The Chief Inspector's Daughter (6 page)

‘Do you like being a detective?' she asked.

‘Of course. I wouldn't do it otherwise.'

‘That's what I thought. Isn't it depressing, though, dealing with the unpleasant side of life all the time? Always analysing people's motives, and thinking the worst of them?'

Tait gave her an indulgent smile. ‘Try thinking of it in terms of keeping the Queen's peace,' he advised. ‘It's much more picturesque that way.'

She shook her head. ‘It makes you cynical,' she said.

‘Some of us were born cynical.'

‘That's a pity,' said a gentle masculine voice. A man who had been easing his way through the noisy crush near the bottle table paused beside them with a vague, amiable smile. He wore a denim jacket over a T-shirt, and jeans that were pale with wear at the knees and on the seams. He was taller than Tait, but stooping, with long fine light brown hair that flowed and mingled with his long fine beard. His eyelids were puffy, his eyeballs reddened, his eyes distant, dream-faded blue.

‘I'm Jasmine's gardener.' He spoke slowly, and his smile lingered as though he were enjoying some private vision. ‘If she were here she'd introduce me as an old friend, so perhaps I can lay claim to being both. But cynical I'm not … I have too great an awareness of the harmony and rhythms of nature for that.'

Tait gave him a long, cool look. ‘Oh yes?' he said. He was about to draw Alison away from the man's company, but she had begun to ask about the garden; Tait listened for a moment, heard him rambling innocuously about organic methods, saw that Jasmine Woods had gone to change a record, and took the opportunity to join her.

She looked glad to see him. She had just put on a Lloyd Webber record, full of electronic vitality and contrasting woodwind lyricism, and one of her guests, a thick-set dark-bearded man, tried to persuade her to dance. She laughed and shook her head and answered Tait's question instead.

‘My gardener? Oh, that's Gilbert – Gilbert Smith, an old friend. We were at university together, until he dropped out. Gardening suits him much better. He's a nice, gentle soul – a poet.'

Tait was neither surprised nor impressed. ‘He lives locally, I imagine?'

‘At the end of my garden, actually – we converted a loft over the garage into living quarters for him. I saw him quite by chance last year, trying to sell leather belts and purses at Oxlip Fair – you know, the Easter holiday medieval junket. I went out of curiosity, and it was enormous fun anyway, but seeing Gilbert again was a real bonus. He was living in a slummy part of Yarchester at the time, so I offered him a roof in return for help with my two acres, and the arrangement has worked beautifully.'

‘Hmm,' said Tait. He had heard about Oxlip Fair. There was more than one thick file on it at Divisional Headquarters, and preparations were already under way for the policing of the next fair. Beginning a few years previously as a small open-air crafts market, it had established itself as a major regional Bank Holiday event with a distinctive pseudo-medieval flavour. It attracted great crowds of spectators, to the harassment of the traffic division. It also, Tait had been told by his jaundiced colleagues, attracted every druggy, drop-out and weirdo in eastern England; so many of them openly smoked pot at the fair that the police couldn't hope to pick up more than a token number.

‘I see—' said Tait.

Jasmine Woods's smile faded. ‘You're not going to go all official on Gilbert, I hope?' she said warily.

‘Not at a private party, of course not. But I've seen enough of the effects of cannabis to be fairly sure that he's on it, and I can hardly socialize with a man I suspect of committing a criminal offence. I'm sorry, Jasmine, but I'll have to pass his name to the drug squad, and I'm afraid that the fact that he's living on your premises could put you in a difficult position. He's probably growing cannabis in your greenhouse, have you thought of that?'

‘He's doing nothing of the kind,' she said with some asperity. ‘Not that I'd recognize a cannabis plant if I saw one, but I'm interested in gardening and I do know what tomatoes and courgettes look like!'

‘But can you guarantee that he
isn't
growing it, in some quiet corner of your garden? Don't risk it, Jasmine, your name's too well-known; if Smith's picked up and charged, the fact that he lives here will put the report of the case on the front page of the local paper, and probably some of the national dailies as well.'

‘
Romantic novelist harbours drug user?
' she suggested wryly.

‘Something like that. If I were you, I'd tell him that if he can't kick the habit, he'll have to go. And I'd do it soon.'

