Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  ‘You think she might have gone out?’

  ‘She might.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To smoke a cigarette. She keeps telling me she’s given up, but I’m not sure I believe her. She used to smoke like a chimney at university, and while she was working in London. When Miles and I made it pretty clear that we didn’t like the smell of cigarettes in the house, Tamsin used to go outside.’

  ‘Into the garden?’

  ‘Yes. Or if it was cold or wet, she’d go a bit further.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s an old barn just beyond the end of our garden. Tamsin sometimes used to go in there to smoke.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Brian Helling was once again dressed in the leather coat and beret, uniform of the disaffected artist. Carole couldn’t help recalling Graham Forbes’s Chesterton quote about the artistic temperament being ‘a disease that afflicts amateurs’. In other circumstances, she might have found the self-defined writer a figure of fun. But not with the expression that was currently on his thin face. Nor as she recollected the rest of her conversation with Graham Forbes, about the subject matter of Brian Helling’s writing.

  She answered his question, confirming that she was indeed the one who had found the bones.

  ‘Carole somebody . . .’

  ‘Carole Seddon.’

  ‘Lennie Baylis told me it was you.’

  ‘Ah.’ Strange – or perhaps not strange, perhaps characteristic of the area – how all these Weldisham boys seemed to keep in touch. Brian Helling still living there with his mother; Harry Grant soon to move back in; Detective Sergeant Baylis living elsewhere, but still resentful of his exclusion from the village on economic grounds.

  ‘And what do you know about them?’ Brian Helling went on.

  ‘Know about the bones?’ Carole shrugged. She wasn’t about to share the conjectures that had formed in her mind since visiting the dilapidated barn. ‘I know what’s been on the media. They’re the bones of a woman aged between thirty and fifty. That’s all anyone knows . . . except maybe the police pathologists . . . and they’re not yet sharing their conclusions.’

  ‘So you didn’t go to South Welling Barn looking for them?’

  ‘Looking for the bones?’ Carole was incredulous. ‘No. I was just sheltering from the rain. I’d never seen the barn before. I didn’t even know it existed.’

  ‘Right.’ Brian Helling rubbed the back of his hand against his long nose. It could have been a gesture of relief. He certainly seemed less manic as he continued. ‘I’m sorry. In a small place like Weldisham a lot of rumours get spread around. And some of them aren’t very helpful rumours. They could be hurtful to local individuals.’

  ‘Individuals like your mother?’ Carole hazarded.

  Her words snapped his mood back to paranoia. ‘What do you know about my mother? How do you know who my mother is?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Baylis told me who you were,’ replied Carole evenly. ‘He said your mother was Pauline Helling, who lives in Heron Cottage.’

  The answer was insufficient to allay all of his suspicion. ‘Why did Lennie tell you about me?’

  ‘Because I asked him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, if you must know, I’d overheard you sounding off in the Hare and Hounds. I wondered who it could be who was talking so loudly and tastelessly about the bones I’d discovered.’

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed to accept that, and not to be offended by it. Brian Helling knew he drew attention to himself in public. He even prided himself on the fact.

  ‘Did Lennie say anything else about me?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh. Nothing.’

  Carole pressed on. She might as well get any information she could. ‘So, have people been circulating nasty rumours about your mother?’

  ‘What?’ He looked distracted for a moment. ‘No, no, of course they haven’t.’ A new unease came into his eyes. ‘What makes you ask that? What makes you think my mother has anything to do with the bones?’

  Carole noted the anxiety in his tone, but her answer was entirely palliative. ‘Nothing, no reason.’ She decided to play the ‘silly woman’ card. ‘Sorry, but you make a discovery like I did at South Welling Barn and, needless to say, it sets your mind racing. You get all kinds of daft ideas.’

  ‘So long as you recognize they are daft,’ said Brian Helling, with an edge of threat in his voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Carole responded humbly. She was still trying to work out what Brian Helling’s agenda might be. Why had he come chasing after her so dramatically? Was he trying to get information out of her or simply find out how much she knew? And why did how much she knew matter to him?

