Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Mind you, the picture in the attic is positively wizened. OK, so tell me what you want to find out and I’ll see if I can help you.’

  Carole told him.

  When she’d finished, he said, ‘Ooh, how intriguing. I’m far too polite to ask you why you want to know. I’ll just let my little mind buzz with conjecture.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to help me?’

  ‘Might.’

  ‘Or is all that kind of information high security?’

  ‘Of course it is, Carole dear.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘But don’t you worry about that. I’ll find it. I always think discretion’s such an overrated virtue . . . don’t you?’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Trevor Malcolm rang back within the hour. It was nearly six o’clock. ‘You’re lucky to get me still in the office this late on a Friday.’

  ‘I do appreciate it, Trevor.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Nothing I like more than a little intrigue. And I’m afraid this evening I haven’t got a whole raft of young Adonises fighting over my body.’ For a moment, his façade slipped and he sounded a little wistful. ‘In fact, young Adonises are a bit thin on the ground these days. I keep myself in shape, but do they notice?’

  Carole cut through the potential introspection. ‘Did you have any luck?’

  ‘Not with the young Adonises, no.’

  ‘I meant—’

  ‘I know exactly what you meant, dear. And I wouldn’t have rung you back if I hadn’t got anything to tell you. The assignment wasn’t easy, let me tell you—’

  ‘I do appreciate your making the effort, Trevor. It’s very generous of you.’

  ‘Yes, I am generous. Not recognized as much as it should be, perhaps, but it gives me a warm inward glow. And you don’t get many of those to the pound these days. Still, you want to know what I found out, don’t you?’

  ‘Would be nice.’

  ‘Mm. Well, I had to be a bit lateral. Most of the relevant information would be in personnel files and the Council tends to be a bit anal with those, very unwilling to let all and sundry peer through them . . . which I suppose you can understand. There are a few little details of my time in Morocco that I wouldn’t necessarily want everyone to know about. By no means. That business with the two waiters and the camel . . . hmm . . . So, as I say, I had to think laterally . . . I went to the Literature Department instead.’

  ‘How would that help?’

  ‘A lot of the work someone like Graham Forbes would have been doing out in Malaysia would be hosting tours by British writers, you see. So I thought, if there was anyone out there over the time you’ve asked about . . . Well, Bob would be your male aunt, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Carole, a little bewildered. ‘Very clever.’

  ‘Hm . . . Yes, I always have been clever . . . in every area except my private life . . . Still, I don’t want to whinge. That would just be too painful. No, it was wonderful. I hit pay-dirt straight away. There was a writer out on a tour in Malaysia at exactly the right time.’

  ‘Brilliant. Do you have any means of contacting him?’

  ‘All on his file. Address, telephone, fax . . . It’s even been updated with an e-mail address.’

  ‘Trevor, you’re a genius.’

  ‘Yes, I am, aren’t I? Not that you’d know it from the way the riff-raff round here treat me . . . Some of us were born, you know, just not to be appreciated . . .’

  Carole had heard a blip on her Call Waiting towards the end of her conversation with Trevor Malcolm, but she hadn’t bothered to respond to it. At the end of her call, she checked 1471.

  At first she didn’t know the number. Then she recognized it as Barry Stillwell’s. It didn’t seem like less than twenty-four hours since she’d had her date with him; could have been years before.

  What on earth did Barry want? She didn’t bother to ring him back.

  Sebastian Trent was very happy to talk to them. Carole had rung on the Friday evening and he’d said in his laid-back, slightly aristocratic voice that he always did ‘interviews and stuff’ in the afternoon. ‘I write in the mornings. Can only do three hours a day. If I do more, my writing just gets glib.’

  He suggested three o’clock on the Monday. Carole tried to spell out to him what she wanted to ask about, but he waved the detail away with, ‘I’m sure we can sort all that out when you come. House is dead easy to find. You are familiar with Hampstead, I assume?’

  She didn’t really know why she wanted Jude to come along with her for this part of the investigation. Maybe it was just that she felt uncertain of her own people skills and knew that everyone responded to Jude’s easy manner. She was also keen to bring their enquiries together, so that they didn’t get into another ‘devil’s advocate’ situation. If they both got information at the same time, they might find making sense of it easier.

  Jude agreed readily – indeed enthusiastically. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I haven’t had to go to London for a while. The timing’s right.’

  That was intriguing. Why did Jude have to go up to London? But, as ever, Carole didn’t have time to put the supplementary questions.

  ‘But can we meet there – at Sebastian Trent’s house?’

  ‘Yes, if you like.’

  Carole was slightly put out. She’d had in mind a girls’ jolly, travelling up on the train from Fethering together and then perhaps a nice lunch somewhere. She didn’t, however, let her disappointment show.

  Jude went on, ‘I think this was meant to happen.’

  ‘What was meant to happen?’

  ‘You suggesting I should go up to London. I’m clearly meant to go up there this weekend. It’s a synchronicity thing. There’s someone I ought to see.’

  But, once again, before the compulsion to see this person – or indeed his or her identity – could be explored, the conversation had moved on.

