The Torso in the Town

by Simon Brett

  ‘No.’ Which was all Carole was prepared to say on the subject. But, slightly cheekily, she couldn’t resist adding, ‘Unlike yours.’

  ‘What? Oh yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘In fact, you know, Carole, what you see on the outside of a marriage can sometimes be misleading. Fiona is a wonderful woman in many ways—’

  No, I can’t stand it, thought Carole. Not the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ routine. Anything but that. Time to move the conversation on. And he’d given her the perfect opportunity.

  ‘You’re so right,’ she interrupted. ‘From what I hear, Roddy and Virginia Hargreaves’s marriage looked all right from the outside.’

  ‘Ye-es, to an extent. I mean, there was a feeling round Fedborough that it was a slightly unlikely pairing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, she had a title,’ he said reverently. ‘She was really “Lady Virginia” . . .’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘And Roddy was . . . well . . .’

  ‘From the little I saw of him, he was fairly upper-crust too. Public-school accent, and all that.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ James Lister shook his head knowingly. ‘But he hadn’t got a title.’

  ‘Oh, look.’ Out of the window, Carole had just seen Jude walking up the High Street, picking her way between stilted butterflies, in her customary careless ripple of drapery.

  ‘It’s your friend, yes.’

  ‘She’ll be going up to the Coach and Horses. I said I might be in there.’

  ‘Oh. Do you want me to go out and ask her to join us?’ he asked unwillingly.

  ‘No, no, don’t worry. She’s probably doing some more of the Art Crawl. We’ve fixed to meet later. It’s fine.’

  James Lister relaxed visibly, drained his beer and asked Jean-Pierre for another. Then, remembering his manners, he asked if Carole would like more wine.

  She agreed to another glass. The cosier they got together, the easier it might be to ask the questions she had in mind.

  ‘Presumably,’ she embarked, ‘everyone in Fedbor-ough’s been talking a lot about the Hargreaves . . . ?’

  ‘Not that much, really. I mean, all kinds of rumours were going around before, but once Roddy’s body was found . . . there wasn’t much room left for speculation, was there? Besides, everyone’s got caught up with the Fedborough Festival starting and . . . you know, things move on.’

  ‘Yes.’ Carole warmed to her task. ‘So the theory is . . . Roddy killed her that February weekend three years ago . . . Why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did he kill her?’

  ‘Well . . . We’ve just been saying it’s difficult to see inside a marriage, that things look different on the outside . . . Presumably, he killed her because they were married.’

  Not an entirely satisfactory answer, but that wasn’t what Carole was there to talk about, so she moved on. ‘All right. If we accept that, then we must also accept that Roddy was the one who cut up her body. And then ask the question: why would he do that?’

  ‘To make it easier to dispose of.’

  Everyone seemed to be agreed on that point. Carole nodded thoughtfully. ‘Makes sense. So somehow he disposed of the arms and legs and then . . . why didn’t he dispose of the torso?’

  ‘Someone was suspicious of him? He was afraid of being seen getting rid of it? I don’t think we’ll ever know the full details.’

  ‘No. And yet, aware that a large part of his wife’s body was hidden in the cellar, Roddy Hargreaves then sold Pelling House to Francis and Debbie Carlton. Doesn’t that seem strange behaviour to you?’

  James Lister shrugged. ‘Roddy was a strange chap. Pissed – sorry, pardon my French, drunk – most of the time. He’d forget things.’

  Another less than satisfactory explanation. ‘You said you sold your business about three years ago . . .’ He nodded acknowledgment. ‘And the Frankses next door to you sold up round the same time?’

  Another nod. ‘Stanley had been getting very forgetful. For different reasons, we were both running our businesses down.’

  ‘Terry Harper said the grocery was in quite a state when he bought it.’

  ‘Yes. Our withdrawal at the butcher’s was rather more orderly. Last six months we were moving stuff out of the place, cutting down the amount of goods we stocked.’

  ‘And was Stanley Franks doing the same?’

