Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  ‘Positive thinking.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just that. I kept wondering whether maybe she was telling the truth. She knows that Tamsin’s all right.’

  ‘But if she did know that, surely she’d tell her husband? If he’s in as bad a state as you say.’

  ‘Yes. She would. Gillie’s always been very supportive to Miles. She wouldn’t let him suffer unnecessarily.’ Jude took a thoughtful sip of wine. ‘That’s what’s so odd about it.’

  Their cottage pies arrived, each neat in its oval earthenware dish on a wooden platter. Another earthenware dish contained carefully apportioned vegetables, exactly the same number for each of them. The food looked fine. But the gloss was taken off it by the fact that Carole knew identical portions were being served at the same moment in every one of the Home Hostelries chain.

  ‘Tell me more about these bones,’ said Jude, as they started to eat.

  ‘I’ve told you most of it. There were just these recognizably human bones in two fertilizer bags.’

  ‘But you didn’t get any feeling how old they were?’

  ‘I’m not a forensic pathologist, Jude.’

  ‘No, but . . . I was just thinking . . . Tamsin’s been missing for four months. Left her parents’ house on the night of Hallowe’en. I remember, because at one stage Miles thought that might have some significance.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s very confused about complementary medicine. He assumed it had something to do with witchcraft.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Anyway, say Tamsin was abducted and murdered that very evening . . . which is the first possible time she could have been . . . would there have been time since then for the bones to get as clean as you said they were?’

  ‘Depends where they were left. Out in the open on the Downs . . . there are plenty of predators who’d pick all the flesh off them.’

  ‘But if the body had been left in the open, someone would have seen it, surely?’

  ‘Possibly not. I’m sure there are lots of secret places round here . . . copses, streams, old chalk pits. I should think it’d be easy enough to hide a body if you set your mind to it. I don’t know, though . . . We don’t really have enough information.’

  As if putting a full stop to the conversation, Carole took a large spoonful of cottage pie.

  ‘No. But think about it,’ Jude persisted. ‘The world is full of missing persons – vagrants, tramps, travellers . . . The bones could belong to any one of them. And yet everyone’s assuming they’re Tamsin’s.’

  ‘Village mentality for you.’

  ‘I suppose so. And until Tamsin is actually found alive – or until the police prove the bones belong to someone else – they’ll go on thinking it’s her.’ Jude speared a head of Home Hostelries broccoli and looked at it pensively. ‘I think I’d better find Tamsin.’

  ‘Where would you start looking?’

  ‘I know some of the people she might have contacted.’

  ‘What kind of people?’

  ‘Miles Lutteridge and a lot of other blinkered locals would probably call them “New Age quack doctors”.’

  ‘Ah.’ Carole didn’t like to admit that she was probably one of the ‘other blinkered locals’. ‘And what would you call them?’

  ‘I’d call them “alternative therapists”. And some of them are good, and some of them are not very good, but none of them is deliberately trying to do harm. They’re trying to help people . . . and very often they succeed. Anyway, I’ll make some enquiries.’ And she popped the piece of broccoli into her mouth.

  ‘I think you should market it as one of the murder villages of the South Downs.’

  Both women turned at the sound of the loud voice from near the bar. Indeed, most of the customers in the pub stopped talking and turned towards the sound.

  The man who had spoken did not seem averse to being the centre of attention. His face was thin, its skin apparently drawn towards the point of a sharp nose. Probably in his forties, with wild hair that hadn’t seen a brush – or shampoo – since he got up that morning, he wore a black beret and a long cracked leather coat of the style favoured by Gestapo officers in British war movies. His thin legs in faded jeans ended in large laceless boots which splayed out from his ankles. The glass in his hand looked as though it contained gin and tonic. He was nominally in conversation with Will Maples, who had appeared behind the bar, but clearly his observations were meant for the whole assembled company.

