The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  But everyone finds their own way of coping with life, and I’m very glad that Dodge is part – even though I’m not sure what part – of mine.

  And he can at times be surprisingly perceptive about the behaviour of some of my clients. I have on more than one occasion found him a useful sounding board.

  Which was why he was the first person I contacted after I’d found out the identity of the corpse. He was very supportive of me when Kerry Tallis first came into my life.

  It was early on in my new career. Jools remained as tough and impervious as she’d always been, and Ben was kind of settled. They were both still at school. We were living on the money we’d made by downsizing, but it was dwindling. I needed some income, and I’d got to the point where I’d felt strong enough to move forward and set up SpaceWoman. I was very determined to make a good impression in my new role.

  As with the beginnings of a lot of small businesses, I started out doing jobs for friends. One let slip in the pub her worries about an elderly relative filling up her house with old magazines. At a drinks party, another confided that her husband had filled their garage with empty oil drums. A third told me that her mother had a box in which she’d kept all her finger- and toenail clippings for over thirty years.

  So, by word of mouth, the bookings increased. I didn’t, at that stage, use social media. But I remember, when Bruce Tallis, Kerry’s father, rang my mobile, it was one of the first SpaceWoman calls I’d had from someone I didn’t know.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. His manner was perfunctory, as though he had many more important calls to make, but he needed to fix a minor detail with me first. And his voice made no attempt to hide his East End origins. ‘I gather you sort out people who hoard stuff …?’

  I confirmed that was what I did.

  ‘Well, look, I think my wife’s got a problem.’

  ‘Oh?’ I was non-committal. This was not necessarily a promising start. The last thing I wanted was to be asked to take sides in a marital dispute.

  ‘The fact is,’ he went on, ‘my wife and I have been very happily married for the last eight years.’ The assertiveness with which this was said also sounded warning bells. ‘But recently she’s started behaving in a most peculiar way.’

  ‘In what way – peculiarly?’

  ‘Well, look, she’s always had very good dress sense, beautifully turned out. In fact, the way she dressed was one of the first things that attracted me to her. I know she’ll never let me down when she accompanies me to a business function.’ He hadn’t yet given much indication of his wife’s priorities, and it seemed to me telling that he hadn’t even granted her a name.

  ‘So, what’s changed?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s always bought a lot of clothes … and accessories, bags, shoes, whatever … and I’ve always been happy with that. It’s not as if I can’t afford it. She can use my gold card as much as she likes. It isn’t a question of the money.’ He was very insistent on that point. As if I hadn’t already got the message that he had plenty of the stuff.

  Again, I found the way he spoke telling. ‘He’ could afford it, not ‘we’ could afford it. Increasingly, he was referring to his wife as some kind of chattel.

  ‘Anyway, recently her buying of clothes has got out of hand.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Ordering lots of stuff online. You know, you can do it these days at the click of the button, through Amazon or whatever.’

  I did know that. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Normally, I wouldn’t have bothered about it, leave that stuff to her. If that’s how she wants to spend my money, fine. But I hadn’t realized the scale of what’s been happening, until my daughter drew my attention to it.’

  ‘Your daughter? She must be quite young.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘If you’ve only been married for eight years …’

  ‘Oh no. I’m talking about my daughter from my first marriage. Kerry.’

  Ah, so she did get a name-check. Kerry Tallis. It was a name which was destined to stay with me. And not for good reasons.

  ‘Nearly nineteen now. Lovely girl. She felt very unsure about telling me what’d been going on. Didn’t want to look as if she was betraying her stepmother, but eventually she decided the problem was so big that it couldn’t just be swept under the carpet.’

  ‘So, what exactly did your daughter tell you?’

  ‘We have a big house called Lorimers, up near Chiddingfold … don’t know if you know the area?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was what my mother, when I was growing up, would have referred to as ‘Stockbroker Belt’. Don’t know what estate agents describe it as now. ‘Hedge Fund Manager Belt’, perhaps?

