Death and the Decorator

TEN

Guilt? Did Jude feel any guilt now? She had, after all, virtually been accused of murder.

But, for some reason, she didn’t feel guilty. She tried to analyse why.

And decided that it was because she’d got such a clear impression of Veronica Lasalle having an agenda. Jude knew that bereavement affected people in different ways but she still found the woman’s behaviour odd. Three days after hearing of the death of her husband of … what … forty years …? Given Roland’s age, it might well be nearer fifty … Three days after hearing the devastating news of his death, Jude could believe the new widow might be full of anger and looking for someone to blame for the tragedy. Marching round to confront and bawl out the person she thought responsible did make a kind of sense.

But there were inconsistencies in how she’d behaved. For a start, though Veronica had demonstrated anger, she had not shown any signs of grief. Her main agenda seemed to have been to persuade Jude that Harry’s death had been suicide. And that the reason why he had taken his own life was because of the return of long-buried allegations about his having had a sexual relationship with Anita Garner.

It could have been true. Veronica Lasalle was certainly determined that that explanation should be the accepted one.

Or had she been acting in that way simply to stop any other explanation being considered?

Jude didn’t have long to mull over these thoughts because Pete soon returned. In fact, he returned so soon after Veronica’s departure that he could have been waiting outside to watch her leave. What’s more, his excuse about having to go to the trade counter didn’t stack up. He had returned without any new paint.

Jude did not pass any comment on this. She just made him another cup of coffee (white with one sugar). But, as she handed it across, Pete raised the subject himself.

‘Sorry I had to leave. Veronica and me, we don’t get on. Never have done.’

‘Oh. Any reason?’

‘Goes back a long way. She’s a suspicious cow. Worked with Harry from way back, did all the paperwork when it was just plain “Lasalle Builders”, long before it became “Lasalle Build and Design”. And she always thought everyone was trying to rip them off.’

‘Everyone including you?’

The decorator nodded. ‘I was working for Brenton Wilkinson back then. Harry subcontracted him to do some decorating work on Footscrow House. And all the time we was there, Veronica kept her beady eyes on us, seeing we wasn’t skiving.’

‘Which, I can safely assume, you weren’t?’

‘No way. Well, I got rather sick of having her constantly on my case, so I played a trick on her. Something old Veronica has never forgiven me for.’

‘“Trick”? What did you do?’

‘Like I said, she constantly thought people were trying to get one over on her and, with the decorating, she thought we might be skimping the number of coats of paint we done. There are, I’m afraid, some chancers in the trade who do do that. You know, like, say in the care home bedrooms, the deal was we’d strip down the paintwork, windows and what-have-you, prime where necessary and put on two coats of gloss.

‘Veronica, the suspicious cow, thought I was trying to get away with just doing the one and she’d try to catch me out. Overnight, when I’d left the first coat to dry, she’d sneak round with a pin and put a row of pinpricks in the paint … underside of a windowsill, somewhere like that, where nobody’s likely to look, sort of place a skiving decorator might think they could get away with it. And then bloody Veronica’d check the next day to see her pinpricks had been covered by the second coat before she’d sign off on the job.

‘Well, I don’t like being distrusted – I suppose nobody does, really – so I hatched a little plan to catch her out. After she’s checked her pinpricks was covered and signed the job off, I go back in the room with a pin of my own and put the holes back, through the second coat, exactly where they had been. Kept doing it. Drove Veronica bloody mad. Starts worrying whether she can believe the evidence of her own eyes.

‘Mind you, pretty soon she works out it’s me who’s behind it. And I’m afraid, with someone like Veronica Lasalle, these things go deep. Our relationship – if we ever had one – hasn’t been that harmonious ever since.’

‘Yes, she was bad-mouthing you just now.’

‘Was she? There’s a surprise.’

‘Which is unusual.’

‘What?’

‘Nobody in Fethering has a bad word to say about Pete the decorator.’

That prompted a reappearance of the toothy grin. ‘Nice of you to say so.’

‘When you were doing that job, Pete, you know, changing the care home into a boutique hotel, did you paint any of the bedrooms?’

‘I don’t think so. And it’s so long ago, I can’t remember what I did. So far as I recall, though, on that refurbishment most of the stuff I done was downstairs.’

‘So, you hadn’t been in that bedroom before, the one where we found the handbag?’

He shook his head. ‘First time, that day we found it.’

‘Are you Jude?’

