The Torso in the Town

by Simon Brett

  ‘What – ill?’

  ‘Could have been ill. Certainly pale and drawn. But I thought she looked more . . . emotionally upset.’ He nodded sagely. ‘I remember, I said so that evening at our Friday-night dinner party. I said, “Virginia Hargreaves is looking in a bad way. I don’t think things are too healthy in that marriage”.’ He let the meaning sink in, while Carole and Jude thought how typical it was that private grief should be dissected round the Listers’ dinner table. ‘Little did I know how prophetic my words would be,’ James concluded.

  After a suitably impressed pause, Carole asked, ‘But didn’t anyone in Fedborough think to enquire where she had gone?’

  ‘Not really. Everyone knew things had been sticky between her and Roddy. The surprise really was that she hadn’t walked out earlier. I think the general assumption was that she had gone back to stay with some of her aristocratic relations.’

  Ah yes, thought Carole, the title once again working its magic. Fedborough had been honoured by the presence in its midst of a member of the peerage; not good form to pry after she’d graciously moved back to be among her own kind. Though, if Fedborough had pried, it would quickly have found out that she wasn’t on speaking terms with any of her own kind.

  James Lister’s face took on an expression of pious thoughtfulness. ‘If only I’d asked Virginia what the trouble was when I saw her that Friday afternoon, perhaps I could have saved her.’

  ‘I don’t think you should blame yourself,’ said Carole, managing not to smile.

  ‘No. But one does,’ he said gravely. ‘When something like this happens, inevitably one does.’

  Jude took up the baton of investigation. ‘Jimmy, you don’t know of anyone who saw Virginia Hargreaves after you did?’

  He shook his head. ‘Somebody may have done, but . . . Didn’t realize at the time it would be important, so I never thought to ask.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose,’ said Carole, ‘that you remember when you next saw Roddy after that weekend?’

  ‘Matter of fact, I do.’ He barked a laugh. ‘Typical of the disorganized bugger.’ Too caught up in his narrative, he forgot to ask for his French to be pardoned. ‘I get a call from him on the Tuesday evening. He’s just come off a ferry at Newhaven, he’s smashed out of his skull . . . would I “be a mate” and pick him up?’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Remembered guilt flashed across his face. ‘Fiona has her Church Choir rehearsals on a Tuesday.’

  ‘And what kind of state was Roddy Hargreaves in?’

  ‘Totally paralytic. He must’ve been drinking solidly for two or three days. I assumed he’d been doing it because the boatyard business had gone belly-up, but of course now I realize he had something on his mind he wanted to forget even more – the murder of his wife.’

  ‘Did he actually tell you how long he’d been away?’ asked Carole casually.

  ‘No, he wasn’t coherent enough for that.’ James Lister flicked his moustache as a new thought struck him. ‘Or perhaps he was just pretending to be incoherent . . . ? Yes, perhaps he was completely sober, and he’d only gone to France to establish an alibi.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well . . .’ The butcher warmed to his new role of criminal investigator. ‘Let’s say he’d killed Virginia over the weekend, on the Saturday . . . Then he’d nipped over to France on the Sunday and pretended he’d been there longer than he had.’

  ‘Yes, that makes sense,’ Carole lied. She exchanged a flick of the eyelids with Jude, as Roddy Hargreaves’s real alibi seemed to be confirmed.

  ‘Have the police talked to you about any of this?’ asked Carole.

  James Lister was affronted. ‘Good heavens, no.’

  ‘If they have decided Roddy Hargreaves murdered his wife, you’d have thought they’d have asked around the town.’

  ‘Well, they haven’t talked to me.’ His tone implied the end of that topic of conversation.

  ‘Speaking as a professional . . .’ Jude contrived to get a Marilyn Monroe breathiness into her voice. ‘ . . . would it be easy for someone untrained to dismember a corpse?’

  James Lister guffawed. He was much happier with this subject. On his home ground. ‘Depends on the quality of the job you were after. Any idiot with a chainsaw could cut a body up. If you wanted it neatly jointed . . . well, for that you’d need someone qualified.’