  ‘Anyway, we’ve got a good few outbuildings, changing rooms for the pool, obviously, garages, stables, sheds where the gardeners keep their gubbins and a few others which I never go into. Last weekend, when my wife was away having a spa treatment, Kerry showed me what was inside one of them.’

  He paused, willing me to prompt his revelation. Perversely, I said nothing.

  ‘One of the outhouses – and we’re talking something virtually the size of a barn here – was full to the rafters with clothes that my wife had bought online. Boxes piled sky high.’ I still didn’t grant him any response. ‘And the strange thing about it was … that a lot of the boxes had never been opened.’

  Now that I did find interesting. It was the first indicator I’d been given of irrational behaviour. There are plenty of spoiled women who reject clothes they’ve ordered when they see them at home – or when they see in the mirror that they don’t look on them as they’d looked on the designers’ models. And some are too rich and lazy to go through the tedious process of sending their purchases back. Rejecting the stuff without even looking at it represented another level of irrationality.

  ‘Has your wife any history of psychiatric problems?’

  ‘No!’ He didn’t like the question. ‘And if I thought there was anything wrong with her mental health, I’d be consulting a psychiatrist, not a decluttering expert! This is just a problem she has, a hoarding problem, that needs to get sorted.’

  ‘Why does it need to get sorted?’

  ‘What kind of a question’s that?’

  ‘It’s a perfectly logical question. If, as you say, the money she’s spending’s not important, then what is important? Are you worried by the wasteful effect her habit is having on the environment?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! I don’t give a shit about the environment.’

  ‘Then why have you got in touch with me? Why, if you don’t think your wife’s behaviour is an expression of mental ill health, do you want me to help sort out her hoarding problem?’

  ‘It … it needs doing?’ he replied awkwardly – and a little evasively.

  ‘Do you think that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘From what you’ve said, your wife’s hoarding problem is not really impinging on your life. So, I was just wondering whether it’s you … or someone else who thinks it needs to get sorted …?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Was it your daughter Kerry who suggested you ought to do something about it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted, suddenly exposed. ‘Will you see what you can do?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. For one thing, he was my first client who wasn’t a friend, or friend of a friend. The way he kept going on about how much money he’d got suggested my bill would get paid. Also, his narrative had got me intrigued.

  ‘Incidentally,’ I asked, ‘what’s your wife’s name?’

  ‘Oh?’ He sounded surprised that I should bother with such details. ‘Jeanette.’

  SEVEN

  My first meeting with Bruce Tallis was at Lorimers, the house in Chiddingfold. The Yeti looked somewhat outclassed by the array of cars revealed in the open double garages. A Jaguar SUV, a top-of-the-range BMW, a Porsche sports car, a Mercedes hatchback.

  My meeting with Bruce was ag
ain on a day when Jeanette was not there. Again, a weekend. Back then, I was so keen to get the business up and running, I didn’t worry about the hours I worked. I wasn’t in a position then to dictate my own terms. Jeanette was doing some detox programme in a hotel somewhere, Bruce told me.

  ‘What toxins is she dealing with?’ I asked.

  Her husband didn’t know. But her stepdaughter did. And, of course, Kerry was present at our meeting.

  ‘It’s just another basic spa thing,’ she told me, her voice indicating that a considerable amount had been spent on sending her to the right schools. ‘You know, to iron out the stress.’

  Not the moment to ask what stress Jeanette Tallis was experiencing. Looking round the house and grounds in which she lived, it clearly didn’t arise from money worries.

  ‘As I said on the phone,’ Bruce told me, again emphasizing the wealth, ‘it’s not the money I’m worried about. But Kerry was getting concerned about my wife’s spending.’ What was it with this avoidance of using Jeanette’s name? ‘Kerry really cares about her stepmother, you know.’

  ‘It’s not so much the spending,’ said his daughter, ‘as the hoarding aspect of what she’s doing.’

