PRAISE FOR SIMON BRETT
AND THE FETHERING MYSTERIES
‘A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans’
P. D. James
‘Murder most enjoyable . . . An author who never takes himself that seriously, and for whom any fictional murder can frequently form part of the entertainment industry’
Colin Dexter, Oldie
‘A crime novel in the traditional style, with delightful little touches of humour and vignettes of a small town and its bitchy inhabitants’
Sunday Telegraph
‘With a smidge of adultery thrown in, some wise observations about stagnant marriages, disillusioned lovers and the importance of friendship, and, of course, plenty of whiffy red herrings, it all makes for a highly enjoyable read’
Daily Mail
‘This is lovely stuff, as comforting – and as unputdownable – as a Sussex cream tea. More please’
Brighton Evening Argus
‘Crime writing just like in the good old days, and perfect entertainment’
Guardian
‘I stayed up until three in the morning and chewed off two fingernails finishing this delightful, thoroughly English whodunnit’
Daily Mail
‘Simon Brett comes up trumps yet again . . . an excellent thriller but also a well-observed social commentary’
Irish News
‘One of the exceptional detective story writers around’
Daily Telegraph
‘[Brett is] highly commended for atmosphere and wit’
Evening Standard
‘Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories . . . I would recommend them to anyone’
Jilly Cooper
‘Simon Brett is a man of many talents . . . totally engrossing and unusually funny’
London Life Magazine
‘For readers who like their crime told elegantly and light-heartedly, with a wit which bubbles throughout plot and narrative . . . pure pleasure from beginning to end’
Birmingham Post
‘One of the wittiest crime writers around’
Antonia Fraser
DEATH ON THE DOWNS
Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full time. As well as the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he is the author of the radio and television series After Henry, the radio series No Commitments and Smelling of Roses and the bestselling How to Be a Little Sod. His novel A Shock to the System was filmed starring Michael Caine.
Married with three grown-up children, Simon lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs.
Death on the Downs is the second novel in the Fethering Mysteries series. Simon Brett’s most recent novel, Death Under the Dryer, is out now in Macmillan hardback.
Also by Simon Brett
A Shock to the System
Dead Romantic
Singled Out
The Fethering Mysteries
The Body on the Beach
The Torso in the Town
Murder in the Museum
The Hanging in the Hotel
The Witness at the Wedding
The Stabbing in the Stables
Death Under the Dryer
Mrs Pargeter novels
A Nice Class of Corpse
Mrs, Presumed Dead
Mrs Pargeter’s Package
Mrs Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh
Mrs Pargeter’s Plot
Mrs Pargeter’s Point of Honour
Charles Paris novels
Cast, In Order of Disappearance
So Much Blood
Star Trap An Amateur Corpse
A Comedian Dies
The Dead Side of Mike
Situation Tragedy
Murder Unprompted
Murder in the Title
Not Dead, Only Resting
Dead Giveaway
What Bloody Man Is That?
A Series of Murders
Corporate Bodies
A Reconstructed Corpse
Sicken and So Die
Dead Room Farce
Short stories
A Box of Tricks
Crime Writers and Other Animals
SIMON
BRETT
DEATH ON THE DOWNS
A FETHERING MYSTERY
PAN BOOKS
First published 2001 by Macmillan
First published in paperback 2002 by Pan Books
This edition published 2007 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2009 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-46549-6 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-330-46548-9 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-330-46550-2 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Simon Brett 2001
The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
To Priscilla
Chapter One
The bones didn’t look old, but then what did Carole Seddon know about bones? Her work at the Home Office had brought her into contact with forensic pathologists from time to time, but she didn’t lay claim to any of their arcane knowledge. She was just an ordinary member of the public – in retirement an even more ordinary member of the public.
But any member of the public who’d done the rudiments of anatomy at school, who’d
watched television or been to the cinema, would have recognized that the bones were human.
Carole saw them as she picked herself up off the floor of the barn. When she had realized the rain showed no immediate signs of relenting, she had tried to make herself comfortable on a pile of roughly cut planks. They were dark green with the slime of ages, but her trousers and Burberry raincoat were already so mud-spattered and wet that more dirt would make little difference. She planned to spread out a newspaper over the immaculate upholstery of her Renault when she got back to the road where it was parked.
