But Simon Arrowsmith and Harold Wilkes were waiting for no one. As Quantrill – followed by Hilary, Tait and Dc Bedford – crossed the front office, they heard raised voices at the desk. A thickset man with cropped sandy hair was demanding loudly to see Miss Hilary Lloyd, and the desk sergeant was bursting his buttons in an attempt to find out the man’s name and business.
Hilary went immediately to Harold Wilkes’s rescue, touching his arm to draw his attention. He swung round towards her, his face even paler than usual, his eyes alarmed.
‘Oh, Miss Lloyd –’ He seized her hand in both of his, trying to convey his urgency. ‘Thank God you’re here. Simon and I have been at Angela’s restaurant this afternoon, clearing up her things. He suddenly grew very angry – not with me, but about something he’d just thought of. He’s usually very patient when he wants to tell me something, and writes it down, but he’d worked himself up into such a rage that he just stood and shouted at me. He’s difficult to lip-read, but I’m sure he said Ross’s name several times. Then he rushed out, jumped into his car, and drove off.’
‘Where?’ mouthed Hilary.
‘I’m afraid he’s gone to have a row with Ross – I think he was saying something about “having things out” with him. Simon’s normally a very gentle man, but he can lose his head when he’s roused. And the thing is – before he left the restaurant, he went to the cupboard where the carpenters leave their tools. When he ran out, he was carrying a heavy mallet.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
The blow had already been struck when the police burst into Ross Arrowsmith’s office, closely followed by a scared security guard who kept saying that it wasn’t his fault, how was he to know that Simon Arrowsmith wasn’t to be admitted? Yes, he’d heard the quarrel, but it was none of his business – a family affair, nothing to do with him.
Detective Constable Bedford pushed him out into the corridor and closed the door on him.
Simon Arrowsmith was standing in the centre of the room, feet planted apart, fists clenched at his side, chest heaving, his eyes as wild as his curly hair. Drops of spittle glistened on his beard. A heavy wooden mallet lay on the carpeted floor.
Ross Arrowsmith was lying sprawled in his chair, his head flung back. The papers on his desk were spattered with blood. His dark forelock had fallen to one side, revealing his high, balding forehead. His shirt front was soaking red, his face a gory mask.
The detectives stood quite still for a moment, taking in the scene. Then Quantrill stepped forward and put a hand on Simon Arrowsmith’s shoulder, moving him aside. Hilary hurried to Ross and gently raised his head.
‘Bloody fine mess you’ve made, haven’t you?’ the Chief Inspector observed to Simon dispassionately.
Simon shrugged, and loosened his fists. ‘Serve him right,’ he growled through his beard. ‘Serve the bastard right –’
A choking sound came from Ross Arrowsmith’s throat. It was followed by a gurgle of protest. Hilary Lloyd, SRN, was raising him to a sitting position, at the same time pinching the soft part of his nose between her forefinger and thumb. ‘Breathe through your mouth,’ she instructed him. ‘Yes, I know your nose hurts – it’s bound to, after being thumped. It doesn’t feel as though it’s broken, though. Yes, I’m sorry, but I must keep on pinching. This is the only way to stop the bleeding – if you put your head back you might inhale blood and asphyxiate yourself. Keep on breathing through your mouth … and bend forward. That’s right … good. Now, prop your elbow on your knee, and do the pinching yourself … good … never mind the pain, just pinch firmly and the flow of blood will stop …’
She stood back, her hands dabbled with blood, and took a critical look at her patient. He was groaning, but doing as he was told. ‘Where can I wash?’ she asked Simon.
‘Private suite,’ he muttered, indicating a door at the side of the office. Hilary disappeared through it.
‘What was the mallet for?’ Tait asked, picking it up from the carpet. The only marks on the heavy head were those of legitimate use.
Simon relaxed his aggressive stance and sucked his fist. ‘To break down the door if necessary. I didn’t think the murdering devil would have the guts to let me in.’
Ross raised his head and unclamped his nose. ‘I’ve already told you –’ he began, but another flow of blood silenced him. He gasped and gripped his nose and bent his head forward again. Hilary, returning from his suite, put a damp towel into his free hand, and he wiped the blood away from his mouth.
