The Torso in the Town

by Simon Brett

  She sighed. ‘So I’m afraid we’ll never know the precise reason for Roddy Hargreaves’s death. Like a lot of his life, its details will remain for ever blurred.’

  They were silent, all thinking of the dead man, of the confusions in his sad existence. A wife who didn’t love him, a disastrous aptitude for losing money, Catholic guilt, and the belief that the solution to all his problems lay in a bottle. A total failure. And yet none of them could think of him without affection.

  Carole ended the silence by turning sternly to Debbie Carlton. ‘We’ve established that your mother didn’t murder Roddy Hargreaves . . . but the fact remains that she threatened Jude last night with—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Carole.’ The bird’s nest of blonde hair shook, as if it could erase the memory completely.

  ‘It certainly does, Jude. You were in very real danger. Did you talk to your mother about that, Debbie?’

  The girl nodded. ‘She was just protecting Dad. It was totally out of character. Mum hasn’t got a violent nature. I swear she’d never do anything like that again.’

  ‘Unless there was another threat to your father’s reputation.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Debbie faltered. ‘I suppose . . .’

  Jude tried to lighten the atmosphere. ‘So all we have to do is to see that we never again let Billie think we are putting your dad’s reputation under threat.’

  ‘Yes.’ Debbie Carlton looked pleadingly towards Carole, but an implacable sternness remained in the older woman’s eyes.

  As ever, it was Jude who soothed away the impasse. ‘Carole, what alternatives do we have? Either we take Debbie’s word for her mother’s future good behaviour or . . . what? We report to the police what happened last night, put an old woman under the pressures of court proceedings, possibly remove the only stable element in her husband’s life . . . We can’t do it.’

  There was still a long moment before Carole was convinced, and during that time her eyes held Debbie’s. Finally, the contact was released.

  Brushing her hands against her thighs in a businesslike manner, Carole announced, ‘What Jude and I were planning to do was to go and have lunch at a rather nice pub we know. The Crown and Anchor at Fethering. Would you like to join us, Debbie? It’s my treat.’

  ‘Well . . .’ The girl smiled with relief. ‘That sounds a very good idea indeed. I’d better just . . .’

  They watched her go into the conservatory. The sun had shifted since their arrival and Stanley Franks’s white hair now looked like a halo in the brightness. His daughter leaned down to kiss the old man’s cheek. He showed no signs of having noticed the gesture.

  ‘I’ve got to be off now, Mum. Call you later.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Billie Franks looked at her husband with pride. ‘He’s a lot better today, you know. I think he’s turned the corner.’

  The old woman was unaware that Carole and Jude had even been at The Elms that morning.

  The Crown and Anchor was busy. Many of the dutiful, the concerned, the well-wishing and the will-hungry coming down to visit elderly relatives had chosen to reward themselves with a nice pub lunch. Ted Crisp and his staff were kept constantly occupied behind the bar.

  It was not often Carole had seen him at work when the pub was full and she was impressed by his efficiency. The customers responded to his gruff humour and a lot of laughter rang around the bar. She felt glad that a small bridge between the two of them had been mended.

  All three women had large glasses of Chilean Chardonnay and the comfortable feeling of having ordered roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, with all the trimmings.

  ‘There is one thing I owe you an explanation about,’ announced Debbie Carlton, after a silence.

  She looked ill at ease. ‘Never apologize, never explain,’ said Jude lightly.

  But Debbie didn’t take the proffered chance to get off the hook. ‘No, I need to, for me if not for you. I want to explain about me and Alan Burnethorpe.’

  Jude looked interested. Carole looked embarrassed.

  ‘Well, you both saw me with him, Jude at my place and then you, Carole, at—’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Carole cleared her throat. ‘There’s no need anyone should know you’ve been, as it were . . . I mean . . .’

  Debbie chuckled at her discomfiture. ‘We hadn’t actually been making love when you arrived, you know.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘That wasn’t why I was naked. I was modelling for Alan. He was drawing me.’

