The Torso in the Town

by Simon Brett

  ‘Maybe he was interrupted? Someone got suspicious of him?’

  ‘Frustrating not knowing more, isn’t it? I think it’s unfair that the police keep all the information to themselves.’

  ‘The full details would usually come out later in court . . . but of course that’d only happen if someone was charged with the murder. If the gossip’s right and the police do reckon Roddy Hargreaves killed his wife, then the whole story’ll never be known.’

  ‘No . . .’ The boy was cast down again.

  ‘But the police may not be right,’ said Jude encouragingly. ‘There may still be something to investigate. So, Harry, I’m relying on you to keep thinking about the case and listening to what people say. You might come up with that vital detail that turns the whole thing on its head. You might be able to prove that the police were wrong, and that Roddy Hargreaves wasn’t a murderer.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Now she’d given him his role back, Harry Roxby sounded positively perky. ‘Don’t worry, Jude. My investigation of the case continues.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear, Sherlock.’

  On the Sunday morning Carole and Jude went for a walk on Fethering Beach. As if apologetic for the recent rain, the day was exceptionally fine, the sky a gentle blue, and the beige sand stretched for miles. Gulliver circled ecstatically around them. He appreciated having the attention of two people, and he loved the intriguing smells of the low tide flotsam and jetsam. A late June day scampering across the pungent sand, with infinite sniffing detours, was his idea of dog heaven.

  The two human beings with him were less cheerful. The sadness of Roddy Hargreaves’s death, and the unsatisfactory way in which it might tie up the mystery of his wife’s death cast a pall over both the women.

  ‘I don’t want to leave it like that,’ said Jude.

  ‘But how else can we leave it?’ asked Carole. ‘We have no information. We don’t even know for sure that the police do think Roddy killed her.’

  ‘No, and we probably never will know.’ Jude picked up a stone and threw it into the retreating sea. Her mood was uncharacteristically despondent. ‘I don’t think he did kill her, though.’

  Carole was silent for a moment, before saying, ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘But why do we think that? Given how little hard fact we’ve got about the case, why are we both convinced Roddy didn’t do it?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’

  ‘It’s because we liked him, didn’t we? We met him, and though we could recognize he was an alcoholic and a man with problems, we both had a gut instinct that he wasn’t the kind of man who’d commit a murder.’

  Carole, reluctant to admit to such an irrational impulse as ‘gut instinct’, had nonetheless to admit that Jude had a point.

  ‘So, just for a moment, let’s pretend that our gut instinct is right.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because in my experience gut instincts usually are.’

  Carole awarded that a rather frosty harrumph.

  ‘Come on, if Roddy didn’t do it, who did?’

  ‘We’re back to the same thing, Jude. We have no idea. We don’t have enough information.’

  ‘Then we’d better get some more information, hadn’t we?’

  ‘About what? About whom?’

  ‘Roddy’d be a good person to start with. If we find out more about him, maybe we can actually prove he didn’t do it.’

  ‘All right. So who do we know who can tell us about Roddy?’

  ‘James Lister, I suppose. If we can talk to him without the dreadful Fiona present.’

  ‘Yes. Or . . .’ A smile irradiated Carole’s thin features. ‘There’s someone else.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘At the dinner party on Friday, Jude, don’t you remember? Someone admitted he’d had “one or two conversations” with Roddy Hargreaves round the time Virginia disappeared.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude smiled too as she nodded agreement.

  ‘You know,’ said Carole Seddon, ‘I think I might go to church in Fedborough this evening.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was a long time since Carole had been to any kind of church service, and even longer since she had been to Evensong. The liturgy sounded unfamiliar and awkward. She must have gone to church a few times since the Prayer Book had been modernized, but it was the rhythms of the older version that had stayed with her from schooldays, when non-attendance had not been an option.

