Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  ‘Yes?’ he said dully.

  ‘I’m enquiring into the death of Mary Gedge.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Weston bent his head again. His hands kept at work, unscrewing and tightening the same nut on the carburettor.

  ‘Mary was a friend of yours?’

  The boy hesitated. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, we knew each other. We grew up together.’

  ‘Did you go out together?’

  There was a toot from a car in the forecourt. Weston hurried out to the pumps, wiping his hands on an oil-browned rag.

  Sergeant Tait followed him and stood watching. The boy kept his head down while he was serving, speaking as little as possible. He was personable, discounting the occupational dirt on his overalls, but his appearance was marred by his hands. They seemed disproportionately large for his slim body: ugly, roughened and reddened by weather and work, permanently grimed at the knuckles and finger-joints and round the nails.

  Weston returned to the Chrysler he was working on. ‘What do you want, then?’ he muttered.

  ‘To ask when you last saw Mary Gedge.’

  It was impossible to tell whether the boy reddened, but his jaw tightened suddenly. ‘Thursday,’ he muttered. ‘When I went to the shop.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘Oh—just before half-past six. I locked the pumps a bit early because I was single-handed. When I went to the shop, Mary was serving.’

  ‘And you talked to her? What about?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Nothing special.’

  ‘I see. Well then, what did you do after that?’

  The boy straightened, and for the first time looked Tait in the eye. ‘Came back home, had a wash, got my tea. Ate it.’

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘’Course not. Mum and Dad have gone away, though, to Halifax for a wedding.’

  ‘And after you’d had your tea?’

  Weston ducked back under the bonnet of the car. ‘Went to Breckham. Went to the main Leyland dealer for some spares.’

  ‘What time did you leave here?’

  ‘About eight, I suppose.’

  ‘A bit late in the evening to go getting spares.’

  ‘They stay open until nine. Anyway, they know us, and I’d rung to say I couldn’t get away any earlier.’

  ‘You’d arranged to go into Breckham Market that evening, then?’

  Weston made a non-committal noise. Exasperated, Tait grabbed him by the collar of his overalls, hauled him out from under the bonnet and pushed him upright against the side of the car.

  ‘I’m not playing games, sonny,’ he warned, disregarding the fact that Weston was several inches taller. ‘This is an official enquiry, and I want to hear your answers. I asked whether you’d made an arrangement to go into Breckham Market on Thursday evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you take Mary Gedge with you?’

  The boy’s forehead was almost as red as his cheeks. ‘No,’ he mumbled.

  ‘That’s odd, then, isn’t it? Because Mary was seen in Breckham about half-past eight. She hasn’t a car, so someone must have given her a lift. Was it you?’

  Weston shook his head.

  ‘Speak up!’

  ‘No,’ said the boy hoarsely.

  ‘You’re lying, aren’t you? You’re trying to cover something up! What did you do to Mary?’

  ‘Nothing!’ His face was bleak with misery. ‘I didn’t touch her. All right, I gave her a lift into Breckham and back, but that was all.’

  ‘And back? You brought her back? What time?’

  ‘Oh—I picked her up in Mere Road about nine. She’d wanted to take back a book that the school headmaster had lent her. She did that while I collected the spares. We got back into the village about half-past nine, I suppose.’

  ‘It doesn’t take half an hour to drive from Breckham Market to Ashthorpe.’

  ‘I used the back way, same as I did going. I came back by Fair Green and Lillington, and then round through Dunham and up the Heygate.’

  It meant nothing to Tait. ‘Where’s the Heygate?’ he demanded.

  ‘Why, here.’ The boy pointed through the window of the workshop to the narrow road that joined the main village street just between the school and the garage; the quiet road that Tait and the chief inspector had walked along the previous day, the road that led along the back of the Gedges’orchard, close to Mary’s caravan.

  ‘Oh yes …’ Tait looked hard at the boy. ‘And why did you choose to come that way?’

