Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs (17 page)

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 and scrubby this time of year, but no doubt green and luxuriant in the summer. Elsewhere, there was a floor of trodden earth.

But the interior was very cluttered. In the shadows Carole could see the rusty limbs of long-dead farm machinery. There were bales of corroded barbed wire, stacks of blackened fencing posts and bellied, sagging plastic sacks.

The space had also been used as a rubbish tip by the people of Weldisham. Carole was amused by this manifestation of local hypocrisy. Residents who no doubt waxed righteously furious at Village Committee meetings about the vandalism of tourists, the detritus of bottles and crisp packets left in front of the Hare and Hounds, the drinks cartons scattered on the Green, had their own secret dumping ground. The old barn was home to a sad selection of broken furniture, wheel-less bicycles and the odd superannuated fridge.

Her eyes now used to the light, Carole picked her way cautiously through the clutter. She knew what she was looking for and, with a mixture of excitement and dread, she found it.

In one of the darkest recesses of the barn, where the sun never penetrated, there was a small patch of recently turned earth.

G
illie Lutteridge’s immaculate ensemble that Friday afternoon was a silk dress the colour of morello cherries. The open neck revealed a cluster of gold necklaces; a single gold chain hung from her wrist. Her make-up and the shape of her blonde hair were, as ever, irreproachable.

Jude, who’d just had a cup at the Hare and Hounds, refused the offer of coffee. Gillie gestured her to a freshly plumped armchair. “I hope it wasn’t inconvenient for you to come up here. I’m just not very good at talking on the telephone.”

“It’s fine. I got a lift from a friend. She was coming up here anyway.” A minor lie, but necessary to put her hostess at ease. Jude was getting used to reading the tiny gradations in Gillie Lutteridge’s manner, and had identified a considerable degree of agitation. “It’s about Tamsin, I take it,” she went on, still easing the passage for Gillie’s revelation.

“Yes. I went to see her yesterday.”

“At Sandalls Manor?”

Gillie nodded. “Miles was away on business, so I risked it.”

“And how’re things going with Charles? Is he making her better?”

There was a shrug, almost of hopelessness. Gillie Lutteridge seemed much less positive than Jude had ever seen her. Maybe, having once broken her facade by crying, Tamsin’s mother felt she no longer had to maintain a front. What was the point, since Jude had already seen through it?

“I don’t know. She seems to get better, she relapses. I keep wondering whether it’s our fault.”

“What?”

“The illness. The chronic fatigue syndrome. I wonder if it’s Tamsin’s reaction to growing up in this house.”

“What’s wrong with this house?”

Gillie’s next shrug was nearly despairing. “There’s so much tension between me and Miles. I think there always has been. Ever since Tamsin was born, really. That…changed things between us. And, as she grew up, she can’t have been unaware of the atmosphere.”

“So are you suggesting that the atmosphere in the house got to her, that that’s what made her ill? As if she’d been infected by it?”

Gillie looked at Jude defiantly. “It’s possible. It seems as likely as any of the other explanations that have come up.”

“But Tamsin wasn’t even living here when she got ill. She was in London.”

“Yes, but maybe she couldn’t cope in London, couldn’t cope with the job. Maybe living with us had kind of weakened her, so that she couldn’t deal with real life.”

“Gillie, Gillie, Gillie…” Jude crossed from her chair and took the other woman’s thin hand in hers. “Chronic fatigue syndrome is a genuine illness. You know that. That’s what you have arguments with Miles about. He’s the one who thinks it’s all psychosomatic. You know it’s real.”

But Gillie Lutteridge was in too reduced a state to be persuaded by her own arguments. “I don’t know. It doesn’t happen to other people’s daughters. I keep thinking it must be my fault.”

“But then you’ve thought everything was your fault for a long, long time,” observed Jude quietly.

Gillie sniffed. Once again tears were not far away. Then she nodded. “Well, it is. Most things are my fault.”

“No, Gillie. You’re not well.”

“Me too?” she asked with a bitter smile.

“You’re depressed if you blame yourself for everything that’s wrong.”

“If that’s the case, then I’ve been depressed for a very long time.”

“Perhaps you have.”

“No, of course I haven’t!” Jude had never heard her speak so sharply. Gillie was quick to recover her usual level tone. “Anyway, we don’t want to talk about me. Tamsin’s the one who’s ill.”

