The Torso in the Town Read online

  ‘Ye-es.’ Grant Roxby looked flustered.

  Kim came to his rescue. ‘You’ve just got the two kids?’ Her question was completely gratuitous. Since she’d arrived, Joke Burnethorpe had talked about nothing else.

  ‘That’s right. Caspar and Linus.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Donald Durrington cleared his throat. His wife watched him nervously, as if afraid he was about to reveal some deeply protected secret.

  But he didn’t. All he said was, ‘Have you thought about schools at all yet?’

  Oh dear, thought Jude, is it going to be one of those dinner parties?

  But it didn’t develop that way. Joke Burnethorpe, who Jude had already assessed as a very strong-willed young woman, persisted with her line of questioning. ‘So where is Harry?’

  Grant again seemed embarrassed by the question, and a moment of marital semaphore passed between husband and wife. ‘He must’ve got caught up in . . . you know what they’re like at that age . . . some computer game . . . something on the internet—’

  ‘Or just exploring the house,’ Kim cut in; and then, as though such a pursuit were somehow more respectable than computer games or the internet, she went on, ‘All the children are fascinated by history, you know, and this house is full of history.’

  ‘So’s all of Fedborough,’ said the Rev Trigwell, pausing for a moment to check that this statement had not been controversial. Reassured, he continued, ‘You must get James Lister to take you on one of his Town Walks. He’s a real character, James . . . though of course in the nicest possible way,’ he concluded weakly.

  ‘Oh yes, a great character,’ Donald Durrington agreed. ‘I tell you, it was very amusing during the Fedborough Festival a couple of years back when . . . well, let’s say the drink had flowed liberally in the Sponsors’ Tent and Jimmy had indulged rather more than his wife Fiona would have approved of and—’

  But the anecdote which was to detail James Lister’s qualification as ‘a character’ would have to be wheeled out some other time. A child’s scream was heard from downstairs. Seconds later, Harry Roxby burst in through the dining-room door. He carried a large rubber-covered torch, which was switched on. His face was so red Jude could hardly see the spots which had been prominent earlier, and his eyes were staring.

  ‘Dad!’ he shouted in sheer childish terror. ‘We’ve found a dead body in the cellar!’

  Chapter Two

  Professional priorities might have dictated that Dr Durrington would be first to the body, but he showed a marked reluctance to move from the dinner table. It was Kim Roxby who led the way into the hall, where she immediately stopped to comfort her hysterical daughters.

  Her husband took the torch from his son and set off through the door that led down to the cellar. He was grim-faced, determined not to appear panicked. If the commotion turned out to be a practical joke perpetrated by his children, they were about to be severely reprimanded. Disrupting their parents’ social life, they would learn, was not funny.

  It seemed natural for Jude to follow Grant down the stairs into the darkness. Harry, half-fascinated, half-repelled, trailed after them.

  The beam of the torch waved around in the gloom. Jude had difficulty judging the precise dimensions of the space, but it felt low-ceilinged and smelt of mildew.

  ‘Where is it, Harry – this thing you claim you’ve seen?’ The father’s voice was taut with contained emotion.

  ‘I didn’t claim to see it, Dad,’ the boy protested weakly. ‘It’s there – over through that partition.’

  The torch beam landed on a discoloured sheet of chipboard, bloated with damp, which had been nailed across one end of the cellar space. The top corner had been pulled away and flapped down like a piece of torn paper.

  ‘Did you do that, Harry?’ asked Grant sharply. ‘Pull it down?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the grudging admission from behind Jude.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just to see what space there was down here – see if we can turn this into something.’

  ‘Into what, Harry?’

  ‘I don’t know. Computer room . . . ? Den . . . ? Some place where I can go, somewhere I can be on my own . . .’

  Jude was struck, given the situation, by the incongruity of the father questioning his son in this way. For a moment she wondered if Grant was just delaying the sight of the horror that lay ahead, but then she decided the exchange was simply a reflection of their relationship. Grant Roxby still wanted to know about – possibly even control – everything his son did. And Harry resented this constant monitoring of his life.

