Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  ‘Yes.’ His voice was strained, his eyes dull. ‘I can’t tell you anything about her death,’ he added thickly. ‘My mother says that you think she killed herself because of me, but it’s not true, I swear it isn’t.’

  ‘And how do you know that?’ asked Quantrill quietly. ‘Were you there when she died?’

  Kenward sat slowly upright. His eyes seemed to focus on the chief inspector for the first time. ‘No!’ he protested. His cheeks began to redden. ‘No, of course I wasn’t! I tell you I don’t know anything about her death. It’s just … incomprehensible.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Quantrill sat back, pulled open the drawer of the table and found a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. He pushed them across to Kenward, who hesitated before lighting a cigarette with shaking hands and puffing at it inexpertly. He was right-handed.

  ‘Let’s talk about Mary’s life instead,’ said Quantrill kindly. ‘You were friends?’

  ‘Yes. Well, that is—until a few weeks ago.’

  ‘And then you quarrelled? What about?’

  He went sullen. ‘I’d rather not say.’

  ‘A lovers’quarrel, perhaps?’

  Kenward looked up, his eyes hot with anger. ‘We were not lovers. We were in love, yes, but not lovers. There is a difference, you know.’

  Quantrill acknowledged it. ‘You and Mary were in love until a few weeks ago, and then you quarrelled. Does that mean that you stopped loving her?’

  Kenward stared down at his cigarette. ‘No,’ he said. The word was barely audible.

  ‘You’d have liked to make up the quarrel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You tried to make up the quarrel?’ The boy was silent. ‘Come on,’ said Quantrill, ‘I need an answer. What did you do—ring her? Call at her house? Write to her?’

  ‘Wrote,’ Kenward muttered.

  ‘And did Mary reply?’

  He shook his head.

  Quantrill lit a cigar for himself. ‘When did you last see Mary?’ he asked conversationally.

  Kenward stirred in his chair and puffed and shrugged. ‘At the end of last term,’ he said.

  ‘Did you see her yesterday?’

  ‘No! I told you, I haven’t seen her since the end of last term.’

  ‘What were you doing last night?’ Kenward’s hand stiffened in the act of tapping his cigarette over the ashtray. ‘When, last night?’ he temporised.

  Quantrill sat forward in his chair. The constable turned over a page of his notebook and held his pen poised. ‘Last night,’ said Quantrill distinctly, ‘between eight forty-five and six o’clock this morning.’

  Kenward screwed his cigarette into the ashtray, shredding a good inch of tobacco. ‘I was bird-watching,’ he said defiantly. ‘In Lillington woods.’

  ‘Alone?’

  The boy tugged at his moustache. ‘With my friend Colin Andrews,’ he said.

  Quantrill made no comment. He stared hard at Kenward, who moistened his lips and looked away. Presently the chief inspector said, ‘You wanted to marry Mary Gedge, I believe?’

  Kenward’s blue eyes darkened with misery, but his voice was still defiant: ‘Is there anything wrong with that?’

  ‘A bit premature, perhaps?’ Quantrill suggested. ‘As you’ve said, you weren’t lovers. There wasn’t the—the usual reason for a hasty marriage.’

  Kenward looked at him with disdain. ‘I didn’t want a hasty marriage. I wanted to marry Mary because I loved her—but I don’t suppose you’d understand that.’

  ‘Oh yes, I understand it. You loved Mary so much that you wanted to be with her all the time. I know exactly how you felt. It’s only natural.’ Quantrill got up from his chair and stood looking down at the boy. ‘But I don’t see that marriage would have achieved that, do you? Your mother told me that you’re going to Manchester university. Mary was going to Cambridge. Were you intending to give up Manchester to be with her? Or did you expect her to give up Cambridge to be with you?’

  Kenward shrugged. ‘We couldn’t have got married right away,’ he admitted. ‘But we could have been engaged.’

  ‘For three years! Is that what you wanted Mary to do, to promise that she’d marry you in three years’time? No wonder she fell out with you! Everyone tells me that she was looking forward to Cambridge because she wanted to spread her wings a bit, meet new people, make new friends. Of course she didn’t want to be tied to a local boy-friend. An attractive girl like Mary would have had no difficulty—’

  Quantrill stopped speaking. He looked down at Dale Kenward’s bowed head. ‘That was it, then, was it?’ he continued softly. ‘You wanted to get engaged because you were worried about the competition—you were afraid that she’d fall in love with another man?’

