Unhappy Returns

by Elizabeth Lemarchand

  Toye re-joined the group, carrying the satchel under a streaming oilskin cape. He reported that the terrace was littered with loose rock fragments.

  ‘Nothing scuffed up. No sign of a struggle at all. No bits of paper or whatever. Half a small footprint that I’ve covered over as best I can.’

  Pollard turned to Matthew Gillard and Bill Sandford.

  ‘I suggest you two go home and get into dry clothes,’ he said. ‘Inspector Toye and I’ll be along later, when we’ve had a look up at the top there.’

  ‘Reckon you could do with a dry-off yourselves,’ the farmer objected. ‘Townsfolk aren’t used to going around in this sort o’ weather. My wife’ll be home getting a hot meal, what’s more.’

  ‘A good offer we’ll be glad to take up soon,’ Pollard assured him.

  The two men went off reluctantly.

  ‘June the eleventh, 1974?’ Toye asked, with an upward glance.

  ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken. Let’s lock this satchel in the car and scale the heights. Even after nearly eighteen months there could be some handy little tell-tale trace.’

  The path up to the Whitehallow Hills rose steeply behind Quarry Cottages. As he waited for Toye to stow the satchel away in the Hillman, Pollard contemplated Ethel Ridd’s cottage. In a curious way, he thought, she herself seemed to be receding into the background as the case developed one fresh complication after another… The slam of the car door roused him from his thoughts. Toye locked it, and they headed for the path in silence. It was rocky and running with water, shut in on either side by the uncompromisingly straight trunks of spruce fir. High overhead wisps of low cloud wreathed in the treetops. The gradient was taxing to the heavily clothed and booted.

  ‘Good thing we’re in reasonable shape,’ Pollard remarked, stopping for a breather.

  Toye replied that the whole set-up was enough to give you the willies, but conceded that it might be a bit better on a fine day. They resumed the climb, and the path suddenly emerged from the claustrophobic conifers into open scrub woodland.

  ‘Guess what!’ Pollard exclaimed. ‘The downpour’s slackening off.’

  Astonishingly it was. Overhead the low trailing clouds were breaking up, driven along in a freshening north-west wind, and intermittent scats of rain were replacing the non-stop deluge. As Pollard and Toye came out on to the rounded crest of the Whitehallows ridge there even came a fleeting shaft of pallid sunshine from the south. They were clear of the wooded slopes now, and an expanse of moorland interspersed with outcrops of rock stretched away to the north. Below the crest, and on their right, were the stunted silver birches rising from a thicket which Pollard had noticed from below, behind the gap in the railing. On closer inspection access to the gap seemed impossible without mechanical aids. A huge mass of brambles, about forty feet long and still bearing a few mildewed blackberries, was interlaced with hazel and elder, the whole complex fighting a losing battle with the ivy, which had also begun to throttle the little birch trees. A thriving colony of nettles provided an outer defence at ground level.

  ‘Nobody got a stiff through that lot in June ’74,’ Toye pronounced.

  Pollard agreed. They walked the length of the thicket to test the possibility of getting to the gap along the actual quarry edge. This appeared more practicable from the northern end. By tacit consent he went first. He loathed heights, and it was reassuring to know Toye was at his heels to make an instant grab if necessary. Averting his eyes from the sheer drop and the sullen water below he inched forward on the slippery mud, scanning both ground and bushes. After a back-breaking interval he stopped suddenly, aware of a small tremor of excitement. Some threads were hanging from a tenacious spray of bramble. He disentangled them with infinite care and passed them back to Toye.

  ‘Notice anything?’ he asked.

  Toye examined the find in silence. ‘Two different colours,’ he replied at last. ‘Brown and white, I’d say.’

  ‘This is it. Old Fatty at North Pyrford said her hiker was wearing a brown and white check shirt, didn’t she? However, we’d better not get carried away. Local lads and lasses might come this way in search of cover, though it doesn’t seem an ideal spot for fun and games.’