  ‘No, it’s good marketing, Will. Lot of people with ghoulish tastes around these days. Look at the way horror movies sell. You want to get some literature out to market this place. I’ll write it for you, give it that professional gloss – for the right money. You know horror’s my speciality. Eat your heart out, Stephen King. You haven’t begun to see nasty until you’ve read my stuff.

  ‘So what should I write for you, Will? “Come to the Hare and Hounds in Weldisham, the village of murder. Sit in the quaint bar, where the local serial killer supped his foaming pint while he targeted his next victim.” ’ The man giggled.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Brian.’ The manager’s manner was embarrassed, as if he wanted to ignore the speaker, but for some reason couldn’t. His body language was trying to draw him away, but the man called Brian held him. ‘We’re not talking about serial killers. We don’t know there’s even been one murder yet.’

  ‘Are you telling me that people who die natural deaths are in the habit of neatly stacking up their own bones in fertilizer bags?’

  Though the man called Brian was speaking as loudly as ever, conversations around the pub had started up again. There was an air of that embarrassment that people often manifest in the presence of the mentally ill. The man didn’t seem completely sane. Despite the jocularity of his manner, there was an edginess to him, a sense that his mood could shift very suddenly.

  ‘And as to what you were saying about serial killers, Will my old darling . . .’ The manager didn’t look pleased to be the recipient of such an endearment. ‘They’ve all got to start somewhere. You need the first murder before you can move on to all the others. We’ve only had the first one so far here in Weldisham, but that’s the one with which he defined his ritual. Mm, I think I might make a very close study of this case – could be the basis for my next bestseller. Very gory it’ll be. Watch out, young girls. The Weldisham serial killer is going to spend the rest of his days repeating in exact detail the way he killed Tamsin Lutteridge.’

  Jude thanked any god who might be listening that Gillie and Miles weren’t in the pub at that moment.

  After she had dropped Jude at her home, Woodside Cottage, Carole put the car in the garage and went inside to the martyred whimpering of Gulliver. She felt frustrated. Jude had something to do. She was going to try to get a lead on the whereabouts of Tamsin Lutteridge. But there was nothing Carole could do that was in any way connected with the case.

  Case? Was there a case? And if there was, what could it possibly have to do with her?

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Hello. This is Graham Forbes. We met in the pub just now.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I mentioned the possibility of your coming to dinner with us at Warren Lodge. Well, as soon as I got home, my wife, Irene, said she’d had a call from one of our friends who was going to join us this coming Friday. Been called away by a family bereavement. And I apologize that it’s awfully short notice . . . but I wondered, Carole, if you might by any chance be free that evening?’

  She accepted. But, as she put the phone down, she thought, that was quick.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jude was glad Carole wasn’t with her. Much as she liked her new friend, she recognized that there were subjects on which they were unlikely ever to see eye to eye. And though Carole hadn’t said much when talk of alternative therapies arose, her expression and body language had immediately invoked scepticism.

  Jude’s attitude was more tolerant. She knew the dangers of being t
oo susceptible and relished the quote she’d heard somewhere that ‘if you have an open mind, people will throw all kinds of rubbish into it’. But she was prepared to approach an idea without prejudice and assess it on its merits. The fact that something didn’t work for her never led her to reject it out of hand. She didn’t rule out the possibility that it might work for someone else.

  Jude had never been drawn to organized religion and the belief system she held was one built up over more than fifty years of life. It wasn’t rigid; as new thoughts came and old ones slipped away, the contents changed, but its overall principle remained the same. Jude believed that there was some purpose in human life, that it had been designed and was monitored by some kind of greater power. She believed that the most important relationships in life were not with that greater power, but with her fellow human beings.

  And some of those relationships were easy and some were difficult. The relationship with the man who she’d just been travelling with fell into the second category. That one, Jude knew, was going to need sorting out soon. The prospect was not one she relished. She was glad she had the search for Tamsin Lutteridge to occupy her mind.

