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

by Simon Brett

  Then Jude felt the easing of pressure from the knife-point under her chin. The woman, suddenly older and more bent, turned towards her daughter. The bottle and the boning knife dropped, making loud clatters on the polished wood of the floor.

  In the doorway, framing Debbie Carlton, Jude could see Carole and Ted Crisp.

  Never had there been a more welcome sight.

  ∨ The Torso in the Town ∧

  Forty-Two

  The Elms which had given the home its name were long gone. They had succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in the seventies, and the house still looked a little exposed without them. Set back from the road that ran along the sea front in Rustington, it had been built as a substantial Victorian family home, with space for a small army of servants. Generations of children in changing fashions of swimwear, with their impedimenta of buckets, rakes and spades, must have scampered down to the garden gate, carefully crossed the road and then luxuriated in the freedom of the pebbles and the sand and the sea.

  But it was a long time since any of The Elms’ current inmates had been on the beach. A long time since any of them had been beyond the garden walls, or since most of them had been out through the front door.

  The Sunday morning was fine, promising the continuity of summer, and there was a lot of traffic. Everyone in England seems to have an elderly relative in Angmering, East Preston or Rustington-on-Sea, and summer Sundays witness an invasion of the area by the dutiful, the concerned, the well-wishing and the will-hungry.

  Carole and Jude had followed Debbie Carlton’s instructions exactly. The night before, drama had soon settled into normality. To Debbie’s relief, nobody had suggested calling the police for her mother. They had all realized the irrelevance in that situation of official enquiries. The problems that had been revealed required emotional, not judicial, resolution.

  ♦

  Soon after Jude’s rescue, she and Carole had been in Ted Crisp’s car on the way back to Fethering. He had insisted on driving them straight to the Crown and Anchor, where they’d indulged in a little illegal – but extremely necessary – late-night drinking.

  And Debbie had stayed on the houseboat and talked to her mother. She promised to ring them at ten the next morning. Which she duly had done, asking if they could meet her at The Elms. They agreed on eleven-thirty, because Carole and Jude had to go via Fedborough. There was one more person they needed to talk to.

  The interior of the home was as clean and cheerful as such a place could be, but the many vases of flowers on display could not quite smother the pervasive smells of disinfectant, urine and age. The neatly uniformed staff members were all extremely friendly and recognized Debbie as a regular visitor.

  She met them at the main door, still wearing the T-shirt and sweatpants she had thrown on to cover her nakedness at Alan Burnethorpe’s the night before. Her near-white hair looked yellowed, too flat, in need of shampoo, and there were arcs like bruises underneath her eyes. She hadn’t slept at all since she last saw them.

  She led Carole and Jude through into a large sitting room, off which a conservatory reached into the extensive, well-kept garden.

  There were not many people in there. An old man, somehow contriving to look military in a blue-and-redstriped towelling dressing gown, sat up straight on theedge of an armchair, a Sunday newspaper held resolutely in front of him. But, Jude noted, the newspaper was three weeks old and his eyes did not seem to be moving across the page.

  On a sofa an old woman was stacked awkwardly, like a broken deckchair. Her head lolled back, mouth open in a sleep that mimicked death and would soon be replaced by the real thing.

  In a corner of the room, unwatched, a muted television flickered.

  Debbie found three high-backed chairs and arranged them in a semi-circle, facing the conservatory. She did not need to point for Carole and Jude to see why she had brought them there.

  Billie Franks was unaware of their arrival. She sat upright on the side of a lounger, looking with pride and infinite fondness at the man beside her.

  Stanley Franks was, as she had said, ‘still as strong as an ox’. Though his hair was white, under his blue checked shirt his shoulders swelled menacingly.

  But there was no menace in his face. Only a vagueness, tinged by anxiety, as he looked down at his task.

  On the table in front of him was a selection of children’s building blocks. Plastic, in primary colours, not the kind that can be stuck together. And these the old man kept piling on top of each other, trying to make some structure of perfect symmetry.

