Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  “Or?”

  “Or you might find yourself the third victim, Carole.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Am I threatening you? No, not me. I didn’t kill the other two.”

  “Then who did?”

  He chuckled indulgently. “Ooh, now I can’t make it too easy for you, can I? Amateur snoopers don’t like to be told all the details. You have to leave something for them to work out on their own…otherwise it spoils their fun.”

  “Maybe, but—”

  “Were you watching the lunchtime news, Carole?” he interrupted brusquely.

  “Yes, I was.”

  “And did that photograph of my mother remind you of anyone?”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “Then I think you probably have all the information you require.”

  And at that point Brian Helling rang off.

  THIRTY-SIX

  This time Jude had rung ahead to Sandalls Manor and fixed a time to see Charles Hilton. Four o’clock in the afternoon.

  Wednesday was the changeover day. One group of soul-searching participants had left on the Tuesday (slightly disappointed that due to the guru’s absence in Ireland, they’d been taken on their soul journey by a sub); the next consignment would arrive on the Thursday. Wednesday was the day for Anne Hilton to shout at her staff as she supervised their bed-changing and laundry work. And a day when Charles Hilton retired to his study to get on with his writing.

  It was to the study that Jude was shown, with no pretence at welcome, by the guru’s wife. Charles sat behind a large desk of dark wood, at which Anne’s father had no doubt checked the farm’s accounts. The old man would have been shocked, though, to see the range of objects which neatly littered the desk’s surface. There were pebbles and crystals, fossils and face masks, evil eyes and tiny totems—a mini-museum of the world’s alternative belief systems.

  On the wall behind Charles were pristine editions of Setting Free the Soul and others of his publications. There were framed texts in squiggly Oriental writing, and some in English, calligraphed and illustrated no doubt by besotted acolytes. Jude couldn’t help noticing one that read: “WEA RE ALL IRRELEVANT, AND THAT’S WHAT MAKES US ALL MATTER SO MUCH.”

  She was reminded of her recent encounter with Sebastian Trent. He had stood in his Hampstead sitting room as if posing for a photograph. Jude had a feeling the neatly framed scene she was looking at might well appear on the jacket of Charles Hilton’s books.

  He himself was all solicitous charm as he rose to greet the supplicant. “Jude, great to see you again. Would you care for some coffee?”

  She could sense Anne Hilton’s disapproval of the offer, but that wasn’t why she declined it. If all went well, Jude didn’t intend to be in Charles Hilton’s study long enough to drink coffee. She hoped to be taken straight to see the object of her quest.

  Relieved that at least she wasn’t going to have to get bloody coffee—though of course far too well brought up to verbalize any such opinion—Anne Hilton stomped out of the room, closing the door heavily behind her. Jude wondered whether this was to make a point or if she always did it like that. Anne Hilton’s upbringing had made her the kind of woman who talked loudly in public places. Maybe slamming doors came with the genetic territory.

  Charles Hilton seemed visibly to relax once his wife was out of the room. Maybe he had still been afraid Jude might make some reference to his ill-considered grope of long ago. He was dressed again in neat jeans, though today’s cardigan was of an ethnic design that looked vaguely Peruvian.

  “So…what can I do for you?” His smile was as bland and patronizing as he could make it, but with an undertone of anxiety.

  “I want to see Tamsin Lutteridge,” said Jude.

  “I’ve told you, I can’t discuss my patients’ cases.”

  “I’m not asking you to do that. If you’d listened, Charles, you would have heard me say I wanted to see her, not discuss her.”

  “I don’t know what makes you think I’ve any idea where she is. I’m not—”

  She cut through his bluster. “I know Tamsin’s here, because her mother told me she’s here. I did in fact ring Gillie this morning and tell her I was coming to see her daughter. She was quite happy about it.” Jude gestured to the telephone. “Ring her if you don’t believe me.”

