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, though.’
Carole realized that DS Baylis was rather good at his job. His apparently inconsequential chat was a kind of counselling. She was, as he had said, in shock, and his easy conversation masked an acute observation of her state. He was deliberately relaxing her, distancing her from the horror in the barn.
It was nearly six when his mobile rang. ‘Yes, Hooper? Really think it needs a SOCO? OK, call them.’ He listened to a little more from his junior, then switched off the phone and turned apologetically to Carole. ‘Sorry, Mrs Seddon. I’ll have to go. Ring me on the number I gave you if there’s anything else.’
‘There’s hardly likely to be anything else, is there?’
‘I meant if you had any adverse reactions to what you saw, Mrs Seddon. We could put you in touch with a counsellor if you like.’
‘I’m sure I’ll be fine, thank you very much.’
‘Well, you just take it easy.’ Good Cop had become Extremely Caring Compassionate Cop. What was happening to the police force?
There was a tap on the door behind the bar and Will Maples appeared with a tentative cough. ‘Sorry, Lennie. I’m afraid we’re going to have to open up.’
‘Of course, Will. Can’t keep the good people of Weldisham from their pints, can we? Could you do the lady another large brandy, please?’
‘Certainly.’
‘On my tab.’
There was another unmistakable wink from Baylis. And an embarrassed look from the manager. Whatever the hold Baylis had over him, Will Maples would rather it didn’t exist. Carole felt certain that the tab which had been alluded to did not exist. But she did not feel the righteous anger such an arrangement might normally have fired in her. DS Baylis was a kind man, a good policeman. A few free drinks to ease relations with the public couldn’t do much harm.
‘You just relax, OK, Mrs Seddon.’ He stopped at the door. ‘Let’s hope we meet again one day . . . in more pleasant circumstances.’
‘Yes, I’d like that,’ said Carole, as the latched door clattered shut behind him.
But she didn’t relax. All she could think was that a SOCO was being called up to the barn. She knew ‘SOCO’ stood for ‘Scene of Crime Officer’.
Which meant that the police thought there was a crime to investigate.
Chapter Three
Left on her own, Carole had an opportunity to look around the interior of the Hare and Hounds. Another carved shingle over a doorway the far side from the Snug announced that that way lay the restaurant. More rustic notices over doors beside the bar identified the toilets.
The atmosphere being sought after in the pub was that of a comfortable country house. There were pairs of riding boots and the odd crop, metal jelly moulds, blue and white striped milk jugs and cat-gut tennis racquets in wooden presses. Wooden-shafted golf clubs and antiquated carpenters’ tools leaned artlessly against walls. Books were randomly scattered, without dust-jackets, their covers faded reds, blues and greens. Names like John Galsworthy, Warwick Deeping and E. R. Punshon gleamed in dull gold on their spines. To the wall of the Snug an ox yoke and an eel trap had been fixed. Behind the bar loomed a stuffed pike in a glass case.
All of these artefacts were genuine, but bore the same relationship to reality as the log-effect gas fire did to real flames. They had no natural affinity with their environment; they had been carefully selected to create an instant ambience.
Some of them also raised logical anomalies. For a start, everything that wasn’t firmly screwed to the wall was in a glass-fronted cupboard or on a shelf out of reach. Suppose someone came into the pub and fancied reading a chapter of E. R. Punshon? They couldn’t do much about it while the volume remained three feet above their head.
The piscatorial exhibits prompted the same kind of questions. The Hare and Hounds was a good five miles from the nearest river, the Fether, which reached the sea at Fethering. So it couldn’t really be counted as a fisherman’s pub. The eel trap looked quaint and out of place. There probably were eels in the Fether, but Carole wondered whether they had ever, at any stage in history, been caught by the contraption fixed on the wall. And, though she didn’t know much about fish, she thought it unlikely that a pike would ever have lived in such a fast-flowing tidal river.
On the dot of six, Will Maples unlocked the pub’s one exterior door, and was only just back behind the bar before his first customer of the evening arrived. Red-faced, in his fifties, ginger hair turning the colour of sand. Everything about the man seemed self-consciously to breathe the words ‘pub regular’, from his bottle-green corduroy trousers, deceptively clumsy shiny brown brogues, Guernsey sweater
