But then Pauline added, rather mischievously, ‘Though, of course, the reason for this murder could be something else entirely.’
‘Yes, but going along for a moment with your husband’s theory … the question we should be asking is: what did Tadeusz Jankowski know that represented a threat to someone else?’
‘That’s the question. Mind you, finding the answer might be more difficult, since we don’t know anything about the poor bugger except for his unpronounceable name.’
Jude nodded ruefully. It always came back to the same thing for amateur detectives; they suffered from a dearth of information.
‘And there’s nothing else,’ she asked without much hope, ‘that you can remember about when you saw him in October? Presumably he wasn’t wearing the big overcoat?’
‘No, T-shirt and jeans, as far as I remember.’
‘And you’ve said you don’t recall him going up to the counter to place a bet … You didn’t see him speak to anyone, did you?’
To her surprise, Jude’s last despairing question brought a response. ‘Oh yes, he did talk to someone.’
‘Really? Who?’
‘A woman who’s often in there.’
A spark of excitement had rekindled in Jude. ‘One of the regulars?’
‘She used to be in there a lot. Well-dressed woman, early forties maybe.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Ah, I never found that out. Kept herself to herself. Put on a lot of bets, but never joined in any of the backchat.’
‘But you could point her out to me if she came into the betting shop?’
‘Oh yes, of course I could.’
Jude’s pulse quickened. At least she’d got the beginnings of a lead.
‘Mind you,’ Pauline went on, ‘she hasn’t been in for some months.’
‘Oh? Since when?’
‘I suppose I stopped seeing her …’ The old lady screwed up her face with the effort of memory ‘… quite a few months back … October probably.’
‘Just after you’d seen her talking to Tadeusz Jankowski?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ replied Pauline, before cramming a whole coconut kiss into her mouth.
‘I went back to the betting shop and asked around,’ Jude told Carole. ‘Most of them remembered the woman all right, but none of them had ever seen her off the premises.’
‘Did you get a name?’
‘No.’
‘Well, couldn’t you have asked the manager?’
‘I did ask the manager, Carole.’
‘Without giving away why you were interested?’
‘Of course without giving away why I was interested. I said something about a woman matching the description of a friend of mine having been seen in the betting shop and described her as Pauline had to me.’
‘You do seem to find lying easy, Jude.’
‘Yes, never been a problem for me. Except in certain relationship situations.’
‘Ah.’ Though intrigued, Carole didn’t feel moved to pursue that subject.
‘Anyway, what did the manager say to you?’
‘Like everyone else, Ryan remembered the woman, but didn’t have a name for her.’
‘Surely they keep records?’
‘Placing a bet is an anonymous exercise. Generally speaking, you pay in cash and, unless you have an account, no one has a clue who you are.’
‘Hm.’ Carole still looked a bit pale, but she was a lot better than she had been at the end of the previous week. Her hands were wrapped round a cup of coffee in the kitchen at High Tor. By the Aga Gulliver snuffled comfortably. His mistress was taking him out for walks again and all was even more serene in his comfortable doggy world.
‘So this woman,’ she went on, ‘used to be a regular at the betting shop …?’
‘Semi-regular, it seems. She didn’t go absolutely every afternoon, and she never stayed for long.’
‘All right. So she was a semi-regular till round October … and then suddenly she disappeared?’
‘I think that’s over-dramatic, Carole. She stopped going into the betting shop, that’s all. We have no evidence that she disappeared from the rest of her life … chiefly because we know absolutely nothing about the rest of her life. Anything might have happened. Most likely she moved out of the area. Or maybe she lost interest in the horses … or she underwent a religious conversion and decided that gambling was sinful … There are so many possibilities that, quite honestly, any of them could be viable.’
Carole looked thoughtful. Though she was still physically weakened by the flu, her brain was once again firing on all cylinders. ‘So this unknown woman was in the betting shop one day last October … and Tadeusz Jankowski came into the place and spoke to her?’
‘That’s what Pauline told me.’
‘And did he speak to her as though he knew her?’
‘Apparently, yes.’
‘So we have got something to go on.’
‘Not much. A man about whom we know nothing except his name met a woman whose name we don’t even know … I think it’d be a while before we could get that case to court.’
‘But it’s interesting. Did any of the other regulars see Tadeusz Jankowski last October?’
‘I asked them. They all said no. But although they’re regulars, they’re not there every single day. Or it’s quite possible he did go in when they were there and they didn’t notice. Not everyone has Pauline’s photographic memory for faces.’
‘But the manager …’
‘Yes, there’s something funny there. He told me it’s part of his job to clock everyone who goes in and out of the place. And he also told me he’d never seen the dead man before last Thursday.’
‘So something doesn’t quite ring true, does it?’
‘Well, unless Pauline’s lying and, although I’m sure she’s quite capable of it in the right circumstances, I can’t imagine why she’d do so in this instance.’
‘So what can we do?’
‘I think, given our current lack of information, the only thing we can do is to try and get a quiet word with Ryan.’
SEVEN
Jude went into the betting shop the following morning, the Tuesday, at around eleven, thinking it would be a good time to talk to the manager before the main racing fixtures started. But Ryan wasn’t there. His place had been taken by an older man of uncongenial appearance. Jude’s immediate thought was that the police had spotted the same inconsistency in Ryan’s statements that she had, and he was ‘helping them with their enquiries’. But a question to the vacuous Nikki provided a much less dramatic explanation. Ryan was laid up with the ‘nasty flu’ that had been going round.
At a loose end, Jude decided that she and Carole should have lunch at the Crown and Anchor. Her neighbour initially opposed the idea – she opposed anything that smacked of self-indulgence – but was persuaded. She was, after all, in a convalescent state after her own bout of flu. She wasn’t yet up to cooking for herself. A meal out would be a necessary