Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  ‘Good morning, sir. Do you want to hear about the Nether Wickford incident now, or shall I save it for the conference?’

  Quantrill took her back to his office, with Harry Colman following. He wanted to know what cards he would have up his sleeve when the Chief Super started nagging about progress.

  Sergeant Lloyd reported briskly what she had been told by the Arrowsmiths: the composition of the household, the fact that Angela had got up at about seven to let the cat out, and had then returned to bed. ‘As it’s Saturday, they were all sleeping late. The brother’s stone deaf, but the other three heard nothing until our motorcycle patrolman arrived to tell them what was on their front doorstep. At least, they all say they heard nothing. They also said that none of them had been outside the house, but the bottom of Simon Arrowsmith’s trouser legs were dark with damp. They live just across the road from a large common, and the long grass there and on the roadside verges was soaked with dew. I think he had been out, and that he had some reason for lying about it.’

  ‘Is it a domestic dispute? Would he be likely to have killed the cat?’

  ‘I don’t see it that way. I’d have thought him too soft-hearted, and too much in love with his wife. It’s possible, of course, but there were no obvious signs of bloodstains on him, and if he’d cleaned himself up he’d surely have changed his trousers. What I’m certain of, though, is that whoever decapitated the cat wasn’t the same person who decapitated the woman in the A135 case. That was relatively skilful. The job on the cat was botched.’

  She was careful not to let her new boss know, by her voice or her expression, how sick she’d felt when she saw it. Her stomach had lurched and she’d wanted to go quietly away, not study what she saw and draw logical conclusions from it.

  She always felt sick when she saw the result of death by violence, even after spending two years as a member of Inspector Colman’s team and being called to the scene of every murder in Suffolk. The fact that she’d originally trained as a nurse was no help. The sights in the operating theatre could be gory, but the atmosphere there was calm and ordered, the attitude compassionate, the air clinically clean.

  It was the smell of murder that got to her as much as anything else. There was always a smell, a compound of corrupted flesh, spilled blood, the victim’s lingering terror, and a whiff of evil. It caught her by the throat every time, even when the victim was animal rather than human.

  ‘We found the cat’s head under some bushes, just inside the gate,’ she went on composedly. ‘One side of the head had been crushed by a blow that must have killed it. There was a mess of blood and fur on the ground, so I think that must have been where the head was cut off, out of sight of both the house and the road.’

  The Chief Inspector was watching her with eyes as cool as frosted grapes. She knew what he was thinking. After eight years in the force she had learned, reluctantly, to live with the double standards imposed by many – though Harry Colman was a gentle, courteous exception – of her male colleagues. If she showed any emotion in the course of her work, they would despise her for being unprofessional; when she showed none, they thought her unfeminine. It was an outrageously unfair handicap. But then, she had learned that life was unfair before she ever thought of joining the police force.

  As long as Chief Inspector Quantrill treated her as a fellow professional, she was indifferent to what he thought of her as a person. She wasn’t greatly impressed by him either, except by reputation as a detective. She could see that he was handsome, in a heavy, greying way, but she really couldn’t understand why – before Chief Superintendent Mancroft had smartened himself up and indicated that he was interested – Patsy Hopkins had thought Quantrill so unattainably attractive. As far as Hilary was concerned, Patsy was welcome to both of them.

  ‘I’ve left a small team to make local enquiries, and to start searching for the weapon,’ she went on. ‘Something with a metal edge, I think, but not a sharp one. Possibly a garden tool.’

  ‘What about the threatening words? Does Mrs Arrowsmith take them seriously?’

  ‘I think so. She seems thoroughly frightened. She couldn’t talk rationally, though, because she was very upset about the cat. She was swearing and raving that when she found out who did it, she’d strangle him with her bare hands.’ Hilary paused, and gave Inspector Colman another quick grin. ‘I believe she’d try it, too. I know her from Yarchester, about five years ago. She was Angela Hilton then, a divorcee with red hair and green fingernails, and she worked in the evenings as a barmaid at the Black Bull. Tough as they come.’

