Death and the Decorator

ELEVEN

Seeing the decorator’s van outside Woodside Cottage, as soon as she got back to High Tor Carole phoned her neighbour and asked her round for a cup of coffee.

They quickly brought each other up to date. Jude could not suppress a level of shock at the fact that Pete seemed to have lied to her. An uncomfortable feeling about him had been building up for a while, and now she seemed to have confirmation of her worst fears.

Jude also realized that she hadn’t seen Carole since her visit to Glen Porter’s beach hut and gave her the edited highlights of that encounter.

‘And you’re sure he and Lauren Givens are having an affair?’

‘There are certain unmistakable signs.’

‘Oh well, of course,’ said Carole sniffily, ‘you’d know more about that than I would.’ Jude was far too canny to rise to the implied insult, so her neighbour went on, ‘Of course, people having affairs are taking big risks.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Exposing themselves to danger.’

‘Still not with you.’

‘Well, it’s obvious. Someone who’s having an affair wants to keep it secret.’

Jude could actually think of quite a few acquaintances who wanted to shout about their affairs from the rooftops, but she didn’t take issue. She knew it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Just wait and see where her neighbour was going with this.

‘So,’ Carole continued her logic through, ‘people having affairs put themselves at risk of exposure.’

‘Blackmail?’

‘Possibly even that. But news of an affair reaching the betrayed spouse can have pretty devastating effects too.’

‘What are you saying, Carole?’

‘I am saying that if, as you insist – on, it has to be said, very little evidence – that Glen Porter and Lauren Givens are having an affair, they might be prepared to go to great lengths to keep it a secret.’

‘All right. I’ll go along with that. So …?’

‘You know Lauren …’

‘Not very well.’

‘Have you seen anyone threatening her?’

‘Carole, I hardly know the woman. Where would I have seen anyone threatening her?’

But even as she said the words, a little scene she had observed came back to Jude. Fethering Yacht Club, Harry Lasalle on his way out, being accosted by Lauren Givens. Her asking him for something. Him turning her down and leaving the bar.

It could have meant anything. It could have meant nothing. On the other hand, that Saturday had turned out to be the last day of Harry Lasalle’s life. Surely, anything that happens to someone on the last day of their life takes on a special relevance?

‘It might be interesting to talk to her,’ Jude conceded.

‘And we have the perfect opportunity to do just that,’ said Carole triumphantly. ‘The timing is perfect. Today is Wednesday.’

She brandished a flyer picked up off the kitchen table.

‘Fancy going to a Pottery Open Day?’

Neither Carole nor Jude would claim to be an aficionado when it came to ceramic toadstools. Jude had never felt the lack of one in her life and Carole was of the view that they were common, the interior décor version of garden gnomes. And ‘common’ was one of the worst words in Carole Seddon’s lexicon.

Neither of them had been to the Givens’s house before but, like most places in the village, it was within walking distance. In De Vere Road, an upmarket address in Fethering. All of the houses there had at least five bedrooms and substantial gardens. The owners thought De Vere Road was the best place to live in the village – or possibly the world. In this opinion, they were constantly challenged by people who lived on the Shorelands Estate, who were of the view that their seaside location gave them the edge. Basically, the issue was one of money. Residents of the one location were desperate to assert that they had more money than residents of the other location. That was how life worked at the upmarket end of Fethering.

There was a neatly printed notice attached to the gatepost, which read: ‘POTTERY OPEN DAY’. An arrow directed visitors towards the ‘STUDIO’, a kind of conservatory attached to the side of the main building. It had a separate entrance which was crested by another printed notice, again reading: ‘STUDIO’. In spite of the cold weather, the door to this was open, though a thick red velvet curtain was hung across the inside as a draught excluder.

There was no bell or knocker in evidence, so Carole and Jude pushed their way through. The studio was very tidy and well-appointed. No expense had been spared. The kiln and other equipment looked to be new and state-of-the-art. The interior was highly heated and the condensation on the inside of the windows gave the feeling of a greenhouse.

