Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  Chief Inspector Quantrill, having made up his mind to the visit, marched determinedly across the daisied green, crossed the narrow unmade access road, passed Saxe Villa and came to a halt at the yellow door of Coburg House. Detective Sergeant Tait, his arms filled with folders, stood a pace behind and watched with amusement as Quantrill smoothed down his hair, adjusted his tie and buttoned his jacket before ringing the bell.

  ‘You know Mrs Bloomfield, sir?’ Tait probed politely.

  ‘Yes—she was headmistress of the girls’grammar school while my daughters were there. She was very kind to them. I was a sergeant at the time, divisional crime prevention officer, and Mrs Bloomfield invited me to give a talk to the sixth form.’ Quantrill eased his collar and rang the bell again. ‘She said the talk was very good,’ he added defensively.

  ‘Does her husband work locally?’ enquired Tait, all blue-eyed innocence.

  ‘She’s a widow,’ said Quantrill shortly.

  ‘Ah.’ Tait sucked in his cheeks to hide his grin. ‘An elderly lady, I imagine?’

  Quantrill saw from the corner of his eye that Tait’s lips were twitching, and glowered; there were clearly going to be drawbacks to having a sergeant who didn’t miss much. ‘She’s out, anyway,’ he said with regretful relief. He lingered for a moment on the doorstep and a spare ageing man, straight-backed but just beginning to weaken at the knees, emerged from the door of Saxe Villa with a straw shopping basket in his hand.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he called across the narrow intervening side gardens. ‘Mrs Bloomfield is out.’

  The policemen left Coburg House and joined the man on the access road. His vertically creased face had a yellowish tropical tinge and he spoke in a dry, gravelly voice, as though he were permanently thirsty.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ Quantrill replied pleasantly. ‘County police, just making some routine enquiries. Do you happen to know whether Mrs Bloomfield is likely to be back this afternoon?’

  The man’s cloudy eyes brightened, as though even a routine police enquiry had added zest to his day. He stood taller. ‘M’name’s Finlay,’ he said briskly. ‘I haven’t actually spoken to Mrs Bloomfield since she returned this morning from her holiday, but I saw her go out just after two o’clock. Wearing tennis clothes, so I imagine she won’t be away long. Does that help at all?’

  Quantrill smiled at his keenness. ‘Very much, thank you, sir. We’ll come back later, then.’

  ‘Can I be of any help with your enquiries?’ Mr Finlay offered.

  ‘I’m afraid not—it’s a matter of finding the addresses of some of Mrs Bloomfield’s pupils.’

  Mr Finlay nodded glumly, knees going again, the zest departing from his day. ‘Yes, I see. Well, I’m sure Mrs Bloomfield won’t be late. I was surprised that she’d want to go out playing tennis so soon after she got back from France, but obviously her holiday must have improved her health. And then, of course, she’s young … I only wish I had her stamina.’

  The policemen thanked him and walked away. Tait’s grin broadened. ‘Do you play tennis yourself, sir?’ he asked with wicked courtesy.

  Before Quantrill could make an appropriately forceful reply, a police van came bucketing up the dirt road behind them. Pc Godbold put his head out of the window.

  ‘Been trying to contact you, sir. We’ve found the sandals—in that muck just above the bridge, where you suggested. And Mrs Gedge has identified them as Mary’s.’

  ‘Both sandals?’ Tait asked, disappointed.

  ‘Both.’ Godbold was relieved, thinking that Tait’s theory had been demolished. ‘And they’re definitely Mary’s, because she’d put her initials on the inner sole.’

  ‘Good,’ said Quantrill. ‘Thank you very much, Charlie, that’s a great help. I don’t think we’ll need you any more. Well—’ he turned to Tait, relief in his own voice. ‘So there’s no reason why Mary couldn’t have walked down to the river on her own. Took her shoes off when she got there, balanced them on the parapet, perhaps, while she picked flowers, and a passing vehicle knocked them off.’

  Tait was unimpressed. ‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘On the other hand, the fact that she was wearing shoes doesn’t prove that she was alone, or that she didn’t go by car. After all—’

  ‘I know,’ conceded Quantrill. ‘We still haven’t accounted for her movements after half past seven last night.’

