There was a certain uniformity of appearance among the members of the family. The children’s sex was totally indeterminate, dressed as they all were in home-made dungarees, with their hair fringing their eyes. The adults all wore their hair long, though some of the men held theirs back with a headband. One or two of the women were in long skirts but most of them, like the men, wore frayed jeans and sweaters. There was one older woman at the adults’ table, and she rose with a cry of welcome as soon as she saw her sister.
‘Roz!’
‘Polly dear.’
They embraced with a warmth that surprised Alison, who could not remember having touched her sister Jennifer since they were children. She was even more surprised when Roz introduced her and Polly insisted on giving her a welcoming hug.
She could hardly hear the conversation that took place between the sisters, but Roz’s explanations were minimal. Polly was indifferent to everything except Alison’s presence, which seemed to give her genuine pleasure. She put one arm across the girl’s shoulders and took her round the room introducing her to each member of the family; and each one greeted the newcomer with a hug or a friendly kiss. Alison felt almost like a bagatelle ball when, bemused, breathless and liberally smeared with porridge, she fetched up again beside Roz Elliott.
Roz grinned. ‘All right? I must go now, or I’ll never catch my train. Polly’s delighted to have you here, and she’s admirably incurious. She doesn’t know what’s happened – I’ve simply told her that you want to get away from home for a few days. You can tell her just as much or as little as you like, and stay as long as you want.’ She stepped aside to dodge a porridge-encrusted infant that was bent on swarming up her boots. ‘Or as long as you can stand it. I shan’t tell anyone where you are. You’re an independent person, and presumably you’ll get in touch with your family when you’re ready to do so.’
Polly bustled forward to scoop up the baby, pointing out to her sister with gentle reproof that it was wrong to make children feel in any way rejected. Like Roz, she was a big woman with strong, handsome bones. She was in her middle forties, bulky in jeans and what looked like a hand-woven poncho. Her thick auburn hair, straighter than Roz’s, was tied back loosely with a leather thong. She too had a rich warm voice, but a much more relaxed and outgoing personality. She put her free arm round her sister’s waist and they walked outside together, with most of the children toddling or crawling after them.
Alison was immediately absorbed into the family. Room was made for her on a bench at the table, between a man with a straggling brown beard who was carving a piece of wood, and a barefooted girl in jeans and a slouch hat, breast-feeding a baby. Someone insisted on providing her with a pottery bowl containing porridge and a pottery mug of warm liquid that looked like tea, although it tasted as though the leaves had been grown considerably nearer to Breckham than to Bombay.
Discussion continued round her while she cautiously swallowed a second breakfast. The family was, apparently, trying to come to a collective decision about the vegetable crops that would be planted that year. As in any family, there was disagreement. Personalities obtruded, points were scored. The sun rose higher, and still the majority of the commune sat round the table, talking rather than doing.
The mounting tension was broken when the girl with the guitar played a loud discord and burst into tears. Immediately, the family reunited. Love and support overflowed, the girl was hugged and talked out of her tears, and the family rose from the table with a sense of harmony and achievement to begin the day’s work. It was almost ten o’clock, and the bleating of the goats tethered outside had become piteous.
Alison found herself alone in the kitchen with the family’s dirty breakfast dishes. Washing up was not her favourite occupation but she was grateful for the refuge and ready to do her share of the work. She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater and was collecting crockery and scraping up the remains of the porridge when Polly came back, with a different child in her arms.
She gave a rich chuckle when she saw what Alison was doing. ‘Bless your heart, but you needn’t. It’s Linda’s turn for that today, and she’ll get round to it eventually.’
‘It’s the least I can do,’ said Alison. ‘I mean, it’s very good of you—’
‘Oh, you’ll get your turn, never fear! We all muck in with all the jobs. But Roz tells me that you may not want to stay for long, and there are some things we couldn’t expect you to do – the milking, for example, it wouldn’t be fair on the goats. So perhaps a bit of extra washing up will even things out. And you’ll be glad to hear that this isn’t Cold Comfort Farm. We do have hot water and washing-up mops, so you won’t need to cletter the porridge dishes with cold water and a twig.’