She had just left the house, going to visit one of her regular clients who was virtually immobile but still managing to live on her own. Turning at the question, she saw it had come from Roland Lasalle. Except for his father’s jutting lower jaw and underbite, his looks came more from his mother. He had her short stature and harsh features. His copper-beech-coloured hair was firmly slicked down with a clinically straight parting. He was wearing a dark mohair overcoat, the polish on his black shoes was lustrous, and he had just stepped out of an electric BMW. He must have been coming to Woodside Cottage to see her.

‘Yes,’ Jude acknowledged her name.

‘My name’s Roland Lasalle.’ Of course, she knew that, but then again they hadn’t had a proper Fethering introduction and, based in London, he might well not have registered seeing her before.

‘Oh,’ she said, before coming up with the appropriate formula: ‘I was very sorry to hear about your father. I wish you—’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve just been talking to my mother.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘She’s very upset.’

‘I’m not surprised. With your father having just—’

‘Not upset about that.’ Realizing his words might have sounded inappropriate, he backtracked. ‘Well, obviously she is. But more upset about what you’ve been doing.’

‘Oh?’

‘I was in London – that’s where I’m based – and only came back down to Fethering when I heard about my father. So, I didn’t know any of the stuff that’s been going on.’

‘What “stuff” do you mean?’

‘My mother’s only just told me about why people are suddenly talking about Anita Garner again.’

‘Right.’

‘That all seemed to have been forgotten – which was a great relief to my father, let me tell you. And then you bring the whole scandal back to life by finding the bloody girl’s handbag!’

Jude was not going to stand for that. ‘You make it sound like I deliberately went looking for the handbag. I just happened to be in the room when it was found.’

‘With Pete the decorator.’

‘Yes. And, in fact, I met you that day – or rather I saw you. You bawled out Pete for skiving.’

‘Did I?’ Roland Lasalle had no interest in their previous encounter. ‘Pete’s done worse than skiving. Don’t know how he got that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth image round Fethering.’

‘I’ve heard no complaints about—’

‘Anyway, Jude’ – he managed to get a sneer into the name – ‘you’ve done enough harm. My mother reckons you’re the reason why my father topped himself. I don’t know enough detail to support that accusation, but I do know that village gossip never did anyone any good. So, in future, will you and your neighbour keep your bloody mouths shut!’

With that, he got back into his electric BMW and slammed the door.

The care home was on the southern outskirts of Fedborough. Had it been the other side of the town, it would have commanded views over the South Downs. As it was, the building looked over the flatness of the coastal plain. The space between it and the English Channel was filled with endless rows of plastic tunnels for the growing of vegetables. But in the icy February drizzle, any outlook would have been dispiriting.

Nor was the interior of the home calculated to raise one’s mood. There are, along the south of England’s ‘Costa Geriatrica’, a wide range of accommodations for the elderly no longer able to look after themselves. Some have all the facilities of five-star hotels (with prices to match). Swimming pools, spas, gourmet cuisine, hairdressers, lectures, theatre visits, tours of National Trust properties, book clubs, bridge tournaments … all of these and more are available at the top end of the market. A first-class shuttle service to the grave.

Down in the local-authority-funded care homes, like the one Brenton Wilkinson was in, the amenities are more Spartan. Stripped-down budgets and shortage of staff meant there wasn’t much spare capacity to do anything beyond the basics of getting the residents out of bed, feeding them and getting them back into bed at the (early) end of the day. The air was flavoured by the competing smells of urine and disinfectant.

In terms of mental stimulation, there was a library of dog-eared books, whose print was too small for most of the inmates to read, some incomplete boxes of board games and decks of cards.

For most, the only entertainment on offer was daytime television, played at far too high a volume in the day room. Most visitors to the residents had to conduct their conversations, however intimate the subject matter might be, against that background.

Malk Penberthy had arranged the visit to Brenton Wilkinson and he accompanied Carole. Seeing the two men together and knowing them to be contemporaries, Carole was struck by how much better the journalist had worn than the decorator. Probably something to do with what Jude had reported from her conversation with Pete, about the physical strains of a whole lifetime of manual labour. The life of the mind brought its own challenges, but not the same bodily stresses.

Brenton Wilkinson was huge, spilling out of the threadbare armchair into which he had been propped. Presumably, during his working life, much of his bulk had been muscle, but spending all day watching stupid people answering stupid quiz questions, and marginally less stupid people trying to make money from auctions, had turned it all to fat. There was no hair visible on his head; his face and hands were blotched with dark brown liver spots. His lips were sucked in. When he opened his mouth not a single tooth was visible.

