Death and the Decorator

THIRTEEN

‘Is that Carole? I’m afraid I don’t know your surname.’

‘Seddon. Carole Seddon. Mrs Carole Seddon. Who is this?’

‘My name’s Fred Givens.’

‘Ah.’ This was promising. The fact that he was ringing her was surely promising from the point of view of their investigation.

‘Yesterday my wife Lauren held a Pottery Open Day at our house.’

‘Yes, I saw a flyer for it.’ Carole didn’t want to volunteer any more. Wait and see where he would take the conversation.

Fred Givens took it in the direction she had been afraid he would. ‘Did you come to our house yesterday, Mrs Seddon?’

She couldn’t tell an outright lie, but maybe it was time to ration the amount of truth. ‘Yes, I did come with a friend. But there didn’t seem to be anyone there, so we went away again.’

‘You didn’t come into the house?’

‘Er … Well …’

‘Mrs Seddon, I went into the studio and I saw you and your friend going out through the curtain.’

‘Yes. When we saw there was no one in the studio, we turned round and—’

‘Mrs Seddon, while you were in the studio, my wife and I were having a conversation in the kitchen.’

‘Were you?’ asked Carole innocently.

‘And I’d like to know how much you and your nosy friend heard.’

It was hardly surprising that he didn’t want to meet in a public place like the Crown and Anchor or Fethering Yacht Club. His own house was ruled out because Lauren was there. Pete was still finishing up in Woodside Cottage and the place smelled of paint. But, anyway, Carole would have insisted that their meeting took place at High Tor. Hypersensitive to the smallest imagined slight, she wanted to assert her role in their investigation. Fred Givens had contacted her, after all.

He got the full sitting-room treatment, with coffee things and biscuits on a tray. His manner still reflected a lifetime of urbanity, but small details suggested something had shaken him out of his customary serenity. The conversation Carole and Jude had so serendipitously overheard can’t have been the first time he’d heard of his wife’s infidelity, but they got the impression the shock had been relatively recent. The effects showed in the sheen of sweat on his forehead and the tremor in his hand as he picked up his coffee cup.

He and Carole had established on the phone how much information she and Jude had, but he wanted to run through the details to make sure he’d got it right.

‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘this is not the kind of news that I want all round Fethering. So can I rely on your discretion?’ There was a note of pleading in the question.

‘Of course,’ said Carole and Jude together. But their eyes met, exchanging the thought that, though they wouldn’t deliberately spread the scandal, if it was useful in the furtherance of their investigation, that situation might change.

‘You haven’t discussed what you heard with anyone else?’

Both could honestly answer no to that.

‘Well, please don’t.’

They both again affirmed that they wouldn’t.

‘But it is amazing,’ Carole observed, ‘that your wife and Glen Porter could be having an affair without anyone knowing – in a place like Fethering.’

‘It seems they were very discreet.’ Fred Givens brushed the back of his hand against his sweating brow. ‘I’m sorry, I get no pleasure from having to go through these sordid details. Glen, it seems, spends more of his time abroad than he does in the village, so their relationship didn’t have the kind of continuity that might have drawn attention to it. They never went out anywhere, so the local snoopers wouldn’t have seen them together in a restaurant or pub. She used to go to meet him in the beach hut, after dark. And only during the week, of course. Because I’d be here at the weekends, duped into imagining that I was happily married.’ The bitterness in his words was painful.

‘I used to enjoy my weekends. I thought I still was enjoying them, though, when I come to think about it, there were signs that Lauren was drifting away from me. We used to sail together, both members of the yacht club. She would crew for me, but recently she’d lost interest, only went to the club on sufferance. I suppose I should have recognized that as a symptom, a sign that she had developed another interest … like Glen Bloody Porter!

‘It was my starting to work from home more that put a damper on their cosy little relationship. Difficult for Lauren to explain to me why she suddenly had to slip out in the middle of a cosy domestic evening.’ Emotion suddenly seized him. ‘God, I can’t imagine why I ever trusted her!’

