Death and the Decorator

TWO

It was a handbag.

A woman’s red leather bucket bag, which might have been in fashion some twenty or thirty years previously. It certainly wore a coating of twenty or thirty years’ dust.

Pete and Jude exchanged looks. Surprise had now replaced hurt in his expression. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s no way that was left there accidentally.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’m a woman, Pete. The relationship between a woman and her handbag, even in these more enlightened days, is akin to that between Siamese twins. If you carry one, you never want to let it out of your sight. There is no way the handbag’s owner could have just left it in this alcove by mistake.’

‘Equally,’ said Pete, ‘there’s no way whoever boarded this in and painted over it didn’t know that the handbag was there.’

‘Hm.’ Jude was silent for a moment. Her instinct was to reach for the bag and check its contents, but a strange voice inside her head said she shouldn’t touch anything at a crime scene. Which was, of course, complete nonsense. There was no crime involved. She and Pete had just found a handbag. She reached forward for it.

If it had been a crime scene, the police would have now possessed some very fine examples of Jude’s fingerprints. The dull leather was furry with dust.

The zip across the top was stiff but not rusted. She eased it open and examined the contents. No mobile phone from back then, obviously. Lipstick, a powder compact, a packet of tissues, some small change. In fact, only one thing that might have been unexpected in a woman’s handbag. A blue UK passport.

Jude opened it. Though dusty, the passport looked new, its pages unmarked by any stamps. The photograph was of a blonde woman with glasses. In her early twenties. She looked a little embarrassed at having her picture taken.

The name of the passport owner was Anita Garner.

Intriguing though it was, their discovery was basically just a woman’s handbag. Pete said he’d try to find out when the closing-off of the alcove might have happened. Brenton Wilkinson, the decorator he had originally worked for (now long retired), had been involved in many of the transformations of Footscrow House. The old man might be able to put a date on it. Assuming, of course, he’d still got all his marbles. Brenton Wilkinson had been in a local authority care home for some years.

Meanwhile, Jude, conscious of the importance of a lost handbag to any woman, even after twenty or thirty years, decided that she should take it to the police. Whether they would still have records of a reported missing handbag from so long ago was not really her concern. She just knew that handing the bag in was the right thing to do.

Before she delivered it, though – and she didn’t know quite why but her instinct told her to – she made a note of the document’s issue date and its owner’s personal details.

Fethering’s police station was a small building, only open during office hours. It operated as a kind of branch office for the bigger set-up in Fedborough.

The uniformed constable behind the reception desk took possession of the handbag and noted the circumstances of how it had been found. He also took Jude’s contact details. While unfailingly polite, he still managed to give the impression that finding the handbag’s owner was not high on his list of priorities. He was more interested in real crime.

And he was too young to know the extent to which the passport-owner’s name and crime had once been associated in the prurient minds of Fethering.

‘Anita Garner,’ echoed Carole. ‘It does ring a distant bell.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘No, she wasn’t in Fethering when we first came here.’ The ‘we’ was a rare giveaway. After their divorce, Carole had expunged from her life all reference to her ex-husband David. They had bought High Tor as a couple, a weekend place to give their son Stephen a bit of seaside time when he was young. But his parents had parted long before Carole – when she retired from the Home Office – had moved to Fethering full time.

‘So, how do you know the name?’

Behind their rimless glasses, Carole’s pale blue eyes screwed up in puzzlement. ‘It must have been from hearing people talk about her, I suppose. Some mystery …? Maybe she disappeared …? I’ve a feeling it was something like that. I’ll do some research,’ she concluded firmly.

‘Excellent,’ said Jude. Carole was very good at research.

Jude wasn’t as regular as her neighbour in her walking habits. Carole, under the pretence that it was her Labrador Gulliver rather than she who needed an unchanging structure to the day, was on Fethering Beach with him before seven on summer mornings and as soon as it got light in the winter. Gulliver also got another brisk constitutional and toilet break in the early evening.

Jude was more random in all of her habits. The generous nature of her curves, under their usual drapes of skirts, tops and scarves, suggested a relaxed fitness and dietary regime. Her attitude to many things in her life was relaxed. She thought being alive was a natural state of affairs, an attitude her neighbour could never quite embrace.

So, Jude didn’t go for a walk when she felt she ought to go for a walk, she walked when she felt like walking. And the next morning, the Thursday, she felt like a walk on Fethering Beach. She had a couple of clients booked in for the afternoon but nothing till then. So, she wrapped herself in a variety of warming layers of wool and set out.

