Guilt at the Garage

NINETEEN

‘Is this seat taken?’

Carole looked up at the familiar bulky outline of Adrian Greenford, holding his customary mug of flat white.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said, draining her Americano, ‘but get them to put that into a takeaway cup. We need to talk outside.’

‘Really? Surely I—?’

By then Carole had left Starbucks.

He found her in one of the seafront shelters facing Fethering Beach. Though full of day trippers in the summer, they were deserted in February. The cold wind sawed through the broken glass of the windows.

He sat down on the paint-denuded wooden seat beside her, a respectable distance away. ‘So, what’s all this about, Carole? Very mysterious.’ His tone was joshing, ready to join in whatever game she was up to.

‘It’s about your wife.’

‘Oh?’ A new alertness came into his manner. ‘What’s Gwyneth done to annoy you?’

‘I’m not sure that she’s done anything to annoy me. But there are things about her behaviour that require some explanation.’

‘Like what?’ he asked, unsure of his ground.

‘My neighbour Jude met some people from Ilkley at the weekend.’

‘Oh,’ said Adrian, as if he knew what was coming.

And Carole told him everything that she had heard from Jude, finishing up by asking, ‘So? Does Gwyneth need to be in a wheelchair or not?’

There was a silence. Then he said, ‘That’s a rather difficult question to answer.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s a perfectly straightforward question. Either she cannot move anywhere without being in a wheelchair, or she can. Which is it, Adrian?’

‘Hm,’ he said. ‘The mind works in strange ways, Carole.’

‘What, are you telling me her disability is all in her head? Shocked into immobility like some hysterical imaginary invalid from a Victorian novel?’

‘It’s not quite like that.’ He was still holding his cardboard cup in both hands, as if using it to warm them. ‘The fact is that Gwyneth is extremely jealous.’

‘If she is,’ said Carole tartly, ‘according to Jude’s friends, you’ve given her reason to be.’

‘All right. I’m not claiming to be guilt-free in all of this.’

‘And is that why you moved away from Ilkley?’

‘Of course it is. After what Gwyneth did, I couldn’t stay up there. I had become a laughing stock.’

‘So, what made you choose Fethering?’

‘It was about as far away as we could get. And Gwyneth had some recollections of having happy childhood holidays in Littlehampton. I thought making a complete change might … well, might save our marriage.’

‘And how has that process been going so far?’

‘Good. Well, good in some respects. Good, in that Gwyneth hasn’t gone around vilifying me in Fethering, like she did in Ilkley.’

‘You still haven’t explained about the wheelchair.’

‘No. Well, I’m afraid that was part of her deal.’

‘Deal?’

‘Yes. Gwyneth made certain conditions when we moved down here. Things that I had to agree to if the marriage was to continue. She’s a very powerful woman, you know, Carole.’

‘Is she?’ came the dry response.

‘I’m afraid … I’m not proud to say this, but throughout our marriage … I’ve always done what she asked me to.’

‘Done what she told you to, do you mean?’

‘I suppose so. I wanted to have children. Gwyneth didn’t. So, we don’t have children.’

‘I see.’ Carole was glad she hadn’t made any comment when Gwyneth had confided that detail to her.

‘Haven’t you been tempted to leave her at times?’ asked Carole. After all, even she had a divorce behind her.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ said Adrian, as if she’d suggested the unthinkable. ‘Gwyneth and I couldn’t part.’

‘And yet you quite happily went off to have an affair.’

‘I don’t think “quite happily” would be the best way of describing that situation.’

Carole shrugged. ‘Up to you. You still haven’t told me about the wheelchair. Is Gwyneth physically disabled or not?’

‘She might as well be.’

‘What kind of an answer’s that?’

‘I mean that was one of the conditions she made when moving down here. That she would be in a wheelchair and I would do everything for her.’

‘But that’s madness.’

‘It was the deal. It was the deal I agreed to.’

‘Is it her form of punishment for you?’

‘Yes.’ He put down his cup of coffee, which must have gone cold by now, and rubbed the back of his hand against his furrowed brow. ‘My punishment. As I say, she’s a very jealous woman.’

