‘Right. I’ll get the usual notice circulated to antique dealers, asking them to report anyone who tries to sell them netsuke or Chinese jade. Then I’m off to Yarchester to find out what I can from Jasmine Woods’s sister and her husband.’
‘Better see if you can find a WPC to go with you,’ advised Sergeant Tait. ‘Heather Pardoe’s got five kids and another on the way, and I’d hate to think of you being lumbered.’ He turned away, grinning to himself; not hating the thought at all, and betting that he knew which policewoman’s company the Chief Inspector would prefer.
‘We’ll call on Jasmine Woods’s brother-in-law first, Patsy,’ explained Quantrill, driving along the main road towards Yarchester through a lashing of April rain that stopped as suddenly as it had started. ‘She had an entry in her diary that suggested that she might be having supper with them last night, so I want to find out about that. And then we can take him home to break the news to his wife.’
‘Good,’ said WPC Patsy Hopkins. She had a brusque voice and a very firm chin that could give her a formidable, tough-as-a-pair-of-police-boots air; misleading, because nine years in the force had failed to blunt her natural sensitivity. ‘I don’t like having to tell women that their relatives have been murdered. Thank heaven,’ she added frankly, enjoying the company of her favourite senior officer to whom she could talk much more freely than to her own uniformed Chief Inspector, ‘for the Sex Discrimination Act – I really resented the old business of being stuck in a special policewomen’s department, where we were dealing with nothing but women and juveniles. There was so much emotional wear and tear. Give me operational work every time.’
Quantrill grinned. He found her combination of competence and candour very attractive; her smartness in uniform, her smooth fair hair and the length of her legs had never, he told himself firmly, had any bearing upon his good opinion of her.
‘Think yourself lucky you’re in this force, then,’ he said. ‘In some cities, women aren’t being used on beat patrols at night any more, for their own protection. And you know that the Federation want exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act, so that they can keep you out of harm’s way.’
‘Hah! It’s not just our protection they’re concerned about,’ Patsy Hopkins said indignantly. ‘That’s an excuse to try to reduce women’s recruitment. Good grief, if we were afraid of danger we wouldn’t join. Once a woman is trained, she can do just as much as a policeman – more, sometimes. The Federation knows this perfectly well, but some of them are just a bunch of—’
WPC Hopkins made a liberated comment which showed her to be completely unappreciative of the chivalrous instincts of the male members of the Police Federation. Quantrill gave a snort of laughter.
‘You’re obviously not a reader of Jasmine Woods’s romantic novels,’ he said dryly, slowing to a crawl through a village whose ancient gabled houses confined vehicles to a street barely wide enough for one, let alone two lanes of traffic. Pedestrians went sideways, flattening themselves apprehensively against the buildings as massive container lorries, snorting past on their way between the industrial Midlands and the East Coast docks, mounted narrow pavements, gouged holes in plaster walls and sprayed both pedestrians and buildings with puddle dirt and diesel fumes.
‘As a matter of fact,’ admitted Patsy Hopkins, slightly shamefaced, ‘I do read Jasmine Woods. Not that I find much time for reading at all, but when I do I want to get right away from reality; I see enough of that on the job. I like a book with an exotic setting, a fast-moving story and plenty of excitement – and a nice bit of True Love at the end,’ she added, mocking herself defensively. Then she sighed. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it, but I suppose I must really be a romantic at heart. I felt quite upset when I heard that it was Jasmine Woods who’d been murdered – not that I’d ever met her, but I felt as though she was someone I knew.’
‘I did meet her once, a few weeks ago,’ Quantrill said. ‘My daughter’s been working for her, and it seems she found the body.
Alison’s shattered – she was really fond of Jasmine Woods. I liked her too. Shocking that she should come to such a violent end.’
‘Horrible. Symbolic rape, somebody at division said.’
‘Possibly actual as well. We shan’t know that until the pathologist has finished with her.’
‘Oh God …’ said Patsy Hopkins soberly.
