Fate Worse Than Death

by Sheila Radley

  But on reflection Martin Tait had decided that he would make the enquiry himself. Now that he knew better than to lust after Annabel Yardley, it would be no bad thing to meet her again in his official capacity, and then re-establish his pride by walking out of her life in his own good time.

  He had already been to Beech House that morning in the hope of seeing her, but she was not at home. He would try again this afternoon, on his way back to Yarchester.

  ‘Must you really go so soon, Martin?’ His aunt, returning from a conversation over the garden fence with Geoff Websdell to find her nephew already packed, took the news like a blow. She sat down abruptly, her long narrow face drawn as though with shock. ‘But your leave isn’t half over.’

  ‘That’s what I told the regional crime squad co-ordinator when he rang to recall me. But as he pointed out, the job always takes priority. I’m really sorry that I can’t stay – it’s been extremely kind of you to put up with me, Aunt Con, and I’ve enjoyed my visit.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re going, too,’ she said, moving her lips as though with difficulty. Her eyes had a distant, bleak focus. ‘I’d expected just a few more days …’

  ‘Is there something you wanted me to do?’ he asked, puzzled. His aunt had been so preoccupied with the Websdells’bereavement that he’d sometimes wondered whether she knew he was there.

  ‘No, no.’ Con stood up, resuming her bright voice, and gave him her lop-sided smile. ‘You’ve already helped me tremendously, and I’m jolly grateful to you. Of course your work must come first.’ She paused, and then burst out, embarrassed, ‘I’m so pleased that you’re doing so well in your career. Your father would have been very proud of you. I’m awfully proud of you, too. I want you to know that.’

  She had a fine way of showing it, he thought bitterly. But he gave her a charming smile, thanked her, and changed the subject by enquiring after her neighbour.

  Beryl, Con reported – half wry, half envious – was so high on religious faith that she was practically floating. Her relatives, coming to give her their support, had found themselves superfluous; particularly as Marjorie Braithwaite had taken it upon herself to organize everything and everyone.

  ‘It’s Geoff I feel saddest for. He doesn’t say much, but he feels Sandra’s death deeply. It’ll hit Beryl later … but she’ll cope, I’m sure.’

  Con paused, frowning. ‘I think I was able to help her through yesterday evening, though.’ She spoke with a wistful uncertainty, as though she wanted some reassurance. ‘Beryl’s been a very good, kind neighbour, and I’d like to think that I did the right thing.’

  ‘I’m sure you did, Aunt Con. Look, I hate to rush off, but –’

  ‘I know. I won’t keep you, old chap. Oh – you’ve taken the loot, I hope? The family silver, and the other things I gave you? I left them in your room, boxed for the journey.’

  ‘Of course I haven’t taken them!’ Martin protested warmly. It was part of his plan, to leave her gifts behind – temporarily – as evidence that he was not a grasper. ‘I wouldn’t dream of removing them without your permission. I can pick them up next time I come.’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ Con burst out, ‘that’s the whole point.’ She sounded tired and irritated. ‘I don’t expect to be here much longer, and if you’re going now you must take them with you. I want to be absolutely sure you’ve got them.’

  Martin soothed her, took possession of the valuables without reluctance, and loaded them into his Alfa.

  ‘And don’t forget the sampler,’ said Con, her irritation forgotten. She had wrapped it, in its rosewood frame, in a dust sheet, and now she carried it out to her nephew’s car. Placing it carefully beside her other gifts, she moved aside the protective cloth for a final look at ten-year-old Maria Bethell’s stitch-work: the blossoming boughs, the cats, the dogs, the birds, the hearts, the cupids.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re having all the family treasures, Martin,’ she said. ‘I know you’ll look after them – and in time, I hope, hand them on to your own children.’

  He nodded his agreement as the image of Alison Quantrill – the dark-haired, green-eyed girl who would so love the sampler – filled his mind’s eye. As his young ancestress’s verse reminded him, Now in the heat of youthful blood –

  But Alison was no longer his girl-friend. In fact – dismissing her image and visualizing instead Annabel Yardley, with her air of superiority and her questionable cold sore – he’d temporarily gone off women altogether. As for Aunt Constance Schultz and the ‘family treasures’that she was bestowing on him so munificently, all they amounted to were a few scratched pieces of silver and a faded bit of needlework. Total value no more than £2,000 … while the real family treasure, the money that should have been his, was being given away.

