The Chief Inspector's Daughter

by Sheila Radley

  The receptionist, a cool divorcée who, in common with many hotel staff, considered herself underpaid, badly fed and generally put-upon, was busy with some typing. She had more than enough work to do, and did not invite idle enquiries and interruptions by looking up every time the doors opened. She was telling the truth when she told the policeman who came round later that evening with a photograph of Alison that she had not seen the girl.

  Alison had visited the hotel the previous year for a friend’s wedding reception, and so she had some idea of its layout. She went straight to the corridor where the public telephone was, and looked up a number in the local directory. Her fingers trembled as they riffled the pages. She felt shaken and sickened by her unpleasant encounter, but at least it had served a purpose. It had reminded her of one person she could turn to, one woman who would give her unquestioning support and refuge.

  It was only last week that she had heard Roz Elliott telling Jasmine Woods about the latest women’s movement campaign. We need to reclaim the night, Roz had insisted; to make it safe for women to walk through the streets after dark without fear – fear not only of mugging and rape, but of the kind of sexist domination that Alison had just experienced.

  They had argued about it, of course. Jasmine and Roz always argued. Roz believed in national action, although she was usually too much involved with academic and political work in Yarchester to be able to take an active part herself. It was important, she thought, for women to demonstrate their togetherness by gathering in city areas notorious for sexual assault and sexist affront – London’s Soho especially, because of its strip clubs and porn shops. Once gathered, the women could set about reclaiming the streets by walking proudly through them with feminist banners and songs.

  Jasmine had argued not about the need to alter men’s attitudes towards women, and to reclaim the night, but about the method. Gatherings and marches invited confrontations, she had said. Men would jeer, scuffles would start, the police would move in, tempers would give, arrests would be made, violence would erupt. And violent encounters between men and women was precisely what the feminists wanted to end, wasn’t it?

  One thing was certain, Alison thought as she dialled the Old Rectory number: Roz would never undermine her independence by revealing her whereabouts to her father.

  The telephone was answered by Mandy, Roz’s pregnant lame duck. ‘Oh, Alison – how are you? Wasn’t it awful about … what? No, sorry, Roz isn’t here, she’s staying overnight at her flat in Yarchester. The number’s 25387. Look, Claire and I were shattered to hear about Jasmine. She was always so nice to us. You must feel absolutely—’

  Alison thanked her for her information and dropped the receiver clumsily back on to its rest. Mandy was right, she did feel absolutely. She had hoped, if Roz were at home, to be collected from Breckham and taken to Thirling, since it was only a matter of four miles away. But she could hardly expect Roz to drive the seventeen miles from Yarchester to pick her up.

  She felt absolutely defeated. If she stayed in the hotel her father would find her, if she stepped outside the odious Keith might be waiting.

  And then she saw, pinned on to the information board beside the telephone, a card advertising the local taxi firm. She could not make use of it, because she knew that her father knew the proprietor. But also pinned to the board was a hand-written card advertising a private car-hire service.

  As soon as she reached Yarchester, Alison telephoned Roz Elliott. She hardly knew what to say, but Roz’s response was immediate: Alison was to stay exactly where she was, and Roz would pick her up.

  It was not until Alison had put the receiver down that it occurred to her that she might have rung at a very inconvenient time. She was not sure whether a liberated marriage, like the Elliotts’, involved adultery almost as a matter of principle; for all she knew, Roz shared her Yarchester flat with a man.

  But if she did, he left no evidence. The flat consisted of a small but well-furnished bed-sitting room with a kitchen and a bathroom, in a modern block near the university. The main room housed a considerable quantity of reading matter: sociological text books and periodicals, and a daunting variety of feminist magazines that Alison had never heard of. The room was dominated by a women’s liberation movement wall poster.

  Roz Elliott, big and handsome and careless of her appearance, brought two mugs of coffee from the kitchen. Her vigour and her voice were both subdued; she had said very little to Alison, when she picked her up in the centre of Yarchester, but her silence communicated such sympathy that Alison found it easy to tell her everything that had happened, from the time when she had arrived at Yeoman’s that morning.