She looked at him: squarely, thoughtfully. ‘I'd hoped that we were going to become friends, Martin,' she said, ‘but I see now that you really don't know what friendship is. For me, it entails loyalty. Like you, I suspect that Gilbert smokes pot; I don't know for sure, because I don't enquire. I'm fond of him, and I'd much prefer it if he didn't feel the need for drugs, but it was precisely because I was worried about him that I brought him here in the first place. He was adrift, insecure – inadequate, I suppose. And some of the people he knew in Yarchester were junkies, he told me that. I was afraid that if he stayed with them he would be tempted to turn to hard drugs himself. As it is, he's busy and useful and happy here, and I certainly wouldn't dream of throwing him out and putting him at risk again. After all, smoking pot is acknowledged to be a relatively harmless pastime, and we're all entitled to our private pleasures. If Gilbert chooses to smoke it occasionally, in the privacy of his own flat, then I don't consider that it's any of my business.'

‘It happens to be against the law,' pointed out Tait.

‘Then perhaps it's time that particular law was amended. I'm sure that half the kick that kids get when they start experimenting with soft drugs comes from the knowledge that it's illegal. And there's nothing they enjoy more than an opportunity to flout authority.'

‘Arguably. But my job is to enforce the law as it is, regardless of my personal opinion. As it happens, I disagree that pot smoking is harmless. Addiction to cannabis is known to inhibit the user's sense of responsibility. It makes it much harder for him to resist temptation – sooner or later he's almost certain to try hard drugs. And if you'd heard as much as I have about people who started on cannabis and ended as heroin addicts, you wouldn't take such an indulgent view—'

He'd blown his chances completely now, of course: impossible to argue about law and ethics with your hostess at a party, and to point an official finger at one of her friends, yet still expect her to be prepared to go to bed with you. Imprudent, anyway, for a future chief constable to establish a liaison with a woman he knew to be harbouring a suspected criminal offender.

A great pity … Of course, there was now Alison as a possibility, but he'd have to go carefully there. It wouldn't do to upset the old man, or to let Mrs Quantrill imagine that she could hear wedding bells. Well, perhaps if he tried a different technique with Sally from the garage …

‘Sorry about the lecture, Jasmine,' he apologized, ‘but do think about what I said, in Smith's interests as well as your own.' He looked at his watch. ‘Actually I'll have to go now – I'm on duty tonight. My boss, Alison's father, will be calling to take her home.' He looked for the girl across the room, saw with relief that she had left Smith and was now sharing a bowl of peanuts with Heather Pardoe, caught her eye, pointed to his watch and waved good-bye. ‘Thank you for a splendid party,' he told his hostess.

She smiled, with only a little less warmth than when he had arrived. ‘I'm glad you could come. And thank you for bringing Alison – I'm delighted to have met her.'

The doorbell rang, and Tait on his way out was able to introduce Quantrill on his way in. He would have liked to be able to drop a hint to the Chief Inspector about the potential awkwardness of the Gilbert Smith situation, but there was no opportunity. Well, if Quantrill met the man he would draw his own conclusions.

But Quantrill was interested only in collecting his daughter, and incidentally taking stock of Jasmine Woods. He saw that Alison was talking happily to a motherly woman, and turned his attention to the writer. From the paragraph of her book that he had read over his wife's shoulder, he had expected Jasmine Woods to be foolishly soft and blonde and eager and cuddly, a pushover for a practised young man like Tait. He was surprised to find that she looked and sounded quite different.

She insisted on giving him a glass of wine. Quantrill, no wine drinker, commented gallantly on the attractiveness of its colour.

‘Pretty pink plonk,' sneered a fierce deep voice at his shoulder. He looked down to see a small man with a large head helping himself from what appeared to be his personal bottle. It was two-thirds empty.

Jasmine Woods introduced her cousin, Rodney Gifford. He had a wrinkled forehead, a wide mouth and large ears that protruded through his long wavy gingerish hair, giving him the appearance of a middle-aged leprechaun. He was dressed in a badly fitting suit which, from the narrow cut of the lapels and trousers, must have been at least ten years old; the cuffs of his pale green drip-dry nylon shirt were discoloured with wear. ‘Pretty pink plonk,' he repeated angrily, gulping it down.

