Death and the Maiden (2 page)

The road rose over the sharp hump of the bridge. Tait caught a glimpse of gold in the meadow below, a flash of sunlight on water. He also had time to notice that there were tyre marks in the damp earth at the roadside just over the bridge, where a gap in the hedge led down to the river meadow.

‘Looks as though somebody parked there recently,' he commented.

‘Duzzy fool,' said Godbold dispassionately. ‘It's asking for an accident, parking so close to that blind hump. Hadn't better let me catch him doing it again.'

The road climbed gently towards the village, between creamy hawthorn hedges and verges misted knee-high with cow parsley in full bloom. At the top of the rise was a tall-towered church, all flint and flushwork, with a neighbouring rectory that had been built for a family of Georgian size. Then the road dipped down again: past the pantiles and pink plaster of Church Farm and the thatch and white plaster of the Chequers, past a row of mean-windowed inter-war council houses, past a wooden shed that proclaimed itself the post office, past the willow-shaded pond and along the length of the narrow green with the war memorial in the centre; then sharply round to the left and past more thatch and plaster, some of it tatty; past a red brick nineteenth century terrace, a garage offering quadruple trading stamps on petrol, a county council Gothic school, a Georgian manor house, a general store, a gaunt Baptist chapel, an eruption of new bungalows and finally a post-war council estate, more generous as to windows but meaner with gardens. Godbold drew up outside the only detached house on the estate. The name County Police was incised above the doorway, and Tait's own car was parked on the lay-by.

‘Care to come in for a cup of coffee?' Godbold offered.

‘No thanks,' Tait replied, a shade too promptly. ‘I'd better get back to the station.'

‘Toffee-nosed pipsqueak,' thought Godbold, but without malice; the invitation had been no more than a polite formality.

Tait realised that his refusal had been interpreted accurately. ‘Thanks very much for your help, though,' he added quickly, softening his fair sharp features into amiability: ‘I'd never have found my way round the farms without you.'

‘Nor persuaded the farmers to talk, neither,' thought Godbold; but since he was within a few months of half-pay retirement and already had a nice little security job lined up at a plastics factory on the industrial estate at Breckham Market, he could afford to be cordial. ‘Any time. Now then, if you keep straight on from here you'll get to Breckham what we call the back way, through Lillington and Fair Green. But if you want the quickest way, it's back through the village and over the bridge to the turnpike. All right?'

‘Thanks again. See you.' Tait gave him a nod, then did a quick U-turn in his small, aspiring Citroën. ‘A real old-timer', he thought disparagingly, as he left the village and slowed for the hump-backed bridge. ‘Bobbies on bicycles, for heaven's sake!'

Downstream from the bridge the flies clustered and hummed, and

the flowers that were caught in the dead girl's hair began to wilt

under the sun.

Breckham Market divisional police headquarters, a monument to the Festival of Britain taste for neo-Georgian architecture embellished with spiky ironwork balconies, stands beside the main road that divides the old town from the new. Its neighbour on one side is the fire station, on the other the local branch of the county library; there were grandiose plans for a new town hall, but the money ran out.

And no bad thing either, thought Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill as he left the Victorian Italianate town hall in the market place and walked briskly through the streets towards his office. Not that better courtroom accommodation wouldn't be useful, but the five minute walk was good exercise and gave him the opportunity to sniff the atmosphere of the town, to keep in touch at street level.

He listened with patient sympathy to an indignant town councillor's story of vandalism in the public park, and noticed with interest that two apprentice layabouts turned and walked smartly in the other direction when they saw him coming. He passed the time of day with a number of market traders, acquiring from one the side-of-the-mouth information that a local villain was newly out of prison, and from another a hint that a rival's cut-price groceries might well have fallen off the back of a lorry.

The market was busy. Quantrill had a wide acquaintance, and he tipped his hat impartially to the wife of the Methodist minister and to a retired prostitute who, feeling the lack of an occupational pension, tried to supplement her social security by selling information.

She accosted him with an eager greeting: ‘Morning, Mr Quantrill!'

‘Morning, Marje. How are you?'

‘Fine, thanks.' She was thin, her wig and clothes girlish; her voice was hoarse and her seamed upper lip was stained nicotine yellow.

