking to Detective Inspector Rollins that I found out about you being there.’

‘Let’s be clear, Megan, I was at Fethering Library for his talk in the evening. I wasn’t actually there when he died.’

‘No, of course not.’

Again, there was an edge of scepticism in the voice. Jude was the last person in the world to get paranoid, but events of the last twenty-four hours had unsettled her deeply.

‘I think we ought to meet, Megan.’

‘As I said in my email, yes, I think we should.’

‘Where do you live now?’

‘Still in Morden.’

‘Oh.’

‘The same house. I got it as part of the divorce settlement.’

Jude didn’t have a car. Morden was the southernmost stop of the Northern Line. Trains from Fethering terminated at Victoria. ‘Probably make sense if we were to meet in London … what, for lunch maybe?’ she suggested.

‘I don’t go to London,’ said Megan.

‘What?’ Jude reminded herself that she was talking to Megan Georgeson, who at the height of her television fame was photographed at every first night and queened it into the small hours at the Groucho Club and Soho House. Her not going to London was inconceivable. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t go to London,’ Megan repeated with no further explanation.

‘Well, do you want me to come to the house?’

‘No, I don’t like people coming to the house. That’s an invasion of my privacy.’

Jude tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice as she asked, ‘Is there anywhere you would like to meet?’

‘There’s a restaurant in Morden called Ancient Persia. I go there quite often. The owners know me.’

‘So, shall we meet there?’

‘Very well.’ Megan made it sound as though she was making a big concession.

‘When? I think it should be as soon as possible.’

‘I agree.’

‘Tomorrow?’

There was a moment of hesitation from the other end of the line. ‘Yes, all right.’

‘Fine.’

‘One o’clock. Ancient Persia.’

Jude had a couple of healing sessions set up for the Thursday, but she rang the clients and rescheduled them. This was unusual. In her professional life, her loyalty to her clients was paramount. She knew how dependent they were on their regular therapy. That she took such action was a measure of how important she considered her meeting with Megan Sinclair to be.

There was probably an easier way to get from Fethering to Morden by public transport, but Jude didn’t investigate it. Carole, she knew would have done, but Jude was content to get the train from Fethering Station to Victoria, get to the southbound Northern Line and stay on the tube as far as it went.

She had taken a book with her, a treatise a friend had written about the relationship between the NHS and complementary medicine, but her gaze kept sliding off the page. She was tired; the last night had been a troubled one, though that wasn’t the only reason for her poor concentration. Thoughts whirled around her head in unaccustomed agitation. And for some reason, she felt worried about the forthcoming encounter with Megan. Her old friend’s manner on the phone had set up a barrier between them. And, though Jude was not a person to let grievances fester, she did not think their meeting was going to be an easy one.

Getting off at the underground station was familiar from the many times she’d made the journey to visit the newly married Sinclairs, but when she emerged she found herself in a slightly different Morden from the one of twenty years before. Then it had been a depressed, dreary outer suburb. But, as house prices in London rocketed, even well-heeled commuters found themselves having to move further away from the centre to find an affordable family house. Places like Morden were suddenly in danger of becoming trendy. The change hadn’t happened yet; it was a work in progress. Morden remained a depressed, dreary outer suburb, but one perhaps on the verge of gentrification.

Jude noticed a few more coffee shops and restaurants than there had been before. Some of them even had seats and tables outside, supporting England’s doomed attempt to recreate what people liked to call ‘café society’ (which will never quite work until there’s a change in the country’s weather). In January, the only people sitting outside were desperate cigarette-puffers driven there by the smoking ban.

The Ancient Persia was a sign of the change to come. It didn’t look ancient at all. Nor particularly Persian. But it did look very new. Apart from a couple of tall, non-functioning hookahs by way of set dressing, everything else was scrubbed wood, stainless steel and glass. It was one of the new wave of exotically ethnic restaurants that were invading all parts of London. Though giving the impression of individuality, most of them were parts of chains. Equally ‘individual’ Ancient Persias could be found in Shoreditch, Crouch End and Stoke Newington. The fact that one had opened in Morden was a very encouraging sign for the area. Waitrose might come next.

The first thing that struck Jude about Megan, already sitting at the table, was her size. It was at least twenty years since they had last met and Jude knew that the menopause could be cruel. She herself had put on the pounds, but nothing to compare with the scale on which Megan had. She had given up ‘waiflike’ for ‘tubby’. Her once ‘surprisingly’ blue eyes had sunk into rolls of flesh. No one now would speak of her ‘fragile beauty’ without irony. Nor, to be uncharitably accurate, would anyone speak of any kind of beauty. Megan Georgeson, having flitted for some years through the steamy dreams of so many male television viewers, in her fifties had transformed into a dumpy woman to whom no one would have given a second glance.