  ‘Mm . . .’ said Jude coquettishly. ‘Interesting.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The original concept of the Art Crawl had been a brilliant one, but Terry Harper’s attempt to improve the quality of the art on show was not popular with Fedborough opinion. Almost as enjoyable as snooping round the houses of people one knew vaguely was the opportunity of being disparaging about the creative efforts of people one knew vaguely. When the artist in question was not on the premises, but in London, Paris, Hamburg or Amsterdam, the pleasure of murmuring ‘I wouldn’t give house-room to that’ was considerably diminished.

  The fact that the art on display was of a higher standard than in previous years did not make a blind bit of difference. Nobody in Fedborough knew anything about art, anyway. They took much more pleasure in sniggering at a local amateur’s random spars of driftwood impaled by rusty nails or leather bookmarks embossed with Celtic runes than they did in appreciating a delicate water-colour, a subtly lit photograph or a thought-provoking collage of disaster images by a professional artist.

  The people of Fedborough did not know much about art, but they knew what they liked – and that was stigmatizing the excesses of other people in Fedborough. So before Carole and Jude started their tour at three o’clock on the Friday afternoon, that year’s Art Crawl had already received the communal thumbs-down.

  The system was blissfully simple. Throughout the Fedborough Festival, some twenty-five houses around the town opened themselves up as impromptu galleries between two and six every afternoon. In each one, visitors could pick up a map which marked the venues, with the names of the artists exhibiting and brief descriptions of the work on show. There was no obligation to complete the full circuit. One could take in a couple of artists, stop for tea in one of the many teashops or buy the odd antique, and then take in a couple more. All the art on display was available for sale, and quite a lot of it got purchased.

  The Art Crawl, for whatever reasons, brought a large number of people into the town, and was deemed a good thing by the local Chamber of Commerce.

  Interest in the Art Crawl, and in the many other events of the Festival, would build up over the ten days of its duration, but on the Friday afternoon the town was relatively empty. Which suited Carole and Jude perfectly.

  They had had no doubt as to what should be their first artistic port of call. Jude had yet to meet Debbie Carlton, and they were delighted when they emerged at the top of the stairs, to find the artist alone in her flat.

  She had moved most of the furniture out of the sitting room to make more space for the anticipated art-lovers. There were many more paintings on the walls than there had been before. All were in the same style, evoking drowsy afternoons in Italy, but they demonstrated infinite subtle variations. Debbie Carlton fully justified Terry Harper’s description: ‘one of the few genuinely talented artists in Fedborough’.

  ‘This is Jude, my neighbour. I’ve been going on so much about your paintings, she was desperate to come and have a look.’

  Jude slipped easily into the slight exaggeration. ‘You bet. And from a quick look I can tell Carole was absolutely right. Wonderful stuff.’

  Debbie Carlton glowed. Though she claimed to be suffering from a hangover following her Private View the night before, she looked very pretty that afternoon, casual in clown-like dungarees, almost beautiful, and totally relaxed. Carole was even more aware of the tension that her ex-husband’s presence had engendered.

  ‘You’re my first visitors. I’ve been sitting here for the last hour wondering if anyone was going to come, and wondering if I dared go off t
o the loo, in case someone did.’

  ‘Feel at liberty to do so now,’ said Carole. ‘We’ll guard your premises against international art thieves.’

  Debbie grinned. ‘The urge has gone away. Just nerves, I expect. This is a different kind of tension for me. I got terribly nervous yesterday before the Private View, but then at least I knew everyone was going to arrive at about the same time. Waiting around like this is a sort of extended torture.’

  ‘Well, I hope our arrival has taken the curse off it,’ said Jude, whose eyes were darting round the paintings on the wall.

  ‘Yes, I think it has.’

  ‘Ooh, I love that one!’ Jude swooped towards a small close-up of a terracotta urn from which sharp green plant tendrils trailed. ‘It is for sale, isn’t it?’

  ‘They’re all for sale. Except for the ones with red stickers on. Those were bought at the Private View last night.’

  ‘Great! I’ll have this one! How much?’

