Fethering 09 (2008) - Blood at the Bookies (31 page)

Both women made as if to stand up, but were stilled by a wave of the knife.

“I’ll sort this out, Dad,” said Hamish. “Just as I sorted out your other problems.”

“What other problems?”

“I know how you feel about Soph, Dad. I know how you’d feel about her getting into the wrong company. Particularly the wrong male company. So I sorted things out for you.”

“What do you mean, Hamish? I don’t know what you’ve been doing.”

“No, I know you don’t.” There was a quiet smile of pride on the young man’s face. “You didn’t need to know. I did things the way you’ve always said they should be done. The British way. No fuss. No showing off. Not standing up and saying ‘Aren’t I wonderful?’ But that quiet British pride of doing the right thing without crowing about it.”

It was chilling to hear the young man echoing his father’s words. Ewan Urquhart cleared his throat uneasily and said, “What do you mean by doing the right thing, Hamish?”

“Getting rid of the wrong sort of people. People who threaten us Urquharts. I knew what you’d think about Soph going around with a foreigner, so I…dealt with the problem. Never wanted you to know anything about it, but these two busybodies have told you, so you may as well have the details. Soph told me about this chap she was seeing, this Pole, and I knew you’d disapprove. So I thought, ‘No need to get the old man worried about this. Time for me to show a bit of Urquhart initiative and sort the problem out for him.’

“So I got his address from Soph and went round to see him. He wasn’t in, but the door to his room was open. Inside I found…He had written songs about her, songs about Soph. There were tapes, CDs, a guitar. I took them all. I didn’t want any connection ever to be made between my sister and…
that foreigner
!”

“Sophia implied that she’d taken the guitar and things,” said Carole.

“Did she? No, I got them, then I gave them to her to dispose of as she thought fit.”

“So your sister knew what you had done?” asked Jude. “She knew it was you who stabbed Tadek?”

Hamish Urquhart smiled a patronizing smile. “I didn’t tell her. There was no need for her to be involved in anything distasteful. I’ve always tried to protect Sophia from the nasty things in life.”

Just as your father has, thought Jude. She looked across at Ewan Urquhart, whose face registered growing shock and disbelief as Hamish continued to describe his actions.

“Anyway I had just started driving back here, when I saw the Pole walking back to his room. I stopped the car, told him that I was Sophia’s brother and that she was back at the office and wanted to see him. He was over the moon about that and got into the car without a hint of suspicion. So I drove him back here. Knew you’d be off for a couple of hours doing a valuation, Dad, knew it was unlikely there’d be much trade on a Thursday afternoon.

“Anyway, soon as we get back here, his first question is: where’s Sophia? I tell him she must have just slipped out for a minute. Said she was probably shopping along the parade.”

Finally Carole and Jude had the explanation for Tadek’s appearance in the betting shop on the afternoon of his death. He had been looking for Sophia. His last moments of life had been spent looking for the woman he loved. Though whether they would ever be able to pass the information on to anyone else looked, at that moment, unlikely.

Hamish smiled in self-congratulation. “I thought that was rather clever. Thinking she was nearby and would be back in a minute, he relaxed. I asked him to take his coat off, and then revealed the real purpose of his visit. I told the sneaky bastard we took a pretty dim view of his interest in Soph and…” He made an eloquent gesture with his knife.

Ewan Urquhart was having difficulty in believing what he was hearing. “You stabbed him?”

“Yes. In the chest.” Hamish grinned with self-satisfaction. “Worked out rather well, really. I hadn’t decided what I was going to do with the body, but then he put his coat on and went out. Luck was on my side, of course—it always is for people who dare to be bold. The weather suddenly turned, and that hailstorm meant nobody saw him leaving the office. Then he went to the betting shop and…” He spread his hands wide. They all knew what had happened next. “I think I can be said to have used the Urquhart initiative.”

“And Sophia’s lecturer?” asked Ewan Urquhart, his eyes wide with terror.

“Yes. Andy Constant,” said Hamish in a self-congratulatory tone. “Soph had mentioned him to me, but I didn’t know until recently that he’d been coming on to her.” He grinned triumphantly at Jude. “In fact I had my suspicions confirmed when I was doing the valuation of your cottage. There was some writing in a notebook on your kitchen table which linked Andy Constant’s name to Soph’s.

