Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  The way this was said made it clear that Jude wasn’t going to be offered a cup. Ungraciously, Anne Hilton marched off to the kitchen, closing the door behind her with emphatic force.

  Jude looked round the hall of Sandalls Manor. The door Anne had gone through was marked ‘Kitchen’; another closed door was identified as the ‘Karma Room’. A framed painting of some Indian guru was fixed to the wall and in the stairwell hung a circle of metal tubes with a suspended wooden clapper in the middle. But these were the only concessions to the house’s New Age incarnation. Otherwise the furniture and decor were solid and respectable, the kind passed from generation to generation of gentleman farmers. A redoubtable mahogany staircase dominated the space. Through an open door—in contrast to the promise of the sign reading ‘Chakra Room’—large chintzy sofas and swagged brocade curtains could be seen. The impression was as far from the shabby mysticism of Soul Nourishment as could be imagined.

  But for the bonus of a little light therapy thrown in, Sandalls Manor was like any other country house hotel, and this was borne out by the ‘literature’ that Jude had been given. As in the brochure she had read in the taxi, all the fliers and photocopies of magazine articles emphasized the level of comfort offered by ‘the Sandalls Manor experience’.

  One of them identified the ‘award-winning chef as Anne Hilton herself. Jude got the feeling that Anne was the dynamo behind the operation. She enjoyed running an upmarket hotel. Had she married the sort of man her parents had wanted for her, Sandalls Manor would have offered activities such as horse-riding and clay-pigeon-shooting. It was only because she had fallen in love with Charles Hilton that soul journeys were on the agenda.

  A muffled scream interrupted Jude’s thoughts, and reminded her that a soul journey was taking place at that very moment. But a scream at Sandalls Manor was not a cause for anxiety. Indeed, Charles Hilton would regard screaming and hysterics as a validation of what he was trying to achieve. Inside the Karma Room the participants were getting in touch with their inner children, and if those confrontations undammed some repressed emotions, then the therapy was working.

  Jude looked round the hall, quickly to be rewarded by the sight she was expecting. A box of tissues stood on a highly polished dresser. A new sheet was fanned out in readiness for the next participant to be overcome by tears.

  Jude felt sure that the Karma Room and the Chakra Room would be equipped with similar boxes. In therapeutic processes like those conducted by Charles Hilton, tissues were always a discreet presence.

  There was a clatter at the door. Jude turned to see a little cataract of letters tumble from the letter-box slit. Mostly completed booking forms, she reckoned. More exhausted city dwellers applying to sit out the rat race for a few days at Sandalls Manor.

  Curiosity gnawed at her. She looked across at the kitchen and the Karma Room. Both doors remained resolutely shut.

  Jude was always obedient to strong instincts and something told her she was in a significant moment. She moved swiftly to the front door. With her foot, she spread the uneven pile of letters. Most of them were, as expected, bookings sent in reply-paid envelopes.

  But one of them wasn’t. She looked at it closely to double-check, then crossed back to sit on her hard settle.

  A few minutes later, the door to the Karma Room opened. The first session of the morning had ended. Only Charles Hilton stood in the doorway, so Jude deduced that there must be another way out to the room where the participants had their coffee. Also to the toilets. She knew that intense soul-baring frequently had an effect on the participants’ bladders.

  Charles looked exactly as she remembered him, a little below average height with a low centre of gravity. Olive skin, the thinning hair on his head very black, and liquid eyes the colour of horse chestnuts. He wore jeans and a loosely hanging grey knitted cardigan.

  He also wore an expression of anxiety, that very traditional and distinctive anxiety assumed by a married man who fears his wife is about to find out something she shouldn’t.

  “Jude. Why have you come here? You haven’t said anything to Anne, have you?”

  She thought it was rather funny to see the state he was in. Here was a man with an international reputation for helping people find serenity in their relationships, and he was scared witless that his wife was about to be told he’d once groped another woman. The guru reduced to a gibbering guilty husband from a bedroom farce.

