Death and the Decorator

FOUR

Jude liked to keep leisurely hours. Quite capable of getting up for an early appointment when required, she preferred a routine incorporating a cup of tea made in the kitchen and enjoyed back upstairs. Her perfect way of greeting the day was from under the duvet. The residents of the adjacent High Tor, woman and dog, would, on an ideal day, have returned from their brisk walk on Fethering Beach long before their neighbour had started to think about getting dressed.

But the following morning, the Friday, Jude’s laze was interrupted by the telephone ringing. The caller, to her surprise, was Vi Benyon. ‘Sorry, Jude, to trouble you so early, but I wanted to talk to you while Leslie’s out walking the dog.’

These words instantly shifted Jude from comatose to fully alert. ‘Oh, yes? What was it about?’

The answer could not have been better. ‘Well, you know last night we were talking about Anita Garner …?’

‘Yes?’ said Jude eagerly.

‘There were things I could have said then, but I didn’t because Leslie didn’t want me to.’

Even better. Jude reckoned Vi didn’t need another prompt.

She was proved right as the words tumbled out of the old woman’s mouth. ‘The fact is, I always felt unhappy about what happened to Anita. I mean, people don’t just vanish off the face of the earth, do they? She must’ve gone somewhere, and I didn’t reckon the police took her disappearance seriously enough. It was as if nobody cared about the girl.’

‘My friend Carole found quite a lot of coverage of her disappearance in back copies of the Fethering Observer.’

‘Oh yes, there was a lot of fuss at the time, but people soon forget. Fethering’s always been a hotbed for gossip’ – You don’t have to tell me that, thought Jude – ‘but the local attention span is short.’

Perhaps now a nudge was needed. ‘Vi, do you actually know something specific about what happened to Anita?’

‘Not exactly, no. But she was working at Footscrow House which, back then, was a care home …’

‘I’d heard that, yes.’

‘… and my mother was a resident there at the time.’

‘Really?’

‘Terrible place, I’m sorry to say. Standards of care, particularly considering the money they were charging, they was terrible. My mum would be calling for hours for a carer to come and help her … and when one eventually did come, they couldn’t speak English. And she was like as not to get a man as a woman … which was undignified for a lady of Mum’s generation. She wasn’t used to having men dealing with her … private needs.’

Jude was beginning to think another nudge might be required to shift Vi Benyon off the familiar track of the inadequacy of care homes, but the old woman reined herself in.

‘Anyway, Mum knew Anita Garner. She was one of the few carers who she actually liked … who actually cared, you could say. Kind girl, seemed genuinely interested in an old biddy’s reminiscences. And I’m not saying my mum wasn’t a talker, but she had lots to talk about. Well, Anita had lived her whole life around Fethering, so she knew the places and some of the people Mum talked about. And what’s more …’ Vi Benyon held the pause like a professional storyteller – ‘Anita told her some of the stuff that was going on behind the scenes at Footscrow House.’

‘Like what?’ asked Jude eagerly.

‘Well, there was … This is all rather difficult for me, because when Anita disappeared, it was round the time my mum was on the way out, so I was preoccupied with that. You know, her final illness and passing, the funeral and family complications … And I loved my mum to bits, so I wasn’t in a good state. Otherwise, I might have followed up more on some of the stuff Anita told me.’

Jude managed to restrain herself from demanding what Anita did actually tell her, and fortunately Vi continued, ‘Apparently, the standards of cleanliness at Footscrow House, you know, back when it was a care home, was really terrible. I wish I’d known more about it before I put Mum in there. I might have looked somewhere else, though there wasn’t much available, not on the budget we had. But standards there was very low. Sheets not changed nearly as often as they should have been, mice in the kitchen, you name it. No surprise the place was closed down fairly soon afterwards.

‘But, according to Anita, this level of neglect wasn’t down to the carers being slack or anything like that. It was management policy. The staff was effectively told to lower their standards. Well, it was to save money, wasn’t it? Save on the laundry bills. There are always people who’re ready to cut corners if it’s going to save them a few bob, aren’t there?’

‘Too true. Sadly.’ Jude was still hoping for something more specific. ‘Did Anita Garner actually have any run-ins with the management? You suggested when we were in the Crown and Anchor that she might have complained to them about the way things were being run?’

