by Simon Brett
Arrive as the person who gives you problems.
Leave as the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.
There was then a list of dates and prices. The latter confirmed Jude’s opinion that Sandalls Manor certainly was an experience for the well-heeled.
The house, approached by a long gravel drive, was impressive. It had been the centre-point of an extensive farm, owned by Anne Hilton’s parents in the days when farming was both respectable and profitable. They’d sold most of the land, leaving their only daughter extremely well provided for when they died within three months of each other. At the time of their deaths they had assumed she would soon marry one of her own kind, ex-Army perhaps, and stay at Sandalls Manor, breeding children and golden retrievers.
Had they known that Anne would end up marrying Charles Hilton, her parents would have turned in their graves with enough vigour to power the National Grid.
She’d met him through a friend who, as Anne herself put it, ‘had gone a bit doolally’ and set out to ‘find her soul’. Since most of the people Anne mixed with were unconcerned about whether they had souls or not so long as there was plenty of champers, at first her friend’s quest seemed ‘an absolute hoot’. But all that changed when she accompanied her ‘doolally’ friend to a north London literary institute, where a session on ‘soul-searching’ was being conducted by Charles Hilton.
It was love at first sight – certainly as far as Anne was concerned. If the subject ever arose – and they were the kind of couple who brought it up with regrettable frequency – Charles maintained that he’d felt exactly the same.
But Jude, not normally given to cynicism, questioned the truth of his claim. She had the blasphemous thought that, for Charles, it might have been love at second sight, once he had found out about Sandalls Manor and the generous provisions Anne’s parents had made for her.
She also found it hard to take at face value the seamlessly perfect – though childless – marriage about which the Hiltons went on so much. There were suggestions that Charles was not above taking advantage of the emotional one-to-one situations in which he frequently found himself with young women. His recurrent travels abroad on conference and teaching assignments provided him with plentiful opportunities, and sometimes he came back from these surrounded by a whiff of rumour.
Under normal circumstances, Jude was extremely resistant to rumour, but in this case she gave it credence. Once, when they’d been alone doing a co-counselling exercise, Charles Hilton had made a pass at her – so unambiguous that it was in fact more of a pounce than a pass. She had dealt summarily with the advance, pointing out to Charles that he was married, that she didn’t fancy him at all, and that, even if he had been attractive to her, the manner of his approach would very quickly have cancelled that out.
But that moment of embarrassment gave them a history and even, Jude felt, gave her a sense of power over him. There was always the potential threat that she might tell Anne. It was for that reason that Jude had arrived unannounced at Sandalls Manor that Tuesday morning. She felt confident Charles Hilton would make the time to see her.
She paid the cab driver, but agreed that he’d come to pick her up in an hour, unless she gave him a call on her mobile to make other arrangements. He looked up at the impressive frontage of Sandalls Manor and shook his head wryly. ‘Number of loonies I’ve brought up to this place you wouldn’t believe.’
Jude was gratified that what he’d said presumably meant he didn’t include her in the category. ‘What do they do up here then?’ she asked, faux naïve.
‘You name it. Frolicking around naked in the summer, painting themselves, banging drums, screaming and shouting a lot. Down in Lewes,’ he confided, ‘I’ve heard people say they’re into black magic.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes.’ He chuckled. ‘So if I come back in an hour and you’re not here . . . I’ll know you’ve been used as a human sacrifice, won’t I, darling?’
He was still chuckling as his car sped off in an unnecessary flurry of gravel.
Chapter Thirteen
Though in many ways run like a hotel, Sandalls Manor kept its front door closed and Jude had to ring the bell. Anne Hilton came to open it. Jude had met Charles’s wife before, but she didn’t expect to be remembered.
She was right. There was no recognition in the woman’s blue eyes as she uttered a deterrently interrogative ‘Good morning?’
Anne Hilton was a large woman, designed for the heavy labour that had supported her family in previous generations. Although dressed in a long purple crushed-velvet dress, she would have looked more comfortable in a tweed skirt, jumper and pearls.