  ‘Do you know many people in Weldisham?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘I’ve met a few in the past couple of weeks. The Forbeses invited me to dinner.’

  ‘Oh, did they?’ For Brian Helling this seemed to categorize her. She was the sort of woman who got invited to dinner by Graham and Irene Forbes. ‘And you haven’t known them for long?’

  ‘No. I’d hardly say I know them now. I mean, I never met Graham’s first wife.’

  ‘But you know what happened to her?’ He was very alert now, fixing Carole with his eyes, as though her answer mattered a lot.

  ‘The story goes she ran off with another man. In Malaysia.’

  The words seemed to relax him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s how the story goes.’

  ‘Are you implying the story’s not true?’

  ‘Certainly not. Are you?’

  Given the cue, Carole was insanely tempted to share the thoughts that had been building up inside about the first Mrs Forbes. But she restrained herself. To Jude maybe, but not to Brian Helling. He was the last person on earth she should make aware of her suspicions.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  He broke the eye contact between them. ‘Who else do you know in the village?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I didn’t know anyone till two weeks ago.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘You don’t know the Lutteridges?’

  ‘No. I’ve heard the name, but I haven’t met them.’ Carole was about to say that she had a friend who knew them, but some instinct held her back.

  ‘Mm. I see.’ Some of the tension went from his thin face, as if he’d found out what he’d come to find out. He looked along the exposed chalk of the track. ‘Were you going back to South Welling Barn?’

  ‘No. I was just going for a walk. Killing time.’

  ‘Why do you need to kill time?’ he asked sharply.

  Again she kept Jude’s name out of it. Instead, she played for a bit of spurious sympathy. ‘You have a lot of time to kill when you’re retired.’

  ‘Do you?’ Some of the cockiness Brian Helling had shown in the pub returned to his manner. ‘I won’t have to worry about that.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’m a writer. Writers don’t retire.’

  ‘Ah.’ Even those writers who never make any money from their writing?

  He moved towards the Land Rover. ‘Right. I must get back.’

  ‘Mr Helling . . .’

  He stopped and looked at her. There was still malevolence in his eyes.

  ‘I just wanted to ask . . . given the fact that something like the discovery of these bones is, as you said, going to start a lot of rumours in a small place like Weldisham . . .’

  He didn’t help her. He just waited.

  ‘Which of the rumours would you go along with?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Who do you think the bones might have belonged to?’

  He was about to give a brusque answer, but stopped himself. As he smiled, Carole noticed that he had almost no upper lip, just a line above his teeth where the flesh stopped. ‘I think, to answer that,’ he began slowly, ‘you’d have to ask yourself who’d gone missing from Weldisham in the past twenty years . . .�
��

  ‘Yes,’ Carole prompted. That was the conclusion she’d reached herself.

  Brian Helling let out a little grunt of a laugh. ‘Wouldn’t you say Lennie Baylis was taking rather a personal interest in this case?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He seems to be around the village more than he needs to be.’

  ‘But he used to live here, didn’t he? Maybe that’s the reason.’

  ‘Yes, but Lennie’s always been a snooper. I was at school with him, I know. Don’t you think it’s odd, though, the way he keeps checking up on everyone here in Weldisham, seeing if they’re all right, finding out what they’re thinking?’

  It was true. Carole had put his solicitude for her down to compassionate professionalism, but what Brian Helling was hinting at also fitted the facts.

  ‘Well, you probably don’t know,’ he went on, ‘but more than twenty years ago, his mother walked out.’

  ‘He did tell me that, yes.’

  ‘Or was supposed to have walked out,’ said Brian Helling slyly. ‘It was a very unhappy marriage. Lennie’s father beat her up . . . That wasn’t the kind of thing you could keep quiet in a place like Weldisham. Everyone knows everyone’s business.’

  ‘And you’re suggesting Lennie Baylis’s father may have killed his wife?’

  He shrugged. ‘There was talk at the time. I remember my mother talking about it. She’s always known everything that went on in Weldisham.’

