The Chief Inspector's Daughter (27 page)

‘I'm glad,' said Tait, and meant it. A nice kid, Alison; pretty, and a good figure. When this case was sewn up, he might even take her out one evening. ‘About Oxlip Fair, then, sir? If Yarchester can't collar Smith in the meantime, it might be as well if we go there in force. From what I've heard, all the Gilbert Smith types in Eastern England congregate there, and he'll imagine himself safe in the crowds.'

Quantrill was almost light-hearted as he lifted the telephone to tell Inspector Carrow to call off the search for his daughter. ‘All right, I agree. If Yarchester can't find our man, we'll all go to the fair.'

Douglas Quantrill left his office shortly after ten o'clock that evening. There was nothing to be gained by working any longer, and he needed an early night before setting off for Thaxted. Having depressed himself by the realization that there were potentially as many suspects in this case as there were frustrated husbands and men-friends of Jasmine Woods's readers, he had decided to concentrate his enquiries on the victim's past life. With luck, a visit to the part of Essex where she lived before moving to Thirling might reveal someone with a more substantial motive for murdering her.

There was still Smith to be found, of course, but that he would have to leave to the Yarchester boys. The fact that Smith had been seen wandering in the city in possession of a carved ivory figure certainly hardened the case against him, and the sooner Yarchester got off its collective behind and found the man, the better. It would be a sight easier to pick him out in the city than at Oxlip Fair, where all the men were reputed to wear beards and look half stoned.

Quantrill was thinking hard about Smith as he put his latchkey in his front door. Usually, when he came home so late, he would have to brace himself to meet his wife. Their marriage had almost foundered some years previously, when his irregular hours of work and lack of consideration for her had driven Molly to leave him. Their mutual love for their children had brought them together again, and they had patched their marriage with an unspoken agreement that he would pay more attention to her needs, while she would try not to nag him about his job. And it had worked, after a fashion; he no longer had to come home, tired, to face her outspoken resentment. What he usually had to brace himself against now was her concern, which she habitually expressed in terms of food and drink.

But tonight, he felt, was going to be different. Thinking about Smith had reminded him of Alison; and Alison, thank God, was safe from the man. Tired as he was, he smiled to himself as he opened the front door. And to his pleasure Molly came into the hall to greet him, in frilly housecoat and neat furry slippers, with a look of relief and happiness equal to his own.

He took immediate advantage of it. They were so much accustomed not to touch each other that, when he felt the urge to do so, it was often difficult in daytime to find an appropriate opportunity. And Molly was such a romantic woman, her head so stuffed with the Jasmine Woods-type books she read, that when he eventually did touch her in bed she was liable to accuse him of wanting only one thing. He did want it, of course, but there were times – and this was one of them – when what he wanted more immediately was affection.

He held out his arms, and after a second's hesitation she came into them.

‘All right, Molly-mouse?'

‘Yes – so relieved, you can't imagine.'

‘I can, you know.'

She slid her arms under his jacket and squeezed his large waist. ‘Yes, of course you can. But seeing Alison's face on the television screen – oh, Douggie, it was a dreadful experience. I felt so sure that you thought she was either kidnapped or dead …'

‘I didn't know what to think. I knew the screening would upset you, but it had to be done. I wished I could have been here with you at the time, though.'

‘But you did telephone. You've been very good, Douggie, ringing me so often today. That was the only thing that kept me going.'

‘
Good
– my dear love, I'm not just a friend of the family! We're part of each other, aren't we? I may not be the world's most considerate husband and father, but I do care about you all.' He kissed her. ‘I care more than you realize … more than I realized myself, I think.'

She returned his kiss and then moved away from him, a little shaken by the strength of her own physical response. ‘Well … Would you like something to eat, dear?'

‘No thanks, I've been eating on and off all day.' He went into the sitting room, took off his jacket and loosened his tie. ‘What I'd like, though,' he added – forestalling the customary reprimand that it wasn't good for him to live on pies and sandwiches, and wouldn't he like her to make him an omelette and a pot of tea – ‘is a drink. Nothing to eat, but I'd enjoy a whisky if there's any left.'