  “No, no, of course I believe you.” He seemed to recognize the pointlessness of further resistance. “But I think you owe me the courtesy of telling me why you want to see Tamsin.”

  “There’s something I need to ask her.”

  Charles Hilton looked even more anxious. “Is it something to do with her treatment?”

  “No, it has nothing to do with her treatment or her illness.”

  “Then…?”

  “Then it is on a subject that has nothing to do with you, Charles.”

  “Fine.” But his expression suggested everything wasn’t entirely fine. “Jude…I’ve got to make a few ground rules for when you do see her.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “You’re not to ask her anything about the treatment she’s receiving here.”

  “All right. I told you, that’s not what interests me.”

  “No…” He still wasn’t fully reassured. “The work I’m doing with Tamsin is experimental…exploratory perhaps is a better word…I don’t want any details of it to be publicly known until the process is complete, until we’ve achieved some kind of closure.”

  “Charles, will you stop worrying? I’m not a muckraking journalist. I’m not interested in how you’re treating Tamsin…Well, that is to say I’m only interested in how you’re treating Tamsin if the treatment is successful.”

  She hadn’t managed to remove all residue of scepticism from her voice and Charles Hilton flared up. “Look, what I’m doing is perfectly legitimate and may go on to help many other sufferers from an illness that is one of the most complex and disturbing to have emerged in recent decades. I’m a serious therapist, Jude, and I really care about helping people, making them better. It’d be so easy to pigeonhole me as a charlatan, a devious guru, a false prophet, but you can’t do that, because it’s not true!”

  Jude was amazed and not a little amused by this outburst. She would have thought Charles Hilton’s training as a psychotherapist might have given him a little more self-knowledge. She hadn’t made any of the accusations against which he had so vigorously defended himself. If anyone was dubious about the validity of his treatments, then that person had to be Charles himself. His insecurity was so overt, it was almost endearing.

  But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing that needed saying. Charles had already said it all.

  “Right. Could I see Tamsin then, please?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  He rose from his little area of film set and picked up a bunch of keys from the desk.

  “You’re not telling me you keep her locked up, are you, like someone out of a Victorian asylum?”

  He was oblivious of the jokiness in her tone and almost screamed, “No of course I don’t keep her locked up!”

  Charles Hilton looked at Jude. He saw the smile on her lips and his eyes slipped away from hers. He opened the door of his study.

  As she passed through, he put a hand that was a little more than avuncular on the soft curve of her shoulder. Jude gave him a look far more articulate than many novels. Charles Hilton removed his hand.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Carole Seddon tried to be calm, but the thoughts bubbling up in her mind threatened her self-image as a sensible woman. The idea had already taken root in her mind before Brian Helling’s phone call had encouraged its growth and now it was running wild, spreading out more and more shoots of suspicion and implication.

  She still needed more facts, though, facts that might corroborate her conjectures and fill in details of the evolving scenario. And she needed to get those facts from someone who knew Weldisham well, who had known it before Pauline Helling had taken up resid
ence in Heron Cottage.

  She came back to the three boys who’d been at school together. Lennie Baylis, Harry Grant and Brian Helling. The first two had actually lived in the village, and Brian’s mother had worked there as a cleaner. Each one of them, she felt certain, knew something that would be relevant to her enquiries.

  But Carole had no means of recontacting Brian Helling. She guessed he’d been calling from a mobile, but when she tried 1471 she was told, “The caller withheld their number.”

  Lennie Baylis was the obvious person with whom to discuss the case. He kept encouraging her to do just that, but that very eagerness disqualified him as the perfect confidant. Carole still reckoned the sergeant had a personal as well as a professional agenda and, though she wouldn’t go as far as considering him a suspect, she wanted to define his connection with the bones she’d found before volunteering more of her suspicions to him.