‘Yes, being one of those … oh, what’s the word? Tell me again.’

‘“Whistle-blowers”?’

‘I can never get that right. But, yes, Mum said she thought Anita had complained. But I don’t know whether the girl got into trouble over that. I’m sure the management wouldn’t have liked it, though.’ Vi Benyon was silent for a moment, and Jude was worried she might have said her piece. But then the old woman resumed, ‘No, the problems Anita had at Footscrow House back then were more … personal.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, there was someone at the care home who kept … you know … coming on to her.’

‘Oh? Did she say who that person was?’

‘She did give me a name’ – Vi hesitated – ‘but I’m not sure that I should mention it …’

‘Oh, come on,’ Jude urged her. ‘That could be important. It might well have something to do with why Anita disappeared.’

‘Yes, it might. I’d thought that at the time. And there was a bit of gossip round Fethering about the possibility.’

Another silence. Then an abrupt ‘Oh, here’s Leslie back with the dog.’

And Vi Benyon ended the call.

Leaving Jude in a state of considerable frustration.

Fethering Library was not of a size to have a separate room for archival research. The bound copies of the Fethering Observer were kept in a large metal cupboard which had to be unlocked by the librarian Di Thompson. For reasons of space on the available tables, Carole was only allowed to take out four volumes at a time. Then the cupboard had to be locked again until she had finished with those four. Whereupon the processes of unlocking and retrieving had to be repeated. That was how access had always been arranged, and that was how it continued to be arranged.

It was Carole’s view that this level of security was unnecessary. Had the cupboard contained copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, there might have been some point. But back numbers of a local newspaper …? And the Fethering Observer at that …? Graciously restrained, however, she did not share her opinion with the librarian. Just waited patiently while Di Thompson dealt with an elderly enquirer at the issue desk.

There was always a shelf of flyers for local events in the library. Yoga classes, cookery courses, a book group. Carole was not attracted to participate in any of them. She was not by nature a joiner. If the subject of such activities ever came up, she would say she was far too busy to get involved. Busy, busy, busy. The real reason was that she was afraid of exposing herself to the scrutiny of others.

There was a pile of flyers for a Pottery Open Day the following Wednesday. An invitation to visit the studio of Lauren Givens. Carole gave a mental snort (she was good at mental snorts). She had better things to do with her time than find out how ceramic toadstools were made.

Di Thompson, now free, helped her carry the blue-bound volumes to the desk that Carole had appropriated. The previous day, the librarian had explained the indexing that applied to the individual issues. The system had proved very inadequate, supplying far too little information. One or two major local topics, like the endless proposals for rerouting the bypass around Fedborough, had multiple references listed, but following lesser stories through was a matter of trial and error.

The two women knew each other well enough to exchange pleasantries. Carole had rejoined the library for those weekends when her two granddaughters, Lily and Chloe, came down to stay. She knew the fun the little girls could have there and, in a rather old-fashioned way, she preferred the idea of them reading books at High Tor than watching television. For her, words on a page would always be more worthy than images on a screen.

But Carole and Di Thompson would never have revived the other topic that had brought them together. Some years before it had happened – the murder of a visiting author in the library car park, for which Jude was at one stage the chief suspect … Well, that wasn’t the kind of thing Carole Seddon would have continued to discuss with a librarian. When it came to polite conversation, she had her standards.

Her research that morning felt desultory. She had left the library the previous day, feeling that the back numbers of the Fethering Observer could yield a lot more information but, as she flicked through the pages, the law of diminishing returns kicked in. Most of the obvious stuff about Anita Garner’s disappearance she had found the previous day. She was now shuffling through the newspapers’ pages almost at random, hoping to chance on some new detail. And without marked success.

She recalled the other names which had been mentioned in the Crown and Anchor the previous evening. See if she could find any references to them. The Benyons’ son Kent had been at school with Anita Garner. So had the extremely fortunate Glen Porter, who perhaps claimed to have had an affair with her … well, a ‘thing’ if not an affair … at least it had been asserted that he’d ‘got inside her knickers’.