Jasmine Woods raised her glass to the light, as she had done when Alison spoke favourably about the colour of the wine, but this time she gave her own opinion. ‘Pretty, Rodney? Oh no! Come now, you're a writer – a better writer than I am. And you're too exact an observer to dismiss this pink as “pretty”. It has too dark an undertone for that. It always reminds me of watered-down blood.'

Douglas Quantrill was surprised. It was not, he felt, a suitable comparison for a romantic novelist to make. Jasmine Woods saw his frown and smiled at him. ‘Sorry,' she said, ‘but that's the way my mind works. You mustn't be misled by the kind of books I write – they're not the real me at all. I'm not romantic, I'm a realist; that's why I write romance, because it pays.'

‘Prostituting yourself to a genre,' growled Rodney Gifford fiercely. His cousin shrugged, smiled at Quantrill and moved away to talk to someone else. Gifford refilled his glass. ‘Contemptible, don't you think,' he demanded of Quantrill, ‘to write books she despises simply for the sake of money?'

Quantrill had come to the party prepared to dislike Jasmine Woods, but he found that his dislike was rapidly being transferred to her sozzled cousin. ‘We all have to earn a living,' he pointed out, ‘and a lot of us find ourselves doing it in ways that can be distasteful. I wouldn't dream of criticizing your cousin for what she does – and I most certainly wouldn't do so at her party. What's more—' he sipped his wine cautiously, found that it didn't mix with the half-pint of Adnams he'd had at the Plough and Gull on his way through Thirling, and crunched a couple of cheesy biscuits to take away the taste ‘—I'm damned if I'd drink her wine
and
sneer at it.'

But Rodney Gifford seemed not to hear. He waved his almost-empty bottle. ‘It's deliberate, you know,' he said belligerently, ‘giving us this pink swill. It's a calculated insult to our judgement, just like the new book she expects us to celebrate. After all, she could be a proper writer if she tried. She's got the ability to write real novels, but she doesn't because she knows they wouldn't make her enough money. She's not prepared to write about real life because she's not prepared to be poor. She's a hedonist. She's never suffered, that's her trouble.' He made a sudden, vicious gesture with the bottle. ‘A bit of suffering would do cousin Jasmine a world of good.'

Quantrill stared down at him with distaste. ‘Do you live far away?' he demanded.

The man blinked and swayed. ‘Yarchester. Why?'

‘Because you're obviously not fit to drive home.'

Gifford laughed, with anger rather than amusement. ‘Drive, me? How in heaven's name do you imagine I could afford to run a car? I'm the beggar of the family – a better writer than Jasmine, as she so kindly says, and an honest one. I always write what I believe in, and so I don't make money. I'm here only because Jasmine arranged for the Pardoes to give me a lift. Ducky of her, wasn't it?'

Quantrill looked at the long-necked bottle which Gifford was upending unsteadily above his glass. Jasmine Woods was right, he decided, as he watched the last few drops trickle out; the wine did look remarkably like watered-down blood.

‘At least you'll get something out of the evening,' he said coldly, ‘even if it's only a headache.' He turned away and accidentally jolted a woman's arm, spilling her wine over her hand; he began to apologize for his clumsiness, and offered his handkerchief, but she declined it and flicked the wine off carelessly.

‘No gallantry required,' advised Jasmine Woods, who had been talking to the woman. ‘That's right, isn't it, Roz?'

She introduced him to Roz Elliott, a big square handsome woman in her late thirties with thick, rough-cut auburn hair. She wore shabby leather knee-boots, a billowing dun-coloured calf-length skirt, and a patterned blouse that looked like an Indian peasant's cast-off. Quantrill would not have been able, if asked, to define ethnic, but in terms of dress he recognized it when he saw it.

Alison, having heard her father's voice, joined the group. Jasmine Woods repeated the introduction.

‘Are you Mrs Jonathan Elliott?' the girl asked. ‘I met your husband a few moments ago.'

Roz Elliott's strong-boned unpainted face looked disapproving; her untrimmed eyebrows rose to conceal themselves under her wilting-chrysanthemum fringe. ‘No,' she said firmly, ‘I am not Mrs Jonathan Elliott.'

‘Oh come off it …' Jasmine Woods told her pleasantly. ‘You're married to the man – that's all Alison wanted to know. Roz,' she explained to Quantrill and his daughter, ‘is liberated. Aren't you, love?'