The Death on the Downs. Simon Brett

the outside, yes. If you didn’t know her, you’d have no idea what she’s thinking. But over the time I spent with her and Tamsin, I did get to know her quite well, and she’s not calm – at least not where her daughter’s concerned. But this morning she kept saying she knew Tamsin was all right.’

      ‘Positive thinking.’

      ‘Maybe it’s just that. I kept wondering whether maybe she was telling the truth. She knows that Tamsin’s all right.’

      ‘But if she did know that, surely she’d tell her husband? If he’s in as bad 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 Tamsin’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”.’