For some reason, her thoughts were still browsing on the discovery of Anita Garner’s handbag. The oddity of it got to her. The act of concealment was so deliberate. For Jude, whose whole life was a quest for understanding human behaviour, an explanation was required.

Some of West Sussex’s seaside towns are big on beach huts. Brighton, Hove, Worthing and Littlehampton have great parades of them. Carole once rented one to entertain a visiting grandchild in Smalting, a little way along the coast from Fethering. And though they don’t command the astronomical prices of the ones in Bournemouth and Sandbanks, some West Sussex beach huts are very sought after. There are always long waiting lists of people eager to buy them.

Fethering, however, didn’t compete on that level. There were a few beach huts at the edge of the dunes furthest away from the mouth of the River Fether, just before the exclusive Shorelands Estate, whose most favoured properties had grounds which gave direct access to the beach.

Before walkers reached these back garden walls, they would come across an uneven row of half a dozen beach huts. They weren’t built to standard local authority specifications, not identical structures in rows like the yellow, blue and green ones at Littlehampton’s East Beach. They had been put up randomly over the years. One was an Edwardian wooden structure that would not have looked out of place in a Chekhov play, another looked like a cricket pavilion, while the rest had been put up without the advice of an architect. None really deserved to be in the category of ‘hut’. They were much more upmarket and spacious than that.

They also dated from a time before certain nitpicking restrictions had been imposed by Fether District Council. More recently built beach huts were forbidden from having electrical power or plumbing. On some beaches, under sufferance, barbecues were allowed, but basically nothing was permitted that might extend a day’s stay overnight. That was a rule that was strictly policed by the local authority. The nice middle-class people of the South Coast were paranoid about their empty spaces being commandeered by ‘travellers’, illegal immigrants and what they saw as other freeloaders. They distrusted all outsiders and assumed that their countryside and shoreline should be the exclusive preserve of people like them.

The old huts on Fethering Beach, however, had been put up long before such strictures and so retained their ancient rights to power and plumbing. Nights could be spent in them with impunity. And their owners were rich enough to conform to Fethering’s standards of respectability.

As Jude walked towards the huts, she saw ahead of her someone she knew. The woman’s name was Lauren Givens. ‘Knew’ was in the Fethering sense of the word. Which meant that each woman knew the other by name, they knew a certain amount about each other’s background but hadn’t spent any length of time in each other’s company. On passing such an acquaintance on the beach, Carole would have vouchsafed a curt and silent ‘Fethering nod’. Jude, having a more expansive personality, upgraded this, as she overtook the woman, to a beaming smile and a ‘Good morning’.

Lauren Givens’s reaction was unusual. She can’t have heard Jude’s approach, because she turned towards her as in shock at the greeting. She had been slowing down, possibly to go to one of the beach huts, but now, with a flustered, ‘Oh, hello’, she stood still for an uncertain moment. Then, clapping her hand on the empty back pocket of her jeans, she announced, ‘Oh damn, I’ve left my phone at home’, and set off smartly back towards the village.

The moment she had turned around, the heavens suddenly opened, with a deluge of icy February rain.

Oh dear. Amongst the voluminous woollen layers Jude had wrapped herself in that morning, none was even mildly waterproof. And she didn’t have an umbrella with her. There was no point in hurrying to minimize her exposure to the rain. She reconciled herself to arriving back at Woodside Cottage in a totally sodden state.

Ahead of her on the beach, Lauren Givens had made a different calculation. She clearly reckoned running would get her home quicker, back into the dry. And her running seemed somehow a continuation of the furtiveness she had demonstrated when surprised by Jude.

As the first discomforting drips trickled down between her collar and her back, Jude idly wondered why Lauren Givens had reacted like that. She sieved her brain for the little she knew about the woman. Some kind of artist, she recollected … well, perhaps a craftswoman would be nearer the mark. Made little ceramic toadstools and ‘collectibles’, which sold in gift shops along the South Coast.

Not in quantities to make a living from, but Jude seemed to recall there was a rich husband in the background. Couldn’t remember his name, didn’t even know that she’d ever heard it. Some job in international marketing …? Member of Fethering Yacht Club …? He stayed in London most of the week, while his wife was a permanent Fethering resident. Oh yes, and there had been a flyer through the letterbox recently about a Pottery Open Day that Lauren was hosting in her studio the following Wednesday.

But that was the sum total of the local gossip Jude had heard about the couple.

Fortunately, she hadn’t left her phone at home. Because at that moment it rang.

