Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  ‘I don’t mind. And you’re always saying that troubles should be shared.’

  ‘Yes, thanks, Carole, but . . . not in this case, I think.’ Another brisk shake of the head. ‘No, there’s a certain kind of man who gets pleasure from knowing he’s upset you. It’s some kind of validation of his masculinity, the fact that he can make women suffer . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Carole, hoping for more.

  ‘And so talking about how much that kind of man has upset you is really just playing into his hands, joining his conspiracy, building up his self-image as a heart-breaker . . .’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Which means the best thing is to think very deliberately about something else.’ She swept her hands back from her nose, as if wiping away unpleasant memories. ‘OK. Let’s get back to your bones.’

  ‘All right,’ said Carole, disappointed.

  ‘Well, it seems like your wonderful Graham Forbes wife-murderer theory is shot out of the water . . .’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘But don’t worry. Some of the thinking you’ve done may still be relevant. I mean, that newly dug earth in the barn . . . It can’t have anything to do with Graham Forbes, but it still might be where the bones were buried. And, if that is the case, then we’ve got to work out who else it was who dug them up.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Ooh, and there’s one thing I can certainly follow up on.’ Jude’s vitality may not have been spontaneous, but she was willing it back with renewed energy as she took out her mobile phone and punched in a number. ‘I can ask Tamsin Lutteridge what she saw in the barn that night when she was back in Weldisham. I should have done that earlier, but I was so caught up in thoughts of — Ah, hello,’ she said, as she got through on the phone. ‘Could I speak to Charles Hilton, please? How long will he be there? Right. Is that Anne? This is Jude. Jude. We met the other week when I came over to Sandalls Manor. Yes. In fact, it’s not really Charles I’m trying to contact. I’d like to speak to Tamsin Lutteridge. No, as a matter of fact, Anne, I know she’s there. I—’

  But the phone had been put down on her. Jude grimaced as she switched off.

  ‘Hung up on me. Charles’s wife’s maintaining the fiction that Tamsin’s not there. I’ll have to speak to Charles himself.’

  ‘You can get round him?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  Jude rubbed her hands over her brown eyes. Carole noticed how tired she looked. Her weekend had been tough. Whoever the man was, he had caused her a lot of stress.

  Carole was about to make solicitous enquiries, but Jude steepled her hands up to her mouth and puffed through them in an irritated way. ‘Right. What else can we do about the case? What other leads have we got to follow?’

  ‘Nothing very definite. I’m afraid I’ve been so caught up in the Graham Forbes scenario, I haven’t really considered any other options.’

  ‘No . . . But, whatever really happened, the whole thing does go back quite a long time in the history of Weldisham . . .’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘So we need to talk to people who’ve been around the village a long time.’

  ‘Not that there are many of those. The majority of residents only moved there to retire.’

  ‘Yes, but we still have the ones who grew up there . . .’

  ‘Lennie Baylis and Harry Grant.’

  ‘And wasn’t there someone else? I’m sure when I met Harry in the Hare and Hounds, he said . . .’ But Jude’s thought was overtaken by a more urgent one. ‘What about Brian Helling?’

  Carole shuddered. She didn’t want to be reminded of their encounter on the previous Friday. The wildness in Brian Helling’s eyes still disturbed her. ‘I’m not sure whether he actually did grow up in Weldisham. I think he was probably an adult by the time his mother had her pools win and bought Heron Cottage.’

  ‘Hm. So she . . . what’s her name?’

  ‘Pauline Helling.’

  ‘She didn’t live in the village before that?’

  ‘Don’t think so. Mind you, Brian did say that she used to work there.’

  ‘Really?’ There was now almost a sparkle in Jude’s eyes. ‘Well, if the way she snooped at you is anything to go by, I should think Pauline Helling knows everything that’s ever gone on in Weldisham.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘So it’s obvious what you have to do next, isn’t it, Carole?’

  ‘Is it? What?’

  ‘You have to go and see Pauline Helling.’

