Guns in the Gallery

As consciousness returned, she began to piece together the events of the previous night. She remembered arriving in the yurt with Fennel. She remembered checking whether they should be using the place, with Walden about to open the following day, and the reassurance that only two of the bigger yurts had been booked for the first weekend. ‘And staff’ll come in and clean the place out,’ Fennel had said. ‘Always plenty of staff to do everything at Butterwyke House.’

‘But don’t you think you should tell Chervil you’re here?’

‘Oh, if you insist,’ Fennel had said grudgingly, and dashed off a text to her sister.

Jude also recollected that they had drunk a lot. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see one empty bottle and she wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they’d drunk the other one too. Or maybe there had been more. She did have a vague recollection of Fennel having left the yurt at some point in the night. Had that been to get more booze from the house? No, it had been to fetch her latest artwork, the watercolours she’d done in the previous few days. And Jude remembered looking at the pictures, thinking how good they were and how much more serene than the agonized images of earlier in the week.

She also had a recollection of the girl getting a text on her mobile, though quite when that had been she couldn’t be sure.

But through the woolliness of her head, what Jude did remember from her night was how well they had got on together, more like two contemporaries than a pair of women with nearly thirty years between them. And she also recalled how positive Fennel Whittaker had sounded. Yes, she was very drunk, but in a strange way she’d been in control, rational, optimistic about her future. Bawling out Denzil Willoughby in public may not have pleased the guests at the Private View, but it seemed at least to have given Fennel some kind of expiation.

Jude looked across to the other bed, hoping that the girl was safely sleeping off the effects of her prodigious alcohol consumption.

With a shadow of foreboding, she saw that Fennel wasn’t there. Not in the bed, not in the yurt.

Increasingly anxious, Jude slipped on her shoes and hurried outside. She noticed dew on the grass, it was still quite early. Not of course that the glampers of Walden would actually have to step on grass and risk getting their feet wet. Paved pathways linked the yurts.

The door to the one designated as gym and spa was half open. Jude hurried across.

The sight that met her was appalling. Fennel Whittaker was slumped in a chair beside a small table on which stood a half-empty bottle of wine and a Sabatier kitchen knife. On the floor lay her most recent watercolours.

The blood had almost stopped dripping from the girl’s slashed wrists. But it seemed to be everywhere else, splashed and spreading across the white tiles.

TEN

Strange how quickly a hangover can vanish. There seemed to be so much happening that Jude didn’t have time to notice her headache. First she’d had the awful task of rousing the owners of Butterwyke House and telling them that their daughter was dead.

She remembered particularly Sheena Whittaker’s response, simultaneously bursting into tears and saying, with something that sounded almost like relief, ‘At least we don’t have to worry about it happening any more. The worst has happened.’

It was a strange reaction, one that Jude would try to analyse when she had more leisure. But the immediate demands on her time included taking Ned to the scene of his daughter’s death, knowing that he’d witnessed something similar before in the Pimlico flat. He seemed physically to shrink with the impact of what he saw. Jude knew quite a lot about the bond between fathers and their first-born daughters, and she knew that the wound that had just been inflicted on Ned Whittaker would never fully heal.

Then there was the calling of the police, the half-hearted drinking of coffee until they arrived, followed by the complete official takeover of the situation. As the one who had found the body, Jude was given some fairly basic interrogation about the details of her discovery. She was asked for her contact details and told that there was likely to be further questioning. But, for the time being, she was free to go home. To her surprise she saw that it was still not yet nine o’clock.

Jude had rung for a cab and, while she waited in the stricken hallway of Butterwyke House, she heard the sound of a car drawing up on the gravel outside. Chervil, presumably snatched from the arms of Giles Green by a telephone summons from her parents, burst in through the doors, seeing Jude and saying, ‘Isn’t this bloody typical? Are there any lengths Fennel wouldn’t go to, to spoil one of my projects?’

Another question to be pondered on when Jude had more leisure. Which she didn’t have in the half-hour cab ride back to Fethering. She was still in shock and the only question in her mind was whether she could have done anything to save the life of Fennel Whittaker.