‘We shall want to hear from you later, Mr Arrowsmith,’ said Quantrill. ‘At the moment we’re talking to your brother.’
‘He’s dot by brother,’ Ross mumbled, still pinching his nose. ‘He’s by half-brother.’
‘And that‘s why you murdered my wife!’ Simon’s jaw tightened; so did his fists. ‘Why don’t you admit it? It’s perfectly obvious to me, now. It’ll be obvious to the police, too, when I tell them.’
He turned to the Chief Inspector. ‘I was too upset by Angela’s death to think clearly. I couldn’t imagine why anyone could possibly hate her enough to kill her. Oh, I knew Ross didn’t like her. He’s always been an unsympathetic man, and he doesn’t consider what a difficult life poor Angie had when she was a single parent. But it never occurred to me that he would harm her – until I remembered, this afternoon, what a fuss he made over my mother when he thought she was dying.
‘But Ross doesn’t care a rap for my mother. I suppose he resents her, for having taken his own mother’s place. He never bothers to go to see her – so why should he worry if she dies? And thinking about it, I realised that it could only be because he knows that I shall inherit her property.’
‘The house and land at Upper Wickford?’ Quantrill asked.
‘Yes. It was just about all that Dad had. He didn’t make a will. There was no need, because he knew that the house would automatically go to his widow, and that was what he wanted. Mother’s since made a will, and naturally she’s left everything to me. Why not? I’m her only child. Even if she hadn’t made a will, the house would still come to me because I’m her next-of-kin.’
‘That’s the law, on intestacy,’ agreed Tait. ‘My mother’s a widow,’ he told Quantrill, ‘and I read it up when my father died. It can give rise to terrible bitterness when there’s a second marriage, because in practice it means that the children of the first marriage inherit nothing.’
Ross Arrowsmith sat up, his nose puffy, his nostrils blood-rimmed. ‘For God’s sake –’ he said angrily. He shovelled a handful of drooping hair off his forehead. ‘Doesn’t it occur to any of you that I’m not exactly in need of money? Why on earth should I begrudge Simon his inheritance? He’s welcome to it.’
‘But Angela wasn’t welcome to it, was she?’ Simon spat. ‘That’s why you’ve been trying to persuade me to divorce her, because you didn’t like her and didn’t want her to have any share in Dad’s property. And when you got home from Japan on Thursday and thought my mother was dying, you decided to take matters into your own hands. You killed Angela, didn’t you? Come on, God damn you, admit it or I’ll –’
Tait and Bedford seized Simon’s arms to prevent him from launching another blow. ‘That’ll do,’ said Tait. ‘Cool it.’
‘Dc Bedford – take Mr Simon Arrowsmith to another office,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘and get a statement about this incident. Inspector Tait will come with you.’
Inspector Tait was displeased. He didn’t want to miss a thing. But being given an opportunity to find out more about Simon Arrowsmith, the husband of the murdered woman, was infinitely better than being excluded from the case completely. He went without a murmur.
Ross Arrowsmith stood up, clutching the bloodstained towel, and spoke to the Chief Inspector with complete assurance.
‘You do realise,’ he said, ‘that my half-brother’s bluffing? He’s trying to blame me to divert your attention from himself. What he says about the Upper Wickford property is perfectly true – it’ll go to him when his
mother dies. But as I said, I don’t really mind. I don’t need the house, or the money it would fetch in a sale, either.’
‘But the property has a great sentimental value for you, hasn’t it, Mr Arrowsmith?’ said Hilary. ‘I noticed when I fetched the towel that you have a photograph of the house in your private rooms.’
Ross ignored her. ‘The old place has very happy associations for me, certainly,’ he told Quantrill. ‘But that’s no problem. The house needs a great deal of money spending on it, and Simon will be only too glad to sell. I decided long ago that I’ll buy the property from him as soon as he inherits it. I’ll gladly pay full market value, and then restore the house for one or other of my children. So his allegation that I killed his wife to prevent her having the property is a patent lie.
