The Torso in the Town

by Simon Brett

  Carole nodded. She’d forgiven Grant his rudeness now. He was talking an awful lot of good sense.

  ‘So I don’t think God’s likely to do a lot for my son.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Harry couldn’t help himself in an unmanned sweet shop.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Harry’s bedroom contained everything thought essential by a privileged teenager in the early twenty-first century – television, CD and minidisk players, computer, DVD player, mobile phone. All the equipment looked brand-new, as though it had been bought at the time of the move to Pelling House – perhaps even as some kind of bribe or compensation for moving the boy away from his friends to Fedborough.

  To Jude’s mind the room looked distressingly tidy for a fifteen-year-old’s. Not that Harry looked that old. ‘He’s rather a young fifteen,’ Kim had confided as they went up the stairs.

  He was hunched in front of a computer game, his whole body a stiff line of resentment. He didn’t look round when his mother knocked and entered. Though he had been told Jude was coming and couldn’t do anything to stop that happening, he was damned if he was going to be cooperative.

  ‘Harry. Harry, don’t be rude! You have a guest.’

  ‘No, Mum. You have a guest. I wouldn’t invite anyone down to this scummy place. Nobody I know’d want to come.’

  ‘That is not the point, Harry. There is a guest in your room and I will not have you behaving—’

  ‘It’s all right, Kim.’ Jude had been frequently struck by the way parents attracted to alternative lifestyles tended to be extremely traditional and proscriptive with their children. ‘Harry,’ she went on, ‘I just wanted to talk to you about . . . you know, what you found in the cellar. It must have been a terrible shock for you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have found it if we hadn’t moved to this piss-awful place!’

  ‘Harry! How dare you use language like that?’

  ‘Why? Dad uses it all the time.’

  ‘That is not the point.’

  ‘I’d have thought it was exactly the point. When Dad does something, it’s all fine and wonderful. When I do exactly the same thing, it’s crap.’

  ‘Harry! You just—’

  ‘Kim. If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to Harry on his own.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure if—’

  ‘You asked me to do this. I think I should be allowed to choose the way I do it.’

  The calmness with which the words were spoken did nothing to diminish their power. Kim Roxby’s head bowed acceptance. ‘I’ll be downstairs if you . . .’ She trailed out, closing the door behind her.

  A long silence reigned in the room. The boy, determined to make no concession to Jude’s presence, stabbed at the controls of his computer game.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘so you hate Fedborough.’

  ‘Wouldn’t anyone? It’s the arsehole of the world.’

  ‘And you’re just passing through?’ The line was an old one, but he couldn’t have given her a more perfect cue for it.

  A moment was required for the joke to register, but then Harry couldn’t help himself from giggling. He turned towards her. The spots on his face were new and shiny, the kind that would reappear almost immediately after being squeezed away.

  Jude felt deep sympathy for the awfulness of adolescence, but that didn’t stop her from pressing home her advantage. ‘No surprise you hate being transplanted down here. No one likes being taken away from their friends.’

  ‘No.’ A moment of potential empathy came and went. ‘If you’re about to tell me all the benefits of living in Fedborough, forget it.’

  ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t like to live here.’

  He was thrown. ‘I thought you did live here.’

  ‘No. I’m in Fethering. Down on the coast.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s not that different. Still not London.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure it’s fine for old people, people who’ve retired down here, but I haven’t got to that stage of my life.’

  ‘No. At your age you should be having a good time.’

  ‘What chance have I got of that in a dump like this?’

  ‘Presumably your parents knew you weren’t keen on the idea before you came?’

  ‘I kept telling them. Whether they took it in or not is another matter. When Dad gets a bee in his bonnet about something, he does it, regardless of what anyone else thinks on the subject. And Mum . . . well, she just agrees with him all the time. Anything for a quiet life.’

  Jude was impressed by how shrewdly the boy had assessed his parents’ relationship. ‘Putting the fact that you’re stuck in Fedborough on one side for a moment . . .’

  ‘How can I put it on one side? I’m aware of it every minute of the day. There’s nowhere to go down here, nothing to do.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t start talking to me about all the wonderful scenery around, and the walks I can go on, because who wants to go on a bloody walk? And I’m not into ponies like the girls are. Animals are just boring. And I don’t care that Dad’s buying a bloody sailing boat! You’ll never catch me on that thing!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say any of that, Harry. I was going to say that presumably you can still keep in touch with your London friends.’

  ‘How?’

  She pointed to his mobile phone. ‘That. Or you can email them.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted truculently. ‘I could.’

  Suddenly Jude saw it all. Harry Roxby’s problems didn’t begin with the move to Fedborough. He hadn’t had many friends in London either. He was suffering that terrible teenage sense of isolation. Geographical isolation only compounded a pain that was already there.

  But she was too canny to say anything to him about her realization. Instead, she abruptly changed the subject.

  ‘Let’s talk about when we last met, Harry. When you found the torso in the cellar . . .’

  All colour drained from the boy’s face.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Downstairs, Grant Roxby and Carole Seddon were getting on much better than had initially seemed likely. Their mutual contempt for the excesses of healing and psychiatry had bonded them. She’d even, in spite of the car, accepted his second offer of a glass of wine.