The police station in Fedborough. Would it be convenient for them to call on her at home around four that afternoon? They wanted to ask for more detail about the circumstances of her finding Anita Garner’s handbag.

Carole’s relationship with her laptop was typical of most of her relationships. She had started from a position of distrust and scepticism. Like anything else new, this new technology couldn’t be healthy. Engaging with it would be tantamount to signing up to a Faustian pact. The small advantages the laptop brought would come at a terrible cost. It was safer not to get involved.

Then, gradually, she began to feel a little isolated without access to email. Everyone else seemed to have it, even people considerably older than she was, people she might have consigned to the ungenerous category of ‘fuddy-duddies’. Carole Seddon’s main aim in life was to pass unnoticed under the radar, but there came a point when not having email drew more attention to her as a non-conforming oddity. Then there was all that information available at the click of a mouse. And Carole loved information.

Even better, from Carole Seddon’s point of view, owning a laptop offered the possibility of doing one’s shopping without having to talk to anyone.

Needless to say, she didn’t advertise the fact that she was intending to join the information technology revolution. After much private reading-up on the subject, she paid a clandestine visit to PC World in Clincham and quickly made her purchase. She then, rather than leaving her neat Renault in front of High Tor as usual, parked it back in the garage, smuggling her new possession into the house unseen.

It was only after two intense weeks of familiarizing herself with the technology that she casually mentioned to Jude that she’d bought a laptop.

And from that moment on, the relationship between woman and machine had been intense. The only anomaly about it was that Carole did not acknowledge the laptop’s portability. Her keyboard activities almost always took place in the spare bedroom. Everything had an allocated space in the circumscribed life of High Tor, and that was the computer room. The miniaturizing achievements of Silicon Valley geniuses in breaking away from the cumbersome behemoths of previous generations were wasted on Carole Seddon. She used her laptop like a desktop.

So, it was in her spare room that she began her research into the life of Anita Garner. She started with Google. There were a surprising number of people referenced as ‘Anita Garner’ or close variations of the name. A paediatrician in Napier New Zealand, a vocalist with grunge revival band of the 1990s who hailed from Little Rock Arkansas, an event caterer from Porthcawl in Wales … None of them seemed to have any connection with Fethering.

Which meant that Carole had to focus her research more locally. She remembered that amongst the limited facilities of the village library was a complete bound set of copies of the Fethering Observer, since its first appearance in 1893.

Leaving a reproachful Gulliver by the Aga – he’d quickly deduced that he wasn’t going to get a bonus walk – Carole set off to investigate.

The police – one male, one female, both in uniform – arrived on the dot of four at Woodside Cottage. They did not stay long and Jude rather wondered why they’d bothered to come at all. She had been unable to add much to what she had told the desk sergeant the day before. And her visitors seemed to accept the unlikelihood of her having anything to do with the woman whose handbag had been immured long before Jude had moved to Fethering.

The detail they did seem interested in – and indeed asked her repeated questions about – was Pete’s reaction to the discovery. Had he been surprised to find the handbag?

Jude replied that he’d been no more surprised than anyone who found a long-abandoned handbag behind a wooden panel would be.

‘Did he react as if he expected to find a handbag there?’

‘No, of course he didn’t.’

And that was it, really. The female officer took copious notes of their conversation. Maybe their interview was just to get the paperwork sorted. There had been many complaints within the Force about increasing amounts of paperwork.

Jude saw them politely to her front door. They thought it unlikely they’d need to ask her any further questions.

Carole’s reluctance to acknowledge her laptop’s portability meant that she had not taken it with her to Fethering Library. So, all the research she did there had been written longhand into a notebook. Data which she would later copy on to her laptop in the spare/computer room. Despite her self-appointed reputation for efficiency, something which carried through from her time at the Home Office, Carole Seddon did not always take the direct route to her destinations.

But she couldn’t wait for the transcribing process to be completed to share her findings. The moment she got back to High Tor, pausing only to print out something from her laptop, she was on the phone to Woodside Cottage. (Most people would just have knocked on their neighbour’s front door as she passed, but that was never Carole Seddon’s way. To her mind, that kind of casual ‘dropping-in’ was associated with people from the North. People who viewed – and lived the life of – Coronation Street, a programme which she had never watched.) Of course, when she got through to Jude, she received the anticipated invitation to go next door, where her neighbour had just opened a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.

With their glasses charged and the first grateful slurp slurped, Carole embarked on her revelations.

