Читать книгу The Torso in the Town - Simon Brett - Страница 7

She knew Fedborough well enough to find one of the few free parking spaces. Because of the constant invasion of tourists, the town boasted many double yellow lines and, since residents made it a point of honour not to succumb to the ‘Pay and Display’ car parks, the unrestricted roadsides were quickly filled. Still, ten-fifteen was too early for the daily summer influx of bewildered pensioners and spotty French students, so Carole managed to squeeze the Renault into a narrow space outside one of the many antique shops at the top of the town.

Gulliver was disappointed. He had got into the car with high expectations of being taken for a walk, possibly up on the Downs near Weldisham, but getting out in the middle of a town dashed those hopes. Also Fedborough had connotations for him of the vet’s, and distant unhappy memories of being unnecessarily pricked and probed. His woebegone head drooped and his bandaged tail hung between his legs as Carole attached the lead.

She knew he didn’t like what was about to happen, but she had little sympathy. He had brought it on himself. Gulliver had taken the decision to chase that Yorkshire terrier on Fethering Beach, although he knew Yorkshire terriers are notorious for misinterpreting the playful advances of larger dogs. So he’d really asked for the bite on his tail. And the fact that the wound had become infected was ultimately his fault too. So Carole ignored the pitiful whining as she dragged Gulliver down Fedborough High Street towards the veterinary surgery.

In the early June sunlight the town was looking its best. Set where the undulations of the South Downs met the flatness that led to the sea, Fedborough had once been a notable port. Ocean-going vessels had plied up the River Fether from Fethering to deposit their goods from far away – wines from France, coals from Newcastle – and this trade had been the foundation of the town’s prosperity. Now the only vestiges of seafaring were a few privately owned launches, moored with great care to accommodate the considerable tidal rise and fall of the Fether, and a string of some half-dozen houseboats to the north of Fedborough Bridge. The nearest of these had been punctiliously refurbished to its former Edwardian splendour, but the old hulks beyond appeared to be sinking into the river in progressive stages of decrepitude. Few of them looked as if they could still be inhabited.

On the opposite side from the houseboats, a small quay had been dredged out of the riverbank. This was surrounded by a collection of wooden huts, on which faded notices advertised ice creams and pleasure-boat trips on the Fether. But there was an air of dilapidation and business failure about the silted-up inlet, no sign of any ice creams or pleasure boats.

The bridge was at the bottom of the High Street, down whose steep incline Carole pulled the reluctant Gulliver. At the top of what was uncontroversially called Castle Hill, stood the remains of Fedborough Castle. On the site of an old fort, from which Saxons had resisted Vikings marauding up the Fether, a nobleman, rewarded by William the Conqueror with the lands around the town, had built a massive keep to dominate the river valley. Over the following centuries the fabric had been strengthened and the ground plan extended, until Fedborough Castle could withstand the worst that mediaeval armaments could hurl against its walls.

But it could not withstand the cannons of Cromwell’s New Model Army during the Civil War. At the end of a short but brutal siege, the people of Fedborough paid the price of their loyalty to King Charles. Their town was sacked and most of their precious castle reduced to rubble. The ruin was left as a warning to future aspiring rebels.

With the restoration of the monarchy, its symbolism changed but there seemed no purpose in rebuilding the structure. Gradually, surreptitiously, over the years the loose stones were appropriated by local builders and incorporated into the fabric of the growing town.

And the familiar silhouette of the remains, like the irregular teeth of an old man, continued to dominate Fedborough from Castle Hill. With the advent of the Romantic Movement, when ruins suddenly took on fashionably Gothic qualities, the outline became the subject of many paintings, etchings and prints. Then, through the twentieth century, as the heritage industry developed, the Castle ruins were translated into a symbol of West Sussex, a logo for the town of Fedborough, and an essential part of any tourist itinerary.

The major expansion of the town had occurred during the late Georgian and Victorian periods. Fedborough’s market attracted produce from the riches of surrounding agricultural estates, while improvements in communications by road, rail and water made the town a centre for trade. With only a few flint-faced cottages surviving from earlier times, newly enriched entrepreneurs built substantial brick houses to demonstrate their unassailable social position. Large, elegant shops were erected to supply their growing consumerism, and Fedborough found itself in the genteel stranglehold of the middle classes – from which it has never escaped.

