‘About the shotguns,’ said the sergeant. ‘How many were there in the cabinet, Miss Bell?’
‘There were three.’
‘When I first came here with Chief Inspector Quantrill, he saw four.’
‘No. He saw a four-gun cabinet, and obviously came to the wrong conclusion. Why do you ask?’
‘We’re looking for the weapon that was used last Saturday evening to kill Jack Goodrum,’ said Tait.
‘Indeed?’ said Eunice Bell frostily. ‘Then you’re wasting your time by looking here. There were only three shotguns in my house, and Mr Glaze the auctioneer will confirm that he removed them for sale last Thursday.’
‘I suggest that there was a fourth gun,’ said Tait. ‘And that it was used to kill Jack Goodrum.’
Eunice Bell attempted to shrivel the Chief Inspector with a look. ‘Are you implying that I might have shot the man? That would have been impossible. I spent Saturday evening watching My Fair Lady at the Town Hall – as Chief Inspector Quantrill knows.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Hilary. ‘He mentioned that you’d had a chat before the performance. Did you enjoy the show, Miss Bell?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And you sat through the whole of it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Such a pity it had to be interrupted, when Chief Inspector Quantrill was called out because of the murder. What happened, exactly? Did they bring the curtain down and make an announcement, or what?’
For a moment Miss Bell stood rigid. Then she said, ‘I had a headache, and went out to the cloakroom to take some codeine. I believe the interruption occurred while I was away. I knew none of the people who were sitting near me, so I heard none of the details.’
‘And how long were you away? Half an hour or more?’
‘Certainly not. Five minutes at most.’
‘So except for those five minutes, you were in the auditorium watching the show?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then that’s more than can be said of Chief Inspector Quantrill! He didn’t intend to watch it, you know. He pretended he was going to, but he left before it began. That was why the performance had to be interrupted twice, because he didn’t respond to the first announcement. But then, you were there, Miss Bell, so you’ll know about that. Even if you missed the first interruption, you must have been back in the auditorium for the second, twelve minutes later. What happened, exactly? Did they bring down the curtain and make another announcement?’
Eunice Bell drew her coat more closely about her, and made no reply.
‘We’d like to search your car, Miss Bell,’ said Tait.
She gave him another look. ‘Not unless you have a warrant.’
‘Not yet – but meanwhile I’m taking charge of your ignition key.’ He removed it from the car. ‘When Sergeant Lloyd was here this afternoon,’ he added, ‘you gave her permission to search your brother’s room. At the time, she decided not to do so. We’d like to do it now.’
‘No. I withdraw that permission. As I told you, I’ve just fumigated the room.’
‘With petrol?’ the Chief Inspector said. He picked up a five litre can that was lying on the gravel of the drive half-hidden behind the last of the suitcases, as though ready to be taken away. The can was capped, but empty. ‘For God’s sake, you haven’t sprinkled petrol in the room, have you? Don’t you realise that you could blow the place up?’
‘I’m sure Miss Bell does realise it,’ said Hilary quietly. ‘If that’s what she’s done, then it was for a specific purpose.’ She turned to the older woman. ‘It’s too late for you to carry it through now. Let us in, please.’
Eunice Bell took a proud stand immediately in front of the door. ‘I refuse to allow you to enter.’
‘Madam,’ said Tait, ‘in these circumstances we don’t need your permission. We have reason to suspect that there’s a serious fire risk in this building, and we’re empowered to investigate it in the interests of public safety.’ He side-stepped adroitly and barged the door open. ‘Which way, Hilary?’
‘Sorry, Miss Bell – but he’s right.’
Sergeant Lloyd slipped through the door and ran down the lighted, echoing, bare-tiled hall, past the furniture lined up for sale. She pushed open the green baize door that led to the former servants’ quarters. The passage beyond was dark, and smelled unmistakably of petrol. ‘No lights!’ shouted Tait from behind her. ‘For God’s sake don’t touch the light switches!’
He took a powerful torch from the pocket of his Burberry and spotlit the end of the kitchen corridor. The smell increased as they neared Clanger Bell’s room. In the beam from her own torch, Hilary could see the air thickening and wavering as fumes seeped through the gap under the door.
