The Chief Inspector's Daughter (2 page)

Alison shook her head. ‘No thanks,' she said bleakly. ‘I've gone off men.'

For his part, Detective Sergeant Tait was very much in favour of women. He was talking to one now, in the course of his duties; and a duty that entailed sitting in an armchair in front of a log fire, watching an attractive unattached woman refill a china cup with China tea must, he thought, be one of the best available.

‘You were lucky, of course,' he said, referring to the subject of his visit, while his sharp blue eyes missed nothing at all. About five foot four, he estimated, a height that made his own five eight-and-a-half comparatively tall; slim-hipped in dark-blue cord trousers, but with an interestingly feminine outline under her sweater and a dramatic confusion of Victorian rings on her small, square hands. Thick dark hair curved and swung against her high-boned cheeks as she moved her head, and from under strongly marked eyebrows her grey eyes assessed him in return, without embarrassment, as she handed him his tea. Thirtyish, he guessed; a good age for a woman. Young enough not to have lost any of her attractiveness, but experienced enough to enjoy an affair without getting emotionally involved. A very promising discovery, late on a cold wet February afternoon.

He took his cup from her. ‘Thank you. As I was saying, you were lucky not to have been bashed on the head when you heard the noise and came downstairs to investigate. Not many burglars are gentlemanly enough to clear off empty-handed once they've broken in – and I see from the report the constable made this morning that you keep a number of small valuables in the house.'

She smiled with pride and pleasure: ‘My two collections – jade and netsuke. Would you like to see them?'

She had a good voice, too: warm and slightly husky, as though from cigarette smoke, although she was a non-smoker. ‘Watch your head on the beams,' she advised him, as she led the way across the large low-ceilinged room.

The house, which she called Yeoman's, had obviously been converted at considerable expense from a many-roomed sixteenth-century farmhouse. The major part of the ground floor had been gutted, leaving lines of three or four timber uprights standing exposed in unexpected places, like well-scraped spare ribs. One end of the long room was occupied by a massive chimneypiece of soft rose-red local brick, and the log fire burned deep in its centre. The room was furnished with antiques, a great many books and a comfortable variety of chairs. On the oak floorboards was a cream double-knot Bokhara carpet. There were some modern paintings, one a rural primitive, one a stylized early Hockney; a stereo record-player occupied one area, a Bechstein upright another. The affluence of the owner was evident, but deliberately understated. The predominant impression was one of casual comfort. The only flowers were from the garden; a few snowdrops, standing on a desk in a pottery egg-cup, their white petals arching over the writing paper like miniature art-nouveau table lamps.

In an alcove was an illuminated display cabinet. Tait stood at her shoulder while she unlocked it with a key she took from her trouser pocket. There were no more than twenty pieces in the cabinet, all small, some tiny; he bent his head to look with wonder at an intricately carved ivory monkey, five centimetres long.

‘These are my netsuke,' she said. ‘Incredible, isn't it, that they should have been so completely undervalued as works of art?'

‘Incredible,' agreed Tait knowledgeably, brushing an irritatingly boyish wedge of fair hair off his forehead with his fingers. He knew nothing at all about netsuke and was completely unfamiliar with the word as she pronounced it – something Russian, he surmised. He was always ready to absorb new information, but he preferred to do so without revealing his ignorance; and enthusiasts, he knew, once prompted, could always be relied on to tell him as much if not more than he wished to learn. His eyes flicked over the illustrated books on the nearest table, and found a useful title:
Netsuke, the Miniature Sculpture of Japan
. He shrugged. ‘But then, I imagine that the Japanese simply took them for granted,' he murmured.

‘Very much so. After all, they were functional pieces, and it seems that the craftsmen who made them ranked very low in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Japanese society.' She placed on the palm of her hand a tiny wooden tortoise, every scale on its neck and toes distinct, and stroked it lovingly with the tip of her finger. ‘Just imagine, though – how could a man regard something as beautiful as this as nothing more than a toggle to hold his purse and tobacco pouch on to the sash of his kimono? And then simply to throw it out, when it became fashionable to wear Western dress at the end of the last century … Apparently netsuke could be bought by the bucketful in bric-a-brac shops in Tokyo before the last war.'

