Death and the Maiden (16 page)

‘A what?' Quantrill interrupted.

‘“An envious sliver,” sir. He means a branch, don't you think?'

‘Ah,' said Quantrill profoundly, suppressing the disrespectful thought that Shakespeare ought to have put what he meant, instead of wrapping facts up in words. It was the most obscure piece of evidence that he had ever heard. ‘Go on.'

‘When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
…
but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch … to muddy death.'

Quantrill sat in silence for a few moments. ‘How deep would you say this brook was?' he asked eventually.

‘I've always thought of it as being about waist-deep, sir.'

‘Hm. The Dunnock's nowhere near that, at Ashthorpe bridge. Do you know the place?'

‘No, sir.'

Quantrill stood up. ‘Get your cap, then, we'll go and have a look.'

‘Yes
sir!
' breathed Bedford, eagerness pinking his ears.

The evening sky had darkened to unpolished pewter. Rain was on the way, Quantrill smelled it in the wind; but still the sun shone, slanting low from under the clouds, turning the grass a vivid green and lighting every detail of the bridge and the willow trees.

Quantrill led the way down through the meadow, where the flowers had closed their petals for the night, to the place where the body had been found. The water looked dark now, its surface rippled by the evening breeze, but it was as shallow as he had remembered it. There could be no question of Mary Gedge's dress dragging her down, not if she were conscious.

Pc Bedford was clambering about in the nearest willow tree, with an enthusiastic disregard for his uniform that he was to regret when he returned to the section house. ‘There's no evidence that she fell from up here, sir,' he said, disappointed; ‘no coronet of flowers, or broken branch. But if she was acting Ophelia's mad scene she might quite well have climbed up here, and then tripped over her long dress.'

‘Ophelia was mad?' asked Quantrill tentatively.

Bedford swung down to join him on the grass. ‘Oh, that's arguable, I agree, sir. Just quietly out of her mind, I suppose. After all, with Hamlet spurning her and then killing her father—'

‘Quite,' agreed Quantrill, fascinated.

‘You've ruled out suicide in Mary Gedge's case, sir?'

The chief inspector returned to the mercifully less violent reality. ‘No evidence to suggest it. And she was happy, by all accounts.'

Pc Bedford scratched his jaw, in unconscious imitation of Quantrill's habit. ‘But so was Ophelia, when she drowned. Well, serene rather than actually happy. I mean, that was the form her madness took—when she fell in the water she simply floated along singing, didn't she? A kind of unintentional suicide, I suppose. Oh, I know it was just a device that Shakespeare used to keep the sympathy of his audience, because they would think that suicide was a sin. But could it have been unintentional suicide with Mary Gedge?'

‘No,' said Quantrill. ‘She didn't just float along serenely, she hurt her hands and knees trying to save herself. Still, you've reminded me that she didn't necessarily drown. Let's say it happened as you suggest—that she climbed the willow and fell in, hurting herself as she tried to prevent the fall. I've known one or two cases where the death of someone found apparently drowned has actually been due to heart failure, caused by the sudden shock of immersion in cold water. In that event, the depth of the water's immaterial. It's an interesting thought, Bedford, I'm obliged to you. Let's hope that we soon hear the result of the post-mortem, then we might begin to know where we are.'

The road by the bridge was too narrow for Quantrill to turn his car. He had to go up to Ashthorpe before he could find a turning place and having reached the village he drove on, almost defiantly, past the green. But if he had hoped to glimpse Jean Bloomfield outside her house, he was disappointed.

As he drove slowly along the length of the green, he passed the war memorial. On impulse, he stopped the car and got out. The buttercups still lay on the steps, dying now beyond revival. They were flanked by several empty beer cans, some crisp bags and the packaging from a Lyons individual fruit pie. Above the litter, immediately after the names of the men of the village who had been killed in battle between the years 1914 and 1918, was an exhortation to the survivors and their descendants:

Sons of this place, let this of you be said,
That you who live are worthy of your dead.
These gave their lives, that you who live may reap
A richer harvest, ere you fall asleep.

