Who Saw Him Die?

by Sheila Radley

  ‘No thanks. I’ve got too much to do, with the boss away.’

  ‘Rubbish, you’re just making excuses!’ Martin Tait was no taller than Hilary Lloyd, but he contrived to put an indulgent arm round her shoulders and shepherd her to the door. ‘Come for the ride, and I’ll buy you a good lunch afterwards.’

  ‘Really, no thank you.’ She slipped away from his arm, and turned to face him with a firm but pleasant smile. ‘Yes, you’re right: I’m miffed that I didn’t spot Matthew Napier as a suspect. But I still intend to stick to my plan to interview Jack Goodrum’s daughter Tracey, the one with the nose-stud. Because there has to be some good reason why a bit of a punk with an ear-stud, who’s unknown in Breckham Market, should have been in the town on the day the shotgun was stolen, asking where her father lived.’

  Chapter Twenty Five

  By noon the following day, when Chief Inspector Tait and Sergeant Lloyd met again, the weather had changed.

  November had started mild and damp, and deteriorated to cold and wet. But now, Breckham Market seemed to have dried out overnight. The low cloud had dispersed, the temperature had fallen sharply, the air had been crisped by frost. The sun was putting in a guest appearance, and Hilary had suggested to Tait that they should make the most of it by walking through the town to lunch at the Coney and Thistle.

  But it was not an occasion for celebration. Martin Tait, very much the aspirant county chief constable in brown racing trilby, cashmere scarf and Burberry, was unusually silent. When spoken to, he answered abruptly.

  They left divisional headquarters, crossed the main London-Yarchester road, and walked down Market Hill into the narrow streets of the old town. Most other pedestrians looked reasonably cheerful, perked up by the sunshine; but Tait only scowled.

  ‘It was completely logical. Wasn’t it?’ he demanded at last.

  ‘Completely,’ confirmed Hilary. ‘I couldn’t fault it, anyway, and you know how hard I tried.’

  ‘Matthew Napier’s statement was so feeble. He “didn’t like the school” so he spent both Saturday afternoons “just riding round on his own”. And he said he spent both evenings on his own at the cinema in Woodbridge. That’s one of the flimsiest alibis I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘But you can’t call it an alibi, Martin, if it was what the boy actually did on those two Saturdays. And there’s no point in disputing it, if you’ve discovered that there isn’t enough mileage on the bike since he acquired it to have got him here and back twice. You can’t argue with a milometer.’

  ‘I most certainly can! They’re not difficult to alter if you know how, and if you’ve got the right tools. And Saxted College prides itself on its craft workshops.’

  ‘Even so –’

  Martin Tait sighed. ‘Yes, all right, Hilary. Even so, what’s the point in pursuing the boy, when you’ve discovered that he didn’t do the burglary. And when we know that his stepfather’s shotgun wasn’t the murder weapon.’

  They had reached the market place, which was used as a car-park for the Town Hall on five days a week, and for the parish church of St Botolph on Sundays. Today however was market day. Vehicles were barred, and the open space had sprung into vigorous commercial life. Stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables were besieged by customers, and the detectives had to edge through the crush to reach the Coney and Thistle.

  On their way, Tait paused to greet his former bank manager, now retired, and took the opportunity to restore his own ego by mentioning his recent promotion. Hilary went to a stallholder Douglas Quantrill had introduced her to, the wife of a local market gardener whose parsnips and onions and celery still had fresh earth clinging to them, and bought a bag of crisp russet apples and the makings for a winter salad. Just as she had completed her purchases, Tait came to join her.

  There were a couple of old galvanised buckets on the end of the stall, crammed with shaggy garden chrysanthemums. Their rich colours, bronze and yellow and dark red, glowed in the sun. On an impulse, Tait bought a bunch and handed them, their stalks damply paper-wrapped, to Hilary.

  ‘Sorry I was so sickening yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘Martin, how lovely!’ She closed her eyes and sniffed their spicy scent. ‘Mmm – instant nostalgia … Autumn walks in the park opposite our house when I was a child … Thank you very much. Let’s fight our way into the Coney, and I’ll buy you a drink – after all, the theory I was pursuing yesterday hasn’t really got us any further forward, has it?’