  Carole had spent the rest of the evening trying to find a reason that might justify a visit to the owner of Heron Cottage. She and Jude hadn’t stayed at the Crown and Anchor for a meal. One more drink and they’d gone. Ted Crisp hadn’t even looked up from the bar when they called out their goodbyes.

  Carole woke on the Tuesday morning with her problem still unresolved. There was no plausible reason why she needed to call on Pauline Helling, other than the true one – that she wanted to pick the old woman’s brains to help her unauthorized enquiries into the bones found in South Welling Barn.

  She continued to chew through the possibilities as she took Gulliver for his early morning walk on Fethering Beach, and while she drove the few miles from Fethering to Weldisham.

  But nothing came. And, given the antisocial malevolence which was all she had seen of Pauline Helling’s behaviour, as she stood on the doorstep after ringing the bell of Heron Cottage, Carole fully expected to have the door slammed in her face.

  Certainly the old woman’s eyes, close-set on either side of her beaky nose, radiated suspicion. There was also recognition. If Pauline Helling was as much of a social outcast in Weldisham as Detective Sergeant Baylis had suggested, God only knew through what network she got her information, but she was definitely aware that the woman on her doorstep was the one who’d found the bones.

  ‘Good morning?’ The words may have been polite, but their delivery was distinctly deterrent.

  Carole still had no plan of what to say. In desperation, she tried the truth. ‘Mrs Helling, good morning. My name’s Carole Seddon. I wanted to talk to you about something your son Brian said to me.’

  There was a moment’s impasse, then, with bad grace, Pauline Helling moved back into the gloom of her hall. ‘You’d better come in.’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Carole could hear barking as she entered Heron Cottage. Presumably Pauline Helling’s black and white spaniel was locked away in the kitchen.

  The sitting room into which she was ushered looked at odds with the exterior of the house. She had been in enough modernized country cottages to have certain expectations – white walls, exposed beams, open fireplaces, details which accentuated the building’s rustic origins. Pauline Helling’s home had none of these. If there were any beams – and the cottage’s age suggested there must have been – they’d been covered over with plasterboard, and the fireplace had been filled in. The walls were a dyspeptic green colour, not a gentle eau-de-Nil, but a sharp acidic tone. On a carpet whose multi-hued swirly design was too large for the space sat a three-piece suite in purple velour. The same material was used for the orange curtains.

  The room’s only concession to its history was the lozenge criss-crossing on the leaded windows, but these were modern double-glazed units and had probably been demanded by the planning authorities when the cottage was converted.

  Such extreme clashes of style might be used with postmodernist irony in a television decorating make-over programme. In Heron Cottage they seemed to reflect only the owner’s lack of taste. The knee-jerk snobbish reaction which Carole could not quite curb was that someone who’d been brought up in a council house shouldn’t aspire to the middle-class gentility of Weldisham. Like the other residents of the village, she was very quickly condemning Pauline Helling for having ideas above her station.

  There were no pictures on the walls and very few ornaments. On the window sill perched the statuette which Carole had seen from outside. The shepherdess
bent winsomely over her crook, lifting the hem of her long skirt, against which a fluffy lamb nuzzled. The piece wasn’t even china, just a badly painted plaster figurine of the kind that might be won at a fair. Next to the shepherdess sat the pin-cushion in the shape of a fat Chinaman. His tiny head perched incongruously on the ball of his body. There were no pins or needles stuck into the fabric; the object was there purely as an ornament. On the side which faced the window the purple silk was almost bleached of colour. The two-tone effect reminded Carole of a childhood illustration she’d seen of the poisoned apple the Wicked Queen had presented to Snow White.

  On the mantelpiece, bereft of its fireplace beneath, stood a couple of family photographs. One was clearly of some Helling family reunion, an amateur snap in faded black and white, dating back at least twenty years. Sitting uncomfortably in the centre were an elderly couple, while around them generations of descendants posed in various stages of unease. The Hellings, their body language seemed to say, were not good at social events and, what’s more, they didn’t like each other much. None of the family seemed to have escaped the Helling pointed nose.

