Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  Sergeant Tait frowned: ‘He’d have had to bend right over … Or kneel. Yes, the water was only about eighteen inches deep, so he’d almost certainly have to kneel in order to keep his balance.’ His face brightened as the solution clicked up on his mental display board: ‘Of course! The murderer’s knees will probably be as badly grazed as Mary’s were!’

  The pathologist grinned at him genially, refreshed by the encounter. ‘That’s what I think, Sergeant Tait. So don’t bother the scientists yet—try one of the old-fashioned methods of detection instead. Get all your suspects to roll up their trouser legs.’

  For the first time in years, Martin Tait felt a complete fool.

  Chief Inspector Quantrill went from the Old Bakery to Manchester House. Mr Gedge was in the locked shop, but no longer trying to work. He sat in his brown dustcoat on the customers’bentwood chair, staring sightlessly at his shelves.

  Quantrill was gentle with him. ‘We’re trying to trace Mary’s friends, you see. You mentioned some names, Mr Gedge, and one of them was Dusty. Do you happen to know who that was?’

  The shopkeeper made an effort to focus on Quantrill’s face. ‘Why, yes,’ he said. His voice was high with stress. ‘Yes, that would be Mrs Bloomfield. The girls at the grammar school always called her that—something to do with a singer, I think. Yes, that’s what Mary told me when Mrs Bloomfield first went to that school. They called her Dusty because her name was like a singer’s, Dusty Springfield.’

  Quantrill was disappointed. So much for the new lead he’d hoped for.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Mary wrote the name Dusty on her calendar for the first of May, so I thought she must have arranged a meeting.’

  ‘Very likely.’ Mr Gedge got up like a man of eighty and shuffled behind the counter to peer at a calendar of his own. ‘That would have been the day Mrs Bloomfield was due back from holiday,’ he said dully. ‘I made a note of it myself because she wanted me to keep some bread for her. I expect that Mary had arranged to play tennis with her, or something like that. They quite often did, in the holidays. Mrs Bloomfield was always very good to Mary.’

  ‘She tells me that she knew you when she was a child,’ said Quantrill, hoping to take the man’s thoughts from his daughter for a few moments.

  ‘Why yes.’ Mr Gedge almost managed to smile. ‘She was about ten years younger than me, but I was friendly with one of her brothers, so I do remember her. Jean Ransome, she was then. Bright as a button, you could see she’d get on in the world. But then, the whole family was clever—four children there were, with Jean the youngest. Her eldest brother, Roy, was killed while they were living here, just before the end of the war.’

  ‘Mrs Bloomfield mentioned him. In the army, was he?’

  ‘RAF. He was a sergeant air gunner. Only a boy really, of course, he joined up straight from Breckham grammar school. Poor little Jean thought the world of him—really hero-worshipped him. It broke her heart when he was killed.’ He looked up. ‘I tell you what, Mr Quantrill: you remember you asked me whether Mary had put a bunch of flowers on the war memorial? Well, she might have and she might not, I don’t know. But it could have been Mrs Bloomfield.’

  ‘Is her brother’s name on the memorial?’

  ‘Yes. He was shot down over the North Sea. I remember we heard about it from a Breckham chap who was the navigator in the same Lancaster. They all baled out and were rescued, except Roy. He got out but caught fire, parachute and all. Went down like a Roman candle going the wrong way, this navigator said. Terrible way to die, poor boy.’

  Quantrill remembered what Jean Bloomfield had said about Mary Gedge’s death: yes, in comparison with some, Mary’s death had been clean and easy. She’d died whole, unspoiled, in the brightness of youth. It was a thought that would do nothing to lessen her father’s grief now, at this moment. But as Jean had said, in time the girl’s parents would find it a great consolation.

  What was it Jean had said that somebody wrote to her after her husband’s death? Something about it being a splendid thing to die so young and clean …

  Jean knew all about grief, and the mastery of it. She’d been through so much herself that she would be the best possible person to console Mr Gedge. Besides, she could use words so well, so much better than an uneducated copper.

