The Fethering Mysteries 03; The Torso in the Town

Debbie Carlton was thin, but the thinness implied toned muscle rather than frailty. She had naturally blonde – almost white – hair and surprisingly dark blue eyes. Carole always found it difficult to judge the ages of those younger than herself, but reckoned mid-thirties must be about the right mark.

Debbie was wearing a large sloppy red jumper, in which – as intended – she looked waif-like. Deceptively simple black trousers and frivolously large red trainers. For make-up only a hint of blue on her upper eyelids and red lipstick the exact colour of her shoes. She knew precisely the effect of the ensemble.

Her designing skills were also evident in the small sitting room into which she ushered Carole, but forsomeone working from home, that made good business sense. Her domestic decor had to be an advertisement for the skills she hoped to sell.

The flat was pleasant enough. On the first floor, above a hairdresser’s in Harbidge Street, it was not what the finely tuned local snobs would call one of the best addresses in Fedborough. Perfectly acceptable, though, for anyone who hadn’t once enjoyed the lavish expanses and magnificent proportions of Pelling House.

The decor demonstrated Debbie Carlton’s ability to do the best she could with the space she had. On walls and ceiling the predominant colour was terracotta; furniture had been stripped down and stained the colour of pumice stone. Dusty green in the curtains and cunningly faded red on the upholstery gave an impression of a sleepy Italian town, which was intensified by robust morning sunlight streaming through the small panes of the windows.

The Mediterranean theme was maintained by the rows of framed paintings on the walls. Delicate watercolours picked out the apricot honey of tiled roofs, the hazy green of cypresses, the silver shimmer of olive leaves and the soft grey of ancient statuary. The style was so uniform that they had all to be the work of the same artist. Carole wondered whether it was Debbie herself.

Time enough to find that out. Her hostess, gesturing her guest to an armchair which was bleached to a rose colour, sat herself down in front of a table with a waiting cafetiere. “Thank you very much for warning me about the police. Theirs was the first message on the answering machine. Might’ve given me a nasty shock if you hadn’t said anything.”

Carole shrugged that it had been no problem.

“Now, how do you like your coffee?”

“Just a dash of milk. No sugar.” As Debbie busied herself pouring, Carole asked, “Have the police talked to you then?”

“And how! Had about three hours with them yesterday afternoon.”

“Here?”

“Yes,” Debbie smiled. “They didn’t take me down to the station. So far as I can gather, I’m not their number one suspect.”

“No, of course not. I don’t suppose they have any idea who the body – the torso – was.”

“If they have, they didn’t confide it in me. There you are.”

“Thanks.”

“Would you like a biscuit?”

There were none on display, but Carole would have refused the offer, anyway. Though there had been a strong biscuit culture in the Home Office, she had always borne in mind her mother’s proscription of eating between meals.

“So what did the police ask you about?”

“Oh, purely factual stuff. When we moved into the house…”

“When was that, actually?”

“Two…no, I suppose two and a half years ago.” The recollection threatened her poise for a moment, so she moved quickly on. “And of course the police wanted to know who we’d bought Pelling House from…”

“Which was?”

“Man called Roddy Hargreaves. I doubt if you’ve met him. A Fedborough ‘character’. Bought up the placewhere the pleasure boats used to run down on the Fether, but the business didn’t work out. He had to sell up.”

“Did he move away?”

“No, no one ever moves away from Fedborough. They just move into smaller premises,” she added ruefully. “Not sure where Roddy’s place is currently. He’s moved around the town a bit in the last couple of years. His permanent address seems to be the Coach and Horses in Pelling Street.”

“Hm. What else did the police ask you?”

Though Carole’s questions were already tantamount to an interrogation, Debbie Carlton seemed either not to notice or not to mind. “They wanted to know when we sold Pelling House, all that sort of detail. And, needless to say, whether we often went down to the cellar.”

“And the answer to that was…?” This time Carole realized that her instinctive curiosity was becoming a bit too avid for a Fedborough coffee morning, and backtracked. “That is, if you don’t mind my asking…?”

“I don’t mind at all…Mrs Seddon.”

“Please call me Carole.”

“All right, Carole. And call me Debbie. Well, in answer to your question – and indeed the police’s question, I very rarely did go down to the cellar in Pelling House. We had so much space there that we reckoned we’d colonize it slowly. Did our bedroom first, then the sitting room, then the kitchen and…” The sentence, like the relationship it referred to, was left in mid-air.

“But the cellar must’ve been inspected when you bought the house, you know, when it was surveyed?”

Debbie Carlton shook her head. “We actually didn’t have it surveyed. Mad, I know, but I’d have still bought Pelling House if a survey had said the whole of Dauncey Street was about to fall into the Fether. And Francis saw the economic sense of it. He resented the idea of paying the money to some surveyor who’d just spend ten minutes in the place and send in a whacking great bill. You see, my husband was – well, is – an architect, so he checked the basic.”

“Seem to be a lot of architects in Fedborough.”

“Certainly are. Architects, antique dealers, and the retired. Anyway, Francis had always been careful with his money, and he came into some when his parents died, so we didn’t need a mortgage. Which meant we didn’t need a survey for the building society. And I’d dreamed of living in Pelling House since I was a little girl. Dreamed of bringing up a family there, but…”

Carole began to realize the depth of the pain moving out must have caused. But there had been another implication in Debbie’s words. “You were brought up round here, were you?”

“Yes. Fedborough born and bred. I’m a genuine Chub.”

“Chub?”

Debbie grinned at her bewilderment. “People who’re actually born in Fedborough are nicknamed ‘Chubs’. After the fish. Chub still get caught off the bridge sometimes.”

“Ah.”

“My parents used to run the local grocery – in the days when there was a grocery in Fedborough. So I was brought up and went to school round here. Then obviously moved away when I went to St Martin’s College of Art. After that Francis and I moved back down here and…” She grimaced wryly. “Here I am again, as Debbie Carlton.” A frown. “I should really have changed back to my maidenname after the divorce, but I’d got the design stationery printed before I thought of it.”

“What was your maiden name?”

“Franks. Debbie Franks.”

“Either of them sounds all right for an interior designer.”

“Yes.” A light chuckle. “At least I had a maiden name I could go back to. Unlike my poor mother.”

Carole waited for a gloss on this, but it didn’t come. So she smiled briefly, then asked, “Didn’t you want to move after the divorce?” She remembered after David’s departure how frantic she had been to get out of the marital home as soon as possible and make her permanent base in their country cottage in Fethering.

“I desperately wanted to move,” said Debbie with feeling. “But my parents are still down here. Dad’s in a home, which means Mum’s virtually on her own. She sold the big house, to pay for Dad’s hospital expenses and lives in a houseboat on the Fether. I can’t really leave her, so…” The shrug this time encompassed all the hopeless