Though a certain amount of building occurred during the twentieth century, most of the construction work was new houses being put up on the sites of old ones. There was also a lot of conversion work, as buildings changed usage. Former shops, warehouses, workshops and even chapels were transformed into tasteful flats and houses for the newly wealthy or the wealthy retired. Fedbor-ough’s geographical position gave little opportunity for the outward sprawl which has affected so many towns. Trapped in a triangle, bounded on one side by the Downs, on another by the River Fether, and on the third by Sussex’s main east–west arterial road, the A27, there was no direction in which Fedborough could expand further.

So the vista down which Carole Seddon and Gulliver walked was predominantly Victorian. Tall, graceful buildings with multi-paned windows lined the High Street. A few were residential, though most of the town centre population lived in the equally elegant side roads. An old coaching inn, the Pelling Arms, offered tourists the charms of anachronistic authenticity. The logos of a chemist chain, three estate agents and two of the major banks distinguished other buildings. There were a couple of teashops and four pubs (from which Carole, after her recent involvement with the landlord of Fethering’s Crown and Anchor, found herself instinctively shrinking).

But, except for those listed above, every other building in Fedborough High Street was an antique shop.

Carole hauled Gulliver, whimpering with unwillingness, into the vet’s reception area. He continued to whimper while they waited their turn, while the vet cleaned his wound, gave him an injection and prescribed further antibiotics. He was still whimpering when Carole took him back up the High Street and locked him in the Renault to await her return.

As she set off towards the address Debbie Carlton had given her, Carole deliberately turned her back on the look of reproach that followed her through the partly opened car window. That look summed up all the perfidy of humankind. To put a dog in a car as if taking him out for a walk, then to trick him into a visit to the vet’s, and finally to lock him back up in the car . . . Gulliver was having a seriously bad day, and it was all Carole’s fault.

Debbie Carlton was thin, but the thinness implied toned muscle rather than frailty. She had naturally blonde – almost white – hair and surprisingly dark blue eyes. Carole always found it difficult to judge the ages of those younger than herself, but reckoned mid-thirties must be about the right mark.

Debbie was wearing a large sloppy red jumper, in which – as intended – she looked waif-like. Deceptively simple black trousers and frivolously large red trainers. For make-up only a hint of blue on her upper eyelids and red lipstick the exact colour of her shoes. She knew precisely the effect of the ensemble.

Her designing skills were also evident in the small sitting room into which she ushered Carole, but for someone working from home, that made good business sense. Her domestic décor had to be an advertisement for the skills she hoped to sell.

The flat was pleasant enough. On the first floor, above a hairdresser’s in Harbidge Street, it was not what the finely tuned local snobs would call one of the best addresses in Fedborough. Perfectly acceptable, though, for anyone who hadn’t once enjoyed the lavish expanses and magnificent proportions of Pelling House.

The décor demonstrated Debbie Carlton’s ability to do the best she could with the space she had. On walls and ceiling the predominant colour was terracotta; furniture had been stripped down and stained the colour of pumice stone. Dusty green in the curtains and cunningly faded red on the upholstery gave an impression of a sleepy Italian town, which was intensified by robust morning sunlight streaming through the small panes of the windows.

The Mediterranean theme was maintained by the rows of framed paintings on the walls. Delicate water-colours picked out the apricot honey of tiled roofs, the hazy green of cypresses, the silver shimmer of olive leaves and the soft grey of ancient statuary. The style was so uniform that they had all to be the work of the same artist. Carole wondered whether it was Debbie herself.

Time enough to find that out. Her hostess, gesturing her guest to an armchair which was bleached to a rose colour, sat herself down in front of a table with a waiting cafetière. ‘Thank you very much for warning me about the police. Theirs was the first message on the answering machine. Might’ve given me a nasty shock if you hadn’t said anything.’

Carole shrugged that it had been no problem.

‘Now, how do you like your coffee?’

‘Just a dash of milk. No sugar.’ As Debbie busied herself pouring, Carole asked, ‘Have the police talked to you then?’

‘And how! Had about three hours with them yesterday afternoon.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’ Debbie smiled. ‘They didn’t take me down to the station. So far as I can gather, I’m not their number one suspect.’

‘No, of course not. I don’t suppose they have any idea who the body – the torso – was.’

