Guilt at the Garage

GUILT AT THE GARAGE (The Fethering Mysteries #20) Simon Brett

To

Ian, Patrick and Alan,

with thanks for their help

in explaining how cars work

ONE

It felt like a personal invasion. Carole Seddon’s white Renault was one of her most treasured possessions. Indeed, had she ever been asked to choose between it and her Labrador Gulliver, she might well have come down on the side of the car. And now the Renault had been vandalized. Someone had smashed in the back window. Granulated glass was scattered over the boot space and upholstery.

Carole was appalled. That something like this should have happened in Fethering, of all places! A village of unimpeachable middle-class propriety, minding its own business in West Sussex on the South Coast of England. She wouldn’t have been surprised had it happened while she still lived in London, but in Fethering … The barbarians really were at the gate.

Under normal circumstances the Renault would have spent the night locked safely in the garage of her house, High Tor. But the evening before, Carole had spent having dinner with her neighbour, Jude, at Fethering’s only pub, the Crown and Anchor. She had not exceeded her customary intake of two large New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs but, though High Tor was on the High Street, less than a quarter of a mile away, the law-abiding conformist in Carole had done the responsible thing by leaving her car on the shopping parade and walking home. Jude, being more laid-back about everything, would have assessed the chances of being stopped by police on such a short trip and driven. But Jude didn’t have a car, anyway, and, of course, Carole was Carole – a woman in her fifties, thin, spiky, with a helmet of sharply cut grey hair and pale blue eyes that blinked from behind rimless glasses.

She became aware of the vandalism to her Renault the following morning when she took Gulliver for his walk. Carole had recently been experiencing a bit of pain in her right knee, but she wasn’t going to allow that to break her established routine. She just stopped more often on the beach while Gulliver scampered around her. Their regular journey passed the parade of shops. Her plan had been to let the dog stretch his legs on Fethering Beach, and then drive him back to High Tor, but that was before she had seen the smashed window.

Following fast on her initial reactions of shock and affront was one of shame. Carole Seddon had always felt guilty, frequently about things for which she could not possibly have had any responsibility. It was a legacy of her buttoned-up middle-class upbringing. She responded to this tendency towards self-blame by trying never to do anything that might invite censure. She was punctilious in her respect for the laws of the land and also for the more complex societal rules that obtained in a place like Fethering. Though she was not invited out much locally, when she was, she ensured that the reciprocal entertainment she offered was precisely balanced. Though she rarely engaged in conversation with acquaintances she met on her dog walks, she always gave them the minimum greeting of a ‘Fethering nod’. Any service from a neighbour, however small, was rewarded with a card of thanks. Though by nature distant and standoffish, Carole Seddon worked very hard not to appear distant and standoffish. Sadly, the outcome of these efforts was only to make her appear even more distant and standoffish.

Carole’s nirvana would have been to live in a world where she passed completely unnoticed. But in an English country village, such anonymity is unobtainable.

The shame prompted by the sight of her vandalized car bore this out. The Renault was hers. Everyone in Fethering knew that the Renault was hers. Everyone who saw the smashed rear window would, to Carole’s somewhat paranoid mind, be sniggering at her expense. They would be discussing her misfortune behind her back. That, to Carole, would be as much of a personal invasion as the vandalism itself. So, her first priority was to remove the evidence. To minimize the imagined derision from her neighbours, Carole needed to get the glass replaced as soon as possible.

That meant a visit to Shefford’s, Fethering’s only garage. Though she had bought the car new from a Renault dealer in Brighton, as soon as the free services under guarantee ended, she had transferred her custom to the local man. Bill Shefford had run the garage for as long as anyone in Fethering could remember. Now in his seventies, the general view in the village was that he would soon be handing over the reins to his son Billy, who had worked in the business since he left school. This opinion was unsupported by anything said by Bill himself. The word ‘retirement’ had never been heard to pass his lips. He behaved like someone who would work for ever.

Carole valued the regular contact she had established with Shefford’s. She knew, from uncomfortable experience, how easily women could be patronized by men in the motor trade. Though she would never have claimed any proficiency with machines, she had still felt diminished by the way she had been treated at the Brighton dealership. There had been no overt rudeness, just an underlying don’t-you-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-it attitude which she found distinctly unwelcome.

At Shefford’s, though, her ignorance of motoring matters was accepted but not dwelled on. Bill was canny in the management of his mature lady customers. Carole could drop in there with the tiniest anxiety about a flashing warning light and know she would get instant and courteous attention.

He had a particularly good reputation for dealing with the elderly of Fethering. When servicing was due, he would pick up the cars from their homes and return them there. And for those who needed one, a courtesy car was always available. It wasn’t a flashy new one with the Shefford’s logo on the side, but it was always safe and reliable. And for his less mobile pensionable customers, Bill would personally fill up their cars with fuel, so that they didn’t have to get out. He was one of the good guys.

So, Carole’s first instinct on seeing her vandalized car was to walk Gulliver back to High Tor – she didn’t want him to get cut by shards of glass – then return to the car and drive it straight to Shefford’s.

The garage was on the northern edge of the village, just on the edge of the Downside Estate. This sector was made up of what the older and richer residents of Fethering still referred to as ‘council houses’, though quite a few of them, following Margaret Thatcher’s lucrative initiative, were now in private ownership. The younger and richer residents of Fethering described the estate, with just the same kind of snobbery, as ‘social housing’. Sadly, because the train line from Fethering to Fedborough, and then on up to London Victoria, followed the course of the River Fether, the Downside Estate could not be described as ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, but there was a strong feeling among the more genteel residents that it should be.

Most people in Fethering only visited Shefford’s to get fuel. The nearest other filling stations were in Fedborough to the north and Worthing to the east. But the garage also offered a repair and parts services, and a fairly low-key second-hand car business, whose offers, with their marked prices behind the windscreens, were lined up on the forecourt. They all looked rather dusty and neglected.

Carole parked the Renault at the end of the used-car row, out of the way of anyone using the petrol pumps. She went to the effort of reversing in, so that the smashed window could not be seen by passing walkers or from cars. Again, she didn’t want people gossiping about her.

She went inside to the office, which hadn’t changed since the time she had been in Fethering. This was where people paid for their fuel. There was a kind of kiosk, with till and control panel to start the pumps, of which there were only four on the forecourt. The fact that it was not permanently manned showed how slow the trade in fuel was. Not being on the main road, Shefford’s customers were mostly Fethering locals – and a lot of those favoured the cheaper prices at the big supermarkets, like Tesco at Littlehampton or Sainsbury’s at Rustington.