  “What are you worried I might say to Anne?” asked Jude, extending his discomfort. She wasn’t by nature vindictive, but Charles Hilton’s double standards got up her nose.

  “Well, I don’t know, do I?” he replied petulantly. “Why have you come here?”

  “I thought you might have some idea where lamsin Lutteridge is.”

  “Tamsin Lutteridge?”

  “You remember her. Girl with ME. Silver in Soul Nourishment said she’d got in touch with you.”

  “Yes, I remember her. We did have a consultation. She thought I might be able to help with her condition.”

  “And did you think you could?”

  Her tone had not been sceptical, but Charles Hilton’s professional pride was still stung. “I’ve had a lot of successes in the chronic fatigue area!”

  “I’m sure you have. I’m asking whether you had any success with Tamsin Lutteridge.”

  His face assumed a complacent mask. “Jude, you know I can’t possibly talk about an individual patient. Medical ethics. Confidentiality.”

  “All right. I’m not asking whether you’ve managed to cure her. I’m asking whether you know where she is at this moment.”

  He shook his head, his expression still complacent. “Sorry, Jude. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “Look, if you do hear anything…let me know. Her parents are very worried about her.” Well, no, they’re not, actually, thought Jude. Her father’s very worried ahout her.

  “Of course I’ll let you know.”

  “Do you have my new address? I’m living in Fethering now.”

  “Really? Almost neighbours.” He smiled. Now he knew she wasn’t about to blow the whistle to Anne about him, Charles Hilton’s customary cockiness had returned. He moved straight into chatting-up mode. “Maybe we could meet for a meal or something one of these days…” Jude gave his proposition no encouragement. “Give me your number.”

  She did so.

  “I must get back,” he said. “Just done a really good session. Don’t want the participants to lose their concentration.”

  “No. Can’t risk that.” Jude grinned. “How’s this lot going?”

  “Good group. Getting through to them. Really stirring the soup, we are. Ciao, Jude. Great to see you again.”

  He took her hand and held it just that little bit too long, fixing her eyes in a penetrating gaze. Why is it, thought Jude, that certain men—in the teeth of the evidence—think they’re irresistible to women? Maybe Charles Hilton believed that his almost shamanistic powers gave him an added magnetism. And maybe, on some women, he did have that effect. Not on her, however.

  It was too cold to wait outside for her taxi, but the car arrived dead on time. Anne Hilton came out of the kitchen to answer the driver’s ring at the doorbell. She shuffled up the post and bade farewell to Jude with the minimum civility her upbringing allowed.

  In the cab, Jude tuned out the driver’s views on alternative medicine and black magic, two concepts that his mind seemed unable to separate. All she could think about was what she’d seen on the doormat of Sandalls Manor.

  Among the returned booking forms had been a letter addressed to Tamsin Lutteridge.

  Jude would have challenged Charles Hilton with that fact, if she had not recognized the writing on the envelope. The letter had been sent by Tamsin’s mother.

  FOURTEEN

  Detective Sergeant Baylis sat comfortably in front of Carole’s log-effect gas fire. Gulliver, with that immediate trust of strangers that made him such an ineffectual guard dog, fawned around the poli
ceman, trying repeatedly to put his bandaged paw up on Baylis’s knee. The dressing was much smaller now. On the Friday Carole had an appointment when the vet would remove it completely.

  “I was really just calling to see that you were all right,” the sergeant said.

  “That’s very kind of you. I’m fine.”

  “The effects of shock can sometimes be delayed, Mrs Seddon. If you do need any help…counselling or…”

  God, thought Carole, isn’t there anything these days you aren’t offered counselling for? “Really, I’m fine. It was just a nasty moment, but it’s gone. I mean, it’d be different if she’d been someone I knew.”

  “She?”

  “The…The body…The person whose remains I found.”

  “How do you know it was a she?”

  “Why? Isn’t that common knowledge?”