  Carole Seddon looked on, open-mouthed. What Jude had said was the wrong way round. You d idn’t decide to buy something and then ask the price. The correct procedure was to find out the price, assess whether you could afford the object in question and whether it might not be better to consider the decision overnight. If the sums made sense, and you were feeling particularly impulsive, then you might proceed to make the purchase on the spot.

  Jude didn’t work that way. On being told the catalogue listed seventy-five pounds, with a cry of ‘Cheap at the price’, she immediately whipped a cheque-book from her bag and started writing. Flamboyantly, she ripped the cheque out and handed it to a delighted Debbie Carlton.

  This little transaction raised two intriguing questions for Carole. One was an old, recurrent one: where did Jude get her money from, what did she live on? Carole was no nearer to answering that than she had been when her new neighbour first moved in to Woodside Cottage.

  The answer to the second question had proved equally elusive. Ridiculous, given the length of time they’d known each other, but Carole still didn’t know Jude’s surname. It hadn’t been volunteered on their first meeting, and the longer time went on, the more difficult for Carole became phrasing the direct question on the subject.

  But Jude had just produced a cheque-book; and surely printed on her cheques must be her full name. Carole tried, without being too conspicuous, to lean across and read what was on the cheque. But the transaction was too quick. Debbie immediately placed the cheque in a cash-box she hoped would fill up over the next ten days, and by the time Carole looked back, Jude had replaced the cheque-book in her bag. Carole’s frustration was unrelieved.

  Hard on the heels of that annoyance came another troubling thought. If Jude had just bought a painting, shouldn’t Carole do the same? She was the one, after all, who had had more contact with Debbie Carlton. She, if anyone, was Debbie’s friend. Didn’t etiquette demand that she should go against her nature and make a comparable impulse buy? She liked Debbie’s paintings, there was no problem with that, but she couldn’t make a snap decision like Jude just had. And should she go for one at the same price as Jude’s? Though how could she know it was the same price as Jude’s? The prices weren’t marked on the paintings; they were on the set of printed sheets piled up beside Debbie’s cash-box. And if she looked at one of those sheets before deciding on which painting to buy, might her behaviour not – by comparison with Jude’s spontaneity – appear calculating or mean?

  This characteristic spiral of thought in Carole’s mind was fortunately interrupted by an equally characteristic direct question from Jude. ‘You used to live in the house where the torso was found, didn’t you, Debbie?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t know if you heard, but I was present at dinner with the Roxbys the night it was discovered.’

  ‘How horrible. Did you actually see the thing?’

  Jude nodded, and Debbie Carlton smiled sympathy. Carole was once again amazed at her friend’s ease in reaching a state of intimacy with complete strangers.

  ‘Did you know her?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Virginia Hargreaves? I knew her to say hello to. Because my parents have always lived in Fedborough, even when I wasn’t living here I’d often come back. So I’d see Virginia in the High Street or in my parents’ shop. They used to run the grocery in the town.’

  Jude reacted as if this was new information to her. Then, casually, she asked, ‘Everyone seems to be assuming the husband killed her. Do you go along with that?’

  Debbie Carlton splayed out her hands in a gesture of ignorance. ‘What else is there to think? I must say I’m surprised, because, from what I’d seen of Roddy, he appeared to be just a fairly harmless piss-artist. Hard to imagine him as a murderer, but . . . who knows what goes on inside a marriage? People tell me my marriage to Francis looked fine from the outside, so . . .’

  ‘But was Virginia Hargreaves universally liked?’ asked Carole. ‘We’ve found it difficult to get anyone in Fedborough to say a word against her.’

  Debbie Carlton let out a derisive snort of laughter. ‘Oh, they were just impressed by her title. And now it’s even worse, because “not speaking ill of the dead” comes into the equation. But no, there were a few people who’d had their set-tos with the lovely Virginia.’

  ‘What kind of people?’

  ‘People who weren’t impressed by her title and made no secret of the fact. Or people who tried to be competitive with her socially.’

  ‘Like . . . ?’

  ‘Well, I guess the main one would be a woman called Fiona Lister . . . don’t know if you’ve come across her . . . ?’

  They explained that she had been their hostess for dinner the previous Friday.

