The Shooting in the Shop

Eleven

Carole had been ambivalent about getting a Christmas tree. She hadn’t done so any other year since she’d been alone in Fethering. But then again she hadn’t had Stephen and family coming down any other year since she’d been alone in Fethering. And Lily was getting to the age when she might start to take an interest in pretty lights and shiny baubles. It’d really only be for the hours when they were with her, which was a bit of an unnecessary indulgence…but then again…She ended up buying a Christmas tree about three feet high, and a set of fairy lights. And a box of assorted glass baubles. And some lametta. And a little silver fairy to perch on the topmost branch.

Carole thought she’d been rather foolish to buy all the stuff, but she did enjoy setting it up. And while she dressed her Christmas tree, she thought about Polly Le Bonnier. She did an action replay in her mind of the conversation they had shared at Jude’s open house, and tried to identify anything the girl had said that might be odd. But nothing came. Except that line “I know where things went wrong for me.” That was intriguing, but now there was no chance of finding out from Polly what she had meant.

A more obvious question was: why, though, when her father had taken the girl to Fedborough Station to catch a train up to London, had she ended up back in Fethering? Carole concluded with some frustration that she didn’t have enough information to provide an answer. But the mystery still niggled away at her.

Jude phoned her round five that afternoon. “I’ve just had a call from Lola.”

“Oh, anymore news about how it happened?”

“No. Well, if she had any, she didn’t volunteer it to me. But listen, Lola’s got Piers Duncton with her…”

“Polly’s boyfriend?”

“Exactly. Apparently he’s in a terrible state – which is hardly surprising. He feels confused and guilty. I get the impression Lola’s finding it difficult to deal with him…you know, she’s got the children and Ricky and his mother and…I think she’d be quite glad to get Piers out of the house for a while.”

“So?”

“So she was suggesting he might come and talk to me.”

“What, you as a healer?”

“No, no. Me as someone who gave a party which Polly attended. Piers is desperate to work out what happened to his girlfriend in the hours before she died. He wonders whether she might have said anything to someone she’d seen at the party, something that might give a clue to what she was feeling, or what she was planning to do.”

“It’s funny, I was just thinking the same myself.”

“Well, anyway, I said fine, he was welcome to come here and ask me anything he wanted. Lola sounded so relieved. I gather things are pretty tense up at their place – one of the kids, Mabel, the little girl, is laid up with an ear infection, one of the Dalmatians has just had puppies – and Piers may be just one extra complication she could do without right now. So he’s on his way.”

Carole, hypersensitive to any imagined slight, immediately thought that she was being excluded. “Very well,” she said shortly. “Let me know if he tells you anything interesting, won’t you?”

“Carole…” Jude lengthened the name in mild exasperation. “What I was going to say was why don’t you come round and talk to Piers as well? You spent at least at much time at my party with Polly as I did, probably more.”

“Yes,” said Carole. “That’s true.”

He was tall, gangly, with big ears and a big mouth. What would be called ‘a mobile face’. There was no surprise that he worked in comedy. But he wasn’t smiling that afternoon. He looked tense and was sucking on a cigarette as though his life depended on it.

Piers Duncton refused Jude’s offer of an alcoholic drink, opting for a black coffee instead. But she had some Chilean Chardonnay left from her party (the booze never did run out), and she poured glasses for herself and Carole.

“We were desperately sorry,” Jude said, “to hear about what happened to Polly.”

“Thank you.” Nicely spoken, clearly went to the right schools before Cambridge. “I still can’t really believe it. I feel so guilty about the whole thing. I mean, I had a text from Polly yesterday afternoon, saying she was going to catch the seven thirty-two train to Victoria…and now…this.”

He sat uneasily on one of Jude’s over-draped armchairs, tense as a cat testing out an unfamiliar surface. She found a glass dish for him to use as an ashtray and said, “Please, do ask us anything you want. If there’s something we can do to help, then just say what it is.”

“Thank you…Jude, was it?”

“That’s right.”

“And I gather Polly came to a party here on Sunday…?”

“Yes.”

“With her dad?”

“And her famous grandmother.”

The boy nodded. Clearly he’d already encountered the formidable Flora. “Had you met Polly before?”

“No.”

In response to his quizzical look, Carole said, “Nor had I.”

“Did you talk to her much?”

Jude shook her head. “Only really to say hello. I was busy looking after my other guests.”

“Yes, of course.”

“I had quite a chat with her,” Carole volunteered.

“What did you talk about?”

“Her family, a little bit. She mentioned you too, and the fact that you’d be spending Christmas with your parents in Gloucestershire.”

His face registered a new pang of suffering as he said, “God, I haven’t told them what’s happened yet. It’s like I’m pretending it’s all a mistake, like the body in Gallimaufry has been indentified wrongly, and Polly’s about to come through that door any minute.”

Emotion seemed momentarily to rob him of words, so Carole thought she might as well continue. “She also told me that she was an actor – which is, I suppose, what I would call an actress – and that she was finding work hard to come by.” Piers nodded acknowledgement of this. “She said that you were a comedy writer, and that she was writing something too.”

“Ah. So she mentioned the book?”

“She sounded quite optimistic about it, almost as though its publication might start a turnaround in her life.”

“Polly said that?” He shook his head wryly. “She always was something of a dreamer.”

“Have you read the book?” asked Jude.

“No. She was very private about her writing.”

Carole was quick to pounce on the inconsistency. “Polly said you had read it. Said you thought it was wonderful.”