  He paused for a moment. They were just passing the war memorial, a tall granite cross erected on an octagonal stepped base, which stood on the edge of the green a few yards back from the main road. The names of the fallen in two world wars were incised on the shaft of the cross, and a wreath of British Legion poppies, battered after a winter of exposure and of mishandling by village children, leaned crookedly against the upper step. Beside it lay a bunch of wilted buttercups.

  Quantrill picked up the flowers. They flopped over his hand, as wild flowers do when they have been gathered and left waterless in the sun for several hours. By tomorrow they would be dead. He held them for a moment, thinking that they must have been gathered at about the same time as the ones that had floated round Mary Gedge’s body; but then, there were buttercups asking to be gathered on the roadside verge just opposite the memorial. He replaced the flowers tidily.

  ‘All right,’ he said to Tait, ‘we’ll go and see whether Mary’s brother knows what she was doing last night.’

  They collected the chief inspector’s car from outside Mr Gedge’s shop and drove to the address that Godbold had given them. Derek Gedge lived with his wife’s family in Jubilee Crescent, a row of terraced houses that had been erected to commemorate the twenty-fifth year of the reign of King George the Fifth by a local council which had more concern for keeping down the rates than for the convenience of its tenants. The houses in Jubilee Crescent had been built with neither bathrooms, kitchen sinks nor indoor lavatories. But Ashthorpe was now high on the council’s list for the provision of twentieth-century plumbing, and it had begun to seem possible that the tenants might be able to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of George the Fifth’s grand-daughter by walking to the privy in the rain without getting their feet wet.

  The houses all had large well-kept gardens, with flowers and grass in the front and vegetables at the back; with one exception. Quantrill, remembering Godbold’s description of the Pulfer family, made unerringly for the house whose front garden was a wreckage of rank grass, rubbish and weeds. He was not surprised to find the garden ornamented by a rusting bicycle, upside down, tyre cover off and inner tube hanging limp, abandoned half-way through some long-ago repair operation.

  The most prominent feature of the garden was, though, a pram. It stood near the front door, vibrating with sound; from its interior, a fruity masculine voice belted out a pop song with a crashing drum and guitar backing. The policemen peered suspiciously into the pram and found it occupied by a toddler, flushed but soundly asleep, with a transistor radio for company.

  Tait was appalled. He put his hand out to the radio, but Quantrill pulled him back. ‘When they’re asleep,’ he advised with paternal wisdom, ‘leave’em alone.’

  Tait shrugged, and pressed the front door bell. He heard no ring, and banged the knocker.

  A thin ginger woman, with prominent eyes in a flat round face and a small turned-down nose, peered at him owlishly through a narrow gap between the door and its frame. ‘If you’ve come about the rent,’ she said, ‘it’ll be paid right up next week.’

  ‘We’re police officers,’ said Tait briskly. ‘Is Mr Derek Gedge here?’

  The woman opened the door further and stuck out her head, goggling with interest. ‘What’s he done?’ she shrieked. ‘What’s he gone and done?’

  ‘Nothing, as far as we know,’ said Tait. ‘We’d just like a word with him. May we come in?’

  The woman looked disappointed. She opened the door wider. ‘Suit yourselves,’ she said. ‘Derek’s at work, though. Here, mind our Kevin’s motor bike.’

  Quantrill would have preferred to ask directi
ons to her son-in-law’s place of work, and leave; he’d met plenty of families like the Pulfers. But Tait was eager to see the kind of life that Derek Gedge had settled for as an alternative to Cambridge. He followed Mrs Pulfer into the main room of the house, where a gleaming Japanese motor cycle stood just inside the door.

  The room was hot. Despite the warmth and brightness of the day the window was closed and a fire burned in the hearth. The room was littered with discarded clothes, abandoned newspapers and grubby soft toys. There were greasy plates on the table, and the smell of chips and vinegar lingered on the air. A plump girl of about twenty sprawled on the settee, wearing jeans and a thin sweater of knitted material that revealed only too clearly that she was not wearing a bra. She was flicking through a magazine called True Confessions.

  Tait sized her up. She had lovely hair, red rather than her mother’s shabby ginger, and full pouting lips. No wonder Derek Gedge had been attracted.

