“Depends where they were left. Out in the open on the Downs…there are plenty of predators who’d pick all the flesh off them.”
“But if the body had been left in the open, someone would have seen it, surely?”
“Possibly not. I’m sure there are lots of secret places round here…copses, streams, old chalk pits. I should think it’d be easy enough to hide a body if you set your mind to it. I don’t know, though…We don’t really have enough information.”
As if putting a full stop to the conversation, Carole took a large spoonful of cottage pie.
“No. But think about it,” Jude persisted. “The world is full of missing persons – vagrants, tramps, travellers…The bones could belong to any one of them. And yet everyone’s assuming they’re Tkmsin’s.”
“Village mentality for you.”
“I suppose so. And until Tamsin is actually found alive – or until the police prove the bones belong to someone else – they’ll go on thinking it’s her.” Jude speared a head of Home Hostelries broccoli and looked at it pensively. “I think I’d better find Tamsin.”
“Where would you start looking?”
“I know some of the people she might have contacted.”
“What kind of people?”
“Miles Lutteridge and a lot of other blinkered locals would probably call them ‘New Age quack doctors’.”
“Ah.” Carole didn’t like to admit that she was probably one of the ‘other blinkered locals’. And what would you call them?”
“I’d call them ‘alternative therapists’. And some of them are good, and some of them are not very good, but none of them is deliberately trying to do harm. They’re trying to help people…and very often they succeed. Anyway, I’ll make some enquiries.” And she popped the piece of broccoli into her mouth.
“I think you should market it as one of the murder villages of the South Downs.”
Both women turned at the sound of the loud voice from near the bar. Indeed, most of the customers in the pub stopped talking and turned towards the sound.
The man who had spoken did not seem averse to being the centre of attention. His face was thin, its skin apparently drawn towards the point of a sharp nose. Probably in his forties, with wild hair that hadn’t seen a brush – or shampoo – since he got up that morning, he wore a black beret and a long cracked leather coat of the style favoured by Gestapo officers in British war movies. His thin legs in faded jeans ended in large laceless boots which splayed out from his ankles. The glass in his hand looked as though it contained gin and tonic. He was nominally in conversation with Will Maples, who had appeared behind the bar, but clearly his observations were meant for the whole assembled company.
“No, it’s good marketing, Will. Lot of people with ghoulish tastes around these days. Look at the way horror movies sell. You want to get some literature out to market this place. I’ll write it for you, give it that professional gloss – for the right money. You know horror’s my speciality. Eat your heart out, Stephen King. You haven’t begun to see nasty until you’ve read my stuff.
“So what should I write for you, Will? ‘Come to the Hare and Hounds in Weldisham, the village of murder. Sit in the quaint bar, where the local serial killer supped his foaming pint while he targeted his next victim.’”
The man giggled.
“Don’t be silly, Brian.” The manager’s manner was embarrassed, as if he wanted to ignore the speaker, but for some reason couldn’t. His body language was trying to draw him away, but the man called Brian held him.
“We’re not talking about serial killers. We don’t know there’s even been one murder yet.”
“Are you telling me that people who die natural deaths are in the habit of neatly stacking up their own bones in fertilizer bags?”
Though the man called Brian was speaking as loudly as ever, conversations around the pub had started up again. There was an air of that embarrassment that people often manifest in the presence of the mentally ill. The man didn’t seem completely sane. Despite the jocularity of his manner, there was an edginess to him, a sense that his mood could shift very suddenly.
“And as to what you were saying about serial killers, Will my old darling…” The manager didn’t look pleased to be the recipient of such an endearment. “They’ve all got to start somewhere. You need the first murder before you can move on to all the others. We’ve only had the first one so far here in Weldisham, but that’s the one with which he defined his ritual. Mm, I think I might make a very close study of this case – could be the basis for my next bestseller. Very gory it’ll be. Watch out, young girls. The Weldisham serial killer is going to spend the rest of his days repeating in exact detail the way he killed Tamsin Lutteridge.”
Jude thanked any god who might be listening that Gillie and Miles weren’t in the pub at that moment.
¦
After she had dropped Jude at her home, Woodside Cottage, Carole put the car in the garage and went inside to the martyred whimpering of Gulliver. She felt frustrated. Jude had something to do. She was going to try to get a lead on the whereabouts of Tamsin Lutteridge. But there was nothing Carole could do that was in any way connected with the case.
Case? Was there a case? And if there was, what could it possibly have to do with her?
The telephone rang.
“Hello. This is Graham Forbes. We met in the pub just now.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I mentioned the possibility of your coming to dinner with us at Warren Lodge. Well, as soon as I got home, my wife, Irene, said she’d had a call from one of our friends who was going to join us this coming Friday. Been called away by a family bereavement. And I apologize that it’s awfully short notice…but I wondered, Carole, if you might by any chance be free that evening?”
She accepted. But, as she put the phone down, she thought, that was quick.
? Death on the Downs ?
Eleven
Jude was glad Carole wasn’t with her. Much as she liked her new Mend, she recognized that there were subjects on which they were unlikely ever to see eye to eye. And though Carole hadn’t said much when talk of alternative therapies arose, her expression and body language had immediately invoked scepticism.
Jude’s attitude was more tolerant. She knew the dangers of being too susceptible and relished the quote she’d heard somewhere that ‘if you have an open mind, people will throw all kinds of rubbish into it’. But she was prepared to approach an idea without prejudice and assess it on its merits. The fact that something didn’t work for her never led her to reject it out of hand. She didn’t rule out the possibility that it might work for someone else.
Jude had never been drawn to organized religion and the belief system she held was one built up over more than fifty years of life. It wasn’t rigid; as new thoughts came and old ones slipped away, the contents changed, but its overall principle remained the same. Jude believed that there was some purpose in human life, that it had been designed and was monitored by some kind of greater power. She believed that the most important relationships in life were not with that greater power, but with her fellow human beings.
And some of those relationships were easy and some were difficult. The relationship with the man who she’d just been travelling with fell into the second category. That one, Jude knew, was going to need sorting out soon. The prospect was not one she relished. She was glad she had the search for Tamsin Lutteridge to occupy her mind.
As a result of her instinctive tolerance, wandering round Soul Nourishment in Brighton’s North Lanes, Jude saw nothing that prompted her to ridicule. She enjoyed the smell of incense and was untroubled by the sound of wind-chimes. Most of the stock in the tiny shop was books – studies of astrology, crystallography, ley lines, synchron-icity and the meaning of dreams.
But Soul Nourishment also sold New Age life-aids. Some of them had worked for Jude and some hadn’t. Though admiring their beauty, she had never received anything spiritual from crystals, but she knew people to