  Roz listened, smoked and sipped coffee. ‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked. ‘I don’t mean tonight, that’s no problem – I can lend you a sleeping-bag. But I’m speaking at a women’s conference in Birmingham tomorrow, and I can’t very well leave you here. Not that I mind, you understand; you’re welcome to stay, but you asked Mandy where to find me and so sooner or later someone will come here looking for you. Whatever else the police are, they’re not thick.’

  She remembered Alison’s father’s profession and smiled an apology. ‘You know what I mean.’

  Alison nodded. ‘There are times when I hate policemen – detectives especially. I hate the way their minds work. Oh, I’m fond of Dad, he can be a real old softy; and he usually tries to be fair. But when he’s on a case he’ll trample on anyone’s feelings, even his family’s.’ She thought about it. ‘Mostly his family’s,’ she added bitterly, on her mother’s behalf as well as her own.

  Roz Elliott frowned, brushing at her thick fringe with her fingers. ‘I tell you where you could go, just for a few days, while you make up your mind about what you’re going to do next. My sister Polly lives in a farmhouse about twenty miles away, in the other direction from Breckham Market so you should be safe from any police visits. It’s a sort of commune. I’m not into that kind of squalor myself, but you might find it bearable for a short time. And Polly’s a dear, you’ll like her, everyone does. Good. I’ll take you there first thing tomorrow morning.’

  They went to bed, Roz Elliott on her divan and Alison in a sleeping-bag spread against a wall. ‘Feeling better?’ Roz asked her from across the darkened room.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Alison, who had begun to feel weepy again, blew her nose. ‘It helps to talk.’

  ‘Yes.’ The duvet made a billowing noise as Roz’s big body turned over. ‘That goes for me, too.’ She paused, and then said, ‘I was very fond of Jasmine, you know. It was mutual – you might not have thought it, from the way we argued, but we were very good friends.’

  ‘I realized that. You wouldn’t have dropped in so often, otherwise.’

  ‘We enjoyed arguing.’ Roz Elliott’s voice smiled in the dark. ‘We did disagree fundamentally about a lot of things, but to some extent our arguments were just an exercise, a game. And it was a game we particularly enjoyed playing in front of other people. Jasmine and I understood each other; we’d called each other’s bluff long ago.’

  Alison propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Bluff?’

  ‘Yes. You see, we were both, in a sense, public people. We were committed to certain attitudes, Jasmine as a romantic writer, me as a militant feminist. We both wore the appropriate public faces. But in private we both had reservations about our roles, and we understood each other’s reservations.’

  ‘What sort of reservations?’

  There was another pause. ‘Well, take me,’ said Roz. ‘Only don’t for God’s sake point this out to any of my supporters, or I’ll lose all my credibility. I’m known as an enthusiast for women’s liberation: I believe passionately in equality of opportunity for women, and in every woman’s right to live as an individual without being forced to play the conventional, supportive, wifely role. I go to meetings all over the country proclaiming these beliefs, and I write articles and books; and I take political action by lobbying Members of Parliament and by encouragin
g women to band together and join trade unions to fight for their rights.

  ‘But as Jasmine once pointed out to me, I’m a terrible fraud. I’ve never had to fight for anything. I come from a happy and secure middle-class background, and I was always encouraged to achieve whatever I wanted in life. I’ve never met with any discrimination on account of being a woman; I’m doing the job I want to do, and I have a sufficiently large private income to allow me to choose whatever lifestyle I prefer. I have something that the vast majority of women, for lack of money, can never have: the luxury of choice. And what have I chosen? Marriage, and not just two but three children!’

  ‘Oh, but yours is a very unusual sort of married life, isn’t it?’ said Alison.

  ‘Yes, in that I happen to have married an understanding man, and that we’re an articulate and reasonably affluent couple. This kind of marriage suits both of us. We love each other, we love our children, and we wouldn’t want any other kind of life. So I, the militant feminist, could be described – though I’d flay any journalist who dared to do so – as a happily married mother of three. Whereas Jasmine, the romantic novelist, disliked her experience of married life and simply wasn’t interested in children. She was the one who embraced the principle of liberation, and found a very satisfactory alternative to marriage and a family.’

