The Torso in the Town

Thirty-Three

Carole had chosen a good day to find James Lister. He was propping up the bar when she entered the Coach and Horses, because, as he soon explained with a confidential wink, “Fiona’s organizing a charity lunch and, while the cat’s away…”

Carole wondered if he’d realized how apposite in the context the word ‘cat’ was.

In his wife’s absence, James was once again all flirtatious bravado, and he was clearly very pleased when Carole agreed to have lunch with him ‘in a little French place I know just round the corner’.

She was totally unworried about him making any sexual advances to her. Fiona Lister might not actually be present, but the deterrent qualities of her personality spread outwards like radiation from Chernobyl, guaranteeing her husband wouldn’t – probably couldn’t – do anything physical. And, in the cause of advancing her investigation, Carole was prepared to put up with any amount of clumsy verbal innuendo.

The ‘little French place’ seemed pretty ordinary to her, but James Lister made an elaborate routine of chatting up the owner and insisting on a table in the window, overlooking the High Street. With a wink, as he ushered Carole to her seat, he told her that ‘Jean-Pierre’s always got a table for me’. Since the restaurant was only a quarter full, this didn’t seem such a big deal.

She was slightly annoyed, though, when James, with a sideways look at her as he edged her chair in, and another wink to the proprietor, whispered, “Not a word to the wife, eh, Jean-Pierre?”

“Of course not,” the owner murmured back, “you dog.”

James Lister looked very pleased with himself as he took his seat. Oh well, thought Carole, if that’s how he gets his kicks…If he’s making the outrageous assumption that I might have any sexual interest in him, I suppose it doesn’t do any harm. All I’m here for is to pick his brains, and the more relaxed and intimate we are for that, the better.

“Now what’s the lovely lady going to drink? Stay with the white wine, eh? Jean-Pierre does a very fine Graves.” He pronounced it like the things found in churchyards.

“Bit sweet for me. If he’s got a Chardonnay or something…”

“Very well Jean-Pierre, a bottle of your finest – ”

“Just a glass. I’ve got to drive later.”

He seemed relieved. If they’d got a bottle, he’d have felt obliged to drink wine too, and he really wanted to stay with the beer. He asked for a Stella Artois. Then there was a food-ordering routine with Jean-Pierre, involving a lot of “Do you have any of that wonderful casserole with the truffles and…?”

James ended up ordering a rare steak and chips – “or whatever the French is for French Fries.” Carole chose a mushroom omelette. Unlike Jude, she’d had an adequate breakfast. James went into the masculine knee-jerk reaction of trying to get her to order something more elaborate and expensive, but soon gave up.

Their drinks arrived. He took a long swallow, wiped the froth off his white moustache and then seemed to think he should have made a toast. “What shall it be – to us?”

Carole wriggled out of that by saying, “How about – to the success of the Fedborough Festival?”

Though not what he’d had in mind, as a dutiful burgher of the town he couldn’t fault the worthiness of her suggestion. He raised his glass to hers. “I’m not sure what to make of all this Street Theatre business…”

“It’s not my idea of entertainment,” said Carole tartly. “I take the rather old-fashioned view that the proper venue for theatre is inside a theatre.”

“I wouldn’t disagree with that.” He seemed relieved that he wasn’t lunching with a fervent advocate of the avant garde. “Are you going to see any of the proper theatre in the Festival?”

“I don’t think so. We – ” She remembered Fedborough’s view of her relationship with Jude. “I’ve done a bit of the Art Crawl, but nothing else. Are you seeing much?”

“Oh yes. Fiona’s on various committees and is a Director of the Festival.” She would be, thought Carole. “So we’ll be doing the Mozart in All Souls on Monday, and then The Cherry Orchard on Wednesday.” He made it sound as though root-canal work would be a more attractive option.

“Still, enough about me.” He wiped his moustache again, roguishly this time. “Let’s talk about you, Carole. I hardly know anything about you. Tell me everything.”

That was the last thing Carole ever intended to do. Least of all to James Lister. She shrugged. “I took early retirement from the Home Office.” Still sounded the wrong verb. “I was given early retirement from the Home Office’ would be nearer the truth. But never mind that. And I’m divorced.”

“Ah.” This seemed to confirm something in his mind. “I knew Fiona was wrong.”

“About what?”

“Oh.” He coloured. “Oh, she was just saying…she just thought…”

Carole knew exactly what he meant. Maybe now he’d go back to his wife and tell her she’d got the wrong end of the stick about Carole and Jude’s relationship. James Lister was a straightforward soul. In his scheme of things, the fact that a woman had once been married automatically excluded the possibility that she might be lesbian.

There was an edge of disappointment in his expression, though. No doubt, like a lot of men, he had been intrigued by the chance of finding out what lesbians actually did to each other.

“So your marriage didn’t work out?” he blundered on.

“No.” Which was all Carole was prepared to say on the subject. But, slightly cheekily, she couldn’t resist adding, “Unlike yours.”

“What? Oh yes.” He cleared his throat. “In fact, you know, Carole, what you see on the outside of a marriage can sometimes be misleading. Fiona is a wonderful woman in many ways – ”

No, I can’t stand it, thought Carole. Not the ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ routine. Anything but that. Time to move the conversation on. And he’d given her the perfect opportunity.

“You’re so right,” she interrupted. “From what I hear, Roddy and Virginia Hargreaves’s marriage looked all right from the outside.”

“Ye-es, to an extent. I mean, there was a feeling round Fedborough that it was a slightly unlikely pairing.”

“Why?”

“Well, she had a title,” he said reverently. “She was really ‘Lady Virginia’…”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And Roddy was…well…”

“From the little I saw of him, he was fairly upper-crust too. Public-school accent, and all that.”

