Читать книгу The Torso in the Town - Simon Brett - Страница 10

There were no rough pubs in Fedborough – there was nothing rough in Fedborough – so the town’s drinking-holes had to be graded upwards by degrees of gentility rather than downwards by loucheness. On this scale the Coach and Horses in Pelling Street was just over halfway up, not aspiring to the manicured hotel splendour of the Pelling Arms, nor yet as ordinary as the Home Hostelries chain predictability of the Black Horse.

The Coach and Horses had been built as a pub in the early nineteenth century, and sympathetically restored at the end of the twentieth. The new owners were a shrewd couple, skilful managers who recognized the appeal of old beams and large fireplaces in a tourist trap like Fedborough. The stripped-down brick walls were decorated with old photographs of the town – horse-drawn carriages labouring up the High Street, a long-aproned poulterer with a display of Christmas turkeys hanging from his shop front, an Edwardian pageant amid the ruins of Fedborough Castle, a flag-waving crowd celebrating VE Day. The bar was lit by discreet coach-lamps, whose reflections sparkled on polished tables, on the handles of beer pumps and on the display of bottles behind the counter. Elegantly done, but a little impersonal in its efficiency. As they entered the pub, Carole couldn’t help thinking of the scruffier welcome of the Crown and Anchor, and once again tried to force her mind away from corrosive thoughts.

The evening was warm enough for people still to be sitting in the back courtyard, but Jude and Carole decided they would stay inside. A man, in Debbie Carlton’s words, whose ‘permanent address seems to be the Coach and Horses’, was more likely to be found propping up the bar than enjoying the evening sunshine.

The well-trained young barman offered a good choice of white wines and they settled on a Chilean Chardonnay. Carole’s instinctive demurral about having any alcohol was swept aside. ‘One glass isn’t going to affect your driving. And it’s bound to end up as two, which won’t affect your driving either.’

Carole didn’t raise objections, but it wasn’t the thought of the car that had prompted her reaction. Much of the time she’d spent with Ted Crisp had been in a pleasant vinous haze, and to resist alcohol now seemed a necessary deprivation – or even punishment.

They found a table and consulted the menu, whose offerings were carefully themed to the locality: ‘Steak and Sussex Ale Pie’, ‘Cod in Batter, fresh every day from LA (Little ‘Ampton)’, ‘Fedborough Fishcakes’, ‘Castle Quiche’.

‘I think I might go for the South Downs Sausages and Mash . . .’ said Jude.

‘ . . . served with Sussex Onion Gravy. Mm, sounds good. What does that mean, though? Does it mean the onions come from Sussex? Or the gravy’s made to an old Sussex recipe?’

‘It means they get a lot of Americans in here.’

‘Yes, you’re probably right.’ Carole looked around the bar. There were a few men in suits, possibly estate agents having a drink after a heavy day’s mortgage-recommending; some fairly obvious tourists in bright T-shirts and unaccustomed shorts; and, at the bar, a knot of four older men whose exclusive, introverted body language showed that they were regulars, and wanted to be recognized as regulars.

‘If Roddy Hargreaves is here,’ Carole murmured, ‘he must be one of those.’

Jude nodded thoughtful agreement. Then abruptly she stood up. ‘I’ll order the food. You still going for the South Downs Sausages . . . ?’

Carole watched the ensuing scene with amazement, not untinged by envy. Jude had a quality that Carole knew she never had possessed, and never would possess. Jude could talk to people, talk to anyone, and her intrusion was never resented.

It was an alchemy that Carole could not fathom. Partly, she knew, Jude was attractive; men responded to something welcoming in her cuddly body and her large brown eyes. But the technique worked equally well with women. Even as she had the thought, Carole knew that ‘technique’ was too calculating a word for what Jude did. Casualness, artlessness were the keys to her success.

What Carole witnessed at the bar of the Coach and Horses that evening was a perfect demonstration of the magic. Jude saw the young barman moving towards the group of four regulars and somehow timed her approach to get to the bar at the same moment he reached them. He registered her arrival and for a moment looked uncertain. The regulars knew they’d be served in time; his bosses had instructed him not to keep new business waiting. He turned towards Jude.

‘No, please.’ She gestured to the four men and grinned. ‘Wouldn’t want to keep a man from his pint.’

One of the regulars, a red-faced man in his seventies with a luxuriant white moustache, guffawed. ‘Now there’s a woman who’s been well trained. Wouldn’t like to give a few lessons to my wife, would you?’

Carole was once again struck by the effortlessness of it all. Jude didn’t appear to be trying, nor was she demeaning herself by going along with this sexist nonsense; she was simply indulging in small talk at the bar of a pub. Having never in her life been able to produce the smallest syllable of small talk, Carole felt very envious.