  Alison lay on her back with her fingers laced behind her head, staring at the dim outline of the poster on the wall. ‘It’s something I never thought about,’ she admitted. ‘But it’s true: whatever else happened in Jasmine’s books, and whatever independent noises her heroines made, you knew that in the end the girl would marry the hero. It seemed only right and proper. But it obviously wasn’t the kind of ending that Jasmine wanted in her own life.’

  ‘No, she knew better than to assume that married couples necessarily live happily ever after. That was something that used to make me cross, because I felt that she was exploiting impressionable girls and giving them a false idea of the realities of life. But last Wednesday I went up to London to a meeting, and afterwards, on the underground train, I happened to be sitting next to a woman of about my own age. She was a West Indian, and she wore a green nylon overall under her coat. She must have been going home from work – I imagine she was a canteen helper or a hospital cleaner or something like that. She looked tired and defeated, her ankles were swollen and her clothes were shoddy, and she was burdened with shopping bags. I doubt if there was anything anyone could tell that woman about the realities of life.

  ‘I felt that I ought to do something to help her – give her some women’s movement literature, persuade her that she had a right to a fuller life, encourage her to do something positive for herself instead of meekly accepting a subservient role. But as soon as she sat down she took a women’s magazine out of her bag, and flipped through it until she found the serial story. It was from one of Jasmine’s novels. I watched her face, and as she read she began to look happier. She obviously loved Jasmine’s book, really lapped it up. For ten minutes, as she travelled from a dirty, exhausting, boring job to face the demands of her home and family, she was lost to reality. Jasmine had transported her to another world. And when you think about it, it’s quite something, isn’t it, to be able to give pleasure like that to thousands of people you’ve never met?’

  ‘Did you tell Jasmine about the woman?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Of course. I told her when Jonathan and I went to Yeoman’s for drinks yesterday. But I certainly didn’t tell her what I’ve just told you, that I couldn’t help envying her ability to give other people happiness. No, I scolded her for giving opiates to women, for lulling them with romantic trash when they ought to be fighting for their right to self-fulfilment. But Jasmine just smiled and said that fighting wasn’t her line, and that it was time I accepted the fact that women have different needs. She said that it was arrogant of me to assume that the woman on the train wanted to be liberated; she might well want nothing more than to devote herself to her family. And she said that I had no right to belittle and badger women who really do find complete fulfilment in being wives and mothers, or to be superior about their tastes in fiction. I think my views must have mellowed since I’ve known her, because to some extent – and strictly in private – I can see that she was right. I might have said so, if Jonathan hadn’t been there. We enjoyed having apparently irreconcilable arguments in front of him.’

  ‘Jonathan used to argue with Jasmine too,’ remembered Alison.

  His wife laughed indulgently. ‘Oh, that was just a ploy to give him an opportunity to talk to her. Poor man, he did so want to get her into bed with him.’

  Alison was surprised. ‘But I thought you said that you and Jonathan—’

  ‘That we love each other, yes. But we’ve agreed that in our kind of marriage, that doesn’t preclude sleeping with other people. We’re both free individuals. As it happens, though, I’m too busy to want to bother with anyone else, and Jonathan is chased by so many of my students that he’s terrified of getting involved with any one of them. Jasmine is – was – the only one he really wanted, and he daren’t ask her because he’s too vain; he won’t admit it, but he was afraid she’d reject him. I told him only yesterday that I wished he’d ask her right out, instead of making transparent excuses to talk to her. We had quite an argument about it after we got home from Yeoman’s, and he slammed his study door and wouldn’t come out for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Would Jasmine have agreed, do you think, if he’d asked her?’

  ‘Good Lord no!’ Roz Elliott floundered into a more comfortable position. ‘We’ll have to make an early start, so we’d better try to sleep now.’

