The Corpse on the Court (10 page)

‘All kinds of silly ideas were going through my head. I knew the local young people who lacked tolerant parents tended to conduct their sex lives in cars . . . or there was a favoured wooded area on the local golf course, but I thought Reggie would have a bit more sophistication than that. And then the thought came to me . . . that maybe they met at Lockleigh House tennis court.'

‘Really?' said Carole, immediately intrigued.

‘Back then the booking hours were much the same as they are now. No one there between, say, ten o'clock at night and seven thirty the next morning. They didn't have the electronic keypad entry system – each member had their own key, so there was no problem about gaining access. And of course,' she concluded sardonically, ‘the club room, then as now, does boast those large, extremely accommodating sofas.'

‘Are you suggesting,' asked Carole, ‘that the woman with whom your husband had an affair was also a member of the real tennis club?'

Once again Oenone Playfair was drowned in embarrassment. ‘I think, I mean . . . I couldn't be sure, but . . . yes, I think it could have been.'

‘There aren't that many woman members, are there?' asked Jude.

‘There are quite a few, but not as many as the men, no.'

‘So you must have had a pretty shrewd idea of who Reggie's lover was.'

Oenone winced at the word ‘lover'. ‘As I say, I'm not sure how far the relationship went. He was certainly infatuated with her, but whether they actually . . .' Her words petered out.

‘From what you say,' said Carole firmly, ‘you know exactly who the woman was.'

But the widow didn't want to go that far. ‘There were one or two lady members who possibly . . . I couldn't be sure. It was a very difficult time for me. My mind was so confused with lots of different anxieties and suspicions. Sometimes I'd been playing a ladies' doubles and think it could be any one of the other three. I wasn't very rational.'

‘But basically,' said Jude, ‘you are worried that Reggie might have gone to the court the night before last to meet up with his former –' she avoided the word lover this time – ‘infatuation?'

‘That's what I'm afraid of, yes. That's what I'd like you to try and find out.'

‘If you don't tell us the name of the woman who you think your husband may have been meeting,' Carole contributed tartly, ‘you are rather hobbling any investigation we may try to make.'

‘I can see that. But I'm sorry, I can't voice my suspicions, in case I'm wrong. It would be awful, particularly with Reggie just dead, for me to go accusing someone completely innocent. They'd think grief had really unhinged me.'

‘Mm.' Carole Seddon sniffed. ‘Well, if you don't give all the information you have, it is going to make our job very difficult.'

‘I'll give you all the information
of which I'm certain
.'

And that was it. Carole tried pushing for more, but got nothing. Jude essayed a gentler approach, but also drew a blank. Some inbuilt sense of honour would not allow Oenone Playfair to give the name of the woman whom she suspected had caused her so much unhappiness.

‘If we do pursue the investigation you want us to,' said Carole, ‘it's inevitable that we're going to be asking questions of quite a lot of the Lockleigh House club members.'

‘I can see that.'

‘And do you want us to tell them that we're doing it on your behalf?'

Oenone Playfair winced at the idea. ‘I'd rather you didn't . . . if you can avoid it,' she pleaded.

‘We'll do our best,' said Jude.

Though Oenone wouldn't reveal the names of the women she suspected of being loved by her husband, to all the other questions Carole and Jude asked she was extremely forthcoming.

An interesting moment occurred when Carole asked whether Oenone had noticed any differences in her husband's behaviour recently. ‘Well, yes,' she replied. ‘There was one thing . . .'

‘Oh?'

‘He'd got very interested in . . .' Once again she was embarrassed. ‘I suppose I'd have to call it “the occult”.'

‘Seances and that kind of thing?' asked Jude.

‘That kind of thing, certainly, though I don't know whether he actually ever attended a seance. It was more kind of . . . ghosts and things that intrigued him.'

‘Ghosts?' Carole echoed with knee-jerk scepticism. ‘Did he actually believe in ghosts?'

