Death on the Downs

Twenty-Five

When Carole got back from the footpath to Weldisham Lane, she was surprised to see that her venture to the barn had taken less than twenty minutes. Still forty to go before she’d agreed to meet her friend.

It was infuriating. She was dying to tell Jude what she’d seen and discuss the implications. Her thoughts were running too fast; she needed someone to bounce them off, someone to challenge their logic, someone to help her regain a sense of proportion. Once again she was bemused by this potential role reversal, the idea that she should look to Jude for stability. Carole was meant to be the sensible one.

Given the time she had to kill, Carole decided to walk back along the track she’d trodden two weeks before. If, as logic was telling her, the woman’s body had once been buried in the wreck of the building that now belonged to Harry Grant, then someone had been along the same route to take the bones to South Welling Barn.

Ideas as to who that person might have been kept bubbling into her mind and she had to keep rigid control to stop those ideas from crystallizing in conclusions.

The track was still tacky underfoot, but not nearly as bad as it had been on her previous journey. And the mood of the Downs was very different. The menace she had felt under the louring rain-clouds was long gone, and Carole even wondered whether it was a feeling she had grafted on in retrospect, after her grisly discovery. The sun transformed the Downs from a hostile to a nurturing environment.

Her sensible shoes made a regular slapping sound on the mud as she strode forward. She felt fit and optimistic. Carole Seddon was only in her early fifties, after all. There was life in the old girl yet.

Sound travels strangely on the Downs, bounced from hillocks and funnelled by valleys. Frequently it’s hard to tell exactly where a noise is coming from.

So Carole wasn’t distracted by the screech of eroded gears until the vehicle was almost upon her. She turned to see an old Land Rover roaring up the track behind her. It was being driven as though the driver were blind to her existence.

Carole leapt to the verge at the side, mentally cursing the loutishness of whoever was driving, and expected to see the Land Rover career off along the track.

But it didn’t. The vehicle braked fiercely in a flurry of mud. Then, in a grinding of gears, it reversed and came to a halt beside her. The flailing tyres spotted her freshly cleaned Burberry with mud.

Carole opened her mouth to remonstrate with whatever road-hog she was up against, but the words dried on her lips when she saw who got out of the driver’s door.

She was not an accidental victim of someone’s thoughtless high spirits. The man had been looking for her.

Carole Seddon didn’t like the expression she saw in his eyes as he said, more statement than question, “You’re the one who found the bones, aren’t you?”