The Torso in the Town. Simon Brett
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‘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 façade 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?’
‘Or the police have already reached their conclusions as to who the torso belonged to, and how she was killed. Which would mean that their investigation is at an end.’
Chapter Ten
The beach was the only place in Fethering where Carole Seddon felt secure. Ted Crisp never went on the beach. Indeed, he managed to conduct his whole life as if ignorant of the fact that Fethering was on the coast. His base was inside the Crown and Anchor, and for all the difference its location made to his lifestyle, the pub could have been in any part of the British Isles.
To get to the beach, though, now involved a detour for Carole. The direct route from High Tor went too close for comfort to the Crown and Anchor, so, resisting Gulliver’s pulling the other way in his enthusiasm to be amongst the delectable smells of the shoreline, she walked determinedly along to the banks of the Fether, and followed the river to the shingle by Fethering Yacht Club.
Carole’s spirits were low again that Wednesday morning. The detour made her feel foolish, bringing back the bilious taste of all her other foolishness. And the revival of excitement brought on by thinking about the Fedborough torso now seemed another example of over-reaction. She and Jude had so little to go on, so little information, there was no point in even thinking about the mystery. The fact that the Roxbys had been allowed back into Pelling House probably meant that the police already had the investigation neatly tied up with a bow on top.
And now she couldn’t even discuss it. With characteristic casualness, as they parted the evening before, Jude had said, ‘I’m going to be away for a few days. Back Saturday, I should think. So hope we’re on for the Town Walk on Sunday.’
It was typical. Jude was always making remarks like that, and never backing them up with any detail. Where was she going to be ‘away for a few days’? Was it work or pleasure? Who was she going to be with? Would that be work or pleasure? But, as ever, before these supplementary questions could be posed, the moment had passed.
What increased Carole’s frustration was the knowledge that if she had managed to ask any of them, Jude would have given straight, truthful answers. The lack of precision which surrounded her life was not a result of deliberate concealment; but opportunities to ask about its basics were rare and, when they arose, seemed to flash by. After many months of what, by Carole’s standards, was close friendship, the sum total of the facts she knew about her neighbour was distressingly small.
Jude had done a lot of varied things in her life. She had almost certainly been married at some point, and had had a lot of lovers. She might still have a lot of lovers, for all Carole knew. Jude had possibly once been an actress, she may have worked in catering, she’d certainly lived abroad for a while. She showed sympathy for New Age ideas, and may have done some work as an alternative therapist. She was fifty-five years old.
And that was it. A pathetically meagre haul of information. Carole didn’t know where Jude had been brought up, where she had gone to school, whether she’d had further education of any kind. She didn’t even know her neighbour’s surname, for God’s sake. Or what Jude lived on. Though her home, Woodside Cottage, was filled with second-hand furniture and gave the impression that money was tight, she was still capable of sudden generosity and extravagance.
For Carole, who liked everything in her life defined by detail, this ignorance was extremely galling. Jude’s personal history was like the horizon; all the time you felt you were getting closer, it remained exactly the same distance away.
Carole let Gulliver off his lead, and he dashed off over the heaped pebbles to the flat sand, kicking up little flurries in his excitement. The tide was receding, exposing expanses of deep grey which in the June sunlight gradually turned lighter and crustier. Maybe there would be a good summer this year . . . Maybe not . . . Global warming had recently made such changes to the climate that even the weather-wise fishermen of Fethering no longer trusted their own predictions.
Carole found herself looking up towards the Yacht Club and the adjacent seawall that protected the beach against the fast tidal flow of the Fether. From what seemed like another life, her mind instantly pictured Ted Crisp helping in the rescue of a teenage boy from the river mud. Resolutely, she turned her back on the scene and strode across the crunchy sand, searching for new thoughts to drive out the unwelcome image.
The only subject that would engage her mind was the limbless body in Fedborough. If the police had reached a solution, then there would be something about it on the news. But if they hadn’t . . . maybe continuing her investigation would be worthwhile after all . . .
But how? Because of her standoffishness in the Coach and Horses the previous evening, Carole still had only one contact with any connection to the case. Debbie Carlton. But the interior designer seemed to have told her everything she knew that might be relevant. How could Carole justify further questioning, and indeed what further questions could she ask?
Behind her glasses the pale blue eyes scrunched up with the effort of concentration as she tried to get her thoughts in order and to draw a line of logic through them.
Jude’s description of the state of the body made Carole increasingly sure that it had not been killed in the cellar of Pelling House. The crime – or accident, it could still just be an accident – had happened elsewhere and the body had then been moved. If she’d seen the torso herself, Carole might have been able to judge whether the