Guns in the Gallery

Once again, Nikki Green was completely unembarrassed as she said, ‘I’m not. I never liked her. And I think maybe now she’s gone, it’ll be a good thing for Denzil. Not straight away, of course. He’ll be very cut up. But in a few years I think he’ll realize that she was an impossible woman to please and he no longer has to expend so much effort trying to please her.’

‘Did Denzil talk to you about us?’ asked Carole suddenly.

Nikki Green looked astonished at the question. ‘No. Why the hell should he? He hardly knows you. He didn’t know you were going to appear on his doorstep this morning.’

‘Well, he seemed to know about us, even seemed to be expecting us. He’d somehow got the impression from Giles’s mother that we were showing too much interest in Fennel Whittaker’s death.’

‘How do you mean, “too much interest”?’

‘Denzil had got the idea we might have thought Fennel’s death wasn’t suicide at all.’

‘Well, if it wasn’t, it was a pretty unusual accident.’

‘Not an accident. Murder.’

That did stop Nikki Green in her tracks. Her eyes widened as she looked from one woman to the other. ‘And is that what you think? That Fennel was murdered?’

‘We think it’s a possibility,’ said Jude.

Nikki didn’t ask why they thought that. She was silent while she assessed the idea, mentally testing it for feasibility. Then she asked, ‘If you’re talking about murder, then that means that you must have cast someone in the role of murderer.’

‘We haven’t quite got that far,’ said Jude. ‘We are still kind of considering the possibilities.’

‘And Denzil was one of them?’

‘He was the person Fennel bawled out at the Private View.’

‘Yes, but for someone like Denzil that was just water off a duck’s back. It didn’t get to him at all. He’d regard it just as an endorsement of his self-image as the Great Lover.’

‘There was something else,’ said Carole. ‘We also heard a rumour that Denzil had a habit of being violent towards his girlfriends.’

She didn’t attribute the rumour to Sam Torino, but it had a strong effect on Nikki Green. For the first time in their conversation she was really angry. ‘That is complete nonsense!’ she snapped. ‘Denzil may be capable of all kinds of mental cruelty – he’s totally self-centred – but there’s no way he’d ever physically hurt anyone. Now, if you were talking about Giles, that would be a different matter altogether . . .’

On the train back to Fethering, Carole and Jude were as puzzled as each other. ‘I was inclined to believe Nikki,’ said Jude.

‘About Denzil’s violence towards women?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why would Sam Torino have mentioned it? This friend of hers he was supposed to have beaten up?’

Jude tapped her chin pensively. ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out.’

‘On the other hand, Nikki was pretty categorical about Giles having a tendency towards violence. And with her being married to him, you’d have to believe her on that.’

‘Hm . . . I sort of get the feeling that somebody’s covering up for someone, but I can’t work out who’s covering up for who.’

‘No,’ said Carole thoughtfully. ‘And I keep coming back to that mutual alibi of Denzil and Giles for the night of Fennel’s death. Is that where the cover-up was?’

That evening Carole Seddon sat in front of her laptop and googled ‘Addison Willoughby’. There were plenty of results. His agency’s official website chronicled his phenomenal success, building up a small company by skilful acquisitions into one of the world’s most successful advertising agencies. Their client list embraced a wide range of global companies.

Images of Addison Willoughby showed him to be a handsome man in his sixties, dressed in expensively casual tieless style.

There appeared to be no reference to his private life. Even on Wikipedia his wife Philomena was not mentioned. Nor was there anything about his relationship to challenging contemporary artist Denzil Willoughby.

Carole Seddon found that rather odd.

TWENTY-THREE

‘I’m afraid my parents always regarded Elvis Presley as rather common,’ said Carole Seddon.

‘Ah,’ said Jude, wondering why somehow she wasn’t surprised, and also trying not to smile.

‘Anyway, I’m rather too young for him to have been a major influence on my life. I’m more of the Beatles generation.’ Though the idea of Carole having been part of the Swinging Sixties was an incongruous one. ‘I don’t think this evening at the Crown and Anchor really sounds my sort of thing.’

‘It may not be your sort of thing, but I think we should be there to support Ted.’

‘Ted can manage perfectly well without me. He won’t notice whether I’m there or not.’

‘That’s not the point. I should think there’s also a strong chance that Bonita Green will be there. Spider works for her, after all. We might get an opportunity to find out more about Fennel Whittaker.’

That argument clinched it, of course. To Carole Seddon’s mind, Elvis Presley would always remain common, but one could even put up with commonness in the cause of an investigation.