Death on the Downs

by Simon Brett

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He was the one who dug up the bones in the old barn, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. And he was the one who came and told me about his discovery. He took pleasure in it. He liked the idea of having power over Graham. He liked the idea of having power over anyone.’

  ‘Irene, I’ve got to find him!’

  ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘I know you don’t, but I just wondered . . . when he came to see you . . . presumably he talked of blackmail . . .’

  ‘Of course. That’s the only reason he’d dug up the bones in the first place.’

  ‘But presumably he also gave you a promise that, if you coughed up the money, he’d hide the bones somewhere safe . . . somewhere nobody else except for him could find them.’

  ‘Yes. He said he’d do that. I asked him to hand them over for us to dispose of, but he wouldn’t. He wanted to keep them, so that if he ever needed to raise his ransom demands . . . So that he would always have a hold over Graham . . .’

  ‘Mrs Forbes . . . Irene . . . did Brian Helling say anything about where he might hide the bones?’

  ‘No. Well, he didn’t say anything that meant anything to me.’

  ‘What were his exact words?’

  ‘He said, “Don’t worry about anyone finding the bones. Nobody ever goes to Fort Pittsburgh.”’

  Chapter Forty-five

  Though flickers of unhealthy light intermittently penetrated her prison, Carole could see nothing of the outside world. Nor could she draw attention to herself. She had been securely gagged. But she could hear the two men talking.

  At first she was full of a wild, crazy hope. This was a rescue. Why else would he have come? He was her saviour.

  But they weren’t far into their conversation before that hope was crushed. More than crushed – stifled, strangled till no breath of life remained.

  ‘It’s an impasse,’ she heard Brian Helling’s voice say. ‘A Mexican stand-off with no weapons.’

  ‘No weapons?’ Lennie Baylis’s voice echoed.

  ‘Well, no guns. One knife between the two of us.’

  ‘But I hold all the cards,’ said Baylis. ‘I’ve got the authority of the West Sussex Constabulary behind me.’

  ‘Hardly.’ There was triumph and derision in Brian Helling’s tone. ‘You shop me, I tell them about your deals with the boys in Brighton. How long have you been taking a percentage for turning a blind eye to their transactions? Nice little pay-offs from all the pubs and clubs. You must’ve salted away quite a bit by now, Lennie.’

  ‘The police look after their own. Nobody’d in the force’d believe you, Brian.’

  ‘No? All right, maybe not me on my own, but I could get Will Maples to back me up.’

  ‘He won’t say anything. He’ll keep quiet to save his own skin.’

  ‘You can’t be certain of that. I still know too much for you to turn me in, Lennie. You can’t afford the risk.’

  ‘Maybe not.’ There was a silence. ‘Of course, it needn’t be the police. I could just alert the Brighton boys to where you are.’

  An intake of breath. Brian Helling was frightened, but he disguised his fear as well as he could. ‘Another risk too far. I might still be able to get information to the police.’

  Baylis seemed to accept this and changed tack. ‘I’ve got plenty on you, though, Brian. I know about you digging up the bones in the barn behind the Forbeses’ place. I can get you on blackmail – and on torching your mother’s place.’

  ‘You’ve got no proof of that. The fire could have been an accident.’

  ‘No way. There was petrol on the dog’s fur.’

  ‘The dog? Wasn’t that little bugger burnt to a cinder?’

  ‘No, it got out of the cottage. Forced its way through a half-open window, we reckon.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘Yes. Bad luck, Brian. Always enjoyed hurting animals, didn’t you?’

  ‘Better than enjoying hurting people, Lennie.’ The line was spoken with deep viciousness. ‘You remember what you did to me here, don’t you?’

  Baylis laughed, and in her prison Carole shivered. The sound was pure cruelty.

  Then he asked, ‘Why did you kill your mother, Brian?’

  ‘She’d lost her nerve. After Carole Seddon went to see her and then you went to see her the same day, she was all set to turn me in. I couldn’t allow that.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And with the insurance on Heron Cottage, I’ll be able to pay off what I owe in Brighton.’

