Fate Worse Than Death

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• Sheila Radley
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  
• Chapter Twenty Three
  
• Chapter Twenty Four
  
• Chapter Twenty Five
  
• Chapter Twenty Six
  
• Chapter Twenty Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty One
  
• Chapter Thirty Two
  
• Chapter Thirty Three
  
• Chapter Thirty Four
  
• Chapter Thirty Five
  
• Chapter Thiryt Six
  
• Chapter Thirty Seven
  
• Chapter Thirty Eight
  
• Chapter Thirty Nine
  

Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

For Kay and Barbara Crispin

Waking again to stifling, shuttered darkness, she despaired. If she had to endure much longer, she knew that she would die.

Already she felt ill. After weeks – or was it only days? – of shouting and beating her fists on the door she was too exhausted to weep. Her chest was so tight that drawing breath was painful, her bruised hands throbbed, her head felt as light and inconsequential as a balloon. Her skin was clammy, crawled upon by flies. She kept shivering, despite the summer's heat, and her limbs seemed too heavy to be moved without conscious effort.

She could no longer eat. When food arrived, so too did her new room-mates, rustling and squeaking, their small eyes glowing at her in the dark. Fear and revulsion splattered out of her into the bucket in the corner, and the smell compounded her nausea. She would die if she stayed here. She was going to die.

But dear God, how long would it take?

In the hottest August for half a century, everyone wilted. So too did the old climbing roses, the yellow and apricot Gloire de Dijon, the fragrant pink Zephirine Drouhin, that clung to every wall in Fodderstone Green and gave the hamlet the reputation of being the prettiest in Suffolk.

It was also reputedly the smallest and most remote. Fodderstone Green had been purpose-built by an early nineteenth-century Earl of Brandon to house some of his estate workers. The estate was in Breckland, then a tract of heath and twisted pine trees and flinty sheep pasture, haunted by stone curlews and the peewit cry of lapwings, that covered miles of sparsely populated upland to the west of Breckham Market.

Although the estate had been broken up in the 1920s and the Earl's great Hall demolished, the hamlet remained essentially unchanged. Fodderstone Green was officially listed in its entirety as being of Grade I architectural and historic interest. No new building was permitted and no exteriors could be altered, although planning restrictions were relaxed sufficiently in the latter part of the twentieth century to allow the inhabitants inconspicuous access to electricity, telephones, and plumbing.

To outward appearance, Fodderstone Green remained a perfect example of a hamlet in the Gothic Revival style, designed for picturesque effect. It consisted of ten individual cottages, bowered among lime trees and dispersed about a village green. Each cottage was thatched, its roof steeply pitched and hipped, its pointed windows filled with interlacing lattices of lead, its arched front door sheltered by a thatched porch supported on rustic poles. The result was slightly absurd but entirely charming: a setting for a fairy-tale, a city-dwelling exile's dream of age-old rural England.

It was, of course, a sham. Age-old rural England had never looked like that. Fodderstone village proper, situated at a windswept Breckland crossroads a quarter of a mile from the Arcadian green, was far older and more authentic. But Fodderstone – a huddle of houses in different building-styles and materials, together with a plain eighteenth-century pub called the Flintknappers Arms and a church and a school, both now redundant because the population had shrunk – was not picturesque. No sightseers in search of Regency
cottages ornés
gave Fodderstone a second glance. They lingered instead on Fodderstone Green exclaiming, ‘Isn't it delightful!'

But that was in summer. In winter, when sightseers no longer came, the hamlet gave a different impression.

The cottages were built entirely of local material: Suffolk reed for the thatch, Breckland flint for the walls. But Breckland flint is not like the rounded cobblestone flints that were once gathered from the shingle banks of the North Norfolk coast and used for building in that area: there, the pale-skinned stones, laid intact in regular rows, make cottage walls look as warm and chunky as a fisherman's hand-knitted sweater.

Breckland flint is different. In the days when it was used for building – or for making Neolithic axe-heads, or flintlocks for eighteenth-century muskets – it had to be hewn out of the underlying chalk in large, irregular nodules. Before use the nodules had to be split into manageable halves or quarters, exposing the black flint inside the thin chalk crust. And when facing material was wanted, for a mediaeval church tower and porch or, as at Fodderstone Green, for early nineteenth-century domestic buildings, small slices of flint were chipped off – knapped – and then mortared together like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. The resulting wall surfaces were hard and flat and black.

In summer, when the cottage walls were smothered by roses, little could be seen of the knapped flints except an occasional sparkle when the sunlight caught them. But the residents knew that when the roses were dead and the sun no longer shone, Fodderstone Green looked a cold, sombre place. Gloomy. Peculiar. Enough to give you the creeps.

In the month preceding the hottest August for half a century, someone kidnapped Beryl Websdell's gnome.

Garden gnomes are not indigenous to rural Suffolk. Mrs Websdell's Willum, who had sat on a stone toadstool beside a lily pond in the front garden of her cottage on Fodderstone Green for more than twenty years, was a foreigner from Great Yarmouth. But Beryl was fond of him because her husband Geoff had won him at a fairground shooting-gallery while they were on their honeymoon, and so she gave the plaster gnome an annual spring clean, repairing his weather-beaten features with Polyfilla, repainting his hat green and his jacket red, and fixing an encouraging new string to his fishing-rod even though the goldfish in the lily pond had long since been eaten by a heron.

When the gnome disappeared, in mid-July, Beryl was upset. She didn't think it funny that a ransom note had been spiked on a rose bush by the garden gate, demanding a pound of jelly babies for his safe return. Her friends and neighbours didn't think it funny either; nor did the police. It seemed a particularly cruel trick for anyone to play on a woman whose only daughter had disappeared without explanation two days earlier, just before she was to have been married.

Geoff Websdell had called in the police as soon as the girl disappeared, but they had found no reason to fear for her safety. Her honeymoon clothes had gone with her, and everyone who knew her – with the exception of her understandably aggrieved fiancé – thought that Sandra had found that she couldn't face the marriage, and had cut and run.

Beryl, a joyful Christian ever since she had attended a Revivalist meeting on a more recent holiday in Great Yarmouth, was philosophical about the cancelled wedding. About her daughter she was entirely optimistic, convinced that Sandra would telephone or write just as soon as she had sorted herself out.

But the kidnapping of the gnome was a blow. Beryl's eyes, usually shining with born-again happiness, were temporarily dulled.

‘It's only a silly joke,' she said with forced brightness to her neighbours, Constance Schultz and Marjorie and Howard Braithwaite; but she and her husband couldn't help wondering whether it
might
have some connection with their daughter's disappearance.

The police wondered the same thing. But on the more probable assumption that it had been nothing more than a casual prank, they advised Beryl to buy the jelly babies and leave them on the stone toadstool on the appointed night. Geoff Websdell kept watch; but the ransom was not collected and Willum was never returned. The jelly babies were still there in their limp paper bag three weeks later, congealed by the heat into a mono-coloured gunge.

Ill as she felt, Sandra Websdell could not passively wait there to die.

She knew now that although he intended her no physical harm, he would never voluntarily let her go. She had of course refused to co-operate, but at the same time she had tried to reassure him by promising that if only he would let her go she would tell no one what had happened. She intended to leave Fodderstone anyway, she told him, and she would say nothing to anyone before she went. But he refused to listen to reason, and everything else she tried – pleading, cajoling, weeping, screaming – all had the same negative result.