The allusion was unfamiliar to Alison, but she found the reassurance comforting. Polly worked with her, one-handed because of the child she was carrying, chatting about the commune.
‘The family think that they’re being simple and unmaterialistic, bless their hearts. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that a really simple life doesn’t include electricity and plumbing. But I’d find life unbearable without, and so would they – and fortunately I can afford to provide the amenities, so we all continue to take them for granted. But we grow as much of our own food as we can, and sell the surplus, and everyone does some kind of craft work which we sell too. None of my family goes on social security, that’s my one rule. Of course, they’re all supported by me to a large extent; real self-sufficiency’s a romantic myth. But I enjoy communal living, for part of the year anyway. I cheat too, I’m afraid. I rent a villa in Spain for a couple of months each winter – don’t I, my sweet?’ She joggled the gurgling baby against her shoulder, careless of the fact that it was dribbling on her poncho.
‘I’ve never been to a commune before,’ said Alison, ‘but the man I sat next to at breakfast reminded me of one of my friends. Gil carves too, and he’s into organic gardening and things like that, but he lives alone. I suppose some of your family might know him: Gilbert Smith.’
‘Possibly. Does he go to Oxlip Fair?’
‘Oh yes, I’ve heard him talking about it. He goes every Easter. I’ve never been myself, but it sounds interesting.’
‘It is. We all go from here. Some of the family stay the whole three days, and they’ll be going on Friday to set up camp. The rest of us go for odd days. You must come, it’s great fun. And you’ll probably see your friend there.’
‘I’d like that.’ Alison had not thought of Gilbert Smith for the past twenty-four hours. Now she did so with affection, wondering what he was doing and how he was coming to terms with the shock of Jasmine’s death. He was such a gentle, sensitive man … so unlike Alison’s ex-lover, and the lout she had encountered in Breckham Market, that the thought of him made her feel more kindly disposed towards men in general.
‘Gil’s a dear,’ she added. ‘He does smoke pot, which seems an awful pity – I mean, if you’re against using chemicals in the garden, it’s a shame if you can’t enjoy life without using them on your own mind – but it doesn’t stop me from being his friend. My father would go berserk if he knew about the pot. He’s a policeman, you see. But fortunately he doesn’t know, and I’m certainly not going to tell him. You’ve got to be loyal to your friends, haven’t you?’
That had been one of Jasmine’s principles. And more and more, Alison felt an affinity with the murdered woman.
Chapter Twenty Seven
PC Ronald Timms, the middle-aged Breckham Market constable with the Kitchener moustache, was passing Chief Inspector Quantrill’s office late on Tuesday afternoon when he heard coming from it a woman’s voice.
‘It was a strange sensation, to be kissed by someone other than Matt,’ the woman was saying. ‘I hadn’t expected it, or wanted it. After Matt died, my senses seemed to atrophy. I’d thought – no, I’d assumed – that they were dead too. But now I began to realize that they weren’t.’
The constable raised his eyebrows. Some bird making a stateme
nt to the DCI; young, from the sound of her voice, and posh, but definitely sexy. The DCI had all the luck. PC Timms brushed up his moustache and loitered near the door, listening.
The woman drew a deep breath and spoke again. Her voice was low and impassioned. ‘I found myself responding to Stephen’s kiss. Warily at first, almost experimentally; but then with an eagerness that took me by surprise. I no longer knew who I was kissing, or cared. I wasn’t dead, I was alive! I needed someone to prove it to me conclusively, and any living breathing man would do. I clung to him fiercely, so blinkered by the intensity of my reawakening that nothing mattered except here and now.’