  Quantrill muttered an awkward goodbye, and drove back to Breckham Market remembering all the wise and comforting things Jean had said about dying young. And as he thought about what she had said, the frown between his eyes deepened.

  He took the steps to the police station two at a time.

  ‘Is young Bedford in?’ he asked the desk sergeant. ‘Then tell him to go straight round to the library, will you, and see if he can find me anything by or about an American writer who died young, Dorothy Parker.’

  Chapter Twenty Two

  ‘… so I persuaded them,’ said Tait, ‘that if they had nothing to hide there was no reason why they shouldn’t roll up their trousers. I checked them all, Dale Kenward, Derek Gedge, Denning, Dickie Weston and Miller. Not a graze on any of them. But of course, the fact that none of them is marked is no proof that every one of them is innocent—’

  He stopped talking, because it was obvious that the chief inspector wasn’t listening. The old man sat slumped in his chair looking, Tait suddenly realised, like an old man—or at any rate a very much older man than he had been that morning.

  Quantrill pushed aside a half-empty coffee cup and an untouched cheese sandwich. He picked up a library book. ‘Know anything about Dorothy Parker?’ he asked.

  Tait was unwilling to admit complete ignorance of anything between hard covers. ‘Rings a bell, sir.’

  Quantrill opened the book at the introduction. He’d read it three times, and at each reading his depression had increased. ‘Mrs Bloomfield told me about her,’ he said. ‘Dorothy Parker was a brilliant young American writer between the wars, and one of her themes was the desirability of dying young.’

  He looked up at Tait. It was, the sergeant saw, distress that had scored the ageing lines so deeply on the chief inspector’s face.

  ‘I thought,’ Quantrill went on, ‘from what Mrs Bloomfield said, that Dorothy Parker did die young. But she didn’t. She just stopped being a fashionable and popular writer; she reached her peak early, and after that she went downhill. She was lonely and unhappy, and she drank too much. She tried suicide two or three times, but it was only half-meant; she clung on to life as long as it would have her and in the end she died alone in a hotel room, at seventy-three, of a heart attack.’

  Dorothy Parker …? The old man must be going off his head, thought Tait. Well: a vacancy in the division? A reshuffle? Quick promotion to acting inspector for a promising young sergeant? What the hell did Dorothy Parker have to do with anything, anyway?

  ‘Really, sir?’ he said politely.

  The chief inspector sat hunched and brooding in his chair. ‘When we first saw Mrs Bloomfield yesterday,’ he said presently, ‘when she was wearing a tennis dress—did you notice her legs?’

  Martin Tait was not interested in the legs of any woman much above thirty. ‘No, sir. I was looking at Liz Whilton’s.’

  ‘Mrs Bloomfield has very good legs,’ said Quantrill, as if to himself, ‘but I never saw them from the front. She deliberately hid them with her sweater. Since then, she’s been wearing either trousers or a long skirt.’ He looked at Tait. ‘And now you’ve provided me with a reason why a woman with legs as good as hers might want to hide them.’

  ‘Mrs Bloomfield?’ said Sergeant Tait incredulously.

  Quantrill pushed himself heavily to his feet. ‘I don’t know. I can’t be sure. But start checking, will you? Ask the Whilton girl if she noticed anything about Mrs Bloomfield’s knees while they were playing tennis. And get someone to ring Southampton and find out when Mrs Bloomfield crossed the Channel on Thursday, and what time she landed. And tell Godbold to see if he can find out from her neighbour exactly what time she arrived home on Friday morning.’
>
  Tait relinquished his fantasy promotion, and reached for the telephone.

  Mrs Bloomfield was out, but her under-occupied neighbour thought it likely that she would return early in the evening.

  Chief Inspector Quantrill parked his car on the access road near her house, then fidgeted across to the war memorial and passed the time pulling sticky lolly wrappers off the granite. Among the names he revealed was that of Roy Ransome, Jean Bloomfield’s admired brother, who had jumped from his aircraft and fallen, burning, several thousand feet into the sea.

  No wonder she was haunted by a horror of violent death. But haunted to such an extent that she could believe that unnatural death was not, by definition, violent? Haunted out of reason?

