The Chief Inspector's Daughter (22 page)

Quantrill then got through to Yarchester and spoke at some length to John Carrow, with whom he'd once been a sergeant. Afterwards, satisfied that he had done everything he could to find his daughter, he restarted the car. They were in foreign territory and WPC Hopkins sat patiently with her forefinger on an ordnance survey map.

‘Right, Patsy. How far to Oliver Buxton's farm?'

‘Ten or twelve miles.' She looked about her disparagingly as they moved off. ‘Real prairie farming country round here, isn't it?'

They had left behind the undulating countryside and the woods and hedges of Suffolk and were now in bleaker arable country. The land was flatter and there were fewer trees. The pretty colourwashed plaster and thatch of old Suffolk houses had been replaced by Norfolk brick and flint and pantiles. Being flatter, the land could more easily be worked by machinery; and once the giant machines were in the fields, such hedges and trees as there were became an uneconomic nuisance to progressive farmers, who set about removing them. Farming is, after all, an industry. The countryside is the source of food, not a picturesque leisure area.

‘They don't waste an inch of it, do they?' agreed Quantrill, looking about him at the hedgeless, ditchless, almost treeless acres of green winter barley, already ankle-high, growing as close to the sides of the road as the machines could drill it.

The surroundings of the farm he had come to visit were bleak. It was isolated, but clearly visible from its nearest neighbour half a mile away because the intervening hedges had been removed. Spring corn had been sown and the green shoots were beginning to emerge patchily from the drilled lines of brown tilth, giving the fields a threadbare look. The plain substantial early nineteenth-century brick farmhouse would formerly have been sheltered by an attractive and practical windbreak of oaks or elms, but the erection of prefabricated metal-framed farm buildings close to the house had made natural windbreaks superfluous, and so the trees had been cut down.

The minor road from the nearest village ran within two hundred yards of the farm, which was served by a flat dirt lane. The only objects left standing by the roadside were the telegraph poles, and on the pole next to the lane was nailed a board which read
P. J. Buxton and Son High House Farm No Representatives except by Written Appointment
.

‘Charming,' murmured Patsy Hopkins. ‘Imagine what it's like to live here in the middle of winter, when they're up to their knees in mud … The girl we're going to see, Anne Downing, is engaged to the son, is that it?'

‘Getting married at Easter, so she said when I met her at Jasmine Woods's party.'

‘The wedding will be this coming Saturday, then, I suppose. Well, if she's been staying here with his family, at least she knows what she's letting herself in for.'

The car bumped past a long range of windowless sheds that were topped by ventilation cowls. Further progress towards the house was blocked by a high-sided lorry discharging animal feed into a hopper at one end of the shed, and so Quantrill stopped the car and they got out. The stench of pigs was immediately so strong that Patsy clapped her handkerchief over her nose. They hurried towards the house, both of them ducking their heads as though against a storm.

‘Good grief,' gasped Patsy, ‘rather Anne Downing than me!'

Quantrill raised his head. They had rounded the end of the sheds and were now upwind of the smell, though they could still taste it in the air. ‘Oh, I don't know,' he said fairly. ‘Buxton seemed to be a very decent sort of fellow. I daresay he'll make her a good husband. And they're not necessarily going to live here after they're married.'

‘I should hope not. Honestly – just imagine having
that
beside the lane leading to your front door.'

That
was what looked like a deep man-made farmyard pond with a black plastic lining. There were, however, no peacefully paddling ducks. The contents of the pond, almost as black as the lining, glistened and stank.

‘It's a slurry pit,' said Quantrill, steering his companion past it. ‘There must be a few hundred pigs in those rearing sheds, and their muck has to be hosed into pits for storage until it can be pumped out and sprayed on the land.'

‘Yuk!' said WPC Hopkins, a town-bred girl whose father was deputy chief finance officer to the Breckham Market district council.