Ron Timms, eyes bulging, ran a finger round his collar and applied his ear more closely to the door. The woman was alleging rape, presumably. Typical. She’d obviously given this poor sod Stephen a come-on, and now she was going to bleat that she hadn’t meant it …
He was totally unprepared for what followed: a derisive snort from the DCI, and a chuckle from the woman herself. ‘Phew!’ she said, in a lighter, more relaxed voice. ‘Thank God that bit’s over. I do hate all these refined intimations of sexuality, but my publisher doesn’t approve of anything more robust. Just as well for our heroine that Stephen is a gentleman, and will take her at her word when she tells him in the next paragraph to lay off. I must make myself a cup of tea before I do any more, though – heavens, it’s ten past six, I’d better ring Heather and tell her I’m behind schedule and can’t come to supper this evening.’
There was a slight click as a tape recorder was switched off. PC Timms, realizing that he’d been listening to the recorded voice of the writer who had been murdered, shrugged off his disappointment. But if anyone wanted his opinion – which they wouldn’t on account of his being only a poor bloody ordinary copper, not CID – if that was how Jasmine Woods carried on, she’d asked for everything she got. It was Martin Tait who had remembered Jasmine Woods’s tapes. He had begun to play them through without much hope of hearing anything other than the work in progress, but as soon as he realized that her dictation was accompanied by a running commentary on the events of the day – the day of her murder – he had taken the machine to Quantrill’s office so that they could listen together.
They had already heard that George Hussey had arrived without warning at lunch-time, just as the Elliotts had left. Jasmine Woods had not been able to get back to work until four o’clock. When she tried to telephone her sister at ten past six, the line had been engaged. She went on working and obviously forgot the telephone call because her next relevant remark was that the door bell was ringing. The detectives could hear it faintly in the background.
‘Damn it!’ protested Jasmine Woods, in the middle of a cliffhanger. ‘Who on earth’s that? I’m not expecting anyone tonight, and anyway – oh Lord I never rang Heather and it’s after eight already. I must do that as soon as I’ve got rid of my caller. Don’t go away, Ali, I’ll be back.’
The recorder clicked off, and the tape hissed to the end of the reel in silence.
‘It could have been any one of them,’ said Tait. ‘Any one of the men we haven’t already eliminated.’
‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ said Quantrill slowly. He stood at the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out across the main Yarchester road to the narrow streets of the old town. Just below his first-floor office window was a row of ornamental cherry trees, their reddish branches bumpy with swelling buds. A boy and a girl, he in factory dungarees and she in school skirt and pullover, had run to meet each other under the cherry trees and were kissing with fervour. He couldn’t be much more than sixteen, and she looked about fourteen; but then, as Quantrill had cause to know, the stir of spring takes no account of age.
Spending the afternoon listening to Jasmine Woods’s sexy voice dictating a romantic novel hadn’t helped, either. It had reminded him of the occasion, back in February, when he had read a page of one of her books in bed, over his wife’s shoulder. Molly had been so absorbed in the story that she had become aroused; but her absorption in the fiction had been so total that she had rejected her husband. He could still remember the humiliation of it.
He turned from the window. ‘We’ve been working on the assumption that the murderer had to be someone Jasmine Woods knew. But thinking about it, I’m not so sure. After all, her books are bestsellers; women lap them up, and a lot of them probably fancy Jasmine Woods’s heroes more than they do their own boyfriends or husbands. That’s what romantic novels are for, after all, to take women away from reality.’
‘They certainly do that,’ said Tait. He was contemptuous on principle of formula fiction, but nettled that Jasmine Woods’s version of it employed a vocabulary rather larger than his own. There had been a couple of words on her tape that he’d have to look up, as soon as he could get hold of the dictionary that the old man kept in the top drawer of his desk. ‘That was something Jasmine’s ex-husband said about her: when she started to write her books she began to withdraw from him, and in the end he felt that they gave her more satisfaction than he did.’
‘That’s just what I mean. As you discovered, though, Potter isn’t jealous. But plenty of men are, and there must be quite a few of them who’re suffering from frustration on account of Jasmine Woods. There are men who’ve never set eyes on her who probably feel that they hate her … hundreds of them … thousands … And with that glossy magazine article telling them where she lived—’
The two detectives fell silent, contemplating the possibility that the number of suspects in this case was incalculable.
