The Fethering Mysteries 02; Death on the Downs tfm-2

by Simon Brett

  Ted’s answer had the effect of making Carole feel even more jealous. Not jealous of him, just jealous of the rare serenity that surrounded Jude. They’d been next-door neighbours for nearly four months. Carole felt cautiously that she could describe Jude as a friend; and she was confident Jude would have no hesitation in describing Carole as her friend. But she still knew distressingly little about the’ new arrival in Fethering. She didn’t even know whether Jude had ever been married, for God’s sake. Was she divorced? Did she have a permanent boyfriend? Somehow the cues for such basic questions never seemed to arise. Jude wasn’t evasive, she was very honest; but an air of mystery still clung around her. Mystery and serenity.

  Carole would have given a fortune to know the source of Jude’s inner peace.

  They’d arrived outside Carole’s house, High lor, in Fethering High Street. “I’d invite you in for a drink or…”

  “No. No. Got to get back to the Crown. Before the brawls break out. Doesn’t take much to get the old geezers hitting out with their crutches, strangling each other with the cords of their hearing aids…”

  Carole chuckled. “Can’t thank you enough for picking me up.”

  “No problem. You going to be all right to get up there for your car in the morning?”

  She was tempted to see if he’d actually offer to take her. But no, she’d already presumed too much on his goodwill. “Yes, I’ve got that sorted, thank you,” she lied. Organize a cab in the morning.

  He was silent. “And you’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Absolutely fine, thanks. Hot bath, early night, be as good as new.”

  “Great.” Another silence. “Well, it’s been very good to see you again, Carole.”

  Surely she was wrong to detect a reluctance in Ted to let her go. No, that’d be ridiculous. She reached for the door handle. “Good to see you too. And I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Keep me up to date,” he called out, as she stepped into the cold February night. “When you find out who owns dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…”

  “Course I will,” said Carole.

  She waved as his car drew away. Gulliver, alerted by the click of the garden gate, set up a reproachful barking from the hall. He only did that for her. She never knew how he recognized her step. He never barked for anyone else. Burglars could come and go into High Tor unser-enaded.

  But as Carole walked up the path to her front door, she felt strangely elated.

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Six

  On the Saturday morning, the village of Weldisham looked apologetically picturesque, shamefaced about the bad weather of the day before. The sky was a clear pale blue, rinsed clean by the recent rains. Thin winter sunlight glinted off the stone facings of cottages, warmed the green of lichen-covered clay tiles and gilded the outlines of the naked trees.

  As her cab drove up the lane from the main A27, Carole could see no evidence of police presence. She looked along the track up which she had walked the afternoon before, but again could see nothing. South Welling Barn itself was out of sight, tucked away in the folds of the Downs. They must still be investigating there, she thought, wondering whether the bones remained where she had found them, or whether they had been spirited off to reveal their secrets under the intense interrogation of a forensic laboratory.

  It was half past nine when she arrived, but already the area in front of the Hare and Hounds had been neatly swept. In summer, like the garden adjacent to the car park behind, this space would be full of wooden table and bench units of the kind that can’t easily be removed by the unscrupulous in search of garden furniture. Now there was just one low bench in front, on which customers could sit to obey the printed injunction ‘Please remove all muddy boots and shoes.’ By the locked pub door was a row of metal rings to which leads could be attached, and on the ground, also for the dogs, stood a green bowl of clean drinking water.

  After paying off the cab, Carole squinted up at the pub’s sign, which in the confusion of the day before she had failed to register. The painted animals had almost a cartoon quality, the hare close-up, bright-eyed and mischievous, looking over its shoulder at a straggling pack of black and white hounds, whose tongues lolled with the effort of pursuit. Their hunt was doomed to failure; there was no chance they were going to catch the hare.

  Like so much about the Hare and Hounds, the sign was out of keeping in its rural setting. Its archness seemed to be saying, Yes, you really are in the country, but don’t worry, there’s nothing threatening or remote about it. You’re still safely in the hands of a slick metropolitan marketing operation.

