Carole pressed on. She might as well get any information she could. “So, have people been circulating nasty rumours about your mother?”
“What?” He looked distracted for a moment. “No, no, of course they haven’t.” A new unease came into his eyes. “What makes you ask that? What makes you think my mother has anything to do with the bones?”
Carole noted the anxiety in his tone, but her answer was entirely palliative. “Nothing, no reason.” She decided to play the ‘silly woman’ card. “Sorry, but you make a discovery like I did at South Welling Barn and, needless to say, it sets your mind racing. You get all kinds of daft ideas.”
“So long as you recognize they are daft,” said Brian Helling, with an edge of threat in his voice.
“Yes,” Carole responded humbly. She was still trying to work out what Brian Helling’s agenda might be. Why had he come chasing after her so dramatically? Was he trying to get information out of her or simply find out how much she knew? And why did how much she knew matter to him?
“Do you know many people in Weldisham?” he asked suddenly.
“I’ve met a few in the past couple of weeks. The Forbeses invited me to dinner.”
“Oh, did they?” For Brian Helling this seemed to categorize her. She was the sort of woman who got invited to dinner by Graham and Irene Forbes. “And you haven’t known them for long?”
“No. I’d hardly say I know them now. I mean, I never met Graham’s first wife.”
“But you know what happened to her?” He was very alert now, fixing Carole with his eyes, as though her answer mattered a lot.
“The story goes she ran off with another man. In Malaysia.”
The words seemed to relax him. “Yes,” he said. “That’s how the story goes.”
“Are you implying the story’s not true?”
“Certainly not. Are you?”
Given the cue, Carole was insanely tempted to share the thoughts that had been building up inside about the first Mrs Forbes. But she restrained herself. To Jude maybe, but not to Brian Helling. He was the last person on earth she should make aware of her suspicions.
“Of course not,” she said.
He broke the eye contact between them. “Who else do you know in the village?”
“I’ve told you. I didn’t know anyone till two weeks ago.”
“Sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“You don’t know the Lutteridges?”
“No. I’ve heard the name, but I haven’t met them.” Carole was about to say that she had a friend who knew them, but some instinct held her back.
“Mm. I see.” Some of the tension went from his thin face, as if he’d found out what he’d come to find out. He looked along the exposed chalk of the track. “Were you going back to South Welling Barn?”
“No. I was just going for a walk. Killing time.”
“Why do you need to kill time?” he asked sharply.
Again she kept Jude’s name out of it. Instead, she played for a bit of spurious sympathy. “You have a lot of time to kill when you’re retired.”
“Do you?” Some of the cockiness Brian Helling had shown in the pub returned to his manner. “I won’t have to worry about that.”
“Oh?”
“I’m a writer. Writers don’t retire.”
“Ah.” Even those writers who never make any money from their writing?
He moved towards the Land Rover. “Right. I must get back.”
“Mr Helling…”
He stopped and looked at her. There was still malevolence in his eyes.
“I just wanted to ask…given the fact that something like the discovery of these bones is, as you said, going to start a lot of rumours in a small place like Weldisham…”
He didn’t help her. He just waited.
“Which of the rumours would you go along with?”
“How do you mean?”
“Who do you think the bones might have belonged to?”
He was about to give a brusque answer, but stopped himself. As he smiled, Carole noticed that he had almost no upper lip, just a line above his teeth where the flesh stopped. “I think, to answer that,” he began slowly, “you’d have to ask yourself who’d gone missing from Weldisham in the past twenty years…”
“Yes,” Carole prompted. That was the conclusion she’d reached herself.
Brian Helling let out a little grunt of a laugh. “Wouldn’t you say Lennie Baylis was taking rather a personal interest in this case?”
“In what way?”
“He seems to be around the village more than he needs to be.”
“But he used to live here, didn’t he? Maybe that’s the reason.”
“Yes, but Lennie’s always been a snooper. I was at school with him, I know. Don’t you think it’s odd, though, the way he keeps checking up on everyone here in Weldi-sham, seeing if they’re all right, finding out what they’re thinking?”
It was true. Carole had put his solicitude for her down to compassionate professionalism, but what Brian Helling was hinting at also fitted the facts.
“Well, you probably don’t know,” he went on, “but more than twenty years ago, his mother walked out.”
“He did tell me that, yes.”
“Or was supposed to have walked out,” said Brian Helling slyly. “It was a very unhappy marriage. Lennie’s father beat her up…That wasn’t the kind of thing you could keep quiet in a place like Weldisham. Everyone knows everyone’s business.”
“And you’re suggesting Lennie Baylis’s father may have killed his wife?”
He shrugged. “There was talk at the time. I remember my mother talking about it. She’s always known everything that went on in Weldisham.”
“But she wasn’t living here when Mrs Baylis disappeared.”
“Not living here, but working here. Anyway, some of the rumours about Lennie’s dad doing away with his old woman have resurfaced in the last couple of weeks…Might be worth investigating.”
“Yes.”
Abruptly Brian Helling stepped up into the cab of his Land Rover. He slammed the door and, as he peered fixedly at Carole, underwent another of his sudden mood changes. “But not investigating by you,” he hissed. “Weldi-sham is a tightly knit community. It doesn’t like outsiders snooping into its affairs.”
He started the engine, slammed the Land Rover into reverse and set off at breakneck speed, skidding over the track back to Weldisham.
Leaving Carole in no doubt that she had been both warned off and threatened.
? Death on the Downs ?
Twenty-Eight
“But I’m sure I’m right,” Carole crowed.
“Hey, watch how you’re driving!”
“Sorry, Jude.”
Carole slowed the Renault down. The Weldisham Lane was too narrow for the speed she’d been doing. She must slow herself down too. Relief after her unpleasant encounter with Brian Helling was compounding the excitement with which her mind was racing to make her heady and irresponsible. Stop it, she told herself. You are Carole Seddon. Boring, reliable old Carole Seddon. Carole Seddon doesn’t behave like this.
With the Renault progressing as if to a funeral, she laid out her thinking with all the sobriety of a Home Office departmental strategy presentation. “Jude, the clincher is that Lennie – Detective Sergeant Baylis – was going to