  So that left Harry Grant. Or indeed Harry Grant’s wife…Suddenly Carole had a vivid image of the nervous, overdressed woman she’d met at the Forbeses’ dinner party. Though Jenny Grant represented a paler carbon than Pauline Helling, she was still unmistakably stamped with the same facial characteristics. The beaky nose dominated her thin pale face.

  Carole remembered Harry saying that his wife had been related to Graham Forbes’s first wife. Perhaps Jenny too had been in the family photograph on the wall of Heron Cottage. She could be a close relative, a first cousin even, of Pauline Helling. Jenny Grant might be able to reveal everything Carole wanted to know about the old woman and her son.

  There was only one ‘H. Grant’ in the local phone book. The address was nearer Fethering than Weldisham. Jenny Grant answered the phone. She sounded unsurprised by Carole’s call, and not particularly interested. Yes, it was a tragedy about Pauline. And yes, if Carole wanted to come round and talk to her about the old woman, that was fine. Jenny’s voice was flat, containing no curiosity as to why. In one way, that was good for Carole. Explanations might prove difficult. But, on the other hand, there was something spooky about Jenny Grant’s complete lack of interest.

  The house was exactly what a successful property developer would have built for himself. Every feature was immaculately finished, but there were a few too many of them. Did the building need both a turret and a bell-tower? Did every upstairs window need a balcony? Wouldn’t the front garden have looked better paved with one kind of stone rather than four? And did the Tudor beams over the double garage match the panels of neat flint facing either side of the front door? Come to that, wouldn’t the heavy oak front door itself have looked sufficiently monastic without the semicircle of stained glass above it?

  Carole anticipated much toing and froing with the Village Committee of Weldisham over the architectural details of Harry Grant’s barn conversion.

  Jenny Grant was dressed rather like her house. She clearly frequented one of those boutiques which doesn’t like plain colours or plain surfaces. Her black skirt was decorated with random pieces of shiny leather and gold buttons; her fluffy pale blue jumper had quilted panels of scarlet silk and some gold braid at the neck. The house looked like a display unit for building effects; its owner a display unit for haberdashery. Her pallor accentuated the fussiness of her garments. Jenny Grant looked literally washed out, as though she had been put too many times through the laundry cycle.

  She still expressed no curiosity at Carole’s arrival, but ushered her into a sitting room that looked like a display unit for upholstery. Tea things were already on a tray, with a plate of sugared biscuits.

  “It’s very good of you to see me,” said Carole.

  “No problem.”

  After she had poured the tea, Jenny Grant sat back, her faded blue eyes blinking, waiting for whatever should come next. She didn’t volunteer anything. Maybe she never took any initiative, was eternally reactive. That was perhaps the way to survive as wife of someone as noisily energetic as Harry Grant.

  “As I said on the phone, I want to talk about Pauline Helling. Terrible tragedy that was.”

  “Terrible,” Jenny Grant agreed, as though commenting on a minor deterioration in the weather.

  “Harry said you were actually related to her in some way…”

  “Distantly. My maiden name was Helling and there are lots of branches of the family round the area. I think possibly our grandmothers were cousins, something like that.”

  “So you didn’t know Pauline well?”

  “I don’t think anyone knew her well, except possibly Brian. She kept herself very much to herself.”

  “I heard that there was more to it than that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That the village actually ostracized her.” From Jenny Grant’s expression, she had never heard the word. “That she wasn’t made to feel very welcome in Weldisham.”

  Jenny shrugged. “There are a lot of very snobbish people up there.”

  “And you’re about to go and join them, I gather. I heard from Harry that you’d got your planning permission on the barn.”

  If Carole had hoped to prompt Jenny’s views on whether she and her husband would be accepted socially in Weldisham, she was disappointed. All she got was a ‘Yes’.

  “You must be delighted about that.”

  “It’s what Harry wants.”

  And Carole had a feeling that in that sentence lay the secret of the success of the Grants’ marriage, “Anyway, as I gather,” she went on, “let me get this right…Pauline Helling wasn’t brought up the village…”

  “No. She lived not far from here. The Downside Estate…Do you know it?”

