Death and the Maiden (28 page)

Jean Bloomfield stood quite still with her eyes lowered. Sunlight shone on her hair, unkindly emphasising the number of silver-grey strands that had infiltrated the ash-blonde.

‘I expect you were depressed,' Quantrill went on. ‘Your holiday was over, you were returning to a job you disliked and a house where you were lonely. But Mary was happy. Seeing her there, in a long dress with her hands full of flowers, made you think of Ophelia; and it reminded you that Ophelia was a victim. It must have made you wonder what life had in store for Mary. After all, even if she didn't fall in love with the wrong man and become corrupted and die an early death, she was bound sooner or later to lose that radiant happiness. You told me that yourself. Mary was a high-flyer, so she would reach her peak early—perhaps she'd even reached it already. And after that, there'd be nowhere to go but downhill.'

She shrugged. ‘It happens, of course. Inevitably.'

He paused. Then, ‘It happened to you, didn't it?' he asked softly. ‘You were a high-flyer—you must have been, to work your way from a poor background to Oxford. You must have reached your peak during your marriage—and then your husband was killed, and your world was blown apart. But in those days, you must have been a trier. You picked yourself up, worked at your career, made a success of it and eventually became a headmistress. For a time, when you first bought your house in Ashthorpe, you even thought that you could be happy again.

‘But it didn't last, did it? A man you dislike and despise had been made head of the comprehensive; you've been relegated to the middle school, where you're dealing for the first time with ordinary unacademic children, and you find you can't cope. You feel a failure, and you've given up trying. You know you're on your way downhill.'

She had begun to breathe more quickly. Her nostrils arched with disdain. ‘We can't all be police officers, and start making a success of our careers in our mid-forties!'

‘That's true. But people like me, the Pc Plods of this world—ordinary people—don't have the same problem as you high-flyers. We're not brilliant, so we have lower expectations. We don't climb high in our youth, so it hurts that much less if we fall. We don't have the same experience of either happiness or hurt. But you're bound to resent your present life all the more for remembering what you once were, and the happiness you once had.'

‘You've taken to reading psychology?' she asked, tight-lipped. ‘Thank you for that analysis.'

‘There's nothing there that you didn't tell me yourself,' he pointed out. ‘You also told me that you were glad—for your husband's sake—that he died young, before he became disillusioned. You're accustomed to the idea of high-flyers dying young; first your brother, then your husband. In fact, you
like
the idea of dying young, as long as death isn't violent. But—along with Dorothy Parker—you think of early death as something for other people, rather than for yourself. For Mary Gedge, say. There she was in that meadow, innocent and happy; and it came into your head that you could be the means of preserving her innocence and happiness for ever.'

Her face had paled again under her tan, but her head was high. ‘You have no proof …'

‘I've no proof of the way it happened, but I can guess. Perhaps Mary slipped or tripped, and fell in the river face down. It wouldn't have done her any harm, she could have got up laughing. You must have gone in too, and perhaps you stretched out a hand to help her—your right hand. And then, suddenly, you took it upon yourself to give her what you thought would be a quick and painless death at the height of her happiness.'

‘… and you know that you can never have any proof. This is nothing but crude speculation, and there is no reason why I should listen to it. Excuse me.' She began to walk quickly towards her house.

She could be right, too. It was by no means certain that forensic would discover anything on the dead girl's clothing that would identify her assailant. As long as Jean Bloomfield maintained her composure he could not be sure of obtaining sufficient proof ever to charge her with murder.

But he thought that he knew how her composure could be broken. It was a weapon he hesitated to use, the more so because he had loved her, but it was all he had left. He strode after her, and blocked her way.

‘I want to tell you something,' he said urgently. ‘Something that happened while I was doing my national service. I've never told anyone before, but I'd like you to hear it now.'

Surprise made her stop and listen. ‘I wasn't an officer like your husband,' he went on quickly. ‘I was just an erk, an airman, and it happened while I was square-bashing—doing my recruit training.