  Aware of Tait as he was of her, the girl pretended to ignore him. She got up from the settee, pulled her sweater modestly down over her hips so as to make her nipples even more prominent, went to the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette. As she turned her back, the men saw the message patched on to the well-filled seat of her jeans: ‘Make love not babies.’

  ‘A bit late for that’, thought Quantrill caustically. Poor Derek Gedge … the girl’s mouth reminded him of the big devouring lips of one of the occupants of his son’s tank of tropical fish. He averted his eyes with an effort and, since Tait seemed to be temporarily silenced, spoke to the girl’s mother.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Pulfer, but we thought your son-in-law might be at home today. I believe he works at the old station—can you tell me where that is?’

  Interest replaced disappointment on the woman’s face. She pushed her small beak confidentially up towards the chief inspector. ‘Oh, he knows about his sister, if that’s why you’ve come. He heard it at work and biked back specially to tell us at dinner time—only we knew, of course, her-next-door heard it at the butcher’s.’

  ‘But he went back to work?’ Tait asked.

  Mrs Pulfer’s eyes rounded in incomprehension. ‘Nothing for him to stop away for, was there? No sense in losing pay. Mind you, he was upset, eh, Julie? Couldn’t fancy any dinner. Still, he was a bit off colour this morning, couldn’t eat his breakfast neither. He’s got a weak stomach, Derek has. Up with it half the night. Julie’ll tell you.’

  Julie, having lost Tait’s interest, had flung herself back on the settee and picked up a copy of Intimate Stories. She inhaled deeply, and tapped ash from the end of her cigarette on to the floor. Mrs Pulfer fumbled in the pocket of her ginger-brown cardigan, pulled out her own packet of cigarettes and tucked one into her mouth with a pecking motion of her head.

  ‘’Course,’ she went on, ‘—chuck us your matches, Julie. Ta—we’re sorry about Mary. Wouldn’t have wished it on her for the world, but there … Fell in the river and drowned while she was picking flowers, Derek said.’ Her unlit cigarette waggled with amusement. ‘Picking flowers, I ask you, a girl of her age! But then, that’s just about typical of Derek’s sister, eh, Julie? Turned eighteen and still at school, I ask you!’

  ‘Did Mary come here to visit her brother yesterday evening?’ Tait asked.

  Mrs Pulfer was so indignant that she let the match burn out in her fingers. She snatched the cigarette from her mouth. ‘Did she …? You must be joking! That Mary’s never been here in her life—too stuck up to visit us, wasn’t she, Julie? Julie’ll tell you—just the time of day if we happened to see her in the street, that’s all we got from Mary Gedge, just as if we hadn’t been related at all.’

  ‘Perhaps they met somewhere else,’ suggested Tait. ‘After all, they had a lot in common.’

  ‘What would they want to meet anywhere else for?’ demanded Mrs Pulfer, her flat face blank. ‘If they’d got so much in common, why couldn’t she come here? I’ll tell you why, we weren’t good enough for Mary’s precious brother, that’s why. Not that I believe in speaking ill of the dead, but she tried to persuade Derek not to marry our Julie, I know that for a fact. The cheek of it, when my poor daughter was expecting his baby—’

  She paused to concentrate on lighting her cigarette. From outside, the music from the transistor was augmented by a loud wailing. Mrs Pulfer nodded vigorously, coughing over the smoke and pointing to the window. ‘Derek’s boy, her own nephew, that poor little child out there is—eh, Julie? But his own aunt didn’t care tuppence for poor little Jason. Fatherless, that innocent child would have been, if Mary Gedge’d had her way. Julie’ll tell you.’

  Julie yawned delicately, arching her back and eyeing Tait. He ignored her. She shrugged, smiled to herself, moistened her full lips with the tip of her tongue and cuddled down with a copy of True Romances.

  Quantrill asked the way to the chicken factory and quickly left the house, pausing as he reached the noisy, shaking pram. Its occupant, a little over a year old, was sitting up; nappy steaming, eyes screwed tight, face crimson, mouth cavernous, apoplectic with misery. The chief inspector bent down, grimacing over the long-forgotten ammoniac smell of wet nappies, and snapped off the transistor. The child stopped crying instantly, closing its mouth and opening a pair of eyes that were, like its hair, almost black—considerably darker than any eyes or hair the men had seen so far on either side of the family.

  They returned to the car. ‘My God, what a set-up,’ said Tait. ‘Are you still on the girl’s side, sir?’