  I remember that first meeting with Kerry Tallis very well. Nineteen, a slender girl with long blonde hair, probably a couple of inches taller than me – say five eight. She would have been pretty, even beautiful, but for the sharpness of her nose and narrowness of her eyes; features, I’d noticed, she’d inherited from her father. It was summer and Kerry was wearing a pale yellow cotton dress with a design of grey roses on it. Her long tanned legs ended in flip-flops – not the plastic ones you buy at the seaside, but the kind where the label costs a disproportionate amount more than the raw materials. She was draped artlessly on the arm of her father’s well-upholstered office chair, their closeness seeming to emphasize the control she had over him. We were meeting in his study, a room which some interior designer had based on an antiseptic vision of what a gentleman’s club might look like.

  Bruce Tallis himself fitted the archetype of the self-made man. I didn’t know at that time, but later discovered that he’d made his fortune from printing, having invested heavily – and ahead of the game – in the new digital technology. He’d cleaned up, but still carried about him, in his palatial surroundings, the shiftiness of a barrow boy who thinks a rival is about to queer his pitch. He bulged slightly out of designer leisurewear, while his tight body language suggested he’d have felt more relaxed wearing a suit.

  ‘Yeah, the hoarding thing, like Kerry says, that’s what it’s about,’ her father confirmed. ‘And I guess that’s, like, more a woman’s thing.’

  Though new to the profession, I already knew that men were affected by the disorder just as much as women, but it wasn’t the moment to take issue with him.

  ‘So … Ellen, is it?’ Maybe he just wasn’t good with names.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve got some work to get on with …’ He gestured to his empty desk. I got the impression that most of Bruce Tallis’s business was conducted face-to-face or on the phone, and that he let other people handle the paperwork. ‘Then I’m playing a round of golf. I’m a member at the West Sussex,’ he couldn’t resist getting in. It clearly meant a lot to him. ‘And I was thinking it’d make more sense if Kerry showed you where my wife’s been stashing the stuff, and maybe you two take it from there …?’

  Kerry nodded and disengaged herself from her father’s chair.

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.

  ‘I just don’t understand it,’ said Kerry. ‘I mean the secrecy. I’m not good at keeping secrets. I like to have everything out in the open.’

  As we walked through the gardens – estate might be a better word – I began to believe that, as he’d told me on the phone, Bruce Tallis never went into a lot of the outbuildings. Though everything in sight reflected a high level of maintenance – new paint on the window frames, weed-free flower beds, lawns mown to thick-pile-carpet standards – the whole place had an unused air about it. I got the feeling that its owner felt no more at ease in his home than he did in his designer leisurewear.

  Kerry, though, was fully relaxed. Her upbringing had taught her that this was all hers by right.

  ‘What stage of your life are you at?’ I asked casually. ‘Presumably you’ve finished school?’

  ‘Oh yes, done with that.’

  ‘Uni?’

  ‘I started a course at Durham. Business and marketing. Gave it up after a term.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, wondering if I was about to hear some tale of student mental health issues.

  I wasn’t. ‘Crap course,’ Kerry went on. ‘Three years of that would have taught me less than half an hour’s chat with Daddy.’

  ‘Ah.’

  We had reached our destination. She produced a key from her pocket to open the relevant outbuilding. It wasn’t quite as ‘big as a barn’, as her father had described it, but it was a substantial flint-faced structure that might once have been stables.

  And the moment Kerry opened the double doors, I saw the extent of Jeanette Tallis’s problem. The whole of the opposite wall was piled high with boxes, many bearing the familiar Amazon smile logo (at least I assume it’s a smile, though my own dealings with the company have not always given me much to smile about).

  Jeanette was not only a hoarder, she was a punctiliously tidy hoarder. The boxes were piled neatly in rows, as if in a warehouse. A folding stepladder was in evidence, presumably used to lift the higher ones into position. Closer inspection revealed that, on the right-hand side wall, a new pile had been started. This only reached knee height, leaving space for many more orders to come.