They drove the rest of the way into Yarchester without speaking, listening to the radio as it put all patrol cars on watch for Gilbert Smith’s motor cycle.
Chapter Eleven
Paul Pardoe, Jasmine Woods’s brother-in-law, worked for a firm of estate agents whose offices were near Yarchester cathedral. Quantrill parked his car on cobblestones under a row of pollarded lime trees just outside one of the gates that led into the lower end of the cathedral close. He left WPC Hopkins in the car on radio watch and took a short cut, between showers, across a corner of the close. Here, despite the fact that most of the Queen Anne houses once lived in by cathedral clergy had become the offices of solicitors or architects or accountants, there was still an ecclesiastical calm. Traffic was shut out. The great lawn in the centre of the lower close was ornamented by almond trees, whose rained-down pink blossom was spread over the wet grass like sugar icing on the sponge cakes at a mothers’union tea.
Once out of the main gateway, Quantrill re-entered the last quarter of the twentieth century and waited impatiently for the little green man on the traffic lights to allow him to cross the roaring road. The offices of Pardoe’s firm were in a parallel street, once an early Victorian residential area but now the estate agents’ quarter of the city. Nearly every ground floor plate-glass window displayed photographs of small modern houses that looked, and in many instances were, identical with those in the windows of rival firms.
Mr Pardoe was with a client, said the skinny girl at the reception desk. Quantrill took the opportunity of glancing through the firm’s leaflets while he waited. Some of the estate agents in the city were old-established and distinctly up-market, offering country houses at prices that began at £50,000, but Paul Pardoe’s firm appeared to concentrate on bread and butter properties. He was not named as one of the firm’s principals. It was impossible to guess what his income might be, but any man with five children and another on the way would be bound to feel financially straitened. The death of his wife’s affluent sister might well be of considerable advantage to him. It would be interesting, Quantrill thought, to see how he took the news, especially as he had not troubled to conceal from Tait the fact that he disliked Jasmine Woods.
Pardoe’s ‘Come in’ was clogged with food and irritable with incipient dyspepsia. An open plastic container on his desk was filled with waxy white sandwiches, one hurriedly gnawed at.
Quantrill, introducing himself, remembered the long thin face, the dishevelled greyish-fair hair and the look of gloom and harassment. Pardoe, having swallowed what he was chewing, was staring at his visitor uneasily, his mouth partly open.
‘I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?’ he demanded. A paste of masticated bread filled the interstices of his large yellow teeth.
‘I believe so,’ Quantrill agreed, ‘though we didn’t get a chance to speak. I called in on a party given by your sister-in-law at Thirling, about six weeks ago.’
Pardoe’s frown deepened. ‘I didn’t realize you were in the police.’
‘I wasn’t on duty at the time – but I am now, I’m afraid. It’s your wife’s sister, Jasmine Woods, I’ve come to see you about.’
‘Oh yes?’ Pardoe closed his sandwich box and looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got a site meeting out in the country at three, so I can only spare a few minutes.’
‘I think perhaps you’d better cancel the meeting, Mr Pardoe,’ Quantrill advised him. ‘Your wife is going to need you. Her sister was found dead this morning.’
Pardoe’s mouth opened again. His face was so pinched, his eyes so deep set, that it would be difficult for him even at the best of times t
o appear anything but haggard. ‘Jasmine?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Dead – how?’
‘Her body was found in the sitting-room with fatal head injuries. I’m afraid that it was murder.’
‘Oh my God!’ Pardoe rose from his chair in agitation. ‘But that’s… terrible. Why should anyone do such a thing?’ His eyes evaded Quantrill’s, flicking round the small room as though he sought the answer among his plans of cheek-by-jowl housing-estate properties, the first-time-buyer’s dream world that he worked to create. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Jasmine, of all people—’
‘Oh, come now, Mr Pardoe,’ Quantrill pointed out briskly, reserving his sympathy for the man’s wife. ‘It was public knowledge that your sister-in-law was a wealthy young woman. She was known to have some small items of considerable value in her house. Her death is tragic, and of course it’s a shock to you, but it’s certainly not incredible.’