Her eyes began to sting. She pulled the silk square from the neck of her coat, held it to her face and retreated. ‘We can’t go in there just to look for evidence,’ she protested, coughing. ‘It’s too dangerous. Let’s get outside and call the fire brigade. We can come back when they’ve made the building safe.’
‘But it could blow up before they arrive,’ objected Tait. ‘I’m not prepared to risk losing the shotgun, now we’ve come this far. It must be in there – why else should she want to destroy the room? If we don’t rescue the gun intact, we shall never be able to prove that Eunice Bell murdered Jack Goodrum.’
‘Don’t be a fool, Martin! It’s crazy to think of searching a fume-filled room. Quite apart from the danger of an explosion, you’d damage your lungs. No piece of evidence is worth that.’
‘I shouldn’t need to do any searching,’ he said. ‘From what you’ve told me of the state of Clanger’s room, would Miss Bell have wanted to stay there long enough to hide anything? I’ll be in and out in a matter of seconds. You clear off and leave this to me.’
Sergeant Lloyd elected to remain; someone would have to do something if the young idiot collapsed. She lighted the corridor with her torch as Tait, looking absurdly like a thirties gangster with his hat tilted over his eyes and his scarf tied over the lower part of his face, stood back against the wall and pushed open the door with one hand. The petrol fumes rolled silently out, making both detectives cough.
Then Tait sprang in front of the doorway, thrusting his torch like a handgun. Immediately, muffled but triumphant, he cried, ‘I told you so!’
Forgetting her own strictures, Hilary joined him for a moment at the open door. Nothing in Clanger’s dreadful room appeared to have been moved since her afternoon visit, but the nauseating mingled smell of dirt and despair had now been swamped by the reek of petrol. The soiled bedding was sodden with fuel; and on it, at the intended centre of the conflagration, lay a double-barrelled shotgun.
‘We’d like you to come to the station with us, please, Miss Bell.’
She was sitting behind the wheel of her Rover, watching impassively as Chief Inspector Tait, looking pleased with himself, carried the shotgun out of her house. ‘May I drive my own car?’ she asked.
‘Sorry, no.’ Hilary opened the door. ‘The car will have to stay where it is for the time being – we’re very much afraid of sparking off an explosion.’
Miss Bell alighted with dignity. ‘It was foolhardy of you to go into that room,’ she remarked as they walked together down the drive.
‘That was Chief Inspector Tait. I wouldn’t have done it, and neither would Chief Inspector Quantrill. It’s your bad luck that Mr Tait is more single-minded than either of us.’
‘My bad luck?’
‘Yes, if the shotgun was used to kill Jack Goodrum. Whoever fired it made the mistake of not picking up the ejected cartridge case, you see. The experts will be able to tell whether or not it came from that gun.’
Eunice Bell drew an audible breath, but said nothing. They reached the gateway. Tait was sitting in his car, with the door open, using the radio. Hilary went to open the rear door, but Miss Bell put out a detaining hand, almost – but not quite – touching her.
‘I would like to talk to you, Miss Lloyd,�
� she said urgently. ‘In private. On a personal matter. May we stay out here?’
They walked back a few paces. Eunice Bell halted under a pollarded lime tree, where she was shadowed from the street lights on Victoria Road. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted Chief Inspector Quantrill to hear this,’ she said, ‘and I have no intention of saying it in front of that bumptious young man. Only one other living person knows what I’m going to tell you: Mrs Gotts.’
‘Terry’s mother?’
‘Yes. Our former cook-housekeeper.’
‘I thought you seemed concerned,’ said Hilary, ‘after we’d found the child’s body, when I said that I’d be going to talk to Mrs Gotts tomorrow. Did you think she might tell me your secret?’
‘That possibility bothered me, at the time. But now the circumstances have changed, I no longer mind your knowing, Miss Lloyd. It’s the thought of general publicity, and gossip in Breckham Market and Saintsbury, that I abhor. To avoid that, I would even be prepared to go to the length of admitting that I shot Jack Goodrum.’
