Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  Jude looked up suddenly, and Carole was surprised to see tears glinting in her friend’s eyes. “Poor Tamsin…What basis did this man you heard have for saying the bones belonged to her?”

  “Very little, I imagine. Except that the girl was known to be missing from Weldisham. Simply putting two and two together, I suppose.”

  “I must ring Gillie!” Jude reached into a pocket for her mobile phone. “She’ll be desperate.”

  “Use my phone.”

  But Jude had already got through. The tension she heard in Gillie Lutteridge’s voice communicated itself as she made arrangements to go up to Weldisham the following morning.

  After she switched off the mobile, Jude was still clearly upset, more upset in fact than Carole had ever seen her. The atmosphere of the evening was broken. Jude accepted Carole’s offer of a lift up to the Lutteridges’ the following morning, but seemed distracted. She finished her glass of wine and said, “Better get back and sort out my unpacking.”

  After Jude had gone, Carole realized with annoyance that she had no idea where the luggage that required unpacking had travelled from. She hadn’t found out anything about where her friend had been for the past two weeks.

  §

  And by the next morning the moment for such questions seemed to have passed. Jude lived in the present and the future, always much more concerned with what she was about to do than with what she had done. Carole could only piece together her friend’s history from the occasional irritatingly incomplete allusion.

  The weather wasn’t quite as perfect as it had been on the Saturday, but Weldisham was still doing a pretty good impression of an archetypal English village. The houses, mostly built before such concepts as planning existed, clustered round the spire of the church, as if theirs was the only configuration possible. Weldisham was meant to look as it did. There was no alternative. That air of permanence was comforting, reassuring, but to Carole in some strange way threatening.

  She dropped Jude outside the Lutteridges’ house. It was called Conyers, and Carole noticed that the name of the house next door was Warren Lodge. That must be where the Forbeses lived. The Lutteridges’ was one of the village’s middle-sized houses, late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Four bedrooms perhaps. Not grand, but still requiring a pretty high income in a property hot-spot like Weldisham. The privet hedge either side of the farm-style front gate was neatly squared off, the gravel inside raked and unmarked by leaves. On the drive sat a large BMW with the latest registration letter. The space either side of the house gave the impression of a large garden behind, dipping down over the curves of the Downs. Through the gap could be seen the top of an old barn’s collapsing roof, a discordant note of untidiness that couldn’t be part of the Lutteridges’ property. Everything about their house breathed well-ordered middle-class affluence.

  “OK,” said Jude. “I’ll be about an hour, then join you up at the Hare and Hounds. You be all right?”

  “Of course. I’ll have a walk. I’ve got the Times crossword, if all else fails.”

  Carole took the Renault the hundred yards up to the pub and, just out of interest, drew it to a halt outside Heron Cottage in exactly the place where she had parked it on the Friday. And she sat there. Occasionally she glanced at the downstairs window. Through the leaded windows she could see a plaster shepherdess figurine on the sill and a faded silk pin-cushion in the form of a fat Chinaman.

  Carole didn’t have to wait long. Within two minutes, a face had appeared behind the shepherdess. The long sharp nose left Carole in no doubt that the author of the aggrieved note on her windscreen had been the old woman she’d seen walking the black and white spaniel.

  Carole restarted the engine of the Renault and drove it round behind the pub to the Hare and Hounds car park. She tucked her folded Times inside her padded green Marks & Spencer anorak. (She still didn’t feel right without her Burberry—she must remember to pick it up from the dry-cleaner’s when she got back to Fethering.) Then she set off for a walk through the village.

  The circuit didn’t take long. Weldisham was really just one street, along which were placed all its houses, except for the peripheral farms with their clusters of outbuildings. The village seemed to be exclusively residential. One house with a disproportionately large bay window must once have been the village shop, but that had long since had the life choked out of it by the building of local superstores. Though no doubt they had complained bitterly about the erosion of country lifestyle when it closed, the well-heeled of Weldisham were soon happy to fill up their four-wheel-drive pantechnicons from the sumptuous choice available in the local Sainsbury’s or Tesco’s (mostly Salisbury’s, actually—in spite of its remarketing make-overs, Tesco’s still carried a resonance of being ‘common’).

  And that was it. Houses, the village green, the pub, the church. St Michael and All Angels. Carole decided she’d have a look inside.

  She walked under the lych-gate, rustic but of recent construction. It was topped by a pointed lid of new thatch, still too light in colour, looking like a particularly indigestible wholefood breakfast bar. With a frisson, Carole remembered the derivation of the word ‘lych-gate’. From ‘lich’, meaning a body. A place where the pall-bearers could rest the bier on the way to a funeral.

  She wondered whether the bones she had found at South Welling Barn had received the benefit of any kind of religious committal. Somehow she doubted it.

  The graveyard was full of green-stained stones, uneven like an old man’s teeth. For one or two more recent arrivals the marble still gleamed, and fresh flowers—expensive in February—paid homage in glass vases. The grass between the graves was meticulously short.

