Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  ‘Nor do I,’ admitted Quantrill. ‘It’s a matter of following up all possibilities, whether they’re likely or not.’

  He reached for his hat. ‘I’m off to Nether Wickford,’ he told Hilary. ‘I want to have another go at the men with the motive. What we need, urgently, is some piece of hard evidence that will connect one or both of them with the killing. I’ll find out whether either of them has any dark blue cotton clothing, but what I’d really like to discover at or near their home is a source of blue clay subsoil. I know all their shoes were clean, but Harold Wilkes had had plenty of time to make sure of that. I want to have a good look round their garden – perhaps they’ve been digging themselves a nuclear fall-out shelter. And while I’m there, Hilary, will you –’

  She interrupted him. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said, looking at her watch and reaching for the telephone. ‘I’d like to take a couple of hours off – to play squash, with a friend.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘I must have been out of my mind, to ask you for a game,’ panted Hilary. Her face was pink and streaked with sweat. She peeled off her limp whites, hung them on a locker-room peg, and stepped thankfully under a shower.

  ‘You’re out of practice, that’s all,’ gasped Jen Arrowsmith generously from the adjoining shower cubicle. ‘We must do this more often.’

  They had spent the previous twenty minutes on an echoing squash court at Jen’s country club, their rubber soles slapping and squeaking on the floor as they ran and turned, wristing their rackets to send the ball slamming round the walls. Hilary had been soundly beaten, and not for want of trying; Jen had proved to be fitter and more agile, her freckled face fierce with the aggressiveness a good squash player needs in order to win.

  ‘I’d certainly like a chance to get even,’ Hilary said. ‘It’s fun to play again – I’m so glad you were able to come, at such short notice.’

  ‘It wouldn’t usually be possible, on a Saturday or a Sunday. Ross likes weekends to be family times, all of us at home together. But the twins love coming here to swim, and he wanted to catch up with his work after spending most of last week in Japan, so you couldn’t have rung at a better time. I’m delighted that you did.’

  They emerged from the showers, companionably naked, and began to towel themselves dry. There was no atmosphere, Hilary thought, so conducive to the giving of confidences as a locker room. Other women came and went, changing and showering and chatting, but the club was sufficiently far from Breckham Market and drew its members from a sufficiently wide area to provide anonymity. Here if anywhere, while they were pleasurably tired and relaxed, Hilary hoped to be able to persuade Jen Arrowsmith to talk freely about her husband; and in particular about his relationship with his half-brother’s wife, Angela.

  Her conscience was not entirely easy about it. She had approached Jen as a friend, and to take advantage of her in this way was arguably unscrupulous.

  But murder was unarguably heinous, and a detective remained a detective on duty or off. If Ross Arrowsmith were innocent, no harm would be done by encouraging his wife to talk about him; if not –

  If not, thank God that Jen was strong enough to cope with what would necessarily follow. Hilary took a moment’s comfort from the thought, until she remembered that her own duty would be the same whether or not Jen – or some future suspect’s nearest relative – could cope with the consequences.

  This was one of the occasions when she didn’t merely resent being a detective, she hated it. But she was a professional, and so she smothered her conscience and got on with the job.

  What she learned, rapidly, was that the signs of dissatisfaction and unhappiness she had noticed when she first met Jen were caused by Ross Arrowsmith’s belief that his wife ought not to go back to work until their children were at least sixteen.

  ‘He has this fixation about childhood, you see,’ sighed Jen as they dressed, sharing her talcum powder. ‘His own was idyllic, before his mother died. I don’t think he’s ever stopped mourning her early death. As a result, he’s trying to compensate through our own children. Until he was ten, his mother was always there when he ran home from school – so he wants me to go on being at home, for the twins’benefit. Well …’

  Jen grimaced. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she went on. ‘I love them dearly, and of course I want to give them a happy childhood. But Ross’s mother was always at home because she worked on the family smallholding. Me, I’m a systems analyst. I want to use my skills. I do work, of course, from home – but only as a programmer, and it’s not the same. I miss the challenge of my old job, and I miss the daily contact with colleagues and clients. I’m sure you understand that. But my wretched husband either can’t or won’t see my point of view.’