  But he was never satisfied. However carefully he placed the bricks, whatever adjustments he made to their alignment, the result always fell short of his expectations. With a shrug of annoyance, he would knock his edifice down. If some of the bricks fell on the floor, with practised ease Billie would put them back on the table. Then Stanley Franks would start once again on his doomed building project.

  “He does that all day,” said Debbie softly. “Except when he dozes off to sleep. Then as soon as he wakes up, he starts again. Sometimes it makes him very angry that he can’t get it right. The staff say he has become violent. They tried taking the bricks away, to see if that’d make things better, but he nearly went berserk then, so they gave them back to him. Still, he’s usually calm when Mum’s here.”

  As Carole and Jude watched the scene, the same image was in both their minds. It was of a younger Stanley Franks, proud in the hygiene and efficiency of his shop, obsessively piling and repiling his grocery stock on the shelves.

  Carole decided it was time for some serious talking. Though Jude had subsequently pooh-poohed the idea, she had been in real danger the night before. What had happened could not be left unexplained – or even unpunished.

  “You said you talked to your mother last night, Debbie…”

  “Yes. And how. All night. A lot was said that probably should have been said a long time ago.”

  “She said a lot to me too,” murmured Jude.

  “And did you believe all of it?”

  “No.”

  “What?” asked Carole sharply. “I thought we’d got the explanation to everything – how Virginia Hargreaves died, how the body was disposed of…” She saw with some annoyance that Debbie and Jude were both shaking their heads. “Well, then what did happen? Is there information you’ve been keeping from me?” she asked, in a moment of instinctive paranoia.

  “No,” Jude reassured her. “I got a feeling for the truth last night, and I’m sure it’ll be confirmed by things Billie said to Debbie.”

  “Yes,” Debbie agreed.

  Again Carole’s nose felt out of joint. Jude and Debbie hadn’t been having secret conversations behind her back. They understood each other without speaking. Telepathy really did make her feel excluded.

  “Your father killed Virginia Hargreaves, didn’t he?” asked Jude softly.

  “Yes.” Debbie Carlton’s chin sank wearily on to her chest as the tension in her relaxed. “I didn’t know till last night. I didn’t know any of it. First suspicion I had was when you mentioned salmonella, Carole, at Alan’s, because I knew Virginia Hargreaves did most of her shopping at our shop. Suddenly I got an inkling of what might have happened. But then last night Mum told me everything.”

  “So the story she gave me was all true,” asked Jude, “if we recast your father in the role of murderer?”

  “Well, they were both involved. He in the murder…”

  “And she in the disposal of the body.”

  “Yes. Dad had been getting very absent-minded the last year they were in the shop. We didn’t realize, but it was the start of this…” She gestured towards the conservatory, which seemed to sum up all the pain of her father’s illness. “He was starting to make mistakes in the buying from his suppliers, getting details of orders wrong, and cleanliness standards were slipping because he’d forget basic hygienie measures.

  “Mum tried to take some of the burden off him by doing more in the shop, but he hated
that. He’d always been a control-freak about the business, an obsessive if you like…” Debbie’s eyes were unwillingly drawn back to the conservatory. What we’re seeing now is only a grotesque parody of the way he always was.

  “And if something did go wrong in the shop, Dad would get furiously angry. These terrible, blinding rages he had. So I think when Virginia Hargreaves came in and complained – ”

  “In a manner,” Carole contributed, “that, from what one’s heard about her character, wouldn’t have been that sensitive.”

  “No. Exactly. So he got her into the smokehouse on some pretext and…”

  Jude nodded. “Story as we know it, with change of murderer.”

  “So did your mother come in straightaway and find Virginia dead?”

  “No. That happened the next morning.”

  “And then what?”

