Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  ‘But you’re satisfied that it wasn’t a local murder, sir?’

  ‘I’m satisfied that she wasn’t a local woman. But by “local”, I mean Breckham Market and the surrounding countryside. She could be from Yarchester or Great Yarmouth or Lowestoft or Ipswich, one of the big East Anglian towns where there’s a transient population. But the person who dumped her body here – who wasn’t necessarily the murderer, of course – might have more immediate local connections.’

  They turned and walked back along the layby, past the parked vehicles. The caravan family were eating a snack lunch. The hatchback car was empty, although the radio was blaring; presumably the double-glazing salesman was behind a bush.

  ‘I’ve been wondering about the dress the dead woman was wearing,’ said Hilary. ‘We’ve been assuming that it was bought for cash, either at one of the Jayne Edwards shops in the Midlands or at a market stall, and that it’s therefore untraceable. But a lot of women buy from mail-order firms, either for cash or on credit. Sometimes they buy direct from a catalogue or an advertisement, sometimes through an agent. Angela Arrowsmith told me this morning that she’s a mail-order agent – she offered to take me on as a customer. There was a pile of catalogues in her hall, and one of them was a Jayne Edwards. So the firm sells on credit. And that means that they must keep records of their customers.’

  ‘It’s an interesting point,’ Quantrill acknowledged. ‘Certainly worth following up – though it seems too much to hope that the murdered woman would have been one of their credit customers. In fact I’d say it was unlikely, given that she was wearing Marks and Spencer underclothes.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Hilary, intrigued that he was prepared to pontificate on the subject.

  ‘My wife dragged me round Yarchester Marks and Spencer on my day off last week. First completely free day I’d had since the body was found … Anyway, as you know, the firm trades strictly for cash, and they’re not cheap. Molly bought a few underclothes, just enough to set her up for the winter, she said. And do you know what she paid for them? Nearly twenty pounds.’

  He was silent for a moment, dwelling on the enormity of it. And it wasn’t even as though he could accuse Molly of extravagance. No garments could have been of better value and lesser allure than those roomy white cellular cotton panties and stiffly elasticated bras. True, the store did have a much prettier, flimsier, younger range of underwear – the kind of thing the dead woman had been wearing. He had looked it over hopefully, while his wife was trying to decide between ribbon and cotton shoulder straps for her winter vests; but none of it was ever Molly’s size.

  He pushed from his mind the thought that his own new Marks and Spencery-fronts had been equally expensive, equally dull. That was different.

  ‘So it seems to me,’ he went on, ‘that a woman who shops at M & S can’t be short of money. She may take a fancy to a cheap Jayne Edwards summer dress if she sees it in a shop window, but I can’t believe that she’d go to the bother of buying it on credit and making fiddling little weekly payments for it.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Hilary. ‘Mail-order firms give interest-free credit, and that can be very useful. Besides, women who are lonely or housebound may well look forward to having a chat with the agent when she comes to collect their instalments.’

  ‘All right, you’ve made your point.’ Quantrill’s new sergeant was clearly a woman who enjoyed arguing. ‘As I said, we’ll follow it up.’

  They had reached the lower end of the layby and were now facing south, the way they had come. Yellow September sunshine dazzled them as they looked down the slope towards the Wickford-Breckham Market crossroads.

  ‘Ross Arrowsmith was mentioned at the conference this morning, wasn’t he?’ said Hilary. ‘He’d sometimes been seen jogging in this direction, though he said that he hadn’t been here for weeks. Interestingly, his name came up again when I was talking to Angela about the cat incident.’

  She told the Chief Inspector what Angela Arrowsmith had said about her brother-in-law. ‘I didn’t give much weight to her suggestion that Ross could be responsible for the threat,’ she went on, ‘because there was an element of spite in her voice. But it’s quite true that he was jogging round Wickford common between the time when the cat was killed and the time when the postmen reported finding its body on Angela’s doorstep. Both postmen mentioned in their statements that they’d seen Ross Arrowsmith on his way back from the common, and according to the enquiry team he was seen by at least two other local people. I think it might be worth interviewing him again. Because if he was the person who threatened Angela, it’s just possible that he could in some way be connected with the murder.’

