‘Thanks a lot, sir,’ said WPC Hopkins, resigning herself to a difficult interview. ‘By the way,’ she added crossly, ‘that coffee was 25p a cup.’
‘Highway robbery,’ agreed the Chief Inspector.
As the policewoman had anticipated, Anne Downing was in a fragile state. It was with considerable reluctance that she agreed to see them, in the drawing-room of her great-aunt’s Edwardian mock-Tudor villa on the outskirts of Bishops Port, overlooking a golf course and the distant estuary.
Quantrill remembered her from the party as slim, attractive and nervily vivacious. In the intervening six weeks she had lost weight, and now she looked much too thin and drawn. Her fair hair had lost its shine, her ringless hands played with each other incessantly, and her eyelids were swollen with crying. Having sympathized entirely with Buxton over the broken engagement, Quantrill could now see that the decision to break it must have cost Anne Downing a good deal. And the news of the murder of her friend and former employer must have distressed her almost as much as it had distressed Alison.
Wanting to play down the police angle, and not expecting the girl to remember him from the party, he used his daughter as a means of introduction.
‘My name’s Quantrill, and this is Miss Hopkins. You met my daughter Alison a few weeks ago, Miss Downing. She took over your old job at Yeoman’s—’
‘Oh. Oh yes.’ Anne Downing spoke dully, blinking hard. She turned aside and fumbled in a silver box for a cigarette, lighting it inexpertly. ‘I remember her – a shy, dark girl. And I’ve seen the news item in the Daily Press. It said that she – Alison – found … found …’
She stood for a moment with her back to them, her head down and her shoulders braced in an effort to keep herself from crying. Then she raised her head and said unsteadily, ‘How is your daughter?’
‘Upset, of course. Very upset. She’s gone to stay with some friends for a day or two. That’s why I had to come to talk to you, Miss Downing. I’m a police officer, and I’m investigating the case.’
Anne Downing looked at him. Her face was blank, her eyes huge with hurt. ‘Why do you want to see me?’ she said in a small, lost voice. ‘I would never have done anything to harm Jasmine.’
‘No, of course not,’ agreed Quantrill gently. ‘But Alison has been too distressed to talk to me, and I’d be grateful if you can tell me something about your former employer’s way of life. How she spent her spare time, the places she went to, the people she knew.’
The girl closed her eyes. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered, shaking her head. ‘I can’t talk about her. If your daughter’s distressed, after a few weeks with her, how do you think – how do you think I—’
Tears began to filter through her eyelashes and fall down her thin cheeks. She swayed, and Patsy Hopkins hurried to her side and guided her to an armchair. Quantrill bent to pick up the cigarette that the girl had dropped on the carpet. He stubbed it out in a marble ashtray and resumed his questioning, kindly but as persistently as his daughter had known he would question her when he found her.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Downing, but there are some things I need to know. Men friends, for example. There are a number of names in her address book, but we don’t know which ones are the most significant. Can you tell me, please – at the time when you left her employment, in January I believe, did Jasmine Woods have a lover?’
But the girl’s precarious composure had already broken. She lay huddled in the big armchair, her voice rising in such anguish that a beagle that had been asleep in a basket near the fireplace woke up and scrambled on to her knee in puzzled sympathy. Anne Downing was drowned so deep in her own tears that she did not even know that the dog was there.
Patsy Hopkins patted the girl’s shoulder and murmured reassurance. She gave the Chief Inspector a glare of reproof, but refrained from the obvious comment.
‘Sorry, Patsy,’ he acknowledged. ‘You were right, I shouldn’t have tried to push her. But she must know something that would help us. Will you see what you can do?’
Anne Downing’s shoulders were still heaving, her voice still rising in hysterical gasps. ‘Men …’ said WPC Hopkins. ‘For goodness’ sake go away and leave it to me this time. That’s what you brought me for, isn’t it?’