‘Rather more pricey now,' Tait suggested.

‘And rapidly increasing in value,' she said with satisfaction. ‘I started my collection – oh, ten years ago. These are particularly good examples but I paid less than ten pounds for most of them, sometimes less than five. Now they're collected all over the world, and they're fetching four-figure sums in salerooms. I started the collection simply because I loved them, but—' she looked up at him with a grin ‘—I have to admit to a nasty streak of commercialism. It's comforting to know that my accountant reckons they're a much more interesting financial reserve than Krugerrands.'

Impressed, Tait did a rapid assessment of the contents of the cabinet. ‘And these?' he asked, pointing to some small carved stones on the second shelf.

‘That's my Chinese jade – purely decorative pieces, and correspondingly more valuable. I had to pay a few hundred for each of these, and now they're worth several thousands. But aren't they beautiful?' She touched a cream-coloured pendant, carved with a three-clawed dragon among clouds.

Tait blinked at what he estimated to be twenty or thirty thousand pounds'worth of Oriental handicraft. ‘I thought jade was green,' he commented, trying to sound off-hand.

‘Only some of it. Emerald green like this—' she picked up a tiny pendant carved with gourds, bamboo and plum blossom ‘—was one of the favourite colours, but jade goes from almost pure white – like this kitten with a butterfly on its back – to this mottled amber horse.'

She replaced the pieces with loving care. ‘I suppose I ought really to keep them at the bank,' she said, ‘but there are limits to my commercial instincts. I love looking at them, and touching them; and then, they're an incentive to keep me at work. Ever since I started writing, I've bought myself something special and beautiful with the advance on each book. Then, when I get depressed because I write romantic fiction instead of straight novels – I did write one, but couldn't get it published – I can tell myself that something good comes out of my work, apart from the money to pay the bills.'

Tait, the divisional crime prevention officer, gave her his official frown. ‘I take your point, of course; naturally you want to keep the pieces where you can see them. But you must realize that a collection like this makes your house an obvious target for burglars. One of them got in easily enough last night. You were lucky this time, but with the publicity you'll get when that magazine article appears—'

He gave her a friendly lecture and she listened meekly, nodding with contrition as he took her on a tour of her inadequately secured windows and doors. She promised to call in a reputable locksmith; Tait told her that he would come again to make sure that she had done so. She offered him a drink and Tait – remembering that he had officially gone off duty half an hour earlier – accepted. Another half-hour passed rapidly and agreeably before he rose reluctantly from his armchair.

‘I hope we meet again,' he said. ‘Socially, of course.'

She stood back and considered him, an incipient smile denting the corners of her mouth. Making up her mind how far she intended to go? Tait grinned at her in return, quietly confident.

‘Why not?' she said pleasantly. And then: ‘As a matter of fact I'm having a party next Friday evening, to celebrate the publication of my new book. Would you like to come? Any time after nine.'

She was eager, then; so much the better. But she must have sensed his complacency because she added quickly, ‘Bring a girl, if you'd like to. There'll be too many men anyway, there always are at my parties. Yes, do bring a girl.'

Not a bad idea at that, Tait thought: a useful way of entertaining one of his local girl-friends at no expense, combined with an opportunity of becoming better acquainted with an attractive older woman. What more could a man ask for?

He thanked her, and followed her to the door. ‘And remember,' he added, ‘from now on, if you hear any suspicious noises in the night, dial 999 from your bedroom.
Don't
come down to investigate. You could get yourself killed doing that, you know.'

In his office at Breckham Market Divisional Police Headquarters, Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill looked through his sergeant's report on the previous day's work.

‘This woman,' he said, skimming the last page. ‘You'd think she'd have more sense. Doesn't she know that it's asking for trouble to have her house described in a magazine article? It's an open invitation to any villain who wants easy pickings.'