Quantrill had been taught in his boyhood to be respectful of his village war memorial. To his parents, the names of the fallen in the First World War were a harrowing memory, in the Second World War a current grief. Mildly resentful on behalf of his father's decimated generation, Quantrill scooped up the rubbish and carried it a few yards down the road to an almost empty litter bin. Beside the bin was a public bench, ankle deep in lolly wrappers and cigarette packets and empty cans. The chief inspector looked at the mess with resigned disgust, and returned to the memorial. He felt strongly, intuitively, that there was some special significance in the bunch of buttercups; that it was no coincidence that they had been placed there within the last eighteen hours.

As on war memorials everywhere, the list of names of the dead in the First World War was far longer than the 1939–45 list: nineteen names as against five. And in the first list was the common tragic recurrence of the same name. Ashthorpe had lost three Fletchers between 1914 and 1918.

It had also lost a Gedge.

Frowning, Quantrill drove on. He would not have disturbed the dead girl's father at home but Mr Gedge was outside the shop, grey-faced, loading boxes of groceries into his van. Quantrill pulled up just behind him, and got out of his car.

‘Forgive me for bothering you again, sir, but do you mind telling me whether the Gedge on the war memorial was one of your relations?'

The shopkeeper closed the van door, pushed his smudged glasses up on to his high forehead and rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Why, yes,' he said slowly. ‘Yes, that's my Uncle Ralph. Not that I ever knew him, of course, he died exactly ten years to the day before I was born, that's how I know the date—first of July 1916, that's when he was killed.'

Pc Bedford, anxious to miss nothing, had been hovering at Quantrill's elbow. ‘First day of the battle of the Somme,' he contributed promptly. The two older men looked at him, Quantrill in surprise, Mr Gedge with a wan smile.

‘Yes, Mary knew that too,' he said. ‘She was very interested in the First World War, for some reason. Of course, they did it on telly a little while ago,' he added, as though the monstrous carnage of the Somme had been specially devised by the Outside Broadcasts department of the BBC. ‘My Dad—he was Ralph's oldest brother—was alive and living with us then, and Mary used to badger him to tell her about it. She found some old photographs of Ralph up in the attic, and cards and things he'd sent home from France, and made a sort of little memorial to him.'

‘I see … The reason I asked, Mr Gedge, is that there's a bunch of buttercups lying on the steps of the war memorial. I wondered whether by any chance Mary might have put them there.'

Mr Gedge frowned. ‘Could have—I don't know, of course, but it's possible. I know that she got quite emotional about Ralph. He'd volunteered at the beginning of 1915 and falsified his age, you see. He was only just eighteen when he was killed.'

His eyes focused on Quantrill. They were full of the pain of loss. ‘Just eighteen,' he repeated. ‘The same age as Mary herself.'

Alone in his office again, Quantrill looked through the folders that he had retrieved from Mary Gedge's caravan. There seemed to be no personal information there at all; they contained nothing but school notes and essays, written in tiny but beautifully legible handwriting. The chief inspector pushed aside those in foreign languages and those dealing with international affairs, and was left with poems, notes about poems and essays about poets.

It was hard going, for a working detective who had left school at fourteen, but he floundered through, comprehending where he could and trying to decide whether the selection of poems gave any clue to the dead girl's personality. It was some time before he realised that the physical discomfort he felt was not so much inability to digest the poetry, as hunger.

Quantrill looked at his watch. It was nearly nine. The canteen would have closed for hot meals, and he couldn't face another sandwich.

He went to the washroom, shaved hurriedly to freshen himself, put on his jacket again. ‘I'm going to the Rights for a quick meal, Chalky,' he told the desk sergeant. ‘Do you know where young Tait, the new Ds, is?'

‘He went over to the mortuary about ten minutes ago, sir,' said Sergeant White. ‘A bit impatient about the post-mortem they're doing on the Ashthorpe girl.'

‘He's not the only one. Get word through to let him know where I am, will you? I should be back in half an hour anyway.'

