‘Hey, Janet,’ he called softly across the frosted sprouts.
‘What?’
‘I’n it marvellous?’ he said, pointing upwards. ‘They’ve sent men up there to walk about on that moon – but our families still have to come out to a pump for every drop of water. I reckon something’s wrong with their priorities, don’t you?’
We laughed and said goodnight. As I stood in the kitchen filling the kettle, I suddenly heard myself humming and realized that I’d quite forgotten how bleak and friendless life had seemed just ten minutes ago. I caught myself wondering instead, in pleasurable panic, what on earth I could wear for being taken out for an evening at the best hotel in Breckham Market.
Chapter Six
On Thursday 30 March, a week after Ziggy Crackjaw last collected the pensions for himself and his wife from Byland post office, Mrs Thacker senior suffered a stroke.
Ada Thacker was ninety-three years old. Until her stroke she had been in moderately good health; quicker on her feet than her daughter-in-law, as she had enjoyed saying in order to annoy Betty. She had also enjoyed saying that she looked after herself entirely in her part of the house, ignoring the fact that Betty did her washing and ironing and cleaning as well as serving in the shop.
It was some ten years since Ada had handed over the management of the shop to Betty’s daughter, with great reluctance and only because her eyesight had grown too poor to do the paperwork. She was not displeased that Janet had become the sub-postmistress, because the post office paid Janet’s salary and also brought more customers to the shop. But despite that, Ada had continued to keep a tight grip on all business and domestic finances.
It had begun to seem to Betty and Janet that Ada Thacker was going to live forever. Finding her on that Thursday morning, immobile and mumbling incomprehensibly in her bed, had taken them completely by surprise. Naturally, they did everything they could for her. They didn’t pretend to grieve, but as the ambulance took her mother-in-law away to hospital, Betty had shed some stressful tears.
When the news went round Byland, everyone anticipated old Mrs Thacker’s death, and with it the ending of an era. But she was tougher than they thought. Within the first twenty-four hours, skilled nursing enabled her to regain some movement and most of her speech. As she told Betty, who had been driven to Yarchester by Janet, after work, to visit her: ‘I’m not finished yet, you needn’t think it!’
Chief Inspector Quantrill was not a reader of anything except official reports and a limited quantity of the Daily Telegraph. He had never read an autobiography in his life, and when Sergeant Lloyd urged Janet Thacker’s on him, he told her that he wasn’t going to start now. But she insisted that he must at least read the pages she had flagged, because they were relevant to the Crackjaw investigation. And as Gladys Crackjaw’s body still hadn’t been found, and there had been no sightings of Ziggy, Quantrill stopped complaining and settled down in his office for a quiet read.
‘Well, well –’ he said when he finished. ‘I see what you mean about the book giving us a different viewpoint on the Crackjaws’ disappearance. We’ve been assuming that Ziggy killed Gladys, when the chances are that Andrew killed Ziggy.’
‘It does seem to be more likely that way round,’ agreed Hilary. ‘I was beginning to wonder how the old man could possibly have managed to dispose of his wife’s body, and then disappear himself.’
Quantrill stood up and walked to the window, working it out. ‘If Andrew arrived home to find his mother had been ill-treated, he might well have carried out his threat to knock his father down. He wouldn’t necesarily have meant to kill him. But when he realized the old man was dead, he could have put him in the boot of his car, wiped up the living-room floor, and then dumped the body miles away … Ah, but what about the old lady? What would he have done with her?’
‘I’m hoping he’s put her in a residential home somewhere,’ said Hilary. ‘He’s obviously quite fond of her, but he couldn’t look after her himself. Before we convince ourselves that it’s Andrew we want, though, there’s a big problem with the timing.’
Quantrill rubbed his chin. ‘Blast, I’d almost forgotten. Ziggy was last seen on Thursday 23rd, at the post office. By that time, Andrew was back at work on a gas rig in the North Sea … That checks out, I suppose?’