‘I understand it must be very difficult for you,’ said Jude gently, ‘but can I ask whether Lauren had ever had other affairs?’ Her knowledge of human behaviour told her that infidelity could all too easily become a habit.

‘I would have said no,’ Fred replied sourly. ‘I would have said no a hundred times! In fact, I never even asked myself the question. But Lauren and I have talked a lot over the last few days. And all kinds of unpleasant things have crawled out of the woodwork.’

‘So, Glen wasn’t the first?’ asked Carole.

‘No.’

Jude asked suddenly, ‘Did she once have a thing going on with Harry Lasalle?’

Her neighbour’s expression mixed surprise with envy. ‘Extrasensory powers’ were part of the mumbo-jumbo that Carole didn’t believe in, but she had to admit sometimes to being astonished by Jude’s intuition.

‘How did you know that?’ Fred Givens looked horror-struck. ‘Does everyone in Fethering know?’

‘No, of course not. It’s just that, in the conversation we overheard, you mentioned Harry Lasalle had talked about your wife’s relationship with Glen Porter. I thought his motivation might have been jealousy, you know, the ageing former lover being supplanted by the younger model.’

‘Maybe.’ He didn’t sound convinced. ‘And you’re sure you’ve never heard people in Fethering talking about Lauren and Harry Lasalle?’

‘Sure.’

‘It might have been a while ago.’

‘I’ve never heard their names mentioned in the same sentence,’ said Jude.

‘Nor have I,’ Carole confirmed.

Fred Givens looked momentarily relieved by their responses. But his suspicion and self-laceration would not leave him alone. ‘It’s just the thought that everyone might have known, that all of Fethering might have been laughing at me behind their hands. They always say the husband is the last to know. Is there anyone more pathetic than the man who doesn’t know his wife has been constantly cheating on him?’

‘Nobody knew,’ Jude soothed.

‘Harry Lasalle found out about Lauren and Glen Porter. If he could find out about the affair, then so could anyone else.’

‘He probably only found out because he was jealous,’ suggested Jude. ‘Maybe he stalked her. Followed her around to see what she was up to. Nobody else in Fethering would have bothered to do that.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Fred uneasily.

Carole came in, with a harder tone. ‘Of course, the situation has changed now rather, hasn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With Harry Lasalle’s death.’

‘What difference has that made?’ The enquiry sounded innocent. Fred Givens hadn’t caught on to the direction in which Carole’s questions were leading.

She spelled it out. ‘With Harry knowing about their affair, and the constant threat of him sharing the information with someone else, there could be a view that Glen Porter – or indeed your wife – might have wanted to keep him quiet.’

Still, Fred didn’t cotton on. ‘“Keep him quiet”? How?’

‘By killing him,’ said Carole coolly.

‘“Killing him”?’ He was locked in echo mode. ‘You mean – murder him?’

‘There would be a logic to it,’ said Carole.

‘“Murder”? The general view in Fethering seems to be that he committed suicide.’

‘Fethering’s “general view” doesn’t have a great track record for accuracy.’

‘No, but …’

‘Of course, if Harry was murdered,’ Jude joined in, ‘some people might reckon you would have had a motive too.’

‘Really? What?’ Fred appeared still to be lost in their speculations.

‘Revenge on Harry? Once you discovered that he’d had an affair with your wife?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! And how, in your scenario, would Harry have been murdered?’

‘The perpetrator,’ said Carole, ‘would have been someone who knew about boats.’

‘And the fact that I’m a member of Fethering Yacht Club puts me in the frame, does it?’ Fred asked sarcastically.

‘You asked how Harry could have been murdered,’ Carole reprimanded him primly, ‘and I am spelling out how it could have happened.’

‘All right. Go on.’

