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

by Simon Brett

  She drove into the centre of Weldisham, though in a village of some thirty houses she didn’t have far to go. There was a small grassy area, surrounded by a low railing, which she felt sure would be called ‘The Green’. A noticeboard displayed a few dampish posters behind glass. There was a map for walkers, a reminder that Weldisham was a Neighbourhood Watch Area, a faded orange flyer for line–dancing on Wednesday evenings in the Village Hall.

  And, sure enough, beside the board, was a public phone box. One of the old red ones – no doubt the Village Committee had rejected as unsightly any plans to replace it with a modern glass booth.

  Carole dialled 999 and was very calm when asked which Emergency Service she required. The police voice at the other end was a woman’s, solicitous, motherly. She took down the details Carole gave her, asked where she was and said how much it would help if she could stay there until her colleagues arrived.

  “I’m sorry it’s so wet,” the woman said. “Is there somewhere you could go to wait out of the rain? The church perhaps.”

  “I’ve got my car. And actually the rain’s stopped for the moment. I’ll stay parked by the phone box.”

  “Very well. If you’re sure you don’t mind. It would help enormously if you could wait for our officers.”

  Carole gave a grim inward smile. Her last encounter with the police had been with the Bad Cop. Now she’d got the Good Cop. It was disorienting.

  The car was cold, so with a mental apology to the environment Carole switched on the engine to try and get some heat into her sodden body. The windows soon steamed up and, though she couldn’t be said to be comfortable, she felt strangely peaceful. There was an inevitability about what was happening now. Carole had no decisions to make. Everything was in the hands of the police.

  At one point she became aware of someone close by the car window. She swept a little circle in the condensation to reveal the face of an elderly woman with a beaky nose and a purple woolly hat pulled too far down her face. Carole smiled. The old woman continued to look at her with undisguised hostility. So much for the myth of everyone in the country being friendly.

  Doing her bit for the Neighbourhood Watch, Carole decided. A strange car parked, engine running, in the middle of Weldisham. It must belong to some burglar planning his or her next incursion. She tried another smile, her most unburglar-like one, and was about to wind down the window for reassurance when the woman abruptly walked away, dragging an unwilling black and white spaniel in her wake.

  Soon after, the police arrived. A liveried Range Rover with two uniformed officers in the front and a plain-clothes man in the back. Carole felt obscurely disappointed. She’d expected more. A full Scene of Crime team with all their paraphernalia. And yet why? No one knew that a crime had been committed. Even she couldn’t be sure. All the police had to go on was a call from a middle-aged woman who claimed to have found some human bones in a barn. She’d probably got it wrong, they got enough calls from cranks and the confused. Turn out to be sheep bones, cow bones, possibly even chicken bones left from someone’s picnic.

  The plain-clothes man got out of the Range Rover to greet Carole, profuse in his apologies for keeping her waiting on such a disgusting day. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Baylis. A thick-set man with short brown hair and a nose surprisingly small in his broad face, he had an avuncular manner beyond his thirty-five years. It should have been patronizing, but to Carole it felt immensely reassuring.

  After her Bad Cop experience, she now felt like the subject of a Good Cop charm offensive. Was it just down to individual officers, or had one of those Home Office directives about the police becoming more user-friendly really had an effect?

  DS Baylis checked the location of her find. “Sounds like South Welling Barn, Hooper. Go and see what you can find.”

  As the Range Rover set off towards the barn, Baylis squinted up at the louring sky. It wouldn’t be long before more rain fell. “I’m sorry, Mrs Seddon, but I would like to check a few details with you.”

  “Of course. Would you like to come and sit in my car?”

  “Very kind, but I think I can do better than that.” He looked at his watch. “Ten to five.” He produced a mobile phone from his pocket. “Will Maples from the Hare and Hounds owes me the odd favour. I’m sure he can find us a warm room.”

