“Sergeant, this is my friend Jude.”
Baylis seemed as impressed with Jude’s looks as Harry Grant had been.
“Jude, this is Detective Sergeant Baylis…Remember, the one I told you was so kind after my…after my unpleasant experience.”
“Yes. Nice to meet you, Sergeant.”
“I think you should both be calling me Lennie.”
He hadn’t suggested that when there was just me, came Carole’s knee-jerk reaction.
“This becoming your regular, is it, Mrs Seddon?”
“Carole, please,” she said in a way which, to her hypersensitive ear, sounded clumsy. “No, just happened to be up here. Jude’s visiting a friend in Weldisham.”
“I see,” said Baylis, easily enough. But he gave Carole a rather sharp look.
“Is there anything more you can tell us about the bones Carole found?” asked Jude, direct as ever.
Like everyone else, he responded to her manner. “Try me.”
“Well, for instance…are you any nearer to finding out who the woman was?”
“We’re getting there.” Lennie Baylis suddenly cocked a challenging eye at them. “Why? Have you got any ideas of who it might be?”
Carole felt Jude’s eyes boring into her as she looked down at her wine. “No,” she mumbled. “No idea at all.”
“I can guarantee that, as soon as we know anything definite, it’ll be all over the television and radio,” he said, as if drawing the conversation to an end.
“Presumably…” Jude held his attention. “Presumably these days it’s fairly simple to identify bodies by DNA?”
He grimaced. “Dead easy if you’ve got a record of their DNA, certainly. Or if you know who their relatives are. If you’re starting from scratch, you’re no further advanced than a copper any time over the last couple of centuries…relying on educated guesswork.” He glanced at his watch, straightened up and looked around the pub. “No sign of him. Ibid me on the phone he’d be in here.” He shrugged. “Oh well, if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.”
“Are you casting yourself as Mohammed in this scenario?” asked Jude.
“Guess so.”
“Then who’s the mountain?”
“Graham Forbes. Goodbye, ladies.”
As Detective Sergeant Baylis left the pub, the two women exchanged looks. In Jude’s there was an element of apology, and in Carole’s something that approached triumph.
? Death on the Downs ?
Twenty-Three
When they emerged from the Hare and Hounds, the weather was brighter than it had any right to be in the middle of March. A cloudless sky and sunlight gave a false promise of summer. Moving into the shadows, however, they still felt as if they had stepped into a vault.
Carole and Jude didn’t say any more about the case as they walked down to Conyers. There was a kind of tacit agreement between them that they’d discuss it later. Even though Tamsin’s retreat to Sandalls Manor now seemed to be an irrelevance, Gillie had sounded urgent on the phone. What she had to impart to Jude might be important.
Carole had briefly contemplated another dutiful trip to Sainsbury’s, but her kitchen shelves were adequately stocked. There was nothing she couldn’t get at Allinstore in Fethering. And, as she said to Jude, it was wicked not to take advantage of such an afternoon for a walk on the Downs. So they parted at the Lutteridges’ gate, agreeing to meet back at the car in an hour.
Carole felt a guilty excitement as she watched her friend cross the immaculate gravel up to the front door. Her talk of a walk, though not entirely inaccurate, had been incomplete. A little plan had been hatching in Carole’s mind, an investigation opportunity right there in Weldisham. If her conjecture proved correct, when they next came to discuss the case she’d certainly have something that’d make Jude sit up.
From in front of the Lutteridges’ house she could once again just see the sagging rooftop of the old barn behind. From lack of alternative candidates, it must be the one that Harry Grant had bought and for which he had finally received planning permission. From that position, in a few months’ time he would be able to celebrate his return to Weldisham, one of the few local boys who’d made good enough to afford to live in his own village.
The decaying barn was set behind the row of houses that lined Weldisham’s only street and there was no way through to it. That was one of the reasons that the Village Committee produced with such regularity to block the development of the old shell. The barn had no access. A new road would have to be built, with all the attendant disruption.
So Carole knew she’d have to walk down to the end of the village and double back, hoping there was a route to the site through the fields. Belting her Burberry tighter around her, she set out to do just that.
As she walked past the house next door to the Lutteridges’, Warren Lodge, she wondered what was happening inside. Detective Sergeant Baylis had said he was going to talk to Graham Forbes, but on what subject? Were the official enquiries moving in the same direction as her conjectures? How much did the police know?
Whatever the detailed answer to the last question, Carole knew one thing for certain. The police knew more than she and Jude did. Once again she felt the eternal frustration of the amateur, aware that she was on the back foot, pitting her wits against a highly organized and scientifically supported institution whose sole purpose was the investigation of crime.
The houses petered out and ahead of her Carole saw the track that led up over the Downs to South Welling Barn. The thought of that place and what she had found inside the fertilizer bags could still send a chill tremor through her body.
She turned right and walked along the road out of the village, along the garden wall of the first house in Weldisham. When the garden gave way to fields, the next stage of her route proved easier than she had anticipated. There was a stile, and a post with a wooden sign reading ‘Public Footpath’, which pointed in the direction of Harry Grant’s barn. Lifting up the skirts of her Burberry, Carole stepped over the stile.
The path did not lead directly to the barn, but veered off to the left, taking a line between the fences and hedgerow which contained the fields on either side. But Carole had no difficulty leaving the path and continuing towards her destination. The depth to which the wire sagged at that point and the flattened earth on the other side suggested she was following a much-used short-cut. Though there hadn’t been much rain since the downpours of her last walk on the Downs, the ground underfoot was still slippery and clogging. Her sensible walking shoes were soon heavy with mud.
She glanced up to her right. She could see the tops of the roofs in Weldisham High Street over the swell of the Downs, but no windows. The path was not overlooked.
As she got closer to the barn, Carole became more aware of how advanced was its dilapidation. The roof was not just sagging but broken-backed. Much of the greening thatch had slipped away completely, and what remained was rotten and slimy. A few disconnected rafters pointed up to the sky. The large double doors had crumbled away to nothing, leaving only lumps of blackened wood hanging like dead flesh from twisted skeletal hinges.
But the basic brick rectangle, though subsiding towards one end, looked solid enough. With sufficient injections of cash and building expertise, a developer like Harry Grant would have no problems in turning the barn into a dream home from which to crow at the other residents of Weldisham.
What would in time become Harry Grant’s garden was a tangle of briars and other tendrils of undergrowth. In summer these would be interwoven with head-high nettles, but even now it was hard to make a way through to the gaping barn doors. Carole had to hold her hands up to shield her face from the lash of brambles and she felt the constant snag of thorns catching on the fabric of her Burberry.
She battered a path through to the doorway. Inside, alternate patches of gloom and bright March sunlight meant that her eyes took a moment to adjust.
Where the sun and rain could get through the holes in the roof to the ground were patches of growth, low