  Richard Weston stood with his back pressed against the car, exactly where Tait had put him, his big hands dangling by his sides, his face wretched. ‘Because it took longer,’ he blurted out. ‘Because I wanted to be with her as long as possible.’

  ‘Did you go into Mary’s caravan?’

  ‘No, of course not. I just dropped her there, by the little gate.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I came home.’

  ‘But you saw her again later? You arranged to meet her later on, either that night or early next morning?’

  ‘No! I told you. I left her at her gate. Then I came home and went to bed.’

  ‘And can you prove that? Was anyone here when you came home?’

  ‘Well, no … I told you, Mum and Dad are away.’

  ‘Look at me!’ Tait commanded. ‘Do you know anything about the death of Mary Gedge?’

  Tears filled the boy’s eyes. He dashed them away with the back of one big ugly dirty hand. ‘No! Of course I don’t, it was an accident.’

  Tait shook his head, slowly. ‘No it wasn’t, it was murder. And it looks as though you were the last person to see her alive. So lock up your pumps, Dickie-boy, you’re coming with me to the station.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  The interview between Chief Superintendent Mancroft and Mrs Gedge had gone as Quantrill had predicted. She had accepted the news that her daughter had been murdered with a steely resignation, informing the policemen that God moves in a mysterious way. And on the subject of the bonfire, she reiterated that nothing she had destroyed had been of any conceivable interest to the police.

  The chief superintendent was unable to disprove her statement. Finding, as Quantrill had found, that it was impossible adequately to combine reproof with compassion, he had retreated to investigate a more brutal murder in Yarchester, leaving the chief inspector in charge again.

  Quantrill left his hat in his car and walked in sunlight from Manchester House towards the village green, glad to have an opportunity to think quietly about the case. The almost total absence of evidence was its most frustrating aspect. Tait had reported having seen the marks of car tyres in a patch of roadside mud by the bridge; Quantrill himself had seen a bunch of wild flowers, gathered at about the same time as those that had floated round Mary’s body, lying on the steps of the war memorial; and there was the pencilled D on Mary’s calendar against the first of May. But there was no proof that any one of these facts was in any way connected with the girl’s murder.

  There was no proof of anything, except that she had died at the hand—literally at the hand—of a right-handed person. And all the suspect Ds were right-handed.

  Quantrill paused at the memorial. Now that he knew that it was murder, he saw less significance in the bunch of buttercups. The flowers were still there, their petals fallen and faded, the leaves shrivelled. There was no litter on the steps this morning, but the maltreated wreath of British Legion poppies was lying face down on the grass some yards away. Quantrill conscientiously picked it up and replaced it on the steps.

  He had tried not to think of Jean Bloomfield all morning, but he saw her as soon as she emerged from her yellow front door. He stood quite still, watching her from under his eyebrows, holding his breath, assuming that she was going to get her car out or walk to another part of the village. Instead, she walked towards him.

  He went across the grass to meet her. She was wear
ing pale green trousers, a long-sleeved cream shirt, a darker green scarf knotted at her throat. From a distance, apart from an understandable stiffness in her walk, she looked as though she had recovered from her weariness of the previous day; but at close quarters, the smudges of sleeplessness round her eyes were deeper and darker, the lines on her face more obvious. But still she looked beautiful. Quantrill felt uncouth, adolescent, unworthy; and somehow he would have to break the news to her that Mary Gedge had been murdered.

  ‘Good morning!’ Her voice had an artificial lightness, at odds with the heavy eyes. ‘It’s very good of you to keep our green tidy—as you see, we’re not strong on civic pride in Ashthorpe. But I’m afraid you’ll find it a full-time job.’

  ‘I’m beginning to realise that.’ He tried to match her lightness, surreptitiously wiping his palms on the seat of his second-best trousers.

  She walked on past him, and shook her head over the litter surrounding the public bench. ‘When I came to live here, I tried hard to keep the green tidy. I used to trundle out with broom and barrow every Saturday morning. Now—’ she shrugged. ‘Now, I’ve admitted defeat. I’ve given up trying.’ She looked at him, attempting a smile. ‘So it’s very good of the head of Breckham Market CID to make up for our shortcomings. I watched you out here yesterday evening, clearing the litter off the war memorial.’

