The Fethering Mysteries 03; The Torso in the Town tfm-3

by Simon Brett

  “Enjoying the view?” asked a cold male voice behind her.

  Jude turned to face Alan Burnethorpe, who was looking at her with undiluted suspicion.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but a door behind him clattered open. “God,” Joke drawled as she came in, “it’s impossible to get a decent au pair these days!”

  ∨ The Torso in the Town ∧

  Thirty

  The Durringtons’ house was a large Edwardian pile in Dauncey Street, which figured. Respected local doctor, pillar of the community, Donald Durrington’s natural habitat was Dauncey Street. As she followed her Art Crawl map towards the front door, Carole Seddon wished she knew more about him. Had he been a Fethering general practitioner, she would have got some feeling of his reputation, but all she had to go on in Fedborough was the impression he’d made on her at the Listers’ dinner party.

  That impression had been of someone world-weary, disengaged and not as discreet about professional secrets as he should have been. If that last extrapolation were correct, then it could be good news for the cause of her investigation.

  But she couldn’t get the ‘feeling on the street’ about the doctor, those little nuances of resentment and approbation. In every practice there’d be some patient who claimed a male doctor lingered unnecessarily long over a gynaecological examination, some mother complaining that he wouldn’t make a house call when her child was seriously ill, some bereaved relative bitterly resenting his diagnosis of what had been wrong with the deceased. Equally, there would be ecstatic wives praising triedoctor’s early recognition of their husband’s prostate cancer, mothers whose babies had been nurtured back from the edge of dehydration, patients with undying gratitude for the seriousness with which he had approached their Irritable Bowel Syndrome. But to know whether the balance of Donald Durrington’s local image was favourable or unfavourable Carole Seddon would have had to live in Fedborough for a while. So she was left to rely on her instincts.

  When she entered the large hallway of the Dauncey Street house, she didn’t think those instincts were going to be much help to her. The girl who was acting as curator for the art exhibition Carole had never seen before. Late teens, she wore the scowl of bored resentment that went with her age. Along with the photocopied catalogue sheets on the table in front of her lay a magazine with the latest boyband on the front. Its disarray suggested the girl had read every last statistic of the members’ taste in fast food and quality of first snogs.

  Carole felt disappointment for which she knew there was really no justification. What had she expected to find when she came into the house? Donald Durrington sitting waiting, ready with a filing cabinet full of medical records for her to riffle through at will? Was the smooth run of investigation that she and Jude had experienced in Fedborough about to come to an end?

  This thought revived an earlier doubt. She remembered discussing with Jude how easy the first bit of their investigation had been, how ready people had been to talk to them. At that stage, endorsed by his transatlantic dash to clear his name, their suspicions had been moving towards Francis Carlton. And the police’s interest in him had been prompted by an anonymous letter. Carole reminded herself that they still hadn’t identified the sender of that letter. Debbie Carlton had seemed genuinely sceptical about its existence, but then if she actually was the sender, that’s how she would behave. The anonymous letter needed following through…

  As she processed these thoughts, Carole decided she’d better maintain her cover story and look at the art on display in the Durringtons’ hall. She was, after all, meant to be a mere punter on the Art Crawl. But, so far as the teenage guardian of the art was concerned, Carole’s masquerade was wasted. The girl had shown no acknowledgment of, or interest in, her arrival.

  The artist’s name was foreign, Polish perhaps, a jumble of letters which looked like an anagram. What he – or she – did wasn’t Carole’s kind of stuff. Whereas Andrew Wragg’s paintings had been troubling in their violence, these were equally troubling in their blandness. They were abstracts too, abstract to the point of being comatose. Pale washes of blue, grey and white lay lethargically across the canvases. Titles like Serenity VI, Tranquillity IX and Acquiescence XIII raised the unwelcome prospect that somewhere existed at least five more Serenities, eight more Tranquillities and twelve more Acquiescences. The paintings were the visual equivalent of musak.