  “It is, but only just. That’s one of the things I was coming to tell you, Mrs Seddon. They were the remains of a woman’s body.”

  Now it had been confirmed, Carole did feel a shiver of something not unlike shock. “Poor girl,” she said.

  “Poor girl?”

  “Yes, Tamsin Lutteridge.”

  Detective Sergeant Baylis shook his head wearily. “Oh, they’re not still saying that, are they? Bloody Weldisham gossips.”

  “You mean it’s not true?”

  “The bones are in the labs now. There’ll be more detailed information soon. But the preliminary path, report tells us they belonged to a woman, probably aged thirty to fifty, and she died at least five years ago.”

  Carole found it strange how much relief the news brought her. She’d never known Tamsin Lutteridge, but had felt Jude’s affection for the girl and compassion for her illness. Whoever the bones did belong to, she was glad it wasn’t Tamsin.

  “So, Sergeant, they’ve no idea who the dead woman was?”

  He shook his head. “Take some time. We do have procedures, you know. Start with talking to people locally.”

  “Like the person who owns the South Welling Barn?”

  “Phil Ayling. Yes, we’ve talked to him. Needless to say, he doesn’t know anything about it. Why should he? Probably those bones belonged to someone who’s never been to the village. Which means of course that we will have to go through missing persons files, all that stuff.” He sighed in disbelief. “Tamsin Lutteridge, though…Doesn’t change, Weldisham. However many ends a stick has, the people in that village can be guaranteed to get hold of the wrong one. Always had a reputation for gossip, even when I was growing up there.” In response to Carole’s interrogative look, he went on, “Yes, I’m a local boy. My parents used to live in one of the cottages by the pub.”

  “Near Heron Cottage?”

  “That’s right. Mind you, we’re talking when all that lot belonged to the Estate. My dad worked for the Estate. All his life. Started at age fourteen, dropped dead driving a tractor when he was fifty-seven. And the cottages weren’t all tarted up when we lived there, I can tell you. Estate sold them off about fifteen years ago. That’s when the central heating came in, and the fitted kitchens, and the double-glazing—and the fancy prices.”

  He seemed to realize he was digressing. “So…Tamsin Lutteridge. I didn’t even know the girl was missing.”

  “Has been three, four months, I gather.”

  “Not been reported missing.”

  “Ah.”

  Baylis caught her eye and said shrewdly, “Lot of parents don’t report it when their kids go missing. Either they think it’s an admission of failure on their part—which it very probably is—or they know full well where the child is, but don’t want anyone else to know. Again they may keep schtum because their child’s actions, or the company they’re keeping, might be seen to reflect badly on their parents.”

  “I wouldn’t know if that’s the case with the Lutteridges. We’ve never met. But a friend of mine who knows them says the girl hasn’t been seen for four months.”

  “Well, at least the Weldisham gossips will have to change their tune now. We’ve issued a press statement about everything we know so far. Be on the local news this evening, I should think. Anytime then the phones’ll start ringing.”

  “With people who think they can identify the dead woman?”

  “Yes, Mrs Seddon. We’ll get every poor sad bastard in the country who’s lost someone. Mass media are great, all that Crimewatch stuff, encouraging the public to ring in, but it does infinitely increase the loony count.” He looked momentarily abashed. “Sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It’s all right, Sergeant. I know exactly what you mean.”

  Baylis grinned and ruffled the loose skin of the head of Gulliver, who had by now fallen heavily in love with him.

  “Incidentally,” Carole went on, reckoning she’d never get a better opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about the life of Weldisham, “the woman who owns Heron Cottage…”

  “Pauline Helling. What about her?”

  “Nothing. Well, nothing serious. It’s just…I haven’t even met her properly, just come across her a couple of times, but on both occasions she’s made me feel extremely unwelcome in the village.”

  Baylis chuckled. “Don’t take it personally. She makes everyone feel unwelcome in the village—even the people who live there.”

  “My car got left outside Heron Cottage overnight when you and I went to the pub.”

