Death and the Maiden (12 page)

‘You'll be surprised. Right, let's see if it was Dale Kenward who brought Mary into Breckham last night.'

But Dale was out, in the new car his father had given him as an eighteenth birthday present a few weeks previously. He had gone to spend the afternoon and evening in Yarchester, with his friend Colin.

The information came from his mother, in a torrent of words expressing relief that the police had not come to tell her that her son had met with a fatal accident. Quantrill was sorry that as soon as her agitation had subsided, he had to break the news of Mary Gedge's death.

Mrs Kenward was upset. The policemen waited patiently while she stumbled through the necessary expression of disbelief, shock and sorrow. Quantrill murmured practised sympathy, while Tait took the opportunity to smooth his hands over the armchair he sat on and confirm his impression that any furniture that looked like leather, in that handsome thirty foot long room, was genuine hide.

Priory Gardens was not an estate. It was an exclusive development of eight private houses, each with half an acre of landscaped garden airy with willow trees, situated between the edge of the golf course and the grey-fanged ruins of a former Cluniac priory. The houses had been individually designed by an architect who combined a sensitive appreciation of the local area with a shrewd appraisal of the priorities of incoming senior business executives, who were the only people likely to be able to afford to buy them.

The houses had been built, like most of the other new private houses in Breckham Market, by Dale Kenward's father, who had inherited from his own father a considerable scattered acreage of freehold land that, until the early'sixties, was good for nothing but rabbits. Then, like an elephantine fairy godfather, had come the London County Council, homburg in hand; and Dale's father, who had made a point of taking a seat on the moribund town council, had been persuaded without difficulty to vote in favour of the expansion of the town.

By the early 'seventies, Councillor Kenward had made a tidy fortune. It was natural for him to want to enjoy his early retirement in one of the best of his houses, but unhappily the experience was unnatural for his wife. Mrs Kenward was a small, shy, modest woman. Even after three years in residence, she found it difficult to know how to make use of the vast entertainment areas of their new house; the more so as her husband had employed an interior decorator, jovially consigning their own well-used furniture to a dealer. Secretly, she hugged the hope that she might one day wake up to find that it had all been a bad dream, and that they really lived in a snug bungalow near her sister and the shops.

Now, she perched like a nervous visitor on the edge of the six-foot long chesterfield—it was the only position in which she could sit with her feet on the floor—and babbled about the ending of a love affair between her son and Mary Gedge.

‘Of course, I was glad in a way that they'd parted—they'd been getting too serious. Not that we didn't like Mary, but Dale's only just eighteen. It was silly to talk about marriage.'

‘They planned to
marry
?' asked Quantrill, alarmed at the unexpected development.

Mrs Kenward twisted her damp handkerchief in hands that had obviously been accustomed for most of her married life to hard work in a labour-making house. ‘Oh, it hadn't got to that stage—it was just some silly talk of Dale's.' She lifted her head and looked at Quantrill with horrified appeal. ‘You're not trying to tell me that she—that poor Mary drowned herself? I'm sure she wouldn't do that, not on Dale's account! You've got it wrong, it wasn't a matter of Dale throwing her over, the love was more on his side than hers—she wanted him more as a friend. I'm sure that Dale was far more upset about their quarrel than Mary would have been. If either of them did anything rash as a result, it would have been Dale, not poor Mary!'

Quantrill winced, appalled that the woman did not realise what her generous exculpation of her son's girl-friend could suggest to a suspicious mind. ‘No, no, Mrs Kenward,' he said quickly. ‘As I told you, it looks like an unfortunate accident. But we know that Mary came into town yesterday evening, and I wondered if she might by any chance have met your son.'

She smiled damply, reassured. ‘Oh no. Dale went out with Colin yesterday evening—they've spent all their time together this holiday.'

Tait made a note of the friend's name and address. ‘And can you tell us what time Dale came home last night?' he asked.

Mrs Kenward looked at him with big moist innocent brown eyes. ‘He didn't come home till breakfast time. He's a very keen naturalist, you see. Of course, he told me what he was going to do, so I didn't need to worry. He wanted to make recordings of some nightingales, and then the dawn chorus. He and Colin spent the night bird-recording.'