  ‘But,’ said Jude slyly, ‘I gather he makes a habit of drawing his mistresses.’

  ‘Yes.’ Debbie nodded, taking a deep breath before continuing. ‘I’m not pretending that we haven’t been having an affair – though it’s not something I’m particularly proud of. It’s just . . . after Francis walked out . . . I really lost all confidence in myself as a woman . . . I know what Alan’s like. From when I was a child, I’ve always known his reputation round Fedborough. But . . . he was nice to me. He treated me . . . in a way that made me feel like a woman again. My self-esteem was so low. Does that make any sense to you?’

  Jude nodded, and Carole, with surprising gentleness, said, ‘Yes. It does.’ Over Debbie’s shoulder, she could see Ted Crisp joking with someone at the bar. He caught her eye and gave her a cheery wave. Carole felt blessed in his friendship.

  ‘Anyway,’ Debbie Carlton continued resolutely, ‘that’s over. Me and Alan. All that’s happened this weekend . . . the things Mum said, and what you just told me about Alan witnessing Roddy’s death and keeping quiet about it . . . and . . . well, everything. It’s made me realize that that relationship is selfish and going nowhere . . . and actually rather demeaning to me. So may I congratulate you on being the first to know that the affair is over.’

  ‘What about Alan himself?’ asked Jude.

  ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be the second to know. Well, actually, given the fact that there are two of you, he’ll be the third to know. But don’t lose any sleep over how he takes the news.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Carole.

  ‘No. He’ll move on to someone else.’ For a moment, Debbie Carlton looked slightly wistful. ‘He’s just one of those men, who you know’s a bastard, but . . . he is quite good to be with. Do you know the kind I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jude ruefully.

  ‘No,’ said Carole.

  ‘Anyway, I’m going to live my own life from now on.’ Debbie bunched her fists to accentuate this positive approach. ‘The reaction to my paintings in the Art Crawl has really given me a lift. I have got artistic talent. I can make a living from my pictures. And that’s what I’m going to concentrate on for the next bit of my life.’

  ‘And men . . . ?’ Jude let the word dangle.

  Debbie looked thoughtful. ‘I’m not going to go out looking for them. I suppose, if one comes along . . .’ She grinned. ‘He’ll have to be a bloody good one, though.’

  Carole made a decision. ‘You say the reaction to your paintings in the Art Crawl has been good. They haven’t all gone, have they?’

  ‘No. Going fine, but still plenty left.’

  ‘Excellent. I’ll come along and choose one tomorrow.’

  ‘Thanks. Don’t feel you have to.’

  ‘I want to,’ said Carole firmly. ‘And you haven’t given up the interior design business, have you?’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’

  ‘That is good news.’ Carole Seddon rubbed her hands together with confidence and satisfaction. ‘Because I definitely want you to do my sitting room.’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The Fedborough Festival finished, and Fedborough life continued much as before. Memories closed over Roddy Hargreaves just as effectively as the waters of the Fether had done. It was perhaps unfair that he’d gone down in the communal recollection as a murderer and dismemberer, but then Roddy had never cared that much about Fedborough opinion, and wherever he was now he could at least no longer be harmed by the town’s gossip.

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p; The memory of Virginia Hargreaves, by contrast, lived on, and her myth grew. The grisly circumstances of her death added to the attractions of the story. So, of course, did the fact that she had a title. ‘The torso in the town’ became a regular feature of Fedborough’s Town Walks.

  But after the end of that September, no more Town Walks were conducted by James Lister. He had the temerity to die of a stroke without asking his wife’s permission and, with typical lack of consideration, contrived to do it in the middle of one of her Friday-night dinner parties.

  All Fedborough turned out for his funeral at All Souls. The service was conducted, with his customary tentative tremulousness, by the Rev Philip Trigwell. In his address he said that everyone would remember James Lister as a good man, though not without faults. James would be remembered best as an honest local tradesman, though some people would remember him best as a generous host and pillar of Fedborough’s social life. He was sure of a place in heaven, though of course some people in different denominations saw heaven in a different way from the Church of England, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  For the message on James’s gravestone, Fiona had chosen, with her customary unawareness of irony, the words, ‘At peace at last’. She, being made of sterner – not to mention, in her view, socially superior – stuff than her husband, continued to live for many, many years, spreading her bile even-handedly amongst all the inhabitants of Fedborough.