  Carole crossed to her Renault, neatly parked opposite the pub, where she had left it the afternoon before, and was surprised to see that a piece of cardboard had been shoved under the windscreen wiper. On it, written in shaky but forceful capitals, she read: “THIS is PRIVATEPROPERTY. IF YOU’RE INTENDING TO DRINK TOO MUCH AND NEED A LIFT HOME, DON’T BRING YOUR CAR IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! OR IF YOU DO, LEAVE IT IN THE CAR PARK!!! THE NOISE FROM THE PUB IS BAD ENOUGH – PARKING HERE IS AN INSULT!!!”

  Carole looked at the side of the road where she’d parked. There were no yellow lines, single or double. Nor were there any ‘NO PARKING’ signs in evidence. She hadn’t left the car obstructing a garage or gateway.

  She decided that she’d come in in the middle of a long-standing argument between the Hare and Hounds and the owner of the cottage opposite. She looked for the name. An iron plaque with a white heron across the top identified it as Heron Cottage.

  But of its resident, the writer of the note, there was no evidence. The windows, double-glazed leaded units, looked blindly out at the pub.

  Carole wondered for a moment whether the owner might be the old lady who had looked so suspiciously into her car the afternoon before. The woman with the purple hat and the black and white spaniel. The note under the windscreen wiper would have been in character. But it needn’t have been the same person. Perhaps, thought Carole wryly, everyone in Weldisham is equally unwelcoming to visitors.

  She got into the car and immediately felt the dampness of the seat beneath her. Have to dry out the upholstery when she got back to Fethering.

  And then a rather unpleasant thought struck her. Whoever wrote the note may have been generalizing, knowing that a car left overnight outside Heron Cottage meant someone had drunk too much to get home safely. But a much likelier explanation was that Carole had been seen parking the car and going into the Hare and Hounds. And she’d been seen being driven away in Ted Crisp’s Bluebird.

  In other words, someone had been watching her every movement.

  She shivered, and not just from the dampness of her seat. She knew that not much went unobserved in Fethering, but that constant surveillance must be even worse in a tiny village. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.

  In spite of the beauty of the day, Weldisham suddenly felt claustrophobic.

  ♦

  The rest of Carole’s Saturday passed uneventfully. She gave the car a thorough cleaning, inside and out. She took her Burberry to the dry-cleaner’s. Gulliver’s foot seemed to be giving him less pain, so she took him for the most extended walk he’d had since the accident. She didn’t dare let him off the lead, which he thought to be a gross breach of canine rights, but his foot seemed to cope. His recovery was on track, according to the time-scale given by the vet.

  At around six in the evening, Carole for a moment contemplated going to the Crown and Anchor for a quick drink. But that was madness. She was Carole Seddon, for heaven’s sake. Fair enough to go out for a drink with Jude once in a while, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who went to a pub on her own.

  She put the idea from her mind and settled down to an evening of watching serious, historical things on BBC2.

  ♦

  As well as being vague about where she was going and why, Jude had also been vague about when she was coming back, so Carole was totally surprised to see her friend on the doorstep early
evening on the Sunday. Jude wasn’t dressed for outdoors. She wore a drifty cream shirt over a drifty long burgundy skirt, and had a sand-coloured drifty scarf around her neck. Her blonde hair had been piled up into a cottage loaf on top of her head. Her face had more colour than when she’d left, though whether that was from wind or sun was hard to say.

  Above all, she looked welcome. There was something reassuring, calming, about her ample feminine contours. Her wide brown eyes prompted trust. Jude always seemed rooted, wherever she was, in touch with some unseen source of energy. In her right hand, characteristically, she held the neck of a wine bottle.

  “Carole, hi. I just got back.”

  “How are you, Jude?”

  “Great.” She waved the wine bottle. “Wondered if you fancied sharing this?”

  “Well…”

  “Or we could go down the Crown and Anchor, if you’d prefer.”