But there were no plants on display. Nor were there any other people inside inspecting what was on offer. The idea of a Pottery Open Day in a village like Fethering might be just about viable in the summer. A few punters, day-trippers and holidaymakers might amble in then. But in a particularly cold February? There weren’t that many art-lovers in Fethering. If you excluded those who didn’t regard ceramic toadstools as up there with Leonardo and Michelangelo, there were even fewer. And the number of those who fancied going out on a cold Wednesday morning … No surprise, really, that Lauren Givens wasn’t fighting off the crowds.

Not only was the studio empty of other visitors, it was also empty of the artist, or craftswoman, or ceramicist, whose artefacts were on display. Small notices on the shelves not only indicated which area of the ceramic toadstool world each section represented, but also their prices.

Carole and Jude moved silently along, scanning the exhibits. The former was appalled by what was on offer. She felt sure that, for some people, ceramic toadstools were … a word she even winced to think of … ‘collectibles’. But, for her, the difference between a Red Polka Dot ceramic toadstool and a Magic Fairy ceramic toadstool was not of importance in the Great Scheme of Things.

She did, however, see one selection that made her nudge Jude and point. The sign read: ‘TINKLING TOADSTOOLS’. These were tall, with pointy ends like partially opened umbrellas, painted, like all the other artefacts, in garishly bright colours. And, presumably, if touched, they would tinkle.

Carole was about to put this function to the test, when Jude’s hand on her arm stopped her. A voice could be heard coming through the open door to the kitchen in the main house.

It was Fred Givens. There was a note of irritation as he asked, ‘Lauren, have you checked if there’s anyone out there?’

‘Of course I haven’t!’ There was more than a note of irritation in her reply. ‘There’s no point in looking every five minutes, when the chances are nobody’s going to come all bloody day!’

‘People will come. That is, they will if you got enough flyers out there. It was a bloody good flyer. I got one of my top designers to do it. The trouble is, Lauren, you have no understanding of the basic principles of marketing.’

‘Fred, will you get off my case! I know enough about marketing to know how many of my ceramic toadstools I can sell. I go back to the same gift shops every quarter and they order more or less exactly the same number of items. And that works for me.’

‘Yes, but a business shouldn’t be static. It needs to keep expanding. It’s like that Woody Allen line about relationships. “A relationship’s like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies.” Businesses are like that, too.’

‘Not just businesses,’ Lauren muttered.

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘I mean, Fred, it’s a while since our relationship moved forward, wouldn’t you say?’

‘No. We’ve been fine for—’

‘Not true, Fred. We haven’t been fine for years. And all this time you’ve been “working from home”, it’s got less fine by the minute.’

‘I thought you liked having me around.’ He sounded aggrieved and a little pathetic.

‘I don’t like having you constantly around. Interfering all the time.’

‘Interfering?’

‘Yes, like this bloody Pottery Open Day. I never wanted a Pottery Open Day. And it’s now pretty damn clear that nobody in Fethering wants a Pottery Open Day either. But you kept bloody insisting I should do it.’

‘Lauren … darling … I’m trying to help you. As you’ve just admitted, you have no experience of marketing. I’ve spent an entire career in the business. And I’m just sharing some of my skills with you. Most wives would be delighted to have their husband putting a gentle hand on the tiller of their business.’

‘Well then, I am clearly not “most wives”! I don’t want “a gentle hand on the tiller of my business”! I want you to mind your own bloody business!’

‘Lauren,’ said Fred, ‘that’s very hurtful.’

‘So? Maybe I want to bloody hurt you.’

‘But why would you want to do that?’

‘God, you’re so dense sometimes!’

There was a silence. Carole and Jude, who’d been breathlessly quiet during their eavesdropping, exchanged looks. Was Lauren about to come into the studio? Should they make a noise and pretend they’d only just arrived? Or should they sneak out on tiptoe?