  Andrew Wragg stayed with Terry Harper. The younger man still threw tantrums, but, as middle-age coarsened his beautiful body, his threats to leave grew decreasingly credible. He started to drink a lot, with predictable effects on his waistline. His temper and his art grew worse, and Terry Harper continued to adore him.

  The Burnethorpes stayed married, in apparent harmony. Nobody who knew Alan well could imagine that Joke was his only physical outlet, but he restricted his extra-mural activities to the discreet anonymity of London. He went on producing sensitive architectural conversions and accurate impersonal drawings of female nudes.

  Donald Durrington continued to be respected as chief partner in the local medical practice. His wife continued to drown the misery of her marriage in drink.

  And Francis and Jonelle Carlton . . . Well, nobody really cared what happened to them. They soon moved permanently to Florida, and that was miles away from Fedborough.

  The town was so self-involved, you see, that people who left it virtually dropped off the map. That’s what happened to the Roxbys. After a Fedborough winter, Grant decided that the family was missing the varied stimuli of London. The children needed access to theatres, cinemas and cultured people. Kim, as ever, agreed with him, so Pelling House and its history were sold yet again.

  The Roxbys’ girls were quite happy to return to London. They were getting to the age when ponies were becoming less interesting and clubs featured increasingly in their conversation. The only family member who objected to the move was Harry. Typical of his bloody father, he thought, to uproot him from all his Fedborough friends and imprison him in some concrete wilderness. And so Harry Roxby’s adolescence continued.

  Debbie Carlton’s career as a painter flourished, so much so that after a few years she was able to give up her interior design work. When Stanley Franks finally died, Debbie moved her mother out of the houseboat and into the flat in Harbidge Street. She herself moved to London, which offered more opportunities for her as an artist, but she was down in Fedborough most weekends.

  And Billie Franks continued as she always had. She knew everyone in Fedborough and everyone in Fedborough knew her. But nobody in Fedborough knew everything about her.

  After their brief intense involvement in the affairs of the town, Carole and Jude didn’t go back to Fedborough much. They lived eight miles downriver in Fethering, you see, and that was a world away.

  Can’t get enough of Fethering Village? Read on for an extract of Carole and Jude’s next case . . .

  Chapter One

  Carole Seddon was good at meetings, but only when she was running them. She got restless under the chairmanship of others, particularly those she didn’t think were very impressive chairmen.

  And Lord Beniston fitted firmly into that category. Carole’s years in the Home Office had been, amongst many other things, a consumer guide in the conduct of meetings. While honing her own style of calm efficiency, she had endured the chairmanship of the overanxious, the under-prepared, the nit-picking, the lethargic and the frankly incompetent. But Lord Beniston brought a new shortcoming to the role – a world-weary patrician arrogance, which suggested that the afternoon’s agenda was a tiresome interruption to his life and that the Trustees of Bracketts were extremely privileged to have him present amongst them. They might represent the Great and the Good of West Sussex, but he represented the Great and the Good on a national scale. Their names might look quite good on a charity’s letterhead, but Lord Beniston was confident that his name looked a lot better (even though the reforms of New Labour no longer allowed him a seat in the House of Lords).

  He was in his sixties, with steel-grey hair whose parallel furrows always looked as if it had just been combed. He had a claret-coloured face, and yellowish teeth which looked permanently clenched, though his manner was too arrogant to be tense. Presumably there were times when he didn’t wear a pin-striped suit and a blue and red regimental tie, but none of the Bracketts Trustees had ever seen him out of that uniform.

  The Bracketts Trust met six times a year, and this was Carole’s second appearance. She had accepted the offer of a Trusteeship with some misgivings, and the first meeting had strengthened these to the extent that now, only halfway through her second, she was already assessing graceful ways of shedding the responsibility she had taken on.