‘If they have, they didn’t confide it in me. There you are.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Would you like a biscuit?’

There were none on display, but Carole would have refused the offer, anyway. Though there had been a strong biscuit culture in the Home Office, she had always borne in mind her mother’s proscription of eating between meals.

‘So what did the police ask you about?’

‘Oh, purely factual stuff. When we moved into the house . . .’

‘When was that, actually?’

‘Two . . . no, I suppose two and a half years ago.’ The recollection threatened her poise for a moment, so she moved quickly on. ‘And of course the police wanted to know who we’d bought Pelling House from . . .’

‘Which was?’

‘Man called Roddy Hargreaves. I doubt if you’ve met him. A Fedborough “character”. Bought up the place where the pleasure boats used to run down on the Fether, but the business didn’t work out. He had to sell up.’

‘Did he move away?’

‘No, no one ever moves away from Fedborough. They just move into smaller premises,’ she added ruefully. ‘Not sure where Roddy’s place is currently. He’s moved around the town a bit in the last couple of years. His permanent address seems to be the Coach and Horses in Pelling Street.’

‘Hm. What else did the police ask you?’

Though Carole’s questions were already tantamount to an interrogation, Debbie Carlton seemed either not to notice or not to mind. ‘They wanted to know when we sold Pelling House, all that sort of detail. And, needless to say, whether we often went down to the cellar.’

‘And the answer to that was . . . ?’ This time Carole realized that her instinctive curiosity was becoming a bit too avid for a Fedborough coffee morning, and backtracked. ‘That is, if you don’t mind my asking . . . ?’

‘I don’t mind at all . . . Mrs Seddon.’

‘Please call me Carole.’

‘All right, Carole. And call me Debbie. Well, in answer to your question – and indeed the police’s question, I very rarely did go down to the cellar in Pelling House. We had so much space there that we reckoned we’d colonize it slowly. Did our bedroom first, then the sitting room, then the kitchen and . . .’ The sentence, like the relationship it referred to, was left in mid-air.

‘But the cellar must’ve been inspected when you bought the house, you know, when it was surveyed?’

Debbie Carlton shook her head. ‘We actually didn’t have it surveyed. Mad, I know, but I’d have still bought Pelling House if a survey had said the whole of Dauncey Street was about to fall into the Fether. And Francis saw the economic sense of it. He resented the idea of paying the money to some surveyor who’d just spend ten minutes in the place and send in a whacking great bill. You see, my husband was – well, is – an architect, so he checked the basics.’

‘Seem to be a lot of architects in Fedborough.’

‘Certainly are. Architects, antique dealers, and the retired. Anyway, Francis had always been careful with his money, and he came into some when his parents died, so we didn’t need a mortgage. Which meant we didn’t need a survey for the building society. And I’d dreamed of living in Pelling House since I was a little girl. Dreamed of bringing up a family there, but . . .’

Carole began to realize the depth of the pain moving out must have caused. But there had been another implication in Debbie’s words. ‘You were brought up round here, were you?’

‘Yes. Fedborough born and bred. I’m a genuine Chub.’

‘Chub?’

Debbie grinned at her bewilderment. ‘People who’re actually born in Fedborough are nicknamed “Chubs”. After the fish. Chub still get caught off the bridge sometimes.’

‘Ah.’

‘My parents used to run the local grocery – in the days when there was a grocery in Fedborough. So I was brought up and went to school round here. Then obviously moved away when I went to St Martin’s College of Art. After that Francis and I moved back down here and . . .’ She grimaced wryly. ‘Here I am again, as Debbie Carlton.’ A frown. ‘I should really have changed back to my maiden name after the divorce, but I’d got the design stationery printed before I thought of it.’

‘What was your maiden name?’

‘Franks. Debbie Franks.’

‘Either of them sounds all right for an interior designer.’

‘Yes.’ A light chuckle. ‘At least I had a maiden name I could go back to. Unlike my poor mother.’

Carole waited for a gloss on this, but it didn’t come. So she smiled briefly, then asked, ‘Didn’t you want to move after the divorce?’ She remembered after David’s departure how frantic she had been to get out of the marital home as soon as possible and make her permanent base in their country cottage in Fethering.