Quantrill laughed. ‘Well, that's modern farming. I can't say that I admire it, but then I lived next to a proper, old-fashioned farm when I was a boy. I loved that place. I used to spend hours round there, getting in the way. The carting was done by horses, and the cows were milked by hand, and the pigs lived in a sty. There was no slurry in those days because all the animals were bedded on straw. There were ricks of straw as high as houses in the yard, and the hens scratched about and laid their eggs wherever they fancied …'

He was silent for a moment, savouring past pleasures: climbing trees, damming the brook, driving the cows to and from their pasture, riding on carthorses, swinging from beams in the great timbered barn; and forever meddling with the few bits of farm machinery. He recalled with a grin the farmer's threatening bellow when that long-suffering man discovered yet another of young Douglas's misdemeanours:
‘Come you out of there, booy, and git on hoom, do I'll tell your faather—'

‘It sounds like a picture-book farm,' said Patsy Hopkins. ‘Lovely.'

‘Lovely for kids, but not if you had to make a living from it,' said Quantrill. ‘All that straw and muck had to be cleared out and heaped in the yard, and then carted to the fields and spread by manpower. It took a lot of men, and their wages were rock-bottom. There wasn't any money in farming then, and the farmers themselves were nearly bankrupt. Thinking back, that farm was a poor, tumbledown place; a hard way of life. But it certainly did look and smell a lot pleasanter than this.'

He glanced sideways at WPC Hopkins, who was wearing a fetching pink raincoat over her uniform shirt and skirt, with a pink and green silk scarf at her throat. ‘Not,' he added, ‘that it was so very long ago. It's just that there have been big changes in farming in the last thirty years. I'm not all
that
old.'

‘I never thought you were,' she said.

They had passed the slurry pit, and a shed like an aircraft hangar that contained a good deal of large and expensive agricultural machinery, as well as a pick-up truck, a Rover saloon and a Lotus sports car. Ahead of them was the farmhouse, separated from the yard by a low wall and an area of gravel ornamented by a few tubs of polyanthus. The front door had an unused look about it, and so they followed the cement path round to the side of the house. From there, the view was of fifty acres of emergent sugar beet, drilled almost up to the edge of the cement.

Just as they rounded the corner of the garden wall a black labrador dog rushed up behind them, barking. WPC Hopkins – who was unworried when her police duties required her to cope with disaffected people, but who didn't care for dogs – stepped smartly behind the Chief Inspector. He turned and saw Oliver Buxton approaching from the piggeries. The farmer could not have spent more than an hour at the saleyard at Breckham Market before returning home, exchanging his shoes for wellington boots, and getting on with his job.

Buxton called the dog off, but his attitude was as unwelcoming as the labrador's. ‘Yes?' he said curtly, striding towards them. ‘There's a notice up by the road. If you've come on business—'

‘We haven't,' said Quantrill. ‘I was hoping to have a word with Miss Anne Downing, if she's in. You may not remember me, but we met just after you'd announced your engagement. My name's Quantrill. My daughter Alison took over your fiancée's—'

‘No!' Buxton almost shouted the word. He turned away, his face dark with suppressed emotion. ‘She's not my fiancée, and she's not here any more. It's all off.'

Patsy Hopkins was not surprised. Buxton looked, as the Chief Inspector had said, a very decent sort of fellow; quite handsome, in a florid way, with his dark hair breaking out in thick curls behind his ears, below his tipped-forward cap. Presentable, foursquare, prosperous. But – she moved closer to verify her first impression – despite the fact that he looked perfectly clean, apart from his boots, it wasn't only the farm that smelled of pigs.

‘I'm very sorry to hear that,' said Quantrill, and his sympathy was genuine. He realized now that the fellow-feeling he had imagined with Buxton, when he watched the man in the saleyard, had been completely misplaced.

Buxton's look of dazed delight, at Jasmine Woods's party, had made it clear that he was deeply in love. Instead of the pre-marital depression that Quantrill had projected on him, the farmer was obviously suffering from badly damaged pride and an emotional savaging. Quantrill could see – could smell – Anne Downing's point of view, but his sympathies were undivided. ‘Sorry to hear that,' he repeated.

Buxton nodded wretchedly and muttered something inaudible.

‘Would you mind telling me where I can find Miss Downing?'

The man hunched his shoulders, burying his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. He had the attitude of a cornered bullock, bewildered and angry. ‘How should I know? She took herself off, and I haven't heard from her since.'