  Toye extracted an envelope from an inner pocket, and the threads were put into it and sealed down. The slow progress along the edge of the quarry was resumed, and about ten yards further on they arrived at the gap in the railing. Little trouble appeared to have been taken to put up an effective barrier against venturesome humans or straying animals behind the thicket. Wooden posts supporting a single iron rail lurched at drunken angles and were rotten with damp. Here two lay on the ground, having brought the rail down with them.

  ‘A push would have done it easily,’ Pollard said, inspecting the posts. ‘Here, watch out, for God’s sake!’

  Toye was craning over the edge, and reported that they seemed right over the spot where, according to Mr Sandford, the body would have hit the water.

  They made a painstaking search of the ground and bushes behind the gap but found nothing suggestive of human activity.

  ‘It’s these bloody brambles and things being so tough,’ Pollard said at last. ‘You could roll half a dozen corpses about without snapping bits off. We’d better pack it in.’

  They began to work back to their point of entry, giving every inch of the way a second scrutiny. Suddenly the sun came out, and simultaneously Toye called a halt.

  ‘There’s a bit of white paper stuck in the middle of these brambles,’ he said. ‘Torn off something. It just caught my eye with the sun on it… Ouch!’

  ‘Take off that cape thing and wrap it round your hand,’ Pollard advised. ‘The Gillards can put in a claim if it gets torn.’

  The fragment of paper was damp, but Toye managed to extract it undamaged. In itself it was disappointing: the torn-off corner of a printed page. The number 44 was just distinguishable, and there were traces of the opening words of several lines.

  ‘It must have come from somebody who went along here,’ Pollard said, staring at it. ‘I can’t believe that it got blown up from the quarry and landed in that bush… Poorish paper. Looks like a bit of a cheap magazine or a paperback. We’ll get the lab people to have a go.’

  Nothing further came to light, and they were soon on their way down to Quarry Cottages, drying off as they went. Bill Sandford raised a hand in greeting as they passed his window and reached their car. In under five minutes they were at Ambercombe Barton. Margaret Gillard, looking strained and acutely unhappy, whisked a dish of lamb chops and potatoes on to the table, and urged them to get something inside them. Her husband had gone to the hospital, she told them, and she herself was driving over again when he came back.

  ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ she burst out suddenly. ‘Being so sharp and bustling the child along, and all the time she was scared out of her wits.’

  Pollard attempted what he felt was very inadequate reassurance. He learnt that Rosemary had not referred to the notes, and in accordance with his orders no one had mentioned them to her.

  ‘She knows a policewoman’s there,’ Margaret Gillard said dully, depositing an apple pie and a pot of tea on the table. ‘She seems glad. It makes her feel safer, I suppose.’

  Just as Pollard and Toye were finishing their meal a call came through from Inspector Frost. Two naval frogmen with the necessary equipment and an ambulance were shortly leaving for Ambercombe. He himself would come along with a constable to keep any locals from making nuisances of themselves. Returning to the kitchen Pollard passed on this information, and asked if he and Toye could have a look at Rosemary’s bedroom in the meantime. Margaret Gillard led the way upstairs to a pleasant little room, abruptly burst into tears, and left them to it. Pollard looked around. The wallpaper sprigged with rosebuds and the dainty pink and white of curtains and quilt suggested a conventional mother’s, rather than a contemporary teenager’s ideas of bedroom decor. He inspected the books on a shelf, and found them childish for a girl of
fifteen, and the pictures on the walls equally so. Only a couple of small pinups of current pop idols in a dark corner, and a few with-it magazines on the windowsill indicated a tentative attempt on Rosemary’s part to identify with her generation. Almost completely alienated from her mother, he thought, and he wondered about Matthew Gillard as a father. Too down-to-earth and inarticulate, perhaps, however devoted underneath. The prospect of the twins’ adolescent years suddenly loomed up ominously, but the thought of Jane in the background was reassuring.

  A search of the chest of drawers and wardrobe uncovered a pathetic little cache of cheap cosmetics, but nothing connected with the threatening notes. They stripped the bed and discovered a slit in the mattress cover, inside which was a packet of newspaper cuttings relating to kidnappings and rapes of young girls. The really significant thing, they both agreed, was the blacking out of 11 June in the 1975 calendar on the wall.