  Still, Carole did her stuff. She moved through to the dining room, where the exhibition continued. The Durringtons’ furniture, sideboard, large table and set of matching chairs was dull, but still more interesting than the paintings. These were so like the exhibits in the hail Carole wondered how even the artist himself – or perhaps herself – could tell them apart. The titles – Consent VIII, Satisfaction X and Wish-Fulfilment XIX – seemed to have been selected totally at random.

  She was looking at the photographs on the mantelpiece, presumably of Durrington children, though of an age by now to have moved away from home, when she heard an interior door open into the hall.

  “Can I go?” asked the teenager’s voice immediately. “You said three hours. It’s over that.”

  “Have you had many people?” Joan Durrington’s voice was deeper and more assertive than it had been at the Listers’ dinner party.

  “Hardly any. There’s some woman through there now, but she’s only about the third.”

  “If you stay till six, I’ll give you another couple of pounds.”

  “Hardly worth it,” the girl’s voice said. “‘Fixed to meet my boyfriend down the Stag half-five.”

  “Oh. All right. Well, there’s the money we agreed.”

  No thanks were expressed as the cash was presumably pocketed.

  “Can you do tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Don’t know that it’s really worth my while,” said the girl. “Ten quid for three hours. Do better than that picking down the mushroom farm. Anyway, it’s the weekend.”

  “But I thought we agreed. Are you saying you won’t be back tomorrow?”

  “That’s right. See you. Cheers!”

  “You little bastard!” Joan Durrington’s voice called after the retreating girl. The front door slammed shut.

  The doctor’s wife was still standing looking at the door, when Carole appeared a little sheepishly from the dining room.

  She cleared her throat. “I was just, er, looking at the paintings.”

  Joan Durrington turned. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, which emphasized her thinness. The blonded hair was scraped back by a couple of grips, exposing the white at her temples. Without make-up, her face looked a lot older, its grey puffiness explained by the cigarette that drooped from her lips.

  “So what did you think of them?” she asked, her voice a little uncertain, as though she had only recently learned the language.

  “Not really my sort of stuff,” said Carole discreetly.

  “Nor mine. Looks like décor for changing rooms in a swimming pool.” The crow’s-feet round Joan Durrington’s faded blue eyes tightened. “We’ve met, haven’t we?”

  “Carole Seddon. At the Listers’ last week.”

  “Oh, right. Yes, of course.” The doctor’s wife swayed a little and put a hand on the catalogue table to steady herself. Surely she can’t be drunk, thought Carole, not at half-past five in the afternoon.

  Joan looked at Tranquillity IX and shook her head. “Why do we get landed with garbage like this? We’ve done this Art Crawl since it started, six years ago, and we’ve had some pretty hideous stuff in here. Nothing as dreary as this, though.”

  “Why do you keep doing it then, opening up your house?”

  An unamused smile. “Because my husband Donald is such an important figure in Fedborough society. He’s senior partner in the local medical practice, so he can’t be seen to be standoffish, can he? Doctors have to have the common touch. So when some local committee member says, “Oh, Dr Durrington, can we use your house again for the Art Crawl?” the big-hearted medico says, “
Yes, of course. I’d love to have members of the public traipsing through my house, nothing I’d like more!” But, remarkably, when it comes to the Fedborough Festival, and the exhibits have to be put up and somebody has to keep an eye on all the members of the public traipsing through the house, Donald is not here. Busy life, being a doctor, so many calls on your time. Need a loyal wife to see that everything’s kept going at home.”

  Carole was now in no doubt. Joan Durrington was drunk. As if to confirm it, the doctor’s wife swayed again, tottered and would have fallen if Carole had not moved forward to take her arm. The smell of gin was very strong.

  “Sorry.” The fuddled blue eyes found hers.

  “Do you want to go and lie down?”

