Jude had offered to bring the television upstairs, but her neighbour had been appalled by the idea. For Carole having a television in a bedroom was an unpardonable offence against decency, on the level with actually watching the thing during the daytime (though there was an afternoon chat show to which she was becoming almost addicted, but that was a secret vice).
The killing in Fethering was deemed sufficiently important to make the national news, and the bulletin did at least provide them with some solid information. The dead man had been identified as Tadeusz Jankowski, aged twenty-four. He was a Polish immigrant who had been in Britain less than six months. He had died of stab wounds and the police were launching a murder investigation.
Though it was an awful thing to think, both Carole and Jude would have been terribly disappointed if he’d turned out to have died a natural death.
That evening Jude, still more shaken than she liked to admit to herself, decided that she’d have supper at Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. Before she left High Tor she heated up some soup, but the invalid didn’t seem interested in eating. Carole just sipped a little Lucozade and looked with affronted fascination at the magazines she had been given. Jude had a feeling that the minute she was alone in the house, Carole would pounce on them and start reading. The offer of a hot toddy was refused, but Jude said she’d come in later and maybe make one then. After her surge of excitement over the murder, Carole had now slumped back into total lethargy and voiced no objections to the idea of another visit from her neighbour.
In the Crown and Anchor it didn’t take long for the subject to get round to Fethering’s latest murder. After his usual pleasantries to Jude and the quick provision of her customary large Chilean Chardonnay, the landlord Ted Crisp was on to it straight away. ‘Nasty business down by the betting shop this afternoon.’
‘Tell me about it. I was the one who found the poor soul.’
‘Were you? Blimey, you and your mate Carole certainly have a knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where is she, by the way?’
‘Laid up with flu.’
‘Poor thing. Give her my best.’
‘Will do.’ It was still at times incongruous to Jude that her fastidious neighbour had once had a brief fling with the scruffy bearded landlord of the Crown and Anchor. That evening he was in his habitual faded jeans, though in deference to the cold weather he was wearing a faded zip-up hoodie over his customary faded sweatshirt.
‘Immigrant, I gather from the news,’ he said darkly. In spite of his background as a stand-up comedian, Ted Crisp was capable of being, to Jude’s mind, distressingly right-wing.
His point was quickly taken up by another customer, a man in his fifties, dressed in tweed jacket, salmon pink corduroy trousers and a tie that looked as if it should have been regimental but probably wasn’t. He was thick-set, but in quite good condition. His receding hair was sandy, freckled with grey. He was accompanied by a younger, similarly dressed version of himself, who had to be his son. The boy was probably mid-twenties, large and slightly ungainly, with a thick crest of auburn hair. What might once have been a well-muscled body was on the verge of giving way to fat.
Jude knew the older man by sight. He worked in one of Fethering’s estate agencies on the parade (however small the town in West Sussex, there always seemed to be business for more than one estate agent). The agency was called Urquhart & Pease, though whether the man had one of those as his surname Jude didn’t know.
‘Been only a matter of time before something like this happened,’ he announced in a voice that had been to all the right schools. ‘Ever since the wretched EU opened up our boundaries to all and sundry, it’s been an accident waiting to happen. I mean, I’m the last person to be racist …’ Wasn’t it strange, Jude reflected, how people who started sentences like that always ended up being exactly what they denied they were ‘… but I do think we ought to have a bit of a say in who we let into our country. We are islanders, after all, with everything that goes with that … and we have a long history of doing things our way. And I’m not saying all immigration is bad. I’m as tolerant as the next man …’ Which in West Sussex, thought Jude, wasn’t saying a lot ‘… and I’ve got friends and colleagues who … What are you allowed to say now? Have different ethnic backgrounds …? Pakistani chap works as our accountant, and he fits in, you’d never know … Doesn’t he, Hamish?’
The younger man agreed that their Pakistani accountant did fit in, and listened dutifully as the estate agent pontificated on. ‘But I still do think you have to draw the line somewhere … or we’ll see more things happening like we did today.’
Jude didn’t want to get drawn into the conversation – she knew she’d be on a hiding to nothing – but she couldn’t help asking, ‘So you think this man was murdered because he was an immigrant?’
‘Obviously.’ He flashed her an urbane and slightly patronizing smile. ‘I’m sorry, we don’t know each other. Ewan Urquhart.’ So he was one of the partners in the agency. ‘And my son Hamish.’
‘This is Jude,’ said Ted Crisp, as though he’d been remiss in not making the introduction before.
‘I’ve seen you walking along the High Street,’ said the estate agent. ‘Never fail to notice an attractive woman, you know.’ It was a knee-jerk compliment, a little too smoothly delivered. Jude decided she would not buy a house from this man.
‘But, Mr Urquhart, you were saying—’
‘Ewan, please.’
‘Ewan. You seemed to be making the assumption that this man’s death must have happened because he was an immigrant …?’
‘Well, my dear, in a situation like this the law of probability kicks in, doesn’t it? Get the country full of foreigners and they bring their own ways with them. So you get welfare scroungers, gangs, people traffickers …’ He seemed to be picking randomly at Daily Mail headlines. ‘And then with the ones from the Indian subcontinent you get these so-called “honour killings”. Bumping your sister off because you don’t like her choice of boyfriend. I mean, what kind of behaviour is that?’
‘Barbaric,’ his son supplied.
‘You’re right, Hamish. It’s barbaric. A culture of violence. We never used to have a culture of violence in this country.’
‘No? What about our good old traditional soccer hooligans …?’ Jude was tempted to add, ‘or our good old traditional public schools …?’, but didn’t.
Ewan Urquhart smiled blandly. He was clearly a man who thought he had a way with women and knew how to deal with their little foibles. ‘Ah, now I think you’re just being perverse, Jude. Much as we’d all like to believe there’s no connection between increased immigration and the crime statistics, I’m afraid the facts don’t leave much room for doubt. If you leave your borders open, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get a lot of riff-raff coming in. For me, I’m afraid, it all goes back to joining the Common Market. Worst move this country ever made.’
He was clearly preaching to the converted as far as Ted Crisp was concerned. ‘Couldn’t agree with you more, Ewan. I don’t want to be ordered about by bloody Brussels.’
‘Nor me,’ Hamish managed to slip in before his father continued. ‘Being British used to be a cause for pride. Not showing-off pride like some other countries are so fond of. Not standing up and saying “Aren’t I wonderful?” pride. But that quiet British