  The second picture was a school photograph of Brian. Though he had probably been only about nine when the picture was taken, the same nose and a slyness in his eyes made him instantly recognizable.

  There was not a book in sight; the Radio Times beneath the small television was the only evidence of any kind of reading matter. How Brian Helling could have developed the desire to be a writer from this kind of background Carole’s rather narrow mind could not imagine.

  ‘All right,’ demanded Pauline Helling, after she’d perfunctorily gestured her visitor into a purple armchair. ‘What’s he done this time?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know Brian gets in trouble from time to time. Has he stolen something from you or what?’ Her local accent was strong, and she spoke like someone who was unused to talking. She didn’t sit herself, but hovered uneasily by the stranded mantelpiece.

  ‘He hasn’t stolen anything from me.’

  Pauline Helling looked a little puzzled. Then she said, ‘He might call it “borrowing”. He might say he just wanted to borrow something from you.’

  ‘No, it’s not that.’

  ‘He doesn’t owe you anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘Brian stopped me on the track last Friday.’

  ‘Track? What track’s that?’

  ‘The one on the way out of the village. Where Weldisham Lane turns right back down to the main road.’ Pauline Helling still looked uncomprehending. ‘The track that leads to South Welling Barn.’

  That did it. The old woman’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. Carole noticed that, like her son, she had no visible upper lip. ‘Why were you going to South Welling Barn?’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was just going for a walk.’

  ‘But why in that direction?’

  Carole shrugged.

  Pauline Helling enunciated her next words with great care. ‘I know it was you who found the bones up there.’

  This came as no surprise to Carole, but she still asked, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘It seems to me, Mrs Helling, that there’s very little goes on in Weldisham you don’t know about.’

  The old woman didn’t react to this. Instead, she asked in a voice that was almost fearful, ‘Did Brian say anything to you about the bones?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ From the expression on Pauline Helling’s face, that was the news she was afraid to hear. For a moment, she seemed unable to speak. Carole went on, ‘He effectively said I should mind my own business about them.’

  Brian’s mother found her voice again. ‘Sounds like very good advice to me.’

  ‘He also hinted to me who he thought the bones might have belonged to.’

  ‘Did he?’ The fear in the voice was now almost panic. ‘Who?’

  ‘He talked about Detective Sergeant Baylis . . .’

  The panic grew. ‘Lennie hadn’t been questioning Brian, had he?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t mention that. But he said that Sergeant Baylis’s mother had disappeared more than twenty years ago, and that some people at the time thought his father had done away with her.’

  ‘Ah.’ The thin shoulders sagged, as the tension went out of them. Carole felt sure she was witnessing a reaction of huge relief. Pauline Helling had been afraid she knew who the bones belonged to. What she’d just said ruled out that possibility. Whoever the victim had been, it wasn’t Lennie Baylis’s mother.

  But Pauline Helling knew who it was.

  Carole didn’t reckon much for her chances of finding out, but it was worth trying. ‘You’ve lived round the village for a long time, haven’t you, Mrs Helling?’

  ‘Only been in this cottage twelve years,’ she replied defensively.

  ‘But Brian said you used to work up here before that.’

  ‘So? What’s that to you?’

  Carole tried to guess what kind of work someone like Pauline Helling could have done in a place like Weldisham. She could never have had the outgoing personality to serve in the Hare and Hounds, so that really left only one alternative. ‘What did you do – cleaning?’ There was no reply, but Carole knew she had got it right. ‘Who did you clean for?’

  ‘That’s no business of yours.’

  True, it wasn’t, but Carole was far too caught up in her thoughts to stop there. ‘Did you work for the Lutteridges?’ No reply, and no flicker of reaction either. ‘If you don’t tell me, I can find out.’