Hilary blinked with surprise, but managed to express nothing but mild interest. ‘And did you?’
‘I could deny it, of course. But tell me: if I were to deny it, how deeply would you dig? How far back into my private life would you investigate?’
‘As deeply as necessary, Miss Bell. As far back as we needed to go.’
‘And what you found would be brought out in open court?’
‘If it were relevant, yes.’
Eunice Bell stood with her shoulders braced, her head high. ‘But if I were to plead guilty?’
‘We should still investigate. People have been known’, said Hilary, ‘to confess to murders they didn’t commit.’
‘But perhaps you wouldn’t investigate quite so thoroughly? Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you were able without much difficulty to prove my guilt: would you then be prepared to accept, without looking for any other motive, that I killed Jack Goodrum to avenge the murder of my brother?’
Astonished by the proposition, Hilary gave the only possible answer: ‘I can’t make any deals with you, Miss Bell. I can’t make promises.’
‘I understand that. But I want you to understand that I cherish my privacy. Whatever is going to be said in Suffolk about my conduct last Saturday evening, I want there to be no gossip about my past. I didn’t tell you the truth, you see, when you first visited me to discuss Cuthbert’s death. I mentioned that my father had once thrashed Jack Goodrum, and that I didn’t know why. But I did know.
‘I was nineteen and I had recently been kissed for the first time, by one of my cousins. I liked him, and it was a pleasant experience. And I did know Jack Goodrum, though I told you I didn’t. I spent several evenings, that summer, sitting on the wall at the bottom of the garden, talking to him. He was only sixteen, but as big as a man, and I knew that he admired me. And I thought he looked rather like my cousin, from a distance.
‘So I decided to invite him over the wall and allow him to kiss me. But he wasn’t like my cousin at all. He smelled. And when I told him so, and tried to push him away, he raped me.’
‘Was that why your father thrashed him?’ asked Hilary.
‘Yes: thrashed him and threatened him and ordered his grandfather the butcher to send him back home to Ipswich. Not that I had told my parents. I was much too frightened of them. I knew that I should be punished … as though the rape hadn’t been punishment enough …
‘But Cuthbert had seen what happened and he told Mrs Gotts, though he wouldn’t say who the culprit was until my father beat the information out of him. I had begged Mrs Gotts not to tell my mother. But Terry had disappeared only the previous week, and she had too many worries of her own, poor woman, to keep my secret.’
‘Did your father report the rape to the police?’ said Hilary.
‘There was no question of that. My parents would never allow any scandal to touch the family. So throughout my life I have been able to keep at least my reputation intact. And I don’t want to lose it now.’
‘But would it so desperately matter if local people knew about the incident, after all these years?’
It was, Hilary realised almost immediately, an impertinent question. Rape, however traumatic for the victim, might raise no eyebrows in the present social climate, but it must have caused a woman such as Eunice Bell a continuing agony of shame. The older woman’s hissingly swift reaction left the sergeant in no doubt about that.
‘It matters to me, Miss Lloyd.’
Then, almost to herself, she added: ‘But I didn’t contemplate killing Jack Goodrum for it, when he first came strutting back to Breckham Market as a self-made man. He was beneath my contempt. It was his killing of Cuthbert that angered me into action. All I wanted at the time, though, was for him to be tried and punished. Just think, Miss Lloyd: had you been more efficient when you first investigated my brother’s murder, I would have had no need to kill Jack Goodrum at all …’
It was a fair gibe; a justifiable return, Hilary acknowledged, for her own tactlessness. ‘But you said that your brother’s death wasn’t your motive.’
‘That is so. What finally determined me was that I happened to see Jack, shortly after Cuthbert’s funeral, having lunch at the Angel in Saintsbury with his new wife. She was not at all the type of woman one would expect to marry such an oaf. Her first husband was a barrister, you know.
‘We exchanged a word in the cloakroom, and she was charming. Well bred, well mannered, well dressed – a gentlewoman. And throughout lunch, Jack was aping the gentleman! I was astonished by the gallantry he was putting on.