  She didn’t get the feeling she’d be much missed. The offer to join the Bracketts Board had come from the venue’s new Director, Gina Locke, and seemed to have been issued in the mistaken belief that Carole’s background as a civil servant might provide some shortcuts through the tangles of government bureaucracy, and also that she might have wealthy contacts who would prove useful in the eternal business of fund-raising. When, at the first meeting it had become clear that their new recruit was unlikely to fulfil either of these needs, the other Trustees seemed to lose interest in her.

  And Carole Seddon’s own interest in the affairs of Bracketts was finite. The house was a literary shrine, and she couldn’t really claim to be a literary person. Her reasons for accepting the Trusteeship had been a surprise at being asked, a sense of being flattered, and a feeling that she ought to make more of an effort to fill her years of retirement. Well-pensioned, comfortably housed in High Tor, a desirably neat property in the West Sussex seaside village of Fethering, Carole Seddon did have time on her hands. A thin woman in her early fifties, with short grey hair and glasses shielding pale blue eyes, she reckoned her brain was as good as it ever had been, and deserved more exercise than the mental aerobics of the Times crossword. But she wasn’t convinced that listening to the bored pontifications of Lord Beniston was the kind of workout it needed.

  The setting was nice, though, hard to fault that. The Trustees’ Meetings always took place in the panelled dining room of Bracketts, and were held on Thursdays at five, after the house and gardens had ceased to admit visitors. This was the last meeting of the season; at the end of the next week, coinciding with the end of October, the site would be closed to the public until the following Easter.

  Bracketts, set a little outside the Downland village of South Stapley, was one of those houses which had grown organically. The oldest part was Elizabethan, and additions had been made in Georgian and Victorian times.

  Through the diamond-paned leaded windows, Carole Seddon could see over the house’s rolling lawns to the gleam of the fast-flowing River Fether which ran out into the sea some fifteen miles away at Fethering. It was late autumn, when the fragile heat of the day gave way at evening to the cold breath of approaching winter, but perhaps one of the best ti
mes of year to appreciate the beauty and seclusion of the estate. Bracketts was an idyllic place to be the home of a writer.

  The writer to whom the shrine was dedicated was Esmond Chadleigh. His father Felix had bought Bracketts during the First World War, getting the property cheap, in a state of considerable dilapidation, and spending a great deal on loving restoration of the house and gardens. When Felix Chadleigh died in 1937, Bracketts was left to his son and, funded by family inheritance and his own writing income, Esmond Chadleigh had lived there in considerable style until his own death in 1967.

  Esmond Chadleigh was one of those Catholic figures, like Chesterton and Belloc, who, in that unreal, unrealistic world of England between the wars, had made his mark in almost every department of the world of letters. Adult novelist, children’s story-teller, light versifier, essayist, critic, it seemed there was no form of writing to which Esmond Chadleigh could not turn his hand. But when the derisory adjective ‘glib’ was about to be applied to him, critics were brought up short by a series of deeply felt poems of suffering, published in 1935 under the title Vases of Dead Flowers. Of these, the most famous, a staple of anthologies, school assemblies, memorial services and Radio Four’s With Great Pleasure selections, was the poem ‘Threnody for the Lost’.

  Written, according to Esmond Chadleigh’s Introduction, nearly twenty years before its first publication, this was a lament for his older brother Graham, who at eighteen had set off for the battlefields of Flanders and never returned, even in a coffin. In the room where the Trustees were meeting was a glass-topped display-case, dedicated to the memory of Graham Chadleigh.

  The space was divided down the middle. On one side there were photographs of him as a boy in a house before Bracketts, with his younger brother beside him; both carried tennis rackets. Then Graham appeared in a cricket team in a gravely posed school photograph, dated 1915. Besides this was the faded tasselled cap of his cricket colours. There was a letter he had written from school to his parents, politely requesting them to send him more tuck.