“Yes…” James Lister shook his head knowingly. “But he hadn’t got a title.”

“Oh, look.” Out of the window, Carole had just seen Jude walking up the High Street, picking her way between stilted butterflies, in her customary careless ripple of drapery.

“It’s your friend, yes.”

“She’ll be going up to the Coach and Horses. I said I might be in there.”

“Oh. Do you want me to go out and ask her to join us?” he asked unwillingly.

“No, no, don’t worry. She’s probably doing some more of the Art Crawl. We’ve fixed to meet later. It’s fine.”

James Lister relaxed visibly, drained his beer and asked Jean-Pierre for another. Then, remembering his manners, he asked if Carole would like more wine.

She agreed to another glass. The cosier they got together, the easier it might be to ask the questions she had in mind.

“Presumably,” she embarked, “everyone in Fedborough’s been talking a lot about the Hargreaves…?”

“Not that much, really. I mean, all kinds of rumours were going around before, but once Roddy’s body was found…there wasn’t much room left for speculation, was there? Besides, everyone’s got caught up with the Fedborough Festival starting and…you know, things move on.”

“Yes.” Carole warmed to her task. “So the theory is…Roddy killed her that February weekend three years ago…Why?”

“Why?”

“Why did he kill her?”

“Well…We’ve just been saying it’s difficult to see inside a marriage, that things look different on the outside…Presumably, he killed her because they were married.”

Not an entirely satisfactory answer, but that wasn’t what Carole was there to talk about, so she moved on. “All right. If we accept that, then we must also accept that Roddy was the one who cut up her body. And then ask the question: why would he do that?”

“To make it easier to dispose of.”

Everyone seemed to be agreed on that point. Carole nodded thoughtfully. “Makes sense. So somehow he disposed of the arms and legs and then…why didn’t he dispose of the torso?”

“Someone was suspicious of him? He was afraid of being seen getting rid of it? I don’t think we’ll ever know the full details.”

“No. And yet, aware that a large part of his wife’s body was hidden in the cellar, Roddy Hargreaves then sold Pelling House to Francis and Debbie Carlton. Doesn’t that seem strange behaviour to you?”

James Lister shrugged. “Roddy was a strange chap. Pissed – sorry, pardon my French, drunk – most of the time. He’d forget things.”

Another less than satisfactory explanation. “You saidyou sold your business about three years ago…” He nodded acknowledgment. “And the Frankses next door to you sold up round the same time?”

Another nod. “Stanley had been getting very forgetful. For different reasons, we were both running our businesses down.”

“Terry Harper said the grocery was in quite a state when he bought it.”

“Yes. Our withdrawal at the butcher’s was rather more orderly. Last six months we were moving stuff out of the place, cutting down the amount of goods we stocked.”

“And was Stanley Franks doing the same?”

“The effect was the same, but in his case it was because he was getting so forgetful. He really couldn’t manage any more. I kept offering to help, said he could store stuff in the smokehouse, that kind of thing, but he wouldn’t listen. I think he was very aware of the state he was in, but pretended it wasn’t happening. He got very snappish if anyone suggested anything, offered him help, or criticized him.”

“But you used the smokehouse as a storeroom?”

“You bet. Stopped smoking our own goods more than a year before I retired. You could get the stuff from wholesalers, it saved an awful lot of palaver. And none of the people in the town seemed that bothered. Not much point in making an effort as a small shopkeeper when your customers can get a wider range at the supermarkets than anything you’ve got on offer…”

James Lister’s hobby-horse was threatening to loom into view, so Carole moved quickly to a new question. “You told me and Jude that it would be easy for a qualified butcher to dismember a human body…”

He chuckled knowingly. “Dead easy.”

“What would he use – a saw?”

“No way. 1b do a neat job, you wouldn’t need to cut through any bones. Just use a boning knife round the joints. They’d come away neat and tidy, no problem.”

“But it wouldn’t be such an easy job for someone unqualified?”

He shook his head, enjoying being the fount of knowledge. “No way. Get a real pig’s breakfast once you get the amateurs involved. I’m sure they’d use saws, axes, machetes, cleavers. When it’s done properly, you know, butchery’s a very tidy trade.”

Their steak and omelette arrived. After some coy badinage with Jean-Pierre, James Lister guffawed. “What a subject to be talking about over lunch, eh? When all I want to know is how a pretty little thing like you came to end up in Fethering, of all places.”

Though it went against every instinct she possessed, Carole manufactured an appropriately girlish giggle. “Just one more thing before we eat, though…”

“Mm?” His steak knife was already sawing through the red meat.

“If Roddy Hargreaves had no training as a butcher, how was he able to make such a neat job of dismembering his wife?”

James Lister chuckled. He was bored with this conversation now, and wanted to move on to more intimate topics. “I’ve no idea. Maybe, in an earlier part of his life, he’d trained as a butcher. You’d be amazed the people who’ve got butchery skills tucked away in their past…”

“Really?” Carole leaned closer.

He was enjoying this. Fuelled as he was by the beer, her proximity made him potentially indiscreet, even a little reckless. “I tell you, there’s one very fine upmarketlady of Fedborough who…you’d take your life in your hands if you mentioned it to her…but she used to work as a butcher.”

“Who was that then?” Carole managed to get a teasing, almost sexy, quality into her voice.

“Ooh, I don’t think I should tell you.”

“Go on…” she pleaded.

“Well…Not a word to a soul, but I’m talking about Fiona. My wife.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. Early days of our marriage, before the kids came along, she used to help in the shop with me and my old dad.”

“Well, well, well…”

“Bloody good butcher she was too.”

And certainly still knows how to put the knife in, thought Carole Seddon. But her only words were, “Was she?”