Death on the Downs

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 belong 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.”

“I wouldn’t know if that’s the case with the Lutteridges. We’ve never met. But a friend of mine who knows them says the girl hasn’t been seen for four months.”

“Well, at least the Weldisham gossips will have to change their tune now. We’ve issued a press statement about everything we know so far. Be on the local news this evening, I should think. Anytime then the phones’ll start ringing.”

“With people who think they can identify the dead woman?”

“Yes, Mrs Seddon. We’ll get every poor sad bastard in the country who’s lost someone. Mass media are great, all that Crimewatch stuff, encouraging the public to ring in, but it does infinitely increase the loony count.” He looked momentarily abashed. “Sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s all right, Sergeant. I know exactly what you mean.”

Baylis grinned and ruffled the loose skin of the head of Gulliver, who had by now fallen heavily in love with him.

“Incidentally,” Carole went on, reckoning she’d never get a better opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about the life of Weldisham, “the woman who owns Heron Cottage…”

“Pauline Helling. What about her?”

“Nothing. Well, nothing serious. It’s just…I haven’t even met her properly, just come across her a couple of times, but on both occasions she’s made me feel extremely unwelcome in the village.”

Baylis chuckled. “Don’t take it personally. She makes everyone feel unwelcome in the village – even the people who live there.”

“My car got left outside Heron Cottage overnight when you and I went to the pub.”

“And I bet you got one of Pauline’s little notes on your windscreen?”

Carole nodded.

“You wouldn’t be the first to have had that treatment, nor the last. It’s a nuisance, I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Oh, I wasn’t meaning it was a police matter. I just wondered why she was so antisocial.”

“You should raise the question next time you’re in the Hare and Hounds, and I’m sure you’ll get as many answers as there are people present.”

“And what would your answer be, Sergeant?”

“As to why Pauline’s such a bad-tempered old bat? My answer would be a rather old–fashioned one, in these supposedly classless times. I think Pauline’s ‘living above her station’. She grew up poor, in a council house on the Downside Estate – ”

“In Fethering?”

“That’s right. Then her husband left her with a son to bring up. I think that’s when she developed both the chip on her shoulder and her ambitions to be upwardly mobile. As a result, the minute she got some money, she bought Heron Cottage. The good folks of Weldisham didn’t like that. People of Pauline Helling’s sort, they reckoned, should know their place. They’d be the same with me too. Because my old man worked on the Estate. And I didn’t go to private school>.” He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. “Not that it worries me,” he went on, once again disclaiming a hurt that he clearly still felt. “The new people come to the village, saying that they want to get close to the old rural England, but they don’t want any reminders of the people who used to live in that old rural England. And the prices get pushed up so high, none of the former residents can afford to live in these villages anyway. So that’s why Pauline Helling makes everyone feel unwelcome in Weldisham – because she’s always been made to feel unwelcome there herself.”

“How did she get her money?” asked Carole.

“They didn’t like that either. If you live in Weldisham, it’s all right to get money from stocks and shares, or inherit it from Mummeigh and Daddeigh…” Baylis’s jokey manner could not disguise the deep bitterness with which he was speaking. “But Pauline Helling got her money from winning the pools! The pools! Weldisham reckons it’s bad form even to know what a pools coupon is, and actually to win on one…well, that’s the height of vulgarity. So from day one they’d got Pauline marked down as ‘common’.”

“Were people rude to her?”

“Not insulting to her face, no. Not like they would be somewhere a bit more honest. In Weldisham you freeze people out with politeness. You smile when you meet them, you give them a nod, but you never invite them into your house.”

Carole grinned wryly. She’d encountered some of that aloofness in Fethering.

“So I would imagine,” Detective Sergeant Baylis concluded, “that for the past twenty years the only person Pauline Helling has talked to is her son.”

“He’s still around?”

“Brian? Oh yes, he’s still around.” The sergeant spoke as if this was not an entirely satisfactory state of affairs.

“He isn’t a writer, is he?” asked Carole, with sudden insight.

“He calls himself a writer, though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that he’s ever actually written anything.”

“I think I overheard him in the Hare and Hounds yesterday.”

“It’s quite possible. Hard not to overhear Brian. He’s always been of the view that everyone within earshot should have the benefit of his conversation. He was like that at school. I was in the same class as him. Nasty sneaky little bastard then, and I don’t think the passage of the years has changed him that much.”

“What kind of nasty?”

“Vicious to other kids. And to animals. Most people who grow up round here know how to treat animals. They’re not sentimental about them, but they don’t hurt them deliberately.”

“And Brian Helling did?”

“When he was a kid, yes. Killed a couple of cats in a way I still can’t forgive him for. He thought it was a game. The rest of us didn’t play that kind of game.”

“Oh?” Carole put her next remark as sensitively as she could. “In the Hare and Hounds he did seem to be…a little eccentric.”

“Eccentric’s generous. He’s a self-appointed eccentric, just as he’s a self-appointed writer. Brian Helling has never been able to hold down a proper job. If his mother hadn’t had the pools money to support him, God knows what he’d have lived on. He’s always been getting into trouble of one sort or another.”

“Trouble that’s involved the police?”

“Not often. Occasionally drunk. Reckless driving once, I think.”

“What about drugs?”

A shadow of caution crossed the sergeant’s face. “I’m fairly sure he dabbles in drugs, but he’s never been convicted for it. No, he’s not into anything that you’d call major-league criminal. Brian’s always been a bloody nuisance, though – just like he was at school. Always trying to join everyone else’s gang – and nobody wanted anything to do with him, because he was…I don’t know…creepy.”

“In the Hare and Hounds yesterday,” said Carole, “he was talking about the possibility of there being a serial killer in Weldisham.”

“Was he?” Detective Sergeant Baylis turned very pale. “Was he really?”