  The girl lay thinking about Jasmine Woods; sadly, but at least about Jasmine alive rather than dead. She was interested in what Roz had said about alternatives to marriage and a family. She herself had always assumed that she would marry and have children. That was what she had hoped would be the outcome of her affair with Gavin Jackson, otherwise she would not have let him make love to her. But Gavin had been a disillusionment, and she had been revolted by the way the youth in Breckham Market had tried to handle her.

  ‘Jasmine was perfectly happy living alone,’ she meditated aloud. ‘I think that’s what I’d like, too. It’s ridiculous to imagine, as my mother does, that a woman’s life isn’t fulfilled unless she’s married.’

  Roz Elliott muttered something, but it was muffled by the duck-down depths of her duvet.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  ‘But I can’t descend on your sister without warning,’ Alison objected. ‘Oughtn’t we to ring and ask whether she minds?’

  ‘We can’t, she doesn’t have a telephone at the farm. That’s partly why it’s such a good place for you to go to, because they don’t let the outside world intrude. They’re two miles from the nearest village, and they have no newspapers, no radio, no television – the isolation would drive me mad, but Polly likes it. And don’t worry about inconveniencing her, because you won’t. She’ll be delighted to add you to her family.’

  They were travelling briskly from Yarchester into the countryside in Roz Elliott’s Mini, which was so permanently dirty that it was easy to overlook the fact that it was only one year old and a 1275 GT model. It was half-past eight on the morning of Tuesday 7 April, the day when Alison’s father was pursuing his enquiries in Norfolk and worrying over his daughter’s safety. But Alison, feeling relaxed for the first time since her discovery of the murder, and happy in the company of an understanding woman, hardly gave her parents a thought.

  ‘Does Polly have a big family?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I was using the term loosely, as she does. The commune’s her family, and Lord knows how many are in it – I’ve never attempted to keep track. Polly’s a widow. She has five children of her own from two marriages, but they’re all away from home now. She and her second husband bought the farm ten years ago, shortly before he died, to restore and use as a weekend and holiday place. He’d turn in his grave if he k
new what she’d done with it, but Polly loves kids and enjoys being Mum to everyone.’

  Roz turned from the road along a rutted track. There had been a wooden five-bar gate at the entrance to the track but it was now pushed aside and leaning, off its hinges, against a hedge. The name on the gate, Mill Farm, had weathered almost to illegibility. The land immediately surrounding the farm-house was cultivated only in patches and at first sight it looked virtually derelict. The old sheds and stables, mainly of brick and corrugated iron, black-tarred against the weather, were dilapidated. Ancient pieces of machinery, skeletal with rust, lay dead in corners.

  But neglected as it was, the place stirred with life. Spring helped, of course: weeds shouldered aside frost-bitten cement and flourished in the yard; young nettles thrust through the ribs of the abandoned hardware. At one end of the yard a small building rather like a sentry-box – which Alison’s father would have identified without hesitation as the privy – had been almost completely overgrown by a bush of honeysuckle, which was just coming into leaf. Each opening leaf resembled a tiny pair of wings, trembling in the sharp air. It looked as though a cloud of pale green butterflies had alighted on the bare twigs of the bush and might at any moment take off again.

  The air smelled fresh and damp and earthy, and birds and domestic creatures filled it with their sounds. Two bearded members of the Mill Farm family were in evidence, chopping wood and digging a large vegetable patch with more enthusiasm than skill. They looked up with an amiable ‘Hallo’as Roz and Alison passed them on their way to the house and there were more, and louder, greetings when Roz opened the door and walked into the big kitchen.

  The noise, until Alison became accustomed to it, was distracting and almost deafening. A television set or a radio would have been entirely superfluous. The family appeared to consist of about a dozen adults and as many children under the age of five. The children sat at whim at or on a table, using spoons and fingers to attack bowls of porridge. The adults sat at another table, finishing their own breakfast and discussing the tasks for the day, with the exception of one frowning girl whose sole contribution to the discussion was a guitar accompaniment.