‘Evidently.’ Carole stood up brusquely. ‘I think we should probably cease to meet, Adrian. It sounds like you have a lot to sort out with Gwyneth.’

‘Yes, I have. But we can’t stop meeting.’

‘If she’s as jealous as you say, she’ll begin to think that there’s something between us.’

‘She already thinks that.’

‘What!’ Carole was thunderstruck.

‘And in a way it’s true.’

‘In what way?’

‘I think I’m in love with you, Carole,’ he admitted.

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she said, as she strode back towards the High Tor.

Her conversation with Adrian Greenford had given Carole a lot to process. If Gwyneth wasn’t actually disabled, if she could move around, and if she was as jealous of Carole as he’d said, then perhaps it was she who had delivered the poisoned pen letters …? She could easily have gone out of the back garden gate of Wharfedale to the back garden gate of High Tor … God, maybe it was Gwyneth who had smashed the back windscreen of the Renault in the first place?

But Carole wasn’t allowed time to pursue these thoughts. Even before she had reached her front gate, Jude had come rushing out of Woodside Cottage to greet her. Carole herself wouldn’t have done that. She would have waited till she was back in High Tor, then rung next door to suggest their meeting. But each to her own. She had got used to Jude’s impulsiveness. It did still feel rather Northern, though. Maybe it had been increased by her recent visit to Ilkley.

‘I had a thought I wanted to run by you,’ said her neighbour.

‘Over a cup of coffee?’

‘Please.’

The Aga gave a degree of warmth to Carole’s functional kitchen. It was never going to be a cosy room but, with Gulliver snuffling through his doggy dreams on the floor, it felt almost welcoming.

‘My thought was,’ said Jude, ‘that I should get back in touch with Tom Kendrick.’

‘Nothing to stop you. But I’m not sure how much he could add to what he told us in Brighton.’

‘I just wondered what interaction he had with Bill Shefford when he brought his car in for servicing. The more we can find out about Bill’s behaviour in the days before his death, the better.’

‘Fine. It’s certainly worth asking. We don’t have many other avenues of enquiry open.’

‘No. Well, there is another. I was just wondering …’

‘Hm?’

‘Whether you remember anything else significant about when you were there in the garage – you know, the morning he died?’

Carole let out an exasperated sigh. ‘We’ve been through this time and again, Jude.’

‘Yes, but there might be some little detail …’

‘I’ve told you. He talked about death. He talked about being in a position where something he was going to do would please some people but not please others. Which at the time I thought meant leaving the Shefford’s business to Malee and going off with her to Thailand, but now I’ve talked to her I’m not so sure about that. He was just generally in a low mood.’

‘Depressed.’

‘I’m sure that’s how you’d describe it – depressed.’ It wasn’t a word Carole liked to use. In her personal dictionary, it had connotations of self-indulgence, of not standing up to life. Deep exploration of such thoughts, in her view, was a kind of navel-gazing. She never rationalized that her vehement dislike of the word might be a way of dealing with her own potential depression.

‘Mm.’ Jude was thoughtful for a moment. Then, ‘Right.’ She whipped out her mobile. ‘I’ll ring Tom now.’

Again, the phone was answered by the gatekeeper of Troubadours, Natalie Kendrick. Again, Jude wished she’d got Tom’s mobile number. And yet again, she wondered about the precise dynamics of the family relationship there. Was Tom Kendrick’s lethargy and lack of ambition a direct result of his mother’s omnicompetence? Did he just not bother because he knew that, ultimately, she’d do everything for him?

‘What do you want?’ There was an edge of aggression in his voice. He clearly thought that, by meeting them in Brighton, he had done as much as he wanted to do for the two nosy women.

By pointing and mouthing, Jude indicated to Carole that she was going to put him on to speakerphone.

‘When we last met,’ she said, ‘we talked about your time working at Shefford’s …’

‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I can tell you’ve got me on speakerphone. So, I gather I’m broadcasting to the other gossiping granny as well, am I?’

