Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  Carole snuggled into her damp cocoon, brandy balloon reassuringly in her hand, and pondered what she had just heard.

  Did the remains she’d found really belong to Tamsin Lutteridge?

  But the more puzzling question was how on earth Graham Forbes had found out so quickly about the discovery of the bones at South Welling Barn.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Not my idea of a pub, that Hare and Hounds,’ Ted Crisp grouched.

  His presence seemed to fill the car. He’d arrived in the pub, looking as ever, hair and beard both in need of trimming, paunch in need of slimming. The usual grubby jeans, trainers and sweatshirt, with a zip-up hooded sweater over the top in deference to the February weather.

  He’d nodded to Will Maples, but refused Carole’s offer of a drink. ‘No. Got to pace myself. Be drinking later at the Crown. Friday nights get frenetic. All the old farts and their doxies in, the air heavy with the scent of Germolene.’

  At seven the Hare and Hounds had suddenly become busy. The ‘Reserved’ tables in the bar were quickly filled with people who were going to eat bar snacks, and diners started going through to the restaurant. Will Maples and his newly arrived staff had not a moment to turn round. But, Carole observed, it was an efficient operation. Will was a good manager.

  He was too busy for her to catch his eye when she left. Never mind. It was Lennie Baylis she had to thank for the drinks, after all. With unexpected chivalry, Ted Crisp had picked up her Burberry. ‘What you been doing?’ he asked as he felt its sodden fabric. ‘Auditions for Singing in the Rain?’

  Carole had never been in his car before, but it was in character. An old Nissan Bluebird estate, its back seat and luggage space piled up with boxes. There was a stale whiff of beer and smoke. In fact, Carole realized as she got in, the car smelled exactly like the Crown and Anchor. So did Ted. He was a non-smoker, but he always smelled of cigarette smoke. An occupational hazard. His customers’ smoke clung to his clothes, to his hair and to his beard.

  ‘No, not my idea of a pub,’ he repeated. ‘Everything too neat, too calculated. No real character.’

  This chimed in exactly with what Carole had thought. ‘But you know Will, do you? I saw you nod at him.’

  ‘In this job, you know most of the opposition, to talk to anyway. He used to manage clubs in Brighton, only recently moved into the pub trade. He’s a bright boy, though. He’ll go far.’

  ‘How long has he been landlord there?’

  ‘He’s not the landlord, Carole. Just the manager. Works for the chain. Home Hostelries, they’re called.’

  ‘But they’re just a small chain, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but owned by one of the big breweries. Like everything else these days. I don’t like places like that. A pub should have its own identity, not be part of a bloody olde English drinkers’ theme park.’

  ‘And what do you reckon gives a pub its identity?’

  Ted Crisp chuckled wryly. ‘Got to be your landlord, hasn’t it? Reason, I’m afraid, why the Crown and Anchor is like it is. A reflection of me – a bloody-minded, cussed ex-stand-up comic. And people who don’t like that can bloody well lump it.’ He sighed. ‘Trouble is, I don’t know how much longer the independent landlord can keep going. What did I read in the paper the other day? Six village pubs closing every week. It’s like the supermarkets killing off the village shops a few years back, isn’t it? Only the big boys can afford the investment to keep a pub going.’

  ‘Have you had approaches from some of the chains?’

  ‘Oh yes, plenty.’

  ‘From Home Hostelries?’

  ‘Not yet. The Crown and Anchor’s not quaint enough for them. They prefer something a bit older, more rustic. But other groups have been sniffing around. Not a great building architecturally, but the Crown’s got a good position in Fethering. Someone with half a million could turn it into something extremely bijou.’ He shuddered at the thought and was silent. Then he asked, ‘What’s the matter, Carole?’

  ‘Matter? What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re upset. Something’s upset you.’

  Not for the first time, she was surprised at his perception. Ted Crisp’s aggressive manner masked an unexpected sensitivity to the people around him.

  Carole’s instinctive reaction would normally have been to deny there was anything wrong, but the brandy had lowered her guard. Besides, she did want to talk about what she’d seen. Ideally, she wanted to talk about it to Jude, but Ted’s large bulk felt reassuringly trustworthy.

  ‘I found some human bones in a barn,’ she said. The rest of her narrative didn’t take long. There wasn’t really much to say. Indeed, the smallness of the initial incident seemed disproportionate to the shock she was feeling. She included what she had heard from Graham Forbes in the pub and his potential identification of the victim. ‘Do you know anyone in Weldisham, Ted?’

  He shook his head. ‘Hardly ever go up there. I think Jude’s got some friends in the village, though . . .’

  ‘Has she? Did she mention any names?’

  Another shake of the head. ‘When is it she’s back?’

  ‘Early next week? I’m not sure.’ Suddenly Carole couldn’t wait to see Jude. There was so much she needed to discuss. ‘Did she tell you where she was going, Ted?’

  She’d felt a sudden pang of jealousy at the thought Ted might have received confidences denied to her. But it was quickly dissipated by his reply. ‘No. Never gives away much about what she’s up to, does she?’

  ‘Do you think that’s deliberate?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you think Jude deliberately withholds information? That she’s secretive?’

  In the oncoming headlights Carole could see his face screw up as he tried to get the right words for his answer. ‘No, it’s not deliberate. It’s not devious, certainly. I’m sure if you asked a direct question, she’d give you a direct answer. I think it’s more that Jude has a lot of different parts of her life and she doesn’t really see the necessity for them to overlap.’

  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 Tor, 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 i
nto 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 unserenaded.

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

  Chapter 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 PRIVATE PROPERTY. 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 unhospitable. ‘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 Allinstore – 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.