Death and the Maiden (10 page)

In the middle of the beet field, the old station buildings stood in an isolated cluster, all smoke-stained brick and ornamental barge-boarding. The former station yard was crowded with cars and lorries, some of which were stacked high with wire crates containing what Tait assumed to be dead chickens; white feathers and yellow claws protruded from between the wires.

The policemen walked past what had been the booking hall and waiting rooms, now occupied by the office staff, and made for the centre of activity, a former engine shed. It blared at them, loud with canned music and shouted voices and the hum of extractor fans.

At one end was an unloading bay. As they approached it, one of the lorries backed in and three or four youths began unloading the crates of chickens, heaving them from hand to hand and finally banging them down at the back of the ramp, where they were wrenched open one at a time.

A whistling youth thrust his hand into a newly-opened crate and dragged out a crumpled bundle of feathers. To Tait's surprise and disgust, the bird was alive. It squawked and flapped in its moment of freedom from confinement, but the youth promptly seized its legs and swung the bird upside down, shackling its claws with nonchalant expertise on to the clips of a conveyor chain that moved at shoulder height into the engine shed.

‘Enough to turn you vegetarian, places like this,' Quantrill said gloomily into Tait's ear. His work in rural police divisions had taken him often enough into slaughterhouses, but he had never overcome his sense of depression at their sights, their sounds, their smells, their frighteningly casual doing-to-death. ‘Ah, that looks like the foreman.'

They approached a harrassed-looking man in a long white coat and a white trilby hat. He scowled at them over the clipboard he was writing on.

‘County police,' said Quantrill briskly. ‘We'd like a quick word with Derek Gedge, please.'

The man's scowl deepened. ‘Why—has he done anything?' he demanded. ‘Because if it's just about his sister, he knows. One of the girls in the office had a phone call this morning from her mother, and I passed the news on to him. I offered him the rest of the day off, but he knows we're short-staffed and he said he'd go on working.'

‘We'd still like a word,' said Quantrill.

‘The line's running,' objected the man. ‘He's on the killing machine—I can't stop the whole line, we're behind as it is.'

Quantrill disliked having to pull his rank, but there were times when it was undeniably useful. ‘Chief Inspector Quantrill,' he said quietly. ‘Will you get someone to take his place in the line, please. We sha'n't keep him long.'

The man looked taken aback and turned away quickly, shouting instructions above the din. In a few moments, a young man came towards them. Like the other workers he wore rubber boots, a long white coat and a white cotton cap; like theirs, his whiteness was fouled. There was blood all over him, blood on his face, blood on his cap, blood on his coat, blood on his hands.

Quantrill kept his eyes steadily on Derek Gedge's, trying to ignore the splatter of blood on the young man's forehead and the chicken down that clung to his unkempt hair. Like his dead sister, Derek was blond and blue-eyed; like hers, his features were attractively regular. But he looked unwell: his face was pale and moist, his eyes heavy.

‘You want to see me?' His light, colourless voice was strangely at odds with his bloodied appearance.

Quantrill beckoned him out into the sunshine, away from the worst of the noise, and introduced himself and Tait. ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Gedge, but we have to clear up one or two matters about your sister's death.'

Derek Gedge looked from one to the other and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Oh yes?' he said dully.

Quantrill decided to go straight to the point: ‘Did you see your sister last night?'

‘No.'

‘At any time yesterday?'

‘No. We don't—we didn't meet.'

‘But you live in the same village,' Tait pointed out. ‘You couldn't help meeting her occasionally. When did you last see her?'

Derek Gedge was irritated out of his composure. ‘I don't know!' he snapped. ‘A week, ten days ago—how the hell do you expect me to remember a detail like that? Yes of course we saw each other about the village sometimes, and when we met we'd say “Hallo”. But we didn't socialise, and I certainly didn't see her yesterday. OK?'

‘Yes, thank you.' Quantrill spoke pleasantly, to take the edge off the questioning. ‘We have to try to trace your sister's movements yesterday evening, you see. Your mother-in-law told us that Mary didn't go to Jubilee Crescent, but we wondered whether you might have seen her elsewhere.'