Then there was Roland Lasalle, builder’s son, whose parents had put him through private school and university …

Carole did actually find a reference to Roland in a Fethering Observer from some twenty-five years ago. There was half a page of congratulatory flannel about the completion of his architectural training and his being offered a job at a very prestigious London practice ‘working on many international projects’. He was referred to as ‘son of well-known local builder and character Harry Lasalle, who is currently vice-commodore of Fethering Yacht Club’. Harry claimed to be ‘chuffed to bits’ about his son’s success. As was the boy’s mother Veronica. ‘Roly’s always been a hard worker and I’m glad to see it’s paid off for him’.

Until he took up his job in London, Roland Lasalle would be ‘getting his hands dirty, helping out on various maintenance jobs that his father was working on in the Fethering area’.

There was a photograph of father and son. It didn’t ring any bells for Carole, though. Had Jude been there, she would have recognized in the younger Harry Lasalle the greybeard she’d seen storming out of Footscrow House on the day Anita Garner’s handbag was discovered.

A shadow came across the page Carole was reading. She looked up to see an almost emaciatedly thin man standing over her. His face was blotchy with age. A few tufts of hair rose proud of his cranium’s tight skin. He wore what used to be called ‘cavalry twill’ trousers above thick sandals with socks and a pale blue zip-up ‘windcheater’ from another age.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt you,’ he said, ‘but it is rarely that a writer witnesses someone reading his own work. Of course, it might be more prestigious if the work being read were in the form of a literary novel published by Faber & Faber or Jonathan Cape, rather than in the pages of the Fethering Observer, but it is still a rare honour, of which I am appropriately aware.’

Carole was so surprised by this long speech that it was one of those rare moments when she could think of nothing to say. A smile crinkled across the old man’s face as he continued, ‘I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. Though, in fact, I do conveniently have a visual aid for just such a purpose.’

He pointed down to the by-line of the piece about Roland Lasalle that Carole was reading. ‘“Malk Penberthy”,’ he read out. ‘At your service. And for many years at the service of the Fethering Observer and its diminishing number of readers. A career of dedicated journalism which, while it may not have scaled the heights of front-page terrorist atrocities in the national dailies, did keep the good burghers of Fethering apprised of new brides’ honeymoon plans, thefts of underwear from washing lines, and the all-important results of local dog shows. May I ask whom I have the honour of addressing?’

‘My name is Carole Seddon.’

‘Enchanted to meet you. And would I be imposing on your goodwill were I to ask you what prompts your avid perusal of that fine, though underestimated, organ, the Fethering Observer?’

She could see no point in dissembling. ‘I am trying to find out more about the disappearance of Anita Garner.’

‘Ah. Some time ago – thirty years we’re talking now – but still one of the great Fethering mysteries. One of the great unsolved Fethering mysteries, I should say.’

‘And one that you covered in your professional capacity?’ She found that, inadvertently, she was dropping into his rather old-fashioned mandarin style of speech.

‘Oh yes, I did. Many was the unprovable theory, false lead and wild rumour I pursued in that quest.’

Carole caught a look from Di Thompson. Though the old cartoon image of library staff constantly saying ‘Ssh’ no longer obtained, the expression did suggest that her domain was not the ideal setting for extended dialogue.

‘I wonder, Malk,’ said Carole, ‘would you have time to join me for a cup of coffee?’

The two of them were united in regret at the closing, some years previously, of Polly’s Cake Shop on the Fethering Parade. Malk was no longer working at the time of the murder that took place there, but he still knew everything about it. His interest in all things Fethering, nurtured throughout his life, was not going to be diminished by something as trivial as retirement.

They agreed too that the Starbucks which had replaced Polly’s as the only dedicated coffee shop in the village was a poor substitute. Though the Crown and Anchor had all the latest Italian machines to produce the full gamut of Americanos, macchiatos, flat whites and so on, they also agreed that it didn’t feel right going to a pub just for a coffee. And what passed under the name of coffee at the Seaview Café was only instant.

They were both surprised that, as the remorseless tread of coffee culture took over the whole country, no one had taken the initiative to open a new franchise-free individual venue in Fethering. Such businesses seemed to be springing up all along the South Coast. Maybe there was an entrepreneurial opportunity for someone there?

Carole couldn’t believe her good fortune in having found – or it might be more accurate to say ‘stumbled upon’ – Malk Penberthy. She couldn’t wait to tell Jude about her discovery. Unlike Barney Poulton, that incomer whose vaunted omniscience was now totally discredited, the retired journalist really could claim to be ‘the eyes and ears of the village’.

