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

by Simon Brett

  “Good morning?” The words may have been polite, but their delivery was distinctly deterrent.

  Carole still had no plan of what to say. In desperation, she tried the truth. “Mrs Helling, good morning. My name’s Carole Seddon. I wanted to talk to you about something your son Brian said to me.”

  There was a moment’s impasse, then, with bad grace, Pauline Helling moved back into the gloom of her hall. “You’d better come in.”

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Thirty-Two

  Carole could hear barking as she entered Heron Cottage. Presumably Pauline Helling’s black and white spaniel was locked away in the kitchen.

  The sitting room into which she was ushered looked at odds with the exterior of the house. She had been in enough modernized country cottages to have certain expectations – white walls, exposed beams, open fireplaces, details which accentuated the building’s rustic origins. Pauline Helling’s home had none of these. If there were any beams – and the cottage’s age suggested there must have been – they’d been covered over with plasterboard, and the fireplace had been filled in. The walls were a dyspeptic green colour, not a gentle eau-de-Nil, but a sharp acidic tone. On a carpet whose multi-hued swirly design was too large for the space sat a three–piece suite in purple velour. The same material was used for the orange curtains.

  The room’s only concession to its history was the lozenge criss-crossing on the leaded windows, but these were modern double-glazed units and had probably been demanded by the planning authorities when the cottage was converted.

  Such extreme clashes of style might be used with postmodernist irony in a television decorating make-over programme. In Heron Cottage they seemed to reflect only the owner’s lack of taste. The knee-jerk snobbish reaction which Carole could not quite curb was that someone who’d been brought up in a council house shouldn’t aspire to the middle–class gentility of Weldisham. Like the other residents of the village, she was very quickly condemning Pauline Helling for having ideas above her station.

  There were no pictures on the walls and very few ornaments. On the window sill perched the statuette which Carole had seen from outside. The shepherdess bent winsomely over her crook, lifting the hem of her long skirt, against which a fluffy lamb nuzzled. The piece wasn’t even china, just a badly painted plaster figurine of the kind that might be won at a fair. Next to the shepherdess sat the pin-cushion in the shape of a fat Chinaman. His tiny head perched incongruously on the ball of his body. There were no pins or needles stuck into the fabric; the object was there purely as an ornament. On the side which faced the window the purple silk was almost bleached of colour. The two-tone effect reminded Carole of a childhood illustration she’d seen of the poisoned apple the Wicked Queen had presented to Snow White.

  On the mantelpiece, bereft of its fireplace beneath, stood a couple of family photographs. One was clearly of some Helling family reunion, an amateur snap in faded black and white, dating back at least twenty years. Sitting uncomfortably in the centre were an elderly couple, while around them generations of descendants posed in various stages of unease. The Hellings, their body language seemed to say, were not good at social events and, what’s more, they didn’t like each other much. None of the family seemed to have escaped the Helling pointed nose.

  The second picture was a school photograph of Brian. Though he had probably been only about nine when the picture was taken, the same nose and a slyness in his eyes made him instantly recognizable.

  There was not a book in sight; the Radio Times beneath the small television was the only evidence of any kind of reading matter. How Brian Helling could have developed the desire to be a writer from this kind of background Carole’s rather narrow mind could not imagine.

  “All right,” demanded Pauline Helling, after she’d perfunctorily gestured her visitor into a purple armchair. “What’s he done this time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know Brian gets in trouble from time to time. Has he stolen something from you or what?” Her local accent was strong, and she spoke like someone who was unused to talking. She didn’t sit herself, but hovered uneasily by the stranded mantelpiece.

  “He hasn’t stolen anything from me.”

  Pauline Helling looked a little puzzled. Then she said, “He might call it ‘borrowing’. He might say he just wanted to borrow something from you.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “He doesn’t owe you anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Brian stopped me on the track last Friday.”

  “Track? What track’s that?”

  “The one on the way out of the village. Where Weldi-sham Lane turns right back down to the main road.” Pauline Helling still looked uncomprehending. “The track that leads to South Welling Barn.”

  That did it. The old woman’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. Carole noticed that, like her son, she had no visible upper lip. “Why were you going to South Welling Barn?”

  “I wasn’t. I was just going for a walk.”

  “But why in that direction?”

  Carole shrugged.

  Pauline Helling enunciated her next words with great care. “I know it was you who found the bones up there.”

  This came as no surprise to Carole, but she still asked, “How do you know?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “It seems to me, Mrs Helling, that there’s very little goes on in Weldisham you don’t know about.”

  The old woman didn’t react to this. Instead, she asked in a voice that was almost fearful, “Did Brian say anything to you about the bones?”

  “Yes, he did.” From the expression on Pauline Helling’s face, that was the news she was afraid to hear. For a moment, she seemed unable to speak. Carole went on, “He effectively said I should mind my own business about them.”

  Brian’s mother found her voice again. “Sounds like very good advice to me.”

  “He also hinted to me who he thought the bones might have belonged to.”

  “Did he?” The fear in the voice was now almost panic. “Who?”