  ‘But she wasn’t living here when Mrs Baylis disappeared.’

  ‘Not living here, but working here. Anyway, some of the rumours about Lennie’s dad doing away with his old woman have resurfaced in the last couple of weeks . . . Might be worth investigating.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Abruptly Brian Helling stepped up into the cab of his Land Rover. He slammed the door and, as he peered fixedly at Carole, underwent another of his sudden mood changes. ‘But not investigating by you,’ he hissed. ‘Weldisham is a tightly knit community. It doesn’t like outsiders snooping into its affairs.’

  He started the engine, slammed the Land Rover into reverse and set off at breakneck speed, skidding over the track back to Weldisham.

  Leaving Carole in no doubt that she had been both warned off and threatened.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  ‘But I’m sure I’m right,’ Carole crowed.

  ‘Hey, watch how you’re driving!’

  ‘Sorry, Jude.’

  Carole slowed the Renault down. The Weldisham Lane was too narrow for the speed she’d been doing. She must slow herself down too. Relief after her unpleasant encounter with Brian Helling was compounding the excitement with which her mind was racing to make her heady and irresponsible. Stop it, she told herself. You are Carole Seddon. Boring, reliable old Carole Seddon. Carole Seddon doesn’t behave like this.

  With the Renault progressing as if to a funeral, she laid out her thinking with all the sobriety of a Home Office departmental strategy presentation. ‘Jude, the clincher is that Lennie – Detective Sergeant Baylis – was going to see Graham Forbes. That must mean he’s suspicious about what happened to Graham’s first wife.’

  ‘It could mean a lot of other things. Detective Sergeant Baylis has been to see you a couple of times, and that doesn’t mean he’s suspecting you of murder, does it?’

  ‘No, all right,’ said Carole testily.

  Jude giggled.

  ‘What’s the joke?’

  ‘I’m sorry. This is just such an unfamiliar role for me – playing devil’s advocate.’

  ‘It’s becoming more familiar by the minute. You were doing exactly the same thing last night.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the part I’ll play for the rest of my life. Is that my future – the eternal wet blanket?’

  ‘I can’t see it.’ Carole was not going to be deflected. ‘Look, just let me spell out my scenario, and don’t stop me till I’ve finished. Then pick holes in it, by all means . . . Though,’ she said with an uncharacteristic moment of cockiness, ‘I don’t think you’ll find any.’

  ‘Well, well, there’s confidence for you. OK, spell away.’

  ‘All right. I’ll take the starting point I did last night. In 1987, on the night of the Great Storm, Graham Forbes, driven mad by the aridity of his marriage and the fact that he’s fallen in love with Irene out in Kuala Lumpur, kills his wife, Sheila.’

  Jude opened her mouth to make some comment, but managed to stop herself.

  ‘He buries her body in the old barn. He puts it there, because the barn’s right behind his house and nobody can see him from the rest of the village. Then, on the Monday morning he catches his flight to Kuala Lumpur and is reunited with his beloved Irene. When he next returns to England, he’s alone and he has this hard-luck story about Sheila having gone off with another man. Three years is reckoned to be a decent interval, so when he retires in 1990, he brings back his new bride and they settle down to live permanently in Weldisham.’

  Jude could restrain herself no longer. ‘That’s virtually exactly what you told me last night.’

  ‘No. We have a very important new element – the fact that the body was buried in the barn.’

  ‘Then why was it moved from the barn?’

  Carole grinned triumphantly. ‘I was just coming to that. Graham Forbes’s secret is safe so long as the barn remains a dilapidated wreck. Various people, the latest of whom is Harry Grant, have plans to convert it into a dwelling. But each time the issue arises, the Village Committee makes such a fuss with local objections that planning permission is refused. And who’s Chairman of the Village Committee? Graham Forbes. So he sees to it that every time his secret is threatened, he coordinates the opposition. And he always succeeds. Until this time.