“Well, I knew what your views would be about that, Dad—the idea of someone nearly your own age messing around with your daughter. And I was right, because I just heard you telling these ladies what you thought about that. So again I thought, no need to bother you about it. I took things into my own hands. Soph had told me a bit about Andy Constant’s habits, and I worked out that the Drama Studio would be the best place to get him. I borrowed Soph’s Barbour because I thought it’d make me look more like one of the students, you know, pass unnoticed on the campus. And I told Soph, if anyone asked, she should say I was at home with her yesterday evening. Oh, I thought the whole thing through. And I would have killed the lecturer too, if I hadn’t been disturbed. By you, I gather,” he said, turning with sudden vindictiveness towards Jude.

She said nothing. The knife was dangerously close, and Hamish Urquhart’s eyes showed that he was way beyond responding to logical argument.

“So what are you going to do now?” asked his father, very quietly.

Hamish gestured with the knife. “Deal with these two,” he said airily. “I’ll put their bodies in the van and dispose of them after dark.”

“Where?”

“I don’t need to bother you with the details, Dad. Trust me, it’s all in hand.” He still sounded like a parody of Ewan Urquhart. Hamish was relishing the reversal. For once, he was patronizing his father, he was the one making the decisions. “We need never talk about it again. And don’t you worry. If I find any more unsuitable men sniffing round Soph, trust me to deal with them.”

“Are you telling me, Hamish, that you killed Tadeusz Jankowski and nearly killed Andy Constant because you didn’t think they were suitable men to mix with your sister?”

“Yes, Dad. Of course. Come on, you’re not usually so slow on the uptake.” The boy guffawed. “Usually I’m the one in that role.”

“But, Hamish, don’t you realize, killing someone because they’re having a relationship you disapprove of, well…that’s no different from an ‘honour killing’, the kind of thing Asian immigrants get involved in?”

“Nonsense. Totally different. I’m just upholding the honour of the Urquharts, that’s all.” He looked around the room, then turned to his father and said compassionately, “Look, I’ll sort this out, Dad. No need for you to be involved. Why don’t you nip out to Polly’s for a coffee and a teacake? Come back in half an hour and the whole thing’ll be sorted.”

He spoke so airily that Carole and Jude had to remind themselves that what he was proposing to ‘sort’ was their deaths. To their dismay, Ewan Urquhart rose, zombie-like, from behind his desk and said, “Yes, Hamish. Maybe that’s a good idea.”

When his father reached the door, the son stopped him with an arm on his sleeve. “One thing you haven’t said, Dad…”

“What?”

“You haven’t said you’re proud of me for what I’ve done.” The appeal in the young man’s face was naked and pathetic.

“No, I haven’t,” said his father dully.

“Well, please. Say you’re proud of me.”

The two generations looked at each other. In Hamish Urquhart’s eyes was abject pleading, asking his father at last to give him a ration of praise. The expression in Ewan Urquhart’s eyes was harder to read.

The older man moved very quickly. With his left hand he snatched the knife from his son’s grasp. His right, bunched in a fist, crashed up into the young man’s chin.

Hamish Urquhart went down like a dead weight, thumping the back of his head on a shelf as he fell. He lay immobile. As ever, his father had proved stronger than he was.

Carole and Jude breathed out, letting the accumulated tension twitch out of their bodies.

H
amish Urquhart was taken in for questioning by the police later that Saturday morning. Their suspicions had been moving towards him for some time, and these were confirmed by their interview with Andy Constant in the hospital. He had also been identified by CCTV camera footage on the campus of the University of Clincham. Soon after, the Maiden Avenue entrance to the campus was bricked up.

In police custody Hamish Urquhart made no attempt to deny his crimes and was quickly charged with the murder of Tadeusz Jankowski and the attempted murder of Andy Constant. His defence team were in a quandary as to whether they should put in a plea of insanity. He showed no remorse about his actions, and kept telling them that he had finally done something that would make his father proud of him.

While he was on remand, his sister Sophia visited him as often as she could. Their father didn’t. In Ewan Urquhart’s view, his son had always been unsatisfactory. Now he was no longer on the scene, the older man found it easier and more convenient to forget that he had ever had a son.