  But not if he could help it.

  ‘Aunt Con,’ he began, embarking formally on his major, carefully prepared speech, ‘you’ve always been extremely good to me –’

  But she wasn’t listening. To his confusion she suddenly lurched forward and gripped his shoulders in a strong embrace, pressing her soft-skinned old cheek for a moment against his.

  ‘Bless you, dear boy,’ she muttered in his ear, her voice strangely hoarse. Then she turned and galloped away, up the long garden path and under the arching sprays of the fragrant pink Zephirine Drouhin rose that climbed over the knapped-flint walls of number 9 Fodderstone Green. And shut the door on him.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  The mobile police incident room had stood in the centre of Fodderstone village all day. Noticeboards with blown-up photographs of the dead girl and the message When did you last see Sandra Websdell? had been placed conspicuously in the single main street, and also on Fodderstone Green. Shirt-sleeved policemen trod through the village trying to look friendly and approachable under their helmets; but all to no effect. Passers-by passed resolutely by, and not one person offered any scrap of new information. As the Chief Inspector had predicted, the inhabitants of the isolated village had closed ranks.

  Refreshed by longed-for cups of tea (provided by the balding constable with the unsociable socks, who observed with tolerant amusement that beer no longer seemed to be the DCI’s favourite thirst-quencher, now that Sergeant Lloyd was working with him) the two detectives sat in the incident room under Hilary’s electric fan and read the latest reports.

  Desmond Flood had been eliminated. His prematurely white-haired good looks were memorable, and a Saintsbury woman who travelled regularly to London had recalled that he was a fellow-passenger on the Tuesday afternoon coach. At the time of Sandra’s death he would have been passing through East London, somewhere between Whitechapel and Aldgate.

  No fingerprints had been found on the Websdell’s itinerant garden gnome. This was not surprising, as the wife of the landlord of the Flintknappers Arms had admitted to scrubbing the gnome clean after it had been found in a ditch beside the Horkey road. Mrs Goodwin had asserted that she had done the scrubbing entirely for the benefit of Beryl Websdell. The detectives, remembering the way Lois Goodwin had lied in support of her husband, put another question-mark against her name. They also, in view of the fact that Inspector Tait had just rung in to report that Annabel Yardley knew nothing about any gnome-napping expeditions by her weekend guests, put another question-mark against the gnome.

  The forensic lab had reported that the fragment of twig found on the dead girl originated from an apple tree. There was an apple tree, Hilary recalled, in Charley Horrocks’s overgrown garden. But then, as Quantrill tetchily pointed out, there were apple trees in almost every garden in the village; and an orchard of them at the back of the Flintknappers Arms.

  Another report concerned Sandra Websdell’s car. The only usable fingerprints on it were her own. But what had been found inside the vehicle was a scattering of sawdust, most of it on and immediately in front of the driver’s seat, but some on the back seat as well. The sawdust was similar to that found on the girl’s clothing: hardwood sawdust, coarsely cut, o
f the kind produced by a hand-held chainsaw.

  ‘Now this is interesting,’ said Quantrill. ‘When we first heard about the sawdust on her clothes we assumed that she must have been lying on the ground, either immediately before or just after her death, at a spot where tree-felling had taken place. But the car has been hidden in the forest, untouched, ever since the girl was abducted. And from the distribution of the sawdust, it looks as though whoever abducted her could have been carrying it on his own clothes.’

  ‘As a kind of occupational accumulation, do you mean?’ asked Hilary. ‘That suggests a forester. When I first went to the Websdells, the husband got a scolding from his wife for coming home from work and dripping sawdust over the floor.’