  So she had seen him, though he’d looked in vain for her. ‘Oh, I like a place to be tidy,’ he said off-handedly. He sought for a tactful way to introduce the name of the murdered girl: ‘I believe that the Gedge on the memorial is Mary’s great uncle.’

  ‘Yes—she told me about him after she’d seen some of those harrowing television documentaries about the First World War. Apparently he was just eighteen when he was killed.’

  Quantrill hesitated. No, he couldn’t tell her out here on the village green that Mary too, at eighteen, had been killed. It would be too public. Easier to tell her the news indoors; easier to offer her solace. He asked if she could spare a few moments to talk about the girl.

  ‘Of course. As a matter of fact, I came out to ask if you’d like to have coffee. Oh, before we go in, I might as well finish the public-spirited work you began.’

  She went to the memorial, gathered up the dead flowers from the step and carried them along the road to the litter bin. Quantrill watched her, regretting that she made a habit of wearing either trousers or long skirts. Such a waste, with legs like hers; but at least she looked good in trousers, unlike most women of her age.

  A middle-aged woman who should have known better than to wear trousers was making a portly approach on a bicycle with large wheels. There was no other traffic on the road at that moment, and as the women passed each other Quantrill saw them nod in cool acknowledgement, and heard the greeting they exchanged.

  ‘Good morning, Daphne. Lovely day.’

  ‘’Morning, Jean. That it is.’

  The cyclist came on, giving Quantrill a stare as she passed. He knew her instantly: the one who had tried to barge into Mr Gedge’s shop while he and Tait were there yesterday afternoon, the one who had overheard a conversation in the shop the previous evening between Mary Gedge and Miller. Mrs Daphne Bullock, of Back Lane, Ashthorpe, who fed her husband on bacon and tinned rice pudding … How the devil, thought Quantrill sourly, did she come to know Jean Bloomfield well enough to call her by her first name, while he had never yet found the courage to do so?

  The women were of the same generation, it was true; both in their forties, although Mrs Bullock was certainly the senior. But that alone wouldn’t put them on first name terms—unless of course they had grown up together. And Jean had referred to herself as a Suffolk village child.

  Quantrill joined her as she walked back towards her house. ‘I didn’t realise that you came from Ashthorpe,’ he said.

  She looked surprised. ‘How did you come to know that?’

  ‘Oh, a policeman’s nosey guess, I’m afraid. I heard that woman call you Jean, but you were obviously acquaintances rather than friends, so I thought that perhaps you knew each other as children.’

  ‘Yes, we did. My family lived here for about three years during the nineteen forties. Daphne was one of the big girls at the school—I can remember her as an alarmingly well-developed thirteen-year-old, while I was an undersized eight. I was terrified of her.’

  He grinned. ‘I’m not surprised, after the earful I heard her give Mr Gedge yesterday. Did you know him when you were a child too?’

  ‘Yes—he used to serve in the shop until he went into the army. But I doubt if he remembers me, and he’s certainly far too shy and polite to call me anything other than Mrs Bloomfield. Most of the other people I knew as a child have moved away, or died. It’s a very different village, now.’

  They reached Coburg House. Jean Bloomfield led the way down the hall towards the smell of freshly made coffee. The kitchen was a comfortable room of the kind that Quantrill liked, with modern pine furniture, pots of plants, and a cat asleep on a cushion on an old Windsor armchair. Molly liked her kitchen to be streamlined, hygienic; she discouraged sitting about in it, most of all by the cat.

  Jean poured coffee from the percolator, which had been glugging quietly to itself as they came in. He looked away from what she was doing, disturbed by the fact that her hands were shaking as much as they had been the previous day. Then, he had attributed it to tiredness and shock. Now it began to seem like a permanent manifestation of stress.

