So convincingly did he fill the role that newcomers would assume him to be village born and bred, and rarely to have stirred outside his birthplace.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. As Carole and Jude knew well, Barney Poulton had retired to Fethering relatively recently, having spent his working life commuting daily from Walton-on-Thames to a solicitor’s practice in London. But that didn’t stop him from expounding on every local issue.
He did this, much to the annoyance of Ted Crisp, the bearded, unkempt and unreconstructed landlord of the Crown and Anchor, who, at the pub’s quiet times, provided the only audience for Barney’s endless ruminations. Boring local regulars are among the enduring hazards of running a pub. Sometimes Ted wished he’d followed the example of a publican friend of his who’d put up over his end of the bar a notice reading: ‘NO SYMPATHY CORNER’.
Fortunately, that early evening, Ted did not have to face the monologue alone. Apart from Carole and Jude, there were a few other regulars in the bar, all of whom, in the Fethering way, the two women knew by name, though they’d never spent much time with them. They were people who, on encounter in the village, would have received a ‘Fethering nod’ from Carole and a beaming vocal greeting from Jude.
But there was an elderly couple in the pub that evening whom Jude knew a bit better. They were sitting in one of the alcoves, finishing an early fish-and-chips supper, each making a modest half of bitter last the meal. Leslie and Vi Benyon, both in their eighties. Vi had the comfortable contours of a cottage loaf. Leslie, by contrast, was stick thin. In fact, they reminded Jude of a long-remembered illustration from a childhood book of nursery rhymes. Jack Spratt and his wife; he eating no fat, she no lean.
She had met them when their grown-up daughter had contacted her about her father’s insomnia. Leslie was one of those clients with whom Jude reckoned she was never going to make any headway. He could have matched Carole for scepticism about the whole business of healing. Paying for a healer’s services made as much sense to him as ‘backing a three-legged horse in the Derby’.
But his daughter, who had herself benefited from Jude’s ministrations for a problem of low self-esteem, managed to persuade him to have one session, which she would pay for. The deal was that, if he didn’t think it’d done any good, they’d give up the idea. If he felt any benefit at all, his daughter would pay for a second appointment.
When he first arrived in the sitting room of Woodside Cottage, Leslie Benyon’s whole body expressed distrust and disbelief. It was almost like a smell rising off him. He stated stoutly that he refused to take any clothes off (Jude hadn’t asked him to) and was deeply reluctant to lie on her treatment bed.
So she, knowing well that different clients required different approaches, stopped persuading him to do anything, sat him in an armchair and offered him a cup of tea. She was a good listener and expert at drawing out secrets. This was not a skill that she had worked on. Jude was just genuinely interested in other people.
Leslie Benyon, it turned out, had been a military man, and it soon became clear to her that events he had witnessed in Northern Ireland had destroyed his mental equilibrium. He had a soldier’s reticence, a gruff unwillingness to burden others with his troubles. ‘I couldn’t talk to Vi about it. Nothing that happened out there was her fault, after all, was it?’
No healing took place at that encounter. Jude’s hands did not venture near any part of his body. But she was extremely gratified when, a week later, Leslie’s daughter rang to say he wanted to take up her offer of a second paid-for session.
And, after some months of healing (which he was then happy to pay for himself), Leslie’s sleep patterns returned to a kind of normal.
That evening in the Crown and Anchor, Jude did not expect more than ‘a Fethering nod’ from him. In the presence of his wife, Leslie was still embarrassed about the dealings he had had with her. Or perhaps the fact that he’d needed to have dealings with her. With Vi, he needed to maintain his strong, silent persona.
This was no hardship to his wife. It was probably the way their marriage had worked from the start – he the quiet observant one, she the talker. And Vi was certainly garrulous. Which, from the point of view of Carole and Jude’s fact-finding mission, was rather convenient. Because the conversation in the Crown and Anchor was about Anita Garner.
How that had happened was just another of those Fethering mysteries. Neither Carole nor Jude had mentioned the woman’s name. The discovery of the handbag at Footscrow House was, so far as they knew, only known to the two of them, Pete the decorator and the police at Fethering and Fedborough. And yet, within hours, Anita Garner was once again being discussed in the Crown and Anchor. Carole and Jude no longer allowed themselves to wonder at the speed and efficiency of the Fethering bush telegraph.
‘There was a lot of talk when that Anita disappeared,’ Vi Benyon remarked to fill the momentary silence while Barney Poulton was preparing his next baseless conjecture.
Jude was quick enough to detect the slight shake of the head that Leslie directed towards his wife, but Vi, either not seeing or ignoring the admonition, went on, ‘Fiasco House was a care home back then … not, from all accounts, a very good one. Anita Garner worked there.’
‘Did you know her?’ asked Jude.
‘Ooh, known her from way back. She went through school with our boy Kent. A bunch of them was always going around together, them and Glen Porter and a few others. Well, they was mates at the primary, but when they all go to the comprehensive, suddenly the boys didn’t want to be seen around girls.’ She chuckled. ‘And, a few years later, they want to be all over them, you know, like young people do.
‘Anyway, Kent never had a lot to do with Anita after school, but he knew her. He was as surprised as anyone when she disappeared. Lots of talk there was round Fethering back then about what might have happened to her.’
‘Yes, well, Vi, I don’t think we need to revive any of that again now, do we?’ said Leslie Benyon.
But his wife was not to be put off her stride. ‘Didn’t last much longer as a care home after that,’ she went on. ‘There was talk locally about things having gone seriously wrong there. Old people being maltreated, you know.’
‘Was there an official inquiry?’ asked Carole, who liked everything to be official.
‘Don’t know about that,’ Vi replied. ‘But, as I say, a lot of talk locally.’
‘Was the talk,’ asked Jude, ‘about Anita Garner being involved in the maltreatment of patients?’
‘No, no. Not that. Suggestion was more that she might have seen some bad stuff going on and reported it … you know, like a … what’s the word?’
‘“Whistle-blower”?’ Jude suggested.
‘That’s it, yes. “Whistle-blower”.’ She repeated the word, savouring it. ‘There was people round Fethering at the time reckoned that was what happened.’
‘There was people round Fethering at the time,’ said Leslie Benyon harshly, ‘who reckoned all kinds of other things happened, and all. And none of it was ever any more than gossip. As it always is round here.’
But if he thought that would finally silence his wife, he was wrong. Much to the satisfaction of Carole and Jude, Vi continued, ‘I think what I just said was a lot more believable than most of the other stuff there was around back then. All that business about Anita having had affairs with people. The nonsense they talked. She was a quiet, well-behaved girl from a good Catholic family. But, the way people went on about it, you’d have thought she’d had it off with everyone in Fethering who wore trousers.’