‘This,' declared Chief Inspector Quantrill, ‘is ridiculous.'

Privately, Tait agreed with him. It was ridiculous that the chief inspector should insist on stringing along; perhaps the old man had at last had enough and would go back to his office.

Quantrill drummed his fingers irritably on the warm dusty roof of his car, thinking of the work that would be accumulating in his absence, and of the compensatory cup of tea. ‘There are enough unsolved crimes in this division,' he went on, ‘to keep us all working flat out until Christmas, without anything new. The chief super told me only yesterday that now you're here to fill the vacancy he'll expect a marked improvement in our detection rate. And yet here we are, spending hours making enquiries about something that as far as we know isn't even a crime, and getting suspicious without any justification of any man who happened to know Mary Gedge.'

‘There's no need for you to stay, sir,' Tait pointed out. ‘If you want to get back to the station, I'll carry on.'

‘What with?' Quantrill demanded. ‘I don't see any point in pursuing this any further, until we get the result of the post-mortem and know whether there's anything to investigate. The chances are that Mary and young Kenward had made up their quarrel, and that he'll be able to tell us where she was last night. I'll get one of the patrol men to keep an eye on this house and have a word with the boy as soon as he returns. Until then, we're both wasting our time.'

Tait, who had made it his business to look at the unsolved crimes file as soon as he arrived in Breckham Market, was not impressed. It was a wasteland of largely undetectable crimes: assaults, thefts and burglaries, vandalism, dismantling of cars, all still unsolved because they were without pattern or form, impulsive, mindless. A detective who set himself the task of solving that lot would be lost without trace, and Tait had no intention of sacrificing himself for the sake of the divisional crime statistics.

‘Wouldn't you give a girl's death a rather higher priority than the enquiry I was on this morning, sir?' he asked reproachfully.

Quantrill scowled and turned away, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket. Why the hell, he asked himself, aggrieved, should he let the new sergeant spend valuable time trying to make a difficult case out of something that was almost certainly a simple accident, while the real, dull, seedy police work remained to be done by someone else? Why should Sergeant Tait, with his university degree and his Bramshill qualification, expect to be allowed to devote his time to discovering exactly how Mary Gedge came to drown, rather than to the tedious business of who pinched another man's pigs?

Quantrill found the answer almost before he had formulated the question: because Tait had his priorities right, that was why.

It was easy for Tait, of course. He didn't have the daily responsibility, the everlasting problem of too much work to be done and too few men to do it. Tait didn't have a disagreeable chief super nagging at him to improve the statistics. Tait could afford to take a detached view.

But that didn't make him any less right. People are more important than property. Quantrill had already acknowledged with bitter regret that he should have given more attention to Joy Dawson's disappearance than to a series of burglaries that had been preoccupying him at the time, and now he acknowledged the importance of investigating Mary Gedge's death, even though it should prove to be an accident. The pigs, and the crime statistics, could wait.

He turned back to the car. ‘I'll have to give you a lift to Ashthorpe anyway, so that you can pick up your own car. And while we're there, we might as well take this a stage further. After all, we've no reason to doubt what Mrs Kenward said, and if Dale and Mary really weren't seeing each other any more, then it was someone else who gave her the lift from Ashthorpe.'

‘I was thinking along those lines myself, sir,' agreed Tait, whose pleasure at the chief inspector's capitulation was modified by the realisation that the old man still wasn't going to give him a free hand. ‘I thought it might be worth having a word with the other teacher who sometimes gave Mary lifts to school—Mr Miller.'

‘Good idea,' Quantrill agreed, slipping a mint into his mouth to compensate for the lost cup of tea.

It was seven years since the Old Bakery at Ashthorpe had performed its original function. Everyone in the village gave lip-service to the idea of a bakery and professed to regret its closure; but since the majority of the inhabitants preferred to buy sliced bread—the country women for the very good reason that they had to make sandwiches for their menfolk to take to work every day, the traditional middle class for the equally good reason that it made the best toast—and the thrifty and the trendy preferred to bake their own, a village bakery could no longer be a viable business.

