The Chief Inspector's Daughter (10 page)

‘Of course, if there are any other close relatives I could get them to do the identification. Are there any hereabouts?'

‘There's an elderly aunt, Mrs Gifford, and her son Rodney. I saw you talking to him at the party.'

‘Ah, yes, Rodney. Any relatives anywhere else? Parents, or other sisters or brothers?'

Pardoe caught the drift of the questioning. He flushed, and his eyes glittered. ‘No,' he said, his voice taut again. ‘My wife is Jasmine's nearest relative. But for all I know, she might have willed her money to someone else—'

Quantrill waved aside his protest. ‘Just checking,' he said equably.

Molly Quantrill put her anxious face round the door of Alison's bedroom. ‘Is she all right?' she demanded in a stage whisper, as she brought a cup of tea for the attendant policewoman.

WPC Beth Knowles, startlingly golden-haired, five foot eight, thirteen stone and dying for a cigarette, raised her eyes from the volume she had borrowed from among the faded children's books lined up on the window sill. The two women looked at the girl, who lay on her side with flushed cheeks and parted lips.

Alison's eyelids were closed, but they twitched with the rapid movement of her eyes as she dreamed that she fled from blood, screaming a name. From blood and through blood, puddles of it that glued her feet to the double-knotted cream Bokhara that, incongruously, carpeted the garden path. Ahead of her she could recognize the figure of a man, and she reached out to him, crying for help. But when he approached, she saw that he was a stranger, and she was afraid. She turned and in despair tried to re-enter the house for safety, calling a name.

‘I think she's trying to say something,' said Beth Knowles. She bent over the girl, hoping to obtain some useful information that would give her an excuse to go downstairs to telephone and light up.

Then she straightened, disappointed. ‘It was just “Jasmine”, I think. She's all right, Mrs Quantrill, don't worry, I'll call you as soon as she wakes. Thanks for the tea.'

Molly retreated. WPC Knowles helped herself generously to sugar and settled down again to read
Winnie the Pooh
.

Chief Inspector Quantrill and WPC Hopkins escaped from the Pardoes' sitting-room, where Heather was crying noisily on her husband's thin shoulder while the two youngest children wailed in sympathy, and conferred in the hall. The house was in a substantial mid-Victorian terrace. The hall was a long high passageway, and the coloured glass in the front door gave it the gloomy yellow light that Quantrill always associated with nonconformist chapels. He lowered his voice, and took the precaution of keeping his eyes down too; the hall was perilous with parked skateboards, and twelve-wheeled juggernauts too small to be noticed by anyone above three feet in height.

‘I'm anxious to see Jasmine Woods's cousin, Rodney Gifford, while we're in Yarchester,' he told the policewoman. ‘While I'm doing that, will you arrange the identification of the body with the coroner's officer? And then I want you to—'

The sitting-room door opened and a toddler was forcibly ejected, his squeals rising like a whistling kettle on the boil. Paul Pardoe looked out into the hall, harassed and apologetic.

‘Would you mind minding Ben?' he asked Patsy Hopkins. ‘Just until my wife gets over the shock …' He withdrew his head, and she raised an exasperated eyebrow at the closed door.

‘He wouldn't have dreamed of asking a policeman to do that,' she asserted. ‘It's a ridiculous situation. Most of the boys in the force are married and have kids of their own, so they're a lot more used to dealing with them than policewomen are. Me, I've no personal experience with children at all. I don't particularly like them. I'm a professional police officer, not a nanny in uniform. But neither the public nor the force can get this into their heads. To them I'm a woman, so I'm the one who's expected to hold the baby.'

Quantrill murmured deviously to indicate that she had his complete sympathy and, mollified, she crouched down to try to soothe the child. Ben Pardoe, rising two, had his father's dishevelled hair, and a pair of unusually large front teeth. His sobs touched WPC Hopkins's vulnerable heart, and she sighed and bent to pick him up. He clutched at her immaculate collar with sticky, starfish hands.

‘Yes, well, perhaps you can find a friendly neighbour who will cope with the children for a bit,' said Quantrill hastily. ‘What I'd like you to do, when you've arranged the identification, is to ask Paul Pardoe for a detailed account of his movements last night. The coroner's officer will give you a lift back to the city police station, and I'll pick you up from there. All right?'

