get to the bar at the same moment he reached them. He registered her arrival and for a moment looked uncertain. The regulars knew they’d be served in time; his bosses had instructed him not to keep new business waiting. He turned towards Jude.
“No, please.” She gestured to the four men and grinned. “Wouldn’t want to keep a man from his pint.”
One of the regulars, a red-faced man in his seventies with a luxuriant white moustache, guffawed. “Now there’s a woman who’s been well trained. Wouldn’t like to give a few lessons to my wife, would you?”
Carole was once again struck by the effortlessness of it all. Jude didn’t appear to be trying, nor was she demeaning herself by going along with this sexist nonsense; she was simply indulging in small talk at the bar of a pub. Having never in her life been able to produce the smallest syllable of small talk, Carole felt very envious.
While the barman filled two empty pint glasses and topped up the other two with generous ‘Sussex halves’, Jude chuckled at what had been said and, holding out the menu, continued, “Now, you gentlemen look as if you know your way around this area…”
“You can say that again,” agreed the man with the moustache and the disapproving wife.
“…so perhaps you can tell me what a ‘South Downs Sausage’ is…?”
“You’ve got one of those, haven’t you, Roddy?” the moustached man chortled. “Big one and all, if the town rumours are anything to go by.”
“Very funny; said the man who had been addressed. His voice was surprisingly upper-class, at odds with his discoloured jeans, broken-down trainers, and a faded Guernsey sweater, which Jude thought must be very hot on a day like that. The voice also contained a hint of reproof, a suggestion that the remark might have been unnecessarily crude. He turned his face to Jude, and she saw that he had a real drinker’s nose, a sad purple clusterof broken veins. He was probably only in his early fifties, but looked older.”
“I must apologize for my friend. I would imagine that a South Downs Sausage is extraordinarily like any other kind of sausage, but that Keith and Janet, mine host and hostess, reckon they’ll sell a few more if they give them some spurious local connection.”
He was extremely polite, but spoke with the punctilious concentration of the regularly drunk.
“Oh, well then, I think I’ll go for them.” Having given her order to the barman, Jude took a risk. Turning to the purple nose, she said, “Your friend called you ‘Roddy’. You’re not, by any chance, Roddy Hargreaves, are you?”
“At your service.” He made a little half-bow, which threatened his stability on the bar stool. The friend who’d made the crude remark reached out automatically to steady him.
Having identified her quarry, Jude was faced with a problem. How on earth was she meant to know him? What possible connection could there be between them? What could she say that didn’t sound like blatant interrogation?
As ever, she took the direct route. “Somebody was saying you used to live in Pelling House…you know, where the body was found…”
This was greeted by a guffaw of recognition from the group. “Becoming quite the local celebrity, Roddy,” said the red-faced man, wiping his moustache. “You may not be able to pull the birds by your looks, but they’re still fatally attracted to your Jack the Ripper side.”
“Very witty, Jimmy.” Roddy turned to look at Jude. His scrutiny was not openly suspicious, but it was searching.
“The gossip’s been spreading then. You don’t live in Fed-borough, do you?”
“Fethering.”
“Different kind of folk in Fethering. Very odd people. Low aspirations – that’s because so many of them live in bungalows,” observed the one called Jimmy in a jocular tone. Clearly he was the self-appointed wit of the group.
Automatic male laughter followed the sally, but Roddy didn’t join in. He appeared to make the decision that he could trust Jude. “So what are they saying about the torso in Fethering?”
“Everything and nothing. A lot of ill-informed gossip.”
“Much the same as Fedborough, then. By the way, I see you are drinkless. That’s a real damsel-in-distress situation. Allow me to remedy it for you.”
“I’ve got a drink over there with my friend.”
Roddy Hargreaves looked towards their table. “Why doesn’t she come and join us?”
Carole ignored the perfectly clear invitation in Jude’s eyes, and looked away. There were some instinctive reactions she could not avoid. From school dances onward, she had resisted the social embarrassment of being dragged across to men with the line, “Oh, and this is my friend Carole.” She knew she was being stupid, she knew in this particular instance she was losing the chance to be part of the investigation, but there were certain spots which, even after half a century, this particular leopard could not change.
Immediately understanding, Jude said lightly, “Oh, she hasn’t noticed. Well, I will have a Chilean Chardonnay with you then. Thank you very much.”
“Large Chilean Chardonnay, Lee. Sorry, I didn’t get your name…?”
“Jude.”
“Good evening, Jude. I, as you pieced together; am Roddy Hargreaves. This is Jimmy Lister, and…” As he identified the other two, Jude realized that the man with the moustache must be James Lister, the conductor of Town Walks, he whom the Rev Trigwell had hailed as ‘a real character’. Might be a useful source of Fedborough history, Jude filed away – if I could put up with his jokes.
“I suppose, Roddy,” she went on, direct as ever, as he passed her the wine, “the police have talked to you about what was found in Felling House?”
“Exhaustively. I was with them for…what, four, five hours? Five hours without a drink, imagine that.” There was more knee-jerk laughter. Jude had often thought there was an academic thesis to be written about male laughter in pubs. The words that prompted it didn’t need to be funny – indeed, they very rarely were. The important thing was that the cue should be unmistakable and delivered in the right nudging tone; then laughter would inevitably ensue.
“But presumably they didn’t confide in you the current state of their investigations?”
“Sadly, no. Didn’t give me any pointers to the identity of the corpse, nothing intriguing like that. Just lots of questions about precise dates, when I bought Pelling House, when I sold it, how often I went down to the cellar, all that kind of stuff.”
“Five hours seems quite a long time for just that.”
“Ah,” chipped in James Lister, who felt he had been silent too long, “that’s because Roddy’s their number one suspect. The police’d heard some of the things he’d got up to with his South Downs Sausage, you see, so they reckoned the torso was the result of a sex game that went wrong.”
This tastelessness triggered another bark of male laughter. Roddy, to give him his due, did not participate. Despite his drunkenness, he seemed to have slightly more sensitivity than his companions.
“No,” he said quietly, “they didn’t question me as if I was a suspect. The reason that it took so long is that I have a terrible memory for dates. Just about tell you when my own birthday is, but that’s it. So all these ‘when exactly did you take possession of Pelling House, and when exactly did you sell it?’ questions got me rather confused. Because I’m afraid the whole period while I was selling up is a bit of a blur.”
“Like every day for you, eh?” guffawed James Lister.
In a practised way, Roddy again ignored this, and amplified his comments. His friends knew the story, had heard it many times, but he needed to tell the newcomer what had happened to him. There was a note of self- justification in his voice. “I went through a bad patch round then. I’d invested a lot in the pleasure boat franchise down by Fedborough Bridge…do you know where I mean?” Jude nodded. Ruefully he continued, “Bit of a mess down there now, I know, but I did have big plans for it. Bought the site from Bob Bracken, old bloke who was retiring…”
“Still lives in Fedborough, though.” James Lister was ready with the information. As Debbie Carlton had said to Carole, nobody ever left Fedborough. Or perhaps the memory of those who did was immediately erased from the collective consciousness.
“Yes, and Bob’d run it as a nice simple business, sellingice creams and teas, taking tourists on his motor boat up and down the Fether.” Roddy Hargreaves sighed. “But of course that wasn’t good enough for me. I had much bigger ambitions. I was going to have rowing boats, motor launches, trips down to the sea at Fethering, even hoped to build a small marina. But the Town Committee were against it…or against me, I’ll never know…so they got the
