“Yes. Well, putting two and two together, I reckon you must have been the person who found them.”
“Where did you get your two and two from?”
“Lennie. Sorry, Detective Sergeant Baylis. The policeman who you talked to.” In response to her look of surprise, he explained. “Lennie talked to me on Saturday. I’m Chairman of the Village Committee here, you see. He wanted us to keep an eye out for press, snoopers, ghouls…You know, the people who turn up when something nasty’s happened, the kind who queue up on motorways to look at pile-ups. Anyway, Lennie said he’d been talking to you in the pub, I saw you in the pub, I put two and two together.”
“Right. But was it Detective Sergeant Baylis who told you about my finding the bones in the first place?”
“Sorry?”
“Well, what struck me last Friday was how quickly you knew about what’d happened. I’d found the bones at…what…? Round four o’clock? And by six-fifteen you were in here, talking about them.”
“Ah, with you, see what you mean. Yes, it was Lennie. He was brought up here in Weldisham. He knows how the gossip-mill works in a village like this. So he gave me a quick call the Friday afternoon. Thought it better someone heard officially about what’d happened, rather than letting rumours run riot. Dangerous things, rumours.” Suddenly, he was into quotation.
Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it!
“I’m sorry. I don’t know the reference.”
“No reason why you should. I think it’s probably too obscure to crop up in the
“Ah.” There was a silence. Graham Forbes took another swig of whisky, before Carole asked, “So was there something you wanted to say about the bones?”
“Sorry?”
“Well, you raised the subject.”
“Yes. Of course I did. No, I only wanted to say, so sorry, you have my sympathy. It must have been a horrible experience for you.”
“It has been…surprisingly unsettling.”
“I don’t think you should be surprised at all that you’ve been unsettled. Ghastly for you, coming upon that little cache by pure chance. Or at least I assume it was by pure chance…”
“Hm?”
“Well, you hadn’t set out looking for bones, had you?”
“Hardly.” She gave him a strange look, until she realized he was joking.
“I’m sorry, Carole,” he chuckled. “You get plenty of odd types walking on the Downs. Archaeologists, people with metal detectors…Some of them probably are looking for bones.”
“Well, I can assure you I wasn’t.”
“No. I’m sure you weren’t.” Graham Forbes looked at his watch, swilled down the remains of his whisky and said, “Must be off. Lunchtime. It’s been such a pleasure to meet you, Carole.”
“You too.” She meant it.
“I’d love you to come and meet my wife, Irene, at some point. As I say, we’re just down the lane. Warren Lodge. We always give a little dinner party Friday nights. Maybe we could inveigle you along to one of them?”
“I’d like that very much.” Carole was slightly surprised by the offer, but certainly not averse to the idea. Her Fethering social circle was narrow and not wildly interesting. It would be a pleasure to meet some new people, particularly if they were all as charming and cultured as Graham Forbes.
They exchanged phone numbers and he left for his lunch. Carole readdressed her crossword. Instantly she got her first solution.
The clue was: “A sailor’s in brass, for example, and bony (10).”
She wrote in METATARSAL.
? Death on the Downs ?
Nine
Jude had been to the Lutteridges’ house before, and the first time she had seen its interior she had been impressed by how ‘finished’ everything was. All the paintwork gleamed like new, the carpets might have been laid the day before, the furniture just delivered from the showroom. Jude, whose own style of decor was ‘junk-shop casual’, was amazed how anyone could keep a home looking like that. She could understand that a museum might maintain such standards, but couldn’t equate it to an environment in which people actually lived. When she first went there, the fantasy grew within her that somewhere in the house was a glory hole, a haven of dusty squalor into which were tumbled all those miscellaneous objects which lend character to the average dwelling. But the more time she spent with the Lutteridges, the more that fantasy dwindled. There was no glory hole; the house was perfect throughout.
Gillie Lutteridge also looked as if she had stepped straight out of a brochure. Jude had worked out, from hints and date references in conversation, that Tamsin’s mother must be in her late forties, but the smoothness of her made-up face and the immaculate shaping of her blonded hair could have placed her anywhere between thirty and fifty.
She didn’t seem to possess any ordinary clothes, like most people did. Her garments came straight out of the brochure too – and a pretty up-market brochure at that. She wore them in a way that defied creasing. If she hadn’t seen it happening with her own eyes, Jude would have sworn Gillie Lutteridge never sat down.
That morning, she was wearing a loose ash-grey cashmere sweater, black and white tweed trousers with ruler-edge creases and gleaming black shoes with gold buckles.
In spite of her deterrently flawless exterior, Jude got on very well with Tamsin’s mother. Gillie was sensitive, compassionate, warm; she possessed all of the qualities that her appearance seemed to make unlikely. And, from the moment it first manifested itself, she had been deeply anxious about her daughter’s illness.
But that Monday morning she seemed no more anxious than she had been when Tamsin disappeared from the family house four months previously. So unworried did Gillie Lutteridge seem that Jude wondered whether she had actually heard the rumours about the bones in South Welling Barn. Having no skills in prevarication, that was the first thing Jude asked her about.
“Yes, I heard,” Gillie replied. “But that’s just village gossip. I’m sure the bones have nothing to do with Tamsin. Tamsin’s not dead.”
The words were spoken with firmness and a degree of calm. But was that just the desperate resolution of a mother unable to believe her child was no longer alive?
“Still, it must be hurtful for you even to hear people make the suggestion.”
Gillie Lutteridge shrugged her perfectly tailored shoulders. “People are not very bright – certainly not here in Weldisham,” she said. “They tend to go for the obvious. A dead body’s found. A girl’s missing. If you haven’t got much imagination, then you assume the two must be related.”
“Have the police talked to you?”
“Yes. Nice young man, Lennie Baylis. I’ve often seen him round the village. I think he even used to live here. Anyway, he came. He was very reassuring.”
“What, you mean they’ve identified the bones and they definitely know they’re not Tamsin’s?”
“No. Apparently that’ll take a bit longer. The…” For a moment her equilibrium was shaken by the thought of what she was saying. “The…remains are at the police laboratories. But Lennie said there was nothing so far to connect them with Tamsin. There was no reason for us to panic.”
“It looks as if panicking is the last thing you’re doing.”