  ‘Ross Arrowsmith?’ scoffed Quantrill. ‘Why? Even if the man had enough of a grudge against his sister-in-law to play this morning’s nasty trick on her, that’s no reason to suspect him of complicity in a murder. What possible grounds for suspicion have you got, beyond the fact that he knows the area?’

  ‘It’s a long shot, I agree. But I was thinking of Angela’s dreams of making big money, and our suspicion that if she’s serious about opening a restaurant, she must have a shady backer. And then I started wondering how Ross began his business, and whether he’d ever had a backer who might still have some hold over him. Enough of a hold, perhaps, to enlist Ross’s help in dumping the body?’

  Quantrill snorted. ‘There’s never been a whisper to suggest that Arrowsmith MicroElectronics hasn’t been legitimately financed, right from the start. Ross Arrowsmith is a local boy who’s made good, and local boys who make good are never popular in small towns. If there’d been any muck to rake over his reputation, it would have been done before now.’

  ‘Even so,’ persisted Hilary, ‘I’d like to interview him about this morning’s incident. If he had nothing to do with it, then I agree, there’s nothing at all to connect him with the murder. But if he did threaten Angela – well, it’s worth investigating, isn’t it? After all, what else do we have to work on, apart from the mail-order angle?’

  She was almost as eager with her theories as Martin Tait had been, Quantrill thought sourly. It was a more controlled enthusiasm than Martin’s, a search for the truth rather than an ambitious scramble to notch up an arrest, but no more welcome for that. He felt thoroughly middle-aged, dispirited.

  And the trouble was that she was right. Right to be eager, right to consider every possible lead. His return visit to the layby had so far given him no new ideas about the murder at all; he was just going through the motions of CID work. So if he had any sense he’d welcome his new sergeant’s enthusiasm, instead of being resentful and grouching at her. If the alternatives were to encourage Hilary Lloyd’s initiative, while remaining in control of the case, or to have the regional crime squad in the person of Martin Tait sent in over his head, he had no doubt which to opt for.

  Hilary was a good deal more decorative than Martin, too. He glanced at her profile, and acknowledged that it was as photogenic as Harry Colman had claimed. Something to do with the height of the cheekbones and the angle of the nose and chin … Perhaps, as they’d all told him, he was lucky in more ways than one to have her as his sergeant.

  They moved aside as the car and caravan drove past them and out on to the main road, travelling south. The caravan was followed almost immediately by the double-glazing salesman’s car, which accelerated past it and roared off as though the driver had just heard a weather forecast on his radio and wanted to clinch as many sales as possible on the strength of a warning of imminent frost.

  Quantrill shook off his gloom. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘You’d better talk to Ross Arrowsmith as soon as possible, then. We’re only a couple of miles from where he lives, so you might as well go there now. Take my car. I’ll stay here and have a quiet think, but I want you back within twenty minutes. We’ve wasted enough time on the Nether Wickford incident already.’

  Hilary went. Quantrill paced the layby, poked about among the undergrowth, stood and thought. The
re was nothing to disturb his quiet except the hum of insects, and the muffled noise of traffic – chiefly, at this time on a Saturday, holiday-makers going to and from the coast – on the other side of the trees. But hard as he thought, the only fresh ideas in his head were those that had been voiced by Sergeant Lloyd.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday afternoon, and in sunshine hot enough for midsummer Ross Arrowsmith’s wife and twin son and daughter busied themselves in the grounds of their recently built house at Ecclesby.

  In common with most English villages, Ecclesby had no system of numbering for its houses. To the confusion of new postmen, the inhabitants devised their own addresses, factual, topographical, architectural, reminiscent or whimsical: The Old Bakery, Orchard View, White Gables, Marbella, Erzanmyne. Ross Arrowsmith and his wife called their house New Maltings because its brick walls and pantiled roof echoed the eighteenth-century construction of the Breckham Market building that he had made the headquarters of Arrowsmith MicroElectronics.