  ‘The effect was the same, but in his case it was because he was getting so forgetful. He really couldn’t manage any more. I kept offering to help, said he could store stuff in the smokehouse, that kind of thing, but he wouldn’t listen. I think he was very aware of the state he was in, but pretended it wasn’t happening. He got very snappish if anyone suggested anything, offered him help, or criticized him.’

  ‘But you used the smokehouse as a storeroom?’

  ‘You bet. Stopped smoking our own goods more than a year before I retired. You could get the stuff from wholesalers, it saved an awful lot of palaver. And none of the people in the town seemed that bothered. Not much point in making an effort as a small shopkeeper when your customers can get a wider range at the supermarkets than anything you’ve got on offer . . .’

  James Lister’s hobby-horse was threatening to loom into view, so Carole moved quickly to a new question. ‘You told me and Jude that it would be easy for a qualified butcher to dismember a human body . . .’

  He chuckled knowingly. ‘Dead easy.’

  ‘What would he use – a saw?’

  ‘No way. To do a neat job, you wouldn’t need to cut through any bones. Just use a boning knife round the joints. They’d come away neat and tidy, no problem.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t be such an easy job for someone unqualified?’

  He shook his head, enjoying being the fount of knowledge. ‘No way. Get a real pig’s breakfast once you get the amateurs involved. I’m sure they’d use saws, axes, machetes, cleavers. When it’s done properly, you know, butchery’s a very tidy trade.’

  Their steak and omelette arrived. After some coy badinage with Jean-Pierre, James Lister guffawed. ‘What a subject to be talking about over lunch, eh? When all I want to know is how a pretty little thing like you came to end up in Fethering, of all places.’

  Though it went against every instinct she possessed, Carole manufactured an appropriately girlish giggle. ‘Just one more thing before we eat, though . . .’

  ‘Mm?’ His steak knife was already sawing through the red meat.

  ‘If Roddy Hargreaves had no training as a butcher, how was he able to make such a neat job of dismembering his wife?’

  James Lister chuckled. He was bored with this conversation now, and wanted to move on to more intimate topics. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe, in an earlier part of his life, he’d trained as a butcher. You’d be amazed the people who’ve got butchery skills tucked away in their past . . .’

  ‘Really?’ Carole leaned closer.

  He was enjoying this. Fuelled as he was by the beer, her proximity made him potentially indiscreet, even a little reckless. ‘I tell you, there’s one very fine upmarket lady of Fedborough who . . . you’d take your life in your hands if you mentioned it to her . . . but she used to work as a butcher.’

  ‘Who was that then?’ Carole managed to get a teasing, almost sexy, quality into her voice.

  ‘Ooh, I don’t think I should tell you.’

  ‘Go on . . .’ she pleaded.

  ‘Well . . . Not a word to a soul, but I’m talking about Fiona. My wife.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. Early days of our marriage, before the kids came along, she used to help in the shop with me and my old dad.’

  ‘Well, well, well.’

  ‘Bloody good butcher she was too.’

  And certainly still knows how to put the knife in, thought Carole Seddon. But her only words were, ‘Was she?’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jude had done as Carole surmised, and taken in some more of the Art Crawl. She had found the
quality of the art mixed. Works in one or two exhibitions she liked a lot, others she loathed. She was relieved that she saw nothing she liked better than the watercolour she had bought from Debbie Carlton.

  She wanted to talk to Carole about Debbie. And the appearance of Alan Burnethorpe in her flat. Jude had no wish to succumb to the knee-jerk reactions of Fedbor-ough’s gossips, but it was hard to put an entirely innocent interpretation on his presence there. And it did open up a whole new range of interesting possibilities . . . Yes, she needed to discuss the case with Carole.

  In the meantime, even where she couldn’t enjoy the art, she could enjoy the private view of Fedborough’s houses. The Art Crawl, as Debbie Carlton had said, was a Snoopers’ Charter, and Jude enjoyed a good snoop as much as the next person.