  ‘I’m prepared to bet,’ Pollard said, flicking over the tabs for the other months, ‘that she met the hiker on that day in ’74, and the chap we’re after found out. How, I wonder? Everything depends on what I can get from her tomorrow. And why wasn’t she at school? It was a Tuesday, and they’d have had the Whitsun break, surely?’

  They went downstairs and found Margaret Gillard feverishly attacking household chores.

  ‘The day Mr Viney died?’ she said, breaking off to answer Pollard’s question. ‘Yes, Rosemary’d been away from school with the mumps all the week before. I remember she started again the next morning.’

  She looked at Pollard with a puzzled expression, but the sound of cars arriving broke off the conversation. An ambulance, a small van with two naval frogmen and their gear, and a police car bringing Inspector Frost and a constable indicated that the enquiry into Ethel Ridd’s murder was about to move into a further and grimmer phase.

  As Pollard expected it soon became clear that the news of Bill Sandford’s discovery had leaked out. During the frogmen’s preparations at the old quarry local people began to gravitate to the scene, their curiosity aroused by the convoy of official vehicles. It was not long before a couple of newsmen appeared, armed with cameras. Pollard had already decided that as the threatening notes were now in the hands of the police, Rosemary Gillard was no longer in danger from their writer. The best policy now was to rattle him by giving them maximum publicity. In reply to a barrage of questions, he stated their contents, and gave the details of Rosemary Gillard’s attempted suicide and her rescue by Bill Sandford, adding that a further development was imminent. This handout was received with vociferous gratitude, one of the newsmen haring to the Ambercombe call box, while the other hastily photographed Bill Sandford in conference with the frogmen, while hovering for an opportunity to interview him. Meanwhile the crowd of onlookers grew rapidly, but was firmly kept back by the Westbridge police.

  Once started, operations moved rapidly. A searchlight was directed onto the water at a spot indicated by Bill Sandford. One of the frogmen entered the water, submerged, and a couple of moments later reappeared, indicating that the beam of light should be moved slightly to the left. He emerged to report that the body on the bottom was weighted down by a rucksack full of stones. There was a tense interval during which this was detached and brought out, slimy, dripping and weed-encrusted. Pollard and Toye superintended its envelopment in polythene sheeting and transfer to the van. A tense hush descended on the waiting crowd at the entrance to the quarry. The ambulance manoeuvred forward, blocking the view and causing some murmurs of indignation, and a stretcher was taken to the water’s edge. Finally the frogmen brought out their nightmare burden, which was hurriedly covered and hustled into the ambulance as the newsmen’s cameras clicked from the nearest sanctioned vantage point, and Inspector Frost cleared a passage through the onlookers.

  The underwater investigations continued. Pollard and Toye, who had exchanged a quick triumphant glance at the sight of a disintegrating brown and white check shirt as the body was brought out of the water, waited hopefully. The frogmen submerged again to search the bottom of the quarry pool. In a relatively short time a pair of heavy walking shoes packed with stones was brought to the surface. Finally and unexpectedly a gun was found embedded in the bed.

  ‘A Colt .38,’ Pollard said, examining it. ‘We’ll get it cleaned up, but I don’t think the serial number’s likely to be on the police list of legally owned firearms in these parts.’

  The return to Westbridge was followed by intense activity. An urgent post-mortem on the body was arranged. Preliminary forensic tests on the rucksack, the remains of the shirt and the threads found in the thicket were put in hand. The mud and weeds encrusting the shoes were carefully removed, preparatory to identifying the make of the latter. Pollard reported briefly to his Assistant Commissioner’s office and held a press conference at which he succeeded in being wholly non-committal on the possible connection between Ethel Ridd’s murder and that of the man found in the quarry pool. Finally he rang the hospital and learnt to his relief that Rosemary Gillard’s condition was satisfactory, and that he would be able to see her on the following morning. These matters having been attended to he sat down to a hasty meal with Toye. For a time they ate in silence.

  ‘Frenzied activity without progress,’ Pollard suddenly remarked.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Toye replied. ‘Your hunch that it was blurting out about the hiker and not the chalice that did for Ethel Ridd has paid off all along the line. The chap must’ve been a threat to somebody in the place. Once we get him identified we’ll be more or less home and dry.’