  Over hot toast, pâté and wine – and it was pleasant, for once, Hilary reflected, to share that kind of lunch with a colleague of her own generation – they discussed Jack Goodrum’s original family. As the sergeant had suspected, Doreen had not told her and Quantrill the truth on their first visit.

  When she returned to Factory Bungalow, late the previous morning, Hilary had contrived to catch Doreen’s younger daughter Tracey before the girl had a chance to dress and make her escape. Tracey, as Hilary had thought from the brief glimpse she’d had of her, was a bit of a punk: the colour of her spiky hair was unnatural without being conspicuous, and her facial ornament was limited to ear-rings and the one gold stud in her nose. Without doubt – Hilary recognised all the signs – the girl was a drug-user.

  All three female Goodrums had, as usual, been in their nightwear. Hilary had insisted that Doreen and Tracey should sit down with her at the living room table, though she agreed that Sharon would be better occupied in making a pot of tea.

  But sitting with mother and daughter over the ingredients and the dirty crockery of their permanent meal was one thing; persuading them to talk about Jack Goodrum’s death was another. They were obviously unaccustomed to communicating with each other, on this as on any other subject.

  Sergeant Lloyd had broken their silence by telling them – without saying how she knew the man’s name – that she had visited the home of Jack’s one-time partner, Dave Wheeler, and had taken his shotgun for forensic examination. Doreen Goodrum had immediately burst into an angry denunciation of Wheeler.

  She’d rung him, she said, a week or two back, to say that she’d found out where Jack was living. Jack had owed both of them, and she’d wanted to meet Dave Wheeler to discuss how best to go about getting their rights. But she’d deliberately kept Jack’s whereabouts to herself, because she’d been afraid that Dave might go rushing there on his own account, and so spoil her chances.

  And then she’d read in the local paper about the burglary at her ex-husband’s house in Breckham Market. She’d been livid. Dave Wheeler had done it, she’d been sure. But when she rang to tell him what she thought of him, he had denied it. He said his old mother had seen in the paper that a shotgun had been stolen – so it couldn’t have been him, because he had a shotgun of his own, as Doreen very well knew.

  But Doreen hadn’t believed his denials. Dave had been crafty, that was all: stealing a gun he didn’t need so that he wouldn’t be suspected. She had tried to go on discussing their joint plan for tackling Jack, but Dave seemed to have lost interest. There would be police about, after the burglary, he had said, and he for one wasn’t going near Jack’s place, with or without a shotgun, until the hoo-ha had died down.

  And then, having already helped himself to money and jewellery and stuff, without even offering to share it, if Dave hadn’t gone back to Breckham Market the following week and taken his final revenge by shooting Jack! It wasn’t right, Doreen had protested, mopping her flushed face. It wasn’t fair …

  Sipping the tea that Sharon had made – strong, but perfectly acceptable if you didn’t notice the imperfectly clean cups – Hilary had revealed that there was no evidence to connect Dave Wheeler with the burglary at The Mount. She had come, she told them, because she believed that Tracey might be able to help her.

  Tracey, thin and pale and withdrawn, had kept her eyes down and said nothing until she was asked a direct question, when she answered belligerently. She was smoking ordinary cheap cigarettes, but she held them in shaking fingers.

&
nbsp; What if she did have a boy friend who had hair like hers and wore an ear-stud? It was the fashion, wasn’t it? No, she didn’t know what size shoes he wore. No, she didn’t know if he’d ever been to Breckham Market. What would he want to go there for?

  Yes, all right, she needed money. Didn’t everybody? Yes, she reckoned her Dad owed her. Yes, she knew he’d moved to Breckham Market – she’d heard her Mum phoning Dave Wheeler, so she’d looked through the local paper and found the report of the inquest that mentioned her Dad’s name. So what?

  No of course her boy friend hadn’t gone to Breckham Market last Saturday and shot her Dad! What’d be the point of that? The mean old sod was no good to them dead. As her mother said, it must’ve been that cheating Dave Wheeler who shot him. Tracey was glad the police had got on to Dave – she hoped they’d put him away for the rest of his life.