Molly looked surprised. Her husband rarely drank spirits. But all she said was, ‘I think there's nearly a quarter of a bottle. I'll get you some water.'

‘What about you?' called Quantrill, crouching to open the sideboard door and surveying the modest variety of bottles left over from Christmas.

‘
Whisky
– ugh, no thanks!'

‘Well … cherry brandy?' suggested her husband. ‘Or sherry. There's a medium Cyprus – or what about Bristol Cream?'

Molly, returning from the kitchen with water in a small pyrex measuring-jug, looked pink with pleasurable anticipation; and not merely of the sherry. ‘Are we celebrating?' she asked shyly.

‘Why not?' He poured her a generous measure of Bristol Cream and splashed some water on his double whisky. ‘We've got something to celebrate, haven't we? Here's to – blast! Who the hell's that?'

He strode to the telephone, and watched the happiness ebb from his wife's face as she realized that it was an official call for him. Her cheeks sagged with disappointment, her shoulders slumped. She turned away, and began automatically to tidy the sitting-room, assuming that her husband was being called out and that she would be going to bed as usual with a book.

Quantrill, still watching her while he listened to Inspector Carrow, grieved over the transformation. For a few moments Molly had been young again, glowing and vibrant, warm and beautifully rounded and responsive in his arms. And now she was a disappointed middle-aged housewife, making the best of things. No wonder she sought escape in fiction, where lovers were inexhaustibly ardent and love scenes were never interrupted by anything other than a row of suggestive dots.

Having spent a good part of the afternoon listening to Jasmine Woods's latest book on tape, Quantrill could begin to understand why his wife had become hooked. He wouldn't have admitted it to a soul, but he'd quite enjoyed it; partly on account of the author's frankly sexy voice, of course – he couldn't imagine that she would ever have taken refuge in suggestiveness in her own love-life – but also because it was, quite simply, a rattling good adventure story. Something interesting and unexpected was always happening to Jasmine Woods's heroines. They never had to sit at home and wait, as poor Molly had spent most of her married life doing.

He turned his back to her and concentrated on his telephone call. John Carrow was reporting the discovery in Yarchester of a post-graduate student, a man named Bradley, who admitted to being a friend of Gilbert Smith.

According to Bradley, Smith had arrived at his door the previous evening, looking ill and asking if he could spend the night on the floor of Bradley's bed-sit. He had declined to tell Bradley anything about himself, but he was very jumpy and kept fiddling with a couple of white objects that looked to Bradley like small pieces of bone. They had a meal and rolled a joint together, after which Smith looked more relaxed. He had left the next morning – that morning – at about ten o'clock, without saying where he was going, but he had mentioned during the course of the conversation that he might see Bradley at the weekend, at Oxlip Fair.

‘Mind you, I had to put the screws on Bradley to get that much out of him,' said Inspector Carrow with relish. He was a detective who, untypically, enjoyed the exercise of power; he reckoned that, with the city crime-detection rate currently standing at 45·34 per cent, and any villain therefore having more than half a chance of getting away with it, the law was entitled to show its teeth occasionally.

‘We're holding Bradley on two drugs charges,' he went on, ‘possession and supply of cannabis. I've told him that he's likely to get the maximum, fourteen years, for passing a joint to Smith, because that counts as supplying. He won't, of course, particularly as he's a first offender; it's more likely to be a fine and six months suspended; but he's afraid, and that's given me a bit of bargaining power. Trouble is, I think he really has told us all he knows about Smith. Thought I'd let you know, though, in case you want to have a word with him.'

Quantrill thought rapidly. Had Alison still been missing, he would already be on his way to Yarchester. Any connection, however tenuous, with Smith would seem to be a connection with her. He would gladly have spent the whole night with this man Bradley, going over the conversation he had had with Smith in an attempt to find some clue to the man's whereabouts.

But Alison was safe, and he had better things to do. He thanked Inspector Carrow and declined the invitation, watching Molly's face brighten as he did so.