‘The perpetrator,’ she continued, ‘would have known Harry’s habits, where he usually anchored Harry’s Dream when he went out fishing. They would have gone out there in their own boat, boarded his and sabotaged the heater to start the carbon monoxide leak …’

‘Anyone who did that would be a pretty stupid murderer,’ said Fred Givens with some force.

‘Why?’ asked Carole, a little miffed at having her reconstruction interrupted.

‘Because, if killing Harry by carbon monoxide poisoning was their plan, that would have been a very elaborate way of doing it.’

‘Oh? So, how else could they have done it?’

‘The simplest way,’ said Fred, talking patiently as if to a child, ‘would have been to organize the sabotage before the boat got on to the water.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Like the majority of yacht club boats, Harry’s Dream spends most of its time on the hardstanding at the front. It sits there on its trailer with its cover on. When the owner fancies a sail, they wheel the boat down to the slipway until it floats off the trailer. Any murderer worth his salt would have sabotaged the heater while the boat was still on land.’

Carole looked crestfallen. ‘Ah yes. I suppose they would.’

But she caught a sparkle in Jude’s eye and realized the implication of what Fred had just told them. If the boobytrap on Harry’s Dream had been set up on land, it didn’t have to have been done by a boat-owner. Their range of suspects had opened out considerably. It could have been anyone with a basic knowledge of the workings of Fethering Yacht Club.

Jude couldn’t dispel from her mind the recollection that Lauren Givens used to crew for her husband.

She also realized – and she could see from Carole’s expression that her neighbour was realizing it too – that any suspicion they might have entertained about Fred Givens being involved in Harry Lasalle’s death was trickling away fast. To use his expression, no ‘murderer worth his salt’ would have volunteered so readily how he might have committed the crime.

Unless, of course, his openness was part of an elaborate double bluff. But neither woman thought the stolid and unimaginative Fred Givens was capable of a double bluff.

This talk of murder had briefly diverted him from his main preoccupation, the state of his marriage, but he was soon brought back to it. ‘I just can’t see any future for me and Lauren,’ he said despairingly. ‘Knowing what I now know, we can never get back to the kind of life we had before.’

‘Adultery needn’t always spell the end of a marriage,’ said Jude reassuringly. Well, you’d know about such things, thought Carole. ‘Sometimes, it can get a couple talking about aspects of their relationship they never have before. It can even strengthen the marriage.’

‘Huh,’ said Fred contemptuously. ‘I don’t see that happening with Lauren and me. Now, when I try to start a conversation with her, all she wants to talk about is bloody Glen Porter.’

‘Ah,’ said Jude. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s like she’s been wanting to talk about him to me since the relationship began …’

‘Do you know how long ago that was?’ asked Carole.

‘Four years! Four bloody years I’ve been walking around in blissful ignorance, thinking I’d got a happy marriage, and all the time …’ The pain and anger were too strong for him to finish the sentence.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jude again, feeling that the word was as useless as it had been the time before.

Fred Givens took a sip of now-cold coffee, which seemed to calm him down a little. ‘Anyway, now I know about the … affair, now there’s no need for her to keep secret about it, the floodgates have really opened. Lauren’s bombarding me with unwanted information about Glen Porter. As if I was interested in the details of their pillow talk …

‘Why should I want to know what a generous person he is, how he’s set up all these charitable institutions abroad and that’s where most of his money goes? I don’t give a damn about any of that. The only thing that concerns me about Glen Bloody Porter – and I use the word “concerns” rather than “interests” advisedly – is that he’s been having an affair with my wife for the last four years. That’s the piece of information about him that I wish I didn’t know.’

‘You’d rather you’d never found out about the affair?’ asked Jude.

‘I’d rather … I don’t know! All I do know is that, now I have found out about it, the rest of my life is completely ruined.’