  “No, I bloody don’t!” Joan Durrington broke free. “That’s all Donald ever says to me. “Don’t you want to go and lie down?” Why? So that I can see an example of his famous bedtime manner? I tell you, it’s a long time since he practised his bedtime manner on me.”

  She moved savagely to the front door, and snapped the latch shut. “Bad luck anyone else who wants to come and see these lousy paintings. It’s nearly six, anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Carole’s social instincts told her she should leave, that she shouldn’t be witnessing the woman’s distress. But her burgeoning detective instincts told her to stay as long as possible.

  “You don’t live in Fedborough, do you?”

  “No. Fethering.”

  The reply seemed to reassure Joan Durrington. With someone who didn’t live in Fedborough, someone who wouldn’t instantly report her actions round the town, she dared to take a risk. “Come and have a drink with me,” she pleaded.

  “Well…”

  “Come on. I haven’t seen anyone all day, except for that blasted girl.” She led the way through a door at the back of the hall. Without further protest, Carole followed.

  The Durringtons’ kitchen, like their dining room, was furnished efficiently, but impersonally. Everything was stowed away and tidy. Only the half-full bottle of Gordon’s gin, the glass and the ashtray on the scrubbed table looked out of place.

  Joan opened the fridge. “You drink gin, don’t you?”

  Carole didn’t as a rule, but she wasn’t going to do anything to threaten the intimacy that had suddenly been offered.

  “I’ve even got some tonic and lemon,” said the doctor’s wife, as if this somehow made getting drunk in the afternoon socially acceptable. “Do you know,” she continued with a sudden gleeful chuckle as she fixed Carole’s drink, “Donald’s been highly praised for his work with alcoholics. Referring them, putting them on drying-out programmes, rehabilitating them…” She managed the long word with an effort. “He’s asked to write papers on the subject, speak at seminars…He’s a saint, not a man.” She thrust the full glass on to the table in front of Carole. “Funny no one ever seems to ask him where he does his research.”

  “Has he tried to help you?”

  Joan Durrington, who was lighting up another cigarette, squinted in bewilderment at her guest, trying to come to terms with the oddness of the question. “He doesn’t notice me. We share a house, but he has about as much interest in me as in the wallpaper. All Donald thinks about is keeping up his image in Fedborough as a caring professional and model citizen.”

  “Surely that’s not easy for him…” Carole suggested gently, “if you often get like this?”

  “I don’t often get like this. I am very well behaved. In public I’ve never been seen to drink anything stronger than mineral water. What a perfect doctor’s wife I am.” Joan Durrington topped up her own glass, dispensing with tonic, ice and lemon, and took a long swallow. “It was just something Donald said this morning which made me realize…that he didn’t even think of me as a human being…” Tears threatened. She took another fierce swig from her glass to stop them.

  “But you’re letting me see you like this. Aren’t you afraid I’ll gossip about you, spread the story of your secret?”

  Joan shook her head. “You’re not from Fedborough. You’re not part of Fiona Lister’s Thought Police.”

  Carole was divided between glee at her good fortune in finding her potential witness in such a communicative mood, and pity for the woman’s state. She quickly decided that the pity didn’t really help, though the communicativeness could be very useful to her.

  “What will Donald say when he comes back and finds you’ve been drinking? Will he be angry?”

  “God, no! He won’t give me that satisfaction. He will be infinitely understanding, just as if I was one of his patients. He finds it easier to deal with me as a malfunctioning organism than he does as a human being. And I dare say he’ll decide I need a break, and I’ll be sent away somewhere – ”

  “Won’t people in Fedborough be suspicious of the real reasons why you’ve gone away?”

  “No. Because Donald will be the one who tells them. And he’s a doctor, so he must be right. And I’m known to ‘have trouble with my nerves’ and be ‘highly strung’. Donald is thought locally to be rather magnificent for the way he copes with me. ‘A man like him needs stronger support at home. Pity that such a dedicated professional has to keep being diverted from his work by his wife’s illness’ That’s what they say…little knowing that he’s the one who caused his wife’s ‘illness’ in the first place.”