  “It was Dad who did the first things to the body.” Debbie was almost shuddering. Though she tried to sound very matter-of-fact, what she was talking about was information she had only very recently received and had not had time to process emotionally. “He stripped off the clothes, put the corpse in the bath and partially drained out the blood. And he…” She shook her head briskly to dispel a feeling of nausea. “He put the body in the kiln.”

  “The whole body?”

  “Yes. Hung up on hooks or…” Another shake of the head. “God knows how. But he lit the oak dust under it and…I can’t imagine what was going through his mind. As I said, he was behaving very oddly round that time.”

  “So the next morning…?”

  “Mum arrived very early. Always did on a Saturday, because there were deliveries from the farms of eggs and dairy products. Anyway, first thing she sees is that the smokehouse is being used, and she thinks that’s rather odd, and she goes in and discovers…” Debbie couldn’t find the words.

  “It must have been ghastly for her.”

  “Yes. A half-kippered minor aristocrat,” said Debbie, in an unsuccessful attempt at humour. “So she confronts Dad, and he says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Maybe he’s blanked out the whole thing. His mind was getting very odd.” Debbie Carlton briskly rubbed her hands together, as though the time had come to move on. “So it was left to Mum to dispose of the body.”

  “Which she took out of the kiln and then joined, to make the job easier.”

  “Exactly.” Debbie sighed. She looked as if she was convalescing after a long illness. Turning her head once again towards the oblivious couple in the conservatory, she said in a drained voice, “That’s the story. My father’s a murderer, though whether he’s in a condition to be brought to trial is, I would have thought, unlikely. But my mother, on the other hand…Well, she’s undoubtedly an accessory after the fact or whatever they call it, so I suppose if anyone thought the police should be informed…”

  She looked pleadingly at Carole and Jude. Jude automatically deferred to her friend for the verdict.

  “I don’t think the police need be involved,” said Carole. “If they find things out by their own efforts…well, that’s fair enough. Nothing we can do about that. But I don’t think we need to give them any pointers.”

  “No,” Jude agreed enthusiastically. “If they’re going along with the assumption that Roddy killed his wife and then, when investigations got too close, killed himself…and if they’re happy with that solution…then why upset their apple-cart?”

  “Of course,” said Carole in her sensible voice, “we don’t actually know anything about what the police think. They may know the whole story and, even now, be building up their dossier incriminating your father.”

  “Well, if they are…” A great load seemed to have been lifted from Debbie Carlton’s shoulders. “…we’ll have to face that problem when we get to it.”

  “There is one detail that ought to be explained, though,” said Carole. “Last night your mother told Jude that she had killed Roddy Hargreaves.”

  The colour once again drained from the girl’s cheeks. “But it’s all right,” Jude came in with compassionate speed. “She was just saying it to frighten me.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Debbie, who looked suddenly as if she couldn’t take any more stress.

  “We’re absolutely sure,” Carole replied. “We asked to meet you later this morning, because on our way here we paid another visit to Alan Burnethorpe.”

  Debbie looked bemused.

  “He was the last person to see Roddy alive. Harry Roxby told me,” said Jude. “He saw the two of them together that Saturday evening. On the towpath opposite Bracken’s Boatyard.”

  “So did the boy see what happened to Roddy?”

  “No, but Alan did.”

  Carole took up the narrative. “Needless to say, hedidn’t want to tell us when we went round this morning. But when I threatened to tell the police about his affair with Virginia Hargreaves, he saw his marriage – amongst many other things – at risk, and so he owned up.”

  “Are you saying Alan owned up to killing Roddy Hargreaves?” asked Debbie in disbelief.

  “No. They’d met that evening in one of the pubs. Roddy, according to Alan, had been in maudlin mood and insisted they go down to the Fether to look at what he called ‘the collapse of their dreams’.”

  “The Bracken’s Boatyard site?”

  “Exactly. So Alan agreed. He said that Roddy was hardly coherent down by the river, drunk and despairing. They walked along the towpath to the end of the houseboats, then turned round and walked back. Alan said he’d got to get back into town, but Roddy wanted to stay for what he called ‘one last look at the boatyard where it all went wrong’.”