  Kim had cleared the lunch things around them. Grant made no offer to help, increasing the impression that he ruled his household in a rather traditional manner. The two girls were off having riding lessons. Being younger, they had been attracted more quickly than Harry to the charms of country life.

  Carole had no difficulty in bringing the conversation round to the Pelling House torso. ‘Must be a relief for you to be allowed back into your own house.’

  ‘Yes. The police were surprisingly sensitive, caused as little disruption as they could, but even so . . .’ He chuckled. ‘Mind you, what happened may have speeded up our assimilation into Fedborough society. Everybody in the town knows exactly who we are now, and they all feel like they’ve got carte blanche to come up and talk to us in the street.’

  ‘Giving their theories about what happened?’

  ‘You betcha. God, the number of names that have been whispered discreetly to me . . . You’d think Fedborough was entirely populated by serial killers.’

  ‘And do you have any theories yourself, Grant?’

  He made a negative grimace. ‘I don’t know enough of the personalities involved. I’ve a feeling whatever happened happened at least three years ago.’

  ‘Do you base that on something the police have said?’ asked Carole eagerly, as her mind matched his words with the date of Virginia Hargreaves’s disappearance.

  ‘No. While everyone else has been extremely generous to me with their theories, I’m afraid the police – the only people who might have anything vaguely authoritative to contribute – have said bugger all.’

  ‘So where do you get your three years from?’

  ‘Well, I met the Carltons . . . you know, while th
e house purchase was going through . . . and I just can’t believe they had anything to do with it. Besides, the state of the body when I saw it in the cellar . . . it looked like it had been dead a long time.’

  Carole shook her head wryly. ‘Maybe. From the description Jude gave me, it sounded as if it had been sort of mummified, which would make precise dating a lot more difficult. Could be three years, could be a lot older . . . or indeed a lot more recent.’

  ‘You know about these things?’

  ‘I’m not an expert. But I used to work for the Home Office, and picked up some of the basics. The only thing that the state of the body does seem to indicate is that the woman was killed – or perhaps we should say, pending further information, met her end – somewhere else.’

  ‘And was moved into the cellar here?’

  ‘I should think that’s almost definitely the case, yes.’

  Grant Roxby looked thoughtful, and picked up the wine bottle. Only about a third of its contents remained. He gestured towards Carole, who shook her head again, and he filled up his own glass.

  ‘You sound as if that news has affected your thinking about the case, Grant.’

  He shrugged. ‘As I said, what do I know? On the other hand, it might make sense of something else . . .’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Well, because of what I’d assumed to be the age of the body, and because I hadn’t considered the possibility it might have been moved here, I had rather ruled out as suspects the people we bought the house from.’

  ‘Debbie Carlton and her husband?’

  ‘Ex-husband, yes.’ Grant Roxby tapped his chin thoughtfully. ‘But maybe this explains it.’

  ‘Explains what?’

  ‘Apparently Francis Carlton has been summoned back from Florida.’

  ‘Summoned?’

  ‘Yes. The police want to talk to him.’

  ‘I saw it,’ said Harry truculently. ‘Whatever they say doesn’t change the fact that I saw it.’

  ‘ “They” being your parents?’

  ‘Of course.’ He looked at Jude with defiance. ‘They like to control everything in my life, but they can’t do that. They can’t control my thoughts – or my memories.’

  ‘ “They” in this case being your dad.’

  ‘Well, I suppose . . . Like about everything else, Mum just goes along with what he says.’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘Are you telling me your parents don’t want you to think about what you saw?’

  ‘Yes. “Don’t dwell on it, Harry. Just forget it. Don’t keep picking away at it, Harry.’” Though the impersonation of Grant was not a good one, it caught some of his energy and bossiness.

  ‘But putting that image out of your mind completely must be very hard.’

  ‘Hard? It’s impossible.’ His bottom lip trembled and tears threatened. At that moment he looked nearer ten than fifteen. ‘I’d never seen a dead body before. Any kind of dead body . . . let alone one in . . . in that condition.’

  ‘Pretty ghastly, wasn’t it?’

  ‘So you can’t just keep something like that out of your mind, shut the lid on it and never think about it again.’

  ‘No, you can’t. I don’t think you should try to.’

  The boy looked straight at Jude. For the first time, he seemed to believe she had something worth saying. ‘You mean I should think about it?’

  ‘Of course you should. You don’t come to terms with something unpleasant by closing your mind. You have to go through the experience in detail, process it, reach some kind of conclusion about it.’

  He was cynical again. ‘Isn’t that what a psychiatrist would say? Are you a psychiatrist?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ She grinned. ‘If I was, I’d just have used the word “closure”, and I didn’t, did I?’

  ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘Then why did Dad ask you to talk to me?’

  ‘Wa sn’t him, it was your mum. Your dad is extremely unkeen on my being here.’

  ‘Oh.’ Harry’s reaction suggested Jude had gained credibility from his father’s disapproval.

