Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Sheila Radley
Dedication
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Chapter Twenty Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty One
Chapter Thirty Two
Chapter Thirty Three
Sheila Radley
The Chief Inspector's Daughter
Sheila Radley
Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.
She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.
Dedication
For Grace
LOCAL AUTHOR MURDERED
Jasmine Woods, the well-known novelist, was found dead yesterday morning at her isolated Suffolk home, Yeoman’s, near Breckham Market. The body was discovered by Miss Alison Quantrill, who has for the past six weeks been working as the novelist’s secretary. Miss Quantrill, younger daughter of Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, head of Breckham Market CID, was not available yesterday for comment. A police spokesman has confirmed that the incident is being treated as murder. A man was at divisional headquarters last night, helping police with their enquiries.
Chapter One
‘Anthrax,’ thought Douglas Quantrill gloomily as he watched his daughter step down from the London train wearing a coat of shaggy hide that looked as though it had been transferred half-cured from a particularly unsavoury Afghan goat.
Alison, the younger of his daughters, had always been Quantrill’s favourite. Knowing that she needed a new winter coat, he had given her part of an income-tax rebate as an unusually generous combined birthday and Christmas present, with instructions to buy herself a sheepskin. What he had had in mind was the kind of sensibly English fleece-lined suede jacket that he had recently bought his wife; he might have known, he sighed to himself as he turned up his raincoat collar against the February sleet and began to tramp down the long platform, that Alison would go for something more outlandish and impractical. It was unbecoming, too: she was small, and the combination of the over-long shaggily lined coat with the straight hair that fell over her downcast face gave her the sad appearance of a neglected Skye terrier.
A male fellow-passenger helped her with her luggage, and Quantrill saw her push aside her dark hair and dredge up a smile of thanks with obvious difficulty. Now she stood waiting for her father, forlorn, surrounded by the suitcased remains of her bid for independence.
Quantrill sent his heart out to her, and hurried after it. From behind him he heard the thump of footsteps, and a fit-looking middle-aged man passed him in a burst of speed, one hand hoisting an umbrella, the other outstretched. A fair girl of Alison’s age came running up the platform to meet the man, and they embraced enthusiastically.
‘Daddy!’
‘Darling – lovely to see you!’
‘Great to be home again. Are you and Mummy well? You look well – oh, it’s good to come home!’
They moved past him towards the exit, beaming fondly at each other under the umbrella, arms entwined, and Quantrill felt a touch of irritable envy: greetings were less ostentatious in his family.
He came up to his daughter, smiled at her, and bent to press his mouth shyly and awkwardly on her cold cheek. ‘Hallo, Alison.’
She returned an equally unpractised filial kiss: ‘Hallo Dad.’
He was shocked by the thinness of her face and by the huge melancholy of the eyes that were green as his own. He longed to be able to hug his daughter as that other father had done – as he himself had done when his children were small. But as the girls had grown, so a reserve had grown up on both sides; on their mother’s side, too, because Molly was from a family as traditionally undemonstrative as the Quantrills. Embraces and endearments between adults, he reflected, seemed to come more naturally to established middle-class families than to uneasily indeterminate ones like his own. A pity, but there it was; too late to try to do anything about it now.
He seized the two large suitcases and set off down the platform, turning his head to make a conventional enquiry. Breckham Market station is on the main line from Liverpool Street to Yarchester and the journey from London takes less than two hours, but Quantrill was so firmly rooted in Suffolk that he could never rid himself of his childhood impression that London was a distant foreign country.
‘Did you have a good journey?’
Alison pushed a strand of damp hair out of her eyes. ‘Yes, thanks,’ she murmured listlessly. Her coat had a single inadequate fastening and she clutched the edges together, shivering in the stinging wet wind.
‘Good!’ Quantrill heard the false heartiness in his voice and moderated it slightly. ‘Well, we’ll soon have you home.’ He nodded to the ticket collector at the exit— ‘’Evening, Jack’; ‘’Evening, Mr Quantrill’ – and hurried down the station steps and across the coal sidings to the car-park. Alison trailed behind, burdened less by a bulging hessian bag that carried fin-de-siècle advertisement for French bicycles than by her own unhappiness.
As he drove off, with the wipers working overtime, Quantrill turned up the car heater. Then he glanced sideways at as much as he could see of his daughter’s profile behind the dark fall of her hair. ‘I’m glad you’ve come home,’ he said gently.
She closed her eyes and nodded, not trusting herself to speak until she had pressed the side of her knuckle hard against her set lips. Then she said in a taut voice, ‘I suppose Mum thinks the worst?’