‘I don't know, but he found the possibility of there being ghosts sufficiently fascinating to do some research on the subject. Which I can see from your expression that you find unlikely, and I agree with you it was. Reggie of all people! I say this as someone who loves him deeply, but the one thing he never had much of was imagination. Wonderful practical skills, very talented with money, but Reggie hadn't much time for anything off the straight and narrow. The books he read – and he only tended to do that when we were on holiday – were all blokeish thrillers. Loved James Bond and other writers of a previous generation – Hammond Innes, Alastair MacLean. I think his favourite book was probably Nicholas Monsarrat's
The Cruel Sea
. God knows how many times he read that.

‘So Reggie was a very straightforward “man's man”, I suppose you'd call him. No time for self-questioning, no interest in religion beyond putting in a well-oiled appearance at Midnight Mass every Christmas. The idea that someone with his head screwed on that firmly would believe in ghosts is incongruous. And it was an interest that seemed to grow as he got older. Anyone new he'd met he'd ask if they'd ever had any experience of ghosts. Surprising how many had . . . usually nothing very convincing. Strange noise at night, closed doors being found open, objects moved from where they had last been seen. Nothing to convince the sceptic and yet Reggie always listened with deep attention. It was strange, something happened to him when he was listening to a ghost story. His eyes started to water, almost like tears but without spilling out. I've no idea what caused that.'

‘Can you think of any reason,' asked Jude, ‘why he was interested in ghosts?'

‘I don't know.' But the way Oenone said it made Jude realize that she did. ‘Why does anyone believe in ghosts?'

‘Because they're deluded,' said Carole characteristically. ‘There is no such thing as a ghost and there never has been.'

‘Oh, I'm not so sure,' Jude countered.

‘What, have you ever seen a ghost?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘What do you mean – you don't
think
so? Either you have or you haven't.'

‘I don't think I've seen one, but I've met people who say they have and I've believed them.'

‘Jude, there are no ghosts. When people die, they die and that's all there is to it.'

Her neighbour might have been about to take issue with Carole's blanket scepticism but, realizing where they were, thought better of it and asked Oenone, ‘When I asked you what made Reggie believe in ghosts, you said you didn't know, but I got the impression perhaps you do have some idea.'

The older woman grinned wryly. ‘You're very perceptive, Jude. All right, I'll tell you. It's not something I often talk about because, well, it's not something I often talk about. The fact is that Reggie and I haven't got any children, which was something we rarely talked about but which hurt us both very deeply. Oh, we went on through life, we kept busy, we became serial godparents. We went to some wonderful places, we did some wonderful things. But I always carried the sadness with me, and it was only in recent years that I realized how much it had affected Reggie too.

‘I said – quite carefully – that Reggie and I “haven't got” children. But briefly, very briefly we did have a child. About six months into our marriage, in a very predictable middle-class way, I became pregnant. All seemed fine, normal pregnancy. Went into labour, taken to a nursing home . . . where things didn't work out as they should have done. Difficult birth, cord round the baby's neck, she was stillborn. And the process had made such a mess of my insides that the doctor decided on an emergency hysterectomy.' The very matter-of-factness with which she spoke the words made them all the more moving.

‘Well, I suppose we could have adopted, but . . . and nowadays I read in the papers that there's surrogacy and . . . But there wasn't back then. The simple facts were that I had lost a child and there would never be another one. I was soon fit and healthy again and Reggie just . . . didn't want to talk about it, really. He did say how much simpler our life would be, how much more we'd be able to travel and . . . I was very hurt by his attitude at the time, but . . .' Oenone Playfair sighed. Although she wasn't showing much emotion, the narrative was taking its toll on her.

‘Anyway, as I say, in a very British way Reggie shut things in, continued to make lots of money, continued to play lots of real tennis, but all the time the sadness was niggling away inside him. And then, about eight years ago I suppose, he told me that he'd seen Flora's ghost.'

‘Flora?' prompted Jude.

‘Our daughter's name. She didn't live long enough to be christened or anything, but to us she was Flora.'