No teeth maybe, but Brenton Wilkinson appeared to have all his marbles intact. Forewarned of their visitation, he greeted Carole by name before Malk had a chance to introduce them.

It wasn’t the easiest place to conduct any kind of conversation. But the care home had no quieter rooms available, and visitors were only allowed in the bedrooms if the resident was unwell and confined to bed.

To one side of Brenton Wilkinson sat a frail old woman with wispy white hair who kept, every couple of minutes, saying with what sounded like satisfaction, ‘Oh no, he won’t.’

On the other side, an equally frail old woman was knitting a square of green wool. Soon after Carole and Malk’s arrival, she completed the job, then unravelled it, wound up the wool into a ball, cast on and started knitting the square all over again.

‘Carole,’ Malk Penberthy managed to make himself heard over the television hubbub, ‘was interested in the decorating you did back at Footscrow House.’

‘“Footscrow House”?’ The old decorator let out a wheezy, liquid chuckle. ‘“Fiasco House” more likely. That place has a … what’s that thing young people say? A “death kiss” about it?’

‘“A kiss of death” …?’ Carole suggested tentatively, trying not to sound as if she were correcting him.

She needn’t have worried. ‘Yes, “kiss of death”!’ he echoed cheerily. ‘God, the money I made out of Fiasco House over the years … Every time the latest company owning it goes bust, the new one wants it all redecorated. And fortunately, I’ve got a good name round Fethering, so I keep getting recommended and end up doing the job. The number of layers of paint me and my boys have put on that building doesn’t bear thinking of. Footscrow House was my Forth Bridge, you know. I done very nicely out of it.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Carole. ‘I wonder—?’

But before she could ask another, more specific question, Brenton was away again. ‘Coo, hard work it was back then. Today’s decorators don’t know they’re born. It’s all easy for them.’

‘In what way?’ asked Carole, careful not to put the old man off by rushing him.

‘Well, a lot of it’s technology, new inventions and stuff. When I started, way back when, we didn’t have any rollers, for one thing. Done everything with brushes, haven’t we? And all the ladders was made of wood. Heavy to pull those buggers around – pardon my French. Easy with the aluminium ones they’ve got now.

‘And the paint – blimey, the technology’s changed there. Some of it we had to mix up ourselves. Snowcem for exterior masonry … well, that’s still a powder. But the mixing for the colours – we had to do a bit of that when I started out. And working with thinners and driers and I don’t know what else. Lot simpler once they got vinyl into paints. Easy with colours now, too. You just go down your local trade counter and buy your paint all mixed up and ready to go.’

The sentence ended in a bout of coughing. Again, Carole thought she might get in with a question, but Brenton recovered too quickly and continued, ‘Of course, the big change come in the 1970s and 80s – that’s when you get some of the one-coat paints being developed. And then, non-drip comes in then, and all. Blimey, that makes a difference! Yeah, you still need to put sheets over the furniture, and that, but when you’re doing a ceiling, you don’t get your overalls all splattered like you used to.

‘We done ceilings with six-inch brushes in my day. Hamilton Perfection was the best brushes. Still are. Cost more but last longer. Mind you, back then you had to spend a long time cleaning the ceilings before you could start on the painting. Nicotine, particularly if you was doing a pub or somewhere like that. God, it was a messy business. Today’s kids may call themselves decorators, but they don’t know the half of it.’

The chuckle that followed this developed into a more serious spasm of coughing. Clearly, a lifetime of breathing in paint fumes, and who could say what else, hadn’t done much good for the old boy’s respiratory system.

As the coughing subsided, Carole did manage to get a question in. ‘Do you remember when you did the decorating after Harry Lasalle changed Footscrow House from being a care home to a boutique hotel?’

‘Certainly do,’ said Brenton Wilkinson. ‘And I bet I know why you’re asking.’

‘Oh?’

‘Because that was around the time that Anita Garner disappeared, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’

‘Oh yes, I remember that well. The police were very keen to talk to me and my lads about that. Well, they reckoned the fact that we were outsiders made us suspicious. Everyone else in the building had been working there for a while. We’d only just been brought in to do the decorating. And a couple of the lads hadn’t been working for me that long. I didn’t know what they’d done in the past … well, only the bits they chose to tell me. So, we went through quite a lot of questioning.’