  She paused again. ‘No, that’s not really fair to Ross. I was the one who chose to have children, and I knew his views right from the start, so I shouldn’t complain. I know it grieves him still to remember the hard life his mother had, and he takes pride in having freed me from all financial worry. I ought to be grateful. I am grateful. But sometimes I feel so cooped-up and frustrated that – well, do you wonder I play a mean game of squash?’

  Hilary sympathised genuinely, and said so. But none of this had any connection with Angela Arrowsmith, and she began to think that her previous suspicions might have been unfounded.

  The girl twin, Daisy, came rushing in from the indoor swimming pool, dripping and shivering and gabbling with pleasure, her hair hanging in wet rats’ tails round her freckled face. Her mother bundled her under a warm shower.

  ‘What’s the latest news about your husband’s stepmother?’ Hilary asked, tackling her own damp hair with her brush and the club’s blow-drier.

  ‘Quite encouraging, thank goodness. She should be out of hospital in a couple of weeks. It’s such a relief – we were desperately afraid that she wouldn’t recover.’

  ‘You told me how fond of her you all are.’

  ‘I am, certainly, and so are the twins. I can’t say the same of Ross, unfortunately. I suggested to him that we could have Nellie to stay with us for a few weeks, until she’s strong enough to go back to her own home. I’d be happy to look after her – I’ve time enough, goodness knows – but Ross says that any more than ten minutes of her conversation would drive him mad. He offered to pay for her to go to a convalescent home, but Simon insists that he’ll take care of her in future, with his brother-in-law’s help. Si says he’s going to devote himself to his mother, now that Angela’s dead …’

  Hilary passed her the hair drier. ‘That must have been a great shock for the whole family. Particularly coming straight after Simon’s mother’s heart attack.’

  ‘It was shattering to be told that she’d been murdered. God knows what kind of a life Angela led before she met Simon, but I suppose someone from her past finally caught up with her. I won’t pretend that Ross and I are grieved, but I do feel sorry for poor Simon. Ross doesn’t – he says that Simon is better off without her, and of course that’s true in a lot of ways. But I’ve always felt that their marriage was none of our business. Ross should never have tried to interfere with it.’

  ‘Did he? How?’

  ‘He tried several times to persuade Simon to divorce her. But Simon was too besotted to do any such thing, and I don’t blame him. We all know that he was a fool to marry her, but the point is that he loved her. Why should he divorce her, just to please Ross?’ She hung up the hair drier. ‘Bring me your towel, Daisy, and I’ll dry your back.’

  Hilary watched, puzzled, as Jen Arrowsmith gave her daugher a brisk towelling. Here was a link between Ross and Angela that she had never suspected. Why should he have been so anxious for Simon to divorce his wife? Because Angela’s behaviour might reflect badly on the name of Arrowsmith MicroElectronics? Hardly, when his firm had a national – potentially an international – reputation.

  Or were Ross’s motives selfless? Did he feel an elder-brother protectiveness towards Simon? The answer to that, in view of his insis
tence on the fact that they were not brothers, was almost certainly no. Was Ross trying to protect his stepmother, then? Did he want to remove Angela from the family so that she could make no more raids on Nellie’s late husband’s life savings? But that incident, according to May Cullen, hadn’t taken place until last Wednesday; and according to his wife, Ross wasn’t particularly fond of Nellie.

  ‘Are we going to have tea here?’ asked Daisy as she wriggled into her jeans.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said her mother. ‘Daddy’ll be at the office for hours yet. You’ll have tea with us, Hilary, won’t you?’

  But Hilary had just remembered something: a small point, nothing more than a discrepancy between two pieces of information. It was, though, something that she wanted to pass on to Douglas Quantrill as soon as possible.

  ‘Thank you very much, but I can’t stay – this isn’t my day off, and I have to get back to work.’

  ‘Are you in computers too?’ asked Daisy. ‘Software or hardware?’

