‘To me? I didn’t think I’d be persona grata with your daughter, after the way I conned her this afternoon at Oxlip.’
Quantrill tried not to look as hurt as he felt. ‘Don’t ask me how her mind works, just find out what she knows. But she doesn’t want to see you here, she wants to keep it informal. So take her out into the town, Martin, and buy her a cup of tea or something. And be kind to her, or I’ll pin your ears to the notice-board.’
Alison refused the offer of tea. They walked in silence, several feet apart, across the main road and down into the town. They went down Market Street, along White Hart Street, past the Rights of Man and so to the narrow river Dodman. It was a feature of the town centre, with a paved walk on one side opening on to a pedestrian shopping precinct, and gardens on the other. There were seats on the paved walk, looking out over the river towards flower-beds yellow and white with spring.
It was quiet by the river. The shops had just closed, after the busyness of Easter Saturday, and the precinct had an exhausted, wind-blown, littered look. It was too cool for sitting about. Nearly everyone had gone home to tea. People would return later, when the pubs and the Chinese takeaway opened and the dog owners emerged for their evening walks, but for the moment Alison and Tait had the area to themselves.
She tucked her hands into the pockets of her velvet jacket. ‘This is going to be a bit difficult to explain,’ she said, keeping her voice distant. ‘I can’t tell Dad because he’s emotionally involved with me. He’d be all upset. Anyway, his generation is so prejudiced. That’s one reason why I thought it would be easier to talk to you, because we’re the same generation.’
She turned to him, her cheeks flaring. ‘That doesn’t mean that I’ve forgiven you for the way you set me up this afternoon,’ she said vigorously. ‘I think it was despicable. Oh, I know, you’re a detective and this is a murder investigation and so your job comes before everything. I know all about that, I’ve heard about it all my life. But I won’t stand for being used – particularly when you’re not even after the right man.’
She walked on. ‘The point is, though, that I think I can talk to you. It’s always easiest to talk to someone you’re not emotionally involved with, and that’s certainly true of us. We don’t need ever to see each other again after today. So I don’t mind telling you why I’m sure you’ve got the wrong man, because you can think what you like, it won’t worry me in the least.’
‘Right,’ agreed Tait peaceably. He couldn’t imagine that she had anything significant to reveal, but he was prepared to indulge her. Smith was in custody and they could hold him on a charge of stealing the netsuke, so there was no need to rush the questioning about the murder. He felt pleased with the way the Oxlip Fair operation had gone. The world looked good to him on that spring evening. So did Alison. He glanced with amusement at her determined profile, thinking how much more attractive her guileless personality became when she was fired with indignation.
They had reached the part of the walk directly opposite the small shopping precinct, where the river Dodman, on its way to the Ouse, was joined by the even smaller river Dunnock. The confluence was spanned by an elegant modern triple footbridge. Alison walked half-way across it and leaned on the rail looking down at the water.
Tait joined her. He could sense that she was searching for words, and he had the wisdom to keep quiet.
She straightened and looked at him. ‘Would you say I was normal?’ she demanded, holding her head high and her voice steady.
Tait shrugged. ‘What’s normal?’ he asked, trying to sound idle rather than wary. He peered down into the river. Shoals of tiddlers hovered and darted just under the surface, above the thick ribbons of weed that streamed with the flow of the current. As the weed moved, he thought that he could glimpse a shining object beneath it, a kind of metal grille.
Alison went on looking at him. ‘Hetero,’ she said.
Tait smiled at her, relieved and slightly amused. He had been half-afraid that she had been about to disclose some terminal disease, or imagined psychosis. ‘I’ve never thought of doubting it. Why?’ he added tolerantly. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Yes, of course I am! At least, I’ve always taken it for granted. I’ve had boy-friends ever since I was sixteen.’ She spoke as though sixteen was three centuries rather than three years ago. ‘But now I’m not so sure. I didn’t think about it until this week – I wouldn’t let myself think about it – but I was so upset about Jasmine—’
Her voice rose, wavered and broke. She bent again over the handrail of the bridge to conceal her tears, and Tait waited patiently beside her. He slewed his head to look at the object in the river from a different angle, and finally identified it as part of a shopping trolley, almost buried in mud and weed. The manager of the Fine Fare supermarket had complained to the police that he lost on average five trolleys a month, so here was at least one of them.
