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

state as you say.”
    “Yes. She would. Gillie’s always been very supportive to Miles. She wouldn’t let him suffer unnecessarily.” Jude took a thoughtful sip of wine. “That’s what’s so odd about it.”
    Their cottage pies arrived, each neat in its oval earthenware dish on a wooden platter. Another earthenware dish contained carefully apportioned vegetables, exactly the same number for each of them. The food looked fine. But the gloss was taken off it by the fact that Carole knew identical portions were being served at the same moment in every one of the Home Hostelries chain.
    “Tell me more about these bones,” said Jude, as they started to eat.
    “I’ve told you most of it. There were just these recognizably human bones in two fertilizer bags.”
    “But you didn’t get any feeling how old they were?”
    “I’m not a forensic pathologist, Jude.”
    “No, but…I was just thinking…Tamsin’s been missing for four months. Left her parents’ house on the night of Hallowe’en. I remember, because at one stage Miles thought that might have some significance.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s very confused about complementary medicine. He assumed it had something to do with witchcraft.”
    “I see.”
    “Anyway, say Tamsin was abducted and murdered that very evening…which is the first possible time she could have been…would there have been time since then for the bones to get as clean as you said they were?”
    “Depends where they were left. Out in the open on the Downs…there are plenty of predators who’d pick all the flesh off them.”
    “But if the body had been left in the open, someone would have seen it, surely?”
    “Possibly not. I’m sure there are lots of secret places round here…copses, streams, old chalk pits. I should think it’d be easy enough to hide a body if you set your mind to it. I don’t know, though…We don’t really have enough information.”
    As if putting a full stop to the conversation, Carole took a large spoonful of cottage pie.
    “No. But think about it,” Jude persisted. “The world is full of missing persons—vagrants, tramps, travellers…The bones could belong to any one of them. And yet everyone’s assuming they’re Tkmsin’s.”
    “Village mentality for you.”
    “I suppose so. And until Tamsin is actually found alive—or until the police prove the bones belong to someone else—they’ll go on thinking it’s her.” Jude speared a head of Home Hostelries broccoli and looked at it pensively. “I think I’d better find Tamsin.”
    “Where would you start looking?”
    “I know some of the people she might have contacted.”
    “What kind of people?”
    “Miles Lutteridge and a lot of other blinkered locals would probably call them ‘New Age quack doctors’.”
    “Ah.” Carole didn’t like to admit that she was probably one of the ‘other blinkered locals’. And what would you call them?”
    “I’d call them ‘alternative therapists’. And some of them are good, and some of them are not very good, but none of them is deliberately trying to do harm. They’re trying to help people…and very often they succeed. Anyway, I’ll make some enquiries.” And she popped the piece of broccoli into her mouth.
    “I think you should market it as one of the murder villages of the South Downs.”
    Both women turned at the sound of the loud voice from near the bar. Indeed, most of the customers in the pub stopped talking and turned towards the sound.
    The man who had spoken did not seem averse to being the centre of attention. His face was thin, its skin apparently drawn towards the point of a sharp nose. Probably in his forties, with wild hair that hadn’t seen a brush—or shampoo—since he got up that morning, he wore a black beret and a long cracked leather coat of the style favoured by Gestapo officers in British war movies. His thin legs in faded jeans ended in large laceless boots which splayed out from his ankles. The glass in his hand