– Mr Huff – likes birds,’ she counters. ‘He made a huge fuss of the parrot when he visited. Teobaldo even allowed him to stroke his chest. And Teobaldo hates people. He won’t even let me do that. We spent ages talking about the birds of Me-hico. He collects feathers – exotic feathers. For the shrunken heads. But he never kills anything. He’s very strong on conservation. Very respectful of the environment which I thought was just lovely.’
‘Shrunken …?’ I echo weakly, half-remembering something along the same lines that Mrs Barrow had said.
‘Didn’t he tell you? He has a business which manufactures shrunken heads. The kind you get in Peru. He makes them in Me-hico and exports them. They’re incredibly beautiful. He showed me a sales pamphlet. I mean disgusting but beautiful. Hand-stitched. Extraordinary. Some sell for thousands of dollars. People collect them. He makes them with carved animal bones and skins. He has a small team of ex-gangsters and addicts in Monterrey working for him. The whole enterprise is run like a kind of social programme …’
I think it would be fair to say that Mrs Alys Jane Drury (widow) has been thoroughly won over by Mr Frankin D. Huff (con-artist). The woman is besotted.
‘Rather odd, don’t you think,’ I muse, ‘that Mr Huff should come here with the express intention of finding out things about you, and then should end up talking endlessly all about himself?’ I pause, meaningfully. ‘Did it ever dawn on you that maybe …?’
‘It might all be just a ruse?’ Alys promptly fills in for me, sharp as a tack. ‘A “technique”? To beguile me? Uh, yes. It did occur to me, as a matter of fact.’
‘Oh,’ I say, deflated, ‘well, good.’
‘It may interest you to know that several times in the course of our labyrinthine discussions he actually encouraged me to hold things back. He’d say, “Let’s not trespass any further into that, Alys. I can see how you’re struggling. Save it. Preserve it. Some things need to remain truly inviolate …”’
‘Are you serious?!’
After even only the briefest of acquaintances with Mr Huff, I find it difficult to imagine him readily employing the phrase ‘truly inviolate’.
‘Absolutely,’ Alys insists.
‘And then what?’ I ask.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well did you change the subject?’
‘Uh …’ Alys ponders this for a moment. ‘Sometimes. Yes.’
I roll my eyes and start to walk over towards the window, but am prevented from doing so by the tangled phone cord. I grimace and start the laborious task of unwinding it.
‘Well, for what it’s worth, he was still incredibly rude about Rogue’s weight,’ I mutter (smarting at the mere memory), ‘unforgivably rude.’
‘Rogue is horrendously overweight, Carla,’ Alys sighs, ‘Rolfie too, for that matter. Your father systematically overfeeds them. It’s awful – strange – cruel. You’re always moaning on about it yourself …’
She has me there, admittedly.
‘In Shimmy’s defence,’ she blithely continues, ‘it’s probably the expression of some profound, deep-seated emotional conflict or trauma, possibly relating to the persecution of the Jews.’
‘He is fat,’ I murmur, slightly shame-faced now, ‘but to be so … so forthright about it, and so mean, so horribly judgemental—’
‘Mr Huff has been resident in Pett Level for almost six weeks now,’ Alys interrupts, ‘and in that entire time has hardly breathed so much as a word to you, Carla. Perhaps you might be feeling a little … I don’t know … sidelined? Ignored? Piqued?’
‘That’s ridiculous!’ I exclaim, horrified. ‘I never had any intention of speaking to the man! I’ve been actively avoiding him. Why else did I hire Mrs Barrow to clean the cottage? To act as a go-between? I was actually glad he didn’t approach me – relieved.’
‘Sorry …’ Alys interjects, ‘there’s interference on the line.’
‘I said I was glad he didn’t approach me,’ I repeat, louder, briefly desisting from my frenzied untangling.
‘Right. Okay. So that’s why you approached him this afternoon …’ she wryly observes.
‘I didn’t!’ I squeak. ‘He’s staying in the cottage, my cottage, and by all accounts he’s gradually dismantling it, piece by piece. His wife ran over Mame’s cat, for heaven’s sake! What other option did I have? He lied about his true identity on the lease. They signed in under Ashe …’
‘Yes, yes. And of course you just naturally presumed …?’ I can hear the infuriating smile in Alys’s voice, and behind it (like the alternating layers of blue-grey wash in the lowering sky of a fine watercolour painting) a parrot muttering, ‘Baldo! Baldo! Baldo! Baldo!’ culminating with a deafening, ‘WAH!’
‘Presumed what?’ I demand, wincing (although I know exactly what she’s about to say).
‘That he wanted to talk to you. That he’s obsessed by you – stalking you. That you would naturally be the “crucial witness”. The main focus. The hidden key to it all! You’ve been actively looking forward to rejecting his advances, but he hasn’t actually made any. He’s been the perfect gentleman! Face it, Carla, you’re more obsessed than he is!’
‘I didn’t presume anything …’ I grumble, wounded. Once again – as a distraction – I start untangling the line. ‘Although it was perfectly reasonable to assume that after he’d approached pretty much everyone even remotely connected to the Cleary visit … I mean he tracked down the milkman, Alys! Old Billy Peck who was always deaf as a post. He tracked him down. And the woman who ran the mobile library – I don’t even remember her name!’
‘Meredith Brown. So perhaps he got what he needed from other sources?’ Alys suggests brightly.
‘Yes. Yes. Maybe he did.’ I sullenly play along.
‘I mean it’s not anything too in-depth that he’s after, just a series of captions for this little book of photographs. By Kimberly Couzens. That Canadian woman. The photographer. You know – the one who was with Mr Cleary when …’
‘Well hopefully he’s satisfied with what he’s got,’ I concur, moving a couple of feet closer to the window (as a consequence of my untangling), ‘and now he’ll clear off and leave us all in peace.’
‘Hopefully,’ she echoes (perhaps not entirely convinced).
‘Is it raining in Hove?’ I wonder.
‘It was earlier. Fairlight?’
‘Tipping it down.’
I gaze out at the rain.
‘Are you thinking of heading back?’