‘I say.' She glanced round, then leaned towards him conspiratorially, breathing stale gin. He turned his face away, as if to offer her his ear. ‘I might have something to tell you later in the week, Mr Quantrill.'

He doubted it. ‘Well then, you'll know where to find me,' he said pleasantly, evading a detaining claw. He stepped into a tobacconist's to buy a tin of small mild cigars, then set course for the office again, tweed hat in hand, enjoying the mid-morning air.

The sunshine of early May warmed the streets, drawing out the shop window blinds and the middle-aged women in their white cardigans and summer dresses. A pity, Quantrill thought, that so many girls no longer bothered to wear pretty dresses; jeans and skinny tops were more revealing, but he found them less alluring than the tight-waisted, full-skirted summer dresses that girls had worn twenty-odd years ago.

River water gleamed tantalisingly at the foot of Market Hill. Nice to be going out into the country now, he thought—on an enquiry, of course, strictly on duty, but nice to be able to stay out in the open air with something positive to pursue, instead of having to return to his office and face the paper work that would have accumulated during the past two days while he was at county headquarters.

That was the trouble with promotion, he decided, resisting a passing temptation to have a word with the landlord of the Coney and Thistle. The higher you climbed, the further removed you were from the action; just as, the older you became, the more remote were the girls in their summer dresses.

Which made it all the harder, he remembered, returning to one of his perennial irritations as he waited to cross the main road which took the heavy flow of traffic between London and Yarchester, that the council should have planted a row of such feminine double-flowering pink cherry trees outside police headquarters. Not that he had anything against ornamental cherry trees in their proper place, a park or a small garden. But here, outside the bulk of the fire station and the police station and the library they were merely pathetic, ridiculously out of scale. Why couldn't the council have planted two or three proper trees, something that would grow to a reasonable height and make a positive contribution to the area, instead of these pink frilly things that dropped their blossom like fistfuls of confetti all over the steps of the police station?

He dodged impatiently between a chemical tanker and a refrigerated TIR truck with a Dutch registration and strode, ruffled, through the main doors. The desk sergeant, a prematurely grey forty-year-old, heaved himself to his feet. ‘'Morning, sir.'

‘'Morning, Larry. Get the cleaner to brush those steps down, will you? Wretched blossom makes the place look like a register office.'

‘Right, sir. How did it go in court this morning?'

Quantrill cheered up. ‘Remanded in custody for a week,' he said with satisfaction. ‘Just what we wanted—get word through to Inspector Howell, will you? And when you've a man to spare, send him to take a look at the damage that's been done to the children's playground in the park. Oh, and tell him that it wouldn't hurt to find out what Bert Framsden's youngest and his mate have been up to recently. Is the new Ds in, by the way?'

‘Out on enquiries.' Sergeant Lamb, who had taken a dislike to the new detective long before he met him, drew himself up and began to enunciate in his best courtroom manner: ‘When last seen, Detective Sergeant Tait was proceeding in the direction of a pig farm, wearing a pink suit with flared trousers and a pair of shoes with heels this high.'

Quantrill's thick dark eyebrows shot up an astounded inch, and Sergeant Lamb amended the gap between his out-stretched finger and thumb. ‘Well,
this
high, anyway. But the suit's definitely pinkish.'

A slow, countryman's grin spread over Quantrill's face. ‘And going to a pig farm, was he?' he chuckled. Then he checked himself. ‘Now hold hard,' he said severely, ‘we've got to give this chap a fair deal. Oh, I know it gets up your nose when a man's given rank before he's got the sense to keep his feet dry. How long did it take you to make sergeant?'

‘Seven years, sir,' said Lamb gloomily, ‘and that was six years ago …' He was up for the next promotion board, but was not confident.

‘Only seven?' asked Quantrill briskly. ‘You've been quick, man! It was ten before they made me up, and then another eight before I got as far as inspector. You and I are doing it the hard way. But Tait won't have had it easy, you know. The selection board's tough, I hear, and Bramshill's tougher. If he's survived that, he's got all the right qualities. What he needs now is experience, and that's what he's here for—and it's up to us to help him. He's not used to the country, so if you see him making an obvious mistake, give him a bit of friendly advice. Don't wait to laugh behind his back—lend the man a pair of rubber boots if you know he's going to need them.'

