The Torso in the Town

Forty-One

Billie Franks had a boning knife in her hand. Black-handled, long, with a tapering blade, unevenly scooped-out, as though it had been honed many times on a whetstone.

Jude had been allowed back from her prison into the largest room of the houseboat. Her captor stood between her and the exit to the towpath. Behind her were large windows, which perhaps she’d have more chance of smashing through than the portholes. But they were on the side of the boat that opened on to the Fether, and escape by that route might only hasten the end that was being lined up for her.

Billie Franks stood between her and the towpath. Jude knew she could try rushing the older woman, but Billie had said she’d use the knife and Jude had no reason to disbelieve her. Better to play for time, and try the old trick of engaging her enemy in conversation.

“Why did you kill Virginia Hargreaves?” she asked.

“She was going to do our business down, ruin our reputation in Fedborough.”

“How?”

“That Friday afternoon she came in the shop and complained. Said she’d been ill, been poisoned, got salmonella from something she’d bought from Franks’s grocery. I wasn’t having that. Talk like that could ruin a business in a place like Fedborough. We had our reputation to consider.”

“What had she eaten? What had made her ill?”

“An egg sandwich.”

Of all the motives for murder acted on by real-life killers or invented by crime writers, an egg sandwich did seem one of the most unlikely. Even at that moment Jude could see how ridiculous the idea was.

But it wasn’t funny. The steely determination in Billie Franks’s-eyes defused any potential humour from the situation.

“Stanley always made the egg sandwiches,” she went on. “He always made all the sandwiches. There was nothing in that shop that he hadn’t selected or prepared personally. Stanley had very high standards. It would have destroyed him to know someone claimed to have contracted salmonella from something in our shop.”

“Are you saying he didn’t know?”

There was a momentary flicker of uncertainty in Billie Franks’s eyes before she replied. “No. Stanley wasn’t in the shop when Lady Muck came in. It was just me and her.”

The line sounded like one from an old Western. Again, Jude could not be unaware of the incongruity of her situation. She, a woman in her fifties, was in a standoff with an old woman the wrong side of seventy, a slightly drab, mumsy figure whose grey hair was petrified into an unchanging perm. It was ridiculous.

And yet the knife in the old woman’s hand was very real. She definitely claimed to have killed one person, and had implied she’d killed a second. The danger was not fanciful.

Jude looked for madness in Billie Franks’s blue eyes. Madness would somehow be reassuring, give a reason for the farcical situation. But Jude couldn’t see it. Just a cold, determined rationality, which was much more chilling.

“So what happened, Billie?”

“I asked Lady Hargreaves to come with me to the office at the back of the shop, so’s I could take down details of her complaint. She didn’t know where the office was, and I took her through to Jimmy Lister’s smokehouse. He’d let us have a key to the place. He didn’t do much smoking there any more, and both shops used it for storage.” Billie Franks looked down with fascination at the knife in her hand. “Inside the smokehouse I stabbed her.”

“With that?”

The old woman nodded, then repeated, like a mantra, “Stanley had very high standards. He’d built up a reputation in Fedborough. Through all his working life. I couldn’t allow that to be put at risk.”

“So then what?”

“I knew I had to dispose of the body. There was a lot of blood, but I cleared it up, stripped off her clothes and laid the body in the bath Jimmy used for draining and soaking meat before smoking it. And that’s what gave me the idea…”

Appalled, Jude whispered, “You mean, you smoked the body?”

“I knew it would be easier to deal with if it was dry. I jointed it with this knife. Very easy. Very quick, if you know what you’re doing. My dad had taught me well.” Jude’s terrified eyes homed in on the blade. “I should have left it to soak longer, but I didn’t have time. Most of the blood had been drained out. I hung the meat on the hooks inside the kiln and lit some oak dust under it.”

Jude was beginning to wonder about her diagnosis that the woman wasn’t mad. And yet, in spite of the horrors she was describing, Billie Franks’s voice remained level and unemotional.

“But weren’t you afraid James Lister would notice the smokehouse was being used?”

“No. Stanley and I did occasionally have stuff to smoke, cheeses and what-have-you. Anyway, it was Friday night. Jimmy would be on duty at Fiona’s precious dinner party. And I’d put the fire out before he went into the shop on the Saturday.”

“So what did you do with…” Jude couldn’t match Billie’s casual use of the word ‘meat’. “…the remains?”

“I packed the limbs and her clothes into empty meat boxes, and the torso into a bigger one, and hid the lot at the back of the smokehouse. That night, the Saturday, after midnight, I took them down to the Fether.”

“How? How did you carry them?”

“We’d still kept the big old pram Debbie’d had when she was a baby. I pushed them down to the river in that.”

Here was another image so incongruous as to be laughable in any other circumstances. A neat, ordinary old grocer’s wife going through the streets of a nice middle-class West Sussex town, pushing a pram full of cured human body parts. Jude hoped she would survive to laugh with Carole at the picture.