  It was then that Hilary had explained how forensic tests had shown that Dave Wheeler’s gun was not the murder weapon. That meant, she told Tracey, that the police were still urgently looking for Jack Goodrum’s own gun, the one that had been stolen during the burglary.

  But the police weren’t at the moment interested in the burglary itself, she emphasised. That was a minor matter. It was the murderer they wanted.

  They had reason to believe that a man answering the description of Tracey’s boy friend had done the burglary. If that was so, and if he wasn’t the murderer, it would be in his – and Tracey’s – interests, Hilary had told the girl, to hand over her father’s gun in order to prove it.

  ‘A very useful tactic,’ agreed Chief Inspector Tait. ‘It rarely fails to work.’

  ‘Oh yes, it worked. They promptly turned in Jack’s own AYA side-by-side 12-bore. But since forensic says that it wasn’t the murder weapon either, it doesn’t take us anywhere, unfortunately. We’ve got Tracey’s boy friend – not a nice young man – for the burglary, and Tracey herself for handling stolen goods. They’d intended to return to Breckham Market, disguised, and threaten her father into giving them more money, but his murder put a stop to their plans. And as far as that’s concerned, we’re still plodding through the wretchedly long list of people who had good reason to hate Jack Goodrum.’

  Tait took their emply glasses to the bar, and returned with cups of coffee. ‘It’s the second Mrs Goodrum’s ex-husband who interests me most,’ he said. ‘Austin Napier QC …’

  ‘He may be a QC,’ said Hilary, ‘but he’s also unbalanced, as far as his relationship with his ex-wife is concerned.’

  ‘That’s exactly why he interests me.’ Tait looked at his watch. ‘I’ll go up to London and try to catch him at his chambers. The three-thirty train should do it – I can’t spare the time to go by car, I’ve a briefcase full of my own Saintsbury work to deal with. What about you, Hilary? Shall you be out on enquiries this afternoon, or in the office?’

  She had been admiring her bunch of chrysanthemums, and didn’t answer immediately. She sniffed them again, intrigued by their instant evocation of her suburban childhood. Then she said, ‘They remind me of my family … And that reminded me of the poor Quantrills, and what you said about Alison’s anxiety for Peter because she’d loved him so much as a child. And that reminded me of Eunice Bell and her brother Cuthbert. You remember Clanger, the town drunk, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I heard he’d been killed in a road accident – he played chicken once too often, I suppose?’

  ‘That was what everyone thought, except his sister. She tried to convince us that he’d been murdered. We didn’t entirely disbelieve her, but we simply couldn’t prove it. The thing is, though, Martin – the man who drove into Clanger was Jack Goodrum.’

  ‘Really? Well then, doesn’t that suggest that Clanger’s sister might have taken a shotgun to Goodrum in retaliation?’

  ‘We’ve thought of that one, but Douglas knows she was at the Operatic Society’s performance of My Fair Lady on the night of the murder. No, the point I’m making is that Eunice Bell couldn’t suggest a really convincing reason why Goodrum might have wanted Clanger dead. She told us that they’d known each other as boys, and that they got into some kind of mischief for which Jack was thrashed by her father. But she didn’t know what the mischief was … and I’m beginning to wonder whether it was something more serious than she thought.’

  ‘That’s an interesting possibility,’ said Tait. ‘You mean the boys had shared a secret, all those years ago, and Jack Goodrum was afraid Clanger might blurt it out?’

  ‘Something like that, yes. After all, Jack was newly arrived in the town, and very much in love with his wife. If there was some old scandal that only he and Clanger knew about, Jack wouldn’t want to risk having it revived to spoil his marriage.’

  ‘Ah – but perhaps Clanger wasn’t the only other boy originally involved?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking. We could be looking for someone who’s had no connection with Jack Goodrum for thirty or forty years. Someone who recognised him as soon as he returned to Breckham Market, and took the opportunity to settle a very old score.’

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Although he was interested in Sergeant Lloyd’s theory, Chief Inspector Tait declined to give the pursuit of it any priority.

