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

by Simon Brett

  The path did not lead directly to the barn, but veered off to the left, taking a line between the fences and hedgerow which contained the fields on either side. But Carole had no difficulty leaving the path and continuing towards her destination. The depth to which the wire sagged at that point and the flattened earth on the other side suggested she was following a much-used short-cut. Though there hadn’t been much rain since the downpours of her last walk on the Downs, the ground underfoot was still slippery and clogging. Her sensible walking shoes were soon heavy with mud.

  She glanced up to her right. She could see the tops of the roofs in Weldisham High Street over the swell of the Downs, but no windows. The path was not overlooked.

  As she got closer to the barn, Carole became more aware of how advanced was its dilapidation. The roof was not just sagging but broken-backed. Much of the greening thatch had slipped away completely, and what remained was rotten and slimy. A few disconnected rafters pointed up to the sky. The large double doors had crumbled away to nothing, leaving only lumps of blackened wood hanging like dead flesh from twisted skeletal hinges.

  But the basic brick rectangle, though subsiding towards one end, looked solid enough. With sufficient injections of cash and building expertise, a developer like Harry Grant would have no problems in turning the barn into a dream home from which to crow at the other residents of Weldisham.

  What would in time become Harry Grant’s garden was a tangle of briars and other tendrils of undergrowth. In summer these would be interwoven with head-high nettles, but even now it was hard to make a way through to the gaping barn doors. Carole had to hold her hands up to shield her face from the lash of brambles and she felt the constant snag of thorns catching on the fabric of her Burberry.

  She battered a path through to the doorway. Inside, alternate patches of gloom and bright March sunlight meant that her eyes took a moment to adjust.

  Where the sun and rain could get through the holes in the roof to the ground were patches of growth, low and scrubby this time of year, but no doubt green and luxuriant in the summer. Elsewhere, there was a floor of trodden earth.

  But the interior was very cluttered. In the shadows Carole could see the rusty limbs of long-dead farm machinery. There were bales of corroded barbed wire, stacks of blackened fencing posts and bellied, sagging plastic sacks.

  The space had also been used as a rubbish tip by the people of Weldisham. Carole was amused by this manifestation of local hypocrisy. Residents who no doubt waxed righteously furious at Village Committee meetings about the vandalism of tourists, the detritus of bottles and crisp packets left in front of the Hare and Hounds, the drinks cartons scattered on the Green, had their own secret dumping ground. The old barn was home to a sad selection of broken furniture, wheel-less bicycles and the odd superannuated fridge.

  Her eyes now used to the light, Carole picked her way cautiously through the clutter. She knew what she was looking for and, with a mixture of excitement and dread, she found it.

  In one of the darkest recesses of the barn, where the sun never penetrated, there was a small patch of recently turned earth.

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Twenty-Four

  Gillie Lutteridge’s immaculate ensemble that Friday afternoon was a silk dress the colour of morello cherries. The open neck revealed a cluster of gold necklaces; a single gold chain hung from her wrist. Her make-up and the shape of her blonde hair were, as ever, irreproachable.

  Jude, who’d just had a cup at the Hare and Hounds, refused the offer of coffee. Gillie gestured her to a freshly plumped armchair. “I hope it wasn’t inconvenient for you to come up here. I’m just not very good at talking on the telephone.”

  “It’s fine. I got a lift from a friend. She was coming up here anyway.” A minor lie, but necessary to put her hostess at ease. Jude was getting used to reading the tiny gradations in Gillie Lutteridge’s manner, and had identified a considerable degree of agitation. “It’s about Tamsin, I take it,” she went on, still easing the passage for Gillie’s revelation.

  “Yes. I went to see her yesterday.”

  “At Sandalls Manor?”

  Gillie nodded. “Miles was away on business, so I risked it.”

  “And how’re things going with Charles? Is he making her better?”

  There was a shrug, almost of hopelessness. Gillie Lutteridge seemed much less positive than Jude had ever seen her. Maybe, having once broken her façade by crying, Tamsin’s mother felt she no longer had to maintain a front. What was the point, since Jude had already seen through it?

  “I don’t know. She seems to get better, she relapses. I keep wondering whether it’s our fault.”

  “What?”

  “The illness. The chronic fatigue syndrome. I wonder if it’s Tamsin’s reaction to growing up in this house.”

  “What’s wrong with this house?”

  Gillie’s next shrug was nearly despairing. “There’s so much tension between me and Miles. I think there always has been. Ever since Tamsin was born, really. That…changed things between us. And, as she grew up, she can’t have been unaware of the atmosphere.”

  “So are you suggesting that the atmosphere in the house got to her, that that’s what made her ill? As if she’d been infected by it?”

  Gillie looked at Jude defiantly. “It’s possible. It seems as likely as any of the other explanations that have come up.”

  “But Tamsin wasn’t even living here when she got ill. She was in London.”

  “Yes, but maybe she couldn’t cope in London, couldn’t cope with the job. Maybe living with us had kind of weakened her, so that she couldn’t deal with real life.”