‘That poor girl,’ she said half an hour later, as they headed back to Breckham Market. ‘She’s had a very bad week. She was reluctant to talk about the murder, understandably, but I heard a bit about her engagement after you’d gone. Apparently she‘d been doubtful about it for some time – almost as soon as she went to live at High House farm she knew that it was a mistake. Buxton’s mother is a semi-invalid, so the couple were expected to live there after their marriage. But Anne obviously isn’t suited to life on a farm – not that kind of farm, anyway. And Oliver Buxton is clumsy, she said, a clumsy oaf.’
Quantrill gave a masculine snort of protest.
‘Oh, I can believe her,’ asserted Patsy Hopkins. ‘He may bathe in aftershave to get rid of the smell of pigs, but I can’t imagine that he’d have much finesse when it comes to lovemaking. He simply isn’t her type, anyone can see that. Anyway, she finally realized that she couldn’t face the wedding. She told him that she much preferred living at Yeoman’s with Jasmine Woods, and of course they had a row about it. In the end she announced that she was going back to Jasmine’s, pulled off his ring and walked out. But even though it was her own choice to break the engagement, it was very upsetting for her. And then, within a couple of days, to hear about Jasmine’s death—’
‘Did she actually go back to Yeoman’s last weekend?’
‘I don’t think so – she said she hadn’t seen Jasmine since the party. She knew that your daughter had taken her old job, so there wouldn’t have been much point in going back, would there? She was probably just making an excuse to break the engagement.’
‘Did Anne Downing point to anyone who might have wanted to kill Jasmine Woods?’
‘No. Any mention of the murder made her hysterical again. But from what she said it sounds as though Jasmine led a very quiet life at Yeoman’s, working most of the time and relaxing by pottering about in the garden.’
‘She gave some very noisy parties, if the one I went to was a fair sample.’
‘I asked about the parties, but apparently Jasmine didn’t give more than three or four of them a year. She went to a few writers’ dinners and conferences, invited the neighbours in for drinks occasionally, spent the odd weekend with friends in various parts of the country, and took what amounted to working holidays: Anne went with her, and they visited the foreign countries that Jasmine intended to use as settings for her books. It seems to have been a busy, unemotional life. I took Anne through Jasmine’s address book, but she didn’t seem to know which, if any, of the men in it were lovers or ex-lovers. Or else she wasn’t prepared to talk.’
‘Do you think she knows something? Is she trying to shield somebody?’
WPC Hopkins considered her answer. ‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘that if Anne Downing knew for sure who had murdered Jasmine Woods, she’d have told me. She was too fond of the woman and too shocked by the murder to want to conceal the criminal. But she may well suspect someone. I think it’ll be worth your while to talk to her again in a few days’time, when she’s had a chance to pull herself together.’
‘Right, I’ll bear that in mind. Perhaps you’d like to come with me to do the talking?’
Patsy Hopkins blushed, afraid that he assumed that she had angled for the invitation. ‘I may be quite wrong about that, of course,’ she said hurriedly. ‘Perhaps Anne really does know nothing – after all, she hadn’t been with Jasmine Woods for more than a couple of years. Perhaps Jasmine had a hectic love affair before she came to Suffolk. I asked Anne if she knew anything about her previous life, but she said not. She said that Jasmine was a very private person.’
‘So what have we found out between us? Damn all, as far as I can see.’
Quantrill and Tait were in the Chief Ins
pector’s office, refuelling on canteen sandwiches and coffee while they exchanged information. As soon as he had returned from Bishops Port, Quantrill had rung Chief Superintendent Mancroft at Yarchester; but there was no news of either Alison or Gilbert Smith.
The drug squad had, in their searches, uncovered a hitherto unsuspected pusher, a cache of cannabis resin, a very small quantity of impure yellowish-brown Chinese heroin and a variety of hash pipes, roach ends and dirty syringes. Several people had been booked to appear in the magistrate’s court, and one girl was in hospital having been found, alone, after taking an overdose. The exercise had apparently given the Yarchester division some satisfaction, which Quantrill felt unable to share.