‘There was a boy in my hut, in the next bed to me, called John Sweeting. Well, it was tough enough for all of us in that camp, but anyone with a name like Sweeting went through a special kind of hell. John was small and quiet and sensitive—and some of the drill instructors were real sadists. I used to hear him crying sometimes, after lights out, but I didn't know how to help him. I'd got problems of my own. And then, to cap it all, he had a letter from his girl-friend saying that she was going out with someone else. Not that I heard about the letter until afterwards. He didn't tell his troubles to anyone, poor devil.

‘Then, in the middle of our course, we were allowed out one Saturday afternoon. We all went into Manchester. It was a cold, damp, foggy day at the beginning of December, and the shops were lit up for Christmas. Most of us stuck together, but John went off on his own. He spent his money on Christmas presents, but he also bought a coil of rope.'

Jean Bloomfield had been listening quietly, reluctant but intent. Now, she sidestepped: ‘I don't think I want to hear any more.'

He caught at her sleeve. ‘But I'm going to finish,' he said. ‘This is something that has haunted me for years, and I'm going to tell you, just as you insisted on telling me how your husband was killed. Listen: that evening, we all went to the NAAFI, except John. He stayed by himself in the billet, and he wrapped up all his Christmas presents and wrote the labels—one for his girl-friend as well. He wrote a letter to his mother. Then he changed into working overalls and PT shoes, and polished his uniform boots and buttons and badges. Then, he laid all his kit out on the bed as though there was going to be an inspection, and he put the Christmas presents and the letter on his bed too, and he took the rope and went out.

‘I was on fire picquet later that evening. It was a hutted camp, with coke stoves in each hut, and there was always a danger of fire. We had to patrol round in twos, keeping our eyes open. It was quiet among the huts, with most of the boys either in the NAAFI or at the camp cinema; in fact it was a bit eerie, what with the quiet and the fog. And then, when we were walking past the water tower, I heard a bumping and a scraping and a kind of choking gurgle from above my head. I shone my torch, and saw something swaying from one of the iron girders.

‘We both panicked, though I tried to pretend not to. We knew it must be someone hanging, though we didn't know who. I sent the other airman running off to fetch the orderly corporal, while I waited. Of course, I should have tried to cut the boy down, but I was only eighteen and I was frightened. I just waited for help to come, and prayed that the horrible noises above my head would stop.

‘Then the orderly corporal came, with the station duty officer. The corporal had been afraid to come on his own, but the officer was an older man and he knew what to do. He swore at me for not even trying to cut the boy down, and he made me follow him up the iron ladder and hold the torch while he cut the rope. So I could see everything.

‘I didn't know it was John, even then. There was no way of recognising him. He wasn't dead, you see, just slowly strangling to death. His knees were drawn up in the position of a foetus, and the weight of his body had stretched his neck. He had hooked his fingers under the noose, as though he had tried to loosen it, and there were livid scratches from his fingernails on his long white neck.

‘The officer kept shouting and swearing at me to hold the torch steady so that he could see what he was doing, and I had to watch the boy's face jerking above me as the officer sawed at the rope. The face was dark and congested, except for the eyes which were rolled up and showed nothing but the whites. His tongue was protruding. He was coughing and snorting, choking his lungs up through his nose—'

‘Stop it!'

In the horror of total recall, he had almost forgotten Jean Bloomfield, and his purpose. Her face was distorted by distress, her hands were clapped to her ears.

‘Stop it, I don't want to hear any more! Why did you have to tell me such a dreadful thing?'

Quantrill wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I had to tell you,' he said, slowly and deliberately, ‘because I know that you have a horror of violent death. Not of death itself—you're prepared to welcome that, as long as it's for other people—but of the violence with which it came to your brother and your husband. I think that you imagined that by holding Mary's head under water, you would be giving her a quick, clean, easy death.

‘But it couldn't have happened like that. I don't know whether you and Mary had been discussing the idea of dying young—perhaps you had, perhaps you'd encouraged her in that romantic nonsense you told me about the desirability of dying at the height of your happiness. Perhaps she even believed it.