  ‘What? No way you’re ever going to get the insurance. You’re mad, Brian, do you know that? Always have been, from when you were a kid.’

  ‘I’m not! But if I were, what you did to me here might help explain why!’

  There was another callous laugh from Baylis.

  With an effort, Brian Helling calmed himself. ‘So, like I said, it’s a Mexican stand-off. We know too much about each other. Each one of us has the power to destroy the other. And that’s what’s going to keep us both quiet.’

  There was a long silence while Lennie Baylis took this in. At the end he asked flatly, ‘So what about her?’

  ‘We both know the answer to that. Carole Seddon’s got rather a lot of information, hasn’t she? You know exactly how much. That’s why you’ve been taking such a personal interest in her investigations – to find out if she’s got anything incriminating on you.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘And you know she has, or you wouldn’t have come out to this godforsaken place. Carole Seddon knows enough to shop both of us – particularly if she’s overheard what we’ve just been saying.’

  ‘Yes.’

  To Carole the ensuing silence felt very long. Agonizingly long.

  ‘So we have to kill her?’

  ‘Needn’t be as proactive as that.’

  ‘You mean we just leave her here?’

  ‘That’s right. We just leave her here.’

  Chapter Forty-six

  ‘No sign of Baylis,’ said Ted Crisp gloomily. ‘I’ve phoned his office. They don’t know where he is. Or if they do, they’re not saying.’

  He and Jude were sitting in his car by the village green in Weldisham. Her brow wrinkled with effort as she tried to make sense of what she’d heard. ‘Fort Pittsburgh . . . Fort Pittsburgh . . . I’m sure Carole said something about forts. Someone had talked to her about forts. I’ve heard someone talking about forts. Oh, damn, who was it?’

  There was a long silence, finally broken by Ted. ‘If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ted. Carole will survive,’ said Jude with a confidence she didn’t feel. Suddenly she slapped her hands to the side of her face. ‘Forts – yes! Harry Grant said something about him and Lennie Baylis playing with forts when they were kids. Maybe Fort Pittsburgh fits in with that!’ She reached for her mobile. ‘I must get Harry Grant’s number.’

  Directory Enquiries obliged, but when she called, the phone rang and rang. Jude wasn’t to know that Harry and Jenny Grant were at that moment getting off a plane in Portugal.

  She and Ted Crisp exchanged looks of total despair. There was nothing they could do. Both felt sure that Carole was somewhere close, but they had no means of tracing her.

  Jude put her hands over her eyes and tried to focus on the scene in the Hare and Hounds when Harry Grant had mentioned forts. Her brow scrunched up with the effort. Then it cleared. She snapped her fingers.

  ‘Nick! Harry mentioned someone else called Nick. He’d played their games with them.’

  ‘But where are we going to find him?’

  ‘He works on one of the farms. I’ll ask Irene Forbes. She may know.’

  When Ted’s car drew up beside him, Nick was on a tractor with a fork-lift attachment, lowering a huge cylinder of hay over a fence to a circling herd of hungry cows. He was aware of Jude and Ted’s presence, but ignored them till the bale was grounded. Then he climbed over the fence and used a
knife to cut the string around the hay, forcing the eager animals back as he did so. Only after he had methodically coiled up the string round his hand and crossed back over the fence did he look full on at his visitors.

  He folded the arms of his plaid working shirt and said nothing. His eyes, buried in weather-beaten folds of skin, were cautious.

  ‘Nick?’ A curt nod acknowledged that that’s who he was. ‘My name’s Jude and this is Ted. Look, I’m sorry to interrupt you like this, but I want to know if you’ve ever heard of Fort Pittsburgh.’

  There was an aching silence. Jude was beginning to be afraid he was never going to say anything, when finally he spoke. ‘Long time since I’ve heard Fort Pittsburgh mentioned.’

  ‘But do you know what it is, where it is?’

  Again he left a silence before he said, ‘Chalk pit. Out on the Downs.

  ‘Could you tell us how to get there?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, with a suspicion of strangers that went back through generations.