But, if Carole thought she was about to get the detail she wanted, she was in for a disappointment, as Brenton Wilkinson went off on another tangent. ‘One of the lads was still doing his apprenticeship. Four days a week working with me, one day in college. We all done apprenticeships back then, that was the way it worked. Mind you, there was no college when I started, just working for a right difficult old bugger – pardon my French. He kept my nose to the grindstone, all right.

‘And when we was apprentices then, we had to drink a pint of milk every day before we started work. It was the lead in the paint, you see. Milk supposed to line your stomach, so’s it didn’t poison you.’ He wheezed. ‘Mind you, I think it was the asbestos in some of the schools we painted that did for me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Carole, leaping in as he paused for another gulp of air. ‘What did the police actually ask you about the—?’

But he hadn’t finished talking about apprenticeships. ‘Do you know what the lads did on their college days? Oh, they had lectures and stuff, but they also each had their little station, a bit of wall with a door in it. They had to wallpaper it, paint the door and the architraves, all the right primers, right number of coats, all that. Minute they’d finished it and had it inspected and marked – tough taskmasters they had then – they have to strip off the wallpaper, remove the paint, sand down the surfaces, get them back to being totally undecorated. Soon as they’ve done that, they have to start again, wallpapering, priming, all the right coats of primer and paint. And they keep doing that one day a week for four years. God knows how many times they did the full sequence. But tell you what – those lads certainly knew how to decorate a doorway!’

The high note on which Brenton finished this speech set off a really serious attack of coughing. What he’d said about asbestos had Carole really worried. She looked around the crowded room for a carer but there was none in sight. She exchanged an anxious look with Malk Penberthy who said, ‘I’ll go and get him a glass of water.’

By the time Malk came back, Brenton Wilkinson’s coughing had subsided into rasping breaths that shuddered through his body. He looked totally exhausted by the spasm. His visitors realized they couldn’t stay much longer. Selfishly, Carole hoped he’d still be able to give her the information she sought.

The old decorator took a long swig of water and was silent for a moment.

‘Oh no, he won’t,’ chuckled the woman beside him, for the umpteenth time. The woman on the other side was once again unravelling her square of green wool.

‘Are you all right to talk?’ asked Carole.

All the huge body seemed to shake as he nodded.

‘I just wondered, when the police talked to you, you know, when they were investigating Anita Garner’s disappearance, what kind of questions did they ask?’

‘Well, it wasn’t me so much they talked to. I wasn’t there on the day she vanished. I was busy down at a school we was repainting. The Footscrow House job was one of ours, right, but it was the lads who was doing the actual decorating there. So, it was mostly them they talked to.’

‘And do you know what kind of things they asked?’

‘Oh, usual kind of stuff. If any of them had taken a shine to Anita. If they’d come on to her. If they’d seen anyone else come on to her. If they’d seen anything suspicious.’

‘Had they?’

‘None of them told if they had. So, eventually, the cops gave up talking to them.’

‘And did any of your lads talk to you about Anita Garner?’

‘Nothing important. She was a nice-looking kid, though. And they was young boys, always got their eyes out for a pretty bit of skirt – oh, I’m probably not allowed to say that now, am I? Not politically correct.’ He put his idea of a precious accent on the last two words.

‘Don’t worry about that. But one of your apprentices did say he fancied Anita?’

‘Well, yes. But it was just, like, you know, banter.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Just he reckoned she was a bit of all right.’

‘And what was his name?’

‘Pete. You probably know him. Everyone in Fethering knows Pete.’

‘Yes, I know him,’ said Carole. ‘Did he reckon a lot of women were “a bit of all right”?’

‘Yeah. Back then. He was just a kid, like I said. Had an eye for the ladies, like most lads that age. Pete’s all settled down with wife and kiddies now. Has been for years.’

‘Hm.’ Carole nodded thoughtfully. ‘And was he there, at Footscrow House, decorating, on the last day Anita Garner was seen?’

‘He would have been, yes. Unless it was a Thursday. That was his college day, stripping down and repainting his blooming doorway.’

‘The last day Anita Garner was seen,’ said Malk Penberthy with great precision, ‘was a Tuesday.’

‘And where in Footscrow House would Pete have been working?’ asked Carole.

‘Upstairs,’ said Brenton Wilkinson. ‘Pete was in charge of doing the bedrooms.’