While the barman filled two empty pint glasses and topped up the other two with generous ‘Sussex halves’, Jude chuckled at what had been said and, holding out the menu, continued, ‘Now, you gentlemen look as if you know your way around this area . . .’

‘You can say that again,’ agreed the man with the moustache and the disapproving wife.

‘ . . . so perhaps you can tell me what a “South Downs Sausage” is . . .?’

‘You’ve got one of those, haven’t you, Roddy?’ the moustached man chortled. ‘Big one and all, if the town rumours are anything to go by.’

‘Very funny,’ said the man who had been addressed. His voice was surprisingly upper-class, at odds with his discoloured jeans, broken-down trainers, and a faded Guernsey sweater, which Jude thought must be very hot on a day like that. The voice also contained a hint of reproof, a suggestion that the remark might have been unnecessarily crude. He turned his face to Jude, and she saw that he had a real drinker’s nose, a sad purple cluster of broken veins. He was probably only in his early fifties, but looked older.

‘I must apologize for my friend. I would imagine that a South Downs Sausage is extraordinarily like any other kind of sausage, but that Keith and Janet, mine host and hostess, reckon they’ll sell a few more if they give them some spurious local connection.’

He was extremely polite, but spoke with the punctilious concentration of the regularly drunk.

‘Oh, well then, I think I’ll go for them.’ Having given her order to the barman, Jude took a risk. Turning to the purple nose, she said, ‘Your friend called you “Roddy”. You’re not, by any chance, Roddy Hargreaves, are you?’

‘At your service.’ He made a little half-bow, which threatened his stability on the bar stool. The friend who’d made the crude remark reached out automatically to steady him.

Having identified her quarry, Jude was faced with a problem. How on earth was she meant to know him? What possible connection could there be between them? What could she say that didn’t sound like blatant interrogation?

As ever, she took the direct route. ‘Somebody was saying you used to live in Pelling House . . . you know, where the body was found . . .’

This was greeted by a guffaw of recognition from the group. ‘Becoming quite the local celebrity, Roddy,’ said the red-faced man, wiping his moustache. ‘You may not be able to pull the birds by your looks, but they’re still fatally attracted to your Jack the Ripper side.’

‘Very witty, Jimmy.’ Roddy turned to look at Jude. His scrutiny was not openly suspicious, but it was searching. ‘The gossip’s been spreading then. You don’t live in Fedborough, do you?’

‘Fethering.’

‘Ah.’

‘Different kind of folk in Fethering. Very odd people. Low aspirations – that’s because so many of them live in bungalows,’ observed the one called Jimmy in a jocular tone. Clearly he was the self-appointed wit of the group.

Automatic male laughter followed the sally, but Roddy didn’t join in. He appeared to make the decision that he could trust Jude. ‘So what are they saying about the torso in Fethering?’

‘Everything and nothing. A lot of ill-informed gossip.’

‘Much the same as Fedborough, then. By the way, I see you are drinkless. That’s a real damsel-in-distress situation. Allow me to remedy it for you.’

‘I’ve got a drink over there with my friend.’

Roddy Hargreaves looked towards their table. ‘Why doesn’t she come and join us?’

Carole ignored the perfectly clear invitation in Jude’s eyes, and looked away. There were some instinctive reactions she could not avoid. From school dances onward, she had resisted the social embarrassment of being dragged across to men with the line, ‘Oh, and this is my friend Carole.’ She knew she was being stupid, she knew in this particular instance she was losing the chance to be part of the investigation, but there were certain spots which, even after half a century, this particular leopard could not change.

Immediately understanding, Jude said lightly, ‘Oh, she hasn’t noticed. Well, I will have a Chilean Chardonnay with you then. Thank you very much.’

‘Large Chilean Chardonnay, Lee. Sorry, I didn’t get your name . . . ?’

‘Jude.’

‘Good evening, Jude. I, as you pieced together, am Roddy Hargreaves. This is Jimmy Lister, and . . .’ As he identified the other two, Jude realized that the man with the moustache must be James Lister, the conductor of Town Walks, he whom the Rev Trigwell had hailed as ‘a real character’. Might be a useful source of Fedborough history, Jude filed away – if I could put up with his jokes.

‘I suppose, Roddy,’ she went on, direct as ever, as he passed her the wine, ‘the police have talked to you about what was found in Pelling House?’

‘Exhaustively. I was with them for . . . what, four, five hours? Five hours without a drink, imagine that.’ There was more knee-jerk laughter. Jude had often thought there was an academic thesis to be written about male laughter in pubs. The words that prompted it didn’t need to be funny – indeed, they very rarely were. The important thing was that the cue should be unmistakable and delivered in the right nudging tone; then laughter would inevitably ensue.