Maybe it was the slime, maybe it was the fact that they had recently been moved, but the planks proved an unstable seat. When Carole had put her full weight on them, they had tipped forward, spilling her unceremoniously on to the hard earth floor of the barn. Their collapse revealed the bright blue fertilizer bags, out of one of which protruded the unmistakable ball-joint of a human femur.
The barn was not on one of Carole Seddon’s regular walking routes. Indeed, she rarely went on to the Downs. Gulliver, her dog, was too easily distracted up there, overexcited by the smells of cattle, rabbits and other smaller but infinitely intriguing species of wildlife. Given the luxury of all that space, it would have been cruel to keep the dog on a lead, but she didn’t trust him to return from his manic forays into the Downs. Despite impeccable Labrador breeding, Gulliver wasn’t a natural country dog. He was at home on Fethering Beach; he knew it well, and always returned safely to his mistress from quixotic tilts at seagulls, breakwaters or the fascinating detritus that the tide brought in. Carole even reckoned he could, if necessary, find his own way back from the beach to her cottage, High Tor, in Fethering High Street.
But a sortie on the beach was the reason why Gulliver wasn’t with his mistress that February afternoon on the Downs. The week before, with customary bravado, he’d attacked a seaweed-shrouded potential enemy, only to back off limping from a gash to his forepaw. His quarry had proved to be a rusty can with a jagged edge. An immediate visit to the vet, injections and bandaging had left Gulliver a mournful, housebound creature who snuffled piteously by the Aga, pressing his nose and teeth against the intransigent dressing on his leg. The bandages were swaddled in polythene to keep out the damp when he hobbled off with Carole on the essential toilet outings, which were the only social life the vet’s instructions allowed him for a fortnight.
That was why Carole was up on the Downs. Without Gulliver’s curiosity to worry about, she told herself positively, she had the freedom to roam. But in her heart she knew another reason for her choice of walking route. She was likely to meet fewer people on the Downs. In Fethering Gulliver was her prop. If she was seen walking alone on the beach, she might look as if she was lonely.
She had parked the Renault on the outskirts of Weldisham, a village on the foothills of the South Downs that looked from the outside as though it hadn’t changed much since the days when Agatha Christie might have set a murder there.
The squat tower of a Saxon church rose above the naked trees. There presumably the aristocracy, the gentry and the commonalty might meet, casting suspicious glances from pew to pew after the dirty deed had been done. In the village pub, the Hare and Hounds, old men with rough-hewn accents might become indiscreet over foaming pints of ale, letting drop conveniently vital clues.
Weldisham offered a couple of homes substantial enough to host house-parties at which crimes could be committed. A scattering of smaller dwellings might accommodate those local professionals – the doctor, the solicitor, the vicar – who didn’t quite cut the social mustard, but who could prove invaluable as suspects and witnesses.
There were two old barns in the village whose agricultural purpose was unspecified, but which would provide ideal venues for the discovery of the second murder victim, probably impaled by a pitchfork. And then there were small, flint-faced cottages to house the peasantry – the farm workers, the gardeners and the wheelwright – one of whose quaint dialect testimony would provide the final piece of the jigsaw, allowing the visiting sleuth to bring another malefactor to the unforgiving justice of the scaffold.
Though that was how Weldisham may still have looked to the uninformed observer, at the turn of the new millennium it housed a very different set of characters. The church looked no different, though its congregation could usually be counted without recourse to a third hand. And the Hare and Hounds, after many and varied refurbishments, was now owned by a chain whose corporate mission was ‘to maintain the authenticity and individuality of idiosyncratic country local hostelries’.
A few Estate cottages remained as Estate cottages, though the farm workers who lived in them these days drove in closed tractors with heaters and music systems. Manual workers not employed by the Estate couldn’t begin to afford Weldisham prices. The other cottages had been made over into bijou residences for the retired or for London-based weekenders. Solicitors and doctors, now rather higher up the social pecking order than they had been in Christie’s day, still inhabited the middle-range houses, from which they made their short commute to local offices and surgeries. Some hardened souls resolutely travelled up to London on a daily basis, their constant assertions that they had found ‘quality of life’ undermined by the fact that for half the year they left and arrived back at their country idylls in pitch blackness.