‘But that doesn't mean that Mary Gedge seriously wanted to die! And even if she did, or thought she did, the instinct for self-preservation would have been too strong. Think of poor John Sweeting: no one could have wanted to die more than he did. No one could have prepared himself more thoroughly for death. And yet, when he swung himself off the girder of the water tower and found that death wasn't—as he must have imagined—instantaneous, he struggled instinctively to live. He gouged strips of skin from his neck with his fingernails in his efforts to loosen the noose.

‘And it was the same with Mary, wasn't it? She was young and healthy and happy, she didn't want to die. She didn't simply lie in the water and go limp under your hand, she fought for her life. You were above and behind her, so all she managed to claw at was gravel and river weed. But she tore her finger and toe nails and lacerated her knees on the gravel in the struggle.

‘Poor Mary's was no gentle death! I wonder what you thought, when you realised that you couldn't kill her without using violence, and yet you'd gone too far to be able to stop? How did it feel, to be down there in the water with her, cutting your own knees on the gravel as you tried to hold her down? What did you think, as you forced her head under water while she kicked and clawed and thrashed in her struggle to live? How long did you have to hold her under? It must have seemed like an eternity. How long did it take her to die—three minutes, four—?'

‘No! You're exaggerating, it wasn't like that, it didn't take so long!'

Quantrill's physical reaction was not quick enough. By the time his legs got the message to move, she had reached her car.

He guessed that she would head for the river; not the inadequate Dunnock but the Dodman, which runs west from Breckham Market, slow but moderately deep, towards the Ouse. Quantrill followed, radioing for support. She drove recklessly fast along a minor road, skidded her car to a halt, scrambled out and began to run along the river bank towards a footbridge that spanned one of the deeper reaches.

Quantrill abandoned his car behind hers and pounded after her, forcing himself far beyond a reasonable speed for a man of his age and bulk. He knew that he had to catch her before she reached the bridge. He disapproved of heroics; besides, he couldn't swim.

He tried to spurt. His arms and legs pumped in protesting rhythm, his chest swelled to bursting.

He reached out a hand towards her. She glanced over her shoulder, stubbed her toe against a tree root, and went sprawling on the grass of the river bank. She might have fallen into the water if she had not, instinctively, grabbed at a tuft of grass to save herself.

Quantrill collapsed beside her. There was a red haze in front of his eyes; his heart was thumping against his rib-cage with the ferocity of a badly loaded spin dryer.

Jean Bloomfield turned her back on him and covered her face with her hands. ‘Go away,' she said, her voice muffled. ‘Leave me alone …'

He drew in enough knife-edged air to enable him to gasp out an answer. ‘You can't run away from yourself. You've got to learn to live with what you've done.'

‘But I don't want to live! I want to die.'

It was an effort to find the right words, too much of an effort to speak them in more than an exhausted monotone: ‘No you don't, you know you don't. You're not one of the born victims. You're too strong-minded, you've survived too much. You'll go on clinging to life, just like your friend Dorothy Parker, however unhappy it makes you.'

Her shoulders began to shake. She was crying silently, her head on her arms. Beside her, Quantrill lay flat on his back, spent.

Gradually, the mist began to clear from in front of his eyes. His heart-beat steadied, the pain in his chest began to lessen. His unacknowledged fear that the sudden exertion might have brought on a heart attack receded, to be replaced by an awareness of his surroundings and a pervasive melancholy.

He listened to the slow gurgle of the water and the hum of a dragon fly, smelled the dankness of river weed, felt the rough grass of the bank under his hands. All his sensations had a surprising familiarity, as though somewhere, at some time, he had been through this before.

He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up the past.

Twenty-odd years ago … that was it, a turning point in his life. And now he could recall it vividly: another early summer evening, another river bank, another bout of exertion, another sense of energy drained; another girl who had turned from him and cried, another victory that had tasted of defeat.