‘But presumably they didn’t confide in you the current state of their investigations?’

‘Sadly, no. Didn’t give me any pointers to the identity of the corpse, nothing intriguing like that. Just lots of questions about precise dates, when I bought Pelling House, when I sold it, how often I went down to the cellar, all that kind of stuff.’

‘Five hours seems quite a long time for just that.’

‘Ah,’ chipped in James Lister, who felt he had been silent too long, ‘that’s because Roddy’s their number one suspect. The police’d heard some of the things he’d got up to with his South Downs Sausage, you see, so they reckoned the torso was the result of a sex game that went wrong.’

This tastelessness triggered another bark of male laughter. Roddy, to give him his due, did not participate. Despite his drunkenness, he seemed to have slightly more sensitivity than his companions.

‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘they didn’t question me as if I was a suspect. The reason that it took so long is that I have a terrible memory for dates. Just about tell you when my own birthday is, but that’s it. So all these “when exactly did you take possession of Pelling House, and when exactly did you sell it?” questions got me rather confused. Because I’m afraid the whole period while I was selling up is a bit of a blur.’

‘Like every day for you, eh?’ guffawed James Lister.

In a practised way, Roddy again ignored this, and amplified his comments. His friends knew the story, had heard it many times, but he needed to tell the newcomer what had happened to him. There was a note of self-justification in his voice. ‘I went through a bad patch round then. I’d invested a lot in the pleasure-boat franchise down by Fedborough Bridge . . . do you know where I mean?’ Jude nodded. Ruefully he continued, ‘Bit of a mess down there now, I know, but I did have big plans for it. Bought the site from Bob Bracken, old bloke who was retiring . . .’

‘Still lives in Fedborough, though.’ James Lister was ready with the information. As Debbie Carlton had said to Carole, nobody ever left Fedborough. Or perhaps the memory of those who did was immediately erased from the collective consciousness.

‘Yes, and Bob’d run it as a nice simple business, selling ice creams and teas, taking tourists on his motor boat up and down the Fether.’ Roddy Hargreaves sighed. ‘But of course that wasn’t good enough for me. I had much bigger ambitions. I was going to have rowing boats, motor launches, trips down to the sea at Fethering, even hoped to build a small marina. But the Town Committee were against it . . . or against me, I’ll never know . . . so they got the planners to back-pedal – never a difficult thing to achieve round here and . . . well . . . My money was trickling away as fast as the little harbour I’d dredged out was silting up again. And it was round that time the marriage was breaking up, so . . .’

The gesture which faded away with his words seemed to express the futility of all ambitions.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jude.

‘Very nice of you, but you don’t need to be. My own fault. What, when I was in the Navy, they would have called “a self-inflicted wound” . . . like getting an infection from a tattooist’s dirty needle. Fact is, I’ve always been crap with money. Lost a packet in the Lloyd’s crash and . . .’ a shrug ‘ . . . so it goes on. Money and me can’t wait to be parted. Just seems to trickle away.’

‘Mostly down the urinal here.’ James Lister was inevitably ready with his quip. And, equally inevitably, the laugh followed.

‘Did the police ask you if you had any idea who the torso might have been?’

‘Oh yes, Jude, they did. And I’m afraid I couldn’t give any very helpful answers. As I said, that whole period’s a bit of a blur. Mind you,’ he continued, as if suddenly thinking of the idea, ‘I don’t know what other answer they were expecting me to give. “Oh yes, officer, of course I knew there was a dismembered corpse down in the cellar all the time I lived there. I just didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”’

This too got a laugh from the other three men, but Jude was not certain Roddy had delivered it as a joke. There was a pain behind his words, perhaps an awareness of what he had become. Roddy Hargreaves had once had higher ambitions than ending up as a barfly in a Fedborough pub, recycling stale conversation and jokes with three old bores.

‘Good Lord, my glass is empty! That’s a nasty shock for a chap! Emergency – pint transfusion, please!’ James Lister got his grunt of laughter. ‘Your shout, I think, Roddy.’

The ordering of another round coincided with the appearance from the kitchen of a waitress bearing heaped plates of food. ‘Two South Downs Sausages!’ she called out.

‘Two?’ James Lister winked at Jude. ‘Sure you can manage two at the same time?’

At other times she might have given the innuendo a sharp answer, but on this occasion she just smiled and turned to Roddy Hargreaves, who was having trouble getting his wallet out of his jeans’ back pocket. Once again he swayed perilously on the bar stool.

Just before moving across to join Carole with their South Downs Sausages, she looked straight into Roddy Hargreaves’s eyes, her brown ones probing the bloodshot blue of his.

‘So you really have no idea who the torso might be?’

The bleary eyes became focused in a moment of intelligence and caution.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No idea at all.’