The rain had blown over, after a spit or two, but the streets were fresher for it. Dusk had begun to fall, and the sodium street lights were giving their preliminary red glow before fizzing into yellow brilliance. Quantrill hesitated for a moment at the open door of the half-timbered Coney and Thistle pub, longingly smelling the real, unpressurised Adnams Suffolk ale; but what he needed at the moment was hot food, not a pub snack, and so he turned the corner and entered the cobbled courtyard of the Rights of Man.

The Rights had begun life as the White Hart, an Elizabethan inn that had acquired a Georgian façade and stables in the hey-day of coaching. The inn had declined with the long decline of Breckham Market, but the conversion of East Anglia into a vast United States airfield in the Second World War had brought an influx of new customers.

Long after the war had ended, some American air bases remained. A new generation of thirsty airmen had found their way to Breckham Market, augmented by increasing numbers of American tourists. Each summer, groups of greying, paunchy men would come on pilgrimage to East Anglia, to search among the camouflage of barley and sugar beet for the concrete runways from which they had once lifted off their Liberator bombers, and for the corrugated black half-hoops of their Nissen huts, inhabited now only by the wind and the silent ghosts of the slim young men who had flown from there and had never returned.

It was with an eye to the American tourist market, as well as to the rapid growth of the town, that the old White Hart had been bought by a big hotel combine. The inn had been modernised, considerably extended and re-named the Rights of Man; not in defiance of the proposition of the equality of the sexes but in commemoration of Thomas Paine, the advocate of American independence, whose ancestral connection with the town was a further encouragement to tourism.

Quantrill crossed the courtyard, by-passed the genuinely Tudor room that was so dark and low-ceilinged that it had been furnished with strip lighting and a juke box, named the Prior's Cellar and relegated to the use of the local lads, and entered the modern Tudor Buttery. Here, in the ferroconcrete new extension that had been built on the site of the stables, no expense had been spared to create a more comfortable sixteenth century. The walls of the spacious room were rough-plastered in white; steel girders, sited well above head height, had been covered with a laminate resembling ancient wooden beams. Each wall had a purely decorative row of latticed casements, lit softly from behind to display green whorls of imitation bottle glass. The hum of the air conditioning was as discreet as the perpetual musak.

Quantrill was not enthusiastic about the way the old White Hart had been tarted up, but he was a practical man. The Tudor Buttery served grills at any time from nine in the morning until ten at night, and he regarded the place with gratitude if not affection.

Tonight, he thought, he was going to indulge himself. He reached for the menu. A steak, that was what he would have, a good thick steak with all the trimmings, and hang the expense. After all, it had been a frustrating day, both professionally and personally: he was still no nearer to knowing whether Mary Gedge had died in suspicious circumstances; and as for Jean Bloomfield …

He shrugged irritably and set about trying to assuage desire with food. The menu was a new one since his last visit. Quantrill studied it and flinched. He was learning to live with inflation, but this was ridiculous; a steak meal would set him back over three quid.

It was out of the question, of course, for a man who had no expense account. He couldn't even begin to justify it, not with the mortgage and the rates and the electricity bill and the rental of the colour television set that Molly was dependent on because he was out so much. He sighed, and settled as usual for bacon, eggs and chips—French fries, in the intercontinental jargon of the Rights—and a pint of their burp-inducing bitter.

While he ate, he concentrated his thoughts on a series of warehouse break-ins; he had reached the apple pie and coffee stage before he saw Jean Bloomfield, alone at a table for two. She must have been there for at least ten minutes, because a meal was on the table in front of her. But she was reading a book and, though she held a fork, hardly eating.

Quantrill felt all the physical symptoms that are associated with both love and indigestion, and invariably put the newly-in-love off their food: his chest tightened, his throat thickened. His heart began to thump. Oh God, had she seen him, gorging himself on chips and swilling beer? If she hadn't despised him before, this would be all that she needed. He pushed aside the remains of his pie and blotted the grease from his lips with a paper napkin. He felt hot, his stomach grossly distended, while she looked cool and remote behind the reading glasses that she wore.