And, once her brother had been sentenced to life, Sophia’s visits to him ceased.

She dropped out of the University of Clincharri before the end of that academic year and went to join her father in the offices of Urquhart & Pease. She learnt the business quickly and her good looks went down well with the male clients. There were plenty of admirers around, but none of her relationships lasted for more than a few months. All of the aspiring swains failed for the same reason. They couldn’t match the impossibly high standards set by Ewan Urquhart for ‘the kind of man worthy of my little Soph’.

Magic Dragon broke up even before Sophia left the university and she didn’t sing much after that. The gold of her hair faded and her face and neck thickened out, as she reconciled herself to her fate of looking after her father until he died. Which, of course, suited Ewan Urquhart perfectly. And everyone appreciated the sterling work Sophia put in making teas at Old Carthusian cricket matches. Maybe after her father’s death she might be able to carve out a life for herself, but nobody was putting bets on it.

Bets continued, however, to be put on horses at the betting shop (though most of the shop’s income continued to come from the fixed-price gaming machines). Sonny ‘Perfectly’ Frank continued to ask ‘Know anything?’ to everyone who came in. The waiters from the Golden Palace regularly abandoned serving sweet and sour pork for the quick fix of a bet and kept up their high-pitched wind-chime banter. Pauline continued to enjoy the warm, while Wes and Vie continued to neglect their decorating work. They still shouted at every race, surprised like circling goldfish every time their latest brilliant fancy turned out to be a failure.

One regular ceased to attend. After his flu Harold Peskett had resumed going to the betting shop with his elaborate scribbled permutations of doubles and trebles. Then finally one day the results worked for him, and he won over a thousand pounds. So great was the shock that he died of a heart attack right there in the betting shop. Though it was rather inconvenient for Ryan and Nikki, there was a general view that it would have been the way he wanted to go.

Melanie Newton never went back into a betting shop. She didn’t need to. Her laptop offered everything she required. She could play the virtual casinos and roulette wheels twenty-four hours a day. Which she did. And as her credit card debts grew, she kept taking up offers of new credit cards. And kept moving to ever more dingy accommodation, one step ahead of her creditors.

Andy Constant was not the kind of man to change. He recovered completely from his stab-wound, and the scar became another part of his seduction technique. He told wide-eyed female freshers how a woman had once been so desolated by his ending their relationship that she had persuaded her brother to attack him. He continued to entice women into his little kingdom of the Drama Studio. And his wife Esther continued to think that they had a happy marriage, though Andy’s workload did mean he often had to stay late at the university.

Whenever Jude thought of Andy Constant, she felt very sheepish and shamefaced. She realized how near she had come to making a complete fool of herself. But she knew that, if the same circumstances were to arise, she might again prove susceptible.

So she continued to do some good by her healing. And to wonder whether she really ought at some point to move on from Fethering.

Zofia Jankowska stayed there, though, moving after a few weeks out of Woodside Cottage to a flat of her own. She enrolled in a journalism course at the University of Clincham, and subsidized her studies by continuing to work at the Crown and Anchor. Ted Crisp grudgingly admitted that she was the best bar manager he’d ever had, ‘even though she is foreign’.

Carole Seddon watched the miracle of her granddaughter Lily’s development with growing awe. The child’s existence brought her closer to Stephen and Gaby, but she resisted their ongoing attempts to include David in family encounters.

And she appreciated increasingly the sedate friendship of Gerald Hume. They didn’t often go out for meals or anything like that. Such activities would have had too much of the flavour of a ‘date’ about them. But they did quite often meet in the betting shop.

Carole became very quickly convinced that Gerald’s ‘system’ for applying his accountancy skills to gambling was just as ineffectual as every other ‘system’ that had been invented since mankind had first bet on horses. But logic did occasionally work, and she drew satisfaction from her own infrequent wins (though the largest sum she ever bet was two pounds).

Her attitude had changed, though. She could begin to see the appeal of gambling. In fact, one rainy day some weeks after Hamish’s arrest when she was sitting in the betting shop with Gerald Hume, she surprised herself. Looking at the wet window, Gerald had turned to her with a grin. “Two quid says the raindrop on the left reaches the bottom of the window frame before the one on the right.”