‘Anyway.’ Alison scrubbed at her eyes and recovered her voice. ‘Since then I’ve been talking to Roz Elliott and her sister Polly, and I can see why I’ve been so upset. I’ve understood it, and admitted it to myself. I was falling in love with Jasmine.’
‘Well, that’s perfectly understandable,’ said Tait easily. He could remember being a lonely new thirteen-year-old boarder at public school and falling in love with the captain of the rugby team. It hadn’t been reciprocated, it hadn’t lasted more than a term, and it certainly hadn’t affected him permanently. It was a fact of life, a phase that most adolescents went through; but he could remember how painful it was, and how shaming. He would have died rather than let his mother know, and so he could understand Alison’s unwillingness to talk to her father.
‘Jasmine was an attractive woman,’ he went on, ‘and she’d made a name for herself. She had a strong personality. She was helpful and friendly to you, and so you became infatuated. Naturally, you’re more upset about her death than you would otherwise have been. But there’s no reason why you should worry about it, or think that it has changed your orientation.’
Alison’s reply was iced with contempt. ‘I’m not an adolescent, Martin. I do know what I’m talking about. I’ve been in love several times, and I wanted – I thought I wanted – to marry the man I had an affair with before I came back to Breckham. What I felt for Jasmine wasn’t infatuation.’
‘Yes, all right.’ Tait tried to soothe her. ‘I’m not doubting the strength of your feelings. But I don’t see what this has to do with Jasmine’s murder. I mean, you’re surely not trying to tell me that she felt the same way about you?’
‘No … at least, she never gave me any reason to think so, but … oh, it’s all intuition, but I believe she might have done if we’d been together longer – if she’d lived …’
Tait tried to go on being patient. It wasn’t only that the girl’s father had told him to be kind; he felt too protective towards her to want to say or do anything that would give her feelings any more of a battering. But he knew that she was talking nonsense.
‘Oh, come on, Alison—’ He put a friendly hand on her shoulder. ‘Jasmine was very fond of you, I’m sure of that. She couldn’t help but be fond of you, you’re a very sweet girl. But she was no lesbian. After all, she was a romantic novelist. She spent her life describing passionate love affairs between men and women.’
Alison pulled away from his hand. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she said coolly. ‘Jasmine was a professional writer. She wrote fiction, not autobiography.’
‘But Jasmine liked men,’ insisted Tait. ‘And this time I know what I’m talking about. If it hadn’t been for her friend Smith and his drugs, I’d have been after her myself. She was keen enough, I can tell you that.’
‘You think so?’
Tait glowered.
‘There’s no need to feel offended,’ Alison went on kindly. ‘You see, I knew Jasmine a good deal better than you did. Not that she discussed her private life with me, but I know how she felt about men. Yes, she liked them as friends, and she fou
nd them useful for her books. She enjoyed knowing that some of them were after her. But I’ve realized, this week, that she happened to prefer women.’
‘How do you know that?’
The girl hesitated. ‘Intuition again, I suppose. But you were the one who brought it to my notice, when you told me that Anne Downing had broken off her engagement. Do you know when that happened, by the way?’
‘Last weekend, I think.’
‘Yes, that fits … You couldn’t have known it, but Jasmine was very fond of Anne. They were very close – Anne lived at Yeoman’s, and they did everything together. I don’t know what broke them up, Jasmine didn’t talk about it, but I gathered that they had a quarrel and Anne went off. That was a few weeks before the party that you took me to. And after you’d left the party, Anne turned up with her fiancé – did you know that?’
‘Your father mentioned it.’