  “Couldn’t you just leave him…if staying is making you so unhappy?”

  Joan Durrington let out a harsh bark of laughter. “And go where? I stayed while the children were around, thought I owed it to them, and kept looking forward to the time when they’d moved on and I would up sticks and away. But that moment never seemed to arrive. And now…I’m older than Donald, you know. I’ll be sixty next birthday. Hardly a great time for opening a new chapter in my life.”

  “It can be done,” said Carole stoutly. “I got divorced. I’ve made a new life for myself.”

  “And how old were you when you and your husband split up?”

  “Late forties.”

  Joan Durrington let out a short derisive sigh, as if her point had been made. “No, I’m stuck…” She looked fuddled for a moment. “What was your name again?”

  “Carole. Carole Seddon.”

  “That’s right. As I say, I’ve come too far. If I’d really wanted to do something, I should have done it years ago, while I still had something to offer, before Donald drained all the confidence out of me. Sod the children, I should have just upped and gone. Now…” An infinity of hopelessness lay in that monosyllable.

  She took refuge once again in her glass. Carole matched the action with a considerably smaller sip. On the rare occasions she drank it, she was always surprisedhow nice gin and tonic was. But mustn’t get into the habit. For Carole Seddon, spirits symbolized excess.

  “You remember at the Listers’ last week, Joan…” she began tentatively, “you were the first person to mention that the police had identified Virginia Hargreaves as the mysterious body?”

  “Yes.” The response was toneless. Joan Durrington was still locked away in her own despair.

  “You said the police had talked to your husband about it, and he had talked to you.” A listless nod. “Does Donald often talk to you about his work?”

  This question dragged her back to the present. “Not very often. He doesn’t talk to me much at all. He talks at me quite a lot. And he certainly finds it easier to talk about his work than about anything I might be interested in.”

  “So you didn’t have a medical background?”

  “Why should I have?”

  “It’s quite common for doctors to marry nurses – or other people connected with their profession.”

  “I was a schoolteacher when we met. Not a bad one, actually. Very dedicated to the cause of education. But then I had the children and Donald wanted me around, holding things together at home.” She sighed. “Too late for me to go back to that now.”

  The gulf of despair was opening up again, so Carole moved quic
kly on. “You also said last Friday that Virginia Hargreaves had been in a bad state just before she disappeared…”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. I wondered if you knew her well…?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Was she Donald’s patient?”

  “She was registered with him down here. I think if there was anything major, she had people in London she went to.”

  “What kind of ‘major’?”

  “I don’t know. I do remember her talking about having a gynaecologist in London.”

  “But she didn’t say why she’d been consulting him?”

  Joan Durrington shrugged. “Usual sort of women’s problems, I imagine. At least I don’t have to worry about that any more.” Her glass was nearly empty. She looked at the gin bottle, calculating the moment of her next refill.

  “When you said Virginia Hargreaves was in a bad state at that time, did you mean emotionally or physically?”

  “Physically. I didn’t know her well enough to have any idea of her emotional state.”

  “So what was wrong with her?”

  “She had an upset stomach. Some virus, or perhaps something she’d eaten. Donald reckoned it was the latter, because the vomiting and diarrhoea came on so quickly.”

  “Did she go to the surgery?”

  “No, no. Far too plebeian for her to sit in a waiting room with all the common riff-raff.” Joan Durrington’s lips twisted cynically. “Donald almost never makes house calls, but he moved remarkably quickly when Lady Virginia summoned him.”

  “Was she actually called Lady Virginia? Because that would have meant that she was the daughter of a peer?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what people called her round the town, but whether it was really her title or just a nickname…I’ve no idea.”

  “So your husband went to see her…?”

  “Yes, and he prescribed something to stop the vomiting and diarrhoea…”

  “Which day of the week was this?”

  Joan Durrington shook her head wearily. “I can’t remember. We’re talking three or four years ago.”