‘We’ve done some useful eliminating,’ pointed out Tait. ‘We know now that it wasn’t the ex-husband, and it wasn’t Gifford because the girl at the cinema box office confirms his story. And the Harwich customs men took the Belgian dealer, Wouters, and his car to pieces, but they couldn’t find any sign of jade or netsuke.’
‘That doesn’t mean that Hussey is in the clear,’ said Quantrill. ‘He was the last person to see Jasmine Woods alive, and he was very unhappy about our visit. I’ve got a feeling that he may know more than he told us, so we’ll talk to him again. But first I want to concentrate on Paul Pardoe. He’s the one with the big financial motive, and he was near enough to Thirling on Sunday evening to fit a visit to Yeoman’s into his pub crawl.’
‘But what about the blood?’ demanded Tait. ‘There was no evidence at Yeoman’s that the murderer cleaned himself up before he left, and Pardoe couldn’t have gone to another pub with blood on him – or home, for that matter.’
‘He might have stopped at a public lavatory somewhere, or gone into the gents at the next pub he visited. But there would be bloodstains in his car, and I want that examined.’
‘And what about Jonathan Elliott?’
‘What about him? His wife says that he was working at home on Sunday evening, and so does he. We’ve got no reason to disbelieve them.’
‘You didn’t see the way he looked at Jasmine at the party. And then there was the argument he had about her with his wife. He could easily have slipped out of his study—’
‘I’m not stopping you from using your initiative,’ said Quantrill irritably. ‘If you’ve got a good reason for suspecting anybody, follow it up. This obviously isn’t a case we’re going to solve quickly, so we need to do a thorough check on every story we’ve heard so far. After that we can start to look further afield. The murderer has to be someone who knew Jasmine Woods, so we’ll dig a bit deeper into her past.’
‘Talking of digging,’ Tait remembered, ‘nothing’s been found in the compost heap at Yeoman’s. So if Gilbert Smith or one of his friends did the murder, he didn’t hide the bloodstained clothing there.’
The Chief Inspector frowned. For a few minutes, he had contrived to forget his daughter. Now, it seemed, she was inextricably linked in his mind with Smith; and Smith was still the prime suspect.
‘What’s the situation at Yeoman’s?’ he asked.
Tait telephoned the incident room. ‘Nothing’s been found in the grounds,’ he reported. ‘They’re still searching the roadside verges and ditches, but getting further away from the gates, so it doesn’t look hopeful. But quite apart from the compost heap, there are plenty of newly-dug areas of garden where Smith might have buried the clothing.’
‘About an acre of it,’ Quantrill agreed, ‘if you count all the flower beds and borders as well as the vegetable plots … Well, all right, Martin; you’d better start by going down to Yeoman’s and showing the boys where you want them to dig. When they grumble, you can tell them that we’ve reached the stage where we all have to get down to the nitty-gritty.’
Sergeant Tait winced, and went. Quantrill was about to follow him out of the room when he remembered something, turned back to his desk, and rang his wife.
He had no hope that Molly would have any news about Alison; she would have passed that on to him immediately. And there was nothing that he could tell her, either. In ordinary circumstances he would have thought the call futile, a waste of his time. But Alison’s disappearance, and the circumstances of it, had brought him and his wife closer together than they had been for years, and the least he could do was to keep the lines of communication open.
Chapter Twenty Five
When Alison had left home on Monday evening, creeping out of the house with her suitcase while her mother and brother were watching a television comedy, she had no idea of where she was going. All she wanted to do was to get away from the questioning and the suffocating solicitude.
It was nearly nine o’clock, cloudily dark, and the air smelled of a cold, reluctant spring. There was no one in Benidorm Avenue as she left the house. She walked aimlessly for some time, her feet leaden on the pavements and her head heavy with weeping. Presently it began to rain.
She stopped in the doorway of a shop and looked about her. She was near the centre of the town in White Hart Street, the narrow shopping street that had been made into a pedestrian precinct. The shop windows were lighted but the street was dead, apart from one woman in furry hat, calf-length coat and trousers, exercising her dog and fondly encouraging it to foul the pavement.