‘Yes, that’s the odd thing. Dad saw exactly what I saw at the party, but he couldn’t ever put it together for himself because, like you, he thought of Jasmine only as a romantic novelist. What we thought we saw was Jasmine’s ex-secretary calling in to say that she’d become engaged. I can remember how flushed Anne looked, and how bright her eyes were. I put it down to happiness, and so did Dad I suppose, and everybody else. But what I now think we were seeing was Anne coming back in triumph to her ex-lover, and saying in effect that she could do without her.’
‘You mean that Anne was using Buxton as a way of getting even with Jasmine after their quarrel?’
‘It’s possible. It didn’t occur to me at the time, of course, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the past few days. I know that at the party her fiancé looked as though he couldn’t believe what had happened to him. He was overjoyed. But once she’d made her point to Jasmine, Anne would have had to come to terms with the fact that she’d agreed to marry the man. She must have decided that she couldn’t go through with it, and I suppose she had a row with him. She must have let him know about Jasmine – perhaps she even taunted him … I don’t know. I don’t know any of this, but it’s possible, isn’t it? It does make sense?’
Tait was thinking hard. ‘Oh, it makes sense all right. It makes very good sense. But it’s only intuition, and I can’t go to your father with that.’
‘I don’t want you to,’ she said, alarmed. ‘I don’t want you to tell him how I felt about Jasmine, he’s too old-fashioned to take it. I love him, and I don’t want to hurt him. But there is just one fact I can tell you. I’ve been trying, ever since I found – ever since Monday morning, not to think about what I saw at Yeoman’s. It was too dreadful. But this morning, when Gilbert was telling me how he stole the netsuke, I did think about what I saw. And I remembered quite clearly that just as I turned from opening the window curtains, I noticed that a photograph was missing. It had always stood in the same place, on a writing desk. It was a photograph of Jasmine and Anne, standing close together and looking very happy. And I can think of only one person who would want to get rid of that.’
Chapter Thirty Two
At High House Farm, Oliver Buxton had given his pigman Easter Saturday off. Instead of getting married, Buxton had spent the day in the farrowing shed. He was crossing the yard in working jeans and wellington boots, combat hat and jacket, on his way to the house for supper, when three cars came roaring up the approach road. The first was unmarked, the others were police cars. Buxton stood motionless beside the slurry pit, his eyes on the ground, as the cars stopped and their occupants approached him. He said nothing at all, until Quantrill asked him what he had done the previous Sunday evening.
Buxton looked up. He needed a shave, and a bath. It was not a factor that Quantrill was crass enough to hold against a hard-working man, but it did strengthen the theory that Tait had put to him on the basis of the photograph that Alison believed to be missing.
The relationship that Tait had postulated between Jasmine Woods and Anne Downing might or might not be true, but Quantrill could see and smell for himself that life at High House Farm would have been a good deal less pleasant for the girl than life at Yeoman’s. Whatever the fundamental reason for the broken engagement, there was – as Tait had said – only one person who would have wanted to get rid of the photograph of the two women.
‘Sunday?’ said Buxton gruffly. ‘I went out for a drink. A pub crawl. I had a good reason for getting drunk, so I did.’
‘Was that the day Anne Downing broke off your engagement?’ asked Quantrill.
Buxton nodded.
‘Did you go out on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you go to Norfolk? Did you go to Thirling?’
Buxton said nothing.
‘That’s where I would have been tempted to go,’ suggested Tait, needling the man deliberately. ‘I can understand your wanting to hurt Jasmine Woods. Any man would loathe a woman who had an affair with the girl he wanted to marry.’
Buxton’s healthy face became a darker red. The muscles at the sides of his jaw tightened with suppressed fury, but he said nothing.
‘We shall be able to trace the man who killed Jasmine Woods,’ said Quantrill quietly, ‘because of the blood. It spurts, doesn’t it, when a major blood vessel is ruptured – you’re a farmer, you deal with animals, so you know about that. Even though he’ll have cleaned his car, there’s bound to be a speck left and we’ll find it. And then there are the clothes he wore – it’s not easy to get rid of clothes, and we’ll find some trace of them somewhere. The valuables too, the jade and netsuke that he took to try to give the impression that they were the reason for the murder. And the photograph, of course. The photograph of Jasmine Woods with your fiancée … What did you do with that, I wonder?’