‘She realizes that now,' said Tait. ‘The abortive break-in on Monday night really shook her, and the article hasn't even been published yet. She showed me an advance copy. No address given, of course: just the information that she lives alone in a delightful country cottage set in a big garden in unspoiled North Suffolk, not far from sleepy little Breckham Market … you've read the sort of thing.'

‘Squit,' agreed the Chief Inspector with Suffolk dismissiveness. He knew too much about country life to have any time for people who imagined it to be idyllic. ‘And I suppose there's a photograph, to make the place easily identifiable?'

‘Of course. But because there's no address in the article, and because her telephone number's ex-directory, she thought that no one would be able to trace her.'

Quantrill sighed over the folly of it. ‘She's not just inviting trouble, she's begging for it … How come she's featured in a magazine, anyway?'

‘Publicity. She's a romantic novelist.'

‘Hah!' said Quantrill, who had no time for romantic novelists either. ‘Jasmine Woods … that's not her real name, then?'

‘Yes it is. She married a man named Potter, but preferred to use her unmarried name for her books.'

‘Hmm. Yes, well, that's understandable. What happened to Mr Potter?'

‘They're divorced.'

‘Very romantic,' observed Quantrill censoriously. He had been brought up to believe that it is morally wrong for married couples to admit that they have made a mistake; a marriage, he thought, was something you were stuck with and had to make the best of. ‘And does this magazine article make it clear that she's got a houseful of valuables?'

‘Clear enough – it mentions her love of jade and netsuke, and that'll draw the intelligent professionals.'

‘Jade and what?' Quantrill asked.

‘Netsuke – they're miniature Japanese sculptures in wood and ivory,' Tait explained authoritatively, without a flicker of shame from his stiff fair eyelashes. ‘They were used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as toggles to fasten the men's purses to the sashes of their kimonos. They've been completely undervalued until recently, but now they're fetching a packet.'

‘Ah,' said Quantrill, accepting it as a fact that there was no limit to the breadth of his sergeant's knowledge; that, he assumed enviously, was what a good education did for you. ‘Well, we shall have to keep an eye on that particular patch of unspoiled North Suffolk in the near future.'

‘I intend to,' said Tait.

‘Oh yes? Attractive, is she?'

‘Very. And she's invited me to a party on Friday.'

‘She's probably planning to have you for supper afterwards. You want to watch out with older women, boy,' Quantrill advised him kindly, from hearsay not personal experience. ‘They can get their hooks into a young man and ruin his career.'

Tait smiled confidently. ‘Don't worry about that, sir, I can look after my own interests. Anyway,' he added fairly, ‘she's nowhere near old enough to be my mother, you know. And she did say that I could take a girl with me to the party.'

‘Generous of her. Jasmine Woods …' Quantrill scratched his chin. ‘I'm sure I've heard the name.'

‘Two romantic novels a year for the past ten years, and every one a bestseller, apparently. Perhaps Mrs Quantrill reads them?'

‘More than likely,' said her husband disparagingly. ‘It must pay, then, this writing business?'

‘According to Jasmine Woods, it certainly does.'

Quantrill fumbled in his trouser pocket, looked at his small change, and found that he would have to break into a pound note to buy them a pint of lunch-time bitter apiece at the Coney and Thistle.

‘We're in the wrong job, Martin,' he said.

The Quantrills lived at Number 5 Benidorm Avenue, a road built in Breckham Market by a local developer in the late 1960s and named after his favourite holiday resort.

The houses were semi-detached. Quantrill had been a sergeant when he had first taken out his mortgage, and a semi was all he could afford; a step up, anyway, from a police house. He and Molly had been so proud of their status as owner-occupiers of a brand new house that he had had great difficulty in preventing her from giving their property a name, instead of using the number. The prevailing fashion had been to concoct house names from the abbreviated names of the owners, or of their children. Quantrill, with apprehensive guesses at what his wife might suggest if she put her mind to it –
Doug-Moll? Jen-Al-Pete?
– insisted that they lived at Number 5, and fixed the numeral to both front door and gate to prove it.