Death and the Decorator

SIXTEEN

The address in Liverpool was up near the Anglican cathedral. After her early start from Fethering Station, Jude arrived at around two in the afternoon. She thought about stopping for something to eat but rejected the idea. What she had to do was her first priority. There’d be time for food afterwards.

Glen Porter had given her a phone number as well as the address, but Jude felt disinclined to use it. From what he had told her, she got the impression that her quarry was of a nervous disposition, likely to take fright and hide away if she had warning of a stranger’s arrival.

The area looked almost middle class, well-maintained houses with neat, small front gardens. Little was growing there in February, but the care with which the plants were tended suggested that spring would bring a profusion of flowers. Nothing looked opulent, everything looked respectable.

But the shabbier streets Jude walked through as she climbed St James’s Mount, the empty bottles and other detritus she saw on the pavements and in the gutters, suggested a darker side to the area. She got the feeling it might be less welcoming after dark.

The house whose address she had been given was divided into two flats, one on each floor. ‘74A’ was at ground level. With trepidation, Jude pressed the plastic bell push.

It wasn’t an encounter for which she could have done much useful preparation. As so often in her life, she would have to react instinctively to whatever she was presented with.

The door was opened by a woman about her own age. She was dressed in dark blue, shirt, skirt, tights. A grey cardigan against the cold. Shoes so sensible they could have started a Neighbourhood Watch.

Her hair, that fine white which had once been blonde, was swept back into a kind of Alice band. The impression she gave was of being in a kind of uniform, an acolyte of some religious order perhaps.

‘Hello?’ she said. Her voice had the slightest Scouse nasal twang.

‘Mary White?’

‘Yes. And you must be Jude.’

It was a huge relief. Glen Porter had been in touch, warning the woman of her prospective visitor.

‘Come in. I’m sure you could use a cuppa.’

The sitting room was at the front, bare, austere. And chilly. If there was any central heating on, it was turned down low. The furniture was functional, a rather bony three-piece suite. A few dark-bound books on a shelf, no fiction. Nothing on the walls except an anaemic print of St Francis of Assisi.

Mary White brought the tea things through on a tray from the kitchen. Jude was relieved to see there was a plate of digestive biscuits.

Her hostess’s unease showed in the trembling of her hands as she poured the tea into two mugs. They still shook as Mary raised hers to her lips.

‘I’m only seeing you,’ she said, ‘because Glen asked me to. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. He said there was a reason you needed to talk to me …’

A relieved ‘Ah’ from Jude.

‘… but he didn’t tell me what it was.’

‘Right.’ Jude wasn’t sure where to start. The handbag? The gossip? The accusations? She decided to come in at a very basic level. ‘As he probably told you, I live in Fethering …’

‘Yes.’

‘And there’s been a suspicious death down there recently.’

‘Oh?’

‘A man called Harry Lasalle.’

Mary White gave no reaction to the name. Either she had never heard it or was skilled in controlling her emotions. Another possibility was that Glen Porter had mentioned the builder’s death and she had been prepared for the news.

Jude pressed, ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

The woman gave a brief shake of her head.

‘Let me try another tack. A couple of weeks ago, in a building in Fethering called Footscrow House, I found a handbag.’

‘So?’

‘It contained a passport belonging to a woman called Anita Garner.’

‘What’s all this got to do with me?’

Jude had had enough of this fencing. ‘What it has to do with you, Mary White, is that you are not Mary White.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You do. So, it’s time to stop pretending. Glen told me your true identity.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. You are Anita Garner.’

The woman burst into tears.

‘I’ve been here in Liverpool,’ she said after Jude had soothed her back to coherence, ‘ever since I left Fethering.’

‘Thirty years ago?’

‘Round that, yes.’

‘Why Liverpool?’

‘It was a long way from Fethering.’

‘Were you aware of all the press interest in your disappearance?’

‘Not really. I knew there must be some, but I was a long way away. I tried to avoid reading the papers and watching the television news. I was not in a very good place back then.’

‘Presumably you knew the state your parents must have been in?’

‘I kind of knew but shut my mind to it. I wasn’t very coherent.’

‘But what did you live on? Where did you live, come to that?’

‘I had a bit of cash with me, though most of that went on the train fare. The first few nights up here, I slept rough. Then I got bar work. I was used to that. It was a job I could do without thinking. Which was just as well, because at the time I didn’t want to think.’

Sudden fear came into the woman’s face. ‘Glen said I should see you. But why are you here? You’re not about to tell the police who I really am?’