  He saw her car approach along the main road. If she were guilty, surely she would want to avoid him?

  She slowed, stopped, got stiffly out, gave him a tired smile. Was he about to make some dreadful, irretrievable blunder? His heart bumped unsteadily, his mouth was dry.

  ‘Still trying to clean up, Douglas?’

  ‘Just waiting to have a word with you.’

  ‘You’d like some tea, I expect.’

  It was not a pressing invitation; rather, Quantrill thought, trying to armour himself against her, a patronising assumption that a policeman must be always on the cadge for free refreshments.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Despite her obvious unease—the air of tension, the restless movement of her hands—she was still beautiful. Too beautiful and too desirable for him to be able to face her in her own home with the questions that he must ask.

  ‘Was it you who put that bunch of buttercups on the memorial?’ he demanded, nervousness making him abrupt.

  For a second she looked startled. Then, ‘Yes,’ she agreed warily.

  He took courage. ‘I have to ask you,’ he said, ‘why you deliberately misled the police: why you said that you travelled overnight from France, when in fact you crossed the Channel on Thursday evening? Why you led us to believe that you got back to Ashthorpe in the middle of Friday morning, when you actually returned to your house very much earlier, just before six?’

  She turned away impatiently. ‘Do such details matter?’

  ‘Yes, if you crossed Ashthorpe bridge early on Friday morning. Did you?’

  Jean Bloomfield said nothing. She lowered her eyes, and closed her lips in a line that, unbecomingly, turned down at each corner.

  Quantrill’s confidence increased, though he took no pleasure in the fact.

  ‘Did you see Mary Gedge when you crossed Ashthorpe bridge? Did you see her gathering flowers, and stop to speak to her?’

  She lifted her head. The lines on her face seemed deeper; her suntan had begun to look an unhealthy yellow. ‘Have you any proof that I did?’

  Quantrill chewed his lower lip. Confidence in his hunch was not the same thing as proof. ‘Do you know anything about Mary Gedge’s death?’ he temporised.

  Her eyes had narrowed, but she continued to look straight at him: ‘What possible reason can you have for imagining that I do?’

  He would have liked to deny his reasoning, to put his hands on her shoulders and reassure her, just as he had done that morning. He recalled the arousing warmth of her flesh through the thin shirt, and the muscularity that had taken him by surprise until he remembered that she was a tennis player.

  For all her thinness, she had strength in that right arm. She could, physically, have been capable of killing Mary Gedge. He felt almost certain that she had killed the girl. But being almost certain was not enough.

  ‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that you must have had some very good reason for misleading the police.’ He looked down at her summery trouser suit. ‘Just as you seem to have some very good reason for keeping your legs covered.’

  Her sun-tan abruptly changed to a darker shade as the blood returned to her skin. Yesterday, or this morning, Quantrill would have attributed her blush to modesty; now it began to seem like an admission of guilt. ‘It was a rough Channel crossing,‘ she insisted. ‘I fell and grazed my legs on a companionway.’

  ‘I’ve heard that’s how you account for it. Is it just coincidence, then, that Mary Gedge’s legs were grazed too, as she was struggling for her life?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She turned away.

  ‘I think you do.’ Quantrill took a deep breath and began to spell out his conclusions. ‘Of course, I can’t say exactly how it occurred, I can only guess—but I don’t imagine that it was in any way premeditated. You happened to be driving home from your holiday, early on the morning of May the first. It was a beautiful morning, and as you crossed Ashthorpe bridge you saw Mary Gedge, on her own in the meadow in her romantic long dress, gathering buttercups. Naturally, you stopped and spoke to her.’

  Jean Bloomfield stood quite still with her eyes lowered. Sunlight shone on her hair, unkindly emphasising the number of silver-grey strands that had infiltrated the ash-blonde.

  ‘I expect you were depressed,’ Quantrill went on. ‘Your holiday was over, you were returning to a job you disliked and a house where you were lonely. But Mary was happy. Seeing her there, in a long dress with her hands full of flowers, made you think of Ophelia; and it reminded you that Ophelia was a victim. It must have made you wonder what life had in store for Mary. After all, even if she didn’t fall in love with the wrong man and become corrupted and die an early death, she was bound sooner or later to lose that radiant happiness. You told me that yourself. Mary was a high-flyer, so she would reach her peak early—perhaps she’d even reached it already. And after that, there’d be nowhere to go but downhill.’

