‘Why, that’s Mr Oliver Buxton. He farms in Norfolk, at Littleover. One of our regulars, just like his father afore him – they keep pigs in a big way. If he wasn’t here to buy and sell pigs on the first Tuesday in every month, I’d know the world was coming to an end. Mind you, I daresay he’ll be arriving a bit later in the mornings in future. I hear he’s getting married at Easter.’ The stockman gave Quantrill a wink and a nudge. ‘Wheey-up! I reckon he’ll have picked hisself a goer!’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ Quantrill agreed. Privately, though, from what he could remember of Buxton’s fiancée, he doubted it; she had seemed too fine-drawn to have the stamina the stockman evidently envisaged. ‘Well, thanks for your help. I only wanted to know where he lived, and I’m in a hurry so you’ve saved me from pushing my way round to ask him. Have one on me when you’re in the Crown.’
The stockman pocketed the price of a pint that the Chief Inspector slipped him. ‘Much obliged, Mr Quantrill sir. I doubt you’d have got a civil reply from him, anyhow. I spoke to him not five minutes ago. “Morning, Mr Buxton,” I said, “a grand pen of breeders we’ve got here,” but he walked straight past me with a face as black as your hat. Never a word, and that’s not like him at all. But there, if he’s getting married Saturday I daresay he’s got more on his mind than pigs, eh? Wheey-up, eh, Mr Quantrill?’
The stockman gave the Chief Inspector a parting nudge, flourished his stick and moved away to prod some squealing, reluctant baconers into the sale ring. Quantrill lingered for a moment, looking across at Buxton who was still leaning, dark-browed, on a rail and paying no attention to the sows in front of him. There was nothing at all of the happy prospective bridegroom about his looks and bearing.
But Quantrill found that entirely explicable. Cause and effect, he thought; getting married is, after all, a hell of an undertaking for any young man. He himself had been worried sick. He’d have given anything, in the week beforehand, to call his own wedding off.
If he had the time now, and if the pubs were open, he would have offered to buy Buxton a drink to cheer him up. He could tell him about the things that compensated for the loss of freedom: children, for example …
Alison—
He ran for his car. He had been out of contact with Divisional Headquarters for all of ten minutes, and in that time there might well have been some news of her. He was within a quarter of a mile of the office but, too anxious to wait, he radioed through.
There was still no news of his daughter.
Sergeant Tait was on the road early in search of Jasmine Woods’s ex-husband, weaving his Citroën through the Suffolk lanes while the sprouting hedgerows looked grey rather than green, and the only other vehicles on the move were mail delivery vans and milk tankers making bulk collections from farms. By seven o’clock he had reached the first of the three addresses provided by the Essex police; but the R.J. Potter who lived in the prosperous-looking bungalow was not Robert John but Ronald James, a self-employed long distance haulier who was, his wife estimated crossly, probably at that moment ogling a belly-dancer in Istanbul while she was stuck in Chelmsford with the kids.
At the second address, a maisonette in Witham, the door was opened by a man who agreed that he was Robert Potter. A pyjama’d and toothless seventy-odd, he was understandably puzzled and indignant at being disturbed so early in the morning. Behind him hovered an equally elderly wife, clutching a teapot to the bosom of her flannel dressing gown with such protective closeness that Tait concluded that it must contain either their life savings or very cool tea. He apologized handsomely for having come to the wrong house, and retreated in a hurry.
By the time he approached the third address, in the breezy blackcurrant and strawberry-growing flatlands north of the Blackwater estuary, he had begun to give up hope of finding his man in Essex. Robert John Potter might well have moved several times in the nine or ten years since his divorce from Jasmine Woods; he might have left the country; he might be dead.
Tait found the address, a small modern detached house in a maze of small modern detached houses that had almost entirely obliterated the Essex village which gave them their identity. His ring was answered by a bespectacled young woman in jeans and a shiny apron that advertised a long-defunct brand of cocoa. She had short straight fair hair, a plain open face and an instantly aggressive manner.