“Are you sure she’s the only one?”

“Yes.” Gillie Lutteridge moved on brusquely. “Tamsin said something yesterday that worried me.”

“What?”

“She implied that she wanted to stay at Sandalls Manor for ever.”

“Ah. Well, I can understand why that would worry you. Given the kind of rates Charles Hilton charges for his—”

“No, it wasn’t that!” Having snapped at Jude once, Gillie Lutteridge had no inhibitions about doing so again. “It wasn’t to do with Charles, not to do with her illness. It was something else and it had her absolutely terrified.”

“What?”

“Ikmsin said, “Nobody knows I’m here. So I feel safe. As long as I’m here, I feel safe. But if people knew where to find me, then my life would be in danger.””

W
hen Carole got back from the footpath to Weldisham Lane, she was surprised to see that her venture to the barn had taken less than twenty minutes. Still forty to go before she’d agreed to meet her friend.

It was infuriating. She was dying to tell Jude what she’d seen and discuss the implications. Her thoughts were running too fast; she needed someone to bounce them off, someone to challenge their logic, someone to help her regain a sense of proportion. Once again she was bemused by this potential role reversal, the idea that she should look to Jude for stability. Carole was meant to be the sensible one.

Given the time she had to kill, Carole decided to walk back along the track she’d trodden two weeks before. If, as logic was telling her, the woman’s body had once been buried in the wreck of the building that now belonged to Harry Grant, then someone had been along the same route to take the bones to South Welling Barn.

Ideas as to who that person might have been kept bubbling into her mind and she had to keep rigid control to stop those ideas from crystallizing in conclusions.

The track was still tacky underfoot, but not nearly as bad as it had been on her previous journey. And the mood of the Downs was very different. The menace she had felt under the louring rain-clouds was long gone, and Carole even wondered whether it was a feeling she had grafted on in retrospect, after her grisly discovery. The sun transformed the Downs from a hostile to a nurturing environment.

Her sensible shoes made a regular slapping sound on the mud as she strode forward. She felt fit and optimistic. Carole Seddon was only in her early fifties, after all. There was life in the old girl yet.

Sound travels strangely on the Downs, bounced from hillocks and funnelled by valleys. Frequently it’s hard to tell exactly where a noise is coming from.

So Carole wasn’t distracted by the screech of eroded gears until the vehicle was almost upon her. She turned to see an old Land Rover roaring up the track behind her. It was being driven as though the driver were blind to her existence.

Carole leapt to the verge at the side, mentally cursing the loutishness of whoever was driving, and expected to see the Land Rover career off along the track.

But it didn’t. The vehicle braked fiercely in a flurry of mud. Then, in a grinding of gears, it reversed and came to a halt beside her. The flailing tyres spotted her freshly cleaned Burberry with mud.

Carole opened her mouth to remonstrate with whatever road-hog she was up against, but the words dried on her lips when she saw who got out of the driver’s door.

She was not an accidental victim of someone’s thoughtless high spirits. The man had been looking for her.

Carole Seddon didn’t like the expression she saw in his eyes as he said, more statement than question, “You’re the one who found the bones, aren’t you?”

“All I could get out of Tamsin,” Gillie Lutteridge went on, “was that something happened last time she came here.”

“That was only a few weeks ago, you said. Another time Miles was away on business.”

“Yes. Anyway, while she was in Weldisham, she saw something that frightened her to death.”

“But she wouldn’t tell you what?”

Gillie shook her head.

“Well, who did she see while she was here?”

“That’s the point. She didn’t see anyone except me. She didn’t want anyone to know she was here.”

“Did she use the phone?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“There weren’t any letters waiting for her?”

“No. As soon as anything addressed to her arrives, I forward it to Sandalls Manor.”

Jude grimaced. “Well, something must’ve happened to get her into such a state.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “She didn’t go out?”

“I was with her all evening. We both went to bed at the same time.”

“So, without leaving the house or having contact with another human being, Tamsin managed to get the impression that someone wanted to kill her? It doesn’t make sense.”

“No. There’s only one thing I can think, Jude…”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I just wonder if…With her illness, Tamsin’s sleep patterns are all over the place. Sometimes she sleeps all the time, almost as if she were narcoleptic. And then she goes through phases when she’s awake for hours in the night and…”