  ‘You do that then,’ said Pauline Helling, defiantly malevolent. ‘Come on, it’s time you went. We haven’t got anything else to say to each other.’

  There was no pretence of politeness between them now, so, though Carole wasn’t optimistic about getting answers, she felt she could ask any questions she wanted to. As if the old woman hadn’t spoken, she said, ‘I gather you had a big pools win . . .’ No reaction. ‘And that’s how you bought this house . . .’ The vestigial upper lip remained an unmoving line. ‘When was that exactly?’

  ‘Out.’ Pauline Helling crossed to open the sitting-room door. ‘You’re not welcome here.’

  She stood in the doorway and opened the front door. Carole stayed in her purple armchair and kept trying. ‘But you’re not welcome here either, are you, Mrs Helling? I gather the good folk of Weldisham don’t think you fit in.’

  ‘If you don’t leave, I’ll call Brian. He can be quite nasty when he needs to be.’

  After her experience on the track, Carole didn’t doubt it. Reluctantly, she rose from her armchair and moved towards the hall. She took one last look around the hideous sitting room.

  Her eye was caught again by the Helling family reunion photograph.

  And in it she saw something she should have noticed before, something that started a whole new set of exciting connections racing through her mind.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Carole wasn’t yet positively suspicious of Detective Sergeant Baylis, but she was surprised by the alacrity with which he responded to her phone call. The fact that he was sitting in front of her fire at three-thirty that afternoon could have borne out Brian Helling’s hint that the detective was more concerned with monitoring other people’s thinking on the case than with finding a solution to it himself. Which could, as Brian had implied, mean that Lennie Baylis’s interest was a very personal one.

  ‘So do I gather that you’ve got some new information, Mrs Seddon?’

  He seemed at ease in her armchair, but watchful. Now she had recognized him as one of the boys in the Helling family photograph, the likeness was obvious. It was only his bulk that made his nose look small; in a thinner face it would have stood out as beakily as Pauline’s or Brian’s.

  ‘I wouldn’t say it was new information, really. New thinking, perhaps.’ He’d been so prompt in answering her summons that Carole hadn’t had time to ref
ine her approach. She had to think on her feet. ‘It seems to me,’ she continued tentatively, ‘that there’s some Helling family connection in this whole thing.’

  He was unshocked by the suggestion. ‘Wouldn’t be a great surprise if there was. The Hellings are a very extensive family round here. At all kinds of different levels. Farm owners, farm workers . . . These days doctors and solicitors. There are Hellings everywhere. Most local people have some distant connection with them.’

  ‘Including you,’ she dared to say.

  He may have been surprised by her knowing this, but not fazed. ‘Yes, my mother was a Helling.’

  ‘So you’re related to Pauline and Brian?’

  ‘Not directly, so far as I know. We probably are if you go back a few generations.’

  ‘But you didn’t see a lot of Brian when you were growing up?’

  ‘I told you we went to school together. But didn’t mix much in our spare time. Never really got on. Had to meet at the occasional big Helling family reunion, but that was it.’ He spoke almost as if he knew she’d made the connection from the photograph on Pauline’s mantelpiece.

  ‘The reason I mention it . . .’ For a moment Carole almost lost her nerve, but she regained impetus. ‘The reason I mention it is something that Brian Helling said to me.’

  ‘When did you see Brian?’

  ‘He came chasing after me on the Downs on Friday. In his Land Rover.’

  Baylis looked alarmed. ‘He didn’t hurt you, did he?’

  ‘No. He frightened me a bit, that’s all.’

  The sergeant relaxed back in his chair. ‘Good. Keep clear of Brian Helling if you can. He’s a nasty bit of work.’

  ‘But not criminally nasty. Or at least that’s what you implied before.’

  ‘No, probably not criminally nasty. But you never know how someone like him might behave, given the right provocation.’

  ‘I will do my level best to avoid meeting him again. And if I do meet him, I’ll do my level best to avoid provoking him. Not that I actually sought out his company last Friday.’