Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs (23 page)

“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.”

The voice sent a chill through her. “Oh. I was terribly sorry to hear about your mother.” Her condolence sounded clumsy.

“Sad,” said Brian, in a voice that gave no clue to his real feelings. “Bit of a bummer, wasn’t it?”

“Where are you, Brian?”

“I’m not going to tell anyone that—least of all you.”

“Why least of all me?”

“Because, Carole, I think you suffer from more than your share of curiosity…and less than your share of reticence.”

“Are you hiding somewhere?”

“You could say that. There are lots of good hiding places on the Downs, you know. I’m just keeping out of the way until it’s safe for me to get back.”

“And when will that be?”

“When the people who threaten my safety have been brought to justice.”

The languor of his delivery was starting to annoy Carole. “Why’re you ringing me?”

“Just a bit of friendly advice.” His voice was still calm, nearly lazy, but with an underlying tension. Not the voice traditionally adopted by someone who’d just lost his mother.

“Like the friendly advice you gave me last Friday?”

“Not unlike that. In fact part of the advice is identical. Mind your own bloody business!”

“Or?”

“Or you might find yourself the third victim, Carole.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Am
I
threatening you? No, not me. I didn’t kill the other two.”

“Then who did?”

He chuckled indulgently. “Ooh, now I can’t make it too easy for you, can I? Amateur snoopers don’t like to be told all the details. You have to leave something for them to work out on their own…otherwise it spoils their fun.”

“Maybe, but—”

“Were you watching the lunchtime news, Carole?” he interrupted brusquely.

“Yes, I was.”

“And did that photograph of my mother remind you of anyone?”

“Yes, it did.”

“Then I think you probably have all the information you require.”

And at that point Brian Helling rang off.

T
his time Jude had rung ahead to Sandalls Manor and fixed a time to see Charles Hilton. Four o’clock in the afternoon.

Wednesday was the changeover day. One group of soul-searching participants had left on the Tuesday (slightly disappointed that due to the guru’s absence in Ireland, they’d been taken on their soul journey by a sub); the next consignment would arrive on the Thursday. Wednesday was the day for Anne Hilton to shout at her staff as she supervised their bed-changing and laundry work. And a day when Charles Hilton retired to his study to get on with his writing.

It was to the study that Jude was shown, with no pretence at welcome, by the guru’s wife. Charles sat behind a large desk of dark wood, at which Anne’s father had no doubt checked the farm’s accounts. The old man would have been shocked, though, to see the range of objects which neatly littered the desk’s surface. There were pebbles and crystals, fossils and face masks, evil eyes and tiny totems—a mini-museum of the world’s alternative belief systems.

On the wall behind Charles were pristine editions of
Setting Free the Soul
and others of his publications. There were framed texts in squiggly Oriental writing, and some in English, calligraphed and illustrated no doubt by besotted acolytes. Jude couldn’t help noticing one that read: “WEA RE ALL IRRELEVANT, AND THAT’S WHAT MAKES US ALL MATTER SO MUCH.”

She was reminded of her recent encounter with Sebastian Trent. He had stood in his Hampstead sitting room as if posing for a photograph. Jude had a feeling the neatly framed scene she was looking at might well appear on the jacket of Charles Hilton’s books.

He himself was all solicitous charm as he rose to greet the supplicant. “Jude, great to see you again. Would you care for some coffee?”

She could sense Anne Hilton’s disapproval of the offer, but that wasn’t why she declined it. If all went well, Jude didn’t intend to be in Charles Hilton’s study long enough to drink coffee. She hoped to be taken straight to see the object of her quest.

Relieved that at least she wasn’t going to have to get bloody coffee—though of course far too well brought up to verbalize any such opinion—Anne Hilton stomped out of the room, closing the door heavily behind her. Jude wondered whether this was to make a point or if she always did it like that. Anne Hilton’s upbringing had made her the kind of woman who talked loudly in public places. Maybe slamming doors came with the genetic territory.

Charles Hilton seemed visibly to relax once his wife was out of the room. Maybe he had still been afraid Jude might make some reference to his ill-considered grope of long ago. He was dressed again in neat jeans, though today’s cardigan was of an ethnic design that looked vaguely Peruvian.

“So…what can I do for you?” His smile was as bland and patronizing as he could make it, but with an undertone of anxiety.

“I want to see Tamsin Lutteridge,” said Jude.

“I’ve told you, I can’t discuss my patients’ cases.”

“I’m not asking you to do that. If you’d listened, Charles, you would have heard me say I wanted to see her, not discuss her.”

“I don’t know what makes you think I’ve any idea where she is. I’m not—”

She cut through his bluster. “I know Tamsin’s here, because her mother told me she’s here. I did in fact ring Gillie this morning and tell her I was coming to see her daughter. She was quite happy about it.” Jude gestured to the telephone. “Ring her if you don’t believe me.”

“No, no, of course I believe you.” He seemed to recognize the pointlessness of further resistance. “But I think you owe me the courtesy of telling me why you want to see Tamsin.”

“There’s something I need to ask her.”

Charles Hilton looked even more anxious. “Is it something to do with her treatment?”

“No, it has nothing to do with her treatment or her illness.”

“Then…?”

“Then it is on a subject that has nothing to do with you, Charles.”

“Fine.” But his expression suggested everything wasn’t entirely fine. “Jude…I’ve got to make a few ground rules for when you do see her.”

“Oh yes?”

“You’re not to ask her anything about the treatment she’s receiving here.”

“All right. I told you, that’s not what interests me.”

“No…” He still wasn’t fully reassured. “The work I’m doing with Tamsin is experimental…exploratory perhaps is a better word…I don’t want any details of it to be publicly known until the process is complete, until we’ve achieved some kind of closure.”

“Charles, will you stop worrying? I’m not a muckraking journalist. I’m not interested in how you’re treating Tamsin…Well, that is to say I’m only interested in how you’re treating Tamsin if the treatment is successful.”

She hadn’t managed to remove all residue of scepticism from her voice and Charles Hilton flared up. “Look, what I’m doing is perfectly legitimate and may go on to help many other sufferers from an illness that is one of the most complex and disturbing to have emerged in recent decades. I’m a serious therapist, Jude, and I really care 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.

C
arole 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.