  The biblical readings were even worse. Again, she had grown up with the King James Bible, and its rolling cadences were deeply etched on her subconscious. The version that was now being used had clearly been assembled by people with no sense of rhythm at all, and every clumsy phrase just made her aware of the perfect symmetries it had replaced.

  The language might have been more effective if presented with conviction, but the Rev Trigwell’s tremulous delivery suggested that he himself was uncertain of the text’s validity. Idly, as she listened, Carole wondered whether it was possible for a Church of England vicar to show conviction. As a religion, Anglicanism was so wishy-washy. A passionate Anglican was an oxymoron, and the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist simply laughable.

  She tried to think back to a time when she had had faith, and couldn’t find it. Till her mid-twenties she had been a regular church-goer, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Attendance had been a social convention, a polite ritual which had nothing to do with belief.

  And, looking round the congregation in All Souls Fedborough that June evening, Carole Seddon didn’t see much evidence of passionately held faith there either. The turn-out was better than most churches had come to expect in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At least two-thirds of the pews were full, but all with the same kind of people, respectable matrons with dutiful, suited husbands in tow. No ethnic diversity, and no children. Perhaps there was a Family Service on Sunday mornings, Carole reflected; there might be more of an age range on show in the church then.

  The congregation were mostly regulars. At least they were very prompt on belting out the liturgical responses, all of which were different from the ones preserved in the amber of Carole’s memory.

  And they certainly knew the hymns, which again weren’t ones she recognized. She wouldn’t have minded giving ‘Rock of Ages’ or ‘O God our help in ages past’ a good seeing-to, but since the words were unfamiliar, she had to fall back on the silent and inaccurate lip-synch she’d relied on in her early days at school. Mouthing something and sounding only the occasional final ‘s’ or ‘t’ has been a church stand-by of the unaccustomed and the tone-deaf for centuries.

  Still, the respectable people of Fedborough treated the verses on their photocopied sheets as if they were proper hymns and delivered them with great gusto. Behind her, Carole could hear one female voice soaring and swooping over the others. Its owner might once have been a good singer, but somewhere along the line had got the idea she could create her own descants to dance around the words, independent of the tune everyone else was singing. She didn’t understand the choral principle of sublimating the individual in the group creativity.

  A surreptitious look around brought Carole no surprise. The owner of the voice was Fiona Lister. Beside her, in a stiff suit, stood James, with the expression of a man who’d much rather be slumped in front of the television watching golf.

  But in his face there was also a resignation. He had long ago recognized that he couldn’t escape. Church-going was one of the rituals in the freemasonry of Fedborough respectability. If Fiona said it had to be done, it had to be done. James Lister couldn’t perhaps help having been a butcher – though that still remained very regrettable – but in every other way he would have to conform to the middle-class stereotype.

  At the end of the service, Carole deliberately dawdled. She had caught the eye of – and been graciously acknowledged by – Fiona Lister, to whom she mouthed a ‘Thank you so much for Friday night.’ She also spotted the Durringtons leaving the church some way ah
ead, but they didn’t see her. Wondering whether the Roxbys might have considered church as a quick route into Fedborough society, she looked around, but saw no sign of them.

  As the congregation filed out, they passed the Rev Trigwell in the porch. He did a lot of hand-shaking and feeble laughing, but bonhomie did not come naturally to him. He seemed, as ever, unrelaxed and gauche. A spike of his thinning hair was pointing upwards, and the red blotches on his face looked almost painful.

  When Carole reached him, he took her hand in a double handshake of unconvincing heartiness. ‘Well, goodness me. All the way from Fethering. I’m honoured. Has news of the quality of my sermons travelled so far?’

  His words contained the ingredients of insouciant small talk, but seemed to cost him a great effort to produce.

  Carole had decided at the Listers’ dinner party that directness was going to be her most effective approach with the Rev Trigwell. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘About Roddy Hargreaves.’

  His second ‘Oh’ was much gloomier. And it was followed by an ‘Oh dear’.