Alison rubbed her blurred eyes and tried to decide where to go. She knew a good many people in Breckham Market, school friends and the families of school friends, and friends of her own family, but there was no one she could turn to for refuge; no one who would be sympathetic enough to understand her, to accommodate her without question and to allow her to stay without revealing her whereabouts to her parents. She had enough money with her to pay for a night at the Rights of Man, the Georgian-fronted coaching inn turned modern hotel on the corner of the market place and White Hart Street, but her father would soon find her there. Wherever she went in Breckham, he would be bound to find her.
It was nearing 9.30 – too late, she knew, in that small town, for either trains or buses. And she had heard enough from her father to make her afraid of trying to hitch a lift. She could neither stay in Breckham Market nor leave it. A feeling of desolation, of loneliness of spirit, seemed to creep up her body from the cold paving stones, contracting her heart into a hard, tight lump that rose and lodged itself in her throat, threatening to choke her.
The woman in the hat disappeared round a corner, although her poodle insisted on lingering at the end of its lead to give a shop front a parting salute. And then the quietness of White Hart Street was broken by a group of youths, shouting and pushing and shoving at each other as they made their way to the next pub on their itinerary. Alison stepped back into the doorway as they passed but one of them, stopping to light a cigarette, saw her.
‘’Allo, darling,’ he said, identifying himself by his accent as one of the metropolitan immigrants to Suffolk. ‘Waiting for me, are you?’ He moved closer to her. He was about her own age, tall and thin, wearing a red and blue plaid bomber jacket. His hair hung lank about his face and there was a pustule at one side of his mouth; he smelled beery and imperfectly washed.
Alison found an approximation of her normal voice. ‘I’m waiting for my boy-friend,’ she asserted.
‘Oh yeh?’ He looked round at the street, empty except for his own friends who had scuffled on. ‘Don’t look as though he’s coming, does it?’ He leaned forward and put one hand up against the shop door, blocking her way.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course he’s coming.’ She tried not to sound nervous; ridiculous that she should have spent eighteen months in London without a single encounter of this kind, only to be cornered in her own home town.
His friends, further up the street, began to shout for him: ‘Come on, Keef.’
‘Piss off,’ bawled Keith over his shoulder, ‘I’m busy.’ He grinned at Alison, putting out his other hand to touch her hair. ‘Big feller, this boy-friend of yours, is he? Bigger ’n me?’ His hand moved down and made a grab at her breast.
‘Much bi
gger.’ Alison swung her suitcase at him, ducked under his arm and ran. He clutched at his thigh, swore, and then limped menacingly after her. She made for a telephone call-box, half-way down the precinct, and stood in the neon-lit rain panting, one hand on the door.
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone or I’ll – I’ll call the police.’
‘Oh yeh?’ He approached slowly, rubbing his thigh. ‘Not from there you won’t, darling. Fixed that’phone meself, not more than an hour ago, didn’t I? Must’ve expected somefing like this. Whatcher going to do now, then, eh?’
Whether it was his work or not, he was right. Alison could see, from where she stood, that the receiver had been wrenched away from the set.
Her mouth felt dry. ‘I’ll – I’ll scream,’ she threatened, backing away, hoping that he would believe her. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself, to be questioned by helpful citizens – if there were any within earshot – and then to be returned ignominiously to her home and her mother’s fussing and her father’s interrogation.
‘Yeh? Well, I might just give you somefing to scream for,’ he said. He made several obscene suggestions. ‘You could’ve damaged me, doing what you did. Really damaged me. You want teaching a lesson, that’s what you want.’
Alison turned, dodged round a plane tree, almost slipped on the sloping wet cobble-stones that had been set at its base as an additional decorative feature, and ran in the direction of the market place, her suitcase bumping against her leg. She heard the thud of following feet and almost panicked; but then the dignified brick façade of the Rights of Man rose above her, and she slipped thankfully through the doors and into the empty brightly lit foyer.
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