‘Brandie, it’s OK. I know your interest in becoming a healer is genuine … and I’m willing to do anything I can to help you on the way.’
‘Bless you, Jude.’ The reassurance had worked. Brandie grinned. ‘I’ll give you a call.’
‘You do that.’
After Brandie had gone, Jude picked up the Dulux colour chart which she’d hidden under a cushion and set off.
She had already decided which colour she was going to have her sitting room painted, long before she talked to Carole or Brandie. Pale Sage. Dulux paint, readily available, didn’t even need special mixing.
Brandie would not have disapproved. Green, after all – as she undoubtedly knew – was the colour corresponding with the fourth chakra, the Heart. Whose main issues were Love and Relationships. And the sense with which it was associated was Touch. What could be more appropriate for healing hands?
Footscrow House had had a great variety of incarnations. Originally a rectory, it had been built back in those Victorian days when the size of the clergyman’s residence bore no relation to the size of his parish or congregation. At the time the foundation stone was laid, Fethering was little more than a fishing village. Though the fishermen and their families were dutiful churchgoers and appeared every week in their Sunday best, they only filled half the pews of All Saints Church. But that didn’t reduce the scale on which the ten-bedroomed Footscrow House had been built. Clergymen of the time were notorious for having large families., as well as having a very comfortable lifestyle.
The building stayed in clerical occupancy until the early 1930s, when it was replaced by a smaller, rather drab new rectory further down the road. The next manifestation of the former rectory was as a boys’ prep school, surviving until staff shortages caused by the Second World War forced the place to close. Footscrow House then remained empty and in a state of progressive dilapidation until the 1950s, when it became an ‘approved school’. Since its pupils were what were then referred to as ‘juvenile delinquents’, it was certainly not approved of by the increasingly middle-class Fethering villagers. That incarnation closed, amidst unspecified and uninvestigated allegations of child abuse, in the late 1960s.
Thereafter, the building transmuted into – in no particular order – an upmarket restaurant, a drug rehabilitation centre (again not allowed to survive long by the censorious residents of Fethering), a boutique hotel, an alternative therapy spa, a care home, and the shrine of a cult led by the usual self-appointed and sexually voracious Messiah.
The one quality that all these enterprises had in common was complete lack of success. Nobody seemed able to make money out of Footscrow House. So much so that the building gained the local nickname of ‘Fiasco House’.
That afternoon, when Jude went there to tell Pete the decorator about the colour choice for her sitting room, Fiasco House was in the process of being converted, by a local property developer called Roland Lasalle, into holiday flatlets.
As she approached the open front doors, a burly-looking elderly man came hurtling out of them. His hair and the beard on his prominent chin were steel-grey. A navy-blue polo shirt was stretched across his chubby but muscular torso. On its left-hand side was a yellow machine-embroidered logo, reading ‘Lasalle Build and Design’. The man seemed preoccupied about something, angry perhaps. Certainly too caught up in his own affairs to notice Jude as he swept past her. He got into an open-backed truck parked outside, slamming the door, and driving off with something approaching fury.
On the side of the truck was painted the same logo. ‘Lasalle Build and Design’.
Jude, always intrigued by human behaviour, idly wondered what had put the man’s nose out of joint.
Like Jude, Pete must have been somewhere in his fifties. He’d been a decorator all his adult life, starting an apprenticeship straight out of school, working for local firms through his twenties into his early thirties when he set up on his own.
His high professional standards, honest charges and easy-going personality had built up a high reputation in the Fethering area. He didn’t advertise in the local press or free sheets, his services weren’t listed in the Yellow Pages, and he’d never bothered with social media or Checkatrade. His work came exclusively from personal recommendation. In a small community, word of mouth always trumps any amount of publicity.
Pete had worked on the inside and outside of many houses in Fethering. Some jobs had lasted less than a day, others weeks or even months. Owners had come to regard him as a welcome part of the furniture, an almost forgotten presence in their homes. And he’d got used to one job leading to another in the same house. Like most decorators, he had become accustomed to frequent requests beginning, ‘Oh, while you’re here …’, ‘Could you just …?’ and ‘Would it be possible for you to …?’
He was married with kids and his hobby was sailing. Never happier than when out on the water, he was a long-term stalwart of Fethering Yacht Club.
Pete was small and wiry but surprisingly strong. D-I-Y enthusiasts who spend any length of time up ladders soon realize the fitness required by being up one all day. Decorating involves a great deal of heavy lifting, moving beds and wardrobes to access the walls behind them. Every day is hard physical labour.
He had yellow-blond hair, showing no signs of greying, but beginning to thin from a growing circle of exposed skin at the back. His teeth were uneven, as though too many of them were trying to fit into his mouth. Throughout the year he wore paint-splattered overalls. The only thing that changed with the seasons was the number of garment layers beneath them.
It wasn’t the first time Pete had worked on Footscrow House. Each new doomed incarnation of the place had involved a makeover, and he’d been employed in many of the more recent transitions. First under the aegis of Brenton Wilkinson, the owner of the firm he worked for as a young man, and later as an independent sole trader.
He had fixed with Jude that she could pop into the building that afternoon if she wanted to discuss colours. Then he could order the paint at the trade counter where he usually did business and be ready to start on Woodside Cottage Monday of the next week. He’d be working at Footscrow House till five, which was when he ended his working day, having usually started at eight in the morning. Though the building would be locked up at night, there was much toing and froing of other workmen during the day and Jude’s appearance on the site would not be questioned.
Or maybe it would be simpler if she gave him a call when she was on her way and he could meet her downstairs …? They agreed to follow that plan.
Pete was waiting in the hall when she arrived and gave her a characteristic toothy grin. ‘Hi, Jude.’
‘Hi. You all right?’
A bigger grin. ‘As ever.’
Before they could get into discussion of colours, they were interrupted by the appearance from one of the downstairs rooms of a tweed-suited, bustling man. Probably round fifty, reddish hair, shorter than average height, he carried a clipboard loaded with papers and an air of self-importance.
‘Pete,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’m paying you to paint, not to stand around chatting up your girlfriends.’
Before the decorator had the opportunity to reply, the man had bustled out of the front door.
Jude could read in Pete’s expression how much the words had hurt. In all the years he’d been employed round Fethering, nobody had ever questioned his work ethic.
‘I’d better go up and get on,’ he mumbled as he started for the stairs.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Jude.
He didn’t object and she followed him silently up to the stripped-back room where he was working.