  ‘I like your house,’ he said quickly. ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘About eighteen months. When I first went to Breckham I lived in a modern flat, just by the river. It was very pleasant, and convenient for school, but when I heard that this house was up for sale I couldn’t resist buying it. Do you know, it was my great childhood ambition to live either here or next door. My father was a farm worker. We used to live in one of the slummy old Ashthorpe yards—where the post-war council houses are now—and my mother came here to do the charring. I thought of these houses as mansions.’ She sat on the bench by the table. ‘Do sit down. Move the cat, if you’d prefer the armchair.’

  The cat, a Cyprus, was curled tight. A segment of yellow eye, luminous in the dark-striped fur, indicated that it was aware of the intrusion and did not wish to be disturbed. Quantrill sat down elsewhere.

  ‘And you enjoy living here?’ he asked. ‘Has it risen to your expectations?’

  Her eyes were dark with disillusion. ‘Does anything, ever? Oh, I certainly enjoyed redecorating and furnishing the house, and I had great hopes of being happy here. To be back in Ashthorpe seemed like a homecoming. The years we spent here when I was a child were the best we had. For once my father got on with the farmer he worked for, and there was plenty of overtime so money was easier. We had three happy years. Then my eldest brother was killed in 1945, and it broke the family up: my mother refused to believe that he was dead, my father started drinking again and lost his job, and mother finally took me to live with her sister. Things were never the same after that. But I’ve always thought nostalgically of the Ashthorpe years, and I suppose I imagined that I could recapture some of that happiness by coming back.’

  ‘It doesn’t do, to go back,’ observed Quantrill, who had never had reason to try.

  ‘So I realise. At the time, though, it seemed a good idea. I’d been so distressed by my husband’s death that for years I couldn’t settle anywhere. But he was a Suffolk man—Bloomfield’s as old a Suffolk name as Quantrill, isn’t it?—and we’d talked about returning one day to East Anglia. I was delighted to be appointed head of Breckham girls’grammar school, and then to find this house for sale. I really thought that life might begin again. Instead, it all seems to be falling apart.’

  She turned away to find a cigarette, and lit it before Quantrill could produce his lighter.

  ‘But you’ve still got the house,’ he argued, ‘whatever happens to the job.’

  She shook her head slowly, speaking with her back to him as she went
to open the window. ‘The house hasn’t been a success,’ she said. ‘This has always been a family home, you see. It’s bigger than it looks—and what do I want with four bedrooms and two attics? I feel lost in it. I’ve hated living here alone.’

  Her shoulders were downcurved. It occurred to Quantrill, for the first time, that a woman in a position of authority and responsibility, who lives alone in a small community where social life is geared to families or couples, must almost inevitably feel lonely.

  But loneliness is not exclusive to women. And you can be just as lonely, he knew, inside marriage as out of it. Lonelier, sometimes.

  He put his coffee mug on the table and stood up, calculating the distance between them. Three strides, and he could put his hands on her shoulders. Three strides, and they could both begin to put an end to loneliness.

  And to his marriage. And to his job.

  To hers too, probably. Small communities demand high moral standards, especially from those they isolate socially.

  She moved away from the window, and Quantrill sat down abruptly. She returned to the bench. The cat raised its head an inch, opened both eyes sufficiently to survey her vacant lap, and took a considered decision to stay where it was.

  ‘You wanted to talk about Mary?’ she said.

  Quantrill jerked his mind back to his job. ‘I’m afraid I have some distressing news—’ he began.

  She spoke as gently as if she were comforting him. ‘I know. It’s all right, I do know. Mike Miller rang me this morning. He’d heard it on the local radio programme—the police suspect foul play, he said.’

  Solace was not, after all, going to be required. There would be no excuse now for taking her in his arms. He’d let the opportunity go for good, and he didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry.

  ‘It does look like murder, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘The pathologist found that she’d been deliberately drowned. But—as you thought—there was no trace of drink or drugs, and she hadn’t been assaulted in any way. As murders go, it wasn’t a violent one. She’d have died quite quickly, I imagine.’