  “Gillie, Gillie, Gillie…” Jude crossed from her chair and took the other woman’s thin hand in hers. “Chronic fatigue syndrome is a genuine illness. You know that. That’s what you have arguments with Miles about. He’s the one who thinks it’s all psychosomatic. You know it’s real.”

  But Gillie Lutteridge was in too reduced a state to be persuaded by her own arguments. “I don’t know. It doesn’t happen to other people’s daughters. I keep thinking it must be my fault.”

  “But then you’ve thought everything was your fault for a long, long time,” observed Jude quietly.

  Gillie sniffed. Once again tears were not far away. Then she nodded. “Well, it is. Most things are my fault.”

  “No, Gillie. You’re not well.”

  “Me too?” she asked with a bitter smile.

  “You’re depressed if you blame yourself for everything that’s wrong.”

  “If that’s the case, then I’ve been depressed for a very long time.”

  “Perhaps you have.”

  “No, of course I haven’t!” Jude had never heard her speak so sharply. Gillie was quick to recover her usual level tone. “Anyway, we don’t want to talk about me. Tamsin’s the one who’s ill.”

  “Are you sure she’s the only one?”

  “Yes.” Gillie Lutteridge moved on brusquely. “Tamsin said something yesterday that worried me.”

  “What?”

  “She implied that she wanted to stay at Sandalls Manor for ever.”

  “Ah. Well, I can understand why that would worry you. Given the kind of rates Charles Hilton charges for his – ”

  “No, it wasn’t that!” Having snapped at Jude once, Gillie Lutteridge had no inhibitions about doing so again. “It wasn’t to do with Charles, not to do with her illness. It was something else and it had her absolutely terrified.”

  “What?”

  “Ikmsin said, “Nobody knows I’m here. So I feel safe. As long as I’m here, I feel safe. But if people knew where to find me, then my life would be in danger.””

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Twenty-Five

  When Carole got back from the footpath to Weldisham Lane, she was surprised to see that her venture to the barn had taken less than twenty minutes. Still forty to go before she’d agreed to meet her friend.

  It was
infuriating. She was dying to tell Jude what she’d seen and discuss the implications. Her thoughts were running too fast; she needed someone to bounce them off, someone to challenge their logic, someone to help her regain a sense of proportion. Once again she was bemused by this potential role reversal, the idea that she should look to Jude for stability. Carole was meant to be the sensible one.

  Given the time she had to kill, Carole decided to walk back along the track she’d trodden two weeks before. If, as logic was telling her, the woman’s body had once been buried in the wreck of the building that now belonged to Harry Grant, then someone had been along the same route to take the bones to South Welling Barn.

  Ideas as to who that person might have been kept bubbling into her mind and she had to keep rigid control to stop those ideas from crystallizing in conclusions.

  The track was still tacky underfoot, but not nearly as bad as it had been on her previous journey. And the mood of the Downs was very different. The menace she had felt under the louring rain-clouds was long gone, and Carole even wondered whether it was a feeling she had grafted on in retrospect, after her grisly discovery. The sun transformed the Downs from a hostile to a nurturing environment.

  Her sensible shoes made a regular slapping sound on the mud as she strode forward. She felt fit and optimistic. Carole Seddon was only in her early fifties, after all. There was life in the old girl yet.

  Sound travels strangely on the Downs, bounced from hillocks and funnelled by valleys. Frequently it’s hard to tell exactly where a noise is coming from.

  So Carole wasn’t distracted by the screech of eroded gears until the vehicle was almost upon her. She turned to see an old Land Rover roaring up the track behind her. It was being driven as though the driver were blind to her existence.

  Carole leapt to the verge at the side, mentally cursing the loutishness of whoever was driving, and expected to see the Land Rover career off along the track.

  But it didn’t. The vehicle braked fiercely in a flurry of mud. Then, in a grinding of gears, it reversed and came to a halt beside her. The flailing tyres spotted her freshly cleaned Burberry with mud.

  Carole opened her mouth to remonstrate with whatever road-hog she was up against, but the words dried on her lips when she saw who got out of the driver’s door.

  She was not an accidental victim of someone’s thoughtless high spirits. The man had been looking for her.

  Carole Seddon didn’t like the expression she saw in his eyes as he said, more statement than question, “You’re the one who found the bones, aren’t you?”

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Twenty-Six

  “All I could get out of Tamsin,” Gillie Lutteridge went on, “was that something happened last time she came here.”

  “That was only a few weeks ago, you said. Another time Miles was away on business.”

  “Yes. Anyway, while she was in Weldisham, she saw something that frightened her to death.”

  “But she wouldn’t tell you what?”

  Gillie shook her head.

  “Well, who did she see while she was here?”

  “That’s the point. She didn’t see anyone except me. She didn’t want anyone to know she was here.”

  “Did she use the phone?”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “There weren’t any letters waiting for her?”

  “No. As soon as anything addressed to her arrives, I forward it to Sandalls Manor.”

  Jude grimaced. “Well, something must’ve happened to get her into such a state.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “She didn’t go out?”

  “I was with her all evening. We both went to bed at the same time.”