But at that moment her chances didn’t look very good. “You did the limbs first, presumably?”

“Yes. They slipped into the water, no problem. The tide was going out. They’d be lost quickly somewhere in the Channel.”

“But the torso…? Why didn’t you get rid of the torso?” Billie Franks let out a little, rueful laugh. “Because of the tide. Because of the bloody tide. The box with the torso in it was the heaviest, took a long time for me to get it on to the pram. By the time I got down to the river, the tide had gone too low. I couldn’t risk the box getting stuck in the mud, so I hid it in one of the sheds in Bracken’s Boatyard.”

“How did it get from there to the cellar of Pelling House?”

“I’ve no idea. All I know is, next night, the Sunday, I go down the boatyard to finish the job, and the box isn’t there. I’m in a dreadful panic for days, weeks, months. I keep expecting the police to arrive at the house or the shop. But gradually time goes by and I start thinking…it’s all right. There is a God. There’s someone out there looking after us.”

Given the circumstances, this counted as one of the most bizarre expressions of belief Jude had ever heard.

“And then Stanley’s health started to deteriorate,” Billie went on. “Mental health, that is, not physical. He’s still as strong as an ox. And I’m kept busy looking after him, and arranging care for him, and selling the house…and I really do, genuinely, forget about it.”

“About the torso? About Virginia Hargreaves’s murder.”

“Yes.” The head was shaken very firmly, but still not a hair of the perm shifted. “It never happened,” she said, as if that were the end of the story.

“But then the torso was discovered…”

Billie Franks sighed at the remembered inconvenience.

“And you realized the danger, and tried to divert suspicion towards Francis?”

“Yes. My anonymous letter.” The old woman smiled at the recollection. “I thought it might work. And, even if it didn’t, I got great pleasure from giving that slimy creep a few nasty moments. After the way he treated Debbie – ”

“But once the police had identified the remains and started investigating Roddy, you knew your secret was at risk again. If his alibi could be proved, then suspicions were going to move elsewhere, weren’t they?”

“Hm?” Billie Franks sounded distracted now.

“So you killed him too, did you?”

“What?” It was an effort to pull herself back from the depths of thought. “Yes. Yes, of course. Roddy had to die too. Anything to save Stanley…” She corrected herself: “Stanley’s reputation.”

She looked down at the boning knife, as if surprised to find it still in her hand. “And now, of course, it’s you…Jude.” She savoured the unfamiliar name. “You’re the current threat to Stanley’s reputation.”

“But I’m not going to tell anyone,” said Jude cosily. “I don’t believe in justice as an abstract concept.” Which was absolutely true. “From all accounts, Virginia Hargreaves wasn’t a very admirable person. Her death doesn’t seem to have left the world much impoverished. Why don’t we agree to forget about the whole thing?”

There was a silence. Billie Franks appeared to be considering the proposition.

Jude pushed home her advantage. “Anyway, even if you managed to keep me quiet, I’ve still got friends who’ll be trying to find me. I’ve still…” The words tapered away, as Jude realized what a foolish change of direction she’d taken.

The old woman shook her head, almost with regret. “That’s the argument for killing you, I’m afraid, Jude. You and everyone else who threatens Stanley’s reputation. However many there are.”

She’d moved suddenly forward and seized Jude’s wrist. The grip was surprisingly strong, considering her age. Jude tried to break free, but stopped when she felt the prick of the knifepoint in the softness under her jaw.

Billie Franks leaned against the glazed doors, which gave instantly. They’d been unlocked all the time, probably opened throughout the day to let in the July sunlight.

But now all outside was blackness. Jude could hear, rather than see, the rushing flow of the Fether, very close now.

“I’m sorry.” Billie sounded genuinely apologetic. “I can’t take the risk of you staying alive.”

She nudged Jude forward on to the sill of the doors. Encountering resistance, the point of the knife was pushed more firmly into the soft neck.

“I can swim,” said Jude desperately.

“Not in the Fether. The tide’s too strong. No one survives in the Fether – particularly if they’re unconscious when they go in.”

The moment Jude felt her wrist released, she saw Billie Franks’s arm rising up with a bottle in its grasp. It reached the top of its arc, and she waited for the inevitable concussion.

“Mum…”

The monosyllable was spoken softly, from the doorway to the towpath. Billie Franks froze at the sound of her daughter’s voice.

“Mum, put that down. And the knife. That’s not going to help Dad.”

There was a stillness on the houseboat. The rushing chatter of the Fether sounded louder than ever.

Then Jude felt the easing of pressure from the knife-point under her chin. The woman, suddenly older and more bent, turned towards her daughter. The bottle and the boning knife dropped, making loud clatters on the polished wood of the floor.

In the doorway, framing Debbie Carlton, Jude could see Carole and Ted Crisp.

Never had there been a more welcome sight.