  As a result of her instinctive tolerance, wandering round Soul Nourishment in Brighton’s North Lanes, Jude saw nothing that prompted her to ridicule. She enjoyed the smell of incense and was untroubled by the sound of wind-chimes. Most of the stock in the tiny shop was books – studies of astrology, crystallography, ley lines, synchronicity and the meaning of dreams. The Road Less Travelled, The Prophet. The Alchemist.

  But Soul Nourishment also sold New Age life-aids. Some of them had worked for Jude and some hadn’t. Though admiring their beauty, she had never received anything spiritual from crystals, but she knew people to whom they meant a lot. The same went for the tarot and angel cards. But she had benefited from aromatherapy and so checked Soul Nourishment’s stock of oils with interest. Acupuncture she believed in strongly, though she questioned the wisdom of selling needles and charts to the unqualified.

  As with all tools for medical or spiritual healing, they were only as good as the practitioners using them. In her contacts with New Age healers, Jude had met very few out-and-out charlatans, but she’d met a distressing number of incompetents.

  And few of them had been helped by the kind of patients attracted to such alternative approaches. Many of these were ‘therapy junkies’, men and women who felt there was something wrong with their lives and were looking for the quick fix that would, at a stroke, sort everything out. Such people tended to butterfly from one alternative solution to another, moving speedily from yoga to shiatsu to reiki healing to reflexology to colonic irrigation. It was the patients, more than the healers, who gave New Age remedies such a bad public image.

  Silver, the owner of Soul Nourishment, was busy behind the counter, showing a display of scarabs to a bearded Californian tourist, so Jude moved to the back of the shop, where there was a cork board dotted with cards from counsellors, healers and therapists. Most of them offered solutions to problems of stress management, anxiety, phobias, personal relationships, alcohol and smoking dependency. Personal growth and major life changes were also catered for. Other cards raised the hopes of a cure for more specifically medical problems – eating disorders, depression, irritable bowel syndrome. Jude took down the numbers of the two that specifically mentioned ME or chronic fatigue syndrome.

  ‘Jude, how’re you doing?’

  Silver had finished with his Californian and she had his full attention. As she planted a kiss on his cheek and gave him a warm hug, Jude wished, not for the first time, that he didn’t dress so much like a stereotype. Everything about Silver seemed to say ‘owner of New Age shop’, from the Turkish cap on his head, past the chunky silver rings threaded into his ears, over the Indian cotton shirt, worn under a thick Bolivian waistcoat, down across the shiny striped harem pants to the thonged Greek leather sandals. His pale eyes blinked through blue-tinted thin-rimmed spectacles. How could Silver hope for his ideas to be taken seriously if he insisted on dressing like a caricature?

  On the other hand, thought Jude, ever slow to condemn, perhaps it goes with the territory. Just as the checkout girls in Sainsbury’s wear hygienic, almost medical-looking tabards, so Silver was dressed in livery appropriate to his surroundings. One thing she did know, it wasn’t done for effect. Silver was wearing the clothes he liked wearing and – even more remarkably, given their cacophony of styles – clothes he must have thought he looked good in.

  Maybe he still got the thrill of nonconformity every morning when he got up and dressed. Silver, then known as ‘Mr Silver’, had spent twenty-two years teaching geography in comprehensive schools before he saw the glint of alternative light at the end of the tunnel. He had earned the right to make whatever sartorial statement he chose.

  ‘I heard you were in Spain,’ said Silver.

  ‘Just got back on Sunday.’

  ‘Terry said he saw you.’

  ‘He was teaching yoga first week I was out there.’

  ‘Did you do the whole fortnight?’

  ‘No, just the first week. Did some body- and voice-work. Second week I went off to the coast. Seafood therapy.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘With a friend.’

  She was upset by the pang even the mention of him caused her, but Silver didn’t probe. Jude’s private life was her own affair.

  ‘You been busy?’

  He nodded. ‘Not bad. Particularly running up to Christmas.’

  ‘Funny, really, isn’t it . . . the major Christian festival of the year and people come here to buy things that very positively have nothing to do with Christianity.’