‘I desperately wanted to move,’ said Debbie with feeling. ‘But my parents are still down here. Dad’s in a home, which means Mum’s virtually on her own. She sold the big house, to pay for Dad’s hospital expenses and lives in a houseboat on the Fether. I can’t really leave her, so . . .’ The shrug this time encompassed all the hopeless inevitability of life.

‘Mm. You say you were at art college . . .’ Carole gestured to the walls. ‘Are those yours?’ Debbie nodded. ‘They’re lovely.’

‘Thanks. I’m hoping to start selling a few, you know, bolster the old income a bit. This flat’s actually going to be part of the Art Crawl.’ In response to Carole’s puzzled expression, she explained, ‘In the Fedborough Festival in July. Only a couple of weeks away now. You’ve heard of the Festival, haven’t you?’

‘Oh yes.’ Carole thought of the programme book that had come through the letter-box a month before, and which this year had remained unopened. ‘I’ve been to the odd play or concert in the past. But I haven’t been aware of the . . . what did you call it?’

‘ “Art Crawl”. So called because it’s kind of modelled on a pub crawl, I suppose. You move from venue to venue. Artists display their work in various houses round the town, and people get maps showing where the stuff is and walk round looking at it. Very popular. Possibly brings more people to the Festival than the theatre and the concerts do.’

‘Does a lot of art get sold?’

‘Some artists do quite well, yes. Some less so.’ Her face twisted with the effort of saying what she was about to say with the maximum of diplomacy. ‘The fact is, in a place like Fedborough you get a lot of self-appointed artists.’

‘Whose talent isn’t up to that of professional artists?’

‘I didn’t say that. You did. I’d hoped to show my stuff in Pelling House during the Festival, but . . .’ Debbie briskly shook off maudlin thoughts. ‘So I’m going to turn this room into a bit of a gallery for the Crawl and see what happens. Which reminds me, I’ve still got a lot of framing to do.’

‘Do you do your own framing?’

‘Yes. Saves money.’ She sighed. ‘At least I can guarantee to get a lot of people through the flat, even if they don’t buy anything.’ She provided another explanation. ‘For most people in Fedborough, the Art Crawl is just a Snoopers’ Charter – chance to have a crafty look round other people’s houses.’

‘Ah.’ Carole grinned.

So did Debbie. But her mood swiftly changed, as an unwelcome thought returned to her. ‘The really horrid thing about this whole business . . . you know, what I’ve been talking to the police about . . . is that that . . . thing . . . the torso . . . must’ve been there all the time we lived in Pelling House . . .’ She shuddered. ‘A kind of malign presence. A curse on the house . . . and on those inside it.’ She let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘People of a superstitious nature might imagine that that’s what cast a blight on Francis and my marriage.’

‘And are you of a superstitious nature, Debbie?’

‘No. I’m of a very realistic nature. And I’m fully aware that the only malign presence which cast a blight on our marriage was a younger, richer American woman called Jonelle. Francis was always very interested in money. He was almost obsessively . . .’ She swallowed back the bile in her voice. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t burden you with my troubles.’

‘It’s all right. I’ve been there.’ As she said the words, Carole realized that she was being sympathetic, showing people skills of the kind that came so effortlessly to Jude. For the first time in months, she felt a tiny flicker of returning confidence. Emboldened, she moved the conversation back to what in her mind was starting to be called ‘the investigation’.

‘The police didn’t say anything else of interest about the torso, did they?’

Debbie Carlton, relieved by the change of subject, firmly shook her head. ‘No. Presumably they’re doing all the forensic tests, going through Missing Persons files and what-have-you, but they were hardly likely to share anything they knew with me, were they?’

‘Hardly. So, Debbie, you weren’t even aware of the boarded-up bit in the cellar in Pelling House, were you?’

‘No. I may have glanced down there when we were looking round with the estate agent, but that’s it. There wasn’t a light fixed up, so, as I say, I never went down to the cellar.’

‘Surely you must’ve been glad of the space for storage?’

‘No. We moved from a tiny flat just along the road here, so we didn’t have nearly enough furniture for somewhere like that. And you’ve no idea how much cupboard space there is in Pelling House,’ she added wistfully.

‘What about Francis?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve said you didn’t, but did Francis often go down to the cellar?’

There was a distinct beat of silence before Debbie Carlton replied, ‘No. Hardly ever.’