“And did you?”
“Yes.” Remembered guilt flashed across his face. “Fiona has her Church Choir rehearsals on a Tuesday.”
“And what kind of state was Roddy Hargreaves in?”
“Totally paralytic. He must’ve been drinking solidly for two or three days. I assumed he’d been doing it because the boatyard business had gone belly-up, but of course now I realize he had something on his mind he wanted to forget even more – the murder of his wife.”
“Did he actually tell you how long he’d been away?” asked Carole casually.
“No, he wasn’t coherent enough for that.” James Lister flicked his moustache as a new thought struck him. “Or perhaps he was just pretending to be incoherent…? Yes, perhaps he was completely sober, and he’d only gone to France to establish an alibi.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well…” The butcher warmed to his new role of criminal investigator. “Let’s say he’d killed Virginia over the weekend, on the Saturday…Then he’d nipped over to France on the Sunday and pretended he’d been there longer than he had.”
“Yes, that makes sense,” Carole lied. She exchanged a flick of the eyelids with Jude, as Roddy Hargreaves’s real alibi seemed to be confirmed.
“Have the police talked to you about any of this?” asked Carole.
James Lister was affronted. “Good heavens, no.”
“If they have decided Roddy Hargreaves murdered his wife, you’d have thought they’d have asked around the town.”
“Well, they haven’t talked to me.” His tone implied the end of that topic of conversation.
“Speaking as a professional…” Jude contrived to get a Marilyn Monroe breathiness into her voice. “…would it be easy for someone untrained to dismember a corpse?”
James Lister guffawed. He was much happier with this subject. On his home ground. “Depends on the quality of the job you were after. Any idiot with a chainsaw could cut a body up. If you wanted it neatly jointed…well, for that you’d need someone qualified.”
“Mm…” said Jude coquettishly. “Interesting.”
Twenty-Six
The original concept of the Art Crawl had been a brilliant one, but Terry Harper’s attempt to improve the quality of the art on show was not popular with Fedborough opinion. Almost as enjoyable as snooping round the houses of people one knew vaguely was the opportunity of being disparaging about the creative efforts of people one knew vaguely. When the artist in question was not on the premises, but in London, Paris, Hamburg or Amsterdam, the pleasure of murmuring “I wouldn’t give house-room to that” was considerably diminished.
The fact that the art on display was of a higher standard than in previous years did not make a blind bit of difference. Nobody in Fedborough knew anything about art, anyway. They took much more pleasure in sniggering at a local amateur’s random spars of driftwood impaled by rusty nails or leather bookmarks embossed with Celtic runes than they did in appreciating a delicate watercolour, a subtly lit photograph or a thought-provoking collage of disaster images by a professional artist.
The people of Fedborough did not know much about art, but they knew what they liked – and that was stigmatizing the excesses of other people in Fedborough. So before Carole and Jude started their tour at three o’clock on the Friday afternoon, that year’s Art Crawl had already received the communal thumbs-down.
The system was blissfully simple. Throughout the Fedborough Festival, some twenty-five houses around the town opened themselves up as impromptu galleries between two and six every afternoon. In each one, visitors could pick up a map which marked the venues, with the names of the artists exhibiting and brief descriptions of the work on show. There was no obligation to complete the full circuit. One could take in a couple of artists, stop for tea in one of the many teashops or buy the odd antique, and then take in a couple more. All the art on display was available for sale, and quite a lot of it got purchased.
The Art Crawl, for whatever reasons, brought a large number of people into the town, and was deemed a good thing by the local Chamber of Commerce.
Interest in the Art Crawl, and in the many other events of the Festival, would build up over the ten days of its duration, but on the Friday afternoon the town was relatively empty. Which suited Carole and Jude perfectly.
They had had no doubt as to what should be their first artistic port of call. Jude had yet to meet Debbie Carlton, and they were delighted when they emerged at the top of the stairs, to find the artist alone in her flat.
She had moved most of the furniture out of the sitting room to make more space for the anticipated art-lovers. There were many more paintings on the walls than there had been before. All were in the same style, evoking drowsy afternoons in Italy, but they demonstrated infinite subtle variations. Debbie Carlton fully justified Terry Harper’s description: ‘one of the few genuinely talented artists in Fedborough’.
“This is Jude, my neighbour. I’ve been going on so much about your paintings, she was desperate to come and have a look.”
Jude slipped easily into the slight exaggeration. “You bet. And from a quick look I can tell Carole was absolutely right. Wonderful stuff.”
Debbie Carlton glowed. Though she claimed to be suffering from a hangover following her Private View the night before, she looked very pretty that afternoon, casual in clown-like dungarees, almost beautiful, and totally relaxed. Carole was even more aware of the tension that her ex-husband’s presence had engendered.
“You’re my first visitors. I’ve been sitting here for the last hour wondering if anyone was going to come, and wondering if I dared go off to the loo, in case someone did.” –
“Feel at liberty to do so now,” said Carole. “We’ll guard your premises against international art thieves.”
Debbie grinned. “The urge has gone away. Just nerves, I expect. This is a different kind of tension for me. I got terribly nervous yesterday before the Private View, but then at least I knew everyone was going to arrive at about the same time. Waiting around like this is a sort of extended torture.”
“Well, I hope our arrival has taken the curse off it,” said Jude, whose eyes were darting round the paintings on the wall.
“Yes, I think it has.”
“Ooh, I love that one!” Jude swooped towards a small close-up of a terracotta urn from which sharp green plant tendrils trailed. “It is for sale, isn’t it?”
“They’re all for sale. Except for the ones with red stickers on. Those were bought at the Private View last night.”
“Great! I’ll have this one! How much?”
Carole Seddon looked on, open-mouthed. What Jude had said was the wrong way round. You didn’t decide to buy something and then ask the price. The correct procedure was to find out the price, assess whether you could afford the object in question and whether it might not be better to consider the decision overnight. If the sums made sense, and you were feeling particularly impulsive, then you might proceed to make the purchase on the spot.
Jude didn’t work that way. On being told the catalogue listed seventy-five pounds, with a cry of ‘Cheap at the price’, she immediately whipped a cheque book from her bag and started writing. Flamboyantly, she ripped the cheque out and handed it to a delighted Debbie Carlton.
This little transaction raised two intriguing questions for Carole. One was an old, recurrent one: where did Jude get her money from, what did she live on? Carole was no nearer to answering that than she had been when her new neighbour first moved in to Woodside Cottage.