  ‘She’d need to be,’ said Harry Colman, ‘if she wanted to last longer than a week at the Black Bull in those days. It was one of the Suffolk pubs owned by the Cory brothers,’ he told Quantrill, referring to two East London gang leaders who had since been put away for attempted murder.

  ‘It had a bad reputation,’ agreed Hilary. ‘I was in uniform then, and we were called to the Black Bull several times because of drunken brawling in the bar. To be fair, we had nothing at all against Angela Hilton. She wasn’t on the game. But she was thought to be free with her favours, and she certainly knows – or used to know – some villains. So I was interested to see that she’s come up in the world, and is now a respectable housewife with a younger, young-executive-type husband who’s obviously devoted to her. She swears that she knows no one who could possibly want to harm her, but she was protesting just a bit too vehemently. I think she’s afraid that something – or someone – is about to emerge from her past and destroy her new image. Or perhaps her life.’

  Chapter Three

  The CID conference on the A135 case began with a review of the known facts. There was no shortage of them. The problem was that they led nowhere.

  Some of the facts had been established by Inspector Colman’s serious crimes team at the place where the headless body had been found. Others had been provided by the Home Office pathologist after his post-mortem examination. Some had been reported by the East Midlands forensic science laboratory, to which the dead woman’s clothing and plastic shroud had been sent; some had been established through the co-operation of other police forces. The bulk of them had been put together by the detectives of the Breckham Market division, after weeks of dogged enquiry.

  The detectives’major problem was their inability either to identify the woman or to establish the precise cause of her death. In the absence of the head this was, as Molly Quantrill had remarked to her husband, not surprising. What puzzled them more was the fact that despite extensive local and national publicity, in the press and on television and radio, no one seemed to know anything about the woman. She had vanished – died – apparently without being missed.

  There had of course been plenty of public interest and reaction. Over 500 telephone messages had been received, and more came in daily. Card indexes lengthened, files bulged with statements. But so far, none of this information matched their limited knowledge of the dead woman, any more than their knowledge fitted anyone on either their own missing persons file or the police national computer index.

  The body was that of a well-nourished woman aged approximately 32, about five feet four inches tall and three months pregnant, with no distinguishing scars or skin blemishes of any kind. There was no evidence of sexual attack.

  She had died two days before the body was found. Immediately before death she had sustained a number of violent blows on her shoulders from a blunt instrument, and it seemed probable that her death had been caused by a similar blow or blows to the head. The severing had been achieved by either an axe or a cleaver, within four to five hours after her death. It had probably been carried out by someone with some knowledge of either anatomy or butchery.

  The woman wore a wide, patterned, inexpensive 9-carat-gold wedding ring, of a type manufactured in quantity by a Birmingham firm and retailed by High Street jewellers in all parts of the country over the past seven years. Circular indentations on the second and third fingers of the right hand sugges
ted that she had habitually worn other rings, which had been removed. Her hands were uncared-for. The nails on her left hand were bitten, but inexpertly-applied pink nail varnish suggested that she had made some attempt to smarten herself up.

  Her shoes were missing, but otherwise she was fully clothed. Her underwear – tights, bra and pants – had all been identified by Marks and Spencer as steadily-selling current lines, buyable from any branch in the country. Her summer dress, however, was not from Marks and Spencer; the only label it bore was the one with the washing instructions. The material was thirty per cent cotton, seventy per cent polyester, in pink with red and grey vertical stripes.

  Extensive enquiries had at length identified it as one of fifty dozen dresses made two years previously by a Leeds clothing manufacturer from material that he had imported from Taiwan. He had sold a quarter of his output to a local wholesaler, who supplied small High Street retailers in the north of England. The remainder went to a firm trading as Jayne Edwards, which had a chain of dress shops in the major Midlands towns. There were no Jayne Edwards shops nearer to East Anglia than Wellingborough.