‘Ah.’ Pardoe let out a long breath. His eyes stilled. ‘Yes, now I understand. You mean that she was murdered by someone who was trying to steal from her?’
‘That’s possible. We shan’t know until we’ve completed our enquiries. At the moment I’m trying to trace her movements yesterday, Sunday. According to a note in her diary, she was coming to have supper with you and your wife. Did she come?’
‘No.’ Pardoe walked over to the window and stood there, tall and round-shouldered. He had a large frame, but he was so thin that the seat of his ready made trousers hung in a slack fold below his jacket. ‘No, Jasmine didn’t show up. Apparently she’d told my wife that she might not be able to come – it wasn’t a definite arrangement.’
‘Did she telephone to let your wife know she couldn’t come?’
‘No. Heather tried to ring her, but there was no reply.’
‘What time was that?’
Pardoe’s shoulders twitched, declining commitment. He remained at the window, staring out at the huddle of roofs above which the sunlit spire of the cathedral rose to take a stab at a scudding flotilla of fleece-lined shower clouds.
‘Mr Pardoe!’ Quantrill spoke sharply, and the man turned with obvious reluctance. ‘This is a murder enquiry, and I need an answer. At roughly what time yesterday did your wife try to telephone her sister?’
Pardoe kept his eyes lowered. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I was out on business yesterday.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘It was a private commission, nothing to do with this firm.’
‘I see. What time did you leave home?’
‘Oh … about ten in the morning.’ He moved to his desk, sat down and began to riffle absently through some papers. ‘I had a meeting with an acquaintance who wanted me to do a survey of a house he’d inherited over near Newmarket. I was working out there all day.’
‘And what time did you get home?’
The man hesitated. Quantrill stared hard at him from under his thick eyebrows. ‘I shall need to see your wife, of course, but I don’t want to question her any more than is necessary—’
‘Just before eleven.’
‘At night? You were out for over twelve hours?’
‘It takes a long time to do a full survey – and then there was the journey.’
‘It’s an hour’s drive from here to Newmarket. It might have taken you as much as an hour and a half to get back, allowing for the Sunday evening traffic returning from the coast. You mean that you were still surveying a house at half-past nine yesterday evening – in the dark?’
‘I didn’t say that. I stopped to have a drink.’
‘With your client?’
‘No – he left me after he’d shown me the house.’
‘What time did he leave you?’
‘About midday. I had a lot to do, it wasn’t a social occasion. I worked until the early evening, and then took his keys back to him and started to drive home. But I was tired, so I stopped for a drink.’
‘I see. Mr Pardoe, the direct route from Newmarket to Yarchester passes within eight or ten miles of Thirling. Did you by any chance call on your sister-in-law for that drink?’
Pardoe gave a bitter shout of laughter. ‘Jasmine’s? That’s the last place I’d go to. I stopped at a pub on the main road. I didn’t go nearer to Thirling than that.’
‘Were you on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must have had more than one drink, then, if you didn’t reach home until just before eleven.’
The man’s face was narrow as a nutmeg grater. ‘Yes, I did have more than one drink! And at more than one pub. I can tell you which ones, if you’re interested. Good God, I’d earned the drinks! I’ve no doubt that I was over the legal limit when I finally drove home, and you can book me for that if you want to, but I’m damned if I can see what any of this has to do with my sister-in-law’s death.’
It was Quantrill’s turn to move to the window. One of the clouds had opened and rain had begun to beat against the glass as noisily as flung gravel, but beyond the newly wet roofs the cathedral spire was still sunlit under the weathercock sky.
‘Tell me, Mr Pardoe,’ he said, turning to face the man again, ‘when did you last see your sister-in-law?’
‘At that party, I suppose,’ Pardoe said slowly. ‘She called on my wife about once a month, but I didn’t see her very often.’
‘She didn’t make a practice of coming to supper?’