  ‘Poor silly young Gedge,’ Quantrill agreed. ‘Ten to one the kid’s not his.’

  ‘It’ll be interesting to see how he’s taken his sister’s death,’ Tait said. ‘You turn left here, and then keep straight on through the village, past the police house.’

  ‘I know,’ snapped Quantrill, ‘I heard what she said, I’m not deaf.’ And then, remembering the advantage Tait had taken of him on account of Mrs Bloomfield, he made a jocular attempt to redress the balance. ‘And not blind, either. No wonder Julie’s had the men after her—she’s quite a piece, isn’t she?’

  Tait wrinkled his nose fastidiously. ‘Did you think so, sir? Not my kind. She smells like a dirty ashtray.’

  Quantrill drove in heavy silence to the site of the old railway station.

  It was a mile out of the village on the Lillington road, the back way to Breckham Market. The railway line had been abandoned so long ago that sugar beet grew where the track must once have been. A gang of freelance beet-hoers, their cars left by the roadside, worked their way across the field chopping out the weeds that threatened to smother the young plants. As they bent over their hoes, they reverted to an age-old stance; no longer unmistakable citizens of the last quarter of the twentieth century, but archetypal agricultural labourers in a landscape.

  In the middle of the beet field, the old station buildings stood in an isolated cluster, all smoke-stained brick and ornamental barge-boarding. The former station yard was crowded with cars and lorries, some of which were stacked high with wire crates containing what Tait assumed to be dead chickens; white feathers and yellow claws protruded from between the wires.

  The policemen walked past what had been the booking hall and waiting rooms, now occupied by the office staff, and made for the centre of activity, a former engine shed. It blared at them, loud with canned music and shouted voices and the hum of extractor fans.

  At one end was an unloading bay. As they approached it, one of the lorries backed in and three or four youths began unloading the crates of chickens, heaving them from hand to hand and finally banging them down at the back of the ramp, where they were wrenched open one at a time.

  A whistling youth thrust his hand into a newly-opened crate and dragged out a crumpled bundle of feathers. To Tait’s surprise and disgust, the bird was alive. It squawked and flapped in its moment of freedom from confinement, but the youth promptly seized its legs and swung the bird upside down, shackling its claws with nonchalant expertise on to the clips of a conveyor c
hain that moved at shoulder height into the engine shed.

  ‘Enough to turn you vegetarian, places like this,’ Quantrill said gloomily into Tait’s ear. His work in rural police divisions had taken him often enough into slaughterhouses, but he had never overcome his sense of depression at their sights, their sounds, their smells, their frighteningly casual doing-to-death. ‘Ah, that looks like the foreman.’

  They approached a harrassed-looking man in a long white coat and a white trilby hat. He scowled at them over the clipboard he was writing on.

  ‘County police,’ said Quantrill briskly. ‘We’d like a quick word with Derek Gedge, please.’

  The man’s scowl deepened. ‘Why—has he done anything?’ he demanded. ‘Because if it’s just about his sister, he knows. One of the girls in the office had a phone call this morning from her mother, and I passed the news on to him. I offered him the rest of the day off, but he knows we’re short-staffed and he said he’d go on working.’

  ‘We’d still like a word,’ said Quantrill.

  ‘The line’s running,’ objected the man. ‘He’s on the killing machine—I can’t stop the whole line, we’re behind as it is.’

  Quantrill disliked having to pull his rank, but there were times when it was undeniably useful. ‘Chief Inspector Quantrill,’ he said quietly. ‘Will you get someone to take his place in the line, please. We sha’n’t keep him long.’

  The man looked taken aback and turned away quickly, shouting instructions above the din. In a few moments, a young man came towards them. Like the other workers he wore rubber boots, a long white coat and a white cotton cap; like theirs, his whiteness was fouled. There was blood all over him, blood on his face, blood on his cap, blood on his coat, blood on his hands.

  Chapter Eight

  Quantrill kept his eyes steadily on Derek Gedge’s, trying to ignore the splatter of blood on the young man’s forehead and the chicken down that clung to his unkempt hair. Like his dead sister, Derek was blond and blue-eyed; like hers, his features were attractively regular. But he looked unwell: his face was pale and moist, his eyes heavy.