As they reached the bottom of the stairs, a finger once again rose conspiratorially to his lips. Tentatively Harry reached a foot over the stripped floorboards of the hall. “Have to go carefully here. Some of them creak.”
They successfully negotiated the route across to the cellar door. Sure enough, it still had police tape and notices on it. The seals were threaded through rivets fixed into the walls. Proud of his handiwork, Harry pulled them gingerly apart.
“Why did you do it?” Jude whispered.
He shrugged. “I was bored. Wanted to know what the policed been up to,” he breathed back. “Also…” He gulped, suddenly losing confidence. “I wanted to go down there, to sort of, I don’t know, look at…”
“Confront your fear?”
Harry nodded. Boldly taking hold of the handle, he opened the door down to the cellar. At the same moment, he produced the torch from his pocket, and pointed its beam down the stairs. “Come on.”
He gently closed the door behind them, and they stepped into the void.
The cellar still contained police equipment, revealed by the sweeps of his torch. Lights on tripods, metal equipment boxes whose contents Jude could only guess at, unspecified objects binned in labelled polythene bags.
The effect was, if anything, antiseptic. The horror was gone. So was the chipboard partition which had screened the torso. The space where it had lain was clinically empty; every trace of body and box had been meticulously combed through, bagged up and removed for analysis.
“Was it just like this when you came down yesterday?” Harry nodded.
“But you still needed to be here?”
“Yes. I pictured it again. I concentrated, and recreated the image of what I had seen.”
“How long were you down here?”
“Two, three hours.”
“Did it help?”
Another nod. “As I said, nobody would talk to me about what I’d seen. But I needed to…” Though his words trailed away, they were very eloquent.
“Yes. I understand why you – ”
There was a sudden clatter from above them. Light from the hall flooded the cellar.
Framed in the doorway stood the outline of Grant Roxby. “What the hell’re you doing down here?”
The beam of Harry’s torch swung round to spotlight his father’s face, which was contorted with rage. Not just rage, though. There was another emotion there, and it looked like guilt.
Sixteen
“It’s all rather frustrating,” said Carole on the Monday. She’d proposed lunch, predictably rejected Jude’s suggestion of going to the Crown and Anchor, and said she’d assemble something for them. But even the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc failed to make the chicken salad in her kitchen look convivial. The weather had changed too; it was dull and drizzly outside. Deprived of a long walk, Gulliver looked reproachfully mournful slumped against the cold Aga.
“I mean, we’ve got so little information,” she went on. “And the vital question we haven’t managed to answer yet is: who does the torso belong to? Until we know that, we haven’t got proper motivation for anyone.”
“Doesn’t stop us having suspects,” said Jude. She was, as ever, more philosophical about their lack of progress. “And really those come down to the people who have at one time or another owned Felling House.”
“Roddy Hargreaves…”
“Yes. Whose Sloane Rangerish wife Virginia disappeared, and thus becomes a potential candidate for the job of victim.”
“Debbie and Francis Carlton…”
“Who’ve suddenly moved up the suspect list, if thepolice really have summoned him all the way from Florida.”
“That’s what Grant Roxby told me. But we don’t know the details. Francis Carlton may not be a suspect, they may just want to ask him some questions.”
“Couldn’t they do that on the phone?”
“We have absolutely no idea, Jude. That’s the trouble. We don’t really know anything.”
“Stop sounding so miserable about it.” Jude smiled in a way that she knew to be potentially infuriating. “Ignorance has certain advantages. Our minds are less cluttered by extraneous detail.”
Carole snorted. “Thank you very much, Pollyanna. Our minds are less cluttered by any detail.”
“Which leaves them free and hair-trigger sensitive.” Jude wasn’t going to be infected by her friend’s gloom. “OK, Roddy Hargreaves and Francis Carlton…I don’t think we can rule out Debbie Carlton either. If her husband’s a suspect, then so’s she.”
“What do you base that on?”
Jude shrugged. “As little logic as any other thoughts we’ve had about the case. But she does seem to have gone out of her way to be helpful to your investigation. Since the effect that’s had has been to make you more suspicious of her ex-husband, maybe that’s what she wanted to do in the first place. Divert suspicion away from herself?”
“Huh.”
“Just a thought. And then there’s Grant. The way he reacted to seeing me and Harry in the cellar yesterday was very odd.”
“Anger at his son’s behaviour, I would imagine. He must’ve realized Harry had cut through the police seals.”
“Don’t know. There seemed to be more to it than that,” Carole sniffed. “Well, if you’re going to have Grant as a suspect, we should have Kim too.”
“What makes you say that?”
“As little logic as any other thoughts we’ve had about the case,” she parroted.
“Touché.” Jude grinned. “The trouble is, we don’t seem to be being very proactive.”
“Sorry?”
“We aren’t driving this investigation. People keep coming to us with ideas for moving it on.”
“Back to your conspiracy theory, are we?”
Jude shook her head ruefully. “Maybe. There is something odd happening. As if someone is orchestrating the way we think about things.”
“So who is that someone? Or are we talking about all the residents of Fedborough?”
“At times it almost seems like that. Don’t you find something spooky about the place, Carole?”
“Spooky?”
“Yes. As if everyone knows what everyone else is thinking. And as soon as anyone gets any information, it’s immediately spread around the entire network.”
“That’s how country towns work.”
“Hm. But it does somehow seem that the timing of things is arranged to – ”
The telephone rang. Carole answered it. “Oh, hello.” She mouthed to Jude, “Debbie Carlton.”
“See what I mean,” Jude mouthed back.
They went into Fedborough again on the Thursday, the morning for which Debbie had issued another invitation to coffee. She’d got in some new curtain fabric samples which, while fully understanding that Carole wasn’t committed to going ahead with any interior design work, she’d still like her to have a look at.
Carole had agreed, undecided whether what Debbie said was true, or was just an excuse to talk further about the discovery at her former home. Jude was convinced of the latter explanation. The timing of Debbie’s phone call, apart from anything else, had to be significant. Jude believed in synchronicity and other mystical concepts which, in her neighbour’s mind, were lumped together under the definition ‘nonsense’.
In spite of herself, though, Carole still felt a little glow of excitement as she parked the Renault at the top of Fedborough High Street.
Jude had fixed to have another session with Harry Roxby. After his anger at finding them in the cellar on the Sunday, Grant had been very quickly calmed down by his wife, and agreed with surprising meekness that Jude’s ‘treatment’ of their son should continue. He had even agreed that Harry should be allowed to take the Thursday morning off school, as if the boy’s session with Jude was like a genuine medical appointment.