Jude put the light on and inspected the phone. Switched it on, nothing happened. Of course it would have run out of power. She almost didn’t want to find out that the mobile was a Nokia, like her own. And that her charger would fit it. But it did.
Grimly she plugged the charger in. The screen took a moment to come to life. No password was required, she just had to press a function key to unlock the phone.
She went straight to Messaging, and opened the in-box. The last text Reggie Playfair had received was sent at 12.37 am on the day of his death.
It read: ‘Something important’s come up. Meet me on the court as soon as you can, like we used to.’
The sender had not identified him- or herself. Nor did the number the text had been sent from mean anything to Jude. But she made a note of it.
As she was scribbling the number down on the back of an Allinstore receipt, she looked up to see Piers standing the doorway from the hall. He had thrown on an orange silk dressing gown of hers. Far too small, it made him look faintly ridiculous.
‘Ah. So you found the phone,’ he said.
‘You hadn’t made much attempt to hide it.’
‘True.’ He sounded weary as he came across to sit at one end of the sofa. She sat at the other end. The void between them seemed incongruous after the intimacy they had shared there only a few hours earlier.
‘I suppose you want some explanations,’ said Piers Targett.
‘Wouldn’t hurt.’
‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I took it from Reggie’s pocket when I sent you out to get my mobile from the E-Type.’
‘I assumed that was what had happened.’
‘But of course you want to know why.’
‘Wouldn’t hurt either.’
‘I did it to protect Reggie.’
‘Bit late for that. He was already dead.’
‘True. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I did it to protect Oenone.’
‘Oh?’
‘If the mobile had come back to her and she had found the text message which had summoned him to the court. .’ He grimaced at the thought of the consequences.
‘On the other hand, Piers, you could simply have erased the text message before the phone got back to Oenone, and your problem would have been solved.’
‘Yes, I can see that now. At the time I wasn’t thinking very straight. The urgent thing seemed to be to prevent Oenone from getting the phone.’
‘Hm.’ Jude didn’t disbelieve him. His behaviour was consistent with the kind of messy, illogical ways people react in a crisis. ‘You’ve presumably read the text message that summoned Reggie down to the court?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you presumably know who it was from?’
‘Yes.’ He gave her a shrewd look. ‘Why, don’t you?’
‘There was no name, the number didn’t mean anything to me and I hadn’t had a chance to check through the phone’s address book before you came down.’
‘Right.’ Slowly, with deliberation, Piers Targett rose from the sofa. He unplugged the stripy-jacketed mobile and put it back into the jacket pocket whence Jude had taken it.
‘The text message,’ he said slowly, ‘was from Jonquil.’
‘Really?’ Jude hadn’t been expecting that.
‘So she told me.’ Piers spread his hands against his forehead and pressed them sideways as if trying to wipe away some memory. ‘Look, as I’ve said before, Jonquil is never the most rational of beings. In her down periods she’s almost catatonic. When she’s up, she’s capable of all kinds of bizarre behaviour.’
‘I thought you said the medication controls that.’
‘It does — providing she takes it. But she always thinks the time will come when she doesn’t need any medication. So when she’s feeling good, like when she’s at the beginning of a new relationship — like she has been recently — she won’t touch the stuff.’
‘And that makes her behaviour even more bizarre?’
‘Precisely. Anyway, there’s a bit of history between Jonquil and Reggie.’
‘Oh?’
‘I told you fidelity was never her strong suit. And after the few months of honeymoon period after we got married. . well, her promiscuous side took over.’
‘So she and Reggie. .?’ Some people might have thought the idea of the fat man in his seventies having an affair incongruous, but Reggie Playfair had been young once. And Jude knew that passion was not always diminished by age.
‘I don’t actually know for a fact that they did. But Jonquil certainly slept with other members of the club round that time. And I think she wanted to add Reggie to the list. Whether he was strong enough to resist her, I’m not sure. I’ve a feeling Reggie was one of those old-fashioned chaps who genuinely believed in the sanctity of the marriage vows. But one thing I know for a fact — if he did resist Jonquil’s advances that would have made her absolutely furious. She liked getting her own way — particularly when it came to men.’
‘You and Reggie never discussed it?’
‘No. Very British of us, wasn’t it? He knew — and Oenone knew — that Jonquil was making a fool of me with other men, but the subject was never mentioned. So, needless to say, the subject of whether Reggie himself was actually one of her conquests. . well, that wasn’t mentioned either.’
Jude felt a surge of pity for Piers, being saddled with Jonquil, the kind of woman who would never be completely out of his life. She felt pity for Jonquil too, as she would for anyone suffering from mental illness, but not as much as she did for Piers.
‘If Jonquil sent the text message,’ she began slowly, ‘and Reggie reacted instantly, in the middle of the night, that must suggest quite regular contact between them, since the time that they. . well, if they did have an affair.’