  The All Souls vicarage was a large building, but the Rev Trigwell only really lived in two rooms. They gave the appearance of having been furnished from second-hand shops by someone who had no interest in furniture. There were no pictures or personal photographs on the walls or mantelpiece. Philip Trigwell seemed as reluctant to impose his personality on his surroundings as on other people.

  ‘I’m not married,’ he announced, as if he had to get that out of the way before they moved on to anything else. ‘I mean, I don’t mean that I’m . . . I never have been married. I’m not married.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could I get you a cup of tea?’

  He seemed relieved when Carole declined the offer. Her refusal was instinctive. The vicarage was not exactly dirty; it just had the feeling of being unused and unvisited. If she had agreed to tea, the Rev Trigwell might have taken some time to find a second cup.

  ‘So . . .’ They were sitting opposite each other in anonymous armchairs. He rubbed his hands together in a manner that anyone else would have made breezy. ‘Poor old Roddy Hargreaves, eh? Sad business.’

  ‘But presumably the Lord giveth . . .’

  ‘Sorry?’ He looked genuinely puzzled by the words.

  ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Isn’t that how we should think about death?’

  The Rev Trigwell nodded his head slowly up and down as though considering a novel idea. ‘Well, it’s an approach, certainly. I didn’t know you knew Roddy Hargreaves well.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Only met him for the first time last week.’

  ‘Ah. Well, he was a . . . He had his faults . . .’ Suddenly this sounded too definitive a statement. ‘That is, not very serious faults. I mean, he was unreliable, and he certainly drank too much . . . but I like to think his heart was in the right place.’

  The vicar sat back, relieved to have achieved a perfect balance, venturing no opinion that hadn’t been cancelled out by its opposite.

  Carole was silent, which she somehow knew would make him uncomfortable.

  It did. ‘So if you didn’t know him well . . .’ Philip Trigwell went on awkwardly, ‘presumably you’re not really here for grief counselling.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People do come to me for that.’ He spoke doubtfully. ‘I like to think I give some kind of help, some comfort . . . but I’m not really sure.’

  ‘Presumably you can recommend the consolations of religion?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He sounded unconvinced by the efficacy of the cure. ‘I can do that.’

  Carole decided it was time to move on. ‘At the Listers’ on Friday James said that Roddy Hargreaves had talked to you during the time when everything was going wrong for him, when his plans for the marina weren’t working out . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes. James did say that, yes.’

  ‘Did Roddy come to you . . . sort of voluntarily . . . in search of help? I mean, was he a church-goer?’

  ‘No. No, he wasn’t. I’ve never seen him in All Souls. He was a Catholic, as we said. No, he just, erm . . .’

  ‘So you went to see him?’

  ‘Um . . . well . . . I suppose, in a way, yes. That’s sort of how it happened.’

  ‘You just recognized that he was in trouble . . . ? Here was someone who needed help . . . so you did your Good Samaritan act and went to see him?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that, really, because the Good Samaritan actually found the man who fell among thieves injured by the roadside, and Roddy wasn’t really injured in that way . . . he was just, erm . . . things weren’t going very well for him . . .’

  Carole began to wonder whether Philip Trigwell was deeply stupid, or whether sounding stupid was just a by-product of his embarrassment.

  ‘But you did decide, off your own bat, that you should go and see him?’

  ‘Well, erm . . . It was suggested to me that, erm, I should perhaps have a word . . . I wasn’t sure it would do any good, but . . .’

  ‘Who suggested that to you?’

  ‘Fiona Lister.’

  That figured. The Queen Bee of Fedborough, trying to ensure that nothing happened outside her control. It would have been totally in character for her to order the Rev Trigwell to go and see Roddy Hargreaves, regardless of the man’s religion and of how little either would have welcomed the encounter.

  ‘She’s a strong character,’ Carole observed.