  It was tempting. But no, that sounded rather unhospit-able. “Come in, Jude. Are you sure about the wine, because I’ve got some…”

  “No, no, let’s have this. It was given to me.”

  “Where you were staying?”

  “Yes.”

  In the kitchen Carole busied herself finding corkscrew and glasses. Gulliver was winsomely pleased to see Jude. He slobbered all over her outstretched hand. “You’re in the wars, aren’t you? What’s he been doing to himself?”

  “Cut his paw on a tin can on the beach.”

  “Poor old boy. All right now?”

  “He’s on the mend. Come through to the fire.”

  When they were sitting in the warm, with glasses in their hands, Carole decided it was time to elicit a few basic facts. “Now, you never told me why you were going away. Was it business or pleasure?”

  Jude grinned, but there was a hint of pain in her voice as she replied, “Bit of each, I suppose.”

  Carole pressed on. “So where is it you’ve been? Abroad?”

  “Mostly,” said Jude with an air of finality. “What’s been going on round here? Or is it the usual old ‘Nothing ever happens in Fethering’?”

  “I haven’t been aware of much happening in Fethering, certainly. Though, according to the Fethering Observer, plans for a new entertainment complex on the seafront have just been turned down. That’s about the biggest news, I think.”

  “What does an ‘entertainment complex’ mean? Slot machines, arcade games, that kind of stuff?”

  “Probably. Very un-Fethering, anyway. The residents here don’t want anything to change, ever. Most of them moved to Fethering because they were looking for a place where time stood still.”

  Jude tossed her loose bundle of blonde hair. “That’s not why I moved here. And surely it’s not why you moved here?”

  “Well…” Carole thought about it. “I think it probably is why I moved here in the first place. That illusion people who live in London have that values in the country have more permanence, more validity perhaps. And, after David left me, it’s maybe why I stayed here. I didn’t want any more change then, I didn’t want an environment that threatened any more surprises. Mind you, I don’t think it’s why I’m still in Fethering now.”

  Jude grinned. “I’m sure it isn’t. Becoming a bit of a tearaway these days, aren’t you, Carole?”

  “Hardly.” But she was flattered by the idea. Jude seemed so different, so unconventional, so alien in the all-enveloping conformity of Fethering, that to be described by her as a ‘tearaway’ was rather flattering. Even if, as Carole feared, it wasn’t really true.

  “Anyway, that’s it, is it? Planning permission for an entertainment complex turned down. Nothing more exotic? No New Age travellers’ convention at the Yacht Club? No ramraiders emptying all the stock out of Allin-store – assuming, of course, that they could find any? Nothing else to set the weak hearts of Fethering aflutter?”

  “Nothing in Fethering, no,” said Carole.

  Inside, she felt a little bubble of excitement. It was the feeling she had identified in Graham Forbes in the Hare and Hounds on the Friday evening – the knowledge that she had sensational news to impart. The same news as he had had, in fact. And, like Graham Forbes, Carole was going to deliver it at her own pace.

  “So where?” asked Jude, on cue.

  “Weldisham.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ted Crisp said you’d got friends up there.”

  “I know some people, yes.” But before Carole had time for the automatic supplementary question, Jude had pressed on, “What, though? What’s been happening up there?”

  “A lot of police round Weldisham on Friday,” said Carole, deliberately enigmatic.

  “What brought them there?”

  “I did,” she replied proudly.

  “How?”

  Carole realized she’d strung out her revelation long enough. To continue the teasing would be merely tiresome. “I found some human bones,” she said, “in a barn on the Downs.”

  The rest was quickly told – how she’d called the police, her conversation with Detective Sergeant Baylis in the Hare and Hounds.

  “Have you heard from the police since?” asked Jude.

  “No. Sergeant Baylis has got my number, so presumably he’ll be in touch when he needs to be.”

  “And you’re sure they were human bones?”

  “I’m not a pathologist, but they looked like it to me. And, as I said, a SOCO team was called for. They’re not going to do that if the victim is an animal, are they?”

