about helping people, making them better. It’d be so easy to pigeonhole me as a charlatan, a devious guru, a false prophet, but you can’t do that, because it’s not true!”
Jude was amazed and not a little amused by this outburst. She would have thought Charles Hilton’s training as a psychotherapist might have given him a little more self-knowledge. She hadn’t made any of the accusations against which he had so vigorously defended himself. If anyone was dubious about the validity of his treatments, then that person had to be Charles himself. His insecurity was so overt, it was almost endearing.
But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing that needed saying. Charles had already said it all.
“Right. Could I see Tamsin then, please?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
He rose from his little area of film set and picked up a bunch of keys from the desk.
“You’re not telling me you keep her locked up, are you, like someone out of a Victorian asylum?”
He was oblivious of the jokiness in her tone and almost screamed, “No of course I don’t keep her locked up!”
Charles Hilton looked at Jude. He saw the smile on her lips and his eyes slipped away from hers. He opened the door of his study.
As she passed through, he put a hand that was a little more than avuncular on the soft curve of her shoulder. Jude gave him a look far more articulate than many novels. Charles Hilton removed his hand.
? Death on the Downs ?
Thirty-Seven
Carole Seddon tried to be calm, but the thoughts bubbling up in her mind threatened her self-image as a sensible woman. The idea had already taken root in her mind before Brian Helling’s phone call had encouraged its growth and now it was running wild, spreading out more and more shoots of suspicion and implication.
She still needed more facts, though, facts that might corroborate her conjectures and fill in details of the evolving scenario. And she needed to get those facts from someone who knew Weldisham well, who had known it before Pauline Helling had taken up residence in Heron Cottage.
She came back to the three boys who’d been at school together. Lennie Baylis, Harry Grant and Brian Helling. The first two had actually lived in the village, and Brian’s mother had worked there as a cleaner. Each one of them, she felt certain, knew something that would be relevant to her enquiries.
But Carole had no means of recontacting Brian Helling. She guessed he’d been calling from a mobile, but when she tried 1471 she was told, “The caller withheld their number.”
Lennie Baylis was the obvious person with whom to discuss the case. He kept encouraging her to do just that, but that very eagerness disqualified him as the perfect confidant. Carole still reckoned the sergeant had a personal as well as a professional agenda and, though she wouldn’t go as far as considering him a suspect, she wanted to define his connection with the bones she’d found before volunteering more of her suspicions to him.
So that left Harry Grant. Or indeed Harry Grant’s wife…Suddenly Carole had a vivid image of the nervous, overdressed woman she’d met at the Forbeses’ dinner party. Though Jenny Grant represented a paler carbon than Pauline Helling, she was still unmistakably stamped with the same facial characteristics. The beaky nose dominated her thin pale face.
Carole remembered Harry saying that his wife had been related to Graham Forbes’s first wife. Perhaps Jenny too had been in the family photograph on the wall of Heron Cottage. She could be a close relative, a first cousin even, of Pauline Helling. Jenny Grant might be able to reveal everything Carole wanted to know about the old woman and her son.
There was only one ‘H. Grant’ in the local phone book. The address was nearer Fethering than Weldisham. Jenny Grant answered the phone. She sounded unsurprised by Carole’s call, and not particularly interested. Yes, it was a tragedy about Pauline. And yes, if Carole wanted to come round and talk to her about the old woman, that was fine. Jenny’s voice was flat, containing no curiosity as to why. In one way, that was good for Carole. Explanations might prove difficult. But, on the other hand, there was something spooky about Jenny Grant’s complete lack of interest.
The house was exactly what a successful property developer would have built for himself. Every feature was immaculately finished, but there were a few too many of them. Did the building need both a turret and a bell-tower? Did every upstairs window need a balcony? Wouldn’t the front garden have looked better paved with one kind of stone rather than four? And did the Tudor beams over the double garage match the panels of neat flint facing either side of the front door? Come to that, wouldn’t the heavy oak front door itself have looked sufficiently monastic without the semicircle of stained glass above it?
Carole anticipated much toing and froing with the Village Committee of Weldisham over the architectural details of Harry Grant’s barn conversion.
Jenny Grant was dressed rather like her house. She clearly frequented one of those boutiques which doesn’t like plain colours or plain surfaces. Her black skirt was decorated with random pieces of shiny leather and gold buttons; her fluffy pale blue jumper had quilted panels of scarlet silk and some gold braid at the neck. The house looked like a display unit for building effects; its owner a display unit for haberdashery. Her pallor accentuated the fussiness of her garments. Jenny Grant looked literally washed out, as though she had been put too many times through the laundry cycle.
She still expressed no curiosity at Carole’s arrival, but ushered her into a sitting room that looked like a display unit for upholstery. Tea things were already on a tray, with a plate of sugared biscuits.
“It’s very good of you to see me,” said Carole.
“No problem.”
After she had poured the tea, Jenny Grant sat back, her faded blue eyes blinking, waiting for whatever should come next. She didn’t volunteer anything. Maybe she never took any initiative, was eternally reactive. That was perhaps the way to survive as wife of someone as noisily energetic as Harry Grant.
“As I said on the phone, I want to talk about Pauline Helling. Terrible tragedy that was.”
“Terrible,” Jenny Grant agreed, as though commenting on a minor deterioration in the weather.
“Harry said you were actually related to her in some way…”
“Distantly. My maiden name was Helling and there are lots of branches of the family round the area. I think possibly our grandmothers were cousins, something like that.”
“So you didn’t know Pauline well?”
“I don’t think anyone knew her well, except possibly Brian. She kept herself very much to herself.”
“I heard that there was more to it than that.”
“How do you mean?”
“That the village actually ostracized her.” From Jenny Grant’s expression, she had never heard the word. “That she wasn’t made to feel very welcome in Weldisham.”
Jenny shrugged. “There are a lot of very snobbish people up there.”
“And you’re about to go and join them, I gather. I heard from Harry that you’d got your planning permission on the barn.”
If Carole had hoped to prompt Jenny’s views on whether she and her husband would be accepted socially in Weldisham, she was disappointed. All she got was a ‘Yes’.
“You must be delighted about that.”
“It’s what Harry wants.”
And Carole had a feeling that in that sentence lay the secret of the success of the Grants’
“No. She lived not far from here. The Downside Estate…Do you know it?”
“Yes. I live in Fethering.”
Downside was the poor end of town.
“And did Pauline marry a Helling?”
“No, she was born a Helling. She never married.”
