by Simon Brett
Contents
Cover
Also by Simon Brett
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Also by Simon Brett
The decluttering mysteries
THE CLUTTER CORPSE *
The Fethering mysteries
BONES UNDER THE BEACH HUT
GUNS IN THE GALLERY *
THE CORPSE ON THE COURT *
THE STRANGLING ON THE STAGE *
THE TOMB IN TURKEY *
THE KILLING IN THE CAFÉ *
THE LIAR IN THE LIBRARY *
THE KILLER IN THE CHOIR *
The Charles Paris theatrical series
A RECONSTRUCTED CORPSE
SICKEN AND SO DIE
DEAD ROOM FARCE
A DECENT INTERVAL *
THE CINDERELLA KILLER *
A DEADLY HABIT *
The Mrs Pargeter mysteries
MRS PARGETER’S PACKAGE
MRS PARGETER’S POUND OF FLESH
MRS PARGETER’S PLOT
MRS PARGETER’S POINT OF HONOUR
MRS PARGETER’S PRINCIPLE *
MRS PARGETER’S PUBLIC RELATIONS *
* available from Severn House
GUILT AT THE GARAGE
Simon Brett
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2020
in Great Britain and in 2021 in the USA by
Crème de la Crime an imprint of
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.
Copyright © 2020 by Simon Brett.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-132-1 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-740-8 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0468-4 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
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Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
To
Ian, Patrick and Alan,
with thanks for their help
in explaining how cars work
ONE
It felt like a personal invasion. Carole Seddon’s white Renault was one of her most treasured possessions. Indeed, had she ever been asked to choose between it and her Labrador Gulliver, she might well have come down on the side of the car. And now the Renault had been vandalized. Someone had smashed in the back window. Granulated glass was scattered over the boot space and upholstery.
Carole was appalled. That something like this should have happened in Fethering, of all places! A village of unimpeachable middle-class propriety, minding its own business in West Sussex on the South Coast of England. She wouldn’t have been surprised had it happened while she still lived in London, but in Fethering … The barbarians really were at the gate.
Under normal circumstances the Renault would have spent the night locked safely in the garage of her house, High Tor. But the evening before, Carole had spent having dinner with her neighbour, Jude, at Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. She had not exceeded her customary intake of two large New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs but, though High Tor was on the High Street, less than a quarter of a mile away, the law-abiding conformist in Carole had done the responsible thing by leaving her car on the shopping parade and walking home. Jude, being more laid-back about everything, would have assessed the chances of being stopped by police on such a short trip and driven. But Jude didn’t have a car, anyway, and, of course, Carole was Carole – a woman in her fifties, thin, spiky, with a helmet of sharply cut grey hair and pale blue eyes that blinked from behind rimless glasses.
She became aware of the vandalism to her Renault the following morning when she took Gulliver for his walk. Carole had recently been experiencing a bit of pain in her right knee, but she wasn’t going to allow that to break her established routine. She just stopped more often on the beach while Gulliver scampered around her. Their regular journey passed the parade of shops. Her plan had been to let the dog stretch his legs on Fethering Beach, and then drive him back to High Tor, but that was before she had seen the smashed window.
Following fast on her initial reactions of shock and affront was one of shame. Carole Seddon had always felt guilty, frequently about things for which she could not possibly have had any responsibility. It was a legacy of her buttoned-up middle-class upbringing. She responded to this tendency towards self-blame by trying never to do anything that might invite censure. She was punctilious in her respect for the laws of the land and also for the more complex societal rules that obtained in a place like Fethering. Though she was not invited out much locally, when she was, she ensured that the reciprocal entertainment she offered was precisely balanced. Though she rarely engaged in conversation with acquaintances she met on her dog walks, she always gave them the minimum greeting of a ‘Fethering nod’. Any service from a neighbour, however small, was rewarded with a card of thanks. Though by nature distant and standoffish, Carole Seddon worked very hard not to appear distant and standoffish. Sadly, the outcome of these efforts was only to make her appear even more distant and standoffish.
Carole’s nirvana would have been to live in a world where she passed completely unnoticed. But in an English country village, such anonymity is unobtainable.