‘It’s Simon himself who had the urgent motive to kill her. He knew that he was too weak to resist her demands – he’s already hopelessly in debt through her folly. When he thought his mother was dying, he realised that Angela would make him sell the property and give her the money for her restaurant … in effect, she’d make him throw it away. But his inheritance is the only thing that’ll save him from financial ruin, and so he daren’t let her get her hands on it. He took the only possible way out, and killed her himself. And now he’s staged this little charade, with the help of his brother-in-law, to try to throw the blame on me.’
Quantrill said nothing. He got up and began to wander round the room, his hands in his pockets, looking. Ross followed him warily with his eyes.
‘Do you want to prefer any charges against your half-brother?’ asked Hilary, diverting his attention. ‘The assault,’ she reminded him as Quantrill sidestepped, neatly for so big a man, into Ross’s suite.
‘What? No, I don’t want to charge Simon – you’re the ones who should be charging him, with murder. I say, do you mind?’ He hurried angrily after the Chief Inspector. ‘These rooms are private –’
‘And very nice too,’ said Quantrill. From an entrance lobby, doors opened on to a shower room, a kitchen, and a sitting room with a sofa bed. The rooms were small, but built-in furniture made them seem more spacious. Professing his genuine admiration of the craftsman’s fitments, Quantrill opened two cup-board doors before he found the wardrobe he was looking for.
‘Ah.’ Remembering, for his back’s sake, to bend from the knees, he lifted out a pair of training shoes. ‘I see you do a bit of jogging from here, as well as from home. And you keep a track suit here, too.’ He stood up, took out the garment, looked it over back and front, inspected the maker’s label, and nodded his approval.
‘Very good exercise, jogging. I sometimes think I ought to take it up myself, but I know my limitations. I’d be on my knees before I’d gone a couple of hundred yards. Whereas you’re fit – you can run for miles with no trouble at all, I imagine? From here to the A135 and back would be no problem for you, Mr Arrowsmith, would it?’
Ross pushed aside his flopping hair and dabbed his face gingerly with his stained towel. He said nothing.
‘And this is the photograph you mentioned, is it, Hilary?’ Moving into the sitting room, Quantrill studied a framed enlargement of a black-and-white snapshot. The photograph was at least thirty years old, to judge by the clothes of the woman and the small boy who stood hand in hand in a summer garden. The house behind them was recognisable as Simon’s mother’s.
‘You and your own mother, Mr Arrowsmith?’ Quantrill asked. ‘Yes, I can see the resemblance. You must have been – what, five or six at the time? I can remember being that age. I was lucky, like you. I had a very happy country childhood. It gives you a marvellous start, but it does have one big snag: nothing else, in the whole of your life, ever seems to match up to it. It’s impossible ever to be quite so happy again. Don’t you find that?’
Ross still said nothing. With his towel clutched in his hand, he walked back into his office and stood staring out of the window.
Quantrill followed him. ‘I believe your mother died when you were still a boy. That was sad. That makes it much more difficult for you to get over your happy childhood. Because it’s only as you grow up that you realise how hard life was for ordinary women of our parents’generation – particularly in the country in those days, with no basic facilities at all, not even water on tap. When you think about it – when you remember it – their lives were drudgery from morning until night. But even so, the best of them managed to keep their families happy – and that’s something it’s good to be able to repay, as you grow up. I know that’s how I’ve always felt. It gave me a great sense of satisfaction, to be able to do a bit to make my mother’s last years as comfortable as possible.’
He brushed aside the guilt that assailed him whenever he thought about the way he’d neglected her, regardless of all that she’d done for him. This was no time for remembering that he rarely managed to put his good intentions into practice.
‘But that satisfaction’s been denied you, Mr Arrowsmith, hasn’t it?’ he went on. ‘Here you are, having made more money than most of us dream of – and yet you never had a chance to repay your mother for all the love and devotion she gave you. It’s hard. It’s a hard thing for you to have to live with, especially if you loved her in return. And you did love her, didn’t you? I can see that in the photograph.’
He could tell from the rigidity of Ross Arrowsmith’s neck and shoulders that he had found the right target. Ross was moved. His childhood memories affected him so deeply that it was all he could do not to weep. Perhaps he was weeping.