  Kenward lifted his head. Tears had begun to gather on his thick dark eyelashes. ‘How could I trust her to choose the right friends?’ he gulped. ‘You know what it’s like at Cambridge—far more men than women. I was afraid it would go to her head. She was so lovely, and so unaware. She’d have been picked up by some older man, she’d have been used and then just pushed aside. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. So I decided that if we were engaged, it would keep the others away.’

  The chief inspector nodded slowly. He looked hard at the desperate, immature face, trying to gauge what extremity Dale Kenward’s love for Mary Gedge might have driven him to. ‘But Mary wouldn’t agree to marry you …’ he said. ‘I can understand how you must have felt. So what happened last night, Dale? You and Mary met, and discussed it? And you decided that if you couldn’t have her, no one else would? Is that what happened?’

  Dale Kenward looked up, frowning. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  The chief inspector loomed over him. ‘I think you do,’ he said heavily. ‘Let’s stop pretending, Dale. Where were you last night?’

  ‘Bird watching.’ But he said it without much conviction.

  ‘And who with?’

  ‘Colin Andrews.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, boy. You told your mother that you were going out with Colin, but we’ve checked. He was with another friend until ten-thirty, when he went home to bed. So where were you last night?’

  Kenward pulled agitatedly at the hairs of his moustache. ‘All right, I wasn’t bird watching. But I wasn’t with Mary—I didn’t see her.’

  Quantrill stared at him with hard green eyes. ‘Did you kill Mary Gedge?’ he asked.

  Kenward’s jaw dropped. ‘Kill her? For God’s sake—what are you telling me? You mean she was—?’

  ‘Murdered,’ Quantrill confirmed. ‘The girl you wanted to marry, the girl who didn’t want to marry you, was deliberately held under water until she drowned. So I’ll repeat my question: did you kill Mary Gedge?’

  Dale Kenward’s face had paled to a dirty grey. His mouth opened and closed again. He began to rise, put out his hand blindly towards the table for support, missed it and collapsed in a heap of dark hair and brown suede at the chief inspector’s feet.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Quantrill went out into the corridor. A fair-haired, uniformed, early-thirtyish policewoman was approaching briskly, and she gave a conspiratorial grin as she saw him.

  ‘I was just coming to have a word, sir. Councillor Kenward’s at the desk, and rather anxious to speak to you.’

  Quantrill pulled a lugubrious face. ‘That’s all we need … His son’s just fainted in there.’

  The policewoman raised an elegantly shaped pair of eyebrows. She had a solid chin but attractive brown eyes, and she knew how to make the most of them. ‘From guilt?’ she asked.

  ‘I wish I knew. Can you get him a glass of water, Patsy? We don’t want Councillor Kenward accusing us of police brutality—oh lord, too late!’

  A short square sandy man was steaming angrily down the corridor, while the desk sergeant hovered and gestured ineffectually in his wake. ‘Inspector Quantrill,’ the man boomed, ‘I demand to see my boy.’
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  Quantrill blocked the passage. ‘Chief Inspector now, sir,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Your son is helping us with our enquiries.’

  Councillor Kenward inflated the hand-stitched lapels of his checked suit. His cheeks were a strong mottled red, and his breath smelled of whisky; if the man became too obnoxious, Quantrill reflected, he could always have him followed and done for driving with excess alcohol in his blood.

  Kenward senior snorted his contempt. ‘You haven’t any right to bring the boy here behind my back,’ he asserted.

  ‘Your son is eighteen years of age, sir,’ Quantrill pointed out, ‘and he came here voluntarily.’

  ‘And he’s going voluntarily an’all.’ He raised his volume. ‘Dale! Where are you?’

  A groan came from the interview room. Quantrill beat Councillor Kenward to the door by a nose, but was too late to prevent him from seeing a large constable thrusting Dale’s head between his knees.

  For a few moments the small room was in an uproar. The councillor jumped and bellowed with rage, demanding his solicitor, invoking the chief constable and the Daily Mirror, threatening instant dismissals from the police force. Wpc Patsy Hopkins, returning with a glass of water, exercised her eyebrows at Quantrill; she found the DCI considerably more attractive and agreeable than his uniformed counterpart.

