So Carole knew that whoever had left the bones in the barn must have intended to return fairly soon to move them on. Indeed, she might have met the person. That thought sent down her spine a trickle much colder than rainwater.
She drove into the centre of Weldisham, though in a village of some thirty houses she didn’t have far to go. There was a small grassy area, surrounded by a low railing, which she felt sure would be called ‘The Green’. A noticeboard displayed a few dampish posters behind glass. There was a map for walkers, a reminder that Weldisham was a Neighbourhood Watch Area, a faded orange flyer for line-dancing on Wednesday evenings in the Village Hall.
And, sure enough, beside the board, was a public phone box. One of the old red ones – no doubt the Village Committee had rejected as unsightly any plans to replace it with a modern glass booth.
Carole dialled 999 and was very calm when asked which Emergency Service she required. The police voice at the other end was a woman’s, solicitous, motherly. She took down the details Carole gave her, asked where she was and said how much it would help if she could stay there until her colleagues arrived.
‘I’m sorry it’s so wet,’ the woman said. ‘Is there somewhere you could go to wait out of the rain? The church perhaps.’
‘I’ve got my car. And actually the rain’s stopped for the moment. I’ll stay parked by the phone box.’
‘Very well. If you’re sure you don’t mind. It would help enormously if you could wait for our officers.’
Carole gave a grim inward smile. Her last encounter with the police had been with the Bad Cop. Now she’d got the Good Cop. It was disorienting.
The car was cold, so with a mental apology to the environment Carole switched on the engine to try and get some heat into her sodden body. The windows soon steamed up and, though she couldn’t be said to be comfortable, she felt strangely peaceful. There was an inevitability about what was happening now. Carole had no decisions to make. Everything was in the hands of the police.
At one point she became aware of someone close by the car window. She swept a little circle in the condensation to reveal the face of an elderly woman with a beaky nose and a purple woolly hat pulled too far down her face. Carole smiled. The old woman continued to look at her with undisguised hostility. So much for the myth of everyone in the country being friendly.
Doing her bit for the Neighbourhood Watch, Carole decided. A strange car parked, engine running, in the middle of Weldisham. It must belong to some burglar planning his or her next incursion. She tried another smile, her most unburglar-like one, and was about to wind down the window for reassurance when the woman abruptly walked away, dragging an unwilling black and white spaniel in her wake.
Soon after, the police arrived. A liveried Range Rover with two uniformed officers in the front and a plain-clothes man in the back. Carole felt obscurely disappointed. She’d expected more. A full Scene of Crime team with all their paraphernalia. And yet why? No one knew that a crime had been committed. Even she couldn’t be sure. All the police had to go on was a call from a middle-aged woman who claimed to have found some human bones in a barn. She’d probably got it wrong, they got enough calls from cranks and the confused. Turn out to be sheep bones, cow bones, possibly even chicken bones left from someone’s picnic.
The plain-clothes man got out of the Range Rover to greet Carole, profuse in his apologies for keeping her waiting on such a disgusting day. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Baylis. A thick-set man with short brown hair and a nose surprisingly small in his broad face, he had an avuncular manner beyond his thirty-five years. It should have been patronizing, but to Carole it felt immensely reassuring.
After her Bad Cop experience, she now felt like the subject of a Good Cop charm offensive. Was it just down to individual officers, or had one of those Home Office directives about the police becoming more user-friendly really had an effect?
DS Baylis checked the location of her find. ‘Sounds like South Welling Barn, Hooper. Go and see what you can find.’
As the Range Rover set off towards the barn, Baylis squinted up at the louring sky. It wouldn’t be long before more rain fell. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Seddon, but I would like to check a few details with you.’
‘Of course. Would you like to come and sit in my car?’
‘Very kind, but I think I can do better than that.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Ten to five.’ He produced a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘Will Maples from the Hare and Hounds owes me the odd favour. I’m sure he can find us a warm room.’
In case any visitor did not know what the small alcove by the bar was called, the word ‘Snug’, carved on an authentically rustic shingle, hung over the doorway. Will Maples, an efficient slender young man in a sharp suit, ushered them in and switched on the log-effect gas fire. Though its initial flare was blue and cold, it soon emanated a rosy flickering glow, rendered suspect only by the fact that the logs never changed their outline or diminished in size. Carole knew about fires like that; she had a similar, smaller one at home in Fethering.
‘Anything I can get for you?’ asked the manager. He seemed over-anxious about their welfare, almost subservient, as if DS Baylis had some hold over him.
The nature of that hold was quickly revealed. ‘Mrs Seddon’s soaked to the skin,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’m sure she could probably do with a nice warming brandy. That is, Will, if you could see your way to bending the law a little and serving drink out of your licensing hours?’
Even without the sergeant’s wink and the young man’s blush, the implication would have been unmistakable. The Hare and Hounds had indulged some out-of-hours – probably after-hours – drinking and DS Baylis had turned a blind eye to it.
‘Certainly.’ Will Maples bustled behind the bar. ‘Is brandy what you’d like, madam?’
It was a drink she rarely touched but, lagged in dampness, Carole couldn’t think of anything she’d like more. ‘Yes, please.’
‘Just on its own?’
‘Thank you.’
‘And will you take something, Sergeant?’
‘Not while I’m on duty – that’s the line the coppers always use on the telly, isn’t it?’ Baylis chuckled. ‘I’ll have a large Grouse, thank you, Will. Same amount of water.’
The manager placed a large brandy and the whisky on the table in front of them. ‘Leave you to it then,’ he said, and discreetly left the room.
DS Baylis took a gratifying sip from his whisky and nestled back into the settle. ‘So, Mrs Seddon, if you wouldn’t mind just taking me through precisely what you saw . . .’
It didn’t take Carole long. At the end of her account there was a silence. She waited, anticipating further questions, or even disbelief. Like most people, from schooldays onwards she had always felt absurdly guilty in the presence of an authority figure, even one nearly twenty years her junior. She felt ready to confess to all kinds of things she hadn’t done.
‘Well, that’s fine,’ said DS Baylis easily. ‘Let’s wait and hear if Hooper and Jenks have found anything else on the site. Must’ve been a nasty shock for you, Mrs Seddon.’
And that was it. No further probing, no suspicion, no recrimination. Baylis moved on seamlessly to talk about his former ambitions as a footballer and how he still turned out, shift patterns permitting, every Sunday morning for his old school side. ‘I was brought up round here and there’s a bunch of us’ve kept the football up. Waddling old men now, though, I’m afraid. I used to be quite fast. Now I’ve got all these younger kids running circles round me. They still let me in the team. Don’t know for how much longer,