‘And the dreadful thing was that she was in love with him! Oh yes, she was completely taken in – I could see it, Miss Lloyd, and I was appalled. How could I allow her, a woman of my own kind, to go on loving and trusting a man I knew to be a rapist and a murderer? I had to do something to stop it. I couldn’t let their relationship continue, for her own sake. And I know she’ll thank me for it, when she hears the truth about the kind of man she married …’
A traffic patrol car arrived in Victoria Road, its powerful blue light punching holes in the night sky, and Chief Inspector Tait went to brief the driver about the Tower House fire hazard. Hilary guided Eunice Bell into the back of Tait’s car. The older woman’s outburst had left her trembling with cold and emotion, but when the sergeant took off her own coat and attempted to put it round her, Miss Bell rejected it.
Regaining her composure, she looked at her watch. Then she said, in her normal stiff voice: ‘Is it too much to hope that you will respect my confidences, Miss Lloyd?’
‘I can make no promise,’ repeated Hilary. ‘But I don’t think that particular motive is likely to come to light during our investigations. And as it happens,’ she added, ‘Chief Inspector Tait isn’t looking for any motive other than your brother’s death. He seems to be satisfied that your desire for revenge would have been quite strong enough.’
‘Does he indeed? Then he’s obviously a more estimable young man than I had supposed,’ said Eunice Bell drily.
The estimable young man came hurrying over to his car. ‘Let’s get out of the way before the fire engine comes,’ he said, driving off down Victoria Road. ‘I shall be glad to be clear of that Tower House time bomb –’
There was a sudden wumph behind them. The car windows rattled. Tait did an emergency stop. They all looked back, and saw orange tongues of flame licking out of the blown windows of the Italianate tower of Eunice Bell’s house.
‘What set that off?’ fumed the Chief Inspector.
‘I did,’ said Eunice Bell. ‘I left a timing device in my brother’s room. How else could I have fired the building without risking my own life?’
‘But why didn’t you tell us it was there?’ protested Hilary. ‘Once we’d found the shotgun, it was absolutely pointless for you to burn Tower House.’
‘Do you think so?’ Eunice Bell turned away from the spectacle and settled back in her corner, upright, self-co
ntained, and yet unusually relaxed. Her face, illuminated by the lights of the approaching fire engine, had a rare look of complete satisfaction.
Chapter Thirty One
Chief Inspector Quantrill had been on leave for two weeks.
During the second week, after his son had been declared out of danger, he had sent occasional messages to the office. One message had congratulated the members of Breckham Market CID – and of course Chief Inspector Tait, who had returned to the Saintsbury division, mission accomplished – on having made an arrest in the Jack Goodrum murder case. Another had congratulated Sergeant Lloyd, personally, on having solved the thirty-five-year-old disappearance of Terry Gotts. A third, in the form of a personal note to Hilary Lloyd, was a pressing invitation to call at number 5 Benidorm Avenue early on the Sunday evening immediately before Quantrill was due to return to work.
Although Hilary had met Molly Quantrill once or twice, she had never before been invited to their house. What bothered her about the invitation was that she knew, through the Martin Tait – Alison Quantrill grapevine, that Molly was expected to spend that Sunday in Yarchester with Alison, visiting Peter in hospital. This meant that, in the evening, Douglas would be at home alone.
Hilary was concerned for him, and even more for Molly. Their marriage had obviously been unsatisfactory for a long time, and although their son’s near-fatal accident might have had the effect of drawing them closer together, Martin had said only the previous week that Douglas was having a particularly bad time because he couldn’t talk to his wife. And the last thing Hilary wanted was to play any part in the irretrievable breakdown of their marriage.
She thought up several good excuses for declining the invitation. But on the other hand, she was still one of his closest colleagues, still very much his friend – and what kind of friend would refuse to help fill a worried father’s lonely evening? She decided to go. But she also decided that if Douglas were to give one hopeful hint of any future development in their personal relationship, she would write an immediate application for the transfer to Saintsbury that Martin Tait had suggested.
Who Saw Him Die? Page 22
