“I’m very optimistic by nature, Jude. I’m positive Tamsin’s still alive. Miles, though…Miles is taking it rather hard.” Gillie Lutteridge sank into an irreproachable armchair, giving for the first time some hint of the strain that she was under. “Miles sees this as kind of…the end of a process.”
“What process?”
“The process that began with Tamsin’s illness. That hit him very hard. Everything had always gone well for us. We’d been fortunate. Tamsin had always done well…school, university, walked straight into her job in magazine publishing. When she got ill, it was the first reverse in her life, in our lives too, I suppose. Miles couldn’t really cope with the idea. He saw it as a reproach, almost as if it was his fault.”
“Of course, he never really believed in Tamsin’s illness, did he?”
“No, he thought it was psychosomatic, that she was malingering. Everything’s very black and white for Miles.”
“And very black at the moment?”
Gillie nodded. “It’s dreadful to see him like this. He’s always been so positive. He’s not gone into work today. The weekend was dreadful. Ever since Lennie Baylis told us about what had been found in South Welling Barn, Miles has just been twitching round the house, waiting for the phone to ring.”
“Is he here now?”
“In the garden. Pretending to be busy. He won’t stay out there long.”
As if to prove her point, Miles Lutteridge appeared in the doorway. He looked at Jude with undisguised disappointment. “Oh, it’s you.”
The husband manifested the same brochure-like quality as his house and his wife. He was expensively dressed in a pale lilac jumper with a designer logo which hid the designer logo on the cream polo shirt he wore underneath. The creases in his beige trousers were as sharp as his wife’s and his brown slip-on shoes carried the same shine.
The only things that would have kept him out of a leisurewear catalogue were his thinning hair on top and the expression of grey anxiety on his face.
“Good morning, Miles,” said Jude.
She knew he didn’t like her – or perhaps just didn’t trust her. She was too forcible a reminder of his daughter’s illness, the very existence of which he sought to deny. He had met her once or twice when she’d come up for exploratory chats with Tamsin and hadn’t disguised the fact that he thought her only one step away from charlatanism.
“I’m very sorry to hear about the rumours going round the village,” Jude continued. “I’m sure it’s nothing to do with Tamsin.”
“What do you know about it?” Miles Lutteridge demanded brusquely. In their previous encounters he’d always managed to stay the right side of politeness. Worry was taking its toll on his civility.
“I don’t know anything for certain,” Jude replied evenly. “I just think it very unlikely that Tamsin would have stayed around this area.”
“Do you mean you know where she did go?” The glint in his eye revealed both hope and suspicion. “I bet she went off with one of your lot.”
“By ‘my lot’, do you mean some alternative therapist who was trying to help her with her illness?”
“If ‘alternative therapist’ is what you want to call it, yes. I mean some New Age quack doctor who took my daughter for everything she was worth by giving her false hopes he’d find her a cure.”
“Are you talking about someone specific?” asked Jude.
But Gillie decided the conversation had become too adversarial for polite society. “Miles,” she intervened, “it’ll be all right, I promise.”
“How can you make promises like that? What meaning do they have? You aren’t a god. You can’t bring Tamsin back to life, Gillie.” He was getting very overwrought now. Tears glinted in his eyes.
“I don’t need to bring her back to life. She is still alive.”
“Can you give me any proof of that?” he bellowed.
There was a long silence while husband and wife held each other’s gaze. Gillie seemed about to say something, but decided against it. She looked down and shook her head.
“See!” He spat the word out. “Why does it happen to my daughter? First she gets some phoney illness. Then she starts mixing with alternative therapists.” He loaded the words with contempt. “And now she’s probably dead!”
“Miles, she isn’t!”
But he’d gone. Afraid to have his tears witnessed, Miles Lutteridge had stormed out of the room.
Jude talked to Gillie for a while, but little new was said. The mother retained her conviction her daughter was alive; the father was convinced she was dead. And all Jude was aware of was how much this new situation had driven a wedge into their marriage. While everything had been going well, Miles and Gillie Lutteridge seemed to have been fine. Tamsin’s illness made the first crack in their unity, pointing up the differences between them – Gillie’s belief in the illness and her search for a cure, Miles’s disbelief and desire to pretend it wasn’t happening. And the discovery of the bones at South Welling Barn had made that rift wider still.
? Death on the Downs ?
Ten
Having cracked that first clue, Carole’s mind moved up a gear and she had nearly completed the
“Just the one,” said Carole automatically. “Driving.” Then she asked about her Mend’s visit to the Lutteridges.
“Odd. Very odd.” Jude screwed up the skin around her large brown eyes. “Miles was in a terrible state of panic, but Gillie seemed unnaturally calm.”
“Is she normally a calm person?”
“From the outside, yes. If you didn’t know her, you’d have no idea what she’s thinking. But over the time I spent with her and Tamsin, I did get to know her quite well, and she’s not calm – at least not where her daughter’s concerned. But this morning she kept saying she
“Positive thinking.”
“Maybe it’s just that. I kept wondering whether maybe she was telling the truth. She knows that Tamsin’s all right.”
“But if she did know that, surely she’d tell her husband? If he’s in as bad a state as you say.”
“Yes. She would. Gillie’s always been very supportive to Miles. She wouldn’t let him suffer unnecessarily.” Jude took a thoughtful sip of wine. “That’s what’s so odd about it.”
Their cottage pies arrived, each neat in its oval earthenware dish on a wooden platter. Another earthenware dish contained carefully apportioned vegetables, exactly the same number for each of them. The food looked fine. But the gloss was taken off it by the fact that Carole knew identical portions were being served at the same moment in every one of the Home Hostelries chain.
“Tell me more about these bones,” said Jude, as they started to eat.
“I’ve told you most of it. There were just these recognizably human bones in two fertilizer bags.”
“But you didn’t get any feeling how old they were?”
“I’m not a forensic pathologist, Jude.”
“No, but…I was just thinking…Tamsin’s been missing for four months. Left her parents’ house on the night of Hallowe’en. I remember, because at one stage Miles thought that might have some significance.”
“Why?”
“He’s very confused about complementary medicine. He assumed it had something to do with witchcraft.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, say Tamsin was abducted and murdered that very evening…which is the first possible time she could have been…would there have been time since then for the bones to get as clean as you said they were?”