‘Well, we just go on working our way through,’ said Quantrill heavily. He looked at his watch and picked up a telephone. ‘I’d better have a quick word with my wife. She usually watches the early evening regional news on television, and she’ll get into a state when she sees the photograph of Alison on the screen. No, don’t go, Martin, this won’t take a minute.’
Tait looked through one of the files while the Chief Inspector made reassuring noises into the telephone. A wife like that must be a real drag, the sergeant thought; probably a typical Jasmine Woods fan – and the old man’s theory about jealous husbands could be based on more than guesswork …
The internal telephone rang. Tait answered it. There was a call for the Chief Inspector from Inspector Carrow, and Tait hurried next door to his own office to take it.
He burst back into the Chief Inspector’s office just as Quantrill finished speaking to his wife.
‘That was Yarchester, sir. They’ve found a girl in a coffee bar, a student friend of Gilbert Smith, who saw him in the city yesterday afternoon. He was wandering round the Earlfield Road area, on his own. He looked strange, she said. Distraught. He wouldn’t say what he was doing or where he was going, but he showed her a tiny carved ivory figure that he was carrying in his pocket.’
Quantrill got to his feet. ‘He did, did he? The Earlfield Road area … that’s near the university, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Inspector Carrow said that they’d been concentrating so far on the sleazy side of the city, near the river, where most of the junkies live. But they’ve switched now to the university area. Not many of the students live there, of course, except for the ones in residence, it’s too expensive. But that doesn’t mean that Smith hasn’t any friends there.’
A telephone rang again. Quantrill answered it, his face at first relieved and then growing anxious. He depressed the rest and held on to the receiver.
‘A possible lead on Alison,’ he said. ‘I sent a man to do another house-to-house in Thirling, making enquiries about her. Apparently there wasn’t anyone at home at the Old Rectory when he first called, but he’s just been back and interviewed a Miss Mandy Walsh – one of the students we saw there. She knows my daughter. Alison rang her last night, asking for Mrs Elliott—’
‘Dr Elliott,’ Tait amended. ‘Ph.D.,’ he explained.
The Chief Inspector stared through him. ‘The girl told Alison that the Elliott woman was at her flat
in Yarchester, and gave her the number. I’ve got the address. It’s near the university, in Earlfield Crescent …’ He put a call through to Inspector Carrow, who promised to send a patrol car straight to Earlfield Crescent and report back.
Douglas Quantrill roamed his office, running his hand through his thick hair. ‘That means that Alison and Gilbert Smith were probably both in the same area last night. And he would know the Elliott woman too, he might have called there … I hope to God we’re not too late.’
‘I’ve had a thought about Smith, sir,’ said Tait, wanting to get Quantrill out of the role of anxious father and back into his Chief Inspector’s cap. ‘There’s a list in this file of the things that were found in his flat, and one of them was a T-shirt with a blazing sun motif and the legend A fair field full of folk. I’ve been seeing a lot of that about in Breckham lately, on posters and handbills advertising Oxlip Fair.’
‘It’s the same every year,’ said Quantrill absently. ‘It seems to be the Oxlip Fair emblem – don’t ask me what it means.’
‘It’s a quote from a medieval poem, Langland’s Piers Plowman,’ Tait supplied. ‘Not,’ he added modestly, ‘that I’ve ever read it, it’s just common knowledge. Anyway,’ he went on quickly, evading Quantrill’s dirty look, ‘I remember Jasmine telling me that she met Gilbert Smith at Oxlip Fair a couple of years ago. If we don’t catch up with him before Easter, I should think there’s a good chance that we’ll find him at the fair.’
Quantrill exploded. ‘Good grief, the fair doesn’t start until Saturday! We’ve got to find him before then – we’ve got to get to him before he finds Alison.’
One of his telephones rang, and he had it in his hand before it had time to give the second half of the initial brr-brr.
The Chief Inspector's Daughter Page 20