  ‘Because I believe a friend of mine is being imprisoned in Fort Pittsburgh.’

  The words sounded melodramatic, but Nick took them seriously. ‘Who’s imprisoned her then?’

  ‘Either Lennie Baylis or Brian Helling.’

  The effect of the names was instantaneous. ‘We’d better get out there!’

  Ted Crisp began, ‘If you show me the way—’

  ‘We’ll go in the tractor. It’s cross-country.’

  The March sky was already darkening as the tractor lumbered off the track and started across fields. On the higher parts of the Downs the ground, though wet, was fairly firm. When they got into the dips, the going would be stickier. But the tractor’s high wheels rode steadily over the terrain.

  In the enclosed cab, conditions for the three of them were cramped and stuffy.

  ‘It’s a kids’ name – Fort Pittsburgh,’ said Nick, suddenly loquacious. ‘If you were brought up in Weldisham, you used to go a long way out of the village to play. Lots of secret places you could find. All our kids’ games were kind of military . . . lots of building camps, having pitched battles, stalking your friends, trapping them. It wasn’t like in a city. We didn’t have many toys and stuff, so we . . . as the expression goes . . . made our own entertainment. Just a few of us . . . and some of the games we invented were pretty rough.’

  Neither Jude nor Ted Crisp said anything. They were too anxious for words, and so they let Nick’s monologue roll.

  ‘Anyway, all around the Downs we had our camps, forts we called them, and we invented names for them. Well, I didn’t do much of the inventing. Lennie and Harry did that. They were in charge. Lennie had heard of Pittsburgh and he thought it sounded American and flashy, so when we found this old disused chalk pit, it became Fort Pittsburgh.’

  ‘A chalk pit?’ said Jude.

  ‘Yes. In the middle of some woods. Very overgrown. Great place to play and . . .’ He seemed to lose impetus. ‘That kind of thing.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Well, we . . . As I say, our games were pretty rough . . . cruel, you could say. I’m sure they’d be called cruel nowadays, but then . . . that’s how kids were . . . Like I said, Harry and Lennie were the leaders . . . And Brian Helling always wanted to play with us . . . and we didn’t want him to . . . you know, because he wasn’t from the village . . . he only spent time up there when his mum was working. His mum was a cleaner . . . and Brian was a mummy’s boy . . . and he was a bastard . . . and . . . Like I said, kids can be very cruel . . .

  ‘So one day Lennie said we’d play this trick on Brian. I wasn’t keen, because I knew what Lennie’s tricks were like, but you didn’t argue with him, nor with Harry. You just went along with them. So, anyway, Lennie told Brian yes, he could come and play with us. He could come to this special place we’d found which we called Fort Pittsburgh. So Brian came along with us, all innocent and, like, very cheery because he thought now he was part of our gang, and we . . .’

  There was a silence. ‘What, Nick?’

  ‘We tied him up and left him in a cave overnight. In what we called the Prison. The Fort Pittsburgh Prison.’

  ‘How old was he then?’

  ‘Seven . . . eight . . . I don’t know. It’s not something I’m proud to have been involved in, but Lennie had a very strong personality and, like I said, kids are cruel. So anything that happens between Lennie and Brian goes back a long way. They both got a really cruel streak and if they’ve captured someone, they—’

  But the farm worker’s narrative got no further. The tractor had reached the edge of a thick tangled wood. He brought it to a halt.

  ‘We walk the last bit,’ said Nick.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  ‘You can’t just leave me here,’ said Carole, as she felt the nylon rope being tied around both her wrists. After the other man had departed, he’d let her out of the cave again and kept her tethered by the one arm. She’d tried to engage him in conversation, but without success. He’d given her permission to relieve herself and even given her some food.

  Why did he bother? She knew they’d agreed to leave her there to die.

  ‘Back in the cave now.’ Brian Helling jerked the rope taut, less gentle than he’d been the day before. He pulled her face round to face his. ‘I’m going to write about you, you know, Carole Seddon.’