  ‘This time, a few different members on the Planning Committee and a new government policy about building more homes in Sussex mean that finally Harry Grant gets the go-ahead he’s been waiting for all this time.

  ‘But, of course, that has very serious implications for Graham Forbes. A house won’t have an earth floor. A house will have proper foundations dug. And once those are dug, his thirteen-year-old skeleton in the cupboard – or rather under the barn – is going to be discovered.

  ‘So, as soon as Graham Forbes gets the tip-off that the Planning Committee decision has gone against him, he has to move his wife’s remains.’ Carole was trying to sound all sober and objective, but she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice as she went on, ‘However, the night he chooses to perform the grisly task of exhumation happens to be the night that Tamsin Lutteridge, knowing her father’s away on business, has come to visit her mother.’

  Jude let out a little gasp as the excitement got to her too. She hadn’t previously made the connection that Carole continued, with mounting triumph, to spell out.

  ‘So now we fit in what you found out from Gillie Lutteridge. That night Tamsin can’t sleep. She’s dying for a cigarette. She goes out into the garden. But it’s cold. So, as she has often done in the past, she goes into the old barn.

  ‘Inside she sees Graham Forbes and she sees what he’s doing. There is a confrontation. He threatens to kill her if she ever breathes a word of what she’s seen. Tamsin is so terrified that she hides herself back in Sandalls Manor, genuinely afraid that she’ll be killed if she ever comes out.’

  Carole Seddon stopped and looked across at the passenger seat. Jude was nodding her head slowly, as she tested the junctions of the logical progression her friend had just described. Finally, she said, ‘No, Carole, that’s good. It’s very good.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Carole turned the Renault sedately out on to the main road towards Fethering. ‘And you’d say that even with your devil’s advocate hat on, would you?’

  Wryly, Jude shook her head. ‘Ooh no. The devil’s advocate in me would want various points proved.’

  ‘Oh. What points?’

  ‘Let’s just start with three obvious ones. The devil’s advocate in me would want proof a) that Grah
am Forbes had met and fallen in love with Irene before he returned to England for the leave that ended on the weekend of the Great Storm, b) that he was definitely on his own when he travelled back to Kuala Lumpur the following Monday, and c), coming up to date, that he knew the likely outcome of the Planning Committee’s meeting two weeks before it happened.’

  There was a silence. Then, bitterly, Carole said, ‘God, you’re picky.’

  ‘Darling, how too, too wonderful to hear from you!’

  It was clear from Trevor Malcolm’s opening words that he’d overcome any reticence he might once have suffered from about his sexual orientation. It was also clear that the lunch he’d returned from had been a good one.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s been such a long time.’

  ‘Carole, my dear, what is thirty years between friends? Presumably you want something?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Oh, come on, dearie. I know I made a huge impression on you at Durham and you’ve been holding a candle for me all these years . . . no doubt in the snug security of your spinster bed . . .’

  ‘I did actually get married, Trevor.’

  ‘Did you? Little devil. Are you still?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thought not. That’s the thing about me. I spoil people for other men. No one really matches up, you know.’

  ‘Mm. You didn’t get married, did you?’

  He giggled a tinkling giggle. ‘No, I don’t think that would have been . . . um . . . appropriate. Why make one woman unhappy when you can make lots and lots of men happy?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So come on, what is it you want from me . . . now we seem to have ruled out the possibility that it’s my body?’

  ‘OK. I need some information about the movements of someone who used to work for the British Council.’

  ‘Ooh, how very sinister. What is this, Carole – are you turning detective?’

  She laughed. The suggestion was too silly.

  ‘Or is it something to do with your work? Yes, you’re at the Home Office, aren’t you?’

  ‘Was. I’m retired.’

  ‘Oh, my God! I don’t believe it. Anno Domini’s so cruel, isn’t she? The policemen’re looking so young these days, I feel like I’m positively cradle-snatching. And you only have to scan the obituaries to see that people are dying at absurdly young ages. No, it’s dreadful, Carole, I’m the only person of my age I know who’s kept his looks.’