Death on the Downs

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 Weldi-sham 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 Weldi-sham. 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 Lutter-idges?” 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.