planners to back-pedal – never a difficult thing to achieve round here and…well…My money was trickling away as fast as the little harbour I’d dredged out was silting up again. And it was round that time the marriage was breaking up, so…”
The gesture which faded away with his words seemed to express the futility of all ambitions.
“I’m sorry,” said Jude.
“Very nice of you, but you don’t need to be. My own fault. What, when I was in the Navy, they would have called ‘a self-inflicted wound’…like getting an infection from a tattooist’s dirty needle. Fact is, I’ve always been crap with money. Lost a packet in the Lloyd’s crash and…” a shrug “…so it goes on. Money and me can’t wait to be parted. Just seems to trickle away.”
“Mostly down the urinal here.” James Lister was inevitably ready with his quip. And, equally inevitably, the laugh followed.
“Did the police ask you if you had any idea who the torso might have been?”
“Oh yes, Jude, they did. And I’m afraid I couldn’t give any very helpful answers. As I said, that whole period’s a bit of a blur. Mind you,” he continued, as if suddenly thinking of the idea, “I don’t know what other answer they were expecting me to give. ‘Oh yes, officer, of course I knew there was a dismembered corpse down in the cellar all the time I lived there. I just didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to cause any trouble’.”
This too got a laugh from the other three men, but Jude was not certain Roddy had delivered it as a joke. There was a pain behind his words, perhaps an awareness of what he had become. Roddy Hargreaves had once had higher ambitions than ending up as a barfly in a Fedborough pub, recycling stale conversation and jokes with three old bores.
“Good Lord, my glass is empty! That’s a nasty shock for a chap! Emergency-pint transfusion, please!” James Lister got his grunt of laughter. “Your shout, I think, Roddy.”
The ordering of another round coincided with the appearance from the kitchen of a waitress bearing heaped plates of food. “Two South Downs Sausages!” she called out.
“Two?” James Lister winked at Jude. “Sure you can manage two at the same time?”
At other times she might have given the innuendo a sharp answer, but on this occasion she just smiled and turned to Roddy Hargreaves, who was having trouble getting his wallet out of his jeans’ back pocket. Once again he swayed perilously on the bar stool.
Just before moving across to join Carole with their South Downs Sausages, she looked straight into Roddy Hargreaves’s eyes, her brown ones probing the bloodshot blue of his.
“So you really have no idea who the torso might be?” The bleary eyes became focused in a moment of intelligence and caution.
“No,” he said. “No idea at all.”
? The Torso in the Town ?
Nine
Their meal wag slightly awkward. They could not be unaware of Roddy Hargreaves and his chortling coterie at the bar, and Jude was not offended but rather puzzled by Carole’s standoffishness when she’d been invited to join them. Carole herself was painfully aware of yet another example of the spikiness in her character. Just being in a pub had started up again the cycle of recrimination about having made a fool of herself with Ted Crisp.
And it wasn’t the moment for Jude to give a resume of the little information she had got from Roddy Hargreaves.
So they didn’t talk much as they waded through their plates of South Downs Sausages. Jude had two large Chilean Chardonnays to drink, but Carole refused the offer of a second for herself. She didn’t even finish her first, feeling that the punishment she deserved was not yet complete. Jude, not usually bothered about waste, still didn’t like to see alcohol going undrunk, so she downed the remains of Carole’s glass as they rose from the table.
“Oh, just a minute,” she said.
Carole hovered by the pub door, feeling more than ever a social outcast, as Jude went back to the group of men.
“Pleasure to meet you all,” she said. “And it’s suddenly struck me…are you the James Lister who I’ve heard does Town Walks round Fedborough…?”
He beamed. “The very same, at your service. Always at the service of the ladies,” he smirked.
“When do they happen?”
“Sunday morning at eleven. I always service the ladies at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.” He winked in a manner which was intended to be roguish rather than repellent, but failed to achieve its object. “Allow me to present my card.”
“Thank you very much,” said Jude. “I’d really like to find out more about Fedborough.”
“Let’s go the long way round,” she said when they got outside the pub. The June day was dwindling to twilight, but the tall frontages of Fedborough’s houses still looked unimpeachably respectable.
“Did you find out much?”
“Not a lot. You could have heard anything I did find out.”
“Yes.” A blush suffused Carole’s pale cheeks. “I’m sorry. There are certain situations when…”
“It’s all right,” said Jude easily. “Don’t worry. Roddy Hargreaves denied knowing the torso was there while he owned the house.”
“Presumably he would have made that denial, whether it was true or even if he had killed and dismembered the body himself.”
“Exactly. Still, we’ve made contact. If we need to follow up – ” Jude looked at the card in her hand. “Do you fancy doing a guided walk round Fedborough on Sunday morning?”
“Well, I…What would be achieved by that?”
Jude shrugged. “Bit of background. Get to know the place. Find out perhaps what horrors lurk behind all this middle-class respectability.”
“All right. I’m game for it. Why’re we going this way?”
“This is Pelling Street, which in the perverse way of English country towns is not where one will find the Pelling Arms, that being in the High Street, but is, however, where one will find Pelling House.”
“Ah. We’re joining the ghouls, are we?”
“If you want to put it that way, Carole, yes. Though I doubt if there’ll be many of those around now. Unless the police release more information soon, I think this murder will be very much less than a nine days’ wonder.”
“The gossip won’t stop.”
“Not in Fedborough, no. But I don’t think many more out-of-towners will bother to come down here in search of cheap thrills.”
They were now within sight of the house. A Land Rover Discovery was parked opposite. “Ah, they’re back,” said Jude.
“Mm?”
“Kim and Grant. That’s their car. They must have been allowed back into the house.”
They walked past the red-brick facade and the fine white portico without breaking step. No bloodthirsty onlookers stood drooling outside. There was no police tape, no notices visible. Pelling House had lost all signs of its recent notoriety and reverted to being just an expensive, respectable dwelling in Fedborough.
“Police didn’t really stay long,” Carole observed thoughtfully. “Body discovered on Saturday night and by Tuesday the house is no longer sealed up. Well, maybe the cellar’s still closed, but otherwise the police would appear to have finished their on-site investigations.”
“So, from the knowledge of their ways you gleaned in the Home Office, what would you say that indicated?”
“One of two things,” Carole replied. “Perhaps they’ve found no signs of anything untoward in the rest of the house and therefore concluded that the body was either killed in the cellar or moved to the cellar post mortem. So the cellar is the only part of the house they’re continuing to examine…”
“Or?”