Her supposition was right, but Quantrill temporized loyally. ‘Your mother’s been very worried,’ he said. ‘It’s only natural – we both were. We could tell from your letters that som
ething was amiss, but we didn’t know what … We’d have liked to help, if only we’d known how …’
Alison gave a small, bitter laugh. ‘There was no way you could do that, either of you.’ She turned towards her father, lifting her chin proudly. ‘I’m not pregnant, you know. Haven’t ever been. There are no … complications for Mum to have hysterics about. If the neighbours ask, I’ve decided to come home for a bit – that’s all anyone needs to know.’
‘That’s all anyone will know,’ Quantrill assured her, trying to disguise his relief. ‘And your Mother and I are both very pleased to have you back.’ He opened the window of the car a little to disperse the rank smell that was rising from Alison’s wet coat. ‘A quiet rest at home will do you the world of good.’
She shook her head. ‘No – I don’t want to hang about brooding. I’d like to get a job as soon as possible. Any chance, do you think?’
‘Sure to be.’ Quantrill was proud of his younger daughter’s five ‘O’and one ‘A’levels, her ability to audio-type with conscientious accuracy, and the secretarial job she had had at the BBC ever since she first went to London, eighteen months ago. ‘Any local employer will jump at the chance of having a secretary with your qualifications and experience. Not that you’re going just anywhere, mind – I’m not having you in one of those factory offices up on the industrial estate. I’ll make a few enquiries in the town first: the district council offices, perhaps, or one of the banks …’
Now that Alison was safely beside him, neither aborted nor pregnant, Quantrill felt almost light-hearted. He had, during the last few weeks, worked up such a hatred against the unknown man who was causing his daughter’s unhappiness that he had been shocked by the realization of his own capacity for violence. It was one thing to acknowledge, as he did freely and frequently, that policemen are human beings and as prone to criminal impulses as anyone else; quite another to realize that if he were ever to meet this man he would almost certainly want to inflict grievous bodily harm on him. And Quantrill was afraid of violence. Not of getting hurt, because that was an occupational hazard, but of losing his temper; of losing control and lashing out blindly, ferociously. That was one of the ways that could lead to murder.
But now, with Alison home, he felt that his double burden – an uneasy conscience as well as concern for her welfare – had been lifted. True, the poor girl seemed heartbroken; but nineteen-year-old hearts, he thought confidently, mend with surprising speed.
‘And you’ll soon be able to pick up your social life again,’ he said. ‘All those old school friends—’
She shrugged. ‘Most of the ones I’m in touch with are away, at college or in London or nursing or something. Anyone who’s still in Breckham seems to be either engaged or married already, and in the circumstances—’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Quantrill hastily. And then he had an idea: ‘I don’t think you’ve met my sergeant yet, have you? Martin Tait – one of the bright boys, university and police college and all that; twenty-five, and he’ll probably make superintendent by the time he’s thirty. Pushy, of course, and a bit too pleased with himself, but he’s a good detective: doesn’t miss much. You must meet him, and see whether you like him.’
Alison shook her head. ‘No thanks,’ she said bleakly. ‘I’ve gone off men.’
For his part, Detective Sergeant Tait was very much in favour of women. He was talking to one now, in the course of his duties; and a duty that entailed sitting in an armchair in front of a log fire, watching an attractive unattached woman refill a china cup with China tea must, he thought, be one of the best available.
‘You were lucky, of course,’ he said, referring to the subject of his visit, while his sharp blue eyes missed nothing at all. About five foot four, he estimated, a height that made his own five eight-and-a-half comparatively tall; slim-hipped in dark-blue cord trousers, but with an interestingly feminine outline under her sweater and a dramatic confusion of Victorian rings on her small, square hands. Thick dark hair curved and swung against her high-boned cheeks as she moved her head, and from under strongly marked eyebrows her grey eyes assessed him in return, without embarrassment, as she handed him his tea. Thirtyish, he guessed; a good age for a woman. Young enough not to have lost any of her attractiveness, but experienced enough to enjoy an affair without getting emotionally involved. A very promising discovery, late on a cold wet February afternoon.
He took his cup from her. ‘Thank you. As I was saying, you were lucky not to have been bashed on the head when you heard the noise and came downstairs to investigate. Not many burglars are gentlemanly enough to clear off empty-handed once they’ve broken in – and I see from the report the constable made this morning that you keep a number of small valuables in the house.’
She smiled with pride and pleasure: ‘My two collections – jade and netsuke. Would you like to see them?’