  ‘Who does he think he is,’ she murmured, as Councillor Kenward stamped on the floor in his fury, ‘Rumpelstiltskin?’

  Quantrill, who had been brought up on Grimm’s fairy tales, gave her an appreciative grin. She blushed, and went to deal more charitably than usual with the small group of women referred to scathingly by Breckham Market people as ‘the overswill’, who invariably celebrated the end of their factory working week and gave themselves the courage to face the quietness of the rural weekend by getting drunk.

  The chief inspector waited diplomatically until the councillor was exhausted and his son had come round. ‘I just fainted, Dad,’ the boy mumbled through lips that were still white, ‘it’s all right, I just fainted.’

  Councillor Kenward sat on the other chair, mopping his face with an ostentatiously silk handkerchief. ‘And what did they do to make you faint?’ he growled.

  ‘I told him that his friend Mary Gedge had been murdered,’ intervened Quantrill.

  The boy’s father looked astounded. ‘Murdered—the girl Gedge?’

  ‘Yes sir. That’s the subject of our enquiry.’

  Councillor Kenward looked in horror from the chief inspector to his son. ‘He didn’t do it,’ he said flatly. ‘He didn’t do it.’ He glared at Dale, his reddened watery eyes suddenly bulging: ‘Did you do it? Because by God if you did—’

  He was out of his chair and had seized his son by the suede lapels before Quantrill could stop him. Dale turned his head aside, but made no attempt to break his father’s grip. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake …’ he said weakly, ‘of course I didn’t. I loved her—can’t any of you get that into your thick heads?’

  His father released him abruptly and shook a stubby, sandy-haired finger in the boy’s face. ‘Now, less of that,’ he said. ‘Less of your lip. Come on, you’re coming home.’

  Dale Kenward turned to Quantrill. His face was still pale, and he had begun to shiver. ‘How did it happen?’ he whispered. ‘Please tell me, I’ve got to know.’

  Quantrill looked at him impassively. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘She was held under water until she drowned.’

  Dale Kenward swallowed. ‘She wasn’t—I mean …’

  ‘No,’ said Quantrill.

  He could swear that the look of relief on young Kenward’s face was genuine. ‘But you still haven’t told me,’ he added sternly, ‘what you were doing last night. Your son,’ he informed Councillor Kenward, ‘lied to me. He said at first that he was bird-watching with a friend all night. Now he’s admitted that it’s not true. So where were you, Dale? Who were you with?’

  The boy lifted his head proudly. The colour had begun to return to his face. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said. ‘I was doing nothing illegal, but I can’t tell you what it was. I swear, though, that I wasn’t with Mary and that I know nothing about her death.’

  His father stared at him, simmering; Quantrill stared at him, rubbing his chin. There were tears in the boy’s eyes but his look was stubborn, unwavering.

  ‘All right,’ said the chief inspector eventually. He turned away. ‘All right, go on home.’

  ‘You’ve finished with him?’ Councillor Kenward demanded.

  ‘For the moment. I shall probably want to see him again.’

  ‘Then you’ll see my solicitor an’all. And I shall be ringing the chief constable about this in the morning, don’t you worry!’

  ‘All that worries me, sir,’ retorted Quantrill, ‘is finding the killer of Mary Gedge. Now if you’ll wait by the desk for a moment, I’ll send a car to take you both home.’

  ‘I don’t want your car,’ Kenward snapped. ‘I’ve got the Merc.’

  Quantrill smiled at him politely. ‘I wouldn’t advise you to drive it, sir, not in your condition … Excuse me, please, I have a lot to do.’

  Sergeant Tait joined the chief inspector in his office.

  ‘The first of the house-to-house reports, sir. Nothing really significant, though one of them is interesting.’ He riffled through the papers he had brought. ‘A Mrs Daphne Bullock, of Back Street—I rather think that she’s the woman who came barging into the shop when we were talking to Mr Gedge this morning. She told Pc Bedford that she went into the shop yesterday evening just after six; Mary was serving Mr Miller, the teacher. They were laughing about something, and Mrs Bullock heard him ask Mary if she’d like a lift into Breckham this morning. She refused.’