And his memory was startlingly good. The Fethering Observer always came out on a Thursday and Malk could be specific about not only each article he wrote on the Anita Garner mystery but also the date on which it was published. He remembered the name of every person he’d interviewed in connection with the disappearance and had almost total recall of what they had said. Carole could not have found a more perfect and willing witness.

And Malk Penberthy responded to her interest. Perhaps retirement had made him feel marginalized from the world of news-gathering and he was just delighted to have his expertise valued once again. He visibly enjoyed engaging in speculation with her.

But, of course, the one vital question to which he could not provide an answer was: what had happened to Anita Garner?

Meticulously, he went through the various possibilities which had been discussed at the time and since. Some of these conjectures Carole had heard before, but she made notes of the ones she hadn’t. Anita’s parents, Malk said, had been little help, no less confused than anyone else. The mother had been the more approachable. Mr Garner, a staunchly old-fashioned Catholic, had clearly been obsessed by his daughter and objected strongly to any suggestions of impropriety in her behaviour. Which had made interviewing him a frustrating process.

‘If he had discovered that she had been up to something he would have disapproved of,’ asked Carole eagerly, ‘how do you think he would have reacted?’

Malk Penberthy smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh, Carole, Carole, we’ve all been there in our conjectures. I considered that scenario. Worshipped daughter admits to having had sex before marriage – or something worse – and obsessed father, in a fit of righteous anger, destroys the malefactor to keep her image unsullied. The Fethering version of an “honour killing”. Is that the direction in which your thoughts might have been tending?’

‘Maybe,’ Carole admitted diffidently.

‘A nice dramatic solution, I agree, that would work well as the climax of some shoddy television drama. But not one that can withstand scrutiny. At the time of his daughter’s disappearance, Mr Garner had been in hospital in Clincham, being treated for prostate cancer. He’d been there two weeks and didn’t come home until a couple of days after the last sighting of Anita.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. Logic and reality have a distressing capacity for squashing our most intriguing hypotheses.’

‘And where was this “last sighting”?’

‘Footscrow House. Then a care home. Some of the staff saw her in the evening. Next morning, no sign of her. And there hasn’t been from that day to this.’

‘Hm.’ Carole nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, you didn’t get any impression of hidden rifts within the Garner family?’

‘Sadly, no.’ Malk related how father and mother had been happy to have their grown-up daughter living with them and Anita herself had seemed equally contented with the arrangement. Her parents had felt confident she would leave home eventually to get married, ‘but the right man hasn’t come along yet’.

Yes, she had had boyfriends, but none of them seemed to last that long. Anita might be a little cast down at the end of each relationship; not for long, though. She was resilient and bounced back quickly. It was Mrs Garner’s view that her daughter had ‘never been properly in love’. And back then she’d reckoned ‘there was time enough for that’.

No, Anita had never got depressed. She ‘had her head screwed on all right’. She wasn’t the sort to ‘get all teary’ over a man. She had more sense.

And yes, Mrs Garner was sure there had been men at work who’d come on to her from time to time. For an attractive young woman, that went with the territory. But Anita had been quite capable of telling any man who tried it on ‘to keep his hands to himself’. And she’d never complained to her mother about suffering ‘unwanted advances’.

Malk Penberthy, like the conscientious reporter he was, had followed up at a good few of Anita Garner’s places of work, the shops, pubs and restaurants where she had been employed. And he had found the girl to have been well-liked in all of them. She could take a joke and had joined in the usual badinage of workplace flirtation. She had even on occasion gone out with colleagues, but nothing serious seemed to have developed with any of them.

‘What about,’ asked Carole, ‘relationships in her final job? At Footscrow House when it was a care home?’

‘Nothing substantiated there.’

She was quick to pounce on the words. ‘“Nothing substantiated”? Are you suggesting there were rumours?’

For the first time, Malk Penberthy looked uncomfortable. ‘Oh, there are always rumours around any workplace. Bosses coming on to workers, that kind of thing. Once again, goes with the territory. And it was worse back then, before all this “Me Too” movement started. Those were the days when a licence to let one’s hands wander was reckoned to be one of the perks of management. No young girl would have had the nerve to report anything. But, when I was investigating it, I got no proof that anything of the kind happened at the care home.’