‘Good morning. My name’s Jude.’ She spoke breathlessly, as if in the grip of anxiety. ‘There’s something I need to talk to Charles about.’
The approach had been carefully pitched. Charles Hilton, as a psychotherapist, would have a lot of patients unknown to his wife. And, though Anne’s natural instinct might have been to send such unexpected arrivals packing, her husband would have instructed her to be more careful. He dealt with damaged people, and knew how destructive rejection could be to some of them. The last thing he wanted professionally was a suicide on his hands.
‘It’s extremely inconvenient,’ said Anne Hilton, asserting what she really felt, before grudgingly standing back to let Jude enter the hall. ‘Charles is busy conducting a session at the moment. You’ll have to wait. And he won’t be able to give you long when they do break.’
‘I won’t need long. I just need a quick word with him.’
‘Do sit down.’ Anne Hilton indicated a hard wooden settle. Jude wasn’t going to be allowed to feel welcome. No invitation to wait in a sitting room. She must be reminded of the inconvenience she was causing.
‘You haven’t done any of the courses here at Sandalls Manor, have you?’
Jude shook her head.
‘You should try one. Charles would be much more able to help you in a structured session than he will in a few moments’ chat. Have a look at some of our literature.’ She thrust across a handful of brochures. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve things to do. They break at half past eleven. I’ve got to get their coffee ready.’
The way this was said made it clear that Jude wasn’t going to be offered a cup. Ungraciously, Anne Hilton marched off to the kitchen, closing the door behind her with emphatic force.
Jude looked round the hall of Sandalls Manor. The door Anne had gone through was marked ‘Kitchen’; another closed door was identified as the ‘Karma Room’. A framed painting of some Indian guru was fixed to the wall and in the stairwell hung a circle of metal tubes with a suspended wooden clapper in the middle. But these were the only concessions to the house’s New Age incarnation. Otherwise the furniture and décor were solid and respectable, the kind passed from generation to generation of gentleman farmers. A redoubtable mahogany staircase dominated the space. Through an open door – in contrast to the promise of the sign reading ‘Chakra Room’ – large chintzy sofas and swagged brocade curtains could be seen. The impression was as far from the shabby mysticism of Soul Nourishment as could be imagined.
But for the bonus of a little light therapy thrown in, Sandalls Manor was like any other country house hotel, and this was borne out by the ‘literature’ that Jude had been given. As in the brochure she had read in the taxi, all the fliers and photocopies of magazine articles emphasized the level of comfort offered by ‘the Sandalls Manor experience’.
One of them identified the ‘award-winning chef’ as Anne Hilton herself. Jude got the feeling that Anne was the dynamo behind the operation. She enjoyed running an upmarket hotel. Had she married the sort of man her parents had wanted for her, Sandalls Manor would have offered activities such as horse-riding and clay-pigeon-shooting. It was only because she had fallen in love with Charles Hilton that soul journeys were on the agenda.
A muffled scream interrupted Jude’s thoughts, and reminded her that a soul journey wa
s taking place at that very moment. But a scream at Sandalls Manor was not a cause for anxiety. Indeed, Charles Hilton would regard screaming and hysterics as a validation of what he was trying to achieve. Inside the Karma Room the participants were getting in touch with their inner children, and if those confrontations undammed some repressed emotions, then the therapy was working.
Jude looked round the hall, quickly to be rewarded by the sight she was expecting. A box of tissues stood on a highly polished dresser. A new sheet was fanned out in readiness for the next participant to be overcome by tears. Jude felt sure that the Karma Room and the Chakra Room would be equipped with similar boxes. In therapeutic processes like those conducted by Charles Hilton, tissues were always a discreet presence.
There was a clatter at the door. Jude turned to see a little cataract of letters tumble from the letter-box slit. Mostly completed booking forms, she reckoned. More exhausted city dwellers applying to sit out the rat race for a few days at Sandalls Manor.