‘No, thank God.’ Pardoe got up, in the manner of a wooden rule unfolding itself. He attempted to square his sloping shoulders. ‘Look, Chief Inspector,’ he said with grim frankness, ‘you’re bound to find this out, so I might as well tell you now. I didn’t like my sister-in-law. I avoided her whenever I could. That’s why I stayed out last night. There was a possibility that she’d be at my house for supper and I couldn’t stand the prospect of her company, not after I’d been working all day. Do you blame me?’
Quantrill rubbed his chin and thought about his own sister-in-law, a fluffy woman who irritated him immeasurably.
‘I can’t say that I do,’ he concurred. He gave Pardoe a brief, brothers-in-law-in-adversity grin, and the man relaxed visibly. ‘Well, then,’ Quantrill continued, ‘we’d better go and break the news to your wife. There’ll have to be an identification of the body – always a distressing formality.’
Pardoe nodded, brisk, businesslike and unmistakably relieved that he had confessed his ill-feelings towards the dead woman. ‘Yes, of course, Heather will need me. I’ll be with you in a moment – I must just rearrange my site meeting.’ His hand went out to the telephone, but Quantrill interrupted.
‘Of course, if there are any other close relatives I could get them to do the identification. Are there any hereabouts?’
‘There’s an elderly aunt, Mrs Gifford, and her son Rodney. I saw you talking to him at the party.’
‘Ah, yes, Rodney. Any relatives anywhere else? Parents, or other sisters or brothers?’
Pardoe caught the drift of the questioning. He flushed, and his eyes glittered. ‘No,’ he said, his voice taut again. ‘My wife is Jasmine’s nearest relative. But for all I know, she might have willed her money to someone else—’
Quantrill waved aside his protest. ‘Just checking,’ he said equably.
Molly Quantrill put her anxious face round the door of Alison’s bedroom. ‘Is she all right?’ she demanded in a stage whisper, as she brought a cup of tea for the attendant policewoman.
WPC Beth Knowles, startlingly golden-haired, five foot eight, thirteen stone and dying for a cigarette, raised her eyes from the volume she had borrowed from among the faded children’s books lined up on the window sill. The two women looked at the girl, who lay on her side with flushed cheeks and parted lips.
Alison’s eyelids were closed, but they twitched with the rapid movement of her eyes as she dreamed that she fled from blood, screaming a name. From blood and through blood, puddles of it that glued her feet to the double-knotted cream Bokhara that, incongruously, carpeted the garden path. Ahead of her she could recognize th
e figure of a man, and she reached out to him, crying for help. But when he approached, she saw that he was a stranger, and she was afraid. She turned and in despair tried to re-enter the house for safety, calling a name.
‘I think she’s trying to say something,’ said Beth Knowles. She bent over the girl, hoping to obtain some useful information that would give her an excuse to go downstairs to telephone and light up.
Then she straightened, disappointed. ‘It was just “Jasmine”, I think. She’s all right, Mrs Quantrill, don’t worry, I’ll call you as soon as she wakes. Thanks for the tea.’
Molly retreated. WPC Knowles helped herself generously to sugar and settled down again to read Winnie the Pooh.
Chapter Twelve
Chief Inspector Quantrill and WPC Hopkins escaped from the Pardoes’ sitting-room, where Heather was crying noisily on her husband’s thin shoulder while the two youngest children wailed in sympathy, and conferred in the hall. The house was in a substantial mid-Victorian terrace. The hall was a long high passageway, and the coloured glass in the front door gave it the gloomy yellow light that Quantrill always associated with nonconformist chapels. He lowered his voice, and took the precaution of keeping his eyes down too; the hall was perilous with parked skateboards, and twelve-wheeled juggernauts too small to be noticed by anyone above three feet in height.
‘I’m anxious to see Jasmine Woods’s cousin, Rodney Gifford, while we’re in Yarchester,’ he told the policewoman. ‘While I’m doing that, will you arrange the identification of the body with the coroner’s officer? And then I want you to—’
The sitting-room door opened and a toddler was forcibly ejected, his squeals rising like a whistling kettle on the boil. Paul Pardoe looked out into the hall, harassed and apologetic.
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