Buxton made no reply, but the police did not need one. They watched his eyes instead and saw – with satisfaction or squeamishness, according to rank and the follow-up action they anticipated – that he glanced involuntarily at the slurry pit.
Chapter Thirty Three
Douglas Quantrill looked at his digital watch, converted the figures to nearly a quarter-past eight, and drained his cup.
‘I’ll be back just after eleven, to take Alison to catch her train,’ he informed his wife.
Molly turned a page of her newly-arrived Woman’s Weekly. ‘You needn’t bother, dear,’ she said absently, looking at an article on Spring Brides. ‘Martin Tait’s coming to do that.’
‘Oh, is he? Does Alison know?’
‘Not yet.’ Molly placidly finished her toast and marmalade. ‘He wanted to surprise her. He’s been trying to talk to her for the past two weeks, ever since you caught that man who murdered Jasmine Woods. He’s telephoned nearly every day, but she won’t speak to him. Apparently he wants to apologize to her for something that happened at Oxlip Fair.’ She looked up. ‘What did happen at Oxlip, Douggie?’
‘Damned if I know,’ said Quantrill. ‘Nobody ever tells me anything.’
‘Well, this will be a good opportunity for the two of them to sort it out.’
‘Huh!’ He felt fiercely disappointed that he would not be able to see his daughter safely on to the train. She was sleeping late – if she could sleep through the thumps and bangs made by Peter in process of getting up, late for school as usual – and so he wouldn’t even be able to say good-bye. ‘If Alison doesn’t want to see Martin, I’m not having him forcing his attentions on her.’
‘Oh, don’t be so old-fashioned! It’ll do no harm if Martin gives her a lift to the station. With Alison going back to work in London, there’s no need for her to see him again if she doesn’t want to. But if she changes her mind about him, well, she’s coming down again at the end of April for Paula Timms’s wedding—’
Quantrill nearly commented that his wife read too much romantic fiction, but thought better of it. He went into the hall, with Molly following, and picked up his tweed hat. ‘You’d better say good-bye to her for me, then,’ he said sadly. ‘Tell her to take care, and to keep in touch.’ He went t
o the front door.
‘Douggie—’ prompted his wife, hurt that his reawakened interest in her should be waning already.
‘Oh – sorry, dear.’ He smiled at her a little guiltily, but his kiss was affectionate as well as dutiful.
Molly accepted it, and brushed a crumb of toast from his lapel. ‘And don’t you forget to keep in touch with me, Doug Quantrill,’ she reminded him.
Alison stopped dead in the front path when she saw Martin Tait’s Citroën parked at the gate. He got out, said a cheerful goodmorning, and began to load her cases. ‘Your father sends his apologies,’ he explained. ‘He was tied up, so he asked me to come instead.’
Alison reluctantly took her seat beside him. ‘Why do detectives always have to be such liars?’ she said.
They drove in silence through the town and out along the Saintsbury Road, past the industrial estate.
‘I suppose it’s no use saying I’m sorry about Oxlip?’ he offered, as the railway bridge came into sight.
‘Not really. What’s the point? It doesn’t matter what we think of each other, does it?’
‘I know you think badly of me,’ he said, ‘but I certainly don’t of you.’
‘Not after what I told you? About my feelings for Jasmine—’
‘Good Lord no.’ In fact, Tait had discovered, her confession had made Alison rather more interesting. He had thought about her a good deal in the past fourteen days, and he could see that her unhappy love affair in London might well have led, temporarily, to a revulsion from men. He could understand how she had come to focus her emotions on Jasmine Woods. But that was all over; she needed now to return to normality, and he felt challenged to make sure that she did so as soon as possible. That was why he had persisted in his attempts to see her.
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