  “So he did commit suicide?”

  Carole twisted her lips wryly. “I don’t think we’ll ever know. Alan said he looked back from Fedborough Bridge and saw Roddy Hargreaves swaying on the towpath. Then Roddy seemed to lose his footing.”

  “There are some old steps down there,” Jude contributed. “It seems he probably fell down those.”

  “Deliberately?”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know the answer to that, Debbie.” Carole shook her head. “He may have slipped, he may have deliberately walked into the river. The only thing we know for certain is that nobody pushed him.”

  There was a silence while Debbie Carlton took this in, another addition to the overload of disturbing information she’d received in the previous twenty-four hours. Then she asked, “Why didn’t Alan tell the police about what happened to Roddy?”

  Carole shrugged. “Come on, can you see him doing that? Stirring up more investigation, which might easily lead to his being questioned about other aspects of the case. I wouldn’t put Alan Burnethorpe down as one of the most public-spirited of men. In fact, ‘totally selfish’ is the description I’d go for. He’d do anything to keep his nicely organized little world intact.”

  She sighed. “So I’m afraid we’ll never know the precise reason for Roddy Hargreaves’s death. Like a lot of his life, its details will remain for ever blurred.”

  They were silent, all thinking of the dead man, of the confusions in his sad existence. A wife who didn’t love him, a disastrous aptitude for losing money, Catholic guilt, and the belief that the solution to all his problems lay in a bottle. A total failure. And yet none of them could think of him without affection.

  Carole ended the silence by turning sternly to Debbie Carlton. “We’ve established that your mother didn’t murder Roddy Hargreaves…but the fact remains that she threatened Jude last night with – ”

  “It doesn’t matter, Carole.” The bird’s nest of blonde hair shook, as if it could erase the memory completely.

  “It certainly does, Jude. You were in very real danger. Did you talk to your mother about that, Debbie?”

  The girl nodded. “She was just protecting Dad. It was totally out of character. Mum hasn’t got a violent nature. I swear she’d never do anything like that again.”

 
; “Unless there was another threat to your father’s reputation.”

  “I don’t know.” Debbie faltered. “I suppose…”

  Jude tried to lighten the atmosphere. “So all we haveto do is to see that we never again let Billie think we are putting your dad’s reputation under threat.”

  “Yes.” Debbie Carlton looked pleadingly towards Carole, but an implacable sternness remained in the older woman’s eyes.

  As ever, it was Jude who soothed away the impasse. “Carole, what alternatives do we have? Either we take Debbie’s word for her mother’s future good behaviour or…what? We report to the police what happened last night, put an old woman under the pressures of court proceedings, possibly remove the only stable element in her husband’s life…We can’t do it.”

  There was still a long moment before Carole was convinced, and during that time her eyes held Debbie’s. Finally, the contact was released.

  Brushing her hands against her thighs in a businesslike manner, Carole announced, “What Jude and I were planning to do was to go and have lunch at a rather nice pub we know. The Crown and Anchor at Fethering. Would you like to join us, Debbie? It’s my treat.”

  “Well…” The girl smiled with relief. “That sounds a very good idea indeed. I’d better just…”

  They watched her go into the conservatory. The sun had shifted since their arrival and Stanley Franks’s white hair now looked like a halo in the brightness. His daughter leaned down to kiss the old man’s cheek. He showed no signs of having noticed the gesture.

  “I’ve got to be off now, Mum. Call you later.”

  “Yes, of course.” Billie Franks looked at her husband with pride. “He’s a lot better today, you know. I think he’s turned the corner.”

  The old woman was unaware that Carole and Jude had even been at The Elms that morning.

  ♦

  The Crown and Anchor was busy. Many of the dutiful, the concerned, the well-wishing and the will-hungry coming down to visit elderly relatives had chosen to reward themselves with a nice pub lunch. Ted Crisp and his staff were kept constantly occupied behind the bar.