‘Robert John Potter – yes, that’s my husband. But if you’re from his union, you can go to blazes. He voted to call off the strike because he’s fed to the teeth with being off work and because we need every penny he can earn, and you needn’t think you can talk him into changing his mind. It’s outrageous that men who want to work should be prevented from doing so just because a few troublemakers—’
‘I’m not from any union,’ insisted Tait. They both had to raise their voices to be heard above the morning noises from inside the house: children squabbling, excited yelps from a dog, light music and blarneying chat from a radio, and the whirring of a washing machine. ‘I’m—’
But as soon as she knew what he was not, her manner softened. ‘Phew, that’s a relief. I can’t be doing with shop stewards on the doorstep at this hour of the morning.’ Then she flinched as the crash of something falling or breaking augmented the domestic symphony. ‘Oh Lord – look, come in whoever you are, while I go and sort somebody out.’
The small metal and glass front porch led straight to an untidy sitting-room, from which rose an open staircase. The room had originally been furnished in young executive style, with teak-look wall units and a low-slung suite upholstered in striped tweed, but it was now shabby after years of being gambolled over by children and pets. It was strikingly different from Jasmine Woods’s gracious-life sitting-room at Yeoman’s.
‘Bob!’ bawled his wife up the stairs as she rushed for the kitchen. ‘Someone to see you!’
The man who came blundering down was large and blond and healthy, with the chunky, homespun good looks of the men who model sweaters for the covers of knitting patterns. Too unsophisticated to be Jasmine Woods’s type, Tait thought – presumably that was one of the factors that had driven them apart – but personable enough to make their marriage understandable. He couldn’t have chosen a more different second wife. This one was undoubtedly loyal, but otherwise not even in the same league as Jasmine.
Potter looked at his visitor suspiciously. ‘Are you from the union?’ he demanded.
‘Your wife would never have let a union official in. My name’s Tait, I’m a detective sergeant from Breckham Market. I’m investigating—’
He paused. His sharp, restless eyes had noticed, among a litter of children’s comics and do-it-yourself magazines on the coffee table, a copy of the previous month’s House and Owner. He recognized the cover of the issue that Jasmine had shown him when he first visited her.
‘You’re Jasmine Woods’s ex-husband? You’ve probably heard that she’s been murdered.’
Potter nodded, compressing his lips into a straight line.
Tait picked up the magazine and flicked it open. So Potter had recently been brought up to date about his first wife’s success; and the article had told him, within a few miles, where she lived. It must have been galling for the man, who was evidently short of money, to read about Jasmine’s affluence. It must have been tantalizing for him to see photographs of the strikingly attractive woman he had once been married to.
Potter certainly had a motive, for robbery and for rape if not for murder. And as the DCI was fond of pointing out, violence fuels itself and can turn to murder all too easily.
Tait glanced at one of the photographs, in which Jasmine was posed elegantly on the sofa behind which, several weeks later, her body had been found. ‘A good-looking woman, wasn’t she?’ he said, deliberately needling Potter to see how the man would react. ‘I knew her well – we were friends. Close friends, you might say.’ He smiled reminiscently over the photograph. ‘She had a beautiful body … but then, I expect you remember that, don’t you?’
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An angry, strangled noise rose in Potter’s throat. He took a menacing step towards the sergeant and raised his hands. His face was pale, his eyes staring.
Tait backed, suddenly alarmed by the realization that he had pushed the man too far. God, he thought, remembering the violence with which Jasmine had been murdered and measuring himself disadvantageously against her former husband, what an idiot I was to bait the man when I’m here alone! He tried to shift unobtrusively towards the door, and at the same time remember what he had learned, and had so far had no opportunity to put into practice, about unarmed combat. Was it better to run, and live to be a prudent chief constable, or to die an heroic sergeant?
Potter made a grab. Tait ducked, dropping the magazine, and vaulted over an armchair, putting it between himself and his assailant. Then he staightened, and took a deep breath. Potter hadn’t harmed his wife and family, and the chances were that he wouldn’t resort to violence in his own home. Tait decided to arrest him now, and call in the local police immediately for support. He stepped forward resolutely, and put out a hand to make the mandatory arresting contact. ‘Robert John Potter—’ he began.