  In a corner of the portico of St Michael and All Angels, Carole noted with surprise there was a discreet CCTV camera. Security, presumably. A deterrent to the vandals for whom the holiness of the church had no meaning. The old wooden church door had a modern keyplate on it. Carole would have put money on the fact that it was locked at night.

  She pushed the door and moved into the interior, which smelt of damp fabric. The air inside the church felt colder than outside. It took Carole’s eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. No lights were on and the February sun was too feeble to spread much through the stained-glass windows.

  St Michael and All Angels was pretty and neat, well looked after. The wooden pews glowed from regular polishing. The brasswork of the hanging chandeliers had also been recently cleaned. Whoever was on the flower rota that week had invested a lot of pride in the displays down near the altar. On the wall a carved Christ twisted in frozen agony.

  And there was someone kneeling in a pew near the front. Carole could see the outline of a fur hat on a head bent in prayer. And she could hear the sound of sobbing.

  Her arrival had disturbed the supplicant. The sobbing instantly stopped. The figure, now recognizable as a woman, rose to her feet, brushed a hand across her face, gave a quick nod of respect to the altar and came up the aisle towards Carole.

  As the woman passed, she flashed a quick shy smile at the intruder and left the church.

  Carole had a fleeting impression of a tear glinting on a face of extraordinary beauty.

  But, perhaps remarkably in Weldisham, the face was Chinese.

  Carole had a desultory look around the church and paid a dutiful fifty pence into the honesty box for A Brief History of St Michael and All Angels. Then she set off for the Hare and Hounds to address the Times crossword.

  EIGHT

  It was only just after twelve, but already there were people having lunch in the Hare and Hounds. Their average age was probably round seventy, but they looked well groomed in their leisurewear and prosperous, enjoying their well-endowed pension plans.

  For a moment Carole luxuriated in the boldness of walking into a pub on her own. She wasn’t by nature a ‘pub person’ and a year ago she wouldn’t have done it. The new boldness was a symptom of the changes that had come over her. Until she met Jude, Carole had expected�
��indeed courted—a predictability in her life in Fethering. Jude had shown her that change was possible, and even desirable.

  Carole ordered a Coca-Cola. She was sure she’d have a glass of wine when Jude arrived, but she needed to pace herself. Mustn’t forget she was driving. She was served by a girl she hadn’t seen before. There was no sign of Will Maples.

  All the seats in the Snug were taken, so she found a table for two by a front window that looked out at Heron Cottage. But after a brief glance across the road, she turned her attention to the crossword. Usually easy on Mondays. She had a suspicion the compilers did that deliberately, to make their addicts feel intellectually on top of things, put them in a good mood at the beginning of the week.

  But, to her annoyance, that day’s clues read like a foreign language. Carole’s approach to the crossword was very linear. She always started with the first Across clue; if she couldn’t get that, she moved to the second Across clue. Only when she’d got one correct solution did she investigate the possibilities opened up by its letters. And if she got stuck again, she’d move on to the next Across clue.

  That Monday, the clues seemed particularly intransigent. She knew it was her attitude that was wrong. Solving crosswords required a kind of mental relaxation, a willingness to think laterally, to let ideas flow. But Carole’s mind wasn’t feeling relaxed. It floated over the words of the clues, not concentrating, not breaking them down into components to tease out their solutions.

  She knew that her mind was really with Jude and what was happening in the Lutteridges’ house. To her annoyance, she found herself at the end of all the Across clues without having got a single answer. She couldn’t remember that ever happening before. With a ferocious effort of concentration, she focused on 1 Down.

  “Tricky today, isn’t it?”

  She looked up to see the tall figure of Graham Forbes stooping over her. He was wearing the same three-piece tweed suit and holding a whisky glass. His unlit pipe was clenched in his teeth. He must have just arrived. He certainly hadn’t been in the pub when she came in.

  “Yes. Yes, it is,” she agreed.

  “And one always thinks Mondays’ are going to be easy.”

  He so exactly reflected her own views that she grinned.

  “Took me ages to get started today,” said Graham Forbes. “Had to stay at the breakfast table much longer than I’d intended. Then I got a couple and it all fell into place.”

  “Well, please don’t tell me any of the answers.”

  He raised a hand histrionically, appalled by her suggestion. “My dear lady, what do you take me for? There is honour among crossword solvers, you know.”

  “I do know. And I apologize humbly for my careless imputation.”

  He chuckled. “Didn’t I see you in here on Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you just moved to Weldisham?”

  “No, I live in Fethering, actually.”

  “Ah. Different country.” He chuckled and indicated the chair opposite her. “Mind if I join you?”

  “I’ve got a friend coming…”

  “Oh, well, I’ll…” He made to move away.

  “No, please.” Carole glanced at her watch. “She won’t be here for another twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll be gone by then.” He sat down and raised his whisky glass. “Just always come in for my pre-lunch tincture, you know. Are you an every day Times crossword person?”

  “Oh yes, part of my ritual.”

  “Me too. Get in a very bad mood when I can’t finish it. Wife knows to keep out of the way on those days.” Another chuckle.

  Carole couldn’t help being charmed by this man with his old-fashioned urbane courtesy. He seemed entirely different from the pontificator she’d heard talking on the Friday. Maybe she had misjudged his character. What had sounded right-wing might just have been nostalgia for a simpler time.