The shame prompted by the sight of her vandalized car bore this out. The Renault was hers. Everyone in Fethering knew that the Renault was hers. Everyone who saw the smashed rear window would,
to Carole’s somewhat paranoid mind, be sniggering at her expense. They would be discussing her misfortune behind her back. That, to Carole, would be as much of a personal invasion as the vandalism itself. So, her first priority was to remove the evidence. To minimize the imagined derision from her neighbours, Carole needed to get the glass replaced as soon as possible.
That meant a visit to Shefford’s, Fethering’s only garage. Though she had bought the car new from a Renault dealer in Brighton, as soon as the free services under guarantee ended, she had transferred her custom to the local man. Bill Shefford had run the garage for as long as anyone in Fethering could remember. Now in his seventies, the general view in the village was that he would soon be handing over the reins to his son Billy, who had worked in the business since he left school. This opinion was unsupported by anything said by Bill himself. The word ‘retirement’ had never been heard to pass his lips. He behaved like someone who would work for ever.
Carole valued the regular contact she had established with Shefford’s. She knew, from uncomfortable experience, how easily women could be patronized by men in the motor trade. Though she would never have claimed any proficiency with machines, she had still felt diminished by the way she had been treated at the Brighton dealership. There had been no overt rudeness, just an underlying don’t-you-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it attitude which she found distinctly unwelcome.
At Shefford’s, though, her ignorance of motoring matters was accepted but not dwelled on. Bill was canny in the management of his mature lady customers. Carole could drop in there with the tiniest anxiety about a flashing warning light and know she would get instant and courteous attention.
He had a particularly good reputation for dealing with the elderly of Fethering. When servicing was due, he would pick up the cars from their homes and return them there. And for those who needed one, a courtesy car was always available. It wasn’t a flashy new one with the Shefford’s logo on the side, but it was always safe and reliable. And for his less mobile pensionable customers, Bill would personally fill up their cars with fuel, so that they didn’t have to get out. He was one of the good guys.
So, Carole’s first instinct on seeing her vandalized car was to walk Gulliver back to High Tor – she didn’t want him to get cut by shards of glass – then return to the car and drive it straight to Shefford’s.
The garage was on the northern edge of the village, just on the edge of the Downside Estate. This sector was made up of what the older and richer residents of Fethering still referred to as ‘council houses’, though quite a few of them, following Margaret Thatcher’s lucrative initiative, were now in private ownership. The younger and richer residents of Fethering described the estate, with just the same kind of snobbery, as ‘social housing’. Sadly, because the train line from Fethering to Fedborough, and then on up to London Victoria, followed the course of the River Fether, the Downside Estate could not be described as ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, but there was a strong feeling among the more genteel residents that it should be.
Most people in Fethering only visited Shefford’s to get fuel. The nearest other filling stations were in Fedborough to the north and Worthing to the east. But the garage also offered a repair and parts services, and a fairly low-key second-hand car business, whose offers, with their marked prices behind the windscreens, were lined up on the forecourt. They all looked rather dusty and neglected.
Carole parked the Renault at the end of the used-car row, out of the way of anyone using the petrol pumps. She went to the effort of reversing in, so that the smashed window could not be seen by passing walkers or from cars. Again, she didn’t want people gossiping about her.
She went inside to the office, which hadn’t changed since the time she had been in Fethering. This was where people paid for their fuel. There was a kind of kiosk, with till and control panel to start the pumps, of which there were only four on the forecourt. The fact that it was not permanently manned showed how slow the trade in fuel was. Not being on the main road, Shefford’s customers were mostly Fethering locals – and a lot of those favoured the cheaper prices at the big supermarkets, like Tesco at Littlehampton or Sainsbury’s at Rustington.
The room also acted as reception for people bringing their cars in for service. A rather threadbare sofa and a couple of plastic chairs were available for those waiting. There was an antiquated machine which delivered tea and coffee into plastic cups. Having tried its product once, Carole had not repeated the experiment. It was very watery stuff. (Though she had for a long time resisted the current faddishness about the infinite variations with Italian names, even Carole had become pickier about the kind of coffee she drank.)
Though most garages had become minimarkets, Shefford’s had not gone down that route. The only items for sale were car-related – plastic containers of oil, light bulbs, wiper blades, cleaning products, de-icers, air fresheners. On the walls were curling posters of other motoring products and a large calendar, provided courtesy of the local Chinese restaurant. Over everything was a patina of dust. It was a while since Carole had been in Shefford’s, and she’d forgotten how run-down the whole place was.