  The dresses had retailed cheaply, at between twelve and fifteen pounds. Any left unsold after the previous summer’s end-of-season sales had been bought up by a man who supplied itinerant market traders. The dead woman’s dress could have been bought that summer for seven or eight pounds from a market stall almost anywhere in the country.

  The plastic in which the body had been wrapped was shaped into a cover such as would fit a double-bed mattress, but it had no distinguishing marks on it. The nylon cord used to truss the plastic-wrapped body was of a type readily obtainable in hardware and Do-It-Yourself shops, and all branches of Woolworths. There had been no sign of a weapon, or any blood, at or near the place where the body was found.

  The sinister size and shape of the bundle had been spotted in the undergrowth at the side of the layby by a lorry driver who travelled regularly on the A135. He had seen it on Monday 17 July, and was confident that it had not been there the previous Friday. Although the A135 was busy in the daytime, and particularly so at weekends in the summer holiday season, the traffic flow was always light between midnight and 6 a.m.

  The layby was on the east side of the A135, the side of the road used by traffic travelling south in the general direction of London. This suggested that the body had been brought from the direction of Yarchester, twenty miles to the north, or from one of the towns on the coast, Lowestoft or Great Yarmouth. But it could equally well have been brought a comparatively short distance, along one of the many minor roads that joined the A135, by someone local who knew of the existence of the layby.

  ‘We’ve so far made house-to-house enquiries within a five-mile radius of the scene, in an attempt to establish her identity,’ said Quantrill, ‘as well as distributing over fifty thousand handbills via newsagents. But this morning’s incident at Nether Wickford does of course open up a possible new line of enquiry.’

  ‘Ah, the decapitated cat.’ Chief Superintendent Mancroft gave Hilary his new, expansive, about-to-be-remarried smile. ‘Very much like to hear your report, Miss Lloyd.’

  She began to give it, and those of the assembled detectives who hadn’t previous met her seized the opportunity to turn in their chairs and take a good look. Uniformed policewomen had served in the Breckham Market division for years, but a female detective was an intriguing novelty. A female detective sergeant, however, was not entirely welcome. Her new colleagues, conventional to a man, eyed her warily.

  What they had dreamed of, when they first heard of her appointment, was someone decorative, under twenty-five, willing, competent, but not too clever; someone who would admire and support them, and be available when required, but make no demands on them either professionally or socially; someone who would ignore the rule book, defend them from the boss, back all their decisions but otherwise keep out of their way.

  That was what they wanted. What they expected was a plain-clothes bossyboots, a middle-aged woman with a hair style as rigid as her mind. What they’d got was Hilary Lloyd, and they didn’t know what to make of her.

  They were not, collectively, much impressed by good bone structure. As far as looks were concerned they preferred Patsy Hopkins, though those with an eye for line and colour were prepared to concede that Hilary Lloyd’s casual clothes would do a lot to brighten up Breckham nick. They all noticed that she wore a diamond eternity ring on the third finger of her left hand, and they speculated on its significance.

  They were relieved that there was nothing overtly authoritative in her manner. She seemed confident without being assertive; eager to contribute to the discussion, ready to listen to what her colleagues had to say. But they observed, as Quantrill had done, that her eyes kept them at a distance. Like him, they were made uneasy by the fact that however animated she sounded, she always held herself straight-backed and still, graceful but unrelaxed. As CID sergeant, Hilary Lloyd was evidently going to be someone to be reckoned with.

  She knew her job, that was obvious. Unlike her predecessor, Martin Tait, a university graduate who had been sent to Breckham Market as a brand new sergeant, straight from police college and still wet behind the ears, she’d had plenty of experience. They’d all heard from Yarchester colleagues about the origin of her scar. Sergeant Lloyd might have a voice almost as classless (and therefore almost as classy) as the former Sergeant Tait, but at least she knew all about the hazards of down-to-earth police work. Her new colleagues were not so rash as to welcome her to Breckham on that account, but they prepared themselves to give her a fair hearing.