  “Yes. I live in Fethering.”

  Downside was the poor end of town.

  “And did Pauline marry a Helling?”

  “No, she was born a Helling. She never married.”

  “So you don’t know who Brian’s father was?”

  A shake of the head. “No idea. I don’t know anyone who knew. It was a long time ago. Brian must be nearly forty now.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I know who he is. I’ve never had a conversation with him.” Jenny Grant didn’t sound as though that was a situation she was in any hurry to change.

  “And Pauline used to work as a cleaner in Weldisham. For Graham Forbes and his first wife.”

  “That’s right.”

  Still there was no curiosity as to how Carole had got this information or why it was of any relevance to her.

  “His first wife was also a Helling, I believe?”

  “Yes. Sheila.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Oh yes. I went to the same school as she did. Many years afterwards, of course.”

  Suddenly Carole realized what kind of school it had been that the two attended. An upmarket girl’s private school. Jenny Grant’s manner of speech was so lacking in animation that its vowels had been ironed out, but now she concentrated, Carole could detect the upper-class languor underneath. Harry Grant had married a few grades above himself. Maybe Jenny’s social status had made up for her lack of more obvious attractions.

  So those who had borne the Helling name went through the strata of class, Sheila Forbes and Jenny Grant aiming at the top, Pauline Helling and Lennie Baylis’s mother down at the bottom, with no doubt many social nuances in between.

  “Did you know Sheila Forbes well?”

  “Quite well.”

  “Were you surprised when you heard she’d gone off with another man?”

  “It did seem odd, certainly.” But nothing seemed to have the power to surprise Jenny Grant for long. She shrugged. “Still, that’s what she did. Maybe a romantic heart beat beneath that forbidding exterior.”

  “Was she forbidding?”

  “Perhaps the wrong word. She was very correct, though. Always did the right thing. British, in the old-fashioned sense. You know, didn’t let her emotions show on the surface. I’m sure that’s why she and Graham went down so well abroad.”

  “The archetypal British
couple.”

  “That’s it, yes.”

  “And would you say their marriage was a happy one…You know, before the split?”

  Jenny Grant’s hands lifted and flopped ineffectually back on to her lap. “Who can say? A marriage may look fine on the surface, but nobody except the two inside know what it’s really like.”

  There was a slight change in her tone as she said this. Carole wondered if a comment was being made on the Grants’ own marriage. But Jenny didn’t seem about to expand on the hint and, intriguing though the subject might be, it wasn’t what Carole was there to find out about.

  “Graham and Sheila Forbes were quite well heeled, I gather. Someone said he had private money.”

  “‘Had’ being the operative word. I don’t think he’s got much now.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, presumably he’s got a British Council pension. Not much else, though.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Harry told me. I don’t know where he got it from, but he’s usually pretty reliable. There aren’t many secrets round here.”

  “So where did Graham Forbes’s money go? Has he got a secret vice or something?”

  “Don’t think so. But I would imagine he’s like the others.”

  Carole looked quizzical.

  “Most people round here who’ve lost a lot of money—I don’t mean from firms going to the wall, I mean investment income…Well, it doesn’t do to talk about it, but with most of them it was Lloyd’s.”

  “Ah.”

  The crash of many Lloyd’s syndicates had hit a lot of ‘names’, as the major investors were called. In a well-cushioned area like the part of West Sussex around Weldisham, there had probably been many casualties.

  “Moving on, Jenny…do you remember when exactly Pauline Helling had her pools win?”

  “Well, let me think…” Jenny’s brow wrinkled, and the effect was to make her look younger, suggesting that she might once have had more spark and vivacity. Maybe it wasn’t just her social position that had drawn Harry Grant to her. “She moved into Weldisham round…I don’t know…I should think about 1988…so presumably some time round then.”