  “He talked about Detective Sergeant Baylis…”

  The panic grew. “Lennie hadn’t been questioning Brian, had he?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t mention that. But he said that Sergeant Baylis’s mother had disappeared more than twenty years ago, and that some people at the time thought his father had done away with her.”

  “Ah.” The thin shoulders sagged, as the tension went out of them. Carole felt sure she was witnessing a reaction of huge relief. Pauline Helling had been afraid she knew who the bones belonged to. What she’d just said ruled out that possibility. Whoever the victim had been, it wasn’t Lennie Baylis’s mother.

  But Pauline Helling knew who it was.

  Carole didn’t reckon much for her chances of finding out, but it was worth trying. “You’ve lived round the village for a long time, haven’t you, Mrs Helling?”

  “Only been in this cottage twelve years,” she replied defensively.

  “But Brian said you used to work up here before that.”

  “So? What’s that to you?”

  Carole tried to guess what kind of work someone like Pauline Helling could have done in a place like Weldi-sham. She could never have had the outgoing personality to serve in the Hare and Hounds, so that really left only one alternative. “What did you do – cleaning?” There was no reply, but Carole knew she had got it right. “Who did you clean for?”

  “That’s no business of yours.”

  True, it wasn’t, but Carole was far too caught up in her thoughts to stop there. “Did you work for the Lutter-idges?” No reply, and no flicker of reaction either. “If you don’t tell me, I can find out.”

  “You do that then,” said Pauline Helling, defiantly malevolent. “Come on, it’s time you went. We haven’t got anything else to say to each other.”

  There was no pretence of politenes
s between them now, so, though Carole wasn’t optimistic about getting answers, she felt she could ask any questions she wanted to. As if the old woman hadn’t spoken, she said, “I gather you had a big pools win…” No reaction. “And that’s how you bought this house…” The vestigial upper lip remained an unmoving line. “When was that exactly?”

  “Out.” Pauline Helling crossed to open the sitting-room door. “You’re not welcome here.”

  She stood in the doorway and opened the front door. Carole stayed in her purple armchair and kept trying. “But you’re not welcome here either, are you, Mrs Helling? I gather the good folk of Weldisham don’t think you fit in.”

  “If you don’t leave, I’ll call Brian. He can be quite nasty when he needs to be.”

  After her experience on the track, Carole didn’t doubt it. Reluctantly, she rose from her armchair and moved towards the hall. She took one last look around the hideous sitting room.

  Her eye was caught again by the Helling family reunion photograph.

  And in it she saw something she should have noticed before, something that started a whole new set of exciting connections racing through her mind.

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Thirty-Three

  Carole wasn’t yet positively suspicious of Detective Sergeant Baylis, but she was surprised by the alacrity with which he responded to her phone call. The fact that he was sitting in front of her fire at three-thirty that afternoon could have borne out Brian Helling’s hint that the detective was more concerned with monitoring other people’s thinking on the case than with finding a solution to it himself. Which could, as Brian had implied, mean that Lennie Baylis’s interest was a very personal one.

  “So do I gather that you’ve got some new information, Mrs Seddon?”

  He seemed at ease in her armchair, but watchful. Now she had recognized him as one of the boys in the Helling family photograph, the likeness was obvious. It was only his bulk that made his nose look small; in a thinner face it would have stood out as beakily as Pauline’s or Brian’s.

  “I wouldn’t say it was new information, really. New thinking, perhaps.” He’d been so prompt in answering her summons that Carole hadn’t had time to refine her approach. She had to think on her feet. “It seems to me,” she continued tentatively, “that there’s some Helling family connection in this whole thing.”

  He was unshocked by the suggestion. “Wouldn’t be a great surprise if there was. The Hellings are a very extensive family round here. At all kinds of different levels. Farm owners, farm workers…These days doctors and solicitors. There are Hellings everywhere. Most local people have some distant connection with them.”

  “Including you,” she dared to say.

  He may have been surprised by her knowing this, but not fazed. “Yes, my mother was a Helling.”

  “So you’re related to Pauline and Brian?”

  “Not directly, so far as I know. We probably are if you go back a few generations.”

  “But you didn’t see a lot of Brian when you were growing up?”

  “I told you we went to school together. But didn’t mix much in our spare time. Never really got on. Had to meet at the occasional big Helling family reunion, but that was it.” He spoke almost as if he knew she’d made the connection from the photograph on Pauline’s mantelpiece.

  “The reason I mention it…” For a moment Carole almost lost her nerve, but she regained impetus. “The reason I mention it is something that Brian Helling said to me.”

  “When did you see Brian?”

  “He came chasing after me on the Downs on Friday. In his Land Rover.”

  Baylis looked alarmed. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  “No. He frightened me a bit, that’s all.”

  The sergeant relaxed back in his chair. “Good. Keep clear of Brian Helling if you can. He’s a nasty bit of work.”

  “But not criminally nasty. Or at least that’s what you implied before.”