  Jude looked thoughtful. “Nor if they’re dealing with a natural death…”

  “However natural the death might have been, you’d be hard pushed to explain away what was done to the bones post mortem as a natural phenomenon.”

  “True.” There was a sparkle in her eye as Jude took a large swallow of wine. “This is potentially rather exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Who knows? It depends rather on what the police come up with.”

  “I’d have thought it depends on what we come up with.”

  “Jude, we don’t know for sure there’s been a crime. We haven’t even got a definite identification of the victim.”

  “Your tone of voice suggests you do have some kind of identification, even if not a definite one.”

  “Well, only pub gossip. I stayed in the Hare and Hounds after Sergeant Baylis had gone, and the manager and an old bloke in there said they reckoned they knew who it was.”

  “Who?”

  “Apparently there was a girl in the village who’d gone missing.”

  The sparkle in Jude’s eye was quickly extinguished.

  Her voice was tense as she asked, “Did the man say the girl’s name?”

  “Yes,” Carole replied. “It was Tamsin Lutteridge.” All the colour drained out of Jude’s face.

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Seven

  It turned out that she had known the girl. “Her mother, Gillie, brought her to me.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if I could help.”

  “Help with what?”

  Deliberately using the present tense, Jude said, “Tamsin is suffering from ME.”

  “Should I know what that is?”

  “Myalgic encephalomyelitis. Though it’s not called that now. I just thought you were more likely to have heard of ME than anything else.”

  “Though, as you see, I hadn’t.”

  “No. Was known for a while as ‘malingerer’s disease’ or ‘yuppie flu’.”

  Graham Forbes’s comments about Tamsin Lutteridge giving up her job and ‘coming back to sponge off her parents’ suddenly made sense. “Oh yes, I’ve heard of that,” said Carole.

  She had been brought up in the ‘snap out of it’ school of mental health treatment, and too much of that attitude must have come across in her voice, because Jude said firmly, “It’s a real illness, no question. Also called ‘post-viral syndrome’. Most recent name I heard for it was ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’, but there’s probably something new by no
w. Doctors – those who believe it exists, and there are still some, I’m afraid, who don’t are divided on the proper treatment, anyway. All kinds of therapies are recommended, though the results are very variable.”

  “But why did Tamsin and her mother come to see you about it?”

  “Because I do some healing.”

  Carole could not have been more surprised if Jude had said she did bungee-jumping. “Healing? You mean all that laying-on-of-hands nonsense?”

  “Call it nonsense if you like. It sometimes works.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it does, but…but…”

  Carole tried not to think about illness. She knew what could be treated by aspirin, and she knew what needed a visit to the doctor for a prescription of antibiotics. Certain conditions required surgical procedures, and she devoutly hoped she would never experience any of them. Her attitude to alternative or complementary medicine was that it was all ‘mumbo-jumbo’.

  “Anyway, Gillie brought Tamsin to me, because she thought I might be able to help.”

  “By ‘help’ you mean cure her?”

  “Maybe get her closer to a cure, yes.”

  “And did it work?”

  Jude grinned. Carole had failed dismally to eradicate the scepticism from her tone. “Work? What does work mean? A complex illness like that, you’re not going to get an instant result after one session. Healers aren’t miracle workers.”

  “That’s the image of them that’s projected in the press.”

  “The image projected in the press of civil servants is that they’re all boring and unimaginative…” It was rare for Jude to make such a pointed remark, and the fact that she did so showed that Carole had strayed into an area of strong belief. Jude eased the situation by smiling. “But I’m sure that’s just another mistaken popular stereotype.” Carole opened her mouth to say something, but Jude went on, “So…my attempts to heal Tamsin didn’t have time to have much effect. Whether they would have done, given that time, I don’t know. But I do know they did no more harm to her than the various treatments traditional doctors had prescribed. As I said, we’re dealing with a very complex illness. The mind and the body are deeply interinvolved in what happens to sufferers like poor lamsin. Anything that might help is worth trying.”