  “And I bet you got one of Pauline’s little notes on your windscreen?”

  Carole nodded.

  “You wouldn’t be the first to have had that treatment, nor the last. It’s a nuisance, I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t meaning it was a police matter. I just wondered why she was so antisocial.”

  “You should raise the question next time you’re in the Hare and Hounds, and I’m sure you’ll get as many answers as there are people present.”

  “And what would your answer be, Sergeant?”

  “As to why Pauline’s such a bad-tempered old bat? My answer would be a rather old-fashioned one, in these supposedly classless times. I think Pauline’s ‘living above her station’. She grew up poor, in a council house on the Downside Estate—”

  “In Fethering?”

  “That’s right. Then her husband left her with a son to bring up. I think that’s when she developed both the chip on her shoulder and her ambitions to be upwardly mobile. As a result, the minute she got some money, she bought Heron Cottage. The good folks of Weldisham didn’t like that. People of Pauline Helling’s sort, they reckoned, should know their place. They’d be the same with me too. Because my old man worked on the Estate. And I didn’t go to private school>.” He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. “Not that it worries me,” he went on, once again disclaiming a hurt that he clearly still felt. “The new people come to the village, saying that they want to get close to the old rural England, but they don’t want any reminders of the people who used to live in that old rural England. And the prices get pushed up so high, none of the former residents can afford to live in these villages anyway. So that’s why Pauline Helling makes everyone feel unwelcome in Weldisham—because she’s always been made to feel unwelcome there herself.”

  “How did she get her money?” asked Carole.

  “They didn’t like that either. If you live in Weldisham, it’s all right to get money from stocks and shares, or inherit it from Mummeigh and Daddeigh…” Baylis’s jokey manner could not disguise the deep bitterness with which he was speaking. “But Pauline Helling got her money from winning the pools! The pools! Weldisham reckons it’s bad form even to know what a pools coupon is, and actually to win on one…well, that’s the height of vulgarity. So from day one they’d got Pauline marked down as ‘common’.”

  “Were people rude to her?”

  “Not insulting to her face, no. Not like they would be somewhere a bit more honest. In Weldisham you freeze people out with politeness. You smile when you meet them, you giv
e them a nod, but you never invite them into your house.”

  Carole grinned wryly. She’d encountered some of that aloofness in Fethering.

  “So I would imagine,” Detective Sergeant Baylis concluded, “that for the past twenty years the only person Pauline Helling has talked to is her son.”

  “He’s still around?”

  “Brian? Oh yes, he’s still around.” The sergeant spoke as if this was not an entirely satisfactory state of affairs.

  “He isn’t a writer, is he?” asked Carole, with sudden insight.

  “He calls himself a writer, though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that he’s ever actually written anything.”

  “I think I overheard him in the Hare and Hounds yesterday.”

  “It’s quite possible. Hard not to overhear Brian. He’s always been of the view that everyone within earshot should have the benefit of his conversation. He was like that at school. I was in the same class as him. Nasty sneaky little bastard then, and I don’t think the passage of the years has changed him that much.”

  “What kind of nasty?”

  “Vicious to other kids. And to animals. Most people who grow up round here know how to treat animals. They’re not sentimental about them, but they don’t hurt them deliberately.”

  “And Brian Helling did?”

  “When he was a kid, yes. Killed a couple of cats in a way I still can’t forgive him for. He thought it was a game. The rest of us didn’t play that kind of game.”

  “Oh?” Carole put her next remark as sensitively as she could. “In the Hare and Hounds he did seem to be…a little eccentric.”

  “Eccentric’s generous. He’s a self-appointed eccentric, just as he’s a self-appointed writer. Brian Helling has never been able to hold down a proper job. If his mother hadn’t had the pools money to support him, God knows what he’d have lived on. He’s always been getting into trouble of one sort or another.”

  “Trouble that’s involved the police?”

  “Not often. Occasionally drunk. Reckless driving once, I think.”