  She and Carole had made flexible arrangements for meeting up again. The most likely event was that they’d bump into each other in the town, but if that didn’t happen, they’d agreed to home in on Carole’s Renault, parked up near the Castle, at three o’clock, four o’clock or five o’clock.

  Jude had missed the three o’clock potential rendezvous, and was contemplating being there for four, when she remembered she had another assignation at that time. So sure was she that it belonged to another of Harry Roxby’s little games that she had almost forgotten about the anonymous letter.

  Still, might as well turn up. There might be someone there. She might get some useful information.

  Walking down the High Street, weaving her way through performance artists, Jude got out the letter once again. As she reread it, she became aware of a strangeness in the phrasing. The writer wasn’t actually promising anything. ‘If you think you know how Virginia Hargreaves died . . .’ The message could be asking for information, rather than offering it.

  Jude crossed Fedborough Bridge, and walked along the dead-end of towpath. Exactly opposite Bracken’s Boatyard, another thought struck her. She’d heard the name of Bob Bracken, the previous owner who’d sold the premises to Roddy Hargreaves, but would Harry Roxby know the name? Didn’t the use of the words ‘Bracken’s Boatyard’ suggest that the writer was someone who’d been a resident of Fedborough for quite a while?

  She swept back the curtain of grass from Harry’s hideaway, but there was no one there. She stared across at the boatsheds. Deserted. Though the bustle of the town in Festival time lay only across Fedborough Bridge, Jude felt very alone.

  She looked along the towpath towards the bridge, now intrigued. Maybe the anonymous letter had nothing to do with Harry . . . Who else would she see walking along from the bridge towards her?

  She suddenly remembered something she had overheard that lunchtime in the Crown and Anchor. Francis Carlton had been talking about why he’d come back from Florida to talk to the police. And Alan Burnethorpe had been very quick to suggest they might have been tipped off. Maybe the anonymous letter had . . .

  There was a sound from behind her.

  ‘Good afternoon, Jude. So you made it,’ said a voice she recognized.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Lunch with James Lister had gone on rather longer than Carole would have wished. Towards the end, his arch flirtatiousness had given way to maudlin self-pity. Though Carole recognized this was an entirely understandable emotion from anyone married to Fiona Lister, she found it hard to be sympathetic. And she wanted to move on, find Jude and discuss her findings.

  But James Lister’s long-winded leave-taking of Jean-Pierre, followed by his reluctant farewell to her – including an unnecessarily slobbery kiss on the stairwell of the restaurant – meant that Carole didn’t arrive back at the Renault till after four.

  There was no sign of Jude. Frustrating; Carole might only just have missed her. Never mind, an hour more of the Art Crawl wouldn’t come amiss.

  Carole didn’t see much she liked, very little that she’d give house-room to. She contemplated having another look at Debbie Carlton’s work. She’d really liked those watercolours, and had almost completed the mental processes involved in reaching a decision to buy one. But perhaps going that afternoon would be too precipitate. The Art Crawl had another whole week to run, after all, Carole reassured herself with some relief.

  When she got back to the Renault just before five, there was still no Jude. Carole waited, then walked up to the small green outside the entrance to the Castle ruins, thinking her friend might be sitting there. But no sign.

  She let a full half-hour elapse before giving up and driving back to Fethering. Couldn’t hang about any longer. Gulliver would want feeding and walking, apart from anything else.

  As she drove down towards the coast, Carole wondered whether she should invest in a mobile phone. Jude had one, and for moments such as this they must be very useful. It’d be very easy to sort out misunderstood arrangements or to explain delays if one had instant telephonic contact.

  She was a little surprised at herself, contemplating two luxury purchases so close together. A watercolour by Debbie Carlton and a mobile phone. That wasn’t appropriate for the Carole Seddon Carole Seddon knew and tried to love. Still, no need to rush into either extravagance, she told herself. Think about whether she really did need them.