  “So, without leaving the house or having contact with another human being, Tamsin managed to get the impression that someone wanted to kill her? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. There’s only one thing I can think, Jude…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I just wonder if…With her illness, Tamsin’s sleep patterns are all over the place. Sometimes she sleeps all the time, almost as if she were narcoleptic. And then she goes through phases when she’s awake for hours in the night and…”

  “You think she might have gone out?”

  “She might.”

  “What for?”

  “Ib smoke a cigarette. She keeps telling me she’s given up, but I’m not sure I believe her. She used to smoke like a chimney at university, and while she was working in London. When Miles and I made it pretty clear that we didn’t like the smell of cigarettes in the house, Tamsin used to go outside.”

  “Into the garden?”

  “Yes. Or if it was cold or wet, she’d go a bit further.”

  “Where?”

  “There’s an old barn just beyond the end of our garden. Tamsin sometimes used to go in there to smoke.”

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Twenty-Seven

  Brian Helling was once again dressed in the leather coat and beret, uniform of the disaffected artist. Carole couldn’t help recalling Graham Forbes’s Chesterton quote about the artistic temperament being ‘a disease that afflicts amateurs’. In other circumstances, she might have found the self-defined writer a figure of fun. But not with the expression that was currently on his thin face. Nor as she recollected the rest of her conversation with Graham Forbes, about the subject matter of Brian Helling’s writing.

  She answered his question, confirming that she was indeed the one who had found the bones.

  “Carole somebody…”

  “Carole Seddon.”

  “Lennie Baylis told me it was you.”

  “Ah.” Strange – or perhaps not strange, perhaps characteristic of the area – how all these Weldisham boys seemed to keep in touch. Brian Helling still living there with his mother; Harry Grant soon to move back in; Detective Sergeant Baylis living elsewhere, but still resentful of his exclusion from the village on economic grounds.

  “And what do you know about them?” Brian Helling went on.

  “Know about the bones?” Carole shrugged. She wasn’t about to share the conjectures that had formed in her mind since visiting the dilapidated barn. “I know what’s been on the media. They’re the bones of a woman aged between thirty and fifty. That’s all anyone knows…except maybe the police pathologists…and they’re not yet sharing their conclusions.”

  “So you didn’t go to South Welling Barn looking for them?”

  “Looking for the bones?” Carole was incredulous. “No. I was just sheltering from the rain. I’d never seen the barn before. I didn’t even know it existed.”

  “Right.” Brian Helling rubbed the back of his hand against his long nose. It could have been a gesture of relief. He certainly seemed less manic as he continued. “I’m sorry. In a small place like Weldisham a lot of rumours get spread around. And some of them aren’t very helpful rumours. They could be hurtful to local individuals.”

  “Individuals like your mother?” Carole hazarded.

  Her words snapped his mood back to paranoia. “What do you know about my mother? How do you know who my mother is?”

  “Detective Sergeant Baylis told me who you were,” replied Carole evenly. “He said your mother was Pauline Helling, who lives in Heron Cottage.”

  The answer was insufficient to allay all of his suspicion. “Why did Lennie tell you about me?”

  “Because I asked him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, if you must know, I’d overheard you sounding off in the Hare and Hounds. I wondered who it could be who was talking so loudly and tastelessly about the bones I’d discovered.”

  “Oh.” He seemed to accept that, and not to be offended by it. Brian Helling knew he drew attention to himself in public. He even prided himself on the fact.

  “Did Lennie say anything else about me?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh. Nothing.”

  Carole pressed on. She might as well get any informa
tion she could. “So, have people been circulating nasty rumours about your mother?”

  “What?” He looked distracted for a moment. “No, no, of course they haven’t.” A new unease came into his eyes. “What makes you ask that? What makes you think my mother has anything to do with the bones?”

  Carole noted the anxiety in his tone, but her answer was entirely palliative. “Nothing, no reason.” She decided to play the ‘silly woman’ card. “Sorry, but you make a discovery like I did at South Welling Barn and, needless to say, it sets your mind racing. You get all kinds of daft ideas.”

  “So long as you recognize they are daft,” said Brian Helling, with an edge of threat in his voice.

  “Yes,” Carole responded humbly. She was still trying to work out what Brian Helling’s agenda might be. Why had he come chasing after her so dramatically? Was he trying to get information out of her or simply find out how much she knew? And why did how much she knew matter to him?

  “Do you know many people in Weldisham?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’ve met a few in the past couple of weeks. The Forbeses invited me to dinner.”

  “Oh, did they?” For Brian Helling this seemed to categorize her. She was the sort of woman who got invited to dinner by Graham and Irene Forbes. “And you haven’t known them for long?”

  “No. I’d hardly say I know them now. I mean, I never met Graham’s first wife.”

  “But you know what happened to her?” He was very alert now, fixing Carole with his eyes, as though her answer mattered a lot.

  “The story goes she ran off with another man. In Malaysia.”

  The words seemed to relax him. “Yes,” he said. “That’s how the story goes.”

  “Are you implying the story’s not true?”

  “Certainly not. Are you?”

  Given the cue, Carole was insanely tempted to share the thoughts that had been building up inside about the first Mrs Forbes. But she restrained herself. To Jude maybe, but not to Brian Helling. He was the last person on earth she should make aware of her suspicions.