  On the Sunday morning, Carole took Gulliver for a long walk on Fethering Beach. He was completely recovered now from his injury and extravagantly grateful to her for the extended excursion.

  Automatically, when she got back to High Tor, Carole went to the phone and checked 1471. Barry Stillwell had rung again. Again she didn’t call him back.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘I just feel story-telling is simplistic. There’s so much one can do with language beyond merely passing on narratives. Rather than opening up the potentialities locked in language, plotting can limit them.’

  Sebastian Trent stood with an arm resting nonchalantly along the mantelpiece of his artfully lived-in sitting room. His unruly grey curls were reflected in the large arched mirror over the fireplace. He was dressed, with calculated casualness, in chunky brown brogues, loose-cut chinos, a slightly frayed button-down Oxford shirt and a shapeless grey cardigan into whose pockets his fists were pushed down.

  On a shelf behind him, adjacent to the mirror – conveniently, had a photographer been present – were copies of his thin literary oeuvre. Carole had thought it politic to consult a reference book before meeting the author, and found that Sebastian Trent had published five novels. They had all been critically lauded for ‘playing with the concepts of magic realism and postmodernism and subverting both to produce a synthesis that is uniquely Trent’.

  Carole was surprised that writing books of that kind made enough money for the three-storey Hampstead pile in which the author lived. But then she didn’t know much about the world of publishing.

  It was clearly his novels Sebastian Trent wished to pontificate on. Carole now understood why he had shooed away the details of what she wanted to ask him about. He would have said the same, whatever the questions. She and Jude were being treated to the authorial overview of his own work, and it was clearly a routine that he’d wheeled out many times before. No doubt his audiences in Malaysia in 1987 had been treated to something very similar.

  His manner was that of a skilled lecturer or intervie
wee. The timing was practised, the jokes honed and the whole presented with that particular brand of self-depreciation which masks huge arrogance.

  Carole recognized that they had a problem. Getting Sebastian Trent off his literary tramlines was not going to be easy.

  ‘I am interested,’ he continued, ‘not in the mere meanings of words but in their resonance. In some ways, I suppose, I could be called a semioticist, except that I’m not solely interested in the adumbration of covert references which get attached to words. I am also concerned by their sounds, the anomalies of homonyms, the latent misunderstandings inherent in assonantal rhymes, the misleading potential of the word half-heard. This is what gives such a rich texture to my writing. And this is why I feel readers only get the full experience on a second reading of my novels. Take, for instance, the Tuscan idyll sequence in my—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jude, ‘but this isn’t what we came here to talk about.’

  Sebastian Trent was so taken aback to be stopped in mid-flow that he could only mouth helplessly. This was the first time in his authorial experience that he’d been interrupted. Listeners usually hung with rapt attention on his every insight and aperçu, frequently taking notes.

  Carole grinned inwardly. Now she knew why her instinct had told her to bring Jude along.

  ‘The reason we came,’ her friend went on with an engagingly innocent smile, ‘was to talk about a trip you made for the British Council to Malaysia in 1987.’

  ‘Oh.’ The supremely articulate Sebastian Trent was still so much in shock that he was reduced to a monosyllable.

  ‘Now, as we understand it, Sebastian, you were in Malaysia in October of that year . . .’

  He gave a bewildered nod.

  ‘You spent most of your time in Kuala Lumpur, but also travelled to Ipoh and Penang.’

  He couldn’t deny that either.

  ‘And while you were out there your British Council host was Graham Forbes.’

  Another nod.

  Carole wondered how long this could go on. It was wonderful while it lasted, but surely at some point Sebastian Trent was going to ask why he was being grilled in this way. She didn’t have to wait long.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but what is this all about?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t Carole say on the phone?’ asked Jude coolly.

  No, thought Carole, she’s not going to throw this over to me, is she? She needn’t have worried.

  Glibly, Jude continued, ‘We’re trying to contact Graham Forbes’s wife, Sheila.’

  He didn’t ask why. Having apparently come to terms with the fact that they weren’t after his pearls of literary wisdom, Sebastian Trent now seemed keen only to send them on their way. ‘Presumably you contact her through Graham. He’s retired now, but I think I’ve got an address for him. Somewhere in Sussex, I seem to remember.’

  Carole came in to do her bit. ‘You didn’t know that he’d remarried?’

  ‘No.’ Sebastian Trent didn’t sound particularly interested in the information. Graham Forbes may have been his host in Kuala Lumpur, but no closeness seemed to have developed between them.

  ‘He remarried someone called Irene. Chinese woman. I wondered if you’d met her while you were out in Malaysia.’

  He shrugged. ‘I met a lot of people. And obviously, because I was giving lectures and things, they’d remember me a lot better than I’d remember them. I’d have made much more of an impression. Anyway, we are talking thirteen years ago. I can’t be expected to remember all the names now, can I?’

  ‘No,’ Carole persisted, ‘but you might have noticed if Graham Forbes was making a particular fuss of Irene, if he was treating her like a girlfriend . . .?’

  ‘Well, he’d be unlikely to do that in public, wouldn’t he? Whatever their private relationship might have been.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Men don’t usually flaunt their girlfriends when their wives are present.’

