And Mrs Metarius, or Miss Nichol, or whoever she happened to be, roared with laughter.
When they arrived that morning, they found Fedborough en fête – or as en fête as a middle-class English country town is capable of being. Had they had a Fedborough Festival programme, they would have known that the Saturday had been designated ‘Street Theatre Day’. The result of this had been an invasion of the town by a wide variety of ‘performance artists’, each of whom had a personal definition of what constituted a ‘performance’, not to mention what constituted ‘art’.
There was a predictable ration of clowns sounding hooters and scattering streamers, white-faced mimes feeling their way round the inside of invisible glass boxes, and people who apparently made their living by being sprayed gold and standing still for hours on end.
There were also more inventive displays. Huge butterflies on stilts stepped their delicate way up the steep incline of the High Street. A black-face chain-gang in striped American prison uniforms straggled along, stopping every now and then to perform tuneless spirituals. In and out of the shops, Henry VIII and his Six Wives played hide and seek for no very good reason.
The reactions of the good people of Fedborough to these antics varied. Some, particularly those with small children, stopped and marvelled at the free entertainment. Others, mostly of the older generation, got extremely English about the whole thing, resolutely pretending it wasn’t happening. Elderly tweeded men and women walked past figures dressed as traffic islands and benappied adult babies without the slightest flicker of an eyebrow. They hadn’t survived the worst that Hitler could throw at them to be fazed by a group of show-offs.
Jude and Carole, predictably enough, differed in their reactions to the spectacle. Jude looked around in giggling wonderment, while Carole’s body language reflected her long-held dread of audience participation, fiercely resisting the notion that any of the performers might make her do anything.
A clown in eccentric Victorian frock coat and steeple hat urged them to pose for his ancient camera. Carole was not quick enough to walk away, and while he fiddled under a black cape before the inevitable explosion from his flash-pan, Jude grabbed her in a hug for the photograph.
With some vigour, Carole moved away. One didn’t want to give any fuel to the misapprehensions of Fedborough.
Jude found this reaction terribly funny, and was still giggling after they had parted and she had set off down the High Street towards Fedborough Bridge.
The rendezvous Harry Roxby had chosen for them once again revealed him to be a rather young fifteen. Following the instructions he’d given her on the phone, Jude crossed over the bridge, away from the main part of the town. She walked along the deserted towpath. The side of the river nearer the town was the tourist route, past the old boatsheds which had proved the financial undoing of Roddy Hargreaves. In that direction people could follow the river for miles, go into the open country, even join up with the South Downs Way. The side where Jude was, the path led only to the houseboats that rode upand down on the tide along the Fether. Most of them were in such a state of dilapidation that, but for James Lister’s assurances to the contrary during his Town Walk, she would have doubted whether any were still inhabited. Presumably, though, their owners were unworried by the outside appearances of their homes and lived in cosily neat interiors.
The houseboat nearest to the bridge was the only one that looked smart. The high windows of the main section were shrouded by pale cotton blinds. Behind these, rows of portholes, diminishing in size, punctuated the hull towards the back of the boat. Burnished wood gleamed; so did the spotless brass of the boat’s fittings. The conversion made such a design statement that Jude didn’t need to see the neat sign reading Alan Burnethorpe – Architect’ to identify its owner.
Harry’s instructions had been very specific. She was to stop before she reached the houseboats, exactly opposite the centre of the inlet dug out for Roddy’s ill-fated marina. This she did with some annoyance. There was no sign of anyone. Was the boy having her on? Had he got too deeply into his role-playing espionage game? Was she part of some adolescent practical joke?
Jude decided to give him five minutes, then see if Carole had found James Lister in the Coach and Horses. She looked down at the swollen khaki of the river, at that time of day flowing resolutely, but bizarrely, upstream.
“Hello, Jude.”
Harry’s voice, definitely his voice, but she had no idea where it was coming from.
“Where are you?”
He let out a little crowing giggle. “I can see you, but you can’t see me.” The sound seemed to be emerging from the river itself.
Jude stepped forward towards the edge. Suddenly there was a rustling of grass in front of her, and she saw Harry Roxby’s head.
He showed her the hiding place. A walkway had been dug down into the bank, presumably to connect with some long-vanished landing stage. There were the remains of wooden steps, but tall grass had grown over to conceal the entrance completely.
“I found it,” said Harry proudly, sounding nearer ten than fifteen. “It’s my secret hideaway. Nobody knows when I’m down here.”
Jude was in no mood to play Peter Pan games. “You said you had something to tell me.”
“Yes. It’s something that I think could have a bearing on our investigation,” he said portentously.
“Come on, Harry, get on with it.”
His expression showed he’d rather have spun the suspense out longer, but he succumbed to the strength of her will. “The thing is, Jude, I’d never met Mr Hargreaves…you know, the one who’s supposed to have killed his wife.”
“So?”
“So I didn’t know what he looked like. Then yesterday I saw the local paper. Probably been lying round the house for days, but I never bother looking at it, because nothing interesting ever happens down here.” He still needed to maintain his pose of the uprooted and misunderstood metropolitan. “But there was a photograph of him in it, of Mr Hargreaves, and I realized I had seen him.”
“That’s not surprising,” said Jude, who was getting a little sick of Harry’s conspiratorial game-playing. “Roddy Hargreaves was quite a familiar figure around the town.”
“No, but I saw him recently. The day he died. Last Saturday. I could have been the last person to see him alive.”
He had Jude’s full attention now. “Where did you see him, Harry?”
“Exactly where you’re standing.” The boy knew she was hooked, and now dared to extend his dramatic pauses. “I was down here in my hideaway…”
“What time of day was this?”
“Early evening. Half-past seven, eight o’clock, maybe.”
“What were you doing here?”
“Oh, I’d had a row at home. Dad was being impossible, as ever, asking when I was going to start ‘making something of my life’. So I came down here. I do that quite often. Nobody knows I’m here and – ”
“Yes, all right. What happened?”
“Well, I heard voices. On this side of the river. Which is quite unusual, because the only people who come along here are the ones who live in the houseboats, and they come and go at different times, so you don’t often hear them talking.”
“Go on!”
“I looked up through the grass. They couldn’t see me…” Recognizing the exasperation in Jude’s face, he speeded up. “And I saw this man with a purple nose, who I now know was Roddy Hargreaves.”
“Who was he with?” murmured Jude. “Did you recognize who he was with?”
“Yes. Someone you know too.”
“For heaven’s sake!” She was unable to maintain her customary serenity. “Who was it, Harry?”