She had a good voice, too: warm and slightly husky, as though from cigarette smoke, although she was a non-smoker. ‘Watch your head on the beams,’ she advised him, as she led the way across the large low-ceilinged room.
The house, which she called Yeoman’s, had obviously been converted at considerable expense from a many-roomed sixteenth-century farmhouse. The major part of the ground floor had been gutted, leaving lines of three or four timber uprights standing exposed in unexpected places, like well-scraped spare ribs. One end of the long room was occupied by a massive chimneypiece of soft rose-red local brick, and the log fire burned deep in its centre. The room was furnished with antiques, a great many books and a comfortable variety of chairs. On the oak floorboards was a cream double-knot Bokhara carpet. There were some modern paintings, one a rural primitive, one a stylized early Hockney; a stereo record-player occupied one area, a Bechstein upright another. The affluence of the owner was evident, but deliberately understated. The predominant impression was one of casual comfort. The only flowers were from the garden; a few snowdrops, standing on a desk in a pottery egg-cup, their white petals arching over the writing paper like miniature art-nouveau table lamps.
In an alcove was an illuminated display cabinet. Tait stood at her shoulder while she unlocked it with a key she took from her trouser pocket. There were no more than twenty pieces in the cabinet, all small, some tiny; he bent his head to look with wonder at an intricately carved ivory monkey, five centimetres long.
‘These are my netsuke,’ she said. ‘Incredible, isn’t it, that they should have been so completely undervalued as works of art?’
‘Incredible,’ agreed Tait knowledgeably, brushing an irritatingly boyish wedge of fair hair off his forehead with his fingers. He knew nothing at all about netsuke and was completely unfamiliar with the word as she pronounced it – something Russian, he surmised. He was always ready to absorb new information, but he preferred to do so without revealing his ignorance; and enthusiasts, he knew, once prompted, could always be relied on to tell him as much if not more than he wished to learn. His eyes flicked over the illustrated books on the nearest table, and found a useful title: Netsuke, the Miniature Sculpture of Japan. He shrugged. ‘But then, I imagine that the Japanese simply took them for granted,’ he murmured.
‘Very much so. After all, they were functional pieces, and it seems that the craftsmen who made them ranked very low in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Japanese society.’ She placed on the palm of her hand a tiny wooden tortoise, every scale on its neck and toes distinct, and stroked it lovingly with the tip of her finger. ‘Just imagine, though – how could a man regard something as beautiful as this as nothing more than a toggle to hold his purse and tobacco pouch on to the sash of his kimono? And then simply to throw it out, when it became fashionable to wear Western dress at the end of the last century … Apparently netsuke could be bought by the bucketful in bric-a-brac shops in Tokyo before the last war.’
‘Rather more pricey now,’ Tait suggested.
‘And rapidly increasing in value,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘I started my collection – oh, ten years ag
o. These are particularly good examples but I paid less than ten pounds for most of them, sometimes less than five. Now they’re collected all over the world, and they’re fetching four-figure sums in salerooms. I started the collection simply because I loved them, but—’ she looked up at him with a grin ‘—I have to admit to a nasty streak of commercialism. It’s comforting to know that my accountant reckons they’re a much more interesting financial reserve than Krugerrands.’
Impressed, Tait did a rapid assessment of the contents of the cabinet. ‘And these?’ he asked, pointing to some small carved stones on the second shelf.
‘That’s my Chinese jade – purely decorative pieces, and correspondingly more valuable. I had to pay a few hundred for each of these, and now they’re worth several thousands. But aren’t they beautiful?’ She touched a cream-coloured pendant, carved with a three-clawed dragon among clouds.
Tait blinked at what he estimated to be twenty or thirty thousand pounds’worth of Oriental handicraft. ‘I thought jade was green,’ he commented, trying to sound off-hand.
‘Only some of it. Emerald green like this—’ she picked up a tiny pendant carved with gourds, bamboo and plum blossom ‘—was one of the favourite colours, but jade goes from almost pure white – like this kitten with a butterfly on its back – to this mottled amber horse.’
She replaced the pieces with loving care. ‘I suppose I ought really to keep them at the bank,’ she said, ‘but there are limits to my commercial instincts. I love looking at them, and touching them; and then, they’re an incentive to keep me at work. Ever since I started writing, I’ve bought myself something special and beautiful with the advance on each book. Then, when I get depressed because I write romantic fiction instead of straight novels – I did write one, but couldn’t get it published – I can tell myself that something good comes out of my work, apart from the money to pay the bills.’
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