  The house had obviously cost a good deal of money, but it was not built to impress or to be used for formal entertaining. The architect had designed it to be on mannerly terms with the older houses of the village, but primarily to function as a comfortable family home. There was ample evidence, in the guinea-pig hutches that stood against the walls of the garage block in full view of anyone who drove up to the side door, and in the scatter of bicycles, bats and balls in the yard between the house and the garages, that despite their recent acquisition of wealth the Arrowsmiths lived unpretentiously.

  Some construction work was still uncompleted. At the back of the house a yellow JCB digger, long-necked and prognathous as a galactic monster, lurked behind a great pile of earth. Beyond the digger, two ponies grazed a paddock. The Arrowsmith children, identical and unisex in tee shirts and jeans, were mucking out the guinea-pigs when Hilary Lloyd arrived; remembering her own childhood obsession with ponies – though there had never been any question of her actually owning one – Hilary guessed that the twin who couldn’t bear to be parted from the riding hat was almost certainly a girl.

  As she stopped the Chief Inspector’s ageing Austin Maxi in the yard and got out, a woman a little older than herself drove across the extensive lawn on a motor mower.

  ‘Hallo,’ called Mrs Arrowsmith exuberantly, switching off her engine. She was neatly built and auburn haired and freckle-faced, so like the twins that they might at a distance be taken for triplets. ‘I say, these mowers are great fun, aren’t they? I’ve always wanted to ride one, and we’ve only just acquired it. Have you had a go?’

  ‘Never. In fact it’s the first time I’ve seen one in action, off the television screen.’ Hilary walked round the mower. ‘Yes, I can see the tempting resemblance to a go-kart. Still, it wouldn’t be much use to me – it would never fit my window box.’

  Mrs Arrowsmith slid off the machine with a penitent grimace. Like her children, she wore jeans; not designer jeans but a scruffy pair with a chainstore label. ‘Sorry …’ she said. ‘You must have thought me ostentatious.’

  ‘Not a bit. With all this grass to cut, only a masochist would do it the hard way. I’m no gardener at all. The summit of my horticultural ambition is to keep my Swiss cheese plant alive – it hasn’t taken kindly to the move from Yarchester, and it’s going droopy on me. I’m a newcomer to Breckham Market, a policewoman: Hilary Lloyd, detective sergeant. We’re making some routine enquiries in this area, and I wondered if your husband could help me.’

  ‘How fascinating!’ Mrs Arrowsmith stared at Hilary with frank, bright-brown-eyed curiosity; not about her visitor’s purpose, but about her job. ‘Well, I’ve never before seen a woman detective, off the television screen – so that makes us even, doesn’t it?’

  They exchanged smiles, liking each other. ‘My name’s Jen,’ she continued. ‘Ross has just gone indoors to take a telephone call, but he won’t be long.’

  ‘I’ll wait, then, if you don’t mind.’ Hilary looked at the mower’s controls, giving an appearance of a continuing interest in the machine although she was not at all mechanically minded. What really interested her was that Jen Arrowsmith had expressed no concern, or even surprise, that a police officer wanted to see her husband.

  The standard police phraseology, the request for help with routine enquiries, was designed to cause no alarm to the innocent and to suggest no prejudgement to the guilty. But nine wives out of ten, hearing it with reference to their husbands, would be worried or defensive; and the tenth would, at the very least, want to know what it was all about. The fact that Jen Arrowsmith heard it without comment showed admirable discretion, and complete confidence in her husband. Either there were no skeletons in his cupboard, thought Hilary, or his wife had never heard the rattle of their bones.

  ‘Have a ride, if you’d like to,’ urged Mrs Arrowsmith hospitably, misinterpreting the attention that Hilary was giving the mower.

  ‘Better not, thanks – my boss would go spare if he saw me on it in working hours. Do you always use the mower yourself, or does your husband hog it when he’s at home?’

  ‘He’d better not try! Not that he would, because he gave it to me as a present. It was a sop, really. I didn’t want to have such a huge garden, but he insisted – he’s a fitness fanatic, you see. He comes home for lunch every day and jogs twice round the garden while I make him a salad. He despises businessmen who snatch sandwiches at their desks and take no exercise at all, and then wonder – if they survive – why they have heart attacks.’