‘Does she have any family?'

‘Her parents live abroad. There's an old great-aunt in Bishops Port, a Mrs Alfred Beckett. I suppose she … Anne … may be there.'

‘Thanks, I'll try Bishops Port, then. Has she been gone long?'

Buxton's mouth twisted. ‘Just a week before our wedding day—' He turned away and whistled to his dog.

‘I see. Well, thanks for your help, Mr Buxton. And – er – good luck.'

The Chief Inspector and the policewoman walked silently to their car. ‘Bloody women,' growled Quantrill as he switched on the ignition, protesting on behalf of the whole ill-used masculine sex.

WPC Hopkins, who knew better than to take it personally, forbore to comment.

She was map-reading Quantrill from the farm at Littleover towards Bishops Port, when the Chief Inspector was called up on the radio.

A report had come in from the forensic lab. Jasmine Woods's blood group was O, but some of the bloodstains on the carpet near her body belonged to another group, AB.

The bloodstains in Gilbert Smith's flat had also been analysed. Those on the clothes he had abandoned were O. Others, on the door handles and the washbasin, were AB.

A wayside pub was in sight, an old house with a brick crow-stepped gable, nine miles from nowhere and appropriately named The World's End. It was trying to keep in business by tempting passing motorists with placards offering coffee and snacks rather than beer, and Quantrill pulled on to the deserted forecourt and sent Patsy Hopkins in for refreshments while he held a radio conference.

He was just hanging up the hand-mike when she brought a cup of coffee out to him.

‘Thanks, Patsy.' He got out of the driving seat and leaned against the side of the car in the sharp April sunlight, feeling depressed. ‘I know the information from forensic sounds useful, but it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know.'

‘Doesn't it? I thought it pointed to the murderer.'

‘Possibly, but not necessarily. We know already that Gilbert Smith went up to Jasmine Woods's house before he bolted. It seems reasonable to assume that the AB bloodstains in his flat were his own, and therefore that the AB blood at the scene of the crime was his too. But that still doesn't indicate whether or not he was the murderer. He might have seen some of Jasmine Woods's valuables on the floor, decided to steal them, and cut himself on the broken glass while he was scrabbling about trying to pick them up. He certainly went into the room where she was murdered, either at the time of the murder or the next morning, because there are some fragments of ivory on the sole of one of the bloodstained sneakers he left behind.'

‘Couldn't forensic find anything that would definitely pin it on to Smith?'

‘Not so far. What they did find, on the carpet where the body had been lying, were some cotton fibres. Forensic think that the fibres come from denims, cut by broken glass. But there aren't any cuts on the bloodstained jeans that Smith left when he bolted, and anyway the fibres don't match.'

Quantrill drained his cup. ‘That doesn't let Smith out, though,' he went on. ‘It's possible that he did the murder under the influence of drugs, and hid his blood-soaked clothes the following morning. We've got a couple of men digging up the compost heap at Yeoman's to see if they can find anything.'

Patsy Hopkins took the empty cup and saucer from the roof of the car, where Quantrill had parked them, and returned them to the pub. ‘Are we going straight back to Breckham, sir?' she asked briskly.

But the Chief Inspector was still leaning against the car, arms folded. ‘I also spoke to Chief Superintendent Mancroft, at Yarchester,' he said. ‘He's going to issue a statement to the press, naming Smith as the man we want to interview and releasing a photofit picture. The Yarchester division are going all out to find Smith, so that's out of our hands. I talked to the Chief Super about Alison, too. There's no further news of her, and it begins to seem unlikely that she'll get in touch of her own accord. In view of her discovery of the body, and her connection with Smith, the Chief Super is taking her disappearance seriously. He's going to issue her photograph to the press, and an appeal for her either to telephone home or to contact the nearest police station. I wanted to go to Yarchester to try to find her, but he told me to stay on my own patch and get on with my own job …'

He looked up, desperately worried. ‘It's the best thing, I suppose,' he reasoned with himself. ‘Molly will be frantic when she sees Alison's photograph on television, but I can't sit at home holding her hand … I'll ring her from the next call-box we come to. There really isn't anything else I can do, except concentrate on this case.'