  She shrugged. ‘It happens, of course. Inevitably.’

  He paused. Then, ‘It happened to you, didn’t it?’ he asked softly. ‘You were a high-flyer—you must have been, to work your way from a poor background to Oxford. You must have reached your peak during your marriage—and then your husband was killed, and your world was blown apart. But in those days, you must have been a trier. You picked yourself up, worked at your career, made a success of it and eventually became a headmistress. For a time, when you first bought your house in Ashthorpe, you even thought that you could be happy again.

  ‘But it didn’t last, did it? A man you dislike and despise had been made head of the comprehensive; you’ve been relegated to the middle school, where you’re dealing for the first time with ordinary unacademic children, and you find you can’t cope. You feel a failure, and you’ve given up trying. You know you’re on your way downhill.’

  She had begun to breathe more quickly. Her nostrils arched with disdain. ‘We can’t all be police officers, and start making a success of our careers in our mid-forties!’

  ‘That’s true. But people like me, the Pc Plods of this world—ordinary people—don’t have the same problem as you high-flyers. We’re not brilliant, so we have lower expectations. We don’t climb high in our youth, so it hurts that much less if we fall. We don’t have the same experience of either happiness or hurt. But you’re bound to resent your present life all the more for remembering what you once were, and the happiness you once had.’

  ‘You’ve taken to reading psychology?’ she asked, tight-lipped. ‘Thank you for that analysis.’

  ‘There’s nothing there that you didn’t tell me yourself,’ he pointed out. ‘You also told me that you were glad—for your husband’s sake—that he died young, before he became disillusioned. You’re accustomed to the idea of high-flyers dying young; first your brother, then your husband. In fact, you like the idea of dying young, as long as death isn’t violent. But—along with Dorothy Parker—you think of early death as something for other people, rather than for yourself. For Mary Gedge, say. There she was in that meadow, innocent and happy; and it came into your head that you could be the means of preserving her innocence and happiness for ever.’

  Her face had paled again under her tan, but her head was high. ‘You have no proof …’

  ‘I’ve no proo
f of the way it happened, but I can guess. Perhaps Mary slipped or tripped, and fell in the river face down. It wouldn’t have done her any harm, she could have got up laughing. You must have gone in too, and perhaps you stretched out a hand to help her—your right hand. And then, suddenly, you took it upon yourself to give her what you thought would be a quick and painless death at the height of her happiness.’

  ‘… and you know that you can never have any proof. This is nothing but crude speculation, and there is no reason why I should listen to it. Excuse me.’ She began to walk quickly towards her house.

  She could be right, too. It was by no means certain that forensic would discover anything on the dead girl’s clothing that would identify her assailant. As long as Jean Bloomfield maintained her composure he could not be sure of obtaining sufficient proof ever to charge her with murder.

  But he thought that he knew how her composure could be broken. It was a weapon he hesitated to use, the more so because he had loved her, but it was all he had left. He strode after her, and blocked her way.

  ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said urgently. ‘Something that happened while I was doing my national service. I’ve never told anyone before, but I’d like you to hear it now.’

  Surprise made her stop and listen. ‘I wasn’t an officer like your husband,’ he went on quickly. ‘I was just an erk, an airman, and it happened while I was square-bashing—doing my recruit training.

  ‘There was a boy in my hut, in the next bed to me, called John Sweeting. Well, it was tough enough for all of us in that camp, but anyone with a name like Sweeting went through a special kind of hell. John was small and quiet and sensitive—and some of the drill instructors were real sadists. I used to hear him crying sometimes, after lights out, but I didn’t know how to help him. I’d got problems of my own. And then, to cap it all, he had a letter from his girl-friend saying that she was going out with someone else. Not that I heard about the letter until afterwards. He didn’t tell his troubles to anyone, poor devil.