  Grant raised the torch through the exposed triangle to illuminate the void beyond. From behind her, Jude heard a sudden dry retching sound.

  ‘I think I’m going to be—’

  ‘It’s all right, Harry! Let’s get you out of here!’ Grant put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and hurried him towards the light at the top of the stairs. The father seemed empowered by his son’s weakness, more confident when he could treat Harry as a child. Passing her, he thrust the torch into Jude’s hands.

  Some people would not have wanted to look, but squeamishness had no part in Jude’s nature. She redirected the torch to where Grant had been pointing, and peered over the broken chipboard partition.

  Any notion that the children’s hysteria might have been prompted by an anthropomorphic dummy was quickly dispelled. What the torchlight revealed was very definitely human.

  The body lay horizontally at the foot of the wall, dark, almost black, with leathery skin tight over the bones. Beaky, reminiscent of an unwrapped mummy whose photograph Jude had once seen in a National Geographical Magazine, the face was still topped by a straggle of mud-coloured hair.

  Rotted round about on the floor were the remains of the box in which the corpse must have lain hidden. From the soggy corrugated debris, this appeared to have been made of no more than stout cardboard. The angled plastic strips which had reinforced its corners lay splayed out on the floor.

  There was no evidence of clothes. The object’s shrivelled breasts and pudenda showed that what Jude was looking at had once been a woman.

  The body had no limbs. The arms had been neatly removed at the shoulders, and the legs at the hip joint.

  Chapter Three

  When Carole Seddon opened her front door the next morning, the Sunday, she looked frosty. Her pale, thin face did frosty rather well. The sensibly cut steel-grey hair offered no concessions, and when she wanted them to, her light blue eyes could look as dead as the glass in her rimless spectacles. The fact that it was a fine June day, that seagulls were doing exploratory aerobatics across the Fethering sky, did not penetrate her gloom.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, without enthusiasm.

  There was a momentary impasse before Jude asked, ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Carole drew back, still making no pretence at a welcome. That someone normally so punctilious in her social usages should behave like this indicated she was in the grip of some powerful emotion.

  Jude knew that. She also knew what the emotion was, and what had caused it. For the last few weeks she had been aware of Carole retreating into her shell and, from the experience of luring her friend out of it once before, Jude knew how tough and impregnable that shell could be. She herself had been away and busy and hadn’t had time to concentrate on fence-mending with her neighbour. But now she was back, determined that a rapprochement should be effected. And she had a feeling that the news of the torso in Fedborough might, perversely, be just the thing to restore the health of their relationship.

  Carole closed the door behind them. ‘Would you like coffee?’ She was aware of how boorish she was being, and that knowledge compounded the darkness of her mood.

  ‘Listen,’ said Jude. ‘Forget coffee. Let’s get things sorted. I know exactly why you’re behaving like this with me, and I promise you – you don’t have to.’

  ‘Would you like to sit down?’ asked Carole
with icy politeness, gesturing towards the sitting room.

  ‘No, I bloody wouldn’t like to sit down! I’d like to take hold of you, shake all this nonsense out of you, then give you a big hug.’

  ‘Oh.’ Carole almost visibly shuddered. Every disciplined middle-class fibre of her being recoiled at the concept of big hugs.

  They stood facing each other, Jude poised for a hug, Carole prepared to repel any such approach.

  ‘You’re just making things worse by cutting yourself off.’

  ‘I would have thought that was my business,’ came the tart reply.

  ‘Oh, come on . . .’ Jude took her neighbour’s hand. Carole, on hug alert, was unprepared for this, and did not immediately snatch the hand away. ‘Let’s go into your kitchen, make some coffee, and get this sorted.’

  Carole felt another twinge of middle-class resistance. She was the hostess. She should serve coffee in her sitting room. Women huddling cosily in the kitchen had overtones of northern soap operas. Which reminded her, she never had found out where her neighbour came from. In fact, given how close at times they had been, she knew remarkably little about Jude’s past.

