Just a matter of having faith. Faith and character. That’s the kind of school my parents sent me to. But every time my character was put to the test, it proved unequal to the challenge. Same goes for my faith too, I’m afraid. I just always escaped into this.” He looked down at the glass.
“When did Virginia walk out?” Jude asked softly.
Whatever his vagueness about other details, he knew that instantly. “Three and a half years ago. February it was.”
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed near to tears. “She needn’t have gone. I still loved her. We could have made it work…if only I had been there.”
“Where were you?”
He chuckled bitterly. “Drunk. Oh, geographically I was there, but so far as being actually on hand, I…” The sentence petered out. “Everything had gone wrong with the business. I’d had to sell what was left, just the strip of land on the riverbank and the buildings there. Got less than I’d paid for them, and I never saw back anything for the money I’d spent on dredging and…Anyway, that was collapsing, and there were all kinds of practical things I should have been arranging, but I couldn’t face it. The new owner wanted all my stuff out of the boatsheds, so I paid Bob Bracken – the old bloke I’d bought the business from in the first place – to clear them for me, and I…I just escaped…”
“Where to?”
“France. I just couldn’t face this place. Fedborough.” He spoke the name with undisguised distaste. “I couldn’t stand the thought of all those smug bastards sniggering behind their hands at me, so I just got a lift to Newhaven, caught the first available ferry, and got stuck into the duty-free.”
“How long were you away?”
Roddy Hargreaves let out a sigh of uncertainty. “I don’t know, three days, four days. A real bender. A real escapist’s bender.” His head sagged on to his chest. “And when I came back, Virginia had gone.”
“Leaving a note?” asked Jude.
“Leaving nothing, except a big hole in my life.”
“And she hasn’t contacted you since?”
He shook his head wearily. “Why should she? She’d given me enough chances, I’d rejected all of them. I knew what she was telling me. The message got across all right. Actions, as they say, speak louder than words.”
“Are you telling us,” said Carole in her sensible, practical voice, “that the people in Fedborough are suggesting you had something to do with Virginia’s disappearance?”
Roddy laughed, without humour. “Of course they’re suggesting that. And they’re right. I let her down, I let down my faith too. I was an inadequate husband to Virginia, so she disappeared. I caused it all right.”
“But are people in Fedborough saying more than that – that you actually did away with your wife?”
A silence followed Carole’s question. He looked at her for a long moment, apparently having difficulty understanding. Then, choosing the words carefully, as if speaking a foreign language, he said, “It’s very hard to answer questions about something you genuinely can’t remember. We’re talking about a lost weekend here…rather longer than a weekend, in fact. And all I know is that I went to France, and I was blind drunk for some days, and when I came back, Virginia had gone. Not a cast-iron alibi, is it? Happens to be true, but I’ve got no one who can…” He negotiated the word with great care. “…corroborate that for me. So I’ve neatly set everything up for the Fedborough gossips to have a bloody field day.”
He slammed his empty glass down on the counter in frustration. “Lee! Could you fill this up for me, please?”
The young barman looked awkward and mumbled, “Erm, Janet said we shouldn’t serve you any more…”
“Well, thank you very much.” Some alcoholics would have made this the start of a furious tirade, but Roddy Hargreaves wasn’t that kind of drunk. His anger vanquished by upbringing, he spoke the words of thanks with great courtesy, then stumbled off his stool and swayed like a sailor finding his land-legs. “Fortunately I do have alternative supplies at home, so am not entirely dependent on the Coach and Horses’ service policy to maintain my necessary intake.”
He smiled at the squirming barman, turned and gravely touched his forehead to Carole and Jude. “Excuse me, ladies. I hope you understand I have to leave. A great pleasure talking to you.”
Then, with eccentric dignity, he tottered out into the sun of Pelling Street. Curious tourist eyes followed him. There was a ripple of nervous laughter. So far as they were concerned, he was just another small-town drunk, but Carole and Jude knew that Roddy Hargreaves was – or could have been – so much more.
? The Torso in the Town ?
Nineteen
As James Lister had said, he and his wife lived in Dauncey Street, far away – well, at least fifty yards – from the Bohemian excesses of Pelling Street. The house was a three-storey Victorian edifice, unadorned almost to the point of being forbidding. Indeed, when Carole and Jude arrived in the rain of the Friday evening, the house looked positively unwelcoming. But it was solid, respectable and undoubtedly worth a lot. There had been money in being a butcher in Fedborough.
Not that his wife chose to draw attention to James Lister’s commercial origins. When the Tournedos Rossini were being served at dinner and he mentioned the fine quality of the beef, he was cut short from the other end of the table by his wife’s voice saying, “I don’t think we need to talk about
Blushing like a schoolboy who had told a dirty joke at a maiden aunt’s tea party, James Lister was duly silent, enabling his wife to steer the conversation to more rarefied planes. “Do tell us about your plans for the Art Crawl, Terry.”
Fiona Lister’s voice was, like her person, so encrusted with gentility that it had to be hiding something less genteel underneath. Though probably in her late sixties, she was one of those thin straight women whose looks don’t change much throughout their adult life. She was dressed in a white blouse with a plain collar and a grey silk dress. Though the clothes were undoubtedly expensive, they made her look like a failed nun. And also somehow gave the impression that she’d worn the same style for many years.
Her dinner menu hadn’t changed for a while either. Though beautifully presented, the food came from the
Each course looked exactly as it must have done in the recipe book photographs. Not a lemon slice was misaligned on the smoked salmon pate. For the Tournedos Rossini, the toast, the
The choice of wines was also from another generation, the existence of the New World unacknowledged. James Lister poured copious amounts of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and an icy sweet Niersteiner. When it came to coffee (and After Eight mints), the guests would be offered Cointreau, Benedictine and Rummel.
The overall effect was rich and rather cloying.
The guest list for the dinner once again included the Durringtons and the Rev Trigwell. Jude wondered if this helped to explain the unexpected invitations to herself and Carole. Without desperate infusions of new blood, perhaps all Fedborough dinner parties ended up with exactly the same personnel.
There was another couple she hadn’t met. The fact that they were gay clearly gave Fiona Lister quite a
Terry Harper, the one to whom she’d addressed the question about the Art Crawl, was the older. A neat man with short grey hair styled like one of the lesser Roman emperors, he wore owl-like tortoiseshell glasses and an immaculately cut charcoal sports jacket. His partner was thin and dark, Mediterranean looks at odds with his very