At the mention of Jubilee Crescent, Derek's mouth twisted. ‘You've been there, have you?'

‘We thought we might find you there,' said Quantrill, ‘in the circumstances.'

Derek gave an abrupt, unamused laugh. ‘Well, now that you've had a good look at my domestic life, you'll know why I prefer being at work.'

‘But in a place like this?' asked Tait. ‘When you've just heard of your sister's death?'

Derek Gedge stared at the sergeant with dislike. ‘Look,' he said with pale intensity. ‘I loved my sister, OK? Just because we had a family row and didn't meet any more, it doesn't mean that I'm not upset by her death. I'm shocked, sick, numbed—oh for God's sake leave me alone.'

He turned away, distressed, but Quantrill called him back. ‘I'm sorry, Mr Gedge, but the point is that someone might have been with Mary just before her death. We've spoken to your father and he says that she often went for walks down by the river. Tell me, who would she be most likely to go for walks with?'

Derek stood with his eyes stubbornly downcast. ‘I don't know.'

‘But surely she wouldn't go alone?' said Tait. ‘An attractive girl like Mary—come on, you must have some idea.'

‘I don't know!' Derek Gedge pulled off his stained cotton cap in a gesture of exasperation and rubbed it over his damp forehead. ‘I haven't talked to Mary since I got married—that's nearly eighteen months ago, she'll have done a lot of growing up since then. It's no use asking me anything about her.'

‘But you haven't been completely out of touch,' said Tait. ‘You must have heard things about her, whether you met her or not; that she was going to Cambridge—to King's—for example.'

The bitter grin returned. ‘Oh yes, I heard about that, from several sources. You'd be amazed how many people wanted to be sure that I knew where she was going.'

‘Right—so you do hear about your sister. Come on, then, tell me—did she have a boy-friend in Ashthorpe?'

‘I don't
know
!' Derek Gedge was sweating freely. He rubbed his cap over his smeared face again, and appealed to Quantrill. ‘Look, it's no use your badgering me, I honestly can't tell you anything about Mary. I'm shattered, that's all I know. Can I go back to work now?'

Quantrill nodded, but walked beside him towards the old engine shed. The powerful beat of the music and the barbaric smell of freshly fallen blood met them even before they reached the building.

Tait came up quietly on Derek Gedge's other side.

‘Lovely place, Cambridge,' mused the sergeant, ‘particularly at this time of year. Delightful to be in a punt on the Backs just now, with a good friend and a couple of intelligent, attractive girls …'

Gedge whirled on him with a look of hatred. ‘All right,' he snarled, ‘don't rub my nose in it! God, don't you think I hate working here? But I'll tell you something: everyone in Ashthorpe thinks that my mother made me give up Cambridge and marry Julie Pulfer against my will, but it isn't true. I married her because I wanted to. I was blindly in love with her and I felt—well, chivalrous, if you want to know. Proud to be shouldering a man's responsibilities. That's what I tried to explain to Mary, but she didn't understand. That's why we had the row.'

Tait raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘You mean you've no regrets about your marriage?'

Gedge answered him contemptuously. ‘Don't be a fool, man! I was telling you what I felt at the time, what made me give up Cambridge. But now—you've seen for yourself the pig-sty the Pulfers live in. And have you seen Jason, my unaccountably dark-eyed son? Have you taken a good look at this place? Well, all of this is the price I'm having to pay—not, as everyone thinks, for the sexual experience, but for being a romantic idiot. My sister told me that I was too young to marry and that I'd regret it, and I've never been able to forgive her for being right. That doesn't mean that I don't grieve over her death—but you know something? Even after what's happened to her, even though she hasn't lived to enjoy her success, I'm not sure that she isn't still the lucky one.'

He strode away, jamming his cap back on his head. The policemen watched as he leaped up on to the concrete platform at the end of the shed, the continuation of the ramp where the chickens were unloaded. The conveyor chain entered the shed at this end, dangling the wriggling black-eyed birds at regular intervals and bearing them to a place where a machine stood, and attendant youths with knives.