‘Anita Garner used to live in Fethering. She went missing about thirty years ago. Her disappearance got brief coverage in the national press and quite a lot more in the Fethering Observer. I’ve been going through their files.’

‘Online?’

‘No, they aren’t online.’ If they had been online, Carole would have felt rather disappointed. Research ought to involve hard work. ‘I’ve been going through the archives at Fethering Library.’

‘Good for you.’

With a flourish, Carole produced the sheet that she had just printed out. (Of course, if she’d brought the laptop with her, she could just have shown the image on the screen, but that was never her way.) It was a photograph, taken from a newspaper, of Anita Garner. Jude recognized her instantly from the image she’d seen in the passport. In this one, though, the subject wasn’t wearing her glasses and looked quite a bit more glamorous. And dated – her blonde hair was long and chunky in the haystack style of Jennifer Anniston from Friends. It suggested a posed picture, taken by a professional photographer, the kind of thing that parents might display proudly on their mantelpieces. Typical of the images that turn up in the press when someone goes missing, images that seem somehow firmly to suggest the person is already dead.

Carole was silent. Jude knew she wanted the satisfaction of actually being asked for information. She always relished playing a scene at her own pace.

Jude readily conceded. ‘So, what have you found out?’ she asked.

The answer came in a rush. Now unleashed, Carole had so much to tell. ‘Anita Garner was twenty-three when she disappeared. At the time she was actually working at Footscrow House. It was a care home back then. She had started helping in the kitchens but was training to become a qualified carer. She was an only child, brought up in Fethering, as I said. On the Downside Estate. She had left school at sixteen to attend a catering college, though there was some suggestion she didn’t finish the course there. Before she went to the care home, she worked in the hospitality industry, chambermaiding in hotels, behind the bar in pubs, also helping out in the kitchens. All of her work was local – Fethering, Fedborough, Smalting, not much further afield than that. At the time of her disappearance, she was still living at home with her parents in the house where she was born.’

Carole’s need to take a breath gave Jude the opportunity to ask, ‘Had she ever worked abroad?’

‘Not so far as I could find out, no.’

‘Had she ever travelled abroad?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Carole a little peevishly. She didn’t like any criticism of her information hoard. ‘Newspapers don’t tell everything about a person.’

‘No, of course they don’t. I just thought … the fact that there was a passport in her handbag …’

‘Anyway, the library closed at five.’ Carole still sounded defensive. ‘It took me a long time to find the right editions of the Fethering Observer to get started. I haven’t seen everything. I’m planning to go back tomorrow.’

‘It’s great how much you have managed to find out,’ said Jude, smoothing ruffled feathers, not for the first time.

‘There was a lot of speculation in the press about what might have happened to her.’

That was inevitable in a village like Fethering, where the two-day absence of a cat could qualify as front-page news.

‘Some people thought,’ Carole went on, ‘she might have been the victim of a serial killer. A character dubbed by the press “The Brighton Batterer” had been linked to a series of murders over a few years. But Anita Garner’s profile didn’t seem to fit. The Batterer’s victims had all been prostitutes and there was really no solid proof that the killings were the work of the same man. Whoever he was – or whoever they were – the police never found him – or them. But the rumours about the killer caused some years of anxiety for women in Brighton.

‘Then again, there were the usual suggestions Anita Garner might have been kidnapped by sex traffickers, Russian agents, Islamic terrorists – Fethering’s usual suspects all lined up.

‘The girl’s parents were interviewed time and again. Was she unhappy at home? No. Had her behaviour ever given her parents cause for concern? No, she was a good Catholic girl, went to Mass every Sunday. Had she just broken up a relationship? Was she in a relationship? No and no.

‘Then the more desperate question … Did Anita have any enemies? Anyone who might have borne a grudge from schooldays? All the answers still negative.’

Jude looked thoughtful. ‘Do you know if her parents are still alive?’

‘No. Her father went relatively soon after the disappearance. Big Catholic funeral at Fedborough Abbey, apparently. Her mother died about ten years ago.’

‘Mm. Mind you, there’d be a lot of other Fethering locals still here from that time. As you know, Carole, it doesn’t take much to get the gossip-mills turning in a place like this.’

‘Very true.’ The pale blue eyes sparkled, attracted by the idea of a ‘case’ to investigate. ‘So, where do you suggest we start?’

‘We start by finding out as much local gossip as we can about Anita Garner.’ Jude looked at her big round watch. ‘Do you know … I could fancy another drink … at the Crown and Anchor.’