‘It's all right, my dear,' he told her, determined to try to go slowly and smoothly and romantically, in the best Jasmine Woods tradition. ‘I'm not going to leave you tonight.'

Half an hour later they came jointly to the conclusion that they would be more comfortable in bed. He bolted the door while she put out the lights and then they crept upstairs, arms round each other, exaggeratedly quiet so as not to wake their son.

But in their bedroom, when he took her in his arms as a preliminary to removing the rest of her clothes, Molly sobered.

‘It's no good, Douggie,' she said, warding him off with her small hands splayed against his solid chest. ‘I can't. You know what'll happen. You're in the middle of a big case, and the phone's bound to ring. It'll be just like that awful time a couple of years ago … and I couldn't bear that again, I really couldn't—'

‘Don't worry,' said her husband boldly, kissing her again. ‘I'll soon fix that!'

For the next hour and thirty-five minutes, Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill's telephone number was unobtainable.

The village of Oxlip is in the Breckham Market divisional area, but the policing of the fair had gone far beyond divisional resources. The first fair, six years previously, had attracted a few thousand people to Oxlip. This year, 100,000 were expected.

The traffic police would be out in force to deal with the inevitable jams on the narrow roads that led to the village. The Yarchester drug squad would be there, with additional support from Ipswich. This year, the CID would be there in strength too. All police leave for the weekend had been cancelled. Oxlip Fair, in police vocabulary, had become two dirty words.

Even the organizers of the fair had, it seemed, had enough. Alarmed by its monstrous growth, they had publicly announced that this fair would be the last. They had described the first one as a spontaneous celebration of spring and the collective joy of individual creation, but the planning required to provide waste-disposal facilities and lavatories for 100,000 people had taken the joy and spontaneity out of it.

They were, however, determined to go out with a bang. This year's fair was going to be the best as well as the biggest. As usual, the theme was medieval. Spuriously, in the sense that everyone involved seemed to equate medieval with simple and uncommercial; apparently it did not occur to them that commerce was the lifeblood of the Middle Ages, as of any other period, and that medieval workers made leather hats and pottery not for the joy of creation, but because there was a demand for them.

The participants, however – because Oxlip Fair was essentially a join-in rather than a spectator event – loved what they thought of as the medieval flavour. The fair provided an annual opportunity for those who had opted out of conventional living to meet together and reaffirm their purpose, and for the more cowardly – or more prudent – who had stuck to their salaries and mortgages to taste an alternative way of life. At Oxlip they could identify with each other by wearing medieval costume. All stallholders and their assistants were required to wear it, and visitors were given an incentive to do so in the form of reduced admission charges.

Chief Inspector Quantrill, passing the entrance on a preliminary tour of the site, was mildly amused by the haggling that went on between visitors and those on gate duty as to whether everyday long skirts, or jeans cross-gartered with string, could be counted as medieval costume. Like the man who was given the allegedly simple job of separating the green apples from the red ones, the people on gate duty found themselves having to take decisions every time.

It was Quantrill's first visit to Oxlip Fair. He had never before had reason to attend on duty, and like any other native East Anglian he would not have thought of going there for pleasure.

Oxlip Fair was for outsiders. The organizers said that one of the motives in setting up the fair was to provide an opportunity for East Anglian craftsmen to meet and sell their wares, but local people disowned it. Oxlip Fair, in their opinion, was for townspeople playing at country life: for all the professional people and potters and painters and poets who had come flocking to the region during the past ten years to take advantage of the comparative cheapness of property. The only East Anglian accents to be heard were those of some of the police.

It had always been police policy, at the fair, to keep a low profile. The only real problem was with the traffic, and there were uniformed men in the road that ran past the site, at crossroads on the outskirts of the village, and on motor cycles further afield, trying to keep vehicles moving. There was usually little trouble on the site itself. A police caravan was parked just inside, near the entrance, and a couple of uniformed officers stood by it looking tolerant and amused, available if required to look after lost children or deal with emergencies, but interfering with no-one's pleasure.