‘Would you mind minding Ben?’ he asked Patsy Hopkins. ‘Just until my wife gets over the shock …’ He withdrew his head, and she raised an exasperated eyebrow at the closed door.
‘He wouldn’t have dreamed of asking a policeman to do that,’ she asserted. ‘It’s a ridiculous situation. Most of the boys in the force are married and have kids of their own, so they’re a lot more used to dealing with them than policewomen are. Me, I’ve no personal experience with children at all. I don’t particularly like them. I’m a professional police officer, not a nanny in uniform. But neither the public nor the force can get this into their heads. To them I’m a woman, so I’m the one who’s expected to hold the baby.’
Quantrill murmured deviously to indicate that she had his complete sympathy and, mollified, she crouched down to try to soothe the child. Ben Pardoe, rising two, had his father’s dishevelled hair, and a pair of unusually large front teeth. His sobs touched WPC Hopkins’s vulnerable heart, and she sighed and bent to pick him up. He clutched at her immaculate collar with sticky, starfish hands.
‘Yes, well, perhaps you can find a friendly neighbour who will cope with the children for a bit,’ said Quantrill hastily. ‘What I’d like you to do, when you’ve arranged the identification, is to ask Paul Pardoe for a detailed account of his movements last night. The coroner’s officer will give you a lift back to the city police station, and I’ll pick you up from there. All right?’
He made for the door but then, an undeniably experienced father, he remembered that howls are a prelude to dribbles, and that dribble stains are a devil of a job to clean from police uniforms. He fumbled in his pocket, racing the saliva as it gathered on the child’s tremulous lower lip, and produced a large white handkerchief.
‘Here – watch him.’ He strode forward, fielded the toffee-tinted blob as it began to drool down the child’s chin, and thrust his handkerchief into the policewoman’s hand. ‘Thanks, Patsy …’
He escaped, leaving WPC Hopkins to invoke the provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act while she finished mopping up.
Rodney Gifford lived with his mother, Jasmine Woods’s aunt, in a 1930s semi-detached house in Rowan Road, on the northern outskirts of Yarchester. Their house boasted the three essential features of between-the-wars suburban ambition: a front garden with a privet hedge, a wooden gate with an art-deco sunburst design, and a bay window with green and amber leaves in the upper leaded lights.
The front door was opened by a featherweight old lady, sprightly in her late seventies. She peeked up at Quantrill. ‘Mrs Thompson …?’ she asked uncertainly.
The Chief Inspector managed to deny it with courtesy. ‘I’d like to see Mr Rodney Gifford, please. Can you tell me where I can find him?’
She looked disappointed. ‘Oh dear – I thought you might be the new visiting chiropodist. Roddy’s just gone round the corner to the shops, he’ll be back in a few minutes. I’d ask you to come in and wait for him, but he says that I must never let strange men into the house.’
‘Quite right,’ said Quantrill. He saw no reason to alarm her by saying that he was a policeman. ‘I’ll wait in my car until he comes back.’
‘Oh, there’s no need for that,’ she said quickly. ‘We don’t have many visitors and I enjoy a little company. And if you stand under the porch, at least you’ll be out of the rain.’ She gave him an artless smile that revealed orange-coloured false gums above the top set of her false teeth. Her white hair was frizzed out on either side of her face, but it was insufficiently thick to conceal the fact that her ears, like those of her son, protruded at an unusual angle from her head. ‘Roddy won’t be long. He’s such a good boy to do my shopping for me, now that I can’t get about so well.’
‘He’s not working today?’ Quantrill asked.
‘Oh no! Roddy doesn’t work – that’s to say, he doesn’t go out to work. He does it here at home. He’s a famous playwright, you know.’
‘Is he?’ Quantrill leaned against the arched brickwork of the porch, trying to convey that his interest was merely idle. ‘I knew that he was a writer, but I didn’t realize that he wrote plays. You must be very proud of him.’
She nodded, bright-eyed. ‘Very – both of us. His father was alive when Roddy first started writing, of course. I don’t mind telling you that we’d been worried about the boy. He did so well at school and we thought that he’d settle down to a good career – in the bank like his father, perhaps, only with better prospects. But he would go off to London, living in an uncomfortable room and doing nothing but odd jobs, as far as we could make out. Such a waste of his education, we thought. We didn’t realize, you see, that he was busy writing his very first play.’