He made for the door but then, an undeniably experienced father, he remembered that howls are a prelude to dribbles, and that dribble stains are a devil of a job to clean from police uniforms. He fumbled in his pocket, racing the saliva as it gathered on the child's tremulous lower lip, and produced a large white handkerchief.

‘Here – watch him.' He strode forward, fielded the toffee-tinted blob as it began to drool down the child's chin, and thrust his handkerchief into the policewoman's hand. ‘Thanks, Patsy …'

He escaped, leaving WPC Hopkins to invoke the provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act while she finished mopping up.

Rodney Gifford lived with his mother, Jasmine Woods's aunt, in a 1930s semi-detached house in Rowan Road, on the northern outskirts of Yarchester. Their house boasted the three essential features of between-the-wars suburban ambition: a front garden with a privet hedge, a wooden gate with an art-deco sunburst design, and a bay window with green and amber leaves in the upper leaded lights.

The front door was opened by a featherweight old lady, sprightly in her late seventies. She peeked up at Quantrill. ‘Mrs Thompson …?' she asked uncertainly.

The Chief Inspector managed to deny it with courtesy. ‘I'd like to see Mr Rodney Gifford, please. Can you tell me where I can find him?'

She looked disappointed. ‘Oh dear – I thought you might be the new visiting chiropodist. Roddy's just gone round the corner to the shops, he'll be back in a few minutes. I'd ask you to come in and wait for him, but he says that I must never let strange men into the house.'

‘Quite right,' said Quantrill. He saw no reason to alarm her by saying that he was a policeman. ‘I'll wait in my car until he comes back.'

‘Oh, there's no need for that,' she said quickly. ‘We don't have many visitors and I enjoy a little company. And if you stand under the porch, at least you'll be out of the rain.' She gave him an artless smile that revealed orange-coloured false gums above the top set of her false teeth. Her white hair was frizzed out on either side of her face, but it was insufficiently thick to conceal the fact that her ears, like those of her son, protruded at an unusual angle from her head. ‘Roddy won't be long. He's such a good boy to do my shopping for me, now that I can't get about so well.'

‘He's not working today?' Quantrill asked.

‘Oh no! Roddy doesn't work – that's to say, he doesn't go
out
to work. He does it here at home. He's a famous playwright, you know.'

‘Is he?' Quantrill leaned against the arched brickwork of the porch, trying to convey that his interest was merely idle. ‘I knew that he was a writer, but I didn't realize that he wrote plays. You must be very proud of him.'

She nodded, bright-eyed. ‘
Very
– both of us. His father was alive when Roddy first started writing, of course. I don't mind telling you that we'd been worried about the boy. He did so well at school and we thought that he'd settle down to a good career – in the bank like his father, perhaps, only with better prospects. But he
would
go off to London, living in an uncomfortable room and doing nothing but odd jobs, as far as we could make out. Such a waste of his education, we thought. We didn't realize, you see, that he was busy writing his very first play.'

‘Was it shown on television?' asked Quantrill, whose acquaintance with live theatre had been limited to an annual visit to the pantomime in his own youth, and again when his children were young; and more recently to dutiful attendance in support of his wife at the performances of the Breckham Market and District amateur operatic society.

‘Oh no – at a London theatre,' she said impressively. ‘Roddy's play was all the rage, you know. Everybody talked about it. Well, not everybody in Yarchester, but then as Roddy said, you couldn't expect them to. It was too advanced for the provinces. But everybody who knew about such things said that it was brilliant …' She looked a little wistful. ‘I didn't quite understand it myself, I'm more of a film-goer. I used to be a real film fan in the old days … Robert Taylor, Clark Gable, Paulette Goddard, Bette Davies … they were lovely films, in the ' 30s. I'd love to go to a cinema again, but I can't persuade Roddy to take me. He doesn't like films. Not that it would ever be the same, of course; there'll never be another Clark Gable.'

Quantrill, whose own mother had been a film fan as a young woman – there had never before been a Douglas in the family, and he suspected her of having had Douglas Fairbanks in mind at his christening, or perhaps at his conception – brought Mrs Gifford back to the subject of her son. ‘You were telling me about Rodney's play.'