‘Yes, his company confirms that he returned to the rig from leave on Tuesday 21st. He’s been there ever since, apart from the day he came to meet us at Longmire End. Andrew Crackjaw’s got a perfect alibi – if it’s true that his father was alive on Thursday 23rd. That’s what I’m beginning to doubt. And that’s where Janet Thacker comes in, because I think she’s the key to this investigation.’
‘You mean she’s been lying to you? Ziggy didn’t collect his pension on the 23rd?’
‘Janet’s the only person in the village who says she saw him that day. Andrew was recognized by someone the previous Monday, though, going to the post office. Janet says he went to buy some stamps, but I think his father was probably already dead, and what he really wanted was an alibi. He got it by persuading her to date-stamp the pension counterfoils in advance.’
‘Fiddling the official date stamp is bound to be against post-office rules,’ objected Quantrill. ‘If she was found out, she’d lose her job at the very least. Why would she be prepared to take the risk?’
‘For old times’sake?’ suggested Hilary. ‘It’s clear from the ending of her book that she and Andrew were on the brink of some kind of relationship. Perhaps she’s still half in love with him.’
Quantrill snorted. ‘After all this time? There’d have to be more to it than that. Look, there must be some way of checking whether or not Ziggy actually drew those pensions on the 23rd. He and his wife would have had to sign for them, wouldn’t they? Can’t the post office produce the receipts?’
Sergeant Lloyd had already made enquiries. She had found that Janet Thacker would have sent the week’s accumulation of receipted pension dockets to the central accounting department on Saturday 25th. The department handled several million items each week, and there was no possibility of any individual docket being identified. The proof that anyone’s pension had been paid was provided solely by the date-stamp on the counterfoil of the pension book.
‘And anyway,’ said Hilary, ‘even if their dockets could be found, we couldn’t be sure that Janet Thacker hadn’t forged the signatures. As long as she persists in her story that Ziggy Crackjaw collected the two pensions on Thursday 23rd, we’ve no way of disproving it.’
Quantrill and Hilary chose to arrive just after Janet Thacker had closed Byland post office for the day. They wanted to be sure of having her uninterrupted attention. By going round to the back door of the house, they took her by surprise.
‘Not again!’ she complained, standing square on the doorstep in her fisherman’s slop. ‘I’ve already told you, Sergeant Lloyd –’
‘This time I’ve come to apologize,’ said Hilary disarmingly. She introduced the chief inspector, and the postmistress gave him a wary nod.
‘Brought reinforcements, have you?’ she asked the sergeant with a quirk of one eyebrow. ‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in. But don’t think I’m not busy just because we’re closed! When I’ve finished in the post office, and shifted some goods from the warehouse to the shop, I’ve got to take Mum to visit Gran in Yarchester hospital.’
Janet led the detectives to her private room and immediately busied herself behind the post-office counter, tidying away the debris of the working day: sorting completed forms, securing them on an array of bulldog clips, tearing up waste paper and tossing it into a plastic rubbish bag. She didn’t ask her visitors to sit down, which suited Hilary in view of what she had to say.
‘I helped myself to some reading material, last time I was here,’ Hilary admitted. ‘Sorry I didn’t ask your permission. I thought the book looked interesting, and it was.’
She placed the dog-eared typescript on the counter, and waited for Janet Thacker’s reactio
n.
It was some moments in coming. Janet was shocked into temporary speechlessness. When she turned to face the detectives, her red cheeks had paled to pink. Then they reddened more than ever.
‘How – how dare you?’ she said in a furiously indignant voice. ‘How bloody dare you take away and read my private papers?’
Hilary answered her pleasantly. ‘You told me you hoped to have the book published. You said you’d sent it to half the publishers in London, and if they’d read it I didn’t see why I shouldn’t.’
‘But not this version.’ Janet snatched up the typescript and riffled through it angrily. ‘Look, it’s full of alterations! This is just the first draft – it was never intended for publication in this form, and you had no business to read it. Of all the underhand, despicable –’
Quantrill, who had been looming quietly in the low-ceilinged room, awaiting his opportunity, cleared his throat and set about defusing her anger.