  ‘It’s not as though we’re having to search for a motive for Goodrum’s murder,’ he pointed out as they left the Coney. ‘Just the opposite – there are so many people who had reason to hate the man that it’s hard to know which lead to follow next. So unless you can come up rapidly with some proof that he intended to kill Clanger Bell, I’d rather you didn’t waste time digging about in Goodrum’s remote past.’

  ‘That’s fair,’ agreed Hilary. ‘What’s niggling at me, you see, is the fact that there were three such respectable and convincing witnesses to Clanger Bell’s death. It was on their evidence that the Coroner decided that Jack Goodrum didn’t have a chance of avoiding the collision. I went to interview all three of them and I couldn’t find any real ground for suspicion, but I’m still not entirely satisfied. Come and see where it happened.’

  Hilary darted up Pump Hill, just off the market place, the narrow street in which Clanger Bell’s favourite pub was situated. The Boot, an inn since the eighteenth century, displayed its sign in the form of a gilt-painted wooden riding boot that hung from an iron bracket high above the doorway of the flint-faced building. The pub was too small to be brought up to the carpeted and upholstered standards now demanded by female social drinkers, and so it remained what it had always been, a male preserve with a doubtful reputation.

  Despite that – and the fact that a betting shop had been strategically placed next door to the Boot – Pump Hill itself was a perfectly respectable street. It also contained a bank, the offices of a building society, and a number of small country town shops; in addition, it provided a useful pedestrian link between the upper residential part of the town and the market place. There was nothing suspicious to be read into the presence on Pump Hill of the three eye-witnesses to Clanger Bell’s death.

  Hilary pointed out to Tait where they had been standing: Mrs Napthen outside the Trustee Savings Bank near the top of the street, Mr Woodrow by the ironmonger’s opposite the Boot, Mr Pike at the greengrocer’s at the bottom. ‘They were so conveniently spread out,’ Hilary said. ‘And they all happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time. Miss Bell thought that suspicious. But the DCI made the point that everyone who knew Clanger would always stand and watch, when they saw him emerging from a pub, to see whether or not he was going to make it across the road.’

  ‘I’ve done it myself,’ Tait agreed. The detectives moved back, out of the way of shoppers and pedestrians, into the angle between a sixteenth-century timber-framed building, now an electrical retailer’s, and the late eighteenth-century grey brick of the building society. ‘But these three eye-witnesses,’ he went on; ‘after Clanger was knocked down, did they volunteer their information on the spot?’

  ‘Yes, and that seems sign
ificant. Some people do rush towards road accidents, a few wanting to help but most of them with a kind of instinctive ghoulishness. Others just as instinctively hurry away, even if – perhaps because – they saw what happened, and they don’t want to be involved. But I understand that our three witnesses hung about until the police arrived, and then spoke up without any persuasion.’

  ‘Did they? And what have they got in common?’ asked Tait. ‘Are they all local people?’

  ‘Yes, Breckham Market born and bred, so they told me.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Mrs Napthen’s a widow in her late fifties. The men are both widowers, both retired – Mr Woodrow’s late sixties, Mr Pike’s well into his seventies.’

  ‘They’re all older than Goodrum, then. And not exactly affluent?’

  ‘Far from it. They’re decent, respectable people who’ve worked hard all their lives, and they’re now managing as best they can on their state pensions.’

  ‘If they were all brought up in the town, they knew each other, presumably?’

  ‘Not necessarily. They seem to live quiet, rather lonely lives in different parts of the town, keeping themselves to themselves.’

  Chief Inspector Tait folded his arms and thought silently for a few moments. ‘But Goodrum might well have known them when he was a butcher’s boy … What did you ask them?’

  ‘Whether they knew the driver of the vehicle that had knocked Clanger down. All three of them denied it, and repeated what they’d told the Coroner. But now I’ve thought about it again, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Jack Goodrum had planted them on Pump Hill.’

  ‘Try them again, Hilary,’ said Tait, making a quick decision. ‘When you went to see them, Goodrum was still alive. Now he’s dead, they may be prepared to talk. I’ll give you the rest of today to prove that Clanger’s death was no accident – if you can’t, your theory’s a non-runner. All right?’