  Kerry Tallis cocked a cynical eye at me. ‘You see the problem?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I must meet your stepmother.’

  My ‘treatment’ of Jeanette Tallis was one of the oddest experiences of my life. At the time, it gave me enormous encouragement. It made me think that I really did have an aptitude for the new career I had embarked on. Subsequent events, sadly, made me doubt that judgement.

  The arrangements were made through Kerry. I suggested tentatively that I’d prefer to meet Jeanette for the first time without her husband, and there seemed to be no problem about that. ‘Daddy’s very rarely here except at weekends,’ his daughter told me. ‘He travels a lot for his work.’

  Husband off at work all week, wife off having spa treatments at hotels at the weekends … It wasn’t my place to comment on the state of someone else’s marriage, but it didn’t change the direction of my thoughts on the subject. Philip and Hilary also spent a lot of time apart, but they had a closeness of which I hadn’t seen much evidence in Bruce Tallis’s talk of his wife.

  Kerry said she had better be there when we met. The ease with which the appointment was set up suggested that she didn’t have too many demands on her time. Having dropped out of university, she was presumably surviving very comfortably on her father’s largesse.

  The date was fixed – coffee at eleven on the following Wednesday. The whole set-up was – I suppose unsurprisingly – very genteel. When I arrived, Kerry answered my ring at the front door and ushered me through to a sumptuously appointed sitting room, whose French windows opened out to a terrace of choreographed pot plants and a view of the swimming pool. Sunlight twinkled off the blue surface of the water.

  The woman who rose from the sofa to greet me was very much as I had anticipated. Jeanette Tallis was so perfectly groomed that she looked as if she’d only just been taken out of the box and had the tissue paper removed. She was about the same height as Kerry, and the trimness of her figure suggested she spent time in the gym at her various spa hotels. Her blonded hair had been cut to circle her oval face, whose make-up was subtle and exact. She wore a pale blue linen shirt over wide-legged white linen trousers, and the sort of tennis shoes that cost almost as much as a tennis court.

  Though I knew they were not blood relations, I noticed a
surprising similarity between her and Kerry, suggesting that maybe Bruce Tallis always went for the same type of woman. One thing was certain – as he had proudly boasted, Jeanette would never let her husband down at a business function.

  Nor could I imagine her feeling let down when she put on a garment she’d ordered and found the image in her mirror didn’t match the one in the brochure. But that was, of course, just outward appearance. I had reason to know how different the image presented to the world could be from self-image. And what Kerry had shown me in the outbuilding dictated that Jeanette Tallis could not be as in control of her life as she appeared to be.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, extending a hand to me. ‘You must be Ellen.’

  It was clear when she spoke that Bruce Tallis had not only got a perfectly packaged second wife, but that with Jeanette he had also moved a few rungs up on the social ladder. Her vowels bore witness to the fact that she had been to the same right schools as her stepdaughter.

  I shook her hand and was gestured to a sofa. Kerry sat down beside me. Jeanette descended gracefully back into her armchair, very much the grande dame. ‘Now, Ellen, would you like coffee? Tea? Something else?’

  ‘Coffee would be very nice, thank you.’

  ‘Coffee, please, Ramiro,’ she called across the room.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Tallis,’ I heard from behind me. He must have been in the kitchen doorway, waiting for the order. A stocky man with black trousers and a white shirt under a black waistcoat. His clothes were sufficiently like a uniform for me to wonder what title he was given in the Tallis household. Given their level of pretentiousness, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was ‘butler’.

  By unspoken but mutual agreement, we didn’t embark on the subject of our meeting until we were all equipped with cups of excellent coffee (brought in, incidentally, not by Ramiro but by a short dark woman, his wife perhaps, taking the role of housekeeper). Till then, we talked inconsequentially about the good weather, a constant source of surprise to the British, and how fortunate it had been to ensure an uninterrupted Wimbledon fortnight. I got the impression Jeanette had been watching every second of the coverage.