‘I’m not a great reader myself, Miss Thacker,’ he said. ‘But I’m interested that you were at Breckham Market grammar school. That’s where my daughters went. Mrs Bloomfield was headmistress in their time. Like you, they thought very highly of her.‘
He didn’t, of course, add that he too had thought highly of Mrs Bloomfield; had been in love with her, until a distressing major aberration had removed her from Breckham Market. But his mention of her had the desired effect. Janet Thacker was unprepared to talk or listen to Hilary, but she found him more sympathetic.
‘I have to tell you’, he explained, ‘that we’re now treating the old Crackjaw couple’s disappearance as suspicious. We’ve found evidence that someone fell heavily against the iron fender in their living-room. Someone else tried to wipe that evidence away. Now, Miss Thacker –’
He paused. She was beginning to look worried.
‘Your book makes it clear that Andrew Crackjaw had threatened his father. He had good reason, I agree, and it was a long time ago, but –’
For a moment, Janet had looked even more worried. Then her face cleared; she even chuckled.
‘Now hold you hard, Chief Inspector,’ she said, lapsing into the Suffolk idiom. ‘You can’t use my book as evidence of Andrew Crackjaw’s relationship with his father! Or with me, if it comes to that. I wasn’t writing fact, you know, I was writing fiction. It’s a novel, not an autobiography.’
Quantrill was thrown. ‘Didn’t it actually happen, then?’ he said uncertainly.
‘Of course it didn’t!’ Half-amused, half-exasperated, Janet resumed her tidying of the post-office counter. ‘Just because a novel’s written in the first person, it doesn’t mean that it’s true. Writing fiction’s a bit like economy dressmaking – you take whatever material you can get hold of, whether your own or someone else’s and then you make it into something different.’
‘But most of this material’s your own, isn’t it?’ said Hilary. ‘Longmire Lane, your schools, this shop …’
‘Well, yes.’ Janet spoke with the care of someone who knew she was on the edge of a verbal minefield. ‘Yes, most of the first part did actually happen. I wrote it in my first year at college. At the time, in the early ’Seventies, people who lived in towns were enthusing about the importance of keeping the countryside “unspoiled”, as they called it. It made me cross, because they hadn’t the faintest idea what real country life was like. It wasn’t simple and unspoiled for us, it was poor and downright insanitary. So I wrote about it in detail, just to tell’em.’
‘And did they get the message?’ said Quantrill.
‘No chance. What I’d written didn’t amount to more than half a book.’ Janet flapped a duster over her counter, fastened the top of the bulging waste-paper bag with an elastic band, and propped the bag by the door ready to be taken out.
‘It seemed a pity to waste it, though,’ she said. ‘Years later, I thought I’d have a go at making it a proper novel. This time it had to be mostly fiction, because the reality of my first year in London was far too dull to write about. The guest house was real enough, but I had to invent most of the characters and incidents, just to make the book more interesting.’
‘You didn’t invent Andrew Crackjaw,’ pointed out Hilary.
‘True … But I certainly invented the last two chapters! I wanted to round the novel off, you see, and I had the idea of reintroducing Andrew so as to bring it full circle. And that’s all I can tell you. Everything I wrote about him in the second half of the book is fiction, not fact.’
Unwilling to believe her, the detectives stood frowning at her. A little redder than usual, but otherwise entirely composed, Janet Thacker looked from one to another without a blink
‘When Andrew Crackjaw came in here on Monday 20th,’ said Hilary, ‘did he ask you to put a false date-stamp on his parents’ pension books?’
‘No, he did not.’
‘Did he ask you to say that his father came here to collect their pensions on Thursday 23rd?’
‘No, he didn’t. And to save you the trouble of asking, Ziggy Crackjaw did come in on the 23rd. That’s all I have to say – except that I’d be very grateful, Chief Inspector, if you would instruct Sergeant Lloyd to stop wasting my time.’
Quantrill apologized on behalf of his quietly fuming sergeant, picked up his hat and ushered Hilary out. But then, in an attempt to maintain communication before he left, he turned to Janet and asked if she was still in contact with Mrs Bloomfield.