  What she told them about the former Angela Hilton, the owner of the decapitated cat, made them stir with interest. They quickly compiled a list of the names of known and suspected criminals who were thought to have used the Black Bull at Yarchester during the time when it was owned by the Cory brothers. With luck, they might find a lead on the A135 case. While they waited for the list to be checked and updated on the regional criminal record office computer, most of the detectives began to look at Sergeant Lloyd with reluctant approval.

  An exception was Detective Constable Ian Wigby, a beefy blond man in his middle thirties, who was against sergeants on principle. He knew Breckham Market like the palm of his hand, and all the regular villains in the town, and he resented supervision. His superiors sometimes suspected him of knowing some of the villains just a little too well, but they’d never been able to prove anything against him.

  Wigby had particularly disliked Sergeant Tait, and had been delighted when Tait was moved to Yarchester on his promotion to Inspector. The sergeantless year at Breckham had suited Wigby very well. But now he had been lumbered with another sergeant, a woman at that, and a woman younger than he was. Wigby seethed.

  ‘Before we get too interested in the Black Bull mob, sir,’ he said loudly to Chief Superintendent Mancroft, ‘there’s another point worth considering. As soon as I heard that this morning’s threat had been made to a Mrs Arrowsmith, I remembered that we’d turned up an Arrowsmith in our A135 enquiries. I took particular notice because it was Ross Arrowsmith, the man who’s made a fortune with his MicroElectronics firm.’

  ‘Reported as having sometimes been seen jogging in the area of the layby where the headless corpse was found, wasn’t he?’ said Quantrill, who remembered the name for the same reason.

  ‘That’s right. Arrogant, uncooperative bastard. Said he didn’t take any notice of either people or vehicles when he was out jogging. He agreed that he occasionally went from Ecclesby towards the main road, but said he hadn’t been there for weeks. He claimed that he nearly always went in the other direction, up to Wickford common.’

  ‘Is he related to Angela Arrowsmith’s husband?’ asked Sergeant Lloyd.

  ‘Yes,’ said Wigby. In fact he didn’t know, but it seemed a safe bet, and he wanted to appear positive in front of the Chief Superintendent. ‘I’m not sure how close the relationship is, but I’ll check.’

 
‘Don’t bother. I’m going back to see her later this morning, after she’s had time to calm down, so I can find out for myself.’ She gave the detective constable a nod of appreciation. ‘Thanks for the information, though.’

  Wigby subsided, glowering.

  ‘Did Mrs Arrowsmith recognise you, Miss Lloyd?’ asked the Chief Superintendent. ‘Does she know that you’ve connected her with the Black Bull?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She isn’t the kind of woman who takes much notice of other women, unless she sees them as rivals. All that would’ve registered with her in the Black Bull days would have been my uniform. And I thought I wouldn’t mention the Bull to her for the moment, because I’d like to know just how much she’s trying to hide.’

  ‘Good tactic. Excellent!’ Chief Superintendent Mancroft beamed at Hilary with an unqualified approval that indicated to the assembled detectives how lucky he thought they were to have her as their sergeant. The conference broke up.

  ‘You and your wife and daughter will be able to come

  to the

  wedding, I hope?’ said the Chief Superintendent, as the

  others

  disappeared. ‘Was going to put you on my guest list, then found that Patsy had put you on hers.’

  Quantrill, who hadn’t been sure from which side the silver-lettered invitation card had come, felt slightly appeased. ‘We’re looking forward to it.’

  That was true of Molly and Alison, at least. Alison was working in London, but the two of them had discussed clothes over the telephone, with Molly saying loudly when he was in earshot that she knew he wouldn’t want her appearance to let him down. This wedding was going to cost him, in more ways than one.

  ‘Would’ve preferred a quieter affair myself,’ confided Bill Mancroft. ‘You know, a private visit to the Registry Office, not bells and hymns at St Botolph’s followed by a buffet lunch for a hundred and fifty guests at the best hotel in Breckham Market. Still – big day in a girl’s life, and of course her parents want to do the right thing. Well-known family in the town, churchgoers too, so it’s got to be the lot. Morning dress –’ he added, adjusting an imaginary cravat.