But he missed, because Potter was in process of bending to pick up the magazine, smooth out the pages and replace it on the coffee table.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man mumbled awkwardly. ‘I shouldn’t have snatched at the magazine like that. Hell, I’ve been divorced from her for nearly ten years, so your relationship with her is none of my business.’ He moved an Action Man toy from a chair, sat down and blew his nose. His eyes had blurred over with tears, and he wiped them shamefacedly. ‘The fact is that I’ve been distressed by her death, though I tried not to let on to Jill when we saw the news on regional television last night. So when I saw you looking at Jasmine’s photograph, and heard you talking about her like that, I felt that I couldn’t stand for it. When you know that a woman you once loved has been murdered, you don’t want her to be sullied any further.’
Tait’s adrenalin had ebbed, leaving him limp. He sat down abruptly opposite Potter. ‘If it’s any consolation to you, I didn’t sully Jasmine,’ he confessed. ‘I knew her slightly, and I liked her and admired her, but I didn’t get anywhere near her. That was only wishful thinking.’
Potter nodded. ‘A lot of the men we knew used to indulge in that. It was the same with me, sometimes. She looked a lot sexier than she was.’
They exchanged wry grins, and then two fair chunky little boys rushed in from the kitchen to kiss their father good-bye before they went to school. Potter’s face lightened immediately. He tousled their hair, went with them to the front door, meekly accepted his wife’s rebuke for messing up their hair just after she had brushed it, and waved them out of sight.
‘Come and have some breakfast,’ he said to Tait when they had gone. ‘If you’ve driven down from Suffolk you must be hungry.’
Jill Potter smiled hospitably as the sergeant, embarrassed into silence, entered the kitchen. It was a small room crowded with scuffed electrical appliances on which were piled clothes in various stages of the laundering process. On the formica-covered table were the remains of the boys’boiled eggs, a tangle of small damp socks and a bulky carton of washing powder. There were just two slices of streaky bacon in the pan that Mrs Potter was holding; she herself appeared to be breakfasting from a mug of coffee.
‘Bacon?’ she offered. ‘Do have this if you’d like it, I can easily cook some more for Bob.’
Tait assured her untruthfully that he had already eaten on the way down, but he accepted coffee. Potter made it, with boiling water and a spoonful of a cheap blend of powdered coffee and chicory. ‘Milk and sugar?’ he enquired, offering Tait a bottle of one and a bag of the other. The men squeezed together side by side on the narrow bench at the table. ‘Sergeant Tait came down to tell me about Jasmine,’ he explained to his wife.
Jill’s face clouded. ‘Yes – poor woman, what a terrible thing to happen.’ She paused in the act of feeding the washing machine with dirty clothes, and went slightly pink. ‘It probably sounds odd, but I’ve always felt that she was part of the family, in a way. I’m rather proud of the connection. I borrowed a House and Owner from a friend last week because there was a feature about Jasmine in it. I was a fan of hers before I met Bob, and I simply couldn’t believe that he seriously wanted to marry me after being married to a woman like her …’
Potter looked up from his bacon and gave his wife a fond, totally committed smile. ‘Jasmine could never be bothered to learn how to make a good Yorkshire pudding,’ he said.
‘Yes, but still … with her looks and her money …’ Jill Potter returned her husband’s glance, half questioning, half teasing, steadfastly affectionate. And then her smile vanished and she turned aggressively to Tait.
‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’ she demanded. ‘Not to tell Bob that Jasmine is dead, but to find out whether he killed her. He’s one of your suspects, isn’t he?’
Tait put down his mug. ‘We have to make routine enquiries,’ he agreed.
‘I suppose you do,’ said Potter. His wife began to say something indignant, but he interrupted her. ‘It’s understandable, Jill, and we’ve got nothing to hide. If you want me to account for my movements, I took young Mark to the dentist yesterday morning, and in the afternoon we went round to Jill’s mother’s.’
She snatched his empty plate with an angry burst of energy and then stood behind him, pressing the other hand on his shoulder. ‘Bob’s the last person in the world who would hurt anyone,’ she protested. ‘It’s unthinkable! Oh, you can check what we were doing yesterday, I can give you the addresses, but you’ll just be wasting your time.’