‘And where did he see the ghost?' asked Carole.

‘Everywhere. He said he kept seeing her. Not as the baby that we saw for such a short time, but as a grown woman. I told him that it was just imagination, that I'd experienced something similar. It's inevitable. You see a girl whose hair's the same colour as yours and you think, maybe that's what my daughter would look like if she were still alive. She'd be over fifty now if she'd lived, but I still see women who make me think of Flora.

‘Anyway, I put that to Reggie, but he said no. He pointed out that I kept telling him he had no imagination, so his mind wasn't going to invent things like that. What he was seeing must be Flora. Or rather Flora's ghost. To cut a long story short, that got him into reading books about ghosts and . . . he sort of became obsessed by the idea.'

‘Well, the obvious question to ask,' said Carole, ‘is: are there any ghosts connected with the Lockleigh House tennis court? Might ghost-hunting explain your husband's appearance there the night before last?'

‘That's a thought.' Oenone was clearly taken with the idea. Perhaps simply because it was more palatable than her other imaginings. ‘Somewhere in the back of my mind that does ring a bell. A story going back a long way . . . to when the Wardock family owned Lockleigh House. Now when did I hear that?' She tapped at her chin in frustration. ‘Oh, when was it? It'll come to me. I must have heard it from one of the members of the tennis club. Who was it?' She waved her hands hopelessly. ‘I'll wake up at three a.m. and remember it.'

Oenone Playfair smiled, obscurely comforted. ‘It would make sense, though. Much more likely that Reggie had gone to the court on a ghost-hunting search than that he had fixed to meet someone there.'

Neither Carole nor Jude was about to point out the inaccuracy of this assessment. If he was interested in its connections with ghosts Reggie Playfair could have inspected the Lockleigh House tennis court on many occasions. His presence there two nights before was much more likely due to an arrangement to meet someone.

And both Carole and Jude knew that the words she had just articulated would only give Oenone a brief respite. Her worries about her husband betraying her would soon return.

Which gave an extra urgency to their mission to find out precisely what had drawn Reggie Playfair to the tennis court that night.

It was Carole who had asked permission to check out the BMW. Oenone admitted that she hadn't had the strength to look inside it. ‘So much Reggie's car – it'll still smell of him, like he's popped out and is just about to come back in. But you two do look in it by all means.'

She had also explained to them how the car had got back to Winnows. ‘George Hazlitt – you know, the pro – he drove it over. With his junior, Ned, following in another car to take them back.'

She gave them the keys, saying, ‘Obviously if you find anything of interest, let me know. Otherwise, just drop the keys back through the letterbox. I think I might go and put my feet up for a while.'

And they both realized how desperately exhausted Oenone Playfair was. In spite of her overt stoicism, the events of the past days had taken a heavy toll on her. And the long conversation with Carole and Jude couldn't have made her any less tired.

She saw them to the door and added, ‘Oh, and by the way, do let me know if you find Reggie's mobile phone in the car. I couldn't find it in the clothes that came back from the hospital . . . not that I really looked that hard. I was . . .' The strain was beginning to show more forcibly now. ‘As I say, I'm just going to put my feet up for a while. Then I'll have to address myself to the subject of funeral arrangements.'

They could both tell that she was now just desperate to be on her own, so they said their hasty goodbyes. And as soon as Oenone had closed the front door, they started their inspection of the BMW.

‘Be very handy,' said Carole, ‘if we did find his mobile phone, with a text on it from someone arranging to meet him at the tennis court.'

‘Well, don't hold your breath,' said Jude. ‘The business of investigation, as we have found out, is seldom quite as simple as that.'

And so it proved. The BMW did not contain a revelatory mobile phone. Nor a note setting up an assignation with an old flame. Nor indeed anything else that one wouldn't have expected to find in the car of a wealthy married man in his seventies.

As she sedately drove her sedate Renault back to Fethering, Carole Seddon observed, ‘There's one thing that's struck me as particularly odd in everything I've heard today.'

‘Something Oenone said?'