  ‘Hmm. Do you know if she gave any reason—said what she intended to do instead?’

  ‘I asked Bedford the same question, and he’d already put it to Mrs Bullock. A bright boy, that. But unfortunately Mary hadn’t given a reason for refusing the lift. Just thanked Miller, and said that she didn’t think she would.’

  ‘I see … Well, if Mrs Daphne Bullock is the faggot we met this morning, I’m not surprised that Mary didn’t want to discuss any arrangements in her hearing. Miller knew the girl pretty well, obviously, and liked her … but with all her private correspondence destroyed, it’s going to be a devil of a job pinning down her friends and finding out what her plans were.’

  ‘I did try Mary’s other Breckham friends earlier this evening,’ said Tait, ‘but none of them saw her yesterday. So Denning, the head master, is still the last person who saw her alive.’

  ‘Yes, but that was at least eight hours before her death, and six miles from where the body was found. No one else in Ashthorpe saw her yesterday?’

  ‘Half a dozen people saw her in the shop, but no one after about six-thirty. Have you seen the boy-friend yet, sir?’

  ‘About half an hour ago.’ Quantrill took a cigar from his tin, looked at it, tasted the staleness of his mouth, and put it back. ‘He’s denied it, of course. Mind, he admitted that he still loved Mary, that he was out all last night, that he wasn’t bird-watching and that he wasn’t with his friend Colin.’

  Tait sat up, astonished. ‘Well—great! What more do you want?’

  Quantrill shrugged. ‘I felt that he was genuine. I’m sure he wasn’t putting on an act. Whatever he was up to last night, I’m prepared to believe—at the moment—that it wasn’t connected with Mary’s death. And I had no reason at all to hold him.’

  For his part, Tait had no reason at all to encourage the chief inspector to wrap up the case unaided. ‘The path, report doesn’t give us much to go on, I agree,’ he said. ‘By attacking her from behind, her assailant made it impossible for her to mark him. All she had under her finger nails was gravel and shreds of river weed.’

  Quantrill looked again at the report. ‘She’d have put up quite a struggle,’ he said. ‘The damage to her finger nails bears that out. The murderer would have had a job to hold her head under water—h
e’d have been soaked in the process. That means he would have returned home sodden and muddy, and possibly trailing river weed. I think I’ll send a Wpc round for a cosy chat with Dale Kenward’s mother in the morning, to check.’

  ‘I doubt whether Derek Gedge’s womenfolk would even see him in the mornings, let alone notice his condition,’ said Tait. ‘They probably aren’t up before he goes to work. He was being taken into an interview room just as I came in, by the way. Do you mind if I have a go at him, sir?’

  The chief inspector looked at Tait’s sharp features. ‘As long as you’re not over-influenced by the man’s job,’ he said firmly. ‘All right, so Derek Gedge is hardened to killing. It’s his trade now. But remember, his sister wasn’t butchered. She must have been killed quite … well, it’s a stupid thing to say, knowing how she would have struggled, but quite mercifully when you think what happens to most girls who are murdered … Come on, then, I’ll sit in with you, I’d like to hear what young Gedge has to say for himself.’

  The chief inspector preceded Tait through the door, and the sergeant scowled at his broad back. Was the old man never going to learn to delegate?

  Derek Gedge, in reasonably clean jeans and a PVC jacket that gave a poor imitation of leather, was sprawled on a chair in the interview room. He looked better than he had looked in the morning. The unhealthy pallor had gone from his face, but his eyes were heavy. He glanced up as the detectives entered the room, and made no attempt to hide his dislike when he saw Sergeant Tait.

  Quantrill sat unobtrusively at the back of the room. Tait stood at the table, opposite Derek Gedge. ‘Detective Sergeant Tait,’ he announced crisply. ‘We met this morning.’

  Gedge tipped his chair back. ‘So?’

  ‘At the time,’ said Tait, ‘Chief Inspector Quantrill and I were making enquiries into the circumstances of your sister Mary’s death.’ He sat down. ‘We are now investigating her murder.’

  The front legs of Gedge’s chair returned to the floor with a crash. He was jolted, literally. ‘Oh my God,’ he said softly, ‘oh no …’ His fair skin reddened to the roots of his blond hair. ‘But it doesn’t make sense … why should anyone want to kill Mary—?’