Guns in the Gallery

‘You’re lying. Of course you did.’ The girl’s mouth was set in a line of defiance. ‘It’s not too difficult to work out, you know, Chervil. And it’s even easier to work out who you showed the suicide note to. There aren’t that many people who you’d invite into your bedroom, are there?’ Jude waited for a response, but once more in vain. ‘Why did you show the suicide note to Giles, Chervil?’

The younger woman’s shoulders sagged suddenly. All the fight had gone out of her. ‘It was when we first started going out together – or at least I wanted us to go out together, but Giles wasn’t so sure. Anyway, I’d met him for a drink at the Crown and Anchor in Fethering and then we’d gone back to the Cornelian Gallery. He was still seeing Fennel, and I wanted to show him that she wouldn’t be good for him, that if he kept seeing her he’d get into the same kind of emotional blackmail trap as Daddy had.’

‘So you actually used the suicide note to persuade Giles to stop going out with Fennel and to start going out with you?’

‘Yes,’ Chervil Whittaker replied. And the note of triumph in her voice revealed the depths of the jealousy she had always felt for her dead sister.

TWENTY-EIGHT

‘So Chervil didn’t see Giles the night of Fennel’s death?’ asked Carole.

‘No. She left him at the Private View. He was supposed to be joining her at Butterwyke House, but then he texted her to say that he was out drinking with Denzil Willoughby and would be a bit late. He didn’t turn up till the following morning.’

‘Did Chervil say why she went to the treatment yurt in the middle of the night?’

‘She gave me some guff about waking up with a sense of foreboding and being drawn towards the place, which sounded like a pack of lies to me.’

‘I’m surprised.’

Carole’s words had Jude fazed for a moment, but then she got it. The implication was that ‘a sense of foreboding’ and ‘being drawn towards the place’ were exactly the kind of New Age mumbo-jumbo that appealed to Jude. She didn’t bother to rise to the insinuation, instead saying, ‘At least we now know for sure that it was murder.’

‘And we know that Giles Green was the perpetrator.’

‘I’m not so convinced about that. He was certainly involved, but I’m wondering whether they planned the thing together.’

‘Hm. And the last message on Fennel’s mobile was presumably from Giles?’

‘From his number, yes. Chervil admitted that.’

They were back in the High Tor kitchen. By the cold Aga, Gulliver looked balefully at the bandage on his infected paw. In the Renault on the way back from the vet’s he’d tried to chew it off, but now recognized that was a battle he was not going to win.

Carole tapped her teeth thoughtfully. ‘Of course, Giles Green has in theory got an alibi for the relevant night.’

‘Oh, come on, Carole. “Drinking with Denzil Willoughby at the Dauncey Hotel”? What kind of an alibi’s that? Denzil’s virtually told us that those two’d tell any lie to get the other one out of a spot.’

‘Yes.’ Carole looked at her watch. ‘Well, one thing I think we can be pretty sure of is that by now Giles Green has had a full action replay of the conversation you’ve just had with Chervil.’

‘I would think so, yes.’

‘Which might of course mean that you are now at risk. That old cliché beloved of crime writers about a person who’s killed once not being afraid to do so again.’

‘I don’t know why you’re looking so smug, Carole. He knows that you were involved in the investigation too. If I’m at risk, I’m certainly not the only one.’

‘So the question is: what do we do? Just wait till Giles Green contacts us?’

Jude spread her hands helplessly wide. ‘What else can we do?’

‘Well, now we definitely know it was murder, maybe you should get back in touch with your friend Detective Inspector Hodgkinson and suggest she reopens the official enquiry . . .?’

‘Ooh.’ A dubious look. ‘I’m not sure that we’ve got enough evidence to do that yet, have we?’

Carole grinned broadly. ‘I’m so glad you said that, Jude.’ Handing over to the cops during one of their investigations always did seem to be a bit of a cop-out.

Jude was unsurprised to have a phone call that Thursday afternoon from Giles Green. He wanted to come and see her. She agreed, but told him that Carole would be there too. Partly she wanted a witness for anything the young man might say, but she had a safety motive too. If Giles really had murdered Fennel Whittaker . . .

He arrived much less flustered than either Ned or Chervil had been. As ever, he was wearing a pinstriped suit (Carole and Jude were beginning to wonder whether he possessed any casual clothes). He accepted the offer of a cup of coffee, and his demeanour was one of urbane reasonableness. There’s been some minor misunderstanding, his manner seemed to say, which I’m sure we can sort out very quickly.

When they were all supplied with drinks, Jude said, ‘I assume that Chervil has told you about the conversation we had earlier.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, it would seem to me,’ said Carole rather beadily, ‘that you have some explanations to provide.’