‘Do you remember washdays?’ said Quantrill softly, joining him at the window. Dusk was beginning to blot the light out of the sky; in a thousand labour-saving homes, the inhabitants of latter-day Breckham Market were settling down to an evening of electronic entertainment. ‘Do you remember the coal-fired coppers where our mothers boiled all the sheets and towels and shirts? And those wickedly heavy old mangles?’
‘Winters were terrible …’ offered Ross hoarsely, still staring out of the window. ‘Oh, not for me. I was loved and protected. But my mother had to work with Dad on his smallholding – both of them needed to labour on it to scrape together enough money to keep us, and to pay the mortgage. My mother had a cruel time every winter. She was out there in the field picking sprouts when the plants were hard with ice. Her fingers were chapped to the bone, but she never complained. And then she’d come back and do the washing, just as you said. But our copper fire would never burn properly. I’ve seen her on her hands and knees in the bitterly cold wash-house, the brick floor wet with soapsuds and coal dust, blowing her lungs out to try to keep the fire going … I’ve seen her weeping over that bloody copper fire … And when she’d finally hauled the wet clothes out of the copper into the tub, she’d rub to get them clean until her fingers bled. Then she’d tie strips of rag round her fingers before she did the mangling and hung the linen out, so as to keep the blood off the clean sheets …’
‘I remember,’ Quantrill agreed quietly. ‘All that work, all that hardship, all that scrimping and saving to pay off the mortgage: no holidays, always second-hand clothes … but unlike my mother, yours didn’t live long enough to benefit from owning the family home.
‘All the benefit of ownership would have gone to Angela instead, wouldn’t it? What a marvellous time she’d have had, spending the money from the sale of the property! Clothes, drink, cars, holidays in the Caribbean – not to mention flaunting herself at her night club. Was that what your poor mother worked her fingers to the bone for? So that a bitch like Angela could have a good time? My God, it’s enough to make any son bitter!’
Ross Arrowsmith was too choked to speak. He pressed the towel against his nose, although the bleeding had stopped.
‘But then, I don’t suppose your mother ever expected any benefit,’ Quantrill went on, ‘apart from the satisfaction of giving you a good start in life. I’m sure she’d have been tremendously proud of what you’ve achieved. But look at it this way, Ross. Would she still be proud
of you, if she knew what you did last Thursday night? Would she be proud to know that you were so resentful on her behalf that you’d do anything – anything at all – to prevent Angela from getting her hands on the property? Would your mother really have wanted you to commit murder for her sake?’
Ross Arrowsmith let his towel fall. ‘You bastard …’ he said slowly. He turned to the Chief Inspector. The lower half of his face was blotched with dried blood, his eyes were red-rimmed. ‘You bastard, trying to trick me with your sympathy! Well, you’ve guessed wrong. You’re quite right about my reason for wanting Simon to divorce the woman, but you’ve taken your theory one giant step too far. You can’t adduce resentment as a motive for murder!’
‘Why not?’ said Quantrill. ‘Resentment and nostalgia make a potent combination.’
‘It’s the most far-fetched allegation I’ve ever heard,’ said Ross disdainfully. ‘Would I – a man in my position, with a happy family of my own – risk everything for a reason like that?’
‘Yes,’ said Quantrill. ‘Because you’re a clever man, and you were sure you could get away with it. You knew that Angela had already been threatened by someone else. So you assumed that you’d never be suspected, as long as you covered your tracks thoroughly and set up a convincing alibi. But you weren’t quite as thorough as you imagined – you left some evidence at the scene of the crime. Sergeant Lloyd?’
She produced the plastic bags into which she had put the clothing that Quantrill had taken from Ross’s wardrobe.
‘One pair of training shoes,’ she said briskly, ‘with dried blue clay on the welt; a lump of dried blue clay was found in Angela Arrowsmith’s car. And one dark blue track suit, according to the label 80% cotton; similar dark blue fibres were also found in Angela’s car. Both the shoes and the track suit are still slightly damp. On the night of Angela’s murder, it poured with rain.’
Blood on the Happy Highway Page 20