‘We exchange Christmas cards,’ she said.
‘Does she live anywhere in this area, now?’
‘No, in Dorset. She married a prison chaplain; they run a school for disadvantaged children.’
Quantrill thanked her for giving them her time, and joined his sergeant in his car. Hilary was too cross about Janet Thacker to talk, and he drove back to Breckham Market in unaccustomed silence.
He felt decidedly miffed. It had nothing to do with the frustrating interview they had just had; nothing to do with Janet Thacker at all. Puzzled, he analysed his emotions and came to the conclusion that what miffed him was the news that Jean Bloomfield had remarried. So much for the last lingerings of his one-time dream …
He shook his head, surprised at himself. He wouldn’t have believed that his former love for the woman could still affect him. It hadn’t even been an affair, they’d got no further than holding hands across a restaurant table. He hadn’t set eyes on her for years, and what’s more he’d since gone through an infatution with Hilary. Astonishing, he acknowledged, how an old love could persist.
Instructive, too.
If long-forgotten love possessed so much staying power, perhaps Hilary was right about Janet Thacker. The events in her book might be fictitious, but even so it was possible that she’d once had an affair with Andrew Crackjaw. And if she was still half in love with him after all these years, she might well be prepared to lie for him; and to go on lying because she was sure she couldn’t be disproved.
Chapter Seven
At home in Breckham Market, Douglas Quantrill was still trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the March gales.
His wife Molly, intent on replacing their well-worn furniture, was having a lovely time looking through samples of floral fabric to cover the hand-made suite she wanted. Which design would he prefer, she kept asking. But as the prices were uniformly horrendous, it was a matter of complete indifference to him whether he ended up sitting on the peonies or the cabbage roses.
What added insult to his financial injury was the fact that the walnut tree, whose fall had flooded their living-room with revealing light, was still lying stricken in full view. The tree’s downfall was not only a vexation to Quantrill but almost like the loss of a family friend. He hated to see it lying there, with its great pad of roots upended and a gaping hole in the grass at its base. The best thing to do, he decided, was to dispose of it as soon as possible.
The following day, he called for petrol at a garage that also hired out agricultural machinery. He served himself at the p
umps, and went inside to pay. Half an hour later, after obtaining some basic instruction, he emerged carrying a hard hat with a safety visor, and a heavy-duty chainsaw.
Like a boy with a new bike, he went home early in the lengthening spring evening, eager to try the chainsaw out. Molly was less enthusiastic when she saw what he was carrying.
‘I hope you know what you’re doing with that dangerous thing,’ she said.
Quantrill bit back the reply he would have liked to make. His son was at the kitchen table munching a pizza, and he didn’t want to set him a bad example. ‘Of course I know what I’m doing,’ he said with dignity.
‘Well don’t start doing it now. Your supper will be ready in twenty minutes.’
‘I’m just going to try the saw, that’s all. Coming to watch, Peter?’
He realized too late that it wasn’t the most tactful of invitations. Having previously refused to allow Peter to touch a chainsaw because of the risk it involved, he could hardly expect him to take kindly to being instructed in the use of the machine.
Peter gave him a dirty look, but otherwise ignored him. With any luck, though, Quantrill thought as he donned his hard hat, the boy would watch from the window and pick up a few tips from a distance.
Carrying the heavy chainsaw in both hands, Quantrill walked respectfully round the fallen tree. The walnut was all of thirty feet long, from roots to topmost branches, and the trunk was a good two feet thick. Cutting up the tree was going to be a very big job he realized – much bigger than he’d imagined. In fact he wasn’t sure how he was going to tackle the trunk at all.
No sense in even thinking about that problem this evening, though. The thing to do was to get in some practice with the saw, starting at the easy end of the tree. He surveyed the spread of the branches, in never-to-open-bud, and chose where to make his first cut. Then he lowered his visor, and went through the routine the hirer had recommended: hold the chainsaw well away from you as you pull the starter, brace the feet wide, grip the saw firmly, cut away from yourself, and never lose your concentration.
Cross My Heart and Hope to Die Page 23