‘Sir,' agreed Lamb, subdued. ‘He's not easy to talk to, though.'

‘Well, try a bit harder.' snapped Quantrill. ‘You're the same rank, aren't you? Have a bit of friendly conversation. You don't have to treat him like a lord, just because he's been to university and police college—but neither is there any call for you to go needling him deliberately. Treat him as you would any other new sergeant, and we'll see what he's like when he's had time to find his feet. Right?'

‘Sir.'

‘All right, then. Send him up when he comes in, will you, Larry, I'd better have a word. And if you could organise a cup of coffee? Thanks.'

As Quantrill went up to his first floor office, he admitted to himself that his own instinctive reaction was much the same as Sergeant Lamb's. He was actually apprehensive about meeting the new sergeant, who would almost certainly resent being sent to this rural division. If Tait had been in the uniformed branch it would have been easier; you knew where you were with a uniform. Besides, a uniformed Tait would not have been his responsibility. But to have foisted on him a university graduate who had been hand-picked and intensively trained for accelerated promotion—well, it was a bit hard on a working detective who had left school at fourteen.

Quantrill entered his narrow high-ceilinged office, hung his hat on the stand provided for the use of officers of the rank of chief inspector and above, and smoothed back his springy hair, dark lightly salted with grey. A young constable knocked and brought in a cup of coffee, and Quantrill sipped it as he glanced through the files in his in-tray.

Paper work. Ironic, really, when you stopped to consider it. Because he was a reasonably good detective—good with people, that is, good at understanding how they felt what they felt and why they did what they did—he had been promoted to a job that entailed spending most of his time in the office. And Quantrill was wistfully conscious, every time he found himself obliged to set down sentences that tended to slip awkwardly from his pen and twist their meaning, of his lack of formal education.

He sighed, put down his cup and picked up his ballpoint pen. Five minutes later he was absorbed in his work. Presently a word eluded him, and he began to chase it through the well-used pages of his dictionary. There was a knock on the door, he called an absent ‘Come in', and started almost guiltily as a sharply blue-eyed young man walked into his office and looked him over, dictionary and all.

‘Detective Sergeant Tait reporting, sir.' The sun was in Tait's eyes and he couldn't see Quantrill's expression, nor identify the book that the chief inspector slapped shut and pushed quickly into a drawer.

Tait stood still, waiting, his eyes lowered against the sun. Chief inspectors had been two-a-new-penny at Bramshill, but he knew that out here in the sticks they rated high, and should be deferred to accordingly. It was for this reason, knowing that Quantrill would be in the office today, that Tait had chosen to dress formally in a suit instead of in casual clothes; for this reason he had had his thick fair hair trimmed. Modest eagerness, he had decided, would be the appropriate line to take.

Quantrill surveyed the young man guardedly, but with a growing sense of relief. Larry Lamb had been exaggerating. The lightweight suit was an unexceptionable pale clover, the heels of the shoes no more than an inch higher than was strictly necessary. The clothes wouldn't suit Quantrill himself, nor yet Lamb, but on a man of Tait's age and figure they were perfectly acceptable; trendy, as Quantrill's daughters would describe them, but not way out. There was nothing objectionable in the sergeant's attitude, either; he looked, Quantrill thought, positively respectful.

The chief inspector stretched a welcoming hand across the width of the desk that, like the hat-stand and the carpet, came in a certain size according to rank.

‘Glad to have you with us, Sergeant Tait. Sit down. Sorry I wasn't here at the beginning of the week, when you arrived.'

Now what on earth had made him say that? It wouldn't have occurred to him to apologise to any other newly promoted, newly arrived sergeant. Quantrill twisted in his swivel chair to the window behind him, and altered the louvres of the blind to keep the sun out of Tait's eyes. ‘You're probably not too pleased about being sent here,' he went on quickly. ‘I understand that you should have spent a year as station sergeant at Yarchester or Bishops Port as soon as you left Bramshill. But we're badly under strength in this division. We haven't had a CID sergeant since your predecessor retired a month ago, so as you'd had some CID experience before going to Bramshill …'