“I’m asking you, Mrs Seddon.”
“All right. Well, I’ve answered your question. Have they any idea how the fire started?”
He shook his head. “Far too early to say.” It was easy for him. In terms of information, he held all the cards. Any time he wanted to avoid a question, Baylis could back away behind professional police-speak. Far too early to say…our enquiries are still progressing…we haven’t had the results yet…
“You’re waiting for the report from the forensic examination of the scene?”
“Exactly, Mrs Seddon.”
“And have you had the results of the other forensic examination yet?” she asked, challenging him with her pale blue eyes.
He looked uncomfortable. “Which other forensic examination?” But he knew what she was talking about.
“The examination of the bones I found.”
He hid again behind his professional front. “I’m afraid, even if I had such information, I wouldn’t be able to divulge it until permission had been given.”
“No, but something must be known by now.” Carole recognized that she was getting increasingly reckless, but wasn’t quite sure why. “They’ll have got a DNA profile from the bones.”
“But for that to have any meaning, they’d have to have tissue to match it to.”
“Might they not try to get a match through relatives of the deceased…?”
He chuckled at her absurdity. “If you don’t know who a victim is, it’s sometimes very difficult to trace their relatives.”
“You haven’t been asked to give a sample of DNA, have you, Sergeant?”
The expression on his face could not have changed more if Carole had slapped him.
“I was just meaning that there were rumours about your mother when – ”
“I know exactly what you were meaning, Mrs Seddon.” He stood up. “I came here to talk about the fire at Heron Cottage and I think there’s nothing else I need to ask you.” He moved towards the door. “Oh, there was one other question…When you went to see Pauline Helling yesterday morning, did you see Brian?”
Carole shook her head, and then her hand leapt to her mouth. “He wasn’t killed too, was he? They didn’t find Brian’s body in the ruins of the cottage?”
“No. No, they didn’t.”
“So where is he?”
“A very good question, Mrs Seddon. And one which we hope, in the not too distant future, to answer.”
Carole had risen from her chair too, as if to show the sergeant out, but still he lingered, swaying slightly, by the door.
“We’ve established that Pauline Helling was profoundly antisocial…”
“Yes.”
“I knew she was before, and your experience with her has only borne that out…” Still he swayed, uncertain. “And yet she let you, a complete stranger, into Heron Cottage. Why?”
Was he suspicious of her, Carole wondered. Did he think she’d been lying, that in fact she had some association with Pauline Helling going back a long way into the past?
“She let me in,” came the unflustered reply, “because I mentioned something that Brian had said to me.”
“Ah, Brian,” said Baylis, almost to himself. “Everything comes back to Brian.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m getting the feeling that Brian Helling had a lot of enemies…that his mother knew he had a lot of enemies…and she was trying to protect him. That’s why she had to listen to what you said about him.”
“Why?”
“Because she thought you might be one of his enemies…or that you might have been sent by one of his enemies. That’s why she objected so much to you snooping around the village.”
“I thought she behaved like that to everyone. I didn’t think I’d been particularly singled out.”
“I think you may have been.”
“But why me? Did I look like one of Brian’s enemies? What kind of enemies did he have, come to that?”
“Drug dealers in Brighton.”
“Well, thank you very much!” Carole Seddon was affronted to her middle–class core. “Do I look like a…I don’t know…like a drug dealer’s moll?”
“You’d be surprised, Mrs Seddon. Maybe you imagine drug dealers are shifty half-castes in loud suits. Very few of them are. Most you wouldn’t be able to tell apart from any other kind of businessman.”
“Oh.”
“We’ve just discovered this morning,” the sergeant went on, “that Brian Helling owes a lot of money to one of the big boys in Brighton. A really enormous amount of money.”
“So are you suggesting that they were behind the torching of Heron Cottage? That it was Brian, and not his mother, who was the intended victim?”
A moment before, Detective Sergeant Baylis couldn’t stop volunteering information. Suddenly, once again, he was all professional caution. “We haven’t established yet,” he said primly, “that the fire was not accidental.”
“No,” Carole agreed, deflated.
He rubbed his hands together. “I must be going. Thank you for bearing with me once again, Mrs Seddon. Sorry, a lot of police work is like this, routine enquiries, double-checking the facts…achieving little, I’m afraid.”
But after the sergeant had gone, Carole wondered whether he really had achieved little that morning. Again, she felt certain that his visit was part of a personal agenda. And that that agenda could well include diverting suspicion away from the circumstances of his mother’s death.
¦
She watched the lunchtime local news. She wished Jude had been there to see it with her, but Jude was on her way to Sandalls Manor.
The bulletin had more on the tragedy in Weldisham. Still, as Baylis had pointed out, it was far too early to say what had caused the blaze, although they did have an ID of the victim, Mrs Pauline Helling.
“One of her nearest neighbours,” said the presenter, “manager of the Hare and Hounds pub in Weldisham, is Will Maples.”
The landlord was filmed behind the bar, in a report which started on the smouldering wreckage of Heron Cottage, then moved round to the jokey sign of the Hare and Hounds, before cutting to the interior. The directors of Home Hostelries must have been delighted; it looked just like a commercial.
“This is a terrible tragedy,” said Will Maples. “Mrs Helling was not a regular here in the Hare and Hounds, but she was a familiar sight around the village, always out walking her dog. She’ll be sorely missed.”
His words were formal and meaningless, like a retirement-party encomium from a managing director who’d never met the guest of honour. For a moment Carole thought how ridiculous it had been to get Will Maples to speak. He had no roots in the village, he was just passing through on the way to his next promotion. He didn’t know Pauline Helling.
But then she reflected that it didn’t matter. No one in Weldisham had known Pauline Helling, or at least no one had chosen to know her. Better perhaps platitudes from Will Maples than condescension from a more established resident.
Will’s mention of the dog made Carole think. Pauline Helling and the spaniel had been inseparable. Had the dog too perished in the blaze? If so, surprising that the local news, always keener on animal-interest than human- interest stories, hadn’t mentioned the fact.
“Mrs Pauline Helling, who died in a fire at her cottage in Weldisham last night.”
The screen filled with a photograph. It must have been twenty years old, dating from before Pauline Hel-ling’s move to the village that subsequently ostracized her. The features were thinner, the sharpness of the nose more pronounced.
Carole gasped. It was a face she recognized.
At that moment the telephone rang.
“Carole Seddon?”
“Yes.”
“This is Brian Helling.”
