Carole offered to take the traumatized girl back to Brighton, but Tonya said it was all right, she’d cycle to Clincham and get the train from there. The girl was embarrassed now at having spilled out so much emotion to two virtual strangers.
‘You say you mentioned what you’d seen on the court that night to Marina Gretchenko?’ said Carole.
‘Yes, but she wasn’t very interested. Busy with all those children, and I think Vladimir was there when I rang.’ The way she mentioned his name showed that she was aware of the domestic violence in the Gretchenko household.
‘Did you tell anyone else?’ asked Carole. ‘About what you saw on the court?’
‘No. Oh well, yes. Just one person.’
‘And who was that?’
‘There’s this lady who plays tennis here — or at least she used to — and she’s been very kind to me since I joined the club and-’
‘Felicity Budgen,’ Jude surmised.
‘Yes.’ Tonya was too emotionally drained to wonder how Jude knew that. ‘Anyway, I did tell her about what happened, you know, me being here that night.’
‘How did she react?’
‘Oh. Well. She’s a very kind woman, Felicity. She didn’t bawl me out about being with Ned. She said she’d never breathe a word to her husband about it. . though she might talk to George Hazlitt and get him to have a quiet word with Ned.’
Maybe it was that ‘quiet word’ Jude had overheard in Oenone Playfair’s conservatory. ‘When did you have this conversation with Felicity, Tonya?’
‘Oh, just this afternoon, before I left to come over here.’
‘And did you tell her you were coming here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And,’ asked Carole, ‘did you tell her about everything you’d witnessed on the court that night?’
‘Yes, I did. Felicity’s the only person I can really talk to. My babushka’s always too busy looking after my grandfather and Marina’s caught up in her own problems. Felicity’s always been a good listener.’
Carole and Jude were both wondering how the chairman’s wife would have reacted to what she had listened to from Tonya that afternoon. That depended, really, on how much of it she already knew.
‘And you told Felicity about the man in the window at Lockleigh House?’
‘Yes, I did.’
Both Carole and Jude were kicking themselves for not having thought of Cecil Wardock earlier. Tom Ruthven had described him as ‘the eyes and ears of Lockleigh House’. Insomniac, sitting at his window rereading the books that he had published, he could easily have witnessed all the comings and goings through the little gate on the night in question. Cecil Wardock could well be the perfect witness. Why on earth hadn’t they thought to question him before?
‘Well, we’re on the spot,’ Carole concluded. ‘We must go and see him. No time like the present.’ She rose from the sofa, then looked down to see why Jude wasn’t doing the same.
‘What’s up?
‘There’s a call I have to make,’ said Jude miserably.
‘Ah.’ Carole knew who it would be to. ‘Shall I wait here for you?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
The bit of the pros’ office with the computers and phones in it was locked, but there was a kind of anteroom whose door was always open. On its walls were lists of match results, members’ handicaps and so on. From wooden pegs hung hire rackets and others that the pros had just restrung or repaired. There was also a glass-fronted cabinet, displaying new rackets and a variety of kit items marked with the distinctive Lockleigh House tennis court insignia. Crossed rackets underneath a fish.
It was from the relative security of this room, with its door closed, that Jude rang Piers.
‘Hello, light of my life,’ he answered cheerily. ‘I’m missing you like mad. When are we going to meet?’
‘Piers,’ said Jude evenly. ‘I’ve found out more about what happened at the court the night Reggie Playfair died.’
‘Oh.’
‘Including the fact that you were having an ongoing affair with Felicity Budgen.’
To give him his due, he didn’t come back with blustering denials. He just said, in a dull voice, ‘I was going to tell you about that, in time. About Felicity. And you have to believe me — that’s over.’
How many men over the years, thought Jude, have used that line to a new lover about a previous one. But at that moment she did actually believe Piers.
She heard the main entrance to the court click open, then the sound of footsteps walking softly down past the court towards the club room. Presumably one of the doubles players for the seven o’clock court.
‘Listen, that’s what caused it all,’ Piers protested.
‘Caused what?’
‘This whole mess. It was me saying to Felicity that things were over between us that set the whole thing in motion.’
‘And when did you tell her?’
‘Obviously — ’ he sounded exasperated now — ‘I told her when I met you.’
‘So it had been going on up until three weeks ago.’
‘To some extent. We didn’t see each other very often. I think the relationship was on the way out before I met you. But, anyway, Felicity got into a very bad state when I told her. And somehow once it was over, she seemed to get even more worried that Don would get to hear about it.’
‘And you understood what Reggie said about “secrets” during the Sec’s Cup to be a threat that he was going to spill the beans?’
‘I didn’t hear it that way. But Felicity did. She was desperately worried that Reggie was going to tell Don. She said we had to silence him.’
‘And so between you you came up with a rather elaborate plan to eliminate Reggie?’
‘No.’
‘And fortunately you had on hand a conveniently loopy estranged wife whom you could persuade to-’
‘I didn’t persuade-’
‘You know you’ve committed murder, Piers,’ said Jude solemnly.
‘No, I haven’t. You’ve got it all wrong.’
‘I don’t think so. You set up Jonquil to kill Reggie.’
Suddenly Jude heard Carole’s voice calling from the far end of the court. ‘Excuse me — can I help you?’ Then there was a sound of footsteps hurrying past and the clicks of the court door opening and closing.
And through all this, Jude could hear Piers Targett saying, ‘It wasn’t me who set Jonquil up. It was Felicity!’
Then Carole was at the door. ‘There’s this strange woman just come in, looking for Tonya. She said she was going to kill her!’
Jude looked out of the office window. Immaculately dressed as ever in a pale grey trouser suit, Felicity Budgen was walking sedately across the garden toward Lockleigh House.
In one hand was a handbag.
In the other was the metal crank used for adjusting the height of the real tennis net.