  Panic snatched away her breath. ‘Write about me?’ she managed to say. ‘What on earth do you mean? There’s nothing to write about me.’

  His answer made her feel even bleaker.

  ‘Oh, there will be. A Diary of Decay. That’ll be the breakthrough book for me. A minute dissection of how someone actually dies . . . How long it takes them to die . . . What actually happens to their body . . . and to their mind.’

  Carole fought off terror with cold logic. ‘If you’re going to make that kind of detailed observation, you’ll have to come out here. You’ll draw attention to my hiding place.’

  ‘No way. I know this area. I grew up round here. I know every copse and fold of the Downs. I’m a good tracker, a good countryman. Nobody’ll find me out here.’

  ‘They will if you keep coming out in a Land Rover.’

  ‘I won’t use the Land Rover after today.’

  ‘Somebody must know where you are.’

  Brian Helling shook his head complacently. ‘Only Lennie Baylis. And he’ll keep quiet.’

  Carole clutched at a straw. ‘Will Maples! He tipped you off and told you where to find me. He knows where you are.’

  ‘As you know,’ said Brian quietly, ‘if you were listening to what Lennie and I said, we’ve both got something of a hold over Will Maples. Incidentally,’ Brian went on, aware of the cruelty of what he was about to say, ‘Will rang through on the mobile earlier. He told me two friends of yours had arrived at the Hare and Hounds looking for you.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Chubby woman with blonde hair, big fat chap with a beard. Needless to say, Will didn’t tell them anything.’

  A shadow of despair engulfed Carole.

  Brian Helling tugged on the rope. ‘Better get you back in your little niche, hadn’t we? I’ve got to be off.’

  ‘When will you be coming back?’ asked Carole, trying to make it sound like the most casual question in the world.

  He let out a dry chuckle. ‘Oh, I don’t think I should tell you that. It’d spoil the fun.’

  ‘So what is going to be the fun for you? Killing me? Watching me die?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes. But,’ he said rather primly, ‘it’s not just random cruelty. There’s a practical side as well. Writers need experience. There are some things you can’t make up. You have to live through them. All my other books were rejected, not because they weren’t horrifying enough, but because they weren’t authentic enough. They lacked that little bit extra that can only be given by firsthand experience.’

  ‘And you didn’t get that first-hand experience when you set fire to Heron Cottage?’r />
  ‘No.’ He spoke with genuine regret and a frightening objectivity. ‘I wasn’t able to watch my mother die. Pity, I’d been looking forward to that for a long time.’

  ‘So she couldn’t give you the authentic material you were looking for?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So . . . you couldn’t get what you wanted when you killed your mother . . . Whereas I, on the other hand, can go to my death with the great satisfaction of knowing I’ve helped you, for the first time in your life, to write a publishable book?’

  He didn’t like the scorn in her voice. He lashed out and slapped her face hard, hissing, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, don’t bother putting me back in that smelly cave. Why don’t you just kill me with your knife?’ Carole demanded defiantly. ‘Get it over with. Watch me die here and now. Sit with your notebook and describe every last twitch of my body. I’m sure that would add the necessary “authenticity” to your precious book.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Brian Helling, with an icicle of a smile. ‘That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t fit. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I have to watch someone die in the Prison of Fort Pittsburgh.’

  ‘Why?’

  His face clouded with painful memories. But the only explanation he could give was, ‘I have to do it.’

  He tugged on the rope, again with unnecessary harshness. ‘Come on, it’ll be dark soon. Time to settle you in for the night, Carole. Though in fact what we’re talking about is nights and days, and more nights and days . . . You won’t be coming out of there again.’

  ‘But you’ll be coming in to watch me?’

  ‘I must make sure my Diary of Decay is authentic.’

  ‘Well, may I at least have another pee before—’

  ‘No!’

  This time the tug on the rope was so hard that Carole fell to the ground. Brian Helling dragged her upright and pushed her towards the undergrowth-hidden entrance to the cave.

  When she tried to resist, he hit her hard around the head. He had lost the restraint that previously curbed his violence. He was very dangerous.