  Sawdust on Websdell’s clothes, sawdust in Sandra’s car; and Websdell had disapproved of his daughter’s proposed marriage. The facts fitted in the Chief Inspector’s mind with a jigsaw puzzle click. ‘The girl’s father? Didn’t you –’

  But then he saw an unfriendly chill in Sergeant Lloyd’s expression. Oh hell … women were so touchy. He might have known that she’d take exception to any hint of doubt about her competence, and the last thing he wanted was to antagonize her. ‘Sorry, Hilary. Yes, of course you checked. Geoff Websdell was a natural suspect as soon as his daughter disappeared.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Hilary coolly, ‘I checked his movements that day, and on the evening she died, and I’m satisfied that he wasn’t involved. But he’s not the only forester in the village.’

  ‘That’s true. But foresters always work in gangs, so it would have been almost impossible for any one of them to have got away on the day of her disappearance. Unless of course he was on holiday, or off sick … It’s certainly worth running a check on absentees. Another snag, though, is that timber from the plantations is softwood, and the lab says that the sawdust in the car is hardwood … Ah, wait a minute! The logs you saw piled in Charley Horrocks’s shed – which were they?’

  Hilary was floored. ‘Sorry, sir. I’ve no idea.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Quantrill, glad that she was both fallible and prepared to admit it. ‘Doesn’t matter – the chances are that the logs are a mixture. What we really need to know is whether they were cut by a chainsaw or an axe.’

  ‘It must have been a chainsaw,’ said Hilary. ‘The cut ends of the logs were smooth, I remember that. And there were dribbles of sawdust where they’d been barrowed from the garden gate to the shed.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Chief Inspector, draining his tea mug. ‘You were going to find out from the woodman when he made that delivery, weren’t you? I’ll come with you. If there’s a conspiracy over Sandra’s abduction and death, it begins to look as though he might be a part of it.’

  The cottage where Christopher Thorold lived was as isolated as Howard Braithwaite’s boathouse and Charley Horrocks’s lodge. It was situated somewhere between the two, just off the dirt lane that led from Fodderstone Green by way of Stoneyhill wood to the plantation where Sandra’s car had been found.

  The woodman’s cottage, once part of the Fodderstone Hall estate, was built of the same grey brick as the fire-ruined house in the middle of Stoneyhill wood. It too stood in a large clearing, ringed by mature oaks and beeches. But the whole of this clearing was in current use, partly as woodyard, partly as vegetable garden and orchard, and partly as barnyard for free-ranging poultry.

  Of the original one-storey cottage itself, not much was visible from the dirt road except the blue-grey pantiles of the roof. Successive occupants had, over the years, enlarged the accommodation by tacking on makeshift extensions and porches, so that the detectives’ first impression was of a huddle of tarred planks, cucumber-frame windows and corrugated-iron roofs. Elsewhere in the clearing were various sheds of similar construction, though with chicken-wire rather than glass in their windows.

  Quantrill left his car in the shade of the trees. He and Hilary approached the cottage across grass worn so bare by the poultry that only well-pecked tussocks of it remained. In craters between the tussocks, basking hens shifted in their dust baths and made querulous complaint about the intruders; but apart from the grumbling of the hens and the persistent hum of insects, the whole of the forest clearing was heavy with heat and silence.

  And then the still air was ripped by a high, nerve-grating scream, agonizingly prolonged. Hilary started: ‘God, whatever –?’

  ‘Chainsaw,’ Quantrill reassured her. He made off in the direction of the woodyard, following the scream that rose to a metallic crescendo and then stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  The woodyard looked rather like a deserted Red Indian encampment, with the trimmed trunks of larch trees set up in teepee form so that the resinous wood could dry. Between the teepees, rosebay willow herb grew tall, its pink blossoms lively with butterflies. Heavy logs of deciduous wood lay in a great pile, behind which was parked an old pick-up truck. Christopher Thorold was there at work, methodically reducing a tree-trunk to chumps of manageable size.

  When he saw that he had visitors he stood disconcerted, open-mouthed, nervously changing his grip on his heavy-duty chainsaw. His shock of grey-fair hair was dark at the roots with sweat, but his only concession to the heat had been to undo the top button of his flannel shirt and roll up his sleeves.

  The Chief Inspector introduced himself and his sergeant. Christopher Thorold glanced with embarrassment at Hilary, placed his chainsaw on the ground and buttoned his shirt to the neck in a gesture of deference and courtesy.

