a lot of it prepared on the premises. Really sad to see him now.
“Used to be a great drinking mate of mine, Stanley. You know, we’d both built up our businesses in the town next door to each other, but…” He shook his head gloomily. “Used to go and see him when he first moved into The Elms, but pretty soon stopped. No point. He didn’t know who I was.”
“I met his wife, Billie. She said she thought he was getting better.”
“Deluding herself, I’m afraid, Carole my love. There’s no way back from the road old Stanley’s gone down. Billie’s had a rotten deal of it. Had to sell the family home and move into a houseboat to pay for his care and, as I say, he looks like he could last for ever. Don’t know what she’ll do when the money runs out.” His head shook mournfully.
“Sorry,” Jude prompted, “but you were telling us about the last time you saw Virginia Hargreaves.”
“Oh, right, so I was.” With relish James Lister resumed his position centre stage of the tragedy. “When I popped into Stanley’s shop that afternoon, Virginia was there and I remember thinking at the time…she looks in a bad way.” He paused for effect.
“What – ill?”
“Could have been ill. Certainly pale and drawn. But I thought she looked more…emotionally upset.” He nodded sagely. “I remember, I said so that evening at our Friday-night dinner party. I said, ‘Virginia Hargreaves is looking in a bad way. I don’t think things are too healthy in that marriage’.” He let the meaning sink in, while Carole and Jude thought how typical it was that private grief should be dissected round the Listers’ dinner table. “Little did I know how prophetic my words would be,” James concluded.
After a suitably impressed pause, Carole asked, “But didn’t anyone in Fedborough think to enquire where she had gone?”
“Not really. Everyone knew things had been sticky between her and Roddy. The surprise really was that she hadn’t walked out earlier. I think the general assumption was that she had gone back to stay with some of her aristocratic relations.”
Ah yes, thought Carole, the title once again working its magic. Fedborough had been honoured by the presence in its midst of a member of the peerage; not good form to pry after she’d graciously moved back to be among her own kind. Though, if Fedborough had pried, it would quickly have found out that she wasn’t on speaking terms with any of her own kind.
James Lister’s face took on an expression of pious thoughtfulness. “If only I’d asked Virginia what the trouble was when I saw her that Friday afternoon, perhaps I could have saved her.”
“I don’t think you should blame yourself,” said Carole, managing not to smile.
“No. But one does,” he said gravely. “When something like this happens, inevitably one does.”
Jude took up the baton of investigation. “Jimmy, you don’t know of anyone who saw Virginia Hargreaves after you did?”
He shook his head. “Somebody may have done, but…Didn’t realize at the time it would be important, so I never thought to ask.”
“And I don’t suppose,” said Carole, “that you remember when you next saw Roddy after that weekend?”
“Matter of fact, I do.” He barked a laugh. “Typical of the disorganized bugger.” Too caught up in his narrative, he forgot to ask for his French to be pardoned. “I get a call from him on the Tuesday evening. He’s just come off a ferry at Newhaven, he’s smashed out of his skull…would I ‘be a mate’ and pick him up?”
“And did you?”
“Yes.” Remembered guilt flashed across his face. “Fiona has her Church Choir rehearsals on a Tuesday.”
“And what kind of state was Roddy Hargreaves in?”
“Totally paralytic. He must’ve been drinking solidly for two or three days. I assumed he’d been doing it because the boatyard business had gone belly-up, but of course now I realize he had something on his mind he wanted to forget even more – the murder of his wife.”
“Did he actually tell you how long he’d been away?” asked Carole casually.
“No, he wasn’t coherent enough for that.” James Lister flicked his moustache as a new thought struck him. “Or perhaps he was just pretending to be incoherent…? Yes, perhaps he was completely sober, and he’d only gone to France to establish an alibi.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well…” The butcher warmed to his new role of criminal investigator. “Let’s say he’d killed Virginia over the weekend, on the Saturday…Then he’d nipped over to France on the Sunday and pretended he’d been there longer than he had.”
“Yes, that makes sense,” Carole lied. She exchanged a flick of the eyelids with Jude, as Roddy Hargreaves’s real alibi seemed to be confirmed.
“Have the police talked to you about any of this?” asked Carole.
James Lister was affronted. “Good heavens, no.”
“If they have decided Roddy Hargreaves murdered his wife, you’d have thought they’d have asked around the town.”
“Well, they haven’t talked to me.” His tone implied the end of that topic of conversation.
“Speaking as a professional…” Jude contrived to get a Marilyn Monroe breathiness into her voice. “…would it be easy for someone untrained to dismember a corpse?”
James Lister guffawed. He was much happier with this subject. On his home ground. “Depends on the quality of the job you were after. Any idiot with a chainsaw could cut a body up. If you wanted it neatly jointed…well, for that you’d need someone qualified.”
“Mm…” said Jude coquettishly. “Interesting.”
? The Torso in the Town ?
Twenty-Six
The original concept of the Art Crawl had been a brilliant one, but Terry Harper’s attempt to improve the quality of the art on show was not popular with Fedborough opinion. Almost as enjoyable as snooping round the houses of people one knew vaguely was the opportunity of being disparaging about the creative efforts of people one knew vaguely. When the artist in question was not on the premises, but in London, Paris, Hamburg or Amsterdam, the pleasure of murmuring “I wouldn’t give house-room to
The fact that the art on display was of a higher standard than in previous years did not make a blind bit of difference. Nobody in Fedborough knew anything about art, anyway. They took much more pleasure in sniggering at a local amateur’s random spars of driftwood impaled by rusty nails or leather bookmarks embossed with Celtic runes than they did in appreciating a delicate watercolour, a subtly lit photograph or a thought-provoking collage of disaster images by a professional artist.
The people of Fedborough did not know much about art, but they knew what they liked – and that was stigmatizing the excesses of other people in Fedborough. So before Carole and Jude started their tour at three o’clock on the Friday afternoon, that year’s Art Crawl had already received the communal thumbs-down.
The system was blissfully simple. Throughout the Fedborough Festival, some twenty-five houses around the town opened themselves up as impromptu galleries between two and six every afternoon. In each one, visitors could pick up a map which marked the venues, with the names of the artists exhibiting and brief descriptions of the work on show. There was no obligation to complete the full circuit. One could take in a couple of artists, stop for tea in one of the many teashops or buy the odd antique, and then take in a couple more. All the art on display was available for sale, and quite a lot of it got purchased.
The Art Crawl, for whatever reasons, brought a large number of people into the town, and was deemed a good thing by the local Chamber of Commerce.
Interest in the Art Crawl, and in the many other events of the Festival, would build up over the ten days of its duration, but on the Friday afternoon the town was relatively empty. Which suited Carole and Jude perfectly.
They had had no doubt as to what should be their first artistic port of call. Jude had yet to meet Debbie Carlton, and they were delighted when they emerged at the top of the stairs, to find the artist alone in her flat.
She had moved most of the furniture out of the sitting room to make more space for the anticipated art-