He looked confused for a moment, as if he had been caught in a lie. Though a more innocent explanation might be that he was thrown by these reminders of his dead girlfriend. The confusion in his expressive face gave way to sudden anger, but he managed to curb it. He reached into his pocket for cigarettes, then belatedly appealing to Jude for permission to smoke, lit one up.

“Yes, I did read a few chapters of Polly’s book,” he conceded.

“And did you think it was wonderful?”

The question made him look even more uncomfortable. “It’s very difficult to pass comment on the work of someone with whom you’re emotionally involved.”

Jude nodded heartfelt agreement. At various times she had shared her life with an actor and a stand-up comedian, so she knew at first hand the level of paranoia in many creative people.

“What kind of book was it?” asked Carole. “Polly told me it was part fact, part fiction.”

“I’d say it was pure fiction,” said Piers firmly.

“And what was it about?”

“Hard to say. A girl growing up, I suppose, and the difficult time she had doing so.”

“A ‘Misery Memoir’?” Jude suggested.

“Well, if it were true, you might have called it that. But it was fiction. And Polly kept telling me what a happy childhood she’d had, so I don’t think there could have been any autobiographical element in it.”

“From what you say,” said Carole, “or rather, from what you don’t say, I don’t get the impression you thought much of Polly’s book.”

“Well…” He was silent, then a bit tearful as he went on, “It can’t hurt her now for me to say what I really thought.” He took a deep breath before announcing, “The writing was clumsy and, from what I read of it, the plot just didn’t hang together.”

“So you don’t think she’d have had any chance of getting it published?”

“God, no.”

“But she said an agent friend had also liked it a lot.”

“Wishful thinking. I know the agent friend in question, Serena. I was up at Cambridge the same time she was. And Serena didn’t want to hurt Polly’s feelings, so she said what she wanted to hear. It’s significant she didn’t offer to represent her as an agent once the book was finished. I’m afraid the situation was that…well, Polly always wanted to be as good as other people, particularly as good as me. When we first met, we were both in the National Youth Theatre. And she was always a better actor than me, I’d never argue about that. I mean, I can do revue and stuff, funny faces, funny accents, but I’m not really an actor, not like Polly. So when we first met, she was kind of the dominant partner. Then I went up to Cambridge and I got involved with the Footlights, so I was writing and appearing in revues and what-have-you…and Polly, on the weekends she came up, was consigned to the role of a hanger-on. You know, she’d be down in London during the week, trying to get acting work, and I’d be in Cambridge having a whale of a time, surrounded by lots of extremely bright and privileged people…”

“People like Lola?”

“Yes, exactly. People like Lola.” He seemed for a moment to lose the thread of his narrative. “Anyway, with all that happening…the dynamics of me and Polly changed.”

Carole remembered the difficulty Polly had hinted at of maintaining their affair through Piers’s time at university.

“And then after Cambridge and after I’d done shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, we moved in together. In a flat just near Warren Street tube station, where we still are, actually. Or were.” He didn’t want to dwell on the thought. “Anyway, I started having some success as a writer and poor Polly was still finding the acting work hard to come by and…well, it put even more pressure on the relationship. You know, I was kind of mixing with supposedly glamorous people in the comedy world, and the prospects for me getting my own sitcom away were looking good, and then there’s Polly sort of in my wake. She hated being seen as an appendage or a parasite. I think that’s what got her thinking about writing something herself.”

“‘Anything you can do, I can do better’ syndrome,” suggested Jude.

“Exactly that.” The memory seemed to depress him. He sank back into silence.

Carole decided it was time to move into investigative mode. “You say you got a text from her from Fedborough Station saying she was about to catch the London train…?” He nodded. “Have you any idea why she might have changed her mind and come back down here to Fethering?”

“None at all. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I thought you might know something.”

“Sadly not,” said Jude.

“Oh well.” He picked up his coffee cup in a shaking hand and downed the remaining contents. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted your evening. It’s just I feel so powerless. Polly’s dead and I’ve got to do something to find out why!”

“I know how you feel,” said Jude, her voice sounding even softer after his outburst. “One thing…” she said, as he rose from his chair.

“Yes?”

“You talked about the dynamics of your relationship with Polly changing, the balance changing. How much have they changed?”

“What do you mean?”

“One of the first things you said when you came here this evening was that what had happened to Polly made you feel ‘guilty’. You presumably mean you feel guilty because you think you should have been around, protecting her?”

“I suppose so. In a way, yes.”

“I was just wondering whether there might be another reason why you felt guilty…?”

He controlled another flash of instinctive anger, then said, “Are you suggesting that I might have had something to do with Polly’s death? Because I was in London at the time and I do have an alibi for the night of the fire, someone who can vouch for where I was and – ”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Jude raised a hand to calm him. “I’m not making any accusations here. All I was wondering was whether the cause of your feeling guilty might be because your relationship with Polly was coming to an end?”

“I didn’t say that.” Piers was blushing furiously.

“No, but was it?”

There was a silence which Carole eventually broke. “Interesting that you said you had an alibi for the time of the fire…someone who could vouch for where you were all night…”

Any barrier of defiance Piers might have put up instantly crumbled away. “Yes, all right. I was with another woman.” He went on, recklessly, “I’ve met someone else. One of the cast of the new sitcom I’m writing. This is the real thing. I was going to tell Polly as soon as we got Christmas and New Year out of the way. I didn’t want to hurt her over the holiday.”

“Ah,” said Jude.

“How thoughtful of you,” said Carole.