  ‘I’m here,’ she went on, ‘because you and I have something in common.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’ve both seen the torso, haven’t we? Apart from the police–andyourdad–we’retheonlypeoplewhohave.And since your dad doesn’t want to talk to you on the subject . . .’

  ‘Certainly not. He won’t even allow me to mention it.’

  ‘Then I’d say you and I really should talk about the torso . . .’

  The boy nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I think we should. Are you still, kind of . . . shocked by what you saw, Jude?’

  The use of her name was very encouraging. ‘A bit. More than shocked, though, I’m intrigued.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Come on, Harry, the torso was a ghastly thing for us to have seen, but, in spite of that – or perhaps because of that – it does raise a lot of questions.’

  ‘What kind of questions do you mean?’

  ‘Who the torso belonged to when she was alive? How her remains came to end up in the cellar here? Who cut off her arms and legs? And was that the same person who caused her death in the first place?’

  ‘You mean, like . . . a murderer?’ There was horror as he spoke the word, but also fascination.

  ‘Yes. You’ve been presented with a possible murder mystery right on your own doorstep. Harry. And I think the best way of working through the shock of what you saw would be to treat that as a challenge, try and find out for yourself what happened.’

  ‘Sort of . . . do my own investigation?’

  ‘Why not? Talk through all the information you have, try to work out the solution.’

  For the first time there was a sparkle in the boy’s eyes as he asked, ‘Would you help me to do that, Jude?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘You’d help me, Harry.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  They tiptoed down the stairs. The door to the dining room was closed, with Grant and Carole presumably still behind it. There was no sign of Kim; no doubt in the kitchen, tidying up the lunch things.

  Harry put his finger to his lips. He was enjoying the conspiratorial element in what they were doing. The torch was still in the large baggy pocket of his large baggy trousers. He wasn’t going to produce it until they were past danger of being spotted.

  ‘I sorted out how to break the police seals, Jude,’ he confided proudly. ‘Cut through with a metal saw and joined them together again with Blu-Tack.’

  ‘Very James Bond,’ she murmured. It was the right thing to say. The boy beamed. ‘Must’ve taken a long time, though.’

  ‘Did it yesterday. They were all out for a walk on the Downs.’ He invested the words with all the contempt a disgruntled fifteen-year-old can muster. ‘Took a while, but I made a neat job of it.’

  As they reached the bottom of the stairs, a finger once again rose conspiratorially to his lips. Tentatively Harry reached a foot over the stripped floorboards of the hall. ‘Have to go carefully here. Some of them creak.’

  They successfully negotiated the route across to the cellar door. Sure enough, it still had police tape and notices on it. The seals were threaded through rivets fixed into the walls. Proud of his handiwork, Harry pulled them gingerly apart.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Jude whispered.

  He shrugged. ‘I was bored. Wanted to know what the police’d been up to,’ he breathed back. ‘Also . . .’ He gulped, suddenly losing confidence. ‘I wanted to go down there, to sort of, I don’t know, look at . . .’

  ‘Confront your fear?’

  Harry nodded. Boldly taking hold of the handle, he opened the door down to the cellar. At the same moment, he produced the torch from his pocket, and pointed its beam down the stairs. ‘Come on.’

  He gently closed the door behind them, and they stepped into the void.

  The cellar still contained police equipment, revealed by the sweeps of his torch. Lights on tripods, metal equipment boxes whos
e contents Jude could only guess at, unspecified objects binned in labelled polythene bags.

  The effect was, if anything, antiseptic. The horror was gone. So was the chipboard partition which had screened the torso. The space where it had lain was clinically empty; every trace of body and box had been meticulously combed through, bagged up and removed for analysis.

  ‘Was it just like this when you came down yesterday?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘But you still needed to be here?’

  ‘Yes. I pictured it again. I concentrated, and recreated the image of what I had seen.’

  ‘How long were you down here?’

  ‘Two, three hours.’

  ‘Did it help?’

  Another nod. ‘As I said, nobody would talk to me about what I’d seen. But I needed to . . .’ Though his words trailed away, they were very eloquent.

  ‘Yes. I understand why you—’

  There was a sudden clatter from above them. Light from the hall flooded the cellar.

  Framed in the doorway stood the outline of Grant Roxby. ‘What the hell’re you doing down here?’

  The beam of Harry’s torch swung round to spotlight his father’s face, which was contorted with rage. Not just rage, though. There was another emotion there, and it looked like guilt.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘It’s all rather frustrating,’ said Carole on the Monday. She’d proposed lunch, predictably rejected Jude’s suggestion of going to the Crown and Anchor, and said she’d assemble something for them. But even the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc failed to make the chicken salad in her kitchen look convivial. The weather had changed too; it was dull and drizzly outside. Deprived of a long walk, Gulliver looked reproachfully mournful slumped against the cold Aga.

  ‘I mean, we’ve got so little information,’ she went on. ‘And the vital question we haven’t managed to answer yet is: who does the torso belong to? Until we know that, we haven’t got proper motivation for anyone.’

  ‘Doesn’t stop us having suspects,’ said Jude. She was, as ever, more philosophical about their lack of progress. ‘And really those come down to the people who have at one time or another owned Pelling House.’