  Hilary forced herself to smile and speak lightly. ‘Neither. I’m in the police force, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Daisy.

  ‘So you are,’ said Jen to Hilary. ‘I’d completely forgotten.’ She put a confident arm round her daughter’s shoulder and smiled fondly at the child. ‘How about that, then? And Hilary’s not an ordinary policewoman either, she’s a real live detective. We shall have to watch what we say in front of her, or she might start using it as evidence.’

  At the CID offices in Breckham Market, a celebration was being planned.

  The A135 murder was no longer a mystery. A man with a criminal record, Paul Edward Hanson, had confessed to the unlawful killing of his wife Denise, and was now in custody. He had, he said, wrenched the leg off a broken chair and hit her over the head with it when he discovered that she was pregnant by another man.

  Hanson had further admitted to cutting off his wife’s head, some hours after she had died from her injuries. He said that he had put the head in a weighted holdall, and had thrown it into the river from Bishop’s Bridge in Yarchester. Police frogmen had found the holdall that afternoon. It contained the head of a woman whose skull had been fractured in several places. As soon as word came to Breckham from Yarchester that the woman’s top front teeth were widely set apart, Quantrill had authorised the booking of the back room at the Coney and Thistle for a party that evening.

  Not that the investigation was over. Hanson might yet retract his confession; the CID was faced with days if not weeks of tracing and checking, until the man’s story was proved in every detail. By that time, the detectives’ euphoria would have evaporated. But today, at five thirty on Sunday afternoon, 22 September, ten weeks after the discovery of the woman’s headless body in the layby, they were high on success and canteen tea.

  From the main CID office in Breckham Market, telephone calls were going out to round up as many as possible of the detectives who had worked so hard and so long to trace the identity of the woman. The fact that the final tracing and the subsequent arrest of Hanson had been made by Inspector Tait of the regional crime squad was enough to make the Breckham men spit. But at least they could console themselves with the thought that all the groundwork was theirs; if they hadn’t been sidetracked by the Arrowsmith murder, they’d have tied up the A135 case by now themselves.

  Besides, Martin Tait had once worked in their division. The older detectives had had to nanny him when he’d first arrived, a big-headed, jumped-up young sergeant who hadn’t known enough about the job to keep his feet dry. They reckoned that they’d been the ones who’d cuffed him into shape; if he’d turned into a good detective, a lot of the credit was theirs. And so when he returned that afternoon from Yarchester to share in the celebrations, they patted him on the back with rather more force than was necessary, and assured him patronisingly that they’d always known he would make the grade.

  Sergeant Lloyd, when she returned from the country club and heard the reason for the rejoicing, was kinder.

  ‘That didn’t take you long, did it? Congratulations, Martin.’

  He thanked her with a kiss, partly because he welcomed any opportunity to kiss an attractive woman and partly to score a substantial point against the watching detectives. ‘And thank you too, Hilary love, for pointing me in the right direction. I’d have got there without your help, of course, but perhaps not quite so quickly.’

  She laughed. ‘Your modesty’s refreshing, I’ll say that for you. How did you persuade Hanson to confess?’

  ‘Skill; how else? He denied it at first. Said he hadn’t been to Yarchester or seen his wife since he came out of the Scrubs, and that her boy friend must have done away with her. But I told him that I’d already found out that he’d been seen in July, going in and out of the bed-sit where his wife was living. And that at about the same time, he’d told another neighbour that they were both packing up and moving on. Once I’d shown him that I knew he was lying, the rest wasn’t difficult.’

  ‘But you still had no hard evidence to tie the crime to him.’

  ‘Yes, I had. He couldn’t know that the pathologist had told us that her head had been cut off by someone with some knowledge of anatomy or butchery. Unluckily for Hanson, I picked him up at his parents’home in north London: a flat over his father’s shop. The old man’s a butcher by trade, and his son used to work for him. Ironic, isn’t it, that by cutting off the woman’s head to hide her identity, he gave me enough evidence to charge him with her murder?’

