again.”
“No, you can’t. I don’t think you should try to.”
The boy looked straight at Jude. For the first time, he seemed to believe she had something worth saying. “You mean I
“Of course you should. You don’t come to terms with something unpleasant by closing your mind. You have to go through the experience in detail, process it, reach some kind of conclusion about it.”
He was cynical again. “Isn’t that what a psychiatrist would say? Are you a psychiatrist?”
“No, I’m not.” She grinned. “If I was, I’d just have used the word ‘closure’, and I didn’t, did I?”
“No,” he conceded. “Then why did Dad ask you to talk to me?”
“Wasn’t him, it was your mum. Your dad is extremely unkeen on my being here.”
“Oh.” Harry’s reaction suggested Jude had gained credibility from his father’s disapproval.
“I’m here,” she went on, “because you and I have something in common.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ve both seen the torso, haven’t we? Apart from the police – and your dad – we’re the only people who have. And since your dad doesn’t want to talk to you on the subject…”
“Certainly not. He won’t even allow me to mention it.”
“Then I’d say you and I really should talk about the torso…”
The boy nodded slowly. “Yes, I think we should. Are you still, kind of…shocked by what you saw, Jude?”
The use of her name was very encouraging. “A bit. More than shocked, though, I’m intrigued.”
“Oh?”
“Come on, Harry, the torso was a ghastly thing for us to have seen, but, in spite of that – or perhaps because of that – it does raise a lot of questions.”
“What kind of questions do you mean?”
“Who the torso belonged to when she was alive? How her remains came to end up in the cellar here? Who cut off her arms and legs? And was that the same person who caused her death in the first place?”
“You mean, like…a murderer?” There was horror as he spoke the word, but also fascination.
“Yes. You’ve been presented with a possible murder mystery right on your own doorstep. Harry. And I think the best way of working through the shock of what you saw would be to treat that as a challenge, try and find out for yourself what happened.”
“Sort of…do my own investigation?”
“Why not? Talk through all the information you have, try to work out the solution.”
For the first time there was a sparkle in the boy’s eyes as he asked, “Would you help me to do that, Jude?”
“No,” she replied. “You’d help me, Harry.”
? The Torso in the Town ?
Fifteen
They tiptoed down the stairs. The door to the dining room was closed, with Grant and Carole presumably still behind it. There was no sign of Kim; no doubt in the kitchen, tidying up the lunch things.
Harry put his finger to his lips. He was enjoying the conspiratorial element in what they were doing. The torch was still in the large baggy pocket of his large baggy trousers. He wasn’t going to produce it until they were past danger of being spotted.
“I sorted out how to break the police seals, Jude,” he confided proudly. “Cut through with a metal saw and joined them together again with Blu-Tack.”
“Very James Bond,” she murmured. It was the right thing to say. The boy beamed. “Must’ve taken a long time, though.”
“Did it yesterday. They were all out for
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, a finger once again rose conspiratorially to his lips. Tentatively Harry reached a foot over the stripped floorboards of the hall. “Have to go carefully here. Some of them creak.”
They successfully negotiated the route across to the cellar door. Sure enough, it still had police tape and notices on it. The seals were threaded through rivets fixed into the walls. Proud of his handiwork, Harry pulled them gingerly apart.
“Why did you do it?” Jude whispered.
He shrugged. “I was bored. Wanted to know what the policed been up to,” he breathed back. “Also…” He gulped, suddenly losing confidence. “I wanted to go down there, to sort of, I don’t know, look at…”
“Confront your fear?”
Harry nodded. Boldly taking hold of the handle, he opened the door down to the cellar. At the same moment, he produced the torch from his pocket, and pointed its beam down the stairs. “Come on.”
He gently closed the door behind them, and they stepped into the void.
The cellar still contained police equipment, revealed by the sweeps of his torch. Lights on tripods, metal equipment boxes whose contents Jude could only guess at, unspecified objects binned in labelled polythene bags.
The effect was, if anything, antiseptic. The horror was gone. So was the chipboard partition which had screened the torso. The space where it had lain was clinically empty; every trace of body and box had been meticulously combed through, bagged up and removed for analysis.
“Was it just like this when you came down yesterday?” Harry nodded.
“But you still needed to be here?”
“Yes. I pictured it again. I concentrated, and recreated the image of what I had seen.”
“How long were you down here?”
“Two, three hours.”
“Did it help?”
Another nod. “As I said, nobody would talk to me about what I’d seen. But I needed to…” Though his words trailed away, they were very eloquent.
“Yes. I understand why you – ”
There was a sudden clatter from above them. Light from the hall flooded the cellar.
Framed in the doorway stood the outline of Grant Roxby. “What the hell’re you doing down here?”
The beam of Harry’s torch swung round to spotlight his father’s face, which was contorted with rage. Not just rage, though. There was another emotion there, and it looked like guilt.
? The Torso in the Town ?
Sixteen
“It’s all rather frustrating,” said Carole on the Monday. She’d proposed lunch, predictably rejected Jude’s suggestion of going to the Crown and Anchor, and said she’d assemble something for them. But even the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc failed to make the chicken salad in her kitchen look convivial. The weather had changed too; it was dull and drizzly outside. Deprived of a long walk, Gulliver looked reproachfully mournful slumped against the cold Aga.
“I mean, we’ve got so little information,” she went on. “And the vital question we haven’t managed to answer yet is: who does the torso belong to? Until we know that, we haven’t got proper motivation for anyone.”
“Doesn’t stop us having suspects,” said Jude. She was, as ever, more philosophical about their lack of progress. “And really those come down to the people who have at one time or another owned Felling House.”
“Roddy Hargreaves…”