Piers shrugged. He looked almost pathetic, inadequately wrapped in orange silk. His deep blue eyes were tight with pain. ‘Jonquil was strange about keeping in touch with people. Suddenly someone’d be her new best friend and she’d be phoning and texting them all the time. Equally suddenly, they’d drop out of favour. Or she might, out of the blue, one day call someone she hadn’t spoken to for years. Just another example of her volatility. Trying to second-guess what Jonquil is about to do next is a very exhausting business — as I know to my cost,’ he concluded with feeling.
‘And do you know whether she had been in touch with Reggie recently?’
He nodded. ‘They never really lost touch. There was a professional relationship, apart from anything else.’
‘Reggie acting for her as a stockbroker?’
‘That’s it. As I mentioned, Jonquil’s always been pretty well heeled, and she came into a lot when her parents died. Reggie looked after her portfolio, did very well for her in fact. But, according to Jonquil, they’d recently found another interest in common.’
‘Oh?’
‘She picks up new fads and ideas with the same randomness that she does people. None of them last very long. But her latest obsession is with ghosts.’
‘Ah.’ Now, Jude felt, they were getting somewhere. ‘Which of course is a subject that Reggie was very much into.’
‘How did you know that? You only met him once.’
‘Oenone told me.’
‘Really?’ Piers didn’t ask why Jude had been in contact with Reggie’s widow, but he was clearly puzzled by the idea. Still, he moved on. ‘Well, there is a ghost story attached to Lockleigh House tennis court.’
‘Agnes Wardock,’ said Jude.
That really did shake him. ‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘I was told about it by Cecil Wardock.’
‘And who’s he?’
‘Relative of Tom Ruthven. Tom introduced me to him.’
‘And he told you the Agnes Wardock story? Goodness, Jude, you seem to know everything.’ He gave a shudder that was only half in jest. ‘Being with you is like spending time with an amateur detective. I feel as if you’re constantly investigating me.’
She added no comment to that. Instead she asked, ‘So do you think that Jonquil summoned Reggie down to the court on a ghost-hunting mission?’
‘I’m rather afraid she did. When she’s in one of her manic moods Jonquil’s sense of humour is sometimes totally inappropriate.’
‘Sense of humour?’ Suddenly something slotted into place in Jude’s mind. Something she’d seen in Jonquil Targett’s car outside the house at Goffham. ‘Oh, she didn’t. .? It wasn’t the wedding dress, was it?’
Piers looked at her aghast. ‘You know about that too? My God, is there anything you don’t know about?’ Gloom spread over his face as he admitted, ‘Yes, that was Jonquil’s idea of a joke. She thought it would be amusing to summon Reggie Playfair down to the court, telling him that she had seen the ghost of Agnes Wardock. And of course he went. Jonquil would have loved the idea that he did that. Nothing gives her more pleasure than having power over men.’
‘So the ghost. .?’
‘Was Jonquil wearing a wedding dress. The dress in fact that she wore at our wedding.’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I asked her what on earth possessed her to do that, and as I did I realized that “possessed” was absolutely the right word. When Jonquil’s in a manic phase, she is possessed.
‘As she explained it to me, she said Reggie was so keen on seeing Agnes Wardock’s ghost that she thought she’d make his dream come true. She thought she’d “give him a surprise”.’
‘And it turned out to be a surprise that killed him?’
Piers nodded. ‘The way she told it, she arrived at the court before he could possibly have got down from London.’
‘How did she get in?’
‘She knows the keypad code, which doesn’t get changed nearly as often as it should do. Jonquil used to be a member. Well, still is a member actually, though she doesn’t play much now. So she went through to the club room, put on the wedding dress and waited. She heard the main door open, she saw Reggie’s torchlight coming down the side of the court, then she saw him go on to the court itself. That’s where she’d said she’d meet him.
‘Jonquil took that as her cue to enter the dedans area. At a distance, in the white dress, with her long blonde hair, her image slightly blurred by the netting in the dedans. . I’m sure Reggie Playfair thought he was looking at the ghost of Agnes Wardock.’
‘And the shock killed him?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long silence. Then Jude asked, ‘When did Jonquil tell you all this, Piers? Over the weekend?’
‘No, she told me that morning.’
‘Oh?’
There was shame in his expression when he said, ‘When things go really badly for Jonquil, I’m afraid it’s still me she rings. Seeing Reggie’s corpse on the court, beginning to realize what she’d done, Jonquil rang me. I went and got her off the premises.’
‘So when you went in with me later, you already knew that we would find Reggie there?’
‘Yes,’ he replied soberly.
‘Well, why the hell didn’t you say something?’ demanded Jude in uncharacteristic anger. ‘Why haven’t you said anything since? Why haven’t you told the police?’
‘I couldn’t do that, Jude. Jonquil’s so unstable. Having enquiries into what she did is just the kind of thing that might push her over the edge.’
There was another long silence. Finally Jude said ruefully. ‘You are so far from being over her, aren’t you, Piers?’