‘Lauren …’ Fred began tentatively.

His reward was a testy, ‘What?’

‘Is it true … what Harry Lasalle said?’

‘What did Harry Lasalle say?’

‘Oh, come on, you can’t have forgotten. We discussed it at the time.’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Lauren dismissively.

‘He said that … He was just passing on gossip, but Harry’d heard rumours that you’d been secretly seeing Glen Porter and—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Fred!’

There was a sudden screech of a chair being pushed back on a stone floor. Carole and Jude looked at each other in alarm. But Lauren didn’t come out to the studio. Instead, they heard the slamming of an internal door. She had stormed out of the kitchen into the rest of the house.

Carole and Jude exchanged looks of agreement. Then they tiptoed out into De Vere Road.

Both sharing the same thought: that neither Fred nor Lauren Givens had intended their Pottery Open Day to be quite that open.

There were other shared thoughts going through their minds as they walked back to the High Street.

‘If,’ said Carole meditatively, ‘we were to take the view that Harry Lasalle knew about the supposed affair between Lauren Givens and Glen Porter …’

‘It’s not a “supposed affair”,’ Jude objected. ‘It’s an actual affair.’

‘We have no proof of that. You surmised there was something going on …’

‘It’s more than “surmised”, Carole. I know there’s something going on. And, for heaven’s sake – given what we’ve just heard Fred Givens say …’

‘Lauren didn’t allow him the opportunity to say much. She stormed out of the room.’

‘Yes, but it was clear that they’d talked about the subject before.’

‘Maybe,’ said Carole. ‘All right, let’s say for a moment that what you’re suggesting is true.’

‘It is!’ Jude protested.

‘If it is, then, going back to what I was saying earlier about the security risk involved in having affairs …’

‘Yes,’ said Jude patiently.

‘… and if Harry Lasalle knew what was going on and threatened to spill the beans …’

‘Which I’m pretty sure he did.’ Jude told Carole about the scene she’d witnessed between Harry and Lauren at Fethering Yacht Club. ‘Suppose he’d threatened to make what he knew about the affair public and Lauren had been trying to persuade him not to …’

‘If that were true,’ said Carole, ‘then we have a whole new range of motivations for people to want him dead.’

‘Assuming he didn’t kill himself.’

‘Do you honestly think he did?’

‘I really don’t know.’ Jude grimaced. ‘What I do know, though, is that both his mother and son are convinced he did.’

‘Or possibly,’ suggested Carole, ‘they, for reasons of their own, want everyone else to be convinced he did.’

‘You could be right.’

‘So, where do we go next with our investigation? We’re still working on the assumption that the two crimes – Anita Garner’s disappearance and Harry Lasalle’s death – are connected?’

‘Yes, we are,’ said Jude doggedly.

‘So, I say again, what do we do next? What lead do we follow up?’

Jude’s face took on a look of determination. ‘I’d like to find out, one way or the other, whether there’s any justification for being suspicious of Pete.’

Coffee back at High Tor. Jude didn’t want to face the decorator again until she’d sorted a few details out in her mind.

Carole supplied the drinks and they sat in the kitchen. From in front of the Aga, Gulliver’s snores rumbled peaceably in the background.

‘I don’t want to harp on about adultery,’ said Carole, ‘but if Harry Lasalle did know about what was going on between Lauren Givens and Glen Porter …’

‘Yes,’ Jude completed, ‘that might, in some rather far-fetched scenario, give either of them a motive to kill him.’

‘Not that” far-fetched”. Adultery,’ Carole insisted, with the confidence of someone who’d had no experience of it, ‘can stir strong emotions.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ agreed Jude, who did have some experience of it, from both sides of the blanket, as wife and mistress. ‘But at the moment, I’m more interested in Pete.’

‘In connection with what?’ asked Carole. ‘Anita Garner’s disappearance? Or Harry Lasalle’s death?’