  When she had got back to High Tor and garaged the Renault, she fully expected to find a message on the answering machine to explain Jude’s absence. But there wasn’t one. She went next door to Woodside Cottage, thinking for some reason her neighbour might have got a cab back early from Fedborough.

  There was nobody in.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  ‘Your note,’ said Jude. ‘Your anonymous letter to me, perhaps I should say . . . asked if I thought I knew how Virginia Hargreaves died.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure she didn’t die a natural death.’ There was a silence. ‘Almost equally sure she was murdered.’

  ‘And who do you think killed her?’

  ‘I don’t think it was Roddy. In fact I know it wasn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He had a pretty solid alibi for the weekend she disappeared. He was in France.’

  ‘Anyone can say they’re in France.’

  ‘But he was seen on to the ferry at Newhaven by the Rev Trigwell, and met off another ferry four days later by James Lister.’

  ‘Ah. Of course, someone plotting to murder his wife could deliberately set up such an alibi and then catch another ferry back to England . . .’

  ‘I agree they could, but from what you knew of Roddy Hargreaves – and the state he was in at the time – could you see him being that organized?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  Another silence fell between them. Not an uncomfortable one. The houseboat swayed gently as the tide of the Fether tugged at its hull. July sunlight spilled through the windows and reflected off the highly polished surfaces of the old dark wood and the brass fittings.

  ‘So,Jude . . .ifRoddywasn’tthemurderer . . .who was?’

  ‘I haven’t worked it out yet. There are quite a few options.’

  ‘That’s nice to know. Says a lot for the people of Fedborough, doesn’t it?’ A chuckle. ‘Incidentally, I was talking to Debbie . . .’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘She said you’d been enquiring about an anonymous letter sent to the police.’

  ‘Oh yes. Sent by someone determined to push the burden of suspicion on to Francis.’

  ‘Have you got any closer to finding out who sent that letter?’

  Jude shook her head. ‘Well, this morning I thought logic dictated that the person who sent the anonymous letter to me must, by definition, be the one who contacted the police. But now I see it was you who wrote to me . . .’ She chuckled. ‘It seems unlikely, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was an answering chuckle. But it didn’t sound very amused. ‘I’ve got a document that I think might interest you, Jude.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Rather relevant to the death of Virginia Hargreaves. Would you like to see it?’

  �
��Very much indeed.’

  ‘It’s through here.’ A door was opened to the back part of the houseboat. ‘After you.’

  Jude stepped into the other room.

  Too late she heard the door closing behind her, and the sound of a key turning in the lock.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  By seven o’clock Carole was beginning to feel a little uneasy. Where could Jude be? Then again, she’d always been a law unto herself, going off without explanation and reappearing equally unannounced.

  But the niggle of anxiety didn’t go away.

  Then a new thought came to Carole, a thought that was almost reassuring. Jude had mentioned the one lead they had yet to follow up. Bob Bracken, the old owner of the Fedborough boatyards. Yes, Jude must’ve followed up on him. She was probably even now talking to the old boy.

  But the surge of confidence brought on by this thought soon started to dwindle. If she had tracked down Bob Bracken, Jude was spending a very long time with him. And why hadn’t she phoned to say what she was doing? Carole knew she had the mobile with her.

  By eight o’clock the anxiety was becoming paranoia. Two people in Fedborough had died in suspicious circumstances. The person responsible was still probably at large in the town. If that person knew that Jude was investigating the crimes, she might well be next on the list to be silenced . . .

  Carole couldn’t stand the uncertainty any longer. She had to find out where Jude was.

  The only pointer she had was the name of Bob Bracken.

  And there was only one way she had of finding him.

  She reached for the phone and dialled the number of the Crown and Anchor.

  Jude prayed as she switched on her mobile again. But once again there was no vestige of a signal. That escape route was barred.

  ‘You can’t keep me here for ever,’ said Jude through the door to her captor.

  ‘I’m well aware of that.’

  ‘People will come looking for me. People will come here to see you, anyway.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why not let me out now, and we’ll forget this ever happened.’