  In case any visitor did not know what the small alcove by the bar was called, the word ‘Snug’, carved on an authentically rustic shingle, hung over the doorway. Will Maples, an efficient slender young man in a sharp suit, ushered them in and switched on the log-effect gas fire. Though its initial flare was blue and cold, it soon emanated a rosy flickering glow, rendered suspect only by the fact that the logs never changed their outline or diminished in size. Carole knew about fires like that; she had a similar, smaller one at home in Fethering.

  “Anything I can get for you?” asked the manager. He seemed over-anxious about their welfare, almost subservient, as if DS Baylis had some hold over him.

  The nature of that hold was quickly revealed. “Mrs Seddon’s soaked to the skin,” said the sergeant. “I’m sure she could probably do with a nice warming brandy. That is, Will, if you could see your way to bending the law a little and serving drink out of your licensing hours?”

  Even without the sergeant’s wink and the young man’s blush, the implication would have been unmistakable. The Hare and Hounds had indulged some out-of-hours – probably after-hours – drinking and DS Baylis had turned a blind eye to it.

  “Certainly.” Will Maples bustled behind the bar. “Is brandy what you’d like, madam?”

  It was a drink she rarely touched but, lagged in dampness, Carole couldn’t think of anything she’d like more. “Yes, please.”

  “Just on its own?”

  “Thank you.”

  “And will you take something, Sergeant?”

  “Not while I’m on duty – that’s the line the coppers always use on the telly, isn’t it?” Baylis chuckled. “I’ll have a large Grouse, thank you, Will. Same amount of water.”

  The manager placed a large brandy and the whisky on the table in front of them. “Leave you to it then,” he said, and discreetly left the room.

  DS Baylis took a gratifying sip from his whisky and nestled back into the settle. “So, Mrs Seddon, if you wouldn’t mind just taking me through precisely what you saw…”

  It didn’t take Carole long. At the end of her account there was a silence. She waited, anticipating further questions, or even disbelief. Like most people, from schooldays onwards she had always felt absurdly guilty in the presence of an authority figure, even one nearly twenty years her junior. She felt ready to confess to all kinds of things she hadn’t done.

  “Well, that’s fine,” said DS Baylis easily. “Let’s wait and hear if Hooper and Jenks have found anything else on the site. Must’ve been a nasty shock for you, Mrs Seddon.”

  And that was it. No further probing, no suspicion, no recrimination. Baylis moved on seamlessly to talk about his former ambitions as a footballer and how he still turned out, shift patterns permitting, every Sunday morning for his old school side. “I was brought up round here and there’s a bunch of us’ve kept the football up. Waddling old men now, though, I’m afraid. I used to be quite fast. Now I’ve got all these younger kids running circles round me. They still let me in the team. Don’t know for how much longer, though.”

  Carole realized that DS Baylis was rather good at his job. His apparently inconsequential chat was a kind of counselling. She was, as he had said, in shock, and his easy conversation masked an acute observation of her state. He was deliberately relaxing her, distancing her from the horror in the barn.

  It was nearly six when his mobile rang. “Yes, Hooper? Really think it needs a SOCO? OK, call them.” He listened to a little more from his junior, then switched off the phone and turned apologetically to Carole. “Sorry, Mrs Seddon. I’ll have to go. Ring me on the number I gave you if there’s anything else.”

  “The
re’s hardly likely to be anything else, is there?”

  “I meant if you had any adverse reactions to what you saw, Mrs Seddon. We could put you in touch with a counsellor if you like.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine, thank you very much.”

  “Well, you just take it easy.” Good Cop had become Extremely Caring Compassionate Cop. What was happening to the police force?

  There was a tap on the door behind the bar and Will Maples appeared with a tentative cough. “Sorry, Lennie. I’m afraid we’re going to have to open up.”

  “Of course, Will. Can’t keep the good people of Weldisham from their pints, can we? Could you do the lady another large brandy, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  “On my tab.”

  There was another unmistakable wink from Baylis. And an embarrassed look from the manager. Whatever the hold Baylis had over him, Will Maples would rather it didn’t exist. Carole felt certain that the tab which had been alluded to did not exist. But she did not feel the righteous anger such an arrangement might normally have fired in her. DS Baylis was a kind man, a good policeman. A few free drinks to ease relations with the public couldn’t do much harm.