  Carole switched on an electric kettle. She had decided it was now warm enough to turn the Aga off for the summer. It wasn’t, quite, and the kitchen felt chill, a deserved reflection of Carole’s mood. Gulliver, her Labrador, rose from his stupor in front of the regrettably cold stove to greet their guest with bleary delight. Whatever may have happened to the mistress, the dog hadn’t lost his social graces.

  Gulliver had a bandage round the thick end of his tail, but Jude knew this wasn’t the moment to enquire what had happened to him. There was another, more demanding, priority.

  ‘I know it’s because of Ted,’ she announced. ‘That didn’t work out, and you feel really low as a result. We’ve all been there.’

  ‘I haven’t been there as many times maybe as you have.’

  It was a sharp line, which might have offended someone less easy-going. But Jude just gave a warm chuckle. ‘Fair criticism. Carole, I know you think everyone in Fethering’s laughing behind their hands at you, but they’re not. Only about half a dozen people knew there was anything between you and Ted, and none of the ones who did are the sort to gloat over someone else’s misfortune.’

  ‘I just feel I’ve made a fool of myself,’ said Carole, and turned pointedly away to make the coffee.

  But Jude recognized it as a start, the first hint of thaw in the frost.

  ‘I know you don’t commit yourself easily, and I know how much your husband walking out hit your confidence.’

  ‘You don’t know that. We hadn’t even met at the time it happened. Anyway, so far as I’m concerned, I’m well shot of him.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that’s true, but I’m sure his leaving you made you withdrawn, unwilling to engage with other human beings.’

  ‘David said I had always been like that. He said it was one of the reasons why he did leave me.’

  Slowly, the thaw was continuing. Very slowly, but then a quick thaw was not in Carole’s nature. With an easy laugh, Jude took her coffee cup and sat down at the kitchen table. Gulliver, besotted, nuzzled into the back of her knee.

  For a moment Carole was tempted to insist they take their coffee through to the sitting room, but instead she sat edgily on a chair opposite Jude.

  ‘Ted just wasn’t the right person for you, Carole. God, people spend their whole lives searching for the right person, it’s no surprise the process can take a long time.’

  ‘It’s a process I’ve never completed. David turned out to be a complete disaster. Then Ted . . .’ The pale blue eyes focused on Jude’s brown ones. ‘Has it ever happened to you?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Have you ever found the right person?’

  ‘I’ve thought I have a few times . . .’ Carole wanted more detail, but before she had a chance to put a supplementary question, Jude went on, ‘Ted’s a nice guy. Not an evil bone in his body.’

  ‘I know that, but . . .’

  ‘But?’

  ‘He’s terribly . . . scruffy. He really doesn’t care what he looks like . . . or what kind of conditions he lives in. He doesn’t have any standards. He actually doesn’t seem to notice things like that.’

  ‘Ah.’ Jude pictured Ted Crisp, landlord of Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. He was a large man with straggling hair and beard, whose idea of a fashion statement was a clean sweatshirt. Though his pub was not dirty, it did express a raffish untidiness which Jude found rather comforting, but Carole apparently didn’t.

  Jude looked round the antiseptically gleaming surfaces of the kitchen, and could not even imagine Ted Crisp in such an environment.

  The relationship had always been an unlikely one, a surprise to both participants when it started, and for the two months of its duration. What effect the affair’s ending had had on Ted was hard to estimate. Never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, he remained the same bear-like presence behind the bar of the Crown and Anchor, ready with an endless supply of jokes remembered from his days working the stand-up circuit. Whether he was putting on the brave face of the suffering clown, who could tell?

  The effect on Carole was much more overt, at least to the eyes of her neighbour. It was entirely in character for Carole Seddon, as a civil servant retired from the Home Office, to withdraw into what she thought of as anonymity; though, perversely, such behaviour had the effect of drawing attention to what she was doing. Carole had taken to shopping at times when she was unlikely to meet anyone she knew, even avoiding Fethering’s Allinstore and driving in her trim Renault to distant supermarkets. With the light mornings, Gulliver’s compulsory walks on the beach had been getting earlier and earlier.