‘What about the night before?’ asked Tait. ‘What were you doing on Sunday evening?’
Husband and wife looked at each other uncertainly. Potter scratched his blond head. ‘Well … nothing I can prove to you. We were here, at home – we haven’t any money to spare for outings while I’m on strike. I’d gardened most of the day, and I had a stiff back, so I was glad to put my feet up in the evening. We all watched the children’s television serial, and then we had supper and put the boys to bed. Then Mark woke crying with toothache, and then the dog threw up at the foot of the stairs … just a perfectly ordinary family sort of evening.’
Sergeant Tait thanked them for the coffee, and said good-bye to Jill Potter. Her husband accompanied the detective to the front door.
‘Am I really under suspicion?’ he asked.
‘We always keep an open mind until a case is wrapped up, but if your conscience is clear you needn’t lose any sleep over it,’ said Tait. ‘Tell me, have you see Jasmine since your divorce? Or kept in touch with her in any way?’
Potter shook his head. ‘We’d drifted apart completely long before the divorce came through. We married too young, that was the trouble – we loved each other, but we hadn’t enough in common to make a good marriage. I wanted a family, and Jasmine didn’t. And then she started writing her books, and she began to withdraw from me. In the end I felt that her fiction gave her more satisfaction than I did.’ He hesitated. ‘Did she marry again?’
‘No. I don’t think she was really the marrying kind.’
‘That was probably our trouble,’ Potter agreed. He looked Tait over. ‘Are you married yourself?’
‘Not yet.’ The sergeant’s disapproving glance took in the chipped and fingermarked paintwork of the doors, the domestic clutter, the stain on the carpet at the foot of the stairs. His visit to the Potters had reinforced his intention not to marry before he could support a family in a more spacious style; and he certainly intended to find himself a more decorative wife than Bob Potter had settled for.
But Potter, his composure completely regained, was smiling with contentment. ‘I can recommend it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing to beat married life – as long as you can find yourself a wife like Jill rather than Jasmine.’
Looking back at the house as he got into his car, Tait saw tha
t Jill Potter had joined her husband on the front step. They stood for a moment with their arms round each other, and then they turned and went inside and closed the door. Tait, his hand raised in a farewell gesture that they hadn’t noticed, had an unaccustomed sensation of being excluded.
Chapter Twenty Three
‘Frankly, sir,’ said WPC Hopkins firmly, ‘if this trip’s going to land any more two-year-old dribblers on my lap, I’d rather you took someone else.’
Chief Inspector Quantrill assured her that Oliver Buxton’s fiancée was unlikely to have acquired a child of any age during the preceding six weeks. ‘But from what little I saw of the girl at Jasmine Woods’s party, she seemed very highly strung. She’s probably het-up anyway, with her wedding in the offing, and she’s bound to be very distressed about the murder. She may be reluctant to talk about her former employer at all, and she’ll certainly prefer to talk to another woman rather than to me.’
Patsy Hopkins agreed. It was a sunny, windy morning, and a drive into Norfolk in civilian clothes with Douglas Quantrill was a much pleasanter prospect than a routine patrol round Breckham with spotty young PC Fowler, looking for any trouble that might be brewing in the London overspill estates that circled the old town.
‘No news of your daughter?’ she asked, as they crossed the river boundary between Suffolk and Norfolk.
‘None at all,’ said Quantrill gloomily. That was one of the reasons why he had sought Patsy Hopkins’s company. The relentless optimism that he felt obliged to display to his wife was very wearing, and he needed to be able to talk honestly to someone who was sympathetic but not emotionally involved. ‘I’m worried as hell, Patsy, I don’t mind telling you.’ He rehearsed his fears to her. ‘Any suggestions?’ he begged. ‘Any ideas?’
‘I did wonder whether Alison might have got to know someone in Thirling during the time she worked at Yeoman’s – someone she liked and might go to if she wanted to hide. For instance, did Jasmine Woods have any domestic help?’
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