by the way her neighbour, for so long a technophobe, had suddenly become hooked on computer technology. It was also characteristic of Carole that she kept her laptop permanently on a table in a spare bedroom upstairs, as if she were unable to acknowledge its portability.
Jude didn’t bother following, she just sat and enjoyed her coffee. She wasn’t expecting there to be any new information on the BBC website yet, and so it proved. “We’ll have to wait for the next bulletin,” said Carole disconsolately. “No other way of finding anything out.”
“We could visit the scene of the incident,” suggested Jude.
“What, you mean actually go down to the parade and have a look?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, we couldn’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, there’ll be lots of other prurient ghouls down there, you know, like people who slow down to look at car crashes.”
“They’re probably not prurient ghouls. They’re just curious.”
“Huh.”
“Are you saying you’re not curious, Carole?”
“Well, I…Well, I…I suppose it’s only natural to want to know what’s happened locally, particularly when it involves people one knows, or rather people one has met…”
“Yes.”
“And there could possibly be something one could do to help.”
“Yes, there could. Come on, Carole, get your coat on.”
“I’ll take my basket, so that it’ll look as if I’ve gone out shopping.”
“If you want to.”
“And if I have Gulliver with me, it’ll look as if I’m taking him for a walk too, rather than just being…”
“A prurient ghoul?”
“Exactly.”
¦
They could smell the fire long before they could see anything. In fact, Carole was amazed she hadn’t smelt it during her earlier excursion with Gulliver. Though no smoke was visible, their nostrils were filled with the stench soon after they stepped out of High Tor. Acrid, redolent of the harsh tang of burning plastic.
As predicted, there was a substantial crowd gathered in front of the High Street Parade. The antennae of Fethering residents had always been finely tuned to catastrophe. But none of the prurient ghouls could get very close to what had once been Gallimaufry. The whole parade had been cordoned off by police tape. There were still two fire engines at the front, and maybe more at the back, the side that faced towards the sea, but the main fury of the flames appeared to have been subdued. A few sparks could be seen in the interior, and some exposed beams still steamed from their recent immersion by the firemen’s hoses.
Basically the building had been gutted, the roof had collapsed, and it stood like a blackened empty box between the adjacent shops which, to the uninformed observer, did not seem to have suffered much damage.
Carole and Jude recognized quite a few of the locals. They also registered the presence of the small, thin, long-haired woman they’d seen in the Crown and Anchor last Friday. She was dressed in a faded green velvet coat over scruffy jeans, and was looking at the wreckage of Gallimaufry with something approaching satisfaction.
They might have commented on the woman’s reaction, had Gerald Hume not come bustling towards them out of the watching crowd. He opined, with all the certainty which he had brought to his career in accountancy, that the fire had been started by an electrical fault. “That’s what it usually is,” he said.
“Do you have any proof that that’s what caused it?” asked Jude.
“That’s what it usually is,” he reasserted.
Nobody else seemed to have anymore reliably authenticated information, but that had never stopped the residents of Fethering from expressing their opinions. There was an atmosphere almost of bonhomie about the gathering. Christmas was only days away, and the burning down of a shop served as a pleasant diversion. It would have been different had it been one of the long-established businesses on the parade. But Lola Le Bonnier was a recent incomer, she lived near Fedborough rather than actually in Fethering, and she had been a bit too flashy for the taste of most locals. The same went for her shop. There was something hubristic in the whole enterprise of Gallimaufry. Even the name was a bit fancy and clever-clever. Did Fethering really need somewhere selling overpriced knick-knacks? Nobody actually used the expression ‘Serve her right’, but that was the dominant feeling amongst many of the crowd.
Jude, who knew and cared for Lola, didn’t share this view. But Carole wouldn’t have taken much convincing to side with the sceptics. “The trouble is,” she said, “when you’re running something like a shop, it’s all very fine to make the place look exotic and trendy, but you can’t ignore basic Health and Safety procedures.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Jude, uncharacteristically combative.
“I mean, having all those candles and fairy lights with stuff draped all over them…well, it was just asking for trouble, wasn’t it?”
“We don’t know that’s what caused the fire,” said Jude doggedly.
“No, but we can make a pretty well-informed guess that – ”
Carole didn’t get to finish her sentence. A policeman with a loudhailer started asking the crowd to move along, telling them there was nothing to see, that there was a danger they might get in the way of the firemen’s work, and that they would be informed when it would be safe for the other shops on the parade to reopen.
Many of the spectators were unwilling to leave, but Carole and Jude separated themselves from the throng and went back home.
¦
“Or the shop could have been torched for insurance reasons.”
“Oh, come on, Carole. What have you been reading?”
“It’s quite a common crime. Particularly in recessionary times. People borrow too much, can’t pay the mortgage…they see a fire as a way out of their liabilities.”
“We don’t know that Ricky Le Bonnier had any money problems.”
“No, but he’s the kind of man who probably has.”
Jude grinned at her friend. “You clearly didn’t take a shine to him, did you?”
“I thought he was a show-off.” In Carole Seddon’s lexicon of bad behaviour there were few more damning descriptions. She had been brought up by her meek and frightened parents to believe that, if you raised your head above the parapet, then getting shot down was completely your own fault.
“We don’t know anything about Ricky’s finances.”
“Well, I didn’t trust him. People who draw attention to themselves like that…He’s all talk, so far as I’m concerned.”
“Carole, he’s been very successful. He must’ve made a lot of money over the years.”
“And no doubt spent it, paying for all those wives.”
“Well, keep your opinions to yourself, won’t you? We don’t want rumours going round Fethering that Ricky Le Bonnier torched his wife’s shop for the insurance money.”
Carole’s thin face grew thinner. “Jude, you know I’m always the soul of discretion.”
“Yes.”
“Mind you, I do think it’s suspicious. And remember the way all the prices in Gallimaufry were discounted…it didn’t look to me like a thriving business.”
“Very few shops do at the moment. People are battening down their hatches, so far as spending’s concerned. Everyone in the retail trade is suffering.”
“Though not everyone is solving the problem by burning down their premises.”
Jude shook her head in wry weariness. Once her neighbour got an idea into her head, it took a great deal of effort to shift it. “Well, Carole, I’m sure in time we’ll find out more details of what happened.”
They did. On the local news that evening there was an item about the fire. It had taken a while for the building to be made safe, before police and firemen could enter.
And when they got inside, they had found the charred body of a woman.