  ‘Y-you’ll want to see Pa,’ he burst out, blinking his thick pale eyelashes. ‘He’s indoors. He can’t get about any more.’

  Quantrill explained that they had come to enquire whether he had recently delivered a load of logs to Mr Horrocks at the lodge. Christopher Thorold said that he had done so on Monday. Yes, he was sure it was Monday. It would be in the account book, which his father kept. No, Mr Horrocks hadn’t exactly ordered the wood: he always had a load at that time of year, and Christopher delivered it when he had it ready.

  ‘Is Charley Horrocks a friend of yours?’ said Sergeant Lloyd.

  It was a question that Quantrill, knowing the rural social structure, would have had no need to put. Christopher Thorold looked shocked. ‘Why no! Mr Horrocks’s Grandpa was the third Earl. My Pa worked for the family at the Hall, and his Pa afore him. I couldn’t be a friend to Mr Horrocks. ’ Twouldn’t do.’

  ‘Who are your friends, Mr Thorold?’ asked Quantrill. ‘Where do you spend your evenings? Do you go to the Flintknappers Arms?’

  Flustered, Christopher said that he always spent his evenings at home. He didn’t drink, didn’t go to the Knappers, had no need of any company except his Pa’s.

  Yes, they sometimes had callers. People came from the village to buy eggs, or to order wood. Yes, he knew Stan Bolderow and Reg Osler – had known them all his life. But they’d always tormented him at school, so he didn’t seek their company. Yes, he knew by sight Mr Braithwaite from Fodderstone Green and Mr Goodwin from the Flintknappers Arms, and their wives to deliver wood to; but that was all.

  ‘Do you know any young women?’ asked Quantrill.

  ‘No,’ he said simply. Then he added with dignified reproach, as though his status were as much a calling as the priesthood, ‘I’m a bachelor.’

  ‘But you knew Sandra Websdell, didn’t you?’

  Christopher’s eyelashes went on the blink again. Sandra was a relation, he said. That was different. He hesitated; then added, ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quantrill. ‘But how did she die?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ A single large tear rolled out of one of Christopher’s pale blue eyes, broke against the first outcrop of stubble it encountered, and spread a patch of damp over his rough cheek. ‘We’re wholly upset about it, me and Pa.’

  ‘When did you last see Sandra, Mr Thorold?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He wiped his cheek with the back of his fist, and picked up his chainsaw. ‘I can’t rightly say. Pa will t
ell you.’

  ‘Did you bring her here, three weeks ago? Did you keep her here, somewhere in the house or in one of your sheds?’

  Christopher Thorold seemed not to hear the question. He had lifted his head, listening to something else. His eyes searched the apple trees that grew just beyond the woodyard, and suddenly he pointed, his solemn face alive with pleasure.

  ‘Look,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘See there, on the trunk of that ol’Bramley? Hear it drumming for insects? That’s a lesser spotted woodpecker – see, red on its head, black an’white splodges on its back. They’re shy birds, you hardly ever see ’em. Wait’til I tell Pa!’

  ‘I asked you a question, Mr Thorold,’ said the Chief Inspector sharply. ‘Have you been keeping Sandra Websdell here?’

  ‘I heard you, Mister,’ said Christopher, his eyes still on the bird. ‘No, I haven’t. I couldn’t do a thing like that without Pa knowing, and he’ll tell you I haven’t. If only he could come out and see this woodpecker! Look, there it goes –’

  Countryman that he was, Quantrill was no birdwatcher, either on or off duty. He snorted, and marched off to the house. But Hilary Lloyd, interested in the change that had come over Christopher Thorold as soon as he was on his own territory, lingered for another word with him.

  ‘I’ve never seen a woodpecker before,’ she said. ‘Thank you for showing it to me.’

  Embarrassed again, Christopher hung his head and shuffled his heavy boots.

  ‘You’re very lucky to live in a place like this, on the edge of the forest,’ she went on. ‘All the birds, and the butterflies … I can understand why you spend all your spare time at home. You’ve got everything that you could want here, haven’t you?’