Derek Gedge stood shoulder to shoulder with one of the youths, watching the sudden flurry of activity as each bird arrived, waiting to get back into the rhythm of the production line.

Quantrill, knowing the process, would have left; but Tait lingered, watching with incredulous distaste as the birds, stunned by an electric shock from the machine, had their throats slit. The dead chickens flapped and jerked violently in their final nervous spasm, their wings beating the youths about the face, their down rising in a dusty cloud to cling wherever their falling blood had splattered.

Sickened, Tait stood as though his shoes had been cemented to the bloodstained concrete floor. The grotesque chorus line of dead birds dipped and swayed on their hooks across the shed, plunging into tanks of scalding water, entering a plucking machine, and then emerging naked to be slapped down on another conveyor belt for evisceration and packing by a team of women. In a matter of minutes, living creatures were being transformed before his eyes into hunks of graded, quality controlled, hygienically packaged, inexpensive protein.

Quantrill pulled at his sergeant's sleeve and led him outside. They stood for a few minutes by the car, and the chief inspector considerately looked away to give Tait time to recover.

‘All right?'

Tait nodded. The delicate green had disappeared from his cheeks, though he was almost as pale as Derek Gedge had been.

‘I know what you're thinking,' said Quantrill. ‘Yes, it's a brutalising job. God knows how anyone as sensitive as Derek Gedge could have contemplated it in the first place.'

‘If he's stuck it for eighteen months,' muttered Tait, ‘his sensibilities must be pretty well blunted by now.'

They sat in the car and clipped on their seat belts. Quantrill glanced at Tait again and grinned.

‘There's a lot to be said,' he suggested, ‘for a station sergeant's job in Yarchester …'

But Tait was determined not to concede a single point. He swallowed. ‘Do you think so, sir?' he said heroically. ‘I've found this a very interesting experience—I wouldn't have missed it.'

Quantrill accelerated out of the yard, still grinning. This was one he had to win. ‘But you won't fancy eating chicken for a while,' he prophesied confidently.

Alan Denning, BSc (Econ), headmaster of Breckham Market comprehensive school, lived in one of the detached houses that had been built in the'sixties along Mere Road. Formerly, when Breckham was nothing but a declining market town, the road had been simply a farm track that skirted a circle of murky water in a rough meadow on the outskirts of the ancient borough. But then an arrangement with the London County Council had brought to the town an influx of factories, people and relative prosperity, and the meadow had quickly spawned an estate of desirable freehold properties.

The houses on the Mere estate were built in a variety of sizes and designs, none of which harmonised in either style or materials with the original buildings of the town. The new roofs were pitched too low, the windows were disproportionately large, the brickwork was either too yellow or too pink; there were too many spurious external features in white plastic ship-lap and simulated Cotswold stone. The developers seemed not to know, and the planning authority of the time not to care, that the local building materials were flint and grey brick.

The largest of the houses on the estate, the executive type with separate dining-room and downstairs cloakroom, had been built on Mere Road itself, facing the attractively tree-lined, dredged and deodorised Mere. Unfortunately for the owners of these houses, the Mere had immediately become a local beauty spot. On summer evenings and at weekends, strange cars were parked outside every house and the air pulsated with chimes from prowling ice-cream vans trying to steal each other's pitches. Litter proliferated.

As a consequence, the Mere Road residents felt themselves beleaguered. Quantrill was not entirely surprised, when he drew up outside the Dennings'house, to see a whiskered face glaring at him suspiciously from over the white ranch fencing. It was a face that he had seen on numerous occasions, in photographs in the local newspaper; Mr Denning was not averse to publicity, for himself or for his school.

Denning reluctantly led the policemen up the weedless drive, past a regimented area of grass. He was, Quantrill knew, in his late thirties: of medium height, inclined to be porky, but dapper in neat, plain, casual clothes. His hands and feet were small and constantly active.

‘
Chief
Inspector, did you say?' he demanded as he opened the front door.

Quantrill confirmed it, and Denning looked slightly mollified. A sergeant on his own, both policemen guessed, would have been offered short shrift. Tait was sorry not to have been given the opportunity to take up the challenge.