One of the barns in the village had been tastefully converted into a dwelling with large rooms, high ceiling and horrendous heating bills. The other, whose mangy thatch slid slowly from broken-backed rafters, remained unconverted and was the subject of continual planning applications. But each approach ended the same way. The Village Committee pointed out that the building was inaccessible behind other houses, and its residential use would necessitate the construction of a new road in Weldisham, which was bound to cause disruption to existing home owners. The barn was also too close to other dwellings; its use as a residential property could only cause a nuisance. So, despite the repeated efforts of the Estate and a sequence of developers who recognized its huge financial potential, the Village Committee stood firm. The planners, hyper-sensitive about press criticism of other blunders and eyesores in West Sussex, paid heed to their arguments and the barn continued its quiet decay.
Had it had a more visible profile in Weldisham, local people might have felt differently, but the barn had been built in a dip behind a row of houses and visitors to the perfect Downland village were completely unaware of its dilapidated existence.
And of the two seriously big properties, one remained in private ownership, while the other had been titivated into a ‘country house hotel’.
Carole Seddon didn’t know Weldisham well. She had been to the Hare and Hounds once, when her son, Stephen, had made one of his rare visits to the South Coast. The pub hadn’t made much impression. It was too like every other idiosyncratic country hostelry whose authenticity and individuality had been maintained by a pub chain.
But she had no friends in Weldisham and that afternoon, after parking the Renault, she’d set off very firmly in the opposite direction from the village. There was a track rippling upwards over the swell of the Downs. On summer weekends it would be dotted with family groups and serious walkers with waterproofed rectangles of map hanging about their necks. On a damp Friday afternoon in late February there was no one but Carole on the track.
With the village behind her, she could see no sign of human habitation ahead. Man had been there, fencing up the curves of the Downs into huge rectangular fields, but man did not live there. The horizon seemed infinite, as though the undulations rolled into each other for ever. Carole felt that she could walk for days before she saw another human being.
The prospect did not worry her. Carole Seddon had trained herself to be on her own, certainly after the collapse of her marriage and, according to the uncharitable view of her former husband, David, for a long time before that. Loneliness, like dependence on other people, was a luxury she did not allow herself.
But she couldn’t deny th
at she was missing her next-door neighbour. Jude had been away for nearly two weeks, having departed suddenly with characteristic lack of specificity as to where she was going, who she was going with or what she would be doing there. Only in Jude’s absence did Carole realize how much she had come to rely on their occasional contact, the spontaneous knocks on her door inviting her to share a bottle of wine. Though their views differed on many subjects – indeed, on most subjects – it was comforting to have someone to talk to.
Still, Jude was away from Fethering for an undefined length of time. No point in brooding about it. Carole had been brought up with the philosophy that one just got on with things. She pulled her knitted hat down over short steel-grey hair. Through rimless glasses her pale blue eyes looked determinedly at the track ahead of her. She was a thin woman, as spare in outline as a piece of cutlery, and, in her early fifties, the age when women can start to become invisible. But for the fact that she was the only person on the Downs that afternoon, no one would have given her a second glance. And that was the way Carole Seddon liked it, and the way she wanted things to stay.
The weather was sullen and threatening, truculent clouds ready to unburden themselves of more rain. Their efforts over the last week had left the ground heavy and clinging. On the higher parts of the track, strips of exposed chalk offered firmness underfoot, but in the wheel-troughs of its hollows coffee-coloured water lurked between banks of slimy mud. The sensible walking shoes Carole had bought when she took early retirement to West Sussex were quickly covered, and small commas of beige mud spattered up her Marks & Spencer’s trousers and even to the hem of her precious Burberry. She realized – too late – that, though the raincoat was eminently sensible for walking on the beach, it wasn’t suitable for the Downs. Never mind, she’d just have to take it to the dry-cleaner’s.
She walked determinedly on. Like housework in the morning and the Times crossword after lunch, a walk was a necessary division in Carole Seddon’s day. Without such disciplines and rituals, the time stretched ahead of her, unbounded and threatening. Gulliver’s injury had broken the continuity of early-morning walks on the beach; a substitute needed to be found. Not just a walk, but a walk with a goal. And the goal Carole had prescribed for herself that afternoon was a high point of the Downs from which she could look down to the sea. Once that had been achieved, she could return to her car and drive back to Fethering, to Gulliver’s enthusiastic but melancholy welcome.