  Ross Arrowsmith wouldn’t have much time for Douglas Quantrill, then, thought Hilary. She had already noticed that the DCI was addicted to sandwich-snatching, and he certainly wasn’t fit.

  ‘I imagine the pressures of building and running a company like Arrowsmith MicroElectronics could be killing,’ she said.

  ‘They could be, quite easily, but Ross seems to thrive on work. He’s off to Japan tomorrow on a sales trip.’

  Astonished, Hilary temporarily forgot why she was there. ‘Selling electronics to Japan? You can’t be serious?’

  ‘Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?’ said Jen proudly. ‘But the Japanese are brilliant at developing ideas, and they’re always interested in new micro-electronic design. I think Ross’s latest home computer is a potential world-beater, at its price – and I used to be a systems analyst, so I have some idea of what’s on the market. But then –’ she gave a freckled grin ‘– perhaps I’m partial.’

  ‘Very probably,’ agreed Hilary, returning the grin. ‘But then again, you could be right.’

  She would have liked to look at her watch. She was enjoying the conversation with Jen Arrowsmith, but she didn’t want to keep the Chief Inspector waiting for nothing, and it had begun to seem totally unlikely that a wealthy, confident computer expert who was about to fly off to Japan would have any knowledge of, let alone a hand in, this morning’s squalid incident at Nether Wickford.

  ‘Do you go with your husband on any of his sales trips?’ she asked.

  ‘No, it’s all too rushed. He never stays a minute longer than is necessary, so by the time I’ve got over my jet-lag he’s itching to come back. Anyway, I couldn’t leave the twins. They go to school in Breckham Market, and I’ve no relatives in the area I could park them with.’

  ‘Is there no one on your husband’s side of the family who could help? I met your sister-in-law at Nether Wickford this morning.’

  For a second or two, Jen Arrowsmith looked blank. Then, ‘Oh, you mean Angela,’ she said. ‘Oddly enough I never think of her as my sister-in-law. Ross and Simon are only half-brothers, you see, they’re not like brothers at all. No, I couldn’t possibly impose on her …’

  She paused, lowering her eyes. There was undoubtedly a good deal more that she could have said about Angela Arrowsmith, but she declined to do so.

  ‘Ross has a widowed stepmother living in Upper Wickford,’ she went on after a moment. ‘Nellie’s a dear, but she isn’t at all well, I’m afraid. I’m v
ery fond of her, and I tend to think of her as my mother-in-law and the twins’grandmother – but of course, as Ross reminds me sharply, she isn’t. His own mother died when he was ten – just the twins’age now. He was taken off immediately by a married sister to live in Cambridge, and he hated being uprooted from the countryside. That’s why he wanted to come back and live in this area, so that we could give the twins the country upbringing he’d so much enjoyed.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said Hilary. ‘And you have a lovely place here.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we’re very lucky.’

  The shadow crossed Jen Arrowsmith’s face so quickly that Hilary might have thought she’d imagined it, if the voice hadn’t been suddenly bleak. Something was wrong, then. Here was a wife who had every material thing she could want; a cheerful, uncomplicated woman who, despite occasional wry shrugs over her husband’s foibles, spoke of him with admiration and affection. But something – or someone – was clouding her happiness. Was it Angela Arrowsmith, Hilary wondered? Perhaps after all it would be worth keeping Chief Inspector Quantrill waiting while she tried to find out.

  When Ross Arrowsmith emerged from the house, wearing a track suit and training shoes, he chose to ignore the fact that they had a visitor. He jerked out the information that he had revised his travel arrangements to Tokyo and would be leaving that afternoon, and turned back immediately to the house.

  He bore no family resemblance to Simon, who took after his sturdy, fair-complexioned mother Nellie. Ross was thin, dark, straight-haired, clean-shaven, with eyes set deep in his narrow face. He had a very high forehead, partly as a result of hair loss. To compensate for this, he grew his hair long on his left temple, parted it two inches above his ear, and brushed it up and over his balding brow. But short of glueing them on, there was no way of keeping the lank strands in place, and they kept slipping forward over his eyes. It was, Hilary thought, an oddly vexatious streak of vanity that impelled a man to keep brushing with his fingers at his flopping hair.