Piers Targett came back to Woodside Cottage after his London meetings and wanted a full debrief on Jude’s experience of a real tennis lesson. It seemed really to matter to him that she should like the game and she found his enthusiasm infectious. If anyone had suggested a month before that she might seriously be about to take up a game she’d hardly heard of, she would have laughed in their faces. But it was strange how quickly things could change when love was involved.
Their relationship took another step forward that evening, in that Jude cooked a meal for Piers. Up until then all their eating had been done out — in fact, Piers always ate out. The idea of his pristine kitchen in Bayswater being sullied by anything other than wine bottles and a corkscrew was unthinkable. Jude wondered if he ever had cooked for himself, whether indeed he had any domestic skills. Maybe when he and Jonquil were cohabiting, they had had a normal home life, but it was a subject she did not yet want to discuss. There’d be time enough for that, particularly since this new domestic phase of their relationship somehow seemed to promise a longer future.
She cooked a Thai green chicken curry, one of her specialities. Jude’s range of cooking was wide and random. She was just as likely to do a fry-up as something more exotic. And whereas in the next-door kitchen at High Tor every ingredient would be weighed out exactly to the last scruple, Jude’s approach was instinctive. She didn’t have a recipe book in the house. On the other hand, she had for a while run a restaurant, so she did possess all of the necessary skills.
They drank a lot of wine with the dinner. Indeed, they always seemed to drink a lot of wine when they were together, Piers probably downing a couple of glasses to every one of hers. But she had never seen him drunk. He just seemed cheerfully to go on topping himself up. And he didn’t go in for any of that what he called ‘nonsense about not drinking and driving’. She’d often seen him take the wheel of the E-Type with a bottle of wine inside him, but she never felt in any danger.
That evening she lit a fire in the Woodside Cottage sitting room. The October night wasn’t really cold enough to justify it, but the warmth and the glow were comforting. After they had eaten (and Jude, with a laxness that would have appalled Carole, had not even thought about taking their dirty plates through to the kitchen), Piers had removed his jacket and they’d slipped naturally down from the sofa to the floor. Equally naturally, snuggling and sipping wine had led to lazy love-making.
Which, later, they continued upstairs. Then, in what was now becoming a jokey ritual for them, Jude asked Piers to explain how a chase was laid on a real tennis court. And she was soon blissfully asleep.
Jude didn’t know what time it was when she woke up. Having someone sharing her bed at Woodside Cottage felt strange. Not unpleasantly strange, just unfamiliar.
She lay there, still, drinking in the welcome unfamiliarity of Piers’ presence, his breathing, steady, deep, just on the edge of a snore. She thought back over the day, particularly the evening, and everything felt good.
But she was wakeful. She knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep for at least half an hour. Had she been on her own, she might have switched on the bedside light and read. Or done some of the personalized stretching exercises that she had developed from yoga. Even gone downstairs and made a cup of herbal tea. But she didn’t want to wake Piers.
Inevitably, as she lay there, she found herself thinking about Reggie Playfair’s funeral in the morning. And from there it didn’t take long for her thoughts to home back in on the circumstances of his death.
That, however, prompted an unwelcome memory, which for the past few days she had been, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, suppressing. The call she’d had from Jonquil Targett about Reggie Playfair’s mobile phone. Probably nothing, probably just an attempt by a severely unstable woman to plant suspicions about her estranged husband. Or was there more to it than that. .?
Jonquil said she’d seen the phone in Piers’ possession. And it had a distinctive cover, specially made in the colours of the Lockleigh House tennis club.
She said she’d seen it in the pocket of Piers’ jacket. And Piers’ jacket was at that moment lying downstairs in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage.
Jude hated the direction in which her thoughts were turning. It went against her every instinct to be suspicious of someone she loved. And particularly now, when she had just regained a feeling of reassurance after her doubts of the weekend. She tried to shift concentration on to some other subject, but still Jonquil Targett’s words sawed away at her mind.
She tried to reason against what the woman had said. Even if Piers had had Reggie’s mobile in his jacket pocket, he was likely to have moved it by now. Or he’d be wearing a different jacket. And even if she did find the mobile, its battery would have run down during the past week, so she wouldn’t be able to gather any information from it.
Jude now knew that she would have no peace until she had behaved like some archetype of the jealous lover, till she had gone downstairs and checked through Piers Targett’s jacket pockets. Hating herself for what she was doing, she edged out from under the duvet. When she was standing by the side of the bed, she froze for a moment, but there was no interruption to the easy regularity of her lover’s breathing.
She slipped on a towelling dressing gown and crept from the bedroom, knowing how to move the half-open door without making it squeak, knowing which creaking step to avoid on the staircase.
The last embers of the fire still cast a meagre glow around her sitting room. Jude moved straight to the sofa on the arm of which Piers’ jacket had been casually abandoned. Now she had made the decision of what she was about to do, there was no point in delaying the inevitable.
She felt in one pocket and her hand closed on the hard rectangle of a mobile. Extracting it, she was relieved to recognize the counters of Piers’ iPhone.
She replaced that and felt in the other jacket pocket. There too she felt a familiar shape and weight. She took it out. The dying glow of the fire gave enough light for her to see the coloured stripes of the cover.
While Piers Targett had sent her on an errand to his E-Type outside the tennis court, he’d taken Reggie Playfair’s mobile.