‘I was interested,’ said Carole, ‘in what you said about Glen Porter’s generosity. Round Fethering, if he has any reputation, it’s for being selfish and tight-fisted. Everyone knows how wealthy he is, but people I know connected with local charities have tried to get donations from him and drawn a blank every time.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Fred. ‘But Lauren doesn’t want to talk about anything else. It’s galling enough for a man to know he’s been cheated on. Being told how much better a person his replacement is only rubs salt in the wound.’

Jude was intrigued. ‘That is a new light on Glen Porter, though. Setting up charitable institutions abroad? I suppose not everyone believes that charity should begin at home.’

‘I don’t care what he believes,’ said Fred petulantly. ‘I just never want to hear his name again! Which, since he seems to be her only topic of conversation, I suppose means never seeing Lauren again.’

‘Is that what you want?’ asked Jude gently.

He lowered his head into his hands and raked his fingers down his forehead. ‘I don’t know what I want. I’m still in shock, I suppose.’

‘Do you hate Lauren for what she’s done?’ Jude’s gentle tone was maintained.

‘I can’t answer that. Ever since we got married, I kind of assumed that I loved her. Not something I thought about much – perhaps, in retrospect, something I should have thought about more – but if anyone had asked me – and fortunately I don’t know many people who’d ask that kind of question – I’d say yes, I loved Lauren. It’s hard to unpick all that in a couple of weeks.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Carole, with surprising empathy. She remembered how long it had taken her to convince herself that her marriage to David was going nowhere.

‘So now,’ Fred went on, ‘I don’t know where I am. I daren’t ask Lauren if she wants to move out and shack up with lover boy. I suppose I’m afraid of the answer … though, equally, I don’t know if that’s an outcome that he would relish.’ He sighed wearily. ‘I’m just totally confused.’

‘Lauren hasn’t mentioned moving in with him?’ asked Carole.

‘God, she’s mentioned so many things, I can hardly tell. But no, I have no recollection of her talking about moving in with him. She just goes on about how caring he is, how much more open he is than I am.’

‘“Open”?’

‘Yes. Apparently, among my many faults, I’m too … “buttoned-up” … that was the expression Lauren used. I’ve never talked to her about my feelings, never asked her about her feelings. Now she tells me. Though it seems she thought that, even before we got married. She hoped that I’d become more communicative with the passage of the years, though apparently that hasn’t happened. Another black mark to me, in comparison with the new paragon, whose name I don’t want to sully my lips with.

‘He’s sensitive. He’s caring. He asks Lauren what she’s feeling all the time. If I’d known that was what she’d wanted, if she’d ever told me that was what she wanted … well, maybe I could have offered it. I could have met her halfway, at least. But she never said anything.’

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘I think the fact that we found we couldn’t have children is at the back of it all.’

There was a long history of pain in his words, but not something to be followed up at that moment.

‘It’s strange,’ Carole mused, ‘given the reputation that Glen Porter has round the village, that he turns out to be this caring paragon of masculine sensitivity.’

Fred grimaced. ‘Well, according to Lauren, that’s what he is. He shares all his secrets with her.’

‘I’m sure he doesn’t,’ said Jude.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, at least in his wild youth, it seems that most of Glen’s secrets concerned other women. He had a reputation as a proper Jack-the-Lad, working his way through the young females of Fethering. I wouldn’t think those were the kind of secrets that he would want to share with a new lover.’

‘According to Lauren,’ said Fred, ‘he did. He talked about all of the women in his past, only to make the point how much more he loved her than any of them.’

Jude could imagine that was the kind of thing a man might say to a new lover. It had been said to her on more than one occasion. And she knew it to be duplicitous nonsense, just an ingratiating masculine ploy to get more sex. But she didn’t say anything.

Carole suddenly saw an opening for another part of their investigation. ‘Did Glen Porter tell Lauren whether he’d ever had sex with Anita Garner?’

‘He did talk about her, yes. And, according to him, they never did.’

‘Have sex?’

‘No.’

‘Oh?’

‘But he did tell Lauren that he knew what had happened to Anita Garner.’