  ‘My, you are honoured. I was never granted the dubious pleasure of an invitation to one of La Lister’s soirees - and for a very obvious reason.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trade, Carole, trade. My parents’ grocery was right next door to James Lister’s butcher’s. All Fiona’s money may have come from trade, but she didn’t want her social life to do so as well. She aimed for something much more genteel.’ There was an uncanny evocation of Fiona Lister in the way Debbie shaped the word.

  ‘And is that why she fell out with Virginia Hargreaves?’

  ‘Spot on. Fiona has always seen herself as the Queen Bee of Fedborough society, and Virginia was a rival for that title.’

  ‘She wasn’t a great entertainer too, was she?’

  ‘No. Rather the reverse. I can’t ever remember Virginia doing any entertaining at Pelling House. But, you see, she didn’t have to. She got invited everywhere simply by virtue of who she was. People in Fedborough fell over themselves to include her in everything. So, without making any effort at all, Virginia Hargreaves was always going to win over Fiona Lister. Virginia was born into the aristocracy and, however much social-climbing effort Fiona Lister made, she would remain, at bottom, the wife of the local butcher’

  ‘Was there a moment when things came to a head?’ Jude asked eagerly. ‘When the two of them actually came to blows?’

  ‘No, no. Coming to blows was very much not Virginia Hargreaves’s style.’ Debbie smiled mischievously. ‘I did hear a rumour from Mum about something that’d happened, though, but I’m not sure if it’s true.’ She read the avid anticipation in the two women’s faces and went on, ‘Still, one of those things that should be true, even if it isn’t. Apparently, according to Mum, Virginia and Roddy were once invited to one of La Lister’s soirees. And Virginia sent a note back, saying that it was an extraordinarily kind thought, but she was afraid they wouldn’t be able to attend, because it wasn’t really their kind of thing.’

  Carole winced. ‘The Snub Direct.’

  ‘Exactly. And entirely unanswerable, from Fiona’s point of view. Virginia had very firmly put her in her place. People of Virginia’s background didn’t mix with butcher’s wives, and that was all there was to it.’

  ‘Sounds like something out of Jane Austen
,’ said Jude.

  ‘Believe me, it could easily have happened here in Fedborough. And, what’s more, it still could today.’

  Carole nodded. She had lived long enough in Fethering to find the anecdote utterly believable. ‘Interesting that last Friday Fiona Lister was almost fulsome in her appreciation of Lady Virginia.’

  ‘Easy to do that now she’s not around,’ said Debbie. ‘Easy - and rather useful - for Fiona to imply, without fear of contradiction, that they were part of the same social circle.’

  ‘Did your husband know Virginia Hargreaves . . . ?’ asked Jude casually.

  Debbie shrugged. ‘I’m sure he’d met her. He was friends with Alan Burnethorpe who married Virginia’s housekeeper, so they probably knew each other.’

  Jude and Carole exchanged a covert look. Debbie Carlton’s innocence sounded genuine. She appeared completely unaware of her ex-husband’s closeness to Virginia Hargreaves. Or of Alan Burnethorpe’s, come to that.

  ‘Has Francis gone back to the States?’ asked Carole, also affecting ignorance.

  ‘Yes. Back to his born-again marriage and prospective family.’ She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  ‘Hm. In retrospect . . .’ Carole mused, ‘it seems strange that the police dragged him all the way over here to talk to them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, given the fact that the murder victim – or perhaps we should just say the body – turned out to be Virginia Hargreaves, who lived in Pelling House long before you took possession of the place, why on earth would the police have any suspicions of Francis?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I heard a rumour round Fedborough . . .’ Carole kept her voice deliberately light. ‘ . . . that they’d had a tip-off.’

  ‘The police? A tip-off about Francis?’ She seemed suddenly to remember. ‘The anonymous letter?’

  ‘Yes. The anonymous letter which pointed the finger of suspicion firmly at him. You do know about that?’

  ‘Francis mentioned an anonymous letter, but I thought he was just being paranoid. But if there really was one . . . Bloody hell!’ Debbie said, on a sudden spurt of anger. ‘I’d like to get my hands on whoever sent it.’