‘Well, I can't tell you very much about it. I'm afraid I'm not clever enough. I didn't really enjoy it, to be honest – some of the language wasn't at all nice. But Roddy explained that it was true to life. Not the sort of life he'd been brought up to, you know, but he said that it was life as most people have to live it.'

‘And he's been writing plays ever since?'

‘Oh yes – a lot of them. I'll show you his press cuttings.' She hurried stiffly to the front room, where Quantrill could hear her muttering to herself and opening and closing drawers. Presently she emerged clutching a folder which she thrust proudly into his hands.

Quantrill glanced through the discoloured cuttings. Most of them dated from the late 1950s, and were play reviews from the
Observer
and the
Manchester Guardian
. There was also a feature from the
News Chronicle
headed, ‘The Angry Generation', and another from the
Daily Express
demanding in thick type ‘WHAT HAVE THEY GOT TO BE ANGRY ABOUT?' Both features linked the name of Rodney Gifford with those of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker.

The reviews were enthusiastic about the message Rodney Gifford had given to the theatre-going public: ‘A savage indictment of the values of the established social order'; ‘Modern life in a new perspective'; ‘Gifford routs Aunt Edna from the theatre'; ‘Gifford excoriates the Establishment'.

The pile of cuttings was impressively thick, but none was dated later than 1964.

‘Extremely interesting,' said Quantrill. He smiled at the old lady. ‘No wonder you're proud of your son. He's still writing, I believe you said?'

‘Yes, of course. That's his work, you see – his work and his whole way of life, you might say. But there's a lot of jealousy in the theatre world, and new writers elbowing their way in, and Roddy's plays have been neglected recently. In London, that is. They're still performed, though – why, his first play was put on here in Yarchester last winter, by the students at the technical college. I didn't go myself – Roddy said that I would only be disappointed after the brilliant London performance – but it just shows how highly his plays are thought of. He's sure they're due for a London revival, and once that happens—'

She broke off her sentence. ‘There he is,' she said eagerly, ‘I've just seen him going past the hedge. He'll be able to tell you all about his plays himself.'

Quantrill turned. Rodney Gifford, one-time angry young man, avant-garde playwright and scourge of the Establishment, was pushing open the garden gate. He wore a felt hat that was a little too small for his large head, and a black nylon mackintosh that flapped loosely round his short legs. From his plastic mesh shopping bag there protruded half a dozen sticks of rhubarb roughly wrapped in newspaper. He looked preoccupied, so much absorbed in thought that he failed to notice the Chief Inspector.

‘Rodney!' piped his mother from the doorway. She gave the Chief Inspector a conspiratorial pat on the sleeve. ‘He doesn't like me to call him Roddy in front of others.' She raised her voice again, trying to compete with the noise of the traffic. ‘Rodney dear, here's a visitor for you.'

Gifford raised his head, making a visible effort to adjust to Quantrill's presence. He appeared dazed, but at the same time covertly elated.

‘This gentleman,' his mother continued importantly, ‘has come to talk about your plays.'

‘My plays?' Gifford focused on his visitor and hurried forward to join him in the porch. ‘Are you an agent?' he demanded, with a look of sudden hope. ‘A producer? A journalist, then?'

‘None of them – and it isn't your plays I want to talk about. My name's Quantrill. We met about six weeks ago, at Jasmine Woods's party.'

Rodney Gifford's ears, protruding through the ginger camouflage of hair, went scarlet. His eyes dulled and slid away. ‘Did we?' he growled. ‘I don't remember.'

Quantrill wasn't surprised, considering the man's condition at the time. ‘I'd like to have a word with you, please. In private, if you will excuse us, Mrs Gifford?'

The old lady had been following their conversation with eager incomprehension. ‘Oh, I didn't realize that you knew my niece,' she apologized. ‘If only you'd said! What will she think if she hears that I kept you on the doorstep?' She scolded herself busily as she beckoned him into the house. ‘I'll go and make you some tea – yes, of course I will, it's no trouble at all.' She peered into the shopping bag that she had taken from her son. ‘Rodney, didn't you get me the evening paper?'