The reception area was empty, but through a glass partition could be seen a back office where a woman with unlikely magenta hair was working away in front of a deep monitor whose beige plastic was soiled by oily fingerprints. Beside her keyboard stood a tall desktop computer from another generation. There was access from the room to the fuel payment kiosk. Magenta hair was in charge of that. The other door between the two offices was ajar and the woman looked up at Carole’s entrance.
‘Can I help?’ Her voice was harsh, nasal and loud.
‘Yes. Good morning.’ Following Fethering convention, though she knew perfectly well who the woman was, Carole didn’t use her name. Frankie had done the books and performed various other secretarial duties for Shefford’s for as long as anyone could remember. She was older than Carole, so probably round the sixty mark, and unmarried. The fierce red hair was just the latest manifestation of Frankie’s urge to draw attention to herself. Changing hairstyles, piercings and tattoos had featured much over the years, and her wardrobe defiantly avoided any two garments that might actually go together. She was a frequent – and loud – visitor to the Crown and Anchor, in the company of a sequence of unsuitable men. She ought to have been a rather sad figure, but somehow contrived not to be.
‘Is Bill about?’ Carole continued.
‘He was here a moment ago. Probably out in the workshop.’
‘Would he mind if I …?’
‘No, go on through.’ Frankie gestured to the door at the back of the reception area.
The workshop was a corrugated-iron-roofed extension which had been there almost as long as the garage. Over the years, the minimum of patching and repair work had been carried out when required, but nothing that would qualify under the title of ‘refurbishment’. Carole found the shabbiness rather comforting; for her it exuded an air of unfussy competence. She certainly preferred it to the gleaming and impersonal efficiency of the workshop from which she had collected the new Renault in Brighton.
Hanging from the walls were a variety of tools and equipment, most of whose functions she could only guess at. There were racks of new tyres and electrical appliances. The space was flooded with light; its double doors had been wheeled back, letting in the thin February sunshine. Cars awaiting service, along with a battered recovery truck bearing a peeling ‘Shefford’s’ logo on the side, were parked rather randomly outside against a wire-netting fence.
The workshop had space for two cars to be worked on at a time. On one side a fairly new BMW 1 Series hatchback was raised some six feet above the ground on a still-shiny four-post hydraulic lift; on the other, at ground level, stood a green Morris Traveller. (Carole, whose only interest in a car was: a) that it was a Renault, and b) that it would get her from A to B, could not of course have identified the models with such precision. She would have categorized them as �
��one of those flashy German things’ and ‘an old car with wood on it, like a shooting brake’.)
Apart from the vehicles, the workshop appeared to be empty. Reckoning Bill must be working outside and calling his name, Carole moved towards the doors.
She was surprised to hear, apparently from beneath the ground, his voice asking, ‘Can I help you?’
This strangeness was quickly explained, as the garage owner appeared, carrying a torch from the inspection pit beneath the Morris Traveller. He was stocky, pushing seventy, and still had the freckled complexion of someone with red hair. The hair itself, though, was now white and sparse, combed over in inadequate cover.
‘Ah. Mrs Seddon. Good morning.’
‘Good morning, Bill.’ This had been the unspoken protocol since their first meeting. On his instruction, she called him ‘Bill’, but to him she was always ‘Mrs Seddon’.
‘What can I do you for?’ he asked. It was almost like a catchphrase for Bill Shefford.
‘My Renault has been vandalized,’ Carole replied dramatically. ‘Someone has smashed in the back window.’
‘Oh dear. That’s bad luck. Where did it happen?’
‘On the parade, right here in Fethering!’ She still couldn’t get over the shock of it.
‘Youngsters, I bet,’ said Bill wryly. ‘Parents don’t instil any discipline into them these days, just let them get on with playing all these computer games and sniffing glue.’
Carole gave an enigmatic smile rather than a full endorsement of his view. She didn’t want to sound too much like a Daily Mail reader. She treasured the superiority of taking The Times.
‘Anyway,’ she asked peremptorily, ‘could you sort it out as soon as possible?’
He did that indrawn-breath thing so beloved of doubting workmen. ‘Replacing glass is a specialist job, Mrs Seddon. Lots of firms out there who do it.’
‘Well, could you organize one of them to come and do my Renault?’