‘Was it shown on television?’ asked Quantrill, whose acquaintance with live theatre had been limited to an annual visit to the pantomime in his own youth, and again when his children were young; and more recently to dutiful attendance in support of his wife at the performances of the Breckham Market and District amateur operatic society.
‘Oh no – at a London theatre,’ she said impressively. ‘Roddy’s play was all the rage, you know. Everybody talked about it. Well, not everybody in Yarchester, but then as Roddy said, you couldn’t expect them to. It was too advanced for the provinces. But everybody who knew about such things said that it was brilliant …’ She looked a little wistful. ‘I didn’t quite understand it myself, I’m more of a film-goer. I used to be a real film fan in the old days … Robert Taylor, Clark Gable, Paulette Goddard, Bette Davies … they were lovely films, in the ’ 30s. I’d love to go to a cinema again, but I can’t persuade Roddy to take me. He doesn’t like films. Not that it would ever be the same, of course; there’ll never be another Clark Gable.’
Quantrill, whose own mother had been a film fan as a young woman – there had never before been a Douglas in the family, and he suspected her of having had Douglas Fairbanks in mind at his christening, or perhaps at his conception – brought Mrs Gifford back to the subject of her son. ‘You were telling me about Rodney’s play.’
‘Well, I can’t tell you very much about it. I’m afraid I’m not clever enough. I didn’t really enjoy it, to be honest – some of the language wasn’t at all nice. But Roddy explained that it was true to life. Not the sort of life he’d been brought up to, you know, but he said that it was life as most people have to live it.’
‘And he’s been writing plays ever since?’
‘Oh yes – a lot of them. I’ll show you his press cuttings.’ She hurried stiffly to the front room, where Quantrill could hear her muttering to herself and opening and closing drawers. Presently she emerged clutching a folder which she thrust proudly into his hands.
Quantrill glanced through the discoloured cuttings. Most of them dated from the late 1950s, and were play reviews from the Observer and the Manchester Guardian. There was also a feature from the News Chronicle headed, ‘The Angry Generation’, and another from the Daily Express demanding in thick type ‘WHAT HAVE THEY GOT TO BE ANGRY ABOUT?’ Both features linked the name of Rodney Gifford with those of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker.
The reviews were enthusiastic about the message Rodney Gifford had given to the theatre-going public: ‘A savage indictment of the values of the established social order’; ‘Modern life in a new perspective’; ‘Gifford routs Aunt Edna from the theatre’; ‘Gifford excoriates the Establishment’.
The pile of cuttings was impressively thick, but none was dated later than 1964.
‘Extremely interesting,’ said Quantrill. He smiled at the old lady. ‘No wonder you’re proud of your son. He’s still writing, I believe you said?’
‘Yes, of course. That’s his work, you see – his work and his whole way of life, you might say. But there’s a lot of jealousy in the theatre world, and new writers elbowing their way in, and Roddy’s plays have been neglected recently. In London, that is. They’re still performed, though – why, his first play was put on here in Yarchester last winter, by the students at the technical col
lege. I didn’t go myself – Roddy said that I would only be disappointed after the brilliant London performance – but it just shows how highly his plays are thought of. He’s sure they’re due for a London revival, and once that happens—’
She broke off her sentence. ‘There he is,’ she said eagerly, ‘I’ve just seen him going past the hedge. He’ll be able to tell you all about his plays himself.’
Quantrill turned. Rodney Gifford, one-time angry young man, avant-garde playwright and scourge of the Establishment, was pushing open the garden gate. He wore a felt hat that was a little too small for his large head, and a black nylon mackintosh that flapped loosely round his short legs. From his plastic mesh shopping bag there protruded half a dozen sticks of rhubarb roughly wrapped in newspaper. He looked preoccupied, so much absorbed in thought that he failed to notice the Chief Inspector.
‘Rodney!’ piped his mother from the doorway. She gave the Chief Inspector a conspiratorial pat on the sleeve. ‘He doesn’t like me to call him Roddy in front of others.’ She raised her voice again, trying to compete with the noise of the traffic. ‘Rodney dear, here’s a visitor for you.’