  “You just relax, OK, Mrs Seddon.” He stopped at the door. “Let’s hope we meet again one day…in more pleasant circumstances.”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” said Carole, as the latched door clattered shut behind him.

  But she didn’t relax. All she could think was that a SOCO was being called up to the barn. She knew ‘SOCO’ stood for ‘Scene of Crime Officer’.

  Which meant that the police thought there was a crime to investigate.

  ∨ Death on the Downs ∧

  Three

  Left on her own, Carole had an opportunity to look around the interior of the Hare and Hounds. Another carved shingle over a doorway the far side from the Snug announced that that way lay the restaurant. More rustic notices over doors beside the bar identified the toilets.

  The atmosphere being sought after in the pub was that of a comfortable country house. There were pairs of riding boots and the odd crop, metal jelly moulds, blue and white striped milk jugs and cat-gut tennis racquets in wooden presses. Wooden-shafted golf clubs and antiquated carpenters’ tools leaned artlessly against walls. Books were randomly scattered, without dust-jackets, their covers faded reds, blues and greens. Names like John Galsworthy, Warwick Deeping and E.R. Punshon gleamed in dull gold on their spines. To the wall of the Snug an ox yoke and an eel trap had been fixed. Behind the bar loomed a stuffed pike in a glass case.

  All of these artefacts were genuine, but bore the same relationship to reality as the log-effect gas fire did to real flames. They had no natural affinity with their environment; they had been carefully selected to create an instant ambience.

  Some of them also raised logical anomalies. For a start, everything that wasn’t firmly screwed to the wall was in a glass-fronted cupboard or on a shelf out of reach. Suppose someone came into the pub and fancied reading a chapter of E.R. Punshon? They couldn’t do much about it while the volume remained three feet above their head.

  The piscatorial exhibits prompted the same kind of questions. The Hare and Hounds was a good five miles from the nearest river, the Fether, which reached the sea at Fethering. So it couldn’t really be counted as a fisherman’s pub. The eel trap looked quaint and out of place. There probably were eels in the Fether, but Carole wondered whether they had ever, at any stage in history, been caught by the contraption fixed on the wall. And, though she didn’t know much about fish, she thought it unlikely that a pike would ever have lived in such a fast-flowing tidal river.

  On the dot of six, Will Maples unlocked the pub’s one exterior door, and was only just back behind the bar before his first customer of the evening arrived. Red-faced, in his fifties, ginger hair turning the colour of sand. Everything about the man seemed self-consciously to breathe the words ‘pub regular’, from his bottle-green corduroy trousers, deceptively clumsy shiny brown brogues, Guernsey sweater and over-new-looking Barbour to his cheery, “Evening, Will, old man. Pint of the usual.” It was a voice that had been to the right schools, or learned to sound as if it had been to the right schools.

  The man shook himself like a dog, as if to remove stray raindrops, though in fact there were none on the waxed shoulders of his jacket. He gave a quick nod to Carole through in the Snug, though with an air of puzzlement, almost of affront. How did she come to be there? He had the look of a man who prided himself on being first into the Hare and Hounds at six every evening.

  “Evening, Freddie,” said Will Maples with automatic bonhomie. “How’s your week been?”

  Carole corrected her surmise. It wasn’t every evening that the regular made his appearance. Perhaps just Friday evenings.

  “Bloody awful,” the man called Freddie replied. “Up in the Smoke, dealing with bloody idiots all the time. Wonderful to be back down here. Minute I get off the train at Barnham, I feel my lungs opening up for the first time in a week. Bloody great to be back in Weldisham.”

  On a day like this, thought Carole, in pitch darkness?

  “Oh, it’s a beautiful village,” the manager agreed, in a tone that made not even the smallest attempt at sincerity. “There you are.” He placed the pint on the counter. “In a jug, as per usual.” But his next words went even further to undermine his customer’s status as a genuine ‘regular’. “Settling in all right then, are you?”