‘No, of course I’m not. You haven’t committed any crime. At least, as far as I know you haven’t. There’s no law against changing your name and starting a new life.’

‘No. No, there isn’t.’ But she didn’t sound certain about it.

‘I can assure you, I have no desire to upset you. If you want to continue being here as Mary White, that’s your business and not mine. All I’m interested in is establishing the circumstances of Harry Lasalle’s death. It would appear to have been suicide. That’s certainly the verdict of his wife Veronica. But there are rumours going around Fethering of murder.’

‘Always rumours going round Fethering,’ said the woman wryly. ‘One of the reasons why I left.’

Jude was desperate to know what the other reasons were, but she didn’t want to rush things. Mary White/Anita Garner was clearly highly strung and capable of clamming up at any moment.

‘Yes. Look, Mary’ – better to stick with her chosen identity – ‘I do want to ask you some questions, but if there’s anything that is too intrusive, or that you don’t want to answer for any reason … well, that’s fine with me. I’m not here to invade your privacy.’

‘No.’ The tone implied that Jude already had invaded her privacy. ‘I’m only seeing you because Glen said I should. He suggested that if I answered your questions, that would avoid a much more public enquiry into my life.’

Jude felt pleased – and just a little bit guilty – that her mendacious approach to Glen Porter had worked so well.

She was about to start on the few, inadequate questions she had been planning on her way from Lime Street Station when Mary came in with one of her own. ‘Where was my handbag found?’

‘As I said, it was in Footscrow House.’

‘Where in Footscrow House?’

‘It was hidden in a boarded-up alcove, in a room which, apparently, back when the place had been a care home, had been used as a staff bedroom.’

Mary White let out a little involuntary gasp. The colour left her face.

‘One thing intrigued me,’ Jude went on. ‘Well, many things intrigued me about your handbag, but the dominant one is the presence of your passport in it.’

‘Why particularly?’

‘Because, from all accounts, you’d never been abroad and had no intention of going abroad.’

‘Perhaps not, but a passport’s a useful thing to have … you know, as a proof of identity or …’ The argument sounded pretty feeble.

‘So, you weren’t secretly planning to go abroad at that time?’

‘No. Why would I want to do that?’

‘Possibly to meet up with Pablo?’

Her face turned what could only be described as a whiter shade of pale.

‘How on earth do you know about Pablo?’

‘I killed Harry,’ said Veronica Lasalle.

She sat upright on a kitchen chair in High Tor. The Aga spread warmth, Gulliver snored snugly in front of it, but the atmosphere was far from relaxed.

‘Why are you telling me?’ asked Carole. She wanted to know if it was the payoff to her plan, apart from anything else.

The response from Veronica confirmed it, very gratifyingly. ‘Because you’ve been spreading rumours in the Crown and Anchor, rumours about Roland.’

Not for the first time, Carole was astonished by the speed of the Fethering grapevine. She had chosen well in using Barney Poulton as a conduit for the false information.

‘I thought,’ Veronica went on, ‘I could get away with it. I thought everyone would accept the conclusion that Harry had taken his own life. But the gossip about it being murder started to spread. I hoped it’d die down. But it didn’t. And, once people – well, not “people” – you’ – she larded the pronoun with contempt – ‘once you started spreading accusations about Roly, I knew I had to confess the truth.’

Though Veronica Lasalle was furiously angry, she showed no other emotions which might be expected from a woman who had recently killed her husband. No regret, no contrition, no shock and certainly no guilt.

‘So, why did you do it, Veronica?’ asked Carole.

‘To save Harry the unhappiness which the inevitable investigation would have caused him.’

‘What investigation?’

‘All that business about Anita Garner suddenly getting revived. It would have destroyed him.’

Carole couldn’t help saying, ‘So you took it upon yourself to destroy him first?’

‘If you want to put it that way, yes. Though, personally, I see it as an act of mercy.’

‘Oh?’

‘Listen, I’m not pretending that Harry and I had a great marriage. Yes, early on it was good. We did everything together, spent all our spare time sailing, and he never looked at another woman. But, after Roly was born … well, I was busy with him and perhaps hadn’t got so much time to devote to Harry and … anyway, that was when he started to stray. The business was doing well, he was doing jobs further away from Fethering, sometimes he had to stay overnight … It’s a familiar pattern, has happened in many marriages, I’m sure. But Harry got into the habit of infidelity.

‘And I’m not saying there weren’t faults on both sides. I was preoccupied with Roland, and I think that made Harry feel excluded. And I hadn’t got the time to spend crewing for him on Harry’s Dream at weekends and … anyway, we drifted apart. And he drifted towards other women.’