Gifford raised his head, making a visible effort to adjust to Quantrill’s presence. He appeared dazed, but at the same time covertly elated.
‘This gentleman,’ his mother continued importantly, ‘has come to talk about your plays.’
‘My plays?’ Gifford focused on his visitor and hurried forward to join him in the porch. ‘Are you an agent?’ he demanded, with a look of sudden hope. ‘A producer? A journalist, then?’
‘None of them – and it isn’t your plays I want to talk about. My name’s Quantrill. We met about six weeks ago, at Jasmine Woods’s party.’
Rodney Gifford’s ears, protruding through the ginger camouflage of hair, went scarlet. His eyes dulled and slid away. ‘Did we?’ he growled. ‘I don’t remember.’
Quantrill wasn’t surprised, considering the man’s condition at the time. ‘I’d like to have a word with you, please. In private, if you will excuse us, Mrs Gifford?’
The old lady had been following their conversation with eager incomprehension. ‘Oh, I didn’t realize that you knew my niece,’ she apologized. ‘If only you’d said! What will she think if she hears that I kept you on the doorstep?’ She scolded herself busily as she beckoned him into the house. ‘I’ll go and make you some tea – yes, of course I will, it’s no trouble at all.’ She peered into the shopping bag that she had taken from her son. ‘Rodney, didn’t you get me the evening paper?’
Gifford shook his damp hat and mackintosh in the porch, then hung them on the hallstand. He tugged down the cuffs of his pullover, hand-knitted in the same sludge-green wool as his mother’s neat cardigan. ‘The papers hadn’t come, Mother, it’s too early. I’ll go for one later.’
‘Thank you, dear.’ She led the Chief Inspector into a sitting room crowded with drab furniture. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she confided. ‘Now, you have your discussion while I make the tea, and then you must tell me how you met Jasmine. Such a charming girl – a good deal younger than Rodney, of course, but there was a big age gap between me and her mother. Jasmine’s a writer, too; it must run in the family. Her work is much more frivolous than Rodney’s, but she’s made quite a success of it in her own way. And although we don’t often see her, she doesn’t forget us. Jasmine always sends flowers for my birthday, and chocolates for me and whisky for Rodney at Christmas. Not that he really cares for alcohol …’
She hobbled away in the direction of the kitchen, and Quantrill and Gifford stood facing each other across a bulbous three-piece suite, still anti-macassared in memory of the Brylcreem that men smeared on their hair in the days when the furniture was new.
Gifford shrugged away his mother’s confidence in his sobriety. ‘Jasmine won’t send any more,’ he said. ‘That’s the last bottle of whisky I’ve had from her.’ He gave Quantrill a narrow look, as if assessing his relationship with Jasmine Woods. ‘She’s dead.’
‘I know,’ said Quantrill. ‘I didn’t want to mention it in front of your mother, but I’m a Detective Chief Inspector in the county police.’
Rodney Gifford sat down more quickly than he had apparently intended, his small body almost bouncing as it hit the metal sprung seat of the armchair. His ears paled; so did the tip of his nose.
‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘I came to Yarchester to break the news to your cousin Heather. As we’d met, I thought I’d call on you on my way back. Tell me, Mr Gifford, how do you know about Jasmine’s death?’
Gifford wriggled forward in his seat so as to be able to assume a small man’s position of dignity, back straight, feet firmly planted on the floor. He pulled from his hip pocket a torn-off and folded front page of the early edition of the Yarchester Evening News, and handed it to Quantrill. ‘Stop press,’ he indicated.
Quantrill sat down and read the smudged type: Jasmine Woods, famous local author, murdered.
‘I heard someone mention it when I got to the newsagent’s,’ said Gifford, ‘otherwise I might not have noticed the stop press item. Mother would have seen it, though, she reads every word. That’s why I had to lie to her about getting the paper – I must break the news to her gently, poor old dear. She thought the world of Jasmine.’
‘But you were of a different opinion, if I remember,’ commented Quantrill drily.