She didn’t rise to meet Jude. She stayed in her seat with a half-empty glass of wine in front of her. ‘Long time no see,’ she drawled, in what now sounded like a parody of her theatrical voice.

Jude followed her instinct and did what she would have done with any of her friends, arms round neck and a kiss. The gesture wasn’t made easier by the recipient’s seated immobility.

As Jude took her seat opposite, Megan said, ‘Well, there’s a lot more of you than when we last met.’

It wasn’t in Jude’s nature to snap back with a line about pots and kettles. Instead, she chuckled. ‘Which of us can resist the march of the years, eh?’

Megan laughed cynically and downed her remaining wine. ‘Must get some more of this. Do you drink red?’

‘Well, I usually—’

But her friend wasn’t listening. She waved to a purple-jacketed waiter who was taking the order from an adjacent table. ‘Cyrus,’ she called, and held her two hands apart at the height of a bottle. Cyrus nodded to acknowledge the order. Clearly Megan was a regular at the Ancient Persia. Also, it seemed, a regular drinker.

‘Still on the red wine, I see,’ Jude observed. ‘Al always liked his red wine, didn’t he?’

‘Red wine, beer, whisky. He liked everything alcoholic. Hardly ever left the house without his little hipflask of Scotch – but you remember that, don’t you, Jude?’

‘I’m not sure I—’

‘Of course you do.’ Megan reached for her glass and was disappointed to be reminded it was empty.

Jude was beginning to feel their conversation had got off on the wrong foot. So, perhaps belatedly, she said, ‘I suppose I should be offering you condolences about Al’s death.’

‘Why? He’s nothing to do with me. He hasn’t been anything to do with me for fifteen years.’

‘Maybe not, but—’

‘Anyway, why should I care what’s happened to the bastard? He screwed up my life pretty thoroughly. Five wasted years of marriage, and then I discovered the slime-ball was screwing everything in sight. I had a complete breakdown after the divorce – did you know that?’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t know, would you? Never heard from you after the marriage ended, did I?’

‘I tried ringing a good few times, left messages, but you never got back to me.’

‘Really? Didn’t I? How remiss of me.’ Megan’s tone implied that no such messages had ever been sent.

‘I can assure you I—’

Jude was interrupted by the arrival at their table of the waiter, Cyrus. He unscrewed the wine bottle and filled their two glasses. Then he poised his pen over his notepad. ‘Are you ready to order?’

‘I’ll have the usual,’ said Megan.

‘Of course.’ He wrote it down ‘Fesenjan.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Jude.

‘It is a very traditional Persian dish,’ the waiter replied. ‘Chicken with ground walnuts and pomegranate – very good.’

‘I’ll have the same.’ She hadn’t had an opportunity to look at the menu, but wanted to get back to challenging Megan’s accusations of disloyalty. As Cyrus moved away, she picked up, ‘I can assure you I did everything to try and contact you, but got no response.’

‘Oh well, water under the bridge.’ But Megan didn’t say it in a forgiving way. ‘So, the marriage took five years out of my life, the breakdown took two – more than that, actually. I’m still not shot of the symptoms. And when I’m finally in a state to pick up my career, I ring my agent and – surprise, surprise – there haven’t been any recent enquiries for my services. The news of my illness had somehow got out, and who wants to employ an actor who’s got mental problems? Making television is such an expensive process, producers can’t risk casting someone who might crack up at any moment. So bye-bye, career.

‘And of course that bastard Al was always stringing me along about having children. He knew I wanted to, but he kept putting it off.’

Jude’s own view was that Al Sinclair had never wanted children. He was one of those men whose ego was so huge he didn’t want his women’s adoration of him to be diluted by any other demands. But she kept that opinion to herself, saying, ‘To be fair, your television career was doing so well at that time, you wouldn’t have wanted to interrupt—’

‘I would have dropped it all in a moment to have a baby!’ Megan was now in full tragic heroine mode. Jude didn’t believe her, but understood how she had refashioned her past into something she now thought was the truth.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but—’

‘You never had children, did you, Jude?’ Megan looked at her beadily.

‘No.’

‘And doesn’t it make you feel dreadful?’

‘No,’ Jude replied, evenly and honestly. ‘The right time and the right man never coincided.’

‘Al was the right man for me, and I’m sure if we’d had a baby we could have saved the marriage.’

Jude disagreed completely. Having Megan tied to the house by a baby would have just given someone like Al Sinclair further scope for his infidelities. But there was no point in saying anything. Nothing would shift Megan from the version of the past that she had forged.

‘Well, who knows?’ said Jude, resorting to a safe platitude.