The Millers, Quantrill suspected unkindly, belonged to the trendy minority; a man who taught Drama could fit into no other category. Their property, a long low detached building with a flint facade and a wide Georgian shop window, had clearly been converted to domestic use by people with more sympathy than money. No plate glass, no carriage lanterns, no shining paintwork. A glazed upper window and a protruding stench-pipe indicated that it was no longer in its original state of innocence of plumbing, but otherwise the property looked as though it had hardly been touched during the past seven years; not so much neglected as never-been-got-round-to.

Tait made reluctant use of his knuckles on the scarred, flaking paintwork of the door. And again. There was the sound of movement from inside the house, and presently the door opened.

Tait made the introductions. ‘Mr Michael Miller?' he asked.

The man blinked and nodded, then winced as though he regretted the movement, and rubbed the back of his neck. He was late fortyish, tall and slim, with thinning red-gold hair and a long, mobile, actor's face, at present unshaven.

Miller was wearing shabby jeans, a T-shirt and a denim jacket. Quantrill told himself that it was pathetic that a middle-aged man—older than himself—should dress as though he were a quarter of a century younger; but had the grace to acknowledge that he was envious, not of the clothes but of Miller's ability to wear them.

‘May we come in?' asked Tait, looking at the denims with the tolerant amusement of an unassailably young man. Miller grunted and grudgingly held open the door.

It led straight in to a large room that must once have been the shop and was now used as a living-room. The sparse furnishings were a mixture of stripped pine cottage antiques and shabby Habitat. An assemble-it-yourself shelving unit leaned precariously against one wall, and a scatter of rugs went only part way to disguising the fact that the work of staining the floorboards had been abandoned before it was completed.

The predominant impression indoors, though, was less of work unfinished than of recent neglect. There was none of the squalor of the Pulfer household, no dirty clothes or greasy plates or smell of food, but instead a strew of newspapers, correspondence, books and tape cassettes. A pair of suede ankle boots stood on the pine dresser, next to a great pottery dish containing a few shrivelled oranges. Dust was thick on every surface, ashtrays overflowed, bottles and dirty glasses stood abandoned. A pile of children's toys had been shovelled into one corner. In the draught from the open door, skeins of dust rolled across the bare boards like tumbleweed.

To Tait, it was immediately identifiable: discounting the toys, a bachelor's pad on the day after a good party.

That it had been—in bachelor terms—a good party was obvious. Miller had all the symptoms of a hangover: bleary eyes, slack cheeks, an aversion to movement and noise and light. In his normal condition he would have been a good-looking well-preserved middle-aged man, but at the moment his condition was abject. He closed the door behind them with exaggerated care and then stood swaying and blinking, rubbing his long fingers over the golden-grey stubble on his cheeks.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Had rather a thick night, and then topped up at lunch time—just been sleeping it off.' His voice was slurred, but still beautifully modulated; a deep, actor's voice. ‘Sit down,' he suggested, as his knees deposited him abruptly on the crumpled colour-weave cushions of the settee. ‘If you can find anywhere to sit,' he added, with a painful gesture at the cluttered room. ‘My wife's away at the moment. Took the children to her mother's for a holiday. You know how it is?'

Quantrill knew how it was. He felt a totally unexpected sympathy. The newspapers that he shifted from a chair were a good three weeks' accumulation; too long for a normal holiday visit. Even though he despised the youthful Breton cap that hung on the back of the door, he could look with fellow-feeling at the dust and the drink and the pathos of the pushed-aside toys.

‘I'm sorry to bother you,' he said, and meant it. ‘We just wanted to have a word about one of your former pupils—Mary Gedge.'

Miller looked from one policeman to the other, without moving his head. ‘She's dead, isn't she?' he said uncertainly. He massaged the back of his neck with his hand, grimacing over the discomfort. ‘That's what they told me at the Ostritch at lunch time—that's why I got tanked up again. Or have I been dreaming it?'