  It was Carole’s turn to be struck dumb. So it was left to Jude to clarify the situation. ‘Sheila Forbes was in Kuala Lumpur with her husband while you were out there?’

  ‘Yes. We even travelled from Heathrow on the same plane.’

  ‘Really? On the morning of Monday 19 October 1987?’ asked Carole.

  ‘I can’t remember the exact date, but if you say that’s when it was, I’m sure you’re right. I remember it was the Monday after that terrible storm, because my wife had to go off down to Hampshire to assess the damage to our country place.’

  A country place too, thought Carole. There must be really serious money in writing experimental literary fiction.

  ‘Did you know you’d be travelling out with Graham Forbes?’

  ‘No. But he recognized me of course at Heathrow and introduced himself and his wife.’

  ‘Ah.’ Carole felt her whole edifice of conjecture tumbling around her ears.

  ‘And at the other end, did you travel from the airport into Kuala Lumpur together?’ asked Jude.

  ‘I can’t remember after all this time.’ He tapped his chin testily, trying to dredge up the recollection. ‘Oh, I think what actually happened was that Mrs Forbes went off in a taxi and Graham Forbes came with me in the British Council car to show me my hotel. The Ming Palace, as I recall. Yes, I remember now. There was a new driver, only just started that day. He didn’t know the way to the hotel.’

  ‘And did you see a lot of Sheila Forbes while you were in Kuala Lumpur?’

  ‘Not a lot, no.’

  ‘But you did see her?’

  ‘I must have done. I can’t honestly remember.’

  ‘Did you get much impression of her personality?’

  He shrugged. ‘She seemed quiet, not very interesting.’ Sebastian Trent gave the impression he didn’t find many other people very interesting.

  ‘But you couldn’t judge whether she and her husband were getting on well?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t judge that.’ He was beginning to find the interrogationirksome.‘For heaven’s sake.Look,Graham Forbes was simply the British Council representative in Kuala Lumpur who made the arrangements for my tour. I didn’t get to know him and I certainly didn’t get to know his wife.’

  And that was it, really. Sebastian Trent had nothing else to tell them. And though he could no doubt have been prompted by the proper cue to continue his dissertation on the genius of Sebastian Trent, Carole and Jude felt too shattered by his revelations to want to do anything other than leave as soon as possible.

  In the large hallway, they met the author’s wife coming in. She was instantly recognizable as the star of one of the country’s most popular and dumbed-down television soaps.

  So that was how a writer of recherché literary novels could afford a mansion in Hampstead and a country place in Hampshire.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  They travelled back together from Victoria to Fethering on a train that was crowded and filthy and rattled through endless stations, getting a little further behind schedule with each one. The market for public transport to that part of West Sussex has always been a finite one, so no effort has ever been made to improve the service. Carole Seddon had become inured to the third-world squalor of her local railway system and so travelled up to London as little as possible.

  They didn’t say much on the train. This was partly because the compartments were so full, loud with the hubbub of shrieking adolescents and businessmen on mobile phones.

  But their silence was also, in a way, because there was nothing to say. The links of logic, so durable on the Friday, had been shattered by a single blow. The connection between the freshly turned earth in one old barn and the bones in another had been destroyed the instant Sebastian Trent said he’d travelled out to Kuala Lumpur with Graham Forbes and his wife.

  Carole and Jude’s investigation had run into a brick wall.

  They could both have gone back to their separate houses in Fethering High Street, but the Crown and Anchor seemed a more cheerful prospect. Not t
hat it felt particularly cheerful when they arrived. Apart from anything else, the landlord was in subdued mood.

  ‘You two been having a good time then, have you?’ he asked gloomily.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Jude.

  ‘Carole?’

  She was so caught up in her thoughts, trying to make new connections in the case, that it took her a moment to realize he was addressing her.

  ‘What? Oh yes. You know, all right.’

  Her tone must have sounded more deterrent than she’d intended, because Ted Crisp went off to serve another customer before returning to take their order. And then he was distinctly offhand, particularly with Carole. She couldn’t think what she’d done to offend him, but Ted’s behaviour seemed just another symptom of her uncanny ability to read signals wrong.

  She sat down with Jude at a table some way away from the bar. Her friend yawned and raked her fingers through her blonde hair. Carole wondered what she’d been doing in London all weekend. Needless to say, Jude hadn’t volunteered anything about the person whom she ‘ought to see’.

  But something seemed to have got her down. Carole had never seen Jude so subdued. Her customary energy had been replaced by a kind of lethargy.

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ Carole asked.

  ‘What? Oh, nothing that won’t get better.’

  ‘Is it what happened with Sebastian Trent?’

  Jude let out a little wry laugh. ‘No, no. Obviously that was disappointing, but . . . No, that’s not what’s got me down.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Oh, a bloody man. It usually is a bloody man, isn’t it?’

  This was closer to a confessional mood than any other moment Carole had shared with Jude. ‘If you want to talk about it . . .’ she said.

  For a moment, Jude looked undecided. Then she shook her head. ‘No. No need to burden you with my troubles.’