‘Either. Or both,’ Jude replied vaguely. There was some relevant detail somewhere in the depths of her mind which she was having difficulty bringing to the surface.

‘Well,’ said Carole logically, ‘why don’t you analyse the basis for your suspicion of Pete, the Paragon of Fethering?’

‘It’s things other people have said. There is clearly bad blood between him and Veronica Lasalle. He couldn’t stand being in the same room as her. And she described him as “a right little troublemaker”. Not the image most people in Fethering have of him.’

‘No, but Veronica has just lost her husband. She must be in a state of shock. Maybe she wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘Hm.’ The reference to Pete’s image reminded Jude of Roland Lasalle’s words: ‘Pete’s done worse than skiving.’ She relayed them to Carole.

‘The Lasalle family certainly seem to have it in for him.’

‘But Harry was perfectly friendly last Saturday at the yacht club.’

‘Yes. I’ve no idea what’s going on there.’ Carole looked thoughtful. ‘And then, of course, there’s what Brenton Wilkinson told me … about Pete thinking Anita was “a bit of all right”.’

‘Mm. That worried me when you told me. Mind you, it was a long time ago. He was only a boy. And there’s a long history of young men fancying young women. No, the thing that worries me most is Pete actually lying to me.’

‘About the rooms he was painting at Footscrow House when Anita Garner disappeared?’

‘Exactly. Pete told me he was working downstairs, but you say Brenton Wilkinson said he was working upstairs.’

‘He was very firm about that.’

‘And also, Pete swore blind he’d never before been in the room where we found Anita Garner’s handbag.’

Carole’s lips pursed with suspicion.

‘But, Carole, why would Pete lie?’

‘Hiding something?’

‘Yes, that’s the usual explanation, isn’t it? To put me off the scent. But what scent?’

‘Also,’ Carole continued deploying her logic, ‘if Pete knew that Anita Garner’s handbag was hidden behind that panel, why on earth would he open it up with you there as a witness?’

Jude shook her head. She had no answer to that question either. And she wasn’t enjoying being suspicious of Pete.

With a positive effort, she redirected her thoughts. Glen Porter … There was something Glen Porter had said when she saw him at his beach hut dacha. What was it? Was that the elusive memory that was nagging at her?

‘I was just thinking,’ she said, piecing it together, ‘I told you what Glen Porter said when I went to see him …’

‘Yes.’

‘He was talking about you and me “digging into things” which didn’t concern us.’

‘Huh.’ Carole Seddon’s Home Office soul was offended. ‘We’re only behaving in the way any public-spirited person should behave.’

Jude wasn’t entirely convinced by that, but she let it go. ‘And Glen said that our investigations were likely to cause pain to someone … to some woman.’

‘If wrongdoing has occurred,’ Carole insisted stoutly, ‘then inevitably revealing it is going to cause pain to someone.’

‘Maybe. Anyway, when he was talking, I thought it was about Anita Garner … that she – or more likely her surviving friends and relations – might be hurt by having the whole story dug up again …’

‘Mm?’

‘But now, given what we know about Glen and Lauren, I wonder if it was her he was worrying about getting hurt.’

‘Which would mean, Jude, that he thought we already knew about the affair …’

‘Yes.’

‘Which we certainly didn’t at that point.’

‘No.’

‘So,’ said Carole slowly, ‘where would he have got that idea from?’

‘Guilty conscience?’

‘Glen’s certainly feeling guilty about something.’ Jude rubbed her chin thoughtfully. ‘I wonder what it is …?’

Jude felt awkward about being faced with Pete when she got back to Woodside Cottage, but she needn’t have worried. There was a note propped up on the mantelpiece of her sitting room. ‘HAD TO LEAVE THE GLOSS TO DRY. A BIT OF TIDYING-UP NEXT TWO DAYS, THEN WE’LL BE DONE. ALL THE BEST, PETE’.

He’d said he’d finish within the week. And the next day was Thursday. Pete was being true to his word. If only she could be certain he was true to his word in all areas of his life.