  Inspector Tait looked inordinately pleased with himself: another criminal caught, another successful enquiry to his credit – and this one on behalf of the regional crime squad, too. An excellent beginning to this stage of his career.

  Hilary Lloyd found his single-minded smugness offensive. ‘The woman, you said. That’s all you’ve called her, either ‘his wife’or ‘the woman’. Just because she was anonymous for so long, you’re talking about her as though she were a butcher’s carcase. But we know her name now – she’s Denise Hanson. Damn it, Martin, you found that out yourself. She was just as much a person as the other murdered woman, Angela Arrowsmith – except that she was unluckier than Angela in every way, even in her death. Angela didn’t know what was coming to her; she went to meet her murderer eagerly. But Denise Hanson must have spent the last few weeks of her life in terror, half-knowing what her husband would do to her.’

  ‘Then she shouldn’t have hung about waiting for him to be released from prison, should she?’ said Tait sharply.

  ‘I don’t suppose she had anywhere else to go.’

  ‘She could have asked for police protection.’

  ‘Just as Simon Arrowsmith did for his wife? A lot of use we were to her, weren’t we?’

  Chief Inspector Quantrill, emerging tweed-hatted and purposeful from his office, saw the two of them glaring at each other.

  ‘Surely you’re not still feeling guilty about Angela Arrowsmith’s death, Hilary?’ he said briskly. ‘Well, don’t. We’ve already discovered that last week’s threat had nothing to do with what happened to her, so stop going on about it. Let’s concentrate on finding out who killed her.’

  Quantrill was on his way to see Simon Arrowsmith and Harold Wilkes, having been delayed by the news of Hanson’s capture and confession. He wanted to get the interviews over, and return to the Coney in time to celebrate the cracking of the A135 case. But when Sergeant Lloyd told him that she had been playing squash with Ross Arrowsmith’s wife, and had acquired some interesting information, he returned to his office and tossed his hat on to its usual peg. He felt cheerful. For one thing, his back was very much easier; a couple of drinks that evening and he’d be a new man.

  Tait followed Hilary into the Chief Inspector’s office. She thought it would be childish to make an issue of his presence, even though what she had to tell the DCI was no concern of the regional crime squad. Quantrill seemed to have forgotten that Tait was no longer a member of his team, and the Inspector decided not
to draw immediate attention to himself. He wanted very much to take part in this investigation too.

  Hilary repeated what Jen Arrowsmith had told her. Quantrill scratched his chin.

  ‘Young Bedford’s been looking round the outside of the Old Maltings, and he says there’s a side door that Ross Arrowsmith could have used without being seen by his own security guards. So he certainly had the opportunity, on Thursday night, to slip out and run as far as the A135 and back without denting his alibi. But we still haven’t established a motive. Wanting Simon to divorce Angela – for whatever reason – is one thing; killing her is monstrously different.’

  ‘True,’ admitted Hilary. ‘But there’s another thing that Jen told me. Ross doesn’t care much for his stepmother, Nellie; he rarely goes to see her – Jen told me that last week – and he isn’t prepared to give her house-room for her convalescence. And yet according to the staff nurse I talked to at the infirmary, Ross went there in a panic after he returned from Japan and heard that his stepmother was ill. Nellie was in the intensive care unit, and Ross said to the staff nurse, ‘She mustn’t die. You mustn’t let her die!’

  ‘Did he?’ said Quantrill slowly. ‘Did he? And that was on Thursday evening …’

  ‘Yes. And there’s just one other thing; I’d forgotten it until this afternoon, when you joked about Simon and Harold digging a nuclear fall-out shelter in their garden. Ross’s wife told me last week, when I called at their house, that he often does a short jog round their grounds. Well, they’re having a swimming pool dug. There’s a JCB behind their house, and a great pile of excavated earth – the hole must be at least twenty feet deep. And if the subsoil that’s been dug out is blue clay, I should be very much surprised if Ross hasn’t collected some of it on his training shoes.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Quantrill. ‘I think it’s high time I had a word with Ross Arrowsmith. He’s at his office, you said? Right, let’s go there. His half-brother and Wilkes can wait a bit longer.’