  “Don’t like a lot of things about The Times these days,” he went on, confirming her conjecture. “Going very tabloid, all those colour photographs and what have you. Any excuse to get a pretty girl on the front page. And the Diary is an absolute disgrace. I’m afraid I’m of a generation that looks back fondly to the days when The Times didn’t have any news on the front page.”

  “I can remember that too.”

  “Well, all I can say is you must’ve been very young at the time.”

  Graham Forbes’s gallantry was of another time, but it was comforting. Carole regretted that political correctness had rendered modern men wary of making that kind of remark.

  “Tell you the favourite Times crossword clue I can remember…It was a Down clue, and it was just two words. ‘Bats do.’ Five letters.”

  He looked interrogatively at Carole.

  “Bats do’…” she repeated slowly, trying to take the words apart.

  “Not fair to throw it at you like that. You have to see it written to make sense of it. I’ll tell you, because I don’t want to prolong the agony. PEELS.”

  “Right.” Carole nodded her appreciation. “SLEEP upside-down. Bats sleep upside-down.”

  “Exactly. Damned clever, I thought.”

  “It is, yes.”

  “Sorry, should have introduced myself.” He stretched a thin freckled hand across the table. “Graham Forbes.”

  “Carole Seddon.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I live just a couple of doors from the pub, so I keep turning up here like a bad penny.”

  He took a sip of his whisky. “Lovely stuff. I swear my innards are pickled in it, you know. So what do you do, Carole?”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Really? Must’ve been an extremely early retirement.” Again the automatic chivalry contrived not to be offensive.

  “Well, it was early, yes.” And that earliness still rankled with Carole. She hadn’t wanted to stay till she was sixty, but she’d have preferred to have made her own decision about her leaving date, rather than being informed of it.

  “What did you do before you retired?”

  “I worked at the Home Office.”

  “Fascinating. What part of the Home Office?”

  “Moved around. A lot of the time dealing with the Prison Service one way or the other.”

  “Hm. Travel much?”

  “Only round this country.”

  “I think maybe you were fortunate. Now I’m permanently settled here, I realize how much I missed about England.”

  “You worked abroad?”

  “Yes. British Council.”

  “Oh, I had a Mend at university who went into the British Council.”

  Carole hadn’t thought about him for years. She wondered whether he still kept up the front he’d maintained at Durham that he wasn’t gay. Or maybe more tolerant times had allowed him to relax into his own nature. “His name was Trevor Malcolm.”

  Graham Forbes shrugged his thin shoulders. “It’s a big organization.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anyway, I worked for them all over the shop. Had the place here in Weldisham for a long time, but only used to come back for leave and breaks between postings. Often wonder if I wouldn’t have been happier staying here all the time.”

  “I never think there’s much point in talking about might-have-beens.”

  “And you’re absolutely right. What a sensible woman you are, Carole. No, I can’t really complain. Seen some fascinating places, met some fascinating people. Real characters, you know, the locals, librarians, drivers we had…And yet…Oh well, it’s human nature not to be content, isn’t it? Always remember a line of Hazlitt’s…‘I should like to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.’ ”

  “That’s good. I think it sums up what most of us feel.”

  “Yes, grass is greener, all that stuff. No, can’t complain. Had an interesting life, still with the woman I love at age seventy-five…What more can you ask, eh?”

  “Not a lot.”


  “No.” There was a silence. “Incidentally…when you were in here on Friday…did you hear what I was talking about with that chap at the bar?”

  Carole blushed, though there was no real reason why she should have felt guilty. Short of putting in earplugs, there was no way she couldn’t have heard what was being said at the bar.

  “About the discovery of the bones at South Welling Barn?”

  “Yes. Well, putting two and two together, I reckon you must have been the person who found them.”

  “Where did you get your two and two from?”

  “Lennie. Sorry, Detective Sergeant Baylis. The policeman who you talked to.” In response to her look of surprise, he explained. “Lennie talked to me on Saturday. I’m Chairman of the Village Committee here, you see. He wanted us to keep an eye out for press, snoopers, ghouls…You know, the people who turn up when something nasty’s happened, the kind who queue up on motorways to look at pile-ups. Anyway, Lennie said he’d been talking to you in the pub, I saw you in the pub, I put two and two together.”

  “Right. But was it Detective Sergeant Baylis who told you about my finding the bones in the first place?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, what struck me last Friday was how quickly you knew about what’d happened. I’d found the bones at…what…? Round four o’clock? And by six-fifteen you were in here, talking about them.”

  “Ah, with you, see what you mean. Yes, it was Lennie. He was brought up here in Weldisham. He knows how the gossip-mill works in a village like this. So he gave me a quick call the Friday afternoon. Thought it better someone heard officially about what’d happened, rather than letting rumours run riot. Dangerous things, rumours.” Suddenly, he was into quotation.

  Rumour is a pipe

  Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,

  And of so easy and so plain a stop

  That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,

  The still-discordant wavering multitude,

  Can play upon it!

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know the reference.”