‘And was one of those “other women” Anita Garner?’

Veronica Lasalle nodded grimly. ‘Yes. Yes, she was. And that hurt me more than all the others. I didn’t know any of the others. I knew about them but I didn’t know them personally. He met them when he was away from Fethering. He was a bastard in many ways, but at least Harry didn’t like to foul his own footpath, which was a kind of relief to me.

‘But with Anita Garner … well, he was bringing his dirty linen home and displaying it for everyone in Fethering to see. Harry and I were running Footscrow House as a care home together. And then suddenly he’s taking up with a member of the staff and, though they managed to keep it quiet at first, very soon everyone would know about it. It was appalling for me to stand by and witness what was going on.’

‘I can imagine it was,’ said Carole. ‘And, at the time of Anita Garner’s disappearance …?’

‘Yes?’ There was a note of resignation in the woman’s voice.

‘… you and Harry had an alibi. You were on a trip to France on Harry’s Dream.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was that true?’

‘No. But,’ she asserted, ‘nobody questioned it. As I said, nobody at Footscrow House knew about the affair back then, so Harry wasn’t a suspect or anything. And the police very quickly lost interest in Anita’s disappearance.’

‘What do you think happened to her?’ asked Carole, quite harshly.

‘I don’t know.’ Veronica Lasalle spoke as if that was the only answer she would offer, whatever the provocation. Whether she did know or not, it was hard for Carole to judge.

But she had a go at getting more detail. ‘You hoped people would believe that your husband had killed himself?’

‘Yes.’

‘For that to be credible, he must have had a reason. Guilt for having killed the girl?’

‘No. Fear of all the gossip starting up again would have been sufficient.’

‘Hm. So if he wasn’t with you on Harry’s Dream on the way to France, where was Harry that Tuesday?’

‘Like an ordinary day off. Round the house. Doing ordinary stuff.’

‘You didn’t live in at Footscrow House?’

‘No. Thank God. We seemed to spend every waking hour there.’

‘Did Harry ever stay there overnight?’

‘Very occasionally. If there was a major crisis, one or other of us might stay there.’

‘Did Harry stay there that Tuesday?’

‘I told you. He was round the house. At home.’

As with her previous answer about what had happened to Anita Garner, Veronica Lasalle wasn’t going to shift an inch from that position.

‘All right,’ said Carole. ‘Coming up to date, how did you kill your husband?’

‘It wasn’t too difficult. I’d followed through every stage of the building – or rebuilding – of Harry’s Dream. I knew as much about that boat as he did. And on a couple of previous occasions, we’d had problems with the heater, carbon monoxide leaking. So, sabotaging it wasn’t that difficult.’

‘Presumably, you did that while it was on the hardstanding at Fethering Yacht Club?’

‘Yes. I was still a member there, so I had my own key-card. The Saturday evening, I waited until the barman had locked up and gone home. Then I let myself in, sabotaged the heater and left another bottle of whisky there, to be sure. Harry had told me he was going out fishing early on the Sunday morning, but I knew he would do more drinking than fishing. He had another bottle with him. I knew what I’d done wouldn’t be guaranteed to kill him. If it hadn’t, I’d have had to try something else.

‘As it turned out, though,’ she concluded with a smile of satisfaction, ‘my first attempt did the business.’

There was a long silence. Then Carole asked, ‘So, what are you going to do now?’

‘I’ll hand myself in to the police.’

‘Oh?’

‘I thought I could get away with everyone believing that Harry had topped himself. But clearly I can’t. You aren’t the only person round Fethering who’s convinced it was murder. It’s only a matter of time before the police come to question me. So, I thought I might save them a bit of trouble by confessing. That means they won’t have to go through all kinds of elaborate investigations.’ A wry, defeated smile. ‘Very public-spirited of me, isn’t it?’

‘You have thought through the consequences of confessing, haven’t you?’

‘Oh yes. And I don’t reckon they’re too bad. I haven’t got many years left. The idea of spending them in prison won’t really make a lot of difference. Not having to think about cooking for myself, that’ll be a bonus. And, really, there’s nothing left in my life. No Harry now, and Roly’s very rarely in Fethering these days.

‘It means Harry’s reputation won’t be ruined. I will have saved him from having to go through all the police investigations and the trial and what-have-you.’

Veronica hadn’t noticed the slip she had made, but Carole picked up on it. The widow had virtually admitted that she thought her husband had killed Anita Garner.

‘Really,’ said Veronica Lasalle serenely, ‘it was a mercy killing.’