  At that moment Jude resolved to get Carole functioning properly again. Though the two women were polar opposites, there was potentially a strong affection between them. Jude even made a resolution to get Carole back into the Crown and Anchor.

  But any realization of her ambitions would be a long way ahead. With Carole, she knew, she’d have to proceed with caution and circumspection.

  ‘But you already knew Ted well enough,’ said Jude gently, ‘to know he was scruffy. Or did you fall into that old female error of thinking you can change a man?’

  ‘No, I fell into that even older female error of having a template for what a man should be and trying to fit one into it.’

  ‘Ah.’ Jude shook her head sagely. ‘We’ve all been guilty of that.’ Then, with a toss of the blonde bird’s nest on top of her head, she moved the conversation on. ‘I didn’t just come here, however, to commiserate with you about the end of your affair . . .’

  Even in her current mood, Carole couldn’t suppress a little glow from Jude’s use of the word. Although it had ended in disaster, the fact that she was a woman who had had an ‘affair’ seemed to her slightly daring, even rather grown-up. Which, she knew, was a ridiculous thought to be entertained by a woman in her fifties.

  ‘I came because last night I saw a dead body.’

  Jude didn’t get the reaction she’d been hoping for. On two previous occasions she and Carole had got caught up in solving murders and their enthusiasm for the challenge had been mutually infectious. This time all she got was a glassy stare from the pale eyes.

  ‘What, was this a road accident or something?’

  ‘No, Carole. The dead body had been hidden in the cellar of a friend’s house. It must have been a murder.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Carole, doggedly contrary. ‘Could have been an accident.’

  ‘I think it’s quite difficult to have an accident in the course of which both your arms and legs get cut off.’

  Carole was silent, unequipped with a riposte to this argument. Then she said lightly, as if nothing in the world could have mattered less to her, ‘Well, I’m sure the police will sort it out.’

  ‘I’m sure they will, but you can’t deny it’s intriguing, can you?’

 
; Carole shrugged, and reached down to ruffle Gulliver’s ears. Her body language was trying to say, Yes, I can see it might be mildly intriguing to some people – not to me, though. But Jude was heartened to see a new alertness in her neighbour’s eyes.

  This was confirmed when, for the first time that morning, Carole – albeit grudgingly – asked for further information. ‘Where did you see this body then?’

  ‘In a house in Fedborough.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was a wealth of nuance in the monosyllable. At one level it said, Oh yes, well, that’s what you’d expect from people in Fedborough. At another level it said, If the body’s in Fedborough, then that’s none of our business. And, encapsulated in ‘Oh’ too, was the conviction that, though only eight miles up the River Fether from Fethering, Fedborough was another – and undoubtedly alien – country.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew any people in Fedborough.’ There was almost a hint of affront in Carole’s voice. She was constantly reminded how little she really knew about Jude’s life and background. But the longer their friendship continued, the more difficult became asking the basic questions that should have been settled on first introduction.

  ‘Not many. These are some not-very-close acquaintances who’ve just moved down from London.’ This reply seemed subtly to reassure Carole, so Jude, still working to thaw the frostiness, went on with humility, ‘You know a lot of people up there, though, don’t you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say a lot. And none of them are that close.’

  ‘No, but you said you’ve often been to see shows and concerts in the Fedborough Festival.’

  ‘I may have done in the past.’ The implication was that Carole never intended to have any kind of social life, ever again. Then she softened. ‘But yes, I do know some people up there. Very full of themselves, the residents of Fedborough, I must say. Just because they live in a town that’s very beautiful and has a certain amount of history attached to it, they seem to imagine that makes them superior to everyone else.’

  ‘Lots of people think like that about where they live. Good thing too, saves a great deal of disappointment and envy.’ Jude giggled. ‘Mind you, I can’t imagine many people feel that way about Fethering.’