Curiosity gnawed at her. She looked across at the kitchen and the Karma Room. Both doors remained resolutely shut.
Jude was always obedient to strong instincts and something told her she was in a significant moment. She moved swiftly to the front door. With her foot, she spread the uneven pile of letters. Most of them were, as expected, bookings sent in reply-paid envelopes.
But one of them wasn’t. She looked at it closely to double-check, then crossed back to sit on her hard settle.
A few minutes later, the door to the Karma Room opened. The first session of the morning had ended. Only Charles Hilton stood in the doorway, so Jude deduced that there must be another way out to the room where the participants had their coffee. Also to the toilets. She knew that intense soul-baring frequently had an effect on the participants’ bladders.
Charles looked exactly as she remembered him, a little below average height with a low centre of gravity. Olive skin, the thinning hair on his head very black, and liquid eyes the colour of horse chestnuts. He wore jeans and a loosely hanging grey knitted cardigan.
He also wore an expression of anxiety, that very traditional and distinctive anxiety assumed by a married man who fears his wife is about to find out something she shouldn’t.
‘Jude. Why have you come here? You haven’t said anything to Anne, have you?’
She thought it was rather funny to see the state he was in. Here was a man with an international reputation for helping people find serenity in their relationships, and he was scared witless that his wife was about to be told he’d once groped another woman. The guru reduced to a gibbering guilty husband from a bedroom farce.
‘What are you worried I might say to Anne?’ asked Jude, extending his discomfort. She wasn’t by nature vindictive, but Charles Hilton’s double standards got up her nose.
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ he replied petulantly. ‘Why have you come here?’
‘I thought you might have some idea where Tamsin Lutteridge is.’
‘Tamsin Lutteridge?’
‘You remember her. Girl with ME. Silver in Soul Nourishment said she’d got in touch with you.’
‘Yes, I remember her. We did have a consultation. She thought I might be able to help with her condition.’
‘And did you think you could?’
Her tone had not been sceptical, but Charles Hilton’s professional pride was still stung. ‘I’ve had a lot of successes in the chronic fatigue area!’
‘I’m sure you have. I’m asking whether you had any success with Tamsin Lutteridge.’
His face assumed a complacent mask. ‘Jude, you know I can’t possibly talk about an individual patient. Medical ethics. Confidentiality.’
‘All right. I’m not asking whether you’ve managed to cure her. I’m asking whether you know where she is at this moment.’
He shook his head, his expression still complacent. ‘Sorry, Jude. I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
‘Look, if you do hear anything . . . let me know. Her parents are very worried about her.’ Well, no, they’re not, actually, thought Jude. Her father’s very worried about her.
‘Of course I’ll let you know.’
‘Do you have my new address? I’m living in Fethering now.’
‘Really? Almost neighbours.’ He smiled. Now he knew she wasn’t about to blow the whistle to Anne about him, Charles Hilton’s customary cockiness had returned. He moved straight into chatting-up mode. ‘Maybe we could meet for a meal or something one of these days . . .’ Jude gave his proposition no encouragement. ‘Give me your number.’
She did so.
‘I must get back,’ he said. ‘Just done a really good session. Don’t want the participants to lose their concentration.’
‘No. Can’t risk that.’ Jude grinned. ‘How’s this lot going?’
‘Good group. Getting through to them. Really stirring the soup, we are. Ciao, Jude. Great to see you again.’
He took her hand and held it just that little bit too long, fixing her eyes in a penetrating gaze. Why is it, thought Jude, that certain men – in the teeth of the evidence – think they’re irresistible to women? Maybe Charles Hilton believed that his almost shamanistic powers gave him an added magnetism. And maybe, on some women, he did have that effect. Not on her, however.
It was too cold to wait outside for her taxi, but the car arrived dead on time. Anne Hilton came out of the kitchen to answer the driver’s ring at the doorbell. She shuffled up the post and bade farewell to Jude with the minimum civility her upbringing allowed.