  ‘Yes, yes, she is. Very strong.’ Thinking ‘strong’ might be too strong a word, he immediately counterbalanced the statement. ‘That is, she’s a very good person, very thoughtful, very concerned for everyone’s welfare, but perhaps she does sometimes . . . rather impose her views on . . . I mean, I’m not using “impose” in the sense of putting any pressure on people . . . Fiona’s a very public-spirited person, and does a lot for charity, but she’s . . . she’s . . . well . . . As you say, she is a strong character,’ he finished lamely.

  ‘So when you went to see Roddy Hargreaves, was he receptive?’

  ‘Receptive?’

  ‘Did he take notice of the religious consolations that you offered him?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mention religion.’ The Rev Trigwell was slightly appalled by the idea. ‘I didn’t want to cram that down his throat. Wouldn’t do that to a Catholic, anyway. They can get funny about things like that. They seem to have such certainty about their religion.’ He sighed wistfully. ‘No, I just told Roddy I gathered he was in a spot of bother . . . was there anything I could do to help?’

  ‘And was there?’

  ‘Well, yes. I mean, it wasn’t a . . . sort of therapeutic or counselling service. It was a purely practical thing he asked me to do for him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give him a lift.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He wanted to get away. Things had been bad for a while. I think Roddy’d just had enough and he kept saying he wanted to go to France for a few days. And he knew he’d been drinking too much for too long to be safe driving, so would I give him a lift to Newhaven?’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Even after such a length of time, the Rev Trigwell still sounded relieved. Giving someone a lift was so much easier than giving someone the consolations of religion.

  ‘You took him to the ferry terminal?’

  ‘Yes. He was very pleased, I remember, because he just got there in time to catch one. He hadn’t got any luggage with him, so he bought his ticket and rushed on just before they pulled up the gangplanks.’

  ‘Have the police asked you about this?’

  ‘No.’ He was genuinely puzzled by the question. ‘Why should they?’

  ‘Well, it’s just . . . Roddy’s dead. The torso that was found in Pelling House has been identified as belonging to his wife. There are a lot of people in Fedborough who’re saying he must’ve
killed her.’

  ‘Are they?’ His surprise still seemed authentic. ‘Oh, but I can’t imagine that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Roddy didn’t seem that kind of person. I mean, as I said, he wasn’t perfect. He certainly drank too much, and he was rather irresponsible, but I don’t think there was any evil in him.’

  ‘No.’ The vicar’s gut instinct was exactly the same as hers and Jude’s. But she needed more than gut instinct. ‘Did you tell anyone that you’d taken Roddy to Newhaven?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. He’d asked me not to . . . which I did find potentially a bit awkward. I try to avoid lying as a general rule. But nobody asked me anything about his movements, so it turned out all right. Mind you . . .’ He coloured. ‘I did have an awkward moment that very afternoon . . .’

  ‘The afternoon you’d taken him to Newhaven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This would have been a Friday?’ He nodded. ‘And we’re talking about . . . what? Late February three years ago?’

  ‘It would have been around then, yes. I suppose I could check, see if I can be more specific about the precise date . . .’ He sounded dubious about the prospects for success in any such search.

  ‘Don’t bother about that. You said you had an awkward moment that Friday afternoon . . .?’

  ‘Yes. I’d just got back from Newhaven and parked the car when I remembered I was out of eggs, so I hurried down to the grocer’s, because it was just before closing time, and in the shop I met Virginia.’

  ‘Virginia Hargreaves?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I thought – wouldn’t it be awkward if Virginia asked me if I’d seen Roddy, because then I’d either have to tell a direct lie or go against what he had asked me to do . . . so it was potentially very awkward. But . . .’ He wiped his brow at the recollection. ‘She didn’t ask me anything about Roddy . . . so it was fine.’

  ‘But did you tell anyone else about giving Roddy the lift?’

  ‘No. Thank goodness nobody else asked, so I managed to avoid that particular moral dilemma.’ He spoke as if avoiding moral dilemmas was a rarity for him.