  Silver shrugged. ‘I’m cool with that.’

  ‘Me too.’

  He indicated the cork board. ‘You thinking of enrolling in something? I’m doing a course in transcendental meditation. He’s really good, the guy who leads it.’

  Jude shook her head. ‘I know the basics. Don’t need to take a course.’

  ‘No.’ He blinked at her, clearly interested, but too laid-back actually to ask why she’d come.

  ‘In fact, I was trying to trace someone. Girl I came in here with once. Probably last September, October . . . Name’s Tamsin.’

  He shook his head. ‘Lot of people come through, Jude.’

  ‘I know. Tall, blonde girl . . . very pale . . . very pretty . . .’

  ‘Oh, now that does ring a bell. She was ill, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Chronic fatigue syndrome.’

  ‘Yes, I do remember. Because she came in with you that time, and then, only a few days later, she was here again, on her own.’

  ‘Oh? What was she after?’

  ‘She was looking for some books, you know, on the relationship between mind and body. I pointed out a few titles for her.’

  ‘Did she buy any?’

  ‘She got Setting Free the Soul.’

  ‘Charles Hilton?’

  ‘Right.’

  Jude looked at the board. One card was larger than the others and better printed. Beneath a picture of a large country house, she read:

  Weekend Breaks for the Body and the Mind

  SANDALLS MANOR

  WESTRIDGE

  Get Close to Nature and Close to Your Own Nature

  Find the Self That Sometimes Can Get Lost

  Proprietors: Charles and Anne Hilton

  There was a Brighton-area phone number. Jude looked at Silver.

  ‘Did Tamsin know about this?’

  ‘Yes. I pointed it out to her.’

  Jude nodded grimly.

  Chapter Twelve

  Silver had given her a brochure for Sandalls Manor and Jude looked at it in the taxi on the way there. She knew Carole would happily have given her a lift, but she still felt that this part of the investigation should be private.

  The Tuesday morning was clear, the green of the Downs and the blue of the sky brittle in their brightness. Outside the car, Jude knew the cold woul
d sting her cheeks. They were driving north of Brighton, where West Sussex and East Sussex meet and the Downs change identity, flattening out in preparation for mixing into the Weald of Kent.

  The Sandalls brochure, like the card in Soul Nourishment, was expensively produced. It wasn’t aimed at dispossessed hippies; instead it offered a taste of New Age attitudes to rich city dwellers.

  Is your life so busy you haven’t time to know you’re alive? Have success and materialism taken away your identity as a human being? Have you lost your relationship with the earth that bore you and that nurtures you still?

  If that’s the case, then the Sandalls Manor experience could be for you. On one of our Midweek or Weekend Breaks, get back in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. What’s more, get back in tune with your own rhythms. Spend some time with the self that you want to spend time with.

  Sandalls Manor is set in the splendour of the South Downs, an area rich in history and spiritualism. Leave the cares of the city behind and look at nature as if for the first time. With small groups of like-minded people, enjoy vigorous – but not too vigorous – walks in some of England’s most beautiful countryside. Then, with your appetite sharpened by all that fresh air, sit down to a nourishing organic dinner, lovingly prepared from the freshest local ingredients by our award-winning chef.

  And, while the concerns of your body are being catered for, we do not neglect your more spiritual dimension. You’re under no obligation to participate, but during your stay there will be a regular programme of classes in meditation, relaxation, yoga, body-mapping, soul-journeying and other consciousness-raising exercises. All of these are conducted by Charles Hilton, a fully qualified Jungian psychotherapist and teacher, whose book Setting Free the Soul has become an international bestseller.

  Sandalls Manor may help you to shed your other addictions, but you’ll certainly find its own atmosphere addictive. Many of our guests come back time and again, knowing that they’ll leave, as one participant put it, ‘feeling that I’d just had a full MOT on my Body and on my Soul’. Sandalls Manor can provide that kind of cleansing experience for you too.