Fethering 02 (2001) - Death on the Downs by Simon Brett, Prefers to remain anonymous Page A

digressing. “So…Tamsin Lutteridge. I didn’t even know the girl was missing.”
    “Has been three, four months, I gather.”
    “Not been reported missing.”
    “Ah.”
    Baylis caught her eye and said shrewdly, “Lot of parents don’t report it when their kids go missing. Either they think it’s an admission of failure on their part—which it very probably is—or they know full well where the child is, but don’t want anyone else to know. Again they may keep schtum because their child’s actions, or the company they’re keeping, might be seen to reflect badly on their parents.”
    “I wouldn’t know if that’s the case with the Lutteridges. We’ve never met. But a friend of mine who knows them says the girl hasn’t been seen for four months.”
    “Well, at least the Weldisham gossips will have to change their tune now. We’ve issued a press statement about everything we know so far. Be on the local news this evening, I should think. Anytime then the phones’ll start ringing.”
    “With people who think they can identify the dead woman?”
    “Yes, Mrs Seddon. We’ll get every poor sad bastard in the country who’s lost someone. Mass media are great, all that Crimewatch stuff, encouraging the public to ring in, but it does infinitely increase the loony count.” He looked momentarily abashed. “Sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.”
    “It’s all right, Sergeant. I know exactly what you mean.”
    Baylis grinned and ruffled the loose skin of the head of Gulliver, who had by now fallen heavily in love with him.
    “Incidentally,” Carole went on, reckoning she’d never get a better opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about the life of Weldisham, “the woman who owns Heron Cottage…”
    “Pauline Helling. What about her?”
    “Nothing. Well, nothing serious. It’s just…I haven’t even met her properly, just come across her a couple of times, but on both occasions she’s made me feel extremely unwelcome in the village.”
    Baylis chuckled. “Don’t take it personally. She makes everyone feel unwelcome in the village—even the people who live there.”
    “My car got left outside Heron Cottage overnight when you and I went to the pub.”
    “And I bet you got one of Pauline’s little notes on your windscreen?”
    Carole nodded.
    “You wouldn’t be the first to have had that treatment, nor the last. It’s a nuisance, I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”
    “Oh, I wasn’t meaning it was a police matter. I just wondered why she was so antisocial.”
    “You should raise the question next time you’re in the Hare and Hounds, and I’m sure you’ll get as many answers as there are people present.”
    “And what would your answer be, Sergeant?”
    “As to why Pauline’s such a bad-tempered old bat? My answer would be a rather old-fashioned one, in these supposedly classless times. I think Pauline’s ‘living above her station’. She grew up poor, in a council house on the Downside Estate—”
    “In Fethering?”
    “That’s right. Then her husband left her with a son to bring up. I think that’s when she developed both the chip on her shoulder and her ambitions to be upwardly mobile. As a result, the minute she got some money, she bought Heron Cottage. The good folks of Weldisham didn’t like that. People of Pauline Helling’s sort, they reckoned, should know their place. They’d be the same with me too. Because my old man worked on the Estate. And I didn’t go to private school>.” He couldn’t keep the scorn out of his voice. “Not that it worries me,” he went on, once again disclaiming a hurt that he clearly still felt. “The new people come to the village, saying that they want to get close to the old rural England, but they don’t want any reminders of the people who used to live in that old rural England. And the prices get pushed up so high, none of the former residents can afford to live in these villages anyway. So that’s why Pauline