Gifford reddened again. ‘I’ve always been disappointed by Jasmine’s lack of literary integrity,’ he said, obviously choosing his words with care, ‘and I believe I had a drink or two at her party, so I might perhaps have expressed myself rather strongly. But I had nothing against Jasmine herself, nothing at all.’ He bent forward to retie the double knot in his shoelaces. ‘How was she murdered, may I ask?’
‘She was struck on the head by a blunt instrument,’ said Quantrill who, unlike Sergeant Tait, could use standard police phrases without self-consciousness.
‘Death would have been immediate, I hope? I mean, my mother will want to know—’
‘Quite so,’ agreed the Chief Inspector with deliberate ambiguity.
Gifford sat up and nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘A burglar, I suppose. Jasmine was mad to keep her collection in the house, I told her that.’
‘You’re familiar with her collection, Mr Gifford?’
‘Of course. She is – she was my cousin.’
‘Did you visit her house very often?’
‘No.’ Gifford’s tongue flicked across his wide lips but he kept his eyes on Quantrill’s face. ‘I hardly ever went there – I haven’t any transport and it’s all of seventeen miles. But she was showing off her jade and netsuke when I arrived with the Pardoes for her party. That was the last time I saw her. Six weeks ago.’
‘I see. Can you tell me what you were doing yesterday?’
Gifford licked his lips again. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘You surely don’t imagine that I had anything to do with her death?’
‘I need to interview everyone who knew your cousin,’ said Quantrill with stolid patience. ‘Is there any reason why you want to avoid telling me what you were doing?’
Gifford sprang up from his chair and made a stand on the hearthrug with his back to the embroidered fire-screen, feet slightly apart, hands in pockets, head up, ears blazing through his pale ginger hair.
‘None at all,’ he asserted fiercely. ‘I’m avoiding nothing. Yesterday I followed my usual Sunday practice – my mother will confirm that. In the morning I sat in here reading the Observer, in the afternoon I took her by bus to the cemetery to put flowers on my father’s grave, and in the evening I sat here with her watching television. Didn’t I, Mother?’
He darted forward and helped the old lady manoeuvre a heavy wooden tea-trolley through the door. ‘Didn’t you what, dear?’ she said.
‘Didn’t I sit in here with you yesterday evening watching television?’
‘Yes, of course, you always do on Sundays. He’s a good boy,’ she inf
ormed the Chief Inspector for the third time. ‘He knows that I enjoy television more in his company, but he doesn’t like to waste his time on frivolous programmes. He’s very serious. He works up in his room every evening during the week, writing his plays, but on Sundays he joins me and we watch BBC2. Sunday afternoons and evenings are our times together, aren’t they, Rodney?’ She smiled at her son, then turned to the Chief Inspector. ‘Now, Mr – er – do you take milk and sugar?’
Lunchless and thirsty, Quantrill moved to the door. ‘Very kind of you, Mrs Gifford, but I’m afraid I can’t stay. I have to get back to work.’
He glanced at her son, who had resumed his proprietorial stance on the hearthrug and was now looking smugly triumphant. He recalled the way Gifford, at the party, had gestured towards his cousin with the long-necked bottle of wine; the way he had looked when he said, ‘A bit of suffering would do Jasmine a world of good.’
But dislike and suspicion could never be enough. The Chief Inspector knew, regretfully, that he had no grounds at all for inviting Rodney Gifford to accompany him to the station to assist with his enquiries.
Chapter Thirteen
Alison sat on the edge of her bed, huddled in a pretty quilted cotton dressing-gown. Her eyes were wide, dark with the recollection of horror. Her mother had switched on an electric fire and the room was so warm that WPC Knowles had taken off her uniform jacket, but Alison was white-faced and shivering.
Molly had made a tentative gesture of support, but the Quantrill family were not accustomed to touch one another; Alison almost immediately flinched away from her mother’s hesitantly encircling arm. Now Molly sat beside her daughter trying not to feel redundant, listening with horrified fascination while the girl stumbled through an account of the events of the morning.
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Alison said, trying to answer the supplementary questions that her father had given the policewoman to put to her. She spoke in a lifeless, husky, cried-out voice. ‘I looked at my watch just before half-past ten, thinking that it was time for coffee. I went out of the office a few minutes later to call … to look for … But after that I just don’t know what time anything was.’
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