‘Any objections?’ asked an affronted Carole.

‘No, no, invite in the whole of Fethering, so far as I’m concerned. They’ve already said so much about me, a little more’s not going to do any harm. And, by the way, you know I agreed to talk to you in Brighton because I thought it might put an end to the gossip …?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it hasn’t worked. Whenever I go out, it still feels like I’ve got a big arrow stuck over my head, saying “Prime Suspect”.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll survive. So come on, what is it you want now?’

‘It just struck me,’ Jude replied, ‘that you haven’t really told us about how you took your car in for repair at Shefford’s.’

‘Well,’ Tom said, as if he was talking to a couple of five year olds, ‘my car needed repairing, so I took it to Shefford’s.’

‘No, I meant what kind of dialogue did you have with Bill Shefford when you took the car in? If, as you said, you’d left his employment in uncomfortable circumstances.’

‘Not that uncomfortable. By mutual agreement. He thought I was crap, I thought his job was crap. Fair exchange, you could say.’

‘So, no recrimination when you took the car in?’

‘No. He didn’t want me as his employee, I didn’t want to be his employee. But me turning up at the garage as a paying customer … that was different.’

Carole could not keep herself out of the conversation. ‘Why did you take the car in?’

‘Because it had a problem with the gearbox,’ Tom replied, with diminishing patience. ‘How technical do you want me to be?’

‘Minimally,’ said Jude.

‘All right. Basically, my mother bought me the Triumph three years ago. Mr Kendrick had had one when the model first came out and she seemed to think that I … It doesn’t matter. She bought me the car. It went OK for a while, then it started to keep slipping out of gear. I thought it was the clutch, took it to Shefford’s. Bill had a look at it, said, no, it was the actual gearbox.’

‘How long ago are we talking?’

‘Three months back, maybe. Anyway, an old car like that, you can’t get a gearbox just off the catalogue. Normal parts dealers wouldn’t carry them. You’d have to source it from a Triumph enthusiast. Bill said he’d look out for one. He was quite excited about the job, dealing with an old car where he could actually access the engine. He was always complaining that car maintenance was all done by computer these days. First tool you need is an iPad.

‘Anyway, a few weeks later he rang me to say he’d tracked down the right gearbox. I could still drive the thing, had to keep my hand on the gearstick most of the time, but I could get it to the garage. Which is what I did.’

‘And when was this?’ asked Carole.

‘It was … let me think … two days before he died.’

‘And did Bill say anything unusual to you when you brought the car in?’ asked Jude.

‘Nothing unusual, no. We both knew what required doing. We’d talked about it before. Gearbox talk, which I don’t think would interest you very much. So, I just parked the Triumph round the back, gave him the key and he told me how long he reckoned the job would take.’

‘Did he tell you how much it would cost?’ asked Carole beadily.

‘We’d discussed that earlier.’ Tom sniggered. ‘Mrs Kendrick would be picking up the tab, anyway.’

‘So that was it?’ Carole pressed. ‘No further conversation?’

‘No, I don’t think so. And now, if you don’t mind, you’ve probably wasted enough of my valuable time. Your call did actually interrupt a very good Netflix series I was watching.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jude said meekly. Carole gave her a look. She wouldn’t have apologized for something like that. ‘Sure there was nothing else?’ Jude pleaded.

‘Oh, I do remember something,’ said Tom. ‘Just as I was about to go home – walk back to Mrs Kendrick’s house, that is – Bill Shefford asked me if I could do something for him.’

‘What was it?’

‘Witness his signature on some document.’

‘What was the document?’ demanded Carole.

‘He didn’t show me. The paper was folded down, so I could just see where he signed.’

‘And you did it, you signed?’ asked Jude.

‘Yes. No skin off my nose.’

‘And what did he do then?’

‘He said he had to get another witness to sign.’

‘Did he say who?’

‘He didn’t say, but he went straight through to the office bit … you know, where Frankie sits and works out what colour she’s going to have her hair done and where she’ll have her next perforation.’

‘And she signed it?’ asked Jude breathlessly.

‘I assume so, yes.’