  The man called Freddie raised his hand dramatically to freeze the conversation and took a long swallow from his tankard. He smacked his lips in a cartoon manner and licked the little line of froth from the upper one. “Sorry, old man. Best moment of the week. Can’t talk till I’ve done that, eh?”

  He chuckled fruitily. Will Maples joined in, a meaningless echo.

  “Oh, we’re getting there,” Freddie went on. “Pam has the worst of it, of course. She’s been up and down from town like a bloody yo-yo this week. Trying to stop the builders treading wet footprints all over the bloody kitchen. Waiting in for deliveries of fridges and what have you from men who never bloody turn up when they say they’re going to.”

  “Still, early days.”

  Carole was beginning to wonder whether Will Maples had a stock of bland responses to every kind of customer’s remark and moved a mental dial round to the right one as required. Maybe it was a skill all landlords had to develop. She wondered whether Ted Crisp, owner of the Crown and Anchor in Fethering, had a similar range of programmed responses. Not for use with her, of course, but with the general run of his customers. Though she wasn’t by nature a ‘pub person’, Carole Seddon tentatively liked to think of Ted Crisp as a friend.

  “Oh yes,” Freddie agreed. “Less than a month since we moved in. Rome wasn’t built in a day, eh?” Once again the ‘eh?” cued a fruity laugh, and a dutiful echo from the landlord.

  The duologue was then opened up by the arrival of another regular, though this one’s credentials seemed more authentic than Freddie’s. Dressed in jeans and a thick plaid workshirt, the newcomer had a thin face, scoured red by exposure to the elements, over which hung a hank of tobacco-like hair. The fingernails of his large hands were rimmed with black. His mouth was a lipless line that didn’t look as if it opened more than it had to. His age could have been anything between thirty and fifty.

  “Evening, Will.” The words were the minimum politeness required, and were delivered with a nasal West Sussex twang.

  “Nick, hi.” No order was given, but the landlord reached instinctively to a tall glass which he started to fill with Heineken lager.

  “Hello, Nick.” Freddie’s voice was full of common touch. “Now let me get you that drink.”

  “I buy my own, thanks.”

  Freddie’s face got even redder in the silence that continued until the pint of lager was placed on the counter. The man called Nick put down the right money, picked up his drink and moved to a stool as far away from Freddie as possible, at the end of the bar
nearest to the Snug. He showed no signs of having seen Carole.

  She looked across at Will Maples as Freddie embarked on a monologue about how careful you had to be with companies who did fitted kitchens. “Always offer you special offers and discounts, but when you come down to it, you end up paying through the bloody nose for all kinds of extras, things they never actually thought to mention until it’s too late for you to tell them to get packing.”

  On the manager’s face, too thin to be quite handsome, Carole could identify an expression of deep boredom. That, coupled with the young man’s smart suit and metropolitan manner, suggested that he didn’t see the future of his career in pulling pints. The Hare and Hounds was a temporary measure, a stopgap, or perhaps an essential staging post to the next promotion.

  The disguised gas fire and the brandy were having their effect. Carole still felt sodden, but it was now a warm dampness. Though she could see no sign of it, she felt as though she were quietly steaming. Drowsy, but more as though she were drugged than about to fall asleep. Sleep, she knew, would not come easily that night. She would keep waking to the image of bones in fertilizer bags, a picture made more disturbing by its simplicity and anonymity. She would be haunted not by what she had seen, but by the implications of what she had seen. Detective Sergeant Baylis had been right. Carole Seddon was in shock.

  The pub door clattered open again. The new arrival was thin and so tall that he had to stoop under the low entrance. He wore a three–piece suit in greenish tweed. It had cost a lot when collected from the tailor’s. But that had been many years before. The elbows and the cuffs were protected with leather patches.

  “Evening, young Will.” It was the patrician, slightly lazy voice of someone who didn’t think he had anything to prove. But there was also tension in the voice, even a kind of suppressed excitement. Ungainly as a giraffe, the man propped himself on a tall bar stool and pulled a pipe out of his jacket pocket.

  “Evening, Graham. Large Grouse, is it?”