In the cab, Jude tuned out the driver’s views on alternative medicine and black magic, two concepts that his mind seemed unable to separate. All she could think about was what she’d seen on the doormat of Sandalls Manor.
Among the returned booking forms had been a letter addressed to Tamsin Lutteridge.
Jude would have challenged Charles Hilton with that fact, if she had not recognized the writing on the envelope. The letter had been sent by Tamsin’s mother.
Chapter Fourteen
Detective Sergeant Baylis sat comfortably in front of Carole’s log-effect gas fire. Gulliver, with that immediate trust of strangers that made him such an ineffectual guard dog, fawned around the policeman, trying repeatedly to put his bandaged paw up on Baylis’s knee. The dressing was much smaller now. On the Friday Carole had an appointment when the vet would remove it completely.
‘I was really just calling to see that you were all right,’ the sergeant said.
‘That’s very kind of you. I’m fine.’
‘The effects of shock can sometimes be delayed, Mrs Seddon. If you do need any help . . . counselling or . . .’
God, thought Carole, isn’t there anything these days you aren’t offered counselling for? ‘Really, I’m fine. It was just a nasty moment, but it’s gone. I mean, it’d be different if she’d been someone I knew.’
‘She?’
‘The . . . The body . . . The person whose remains I found.’
‘How do you know it was a she?’
‘Why? Isn’t that common knowledge?’
‘It is, but only just. That’s one of the things I was coming to tell you, Mrs Seddon. They were the remains of a woman’s body.’
Now it had been confirmed, Carole did feel a shiver of something not unlike shock. ‘Poor girl,’ she said.
‘Poor girl?’
‘Yes, Tamsin Lutteridge.’
Detective Sergeant Baylis shook his head wearily. ‘Oh, they’re not still saying that, are they? Bloody Weldisham gossips.’
‘You mean it’s not true?’
‘The bones are in the labs now. There’ll be more detailed information soon. But the preliminary path. report tells us they belonged to a woman, probably aged thirty to fifty, and she died at least five years ago.’
Carole found it strange how much relief the news brought her. She’d never known Tamsin Lutteridge, but had felt Jude’s affection for the girl and compassion for her illness. Whoever the bones did belo
ng to, she was glad it wasn’t Tamsin.
‘So, Sergeant, they’ve no idea who the dead woman was?’
He shook his head. ‘Take some time. We do have procedures, you know. Start with talking to people locally.’
‘Like the person who owns the South Welling Barn?’
‘Phil Ayling. Yes, we’ve talked to him. Needless to say, he doesn’t know anything about it. Why should he? Probably those bones belonged to someone who’s never been to the village. Which means of course that we will have to go through missing persons files, all that stuff.’ He sighed in disbelief. ‘Tamsin Lutteridge, though . . . Doesn’t change, Weldisham. However many ends a stick has, the people in that village can be guaranteed to get hold of the wrong one. Always had a reputation for gossip, even when I was growing up there.’ In response to Carole’s interrogative look, he went on, ‘Yes, I’m a local boy. My parents used to live in one of the cottages by the pub.’
‘Near Heron Cottage?’
‘That’s right. Mind you, we’re talking when all that lot belonged to the Estate. My dad worked for the Estate. All his life. Started at age fourteen, dropped dead driving a tractor when he was fifty-seven. And the cottages weren’t all tarted up when we lived there, I can tell you. Estate sold them off about fifteen years ago. That’s when the central heating came in, and the fitted kitchens, and the double-glazing – and the fancy prices.’
He seemed to realize he was digressing. ‘So . . . Tamsin Lutteridge. I didn’t even know the girl was missing.’
‘Has been three, four months, I gather.’
‘Not been reported missing.’
‘Ah.’
Baylis caught her eye and said shrewdly, ‘Lot of parents don’t report it when their kids go missing. Either they think it’s an admission of failure on their part – which it very probably is – or they know full well where the child is, but don’t want anyone else to know. Again they may keep schtum because their child’s actions, or the company they’re keeping, might be seen to reflect badly on their parents.’