‘I know,’ Megan responded. ‘The point about being married to a bastard like Al is that …’

Fortunately, the diatribe was stopped by the arrival of Cyrus with their fesenjan. The dark brown stew, served on a bed of rice and garnished with pomegranate seeds, smelt wonderful, rich and warming, perfect for an icy January day.

Cyrus refilled their wine glasses. Megan’s was empty; Jude’s only needed topping up. And that wasn’t because of her preference for white wine. She was finding the Shiraz they were drinking quite acceptable. It was just that Megan was drinking faster than she was.

The fesenjan was as delicious as it smelt: rich, creamy and probably devastating to the waistline. For a moment, there was a silence as the two women started eating.

Then Megan said, ‘Pity Al isn’t with us today.’

‘No, it’s very sad that—’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Oh?’

Megan’s next words were accompanied by a vicious grin. ‘I mean, that this would kill him.’ She gestured to their fesenjan.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, come on, Jude, don’t pretend you’ve forgotten.’

‘Forgotten what?’

‘That Al was allergic to walnuts. For God’s sake, he was always going on about it. Turned it into a drama, like everything else in his life. Never went anywhere without his EpiPen. Kept going on about “spending his life on the edge of death”. Seemed to think it turned him into a tragic doomed artist, like bloody Keats. Oh, Jude, of course you knew about it.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t.’

‘Oh well, if that’s the way you want to play it …’ She took another big swallow of wine. Once again, her glass was emptying considerably faster than Jude’s.

‘Megan, you seem to be under the misapprehension that I knew a lot more about Al than I did.’

‘What, you stopped listening to him after a while, did you? I know what you mean. I did the same. He did go on a bit, didn’t he? But I thought you’d have taken in the information about his precious allergy, given how much time you spent together.’

‘We didn’t spend any time together. I don’t think Al and I ever spent more than ten minutes together without you present.’

Megan let out a little cynical laugh. ‘OK, if that’s your story, stick with it, by all means.’

‘It’s not a story.’ Jude seemed to have been closer to anger in the last thirty-six hours than she had for a very long time. ‘It’s the truth.’

‘Then why were you suddenly so keen to get in touch with me? And don’t tell me it had anything to do with Al’s Seth Marston books.’

‘That was the original reason.’

‘But then, when Al’s death became public, you had other reasons to contact me.’

‘The main one being that the police contacted me.’

‘And that got you worried?’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘No? Detective Inspector Rollins, was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I spent a long time talking to her yesterday.’

‘Right.’

Megan smiled complacently, not about to divulge what she and the Inspector had talked about. ‘And Rollins got you worried, did she?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Oh, come on, Jude. You’re not going to persuade me that you were so keen to see me just to offer condolences?’

‘I’m not saying that. Offering condolences was obviously part of—’

‘Anyway,’ Megan interrupted, ‘shouldn’t it be me offering condolences to you? You loved Al a lot more than I ever did.’

‘What?’

‘As soon as he was on the scene, you seemed to be round all the time.’

‘We saw no more of each other than we did when you were single.’

‘Rubbish!’

‘You were my friend. When Al came along, I was just pleased you’d found someone, that’s all.’

‘If that’s all, why did you see so much of us then?’ asked Megan aggressively. ‘It wasn’t me you wanted to see once Al was around.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Ridiculous? As I mentioned, I haven’t noticed much sign of you being in touch with me since the divorce. Whereas I’m sure you and Al have been permanently “in touch”.’

‘Megan, that is absolute nonsense. Till he contacted me about his talk in Fethering Library, I’d hardly heard from him since the divorce.’

‘You and I haven’t been in touch since then either,’ said Megan, rather wistfully.

‘I know we haven’t, and I regret that much more. You were the one I wanted to keep in touch with.’

For a moment, there was a softness in Megan’s eyes, a flicker of the friendship that had once existed between them. But it vanished very quickly, and she was back on the attack. ‘In spite of that, it was Burton who knew you lived in Fethering, wasn’t it? I didn’t know that.’

‘I assume he heard through a mutual friend. I certainly didn’t tell him.’

‘No?’ Megan gave a weary sigh, topped up her wine glass and took a long swallow. ‘You can stop pretending, Jude. I know that your affair with Al started soon after our wedding. And it was your affair with Al that broke up a perfectly good marriage.’

‘That is just not true!’ In her shock, Jude spoke louder than she’d intended. A few of the other customers looked with characteristically English embarrassment towards their table.

‘Oh, I know what’s true,’ Megan assured her. And Jude realized how firmly the details of her recreated past had taken root in the woman’s mind.

‘And did you tell Detective Inspector Rollins about what you’ve just accused me of?’

‘Of course.’ Megan smiled complacently. ‘When you’re questioned by the police, you have to tell the truth, Jude. Surely you know that?’