  ‘My next hunch is that it’s not going to be all that easy to get him identified. Remember that the Missing Persons Register didn’t help? And it’s going to be one hell of a job to prove where local people were all that time ago.’

  ‘Thinking of George Aldridge?’ Toye asked.

  ‘Yea. I can see him now sitting in that pretentious back room office of his, sweating like a pig. Let’s go and look up your notes.’

  They returned to their room at Westbridge police station and spent some time discussing the record of their interviews with the two Aldridges, finally making out a timetable of George’s alleged movements on the afternoon of Wednesday 19 November:

  1.30 p.m. Leaves fruit depot at Marchester. (Salesman’s evidence.)

  2.00 p.m. G.A. claims to have left depot.

  2.30 p.m. G.A. claims to have arrived in Pyrford.

  2.50 p.m. Arrives in Pyrford. (Martha Rook’s evidence.)

  3.00 p.m. Snip van arrives. (Martha Rook’s evidence.) Aldridge’s van driven into yard and doors closed.

  3.45-6.00 p.m. Stores checked and put away. (Statement made by both Aldridges.)

  6.00 p.m. Shop closed. (Martha Rook’s evidence.)

  6.30 p.m. Aldridges’ supper. (Statement by G.A.)

  ‘So what?’ Pollard remarked, after studying the document critically. ‘Aldridge is a liar, of course, and a fairly incompetent one at that. He couldn’t have got back to Pyrford from the centre of Marchester in half an hour, to start with. He’s got a good half-hour not accounted for. Pity the Marchester chaps don’t seem able to pick up his trail after leaving the depot. Then there’s a good deal of this that hangs on Martha Rook’s unsupported statements. Personally I shouldn’t think she’d miss a trick, but she surely can’t have sat glued to her window from one o’clock to an unspecified time after the bus from Marchester decanted her pals at half past six. What about going to the loo then making a cup of tea? We’d better see her again, and risk her talking and putting Aldridge on his guard. And the Snip driver, too. Was Aldridge really there all through the delivery of the stores?’

  Toye agreed that these enquiries ought to be made. ‘Trouble is the timing, as we’ve seen all along. We accept that Aldridge couldn’t have got to Ambercombe before Ridd. Martha Rook’s definite that he drove into Pyrford in his own van at 2.45 or a shade later. I can’t believe he could have driven it up to Ambercombe while Snip was delivering stock with
out her noticing, let alone murdered Ridd and got back again within the hour, to put it away in his yard just after 3.45, as Martha Rook says he did.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ Pollard said, leaning back in his chair and frowning in the effort of concentration, ‘quite apart from sitting on the vicarage stairs with half a brick until Ridd conveniently turned up. The later time, after Snip had gone, is slightly less improbable, but there we’re up against the unlikelihood of Ridd leaving the locking-up until it was close on dark, and how the hell could he have known that she was going to, anyway? It’s not a cast iron alibi, but not far short of one. I’m banking everything on getting some definite lead out of Rosemary Gillard tomorrow morning. By the way, we might look through her satchel while we’re waiting to hear something from the pathologist bloke doing the P-M.’

  They examined the contents of the satchel thoroughly, but found no direct reference to the events behind the notes. Pollard was interested in various items in a rough notebook. There were a number of names and obviously fictitious addresses in remote parts of the world. A series of drawings showed a figure of indeterminate sex escaping from a prowling beast. Wish-fulfilment symbols, poor kid, he thought. He glanced through exercise books. The work in them showed intelligence but was wildly variable in standard, as frequent comments in red emphasised with asperity.

  Later a preliminary report came through from the pathologist.

  ‘The chap was between forty-five and fifty-five,’ Pollard told Toye on ringing off. ‘He was about five foot eight and rather lightly built. Shot in the back of the head and dead before going into the water, somewhere between fifteen and twenty months ago. We’ll get more details tomorrow morning.’

  Chapter 11

  ‘We’ve got the bullet out,’ the pathologist told Pollard on the following morning. ‘It’s .38 calibre and in fair condition, but whether you’ll be able to prove it came from the gun is another matter.’