  “No, probably not criminally nasty. But you never know how someone like him might behave, given the right provocation.”

  “I will do my level best to avoid meeting him again. And if I do meet him, I’ll do my level best to avoid provoking him. Not that I actually sought out his company last Friday.”

  “No. Of course not. But be careful. He’s volatile and…” The sergeant stopped, as though he’d been about to go too far.

  “Volatile and…?” Carole insisted.

  “I’ve mentioned I think he’s into drugs. I haven’t got any proof yet, but…” He shook his head in exasperation. “Why am I telling you this? I rely on your discretion to keep quiet about it.”

  “Of course.” Well, to everyone except Jude.

  “So what was it Brian said to you last Friday?”

  Presented with the direct question, there was no way Carole could avoid the direct answer. “He suggested that the bones I found might have belonged to your mother.”

  Baylis nodded slowly. Again he appeared unshocked, almost as if he had been expecting that response. “I see. Well, it’s an old rumour. No surprise it should have resurfaced again.”

  “And is it a rumour to which you give any credence?”

  This time his face closed over. “No,” he replied curtly. “I’m not pretending my parents got on. If you think I’m about to say, “Never mind, we were poor but we were happy,” forget it. We were bloody miserable. When I was a kid, I spent as much time out of the house as I could. Out on the Downs all the time.”

  “Must’ve been a great place to play, though.”

  “Oh yes, we had plenty of games.” The grin this time was wry. “It’s easy for kids to play out their fantasies up on the Downs. Except, as I say, I was only out there so’s I didn’t have to go back home. My dad was a violent man, I don’t deny that. And yes, my mother walked out when I was fifteen. Just upped and left.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. You get over things. I joined the police force, made my own mates, got my own life now. Never think about those times.” He was clearly lying when he said the words. “As I say, my mother walked out on my father. He didn’t kill her. Nor did I, in case that was going to be your next question.” Then, before Carole could respond, he went on, “Interesting, though, that Brian should raise that suggestion to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, why you? Apart from the fact that you discovered the bones, you have nothing to do with the case. Why should he bother to go chasing over the Downs after you?”

  “I think he’d somehow got the impression that I was making my own private investigation.”

  “And are you?”

  Carole couldn’t meet his sardonic eyes. “No, of course I’m not.”

  He didn’t sound convinced. “You’ve been around Weld-isham rather a lot the last couple of weeks. You and your chubby blonde friend.”

  She’d never heard anyone describe Jude as ‘chubby’. Least of all a man. Men seemed too immediately caught up in Jude’s aura to be critical of her appearance. And when they’d been introduced, Baylis had apparently responded like the rest. Maybe in his vocabulary ‘chubby’ was a compliment.

  Carole blushed. “Well, obviously we’re interested.”

  “Yes, I suppose it’s not every day you find a dead body.”

  She wondered what access he’d had to her records, whether he knew that this was in fact the second dead body she’d found within the year. “Not every day I find a neatly packed set of bones, no,” she responded cautiously, and then moved quickly on. “You said ‘for one thing’…”

  “Sorry?”

  “You said ‘for one thing’ it was odd Brian should target me. Was there ‘another thing’?”

  “Well, I suppose…” He seemed undecided whether to tell her more, but then shrugged and grinned. “Basic rule of police investigation. When someone volunteers a significant piece of information for no very good reason, they might well be doing it to divert suspicio
n from something else.”

  For a moment, Carole considered an application of Baylis’s words to what he himself had said about Brian Helling’s possible drug habit. It was surely unprofessional for a policeman to drop that kind of hint. He’d have to have a very good reason for doing it…like, say, deliberately building up suspicions of Brian Helling…in order to divert suspicions away from someone else…even from himself.

  But Carole didn’t pursue the thought out loud. “So, Lennie, you’re suggesting that Brian Helling raised the old rumour about your mother to me to stop me focusing my enquiries in any other direction?”

  “Something like that.” He smiled at her ironically. “Except, of course, you’re not conducting an investigation, so you wouldn’t be wanting to focus it in any direction…would you?”

  “No.” Again she couldn’t hold his gaze.

  He rubbed his chin. “Still, it’s interesting that Brian should have bothered to try and divert your suspicions. Maybe I should have a word with him…and with his mother…”

  “The eyes and ears of Weldisham.”

  “Yes. I’ve a feeling that the two of them know more about those bones than they’re letting on.”

  This exactly reflected Carole’s views, but she didn’t embark on further discussion. Her moment of doubt about Detective Sergeant Baylis’s motivations had engendered caution. So she just asked, “Can you tell me something about Pauline Helling?”

  “If it’s something to which I know the answer, yes. And if, of course, it’s not classified information.”

  “I don’t think the answer to this is going to breach any security regulations. She used to work in Weldisham as a cleaner, didn’t she?”

  “Mm.”

  “Who did she work for?”

  “Graham Forbes. Graham and his first wife, Sheila.”

  ♦

  “It’s very frustrating.” Jude was slumped in one of her shapeless draped armchairs, a glass of white wine in her hand.