Carole’s instinct to ask supplementary questions was curbed by the ex-journalist continuing quickly, ‘There was only one work relationship of Anita’s I found out about which might have been more significant.’

And he related how, in the course of her peripatetic employment history, Anita Garner had worked behind the bar at the Cat and Fiddle, a riverside pub on the Fether, just on the edge of the South Downs. Malk had talked to its rather over-the-top landlady, Shona Nuttall, and been told that Anita had taken quite a shine to a young Spanish barman called Pablo. It was Shona’s view that, even though they were both Catholics, something quite steamy had been going on there.

Then Pablo had suddenly been called back home by news of his mother’s serious illness. His family lived in Cádiz. But Shona was convinced the young couple had stayed in touch.

‘And what is interesting,’ he warmed to his task, ‘is that Anita had never expressed any interest in travelling abroad, but – and I got this from her mother – only weeks before she disappeared, she had applied for a passport. Which arrived at the house. Her mother saw the envelope.

‘From which one might extrapolate that her daughter had got the passport simply so that she could join her lover in Spain.’

‘Did the police investigate that possibility?’

A rueful grin from Malk Penberthy. ‘Half-heartedly, if at all.’

‘Hm.’ Carole removed her rimless glasses and polished them thoughtfully.

‘Anyway, for want of something better,’ said Malk Penberthy, spreading his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness, ‘that’s the nearest I got to an explanation for Anita Garner’s disappearance.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to put a damper on your theory,’ Carole apologized, ‘but I’m afraid it won’t hold up.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because, to travel to Spain, Anita Garner would have needed her passport.’

‘And, if you were listening, Carole, I did just say that she had recently been issued with one.’

‘But she didn’t use it to go to Spain.’

‘How do you know that?’

And she explained to Malk about the discovery of the handbag. And its contents.

He looked really crestfallen. Not because his theory had been ruled out, but because he had been excluded from the sources of information. If Malk Penberthy had still been a working journalist, he would have found out from Fethering Police about the find at Footscrow House. Now he was just another curious member of the public, with no special access to anything.

They had both finished their coffees and it seemed Malk had given as much relevant information as he could. He suddenly looked very tired, and Carole found herself wondering how old he actually was.

‘I do hope you wouldn’t mind if I were to contact you to pick your brains further …?’ she asked, again surprised at how easily she slipped into his formal style of speaking.

‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ he said. And then, going positively Jane Austen, ‘I should like it of all things.’

‘Well, let’s exchange phone numbers.’

‘An excellent idea, Carole. I’m afraid mine is a landline … though why I should apologize for that, I’m not quite sure. However, in these days of smartphones and online this and online that, I feel obliged to do so. I do possess some primitive form of mobile phone, but I’m afraid I never got on with it. We didn’t bond. The outdated notion that the sole purpose of a telephone is to make telephone calls was so much a part of my professional life that it is still engrained in my soul. Mea culpa. It is fortunate perhaps that I had to retire from journalism when I did. I enjoyed the daily to-and-fro of searching people out and talking to them. Today’s generation of journalists do most of their work without taking their eyes off the screen on their office desks.’

Carole found herself warming increasingly to him. Though she could not now live without her laptop, and was using her smartphone more, his attitude to technology struck a chord deep within her.

Malk Penberthy was her sort of man.

Jude picked up the phone. It was Pete.

‘Just wanted to check – still all right for me to start work at your place on Monday?’

‘No problem at all. Be good to see you.’

That was true. It was always good to see Pete. But a little bit of Jude’s satisfaction came from the thought that he might be able to tell her more about the history of Footscrow House. Which could of course be helpful in solving the mystery of Anita Garner’s disappearance, now becoming something of an obsession.

‘So, you’ll be there, will you? I won’t need a key?’

‘No, I’ll be here.’ A moment of caution. ‘What time do you start?’

‘Eight.’

‘Eight?’ She hadn’t got any clients booked in for the Monday morning. The thought of not being able to sleep in held little appeal. ‘I’ll give you a key. Shall I drop it in at Footscrow House?’

‘No, I’m on another job now, up at Fedborough. Back at Fiasco House after I finish with you. Tell you what … if you drop in to the Fethering Yacht Club round twelve on Saturday …’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow as ever is. And at the yacht club you can give me a key … and I can buy you a drink.’

‘What a nice idea,’ said Jude.