The Chief Inspector's Daughter (7 page)

‘Certainly.' She had a richly beautiful voice; a striking woman, Quantrill thought, if only she were not determined to make the worst of her appearance. ‘And if I hadn't been a committed feminist before, I'd have become one as soon as I discovered that I had a romantic novelist as a neighbour.'

‘You don't seem to mind coming round to see me, much as you dislike my books.'

‘That's because I haven't entirely given up hope of persuading you to join the women's movement.'

‘Never. I don't believe in quarrelling with the source of my income.'

‘And
that's
what's so infuriating about you! If you were stupid enough to believe in what you write, I wouldn't mind so much; but you know perfectly well that it's rubbish. That means that you're deliberately exploiting your readers.'

Quantrill stared uneasily at Roz Elliott. He had never before been at a party where the guests seemed to regard it as a duty to insult their hostess. He thought that it was time he took his daughter home, but she was engrossed in the duologue; like a Wimbledon spectator at a Centre Court rally, she hardly dared to blink for fear of missing something.

It was apparent to Alison that, with the Elliotts as neighbours, Jasmine Woods must come under regular verbal attack. Her hostess seemed to enjoy it, and to be perfectly capable of defending herself, but on hearing Roz Elliott denounce the Jasmine Woods canon as rubbish, Alison intervened.

‘The books aren't rubbish!' she said indignantly. ‘They're interesting and colourful and exciting … I enjoy them.'

Jasmine Woods gave her a friendly smile. ‘Thank you for that unsolicited testimonal. You see, Roz? Alison doesn't feel in the least exploited.'

‘Oh, for God's sake—' Roz Elliott pushed her hair off her forehead in a gesture of exasperation. She gave the girl a stern glance, but spoke to Jasmine Woods. ‘Isn't this exactly the trouble with the great majority of women? They're so conditioned to accept their traditional role in society that they're incapable of questioning, let alone challenging, your kind of fiction. I loathe romantic novels because they perpetuate so many silly myths and give impressionable girls so many false expectations. It's completely cynical of you, Jasmine, to encourage girls to believe that love is the answer to everything, and that getting married solves problems by automatically ensuring a happy ending.'

The verbal battle continued, with Roz Elliott vigorously reinforcing her assertions about social conditioning, much of which she blamed on the influence of romantic novelists, and condemning the oppression of women, for which she appeared to hold Jasmine Woods personally responsible.

The writer defended herself with weary good humour, pointing out that the immemorial propensity of young people to fall in love and get married could hardly be blamed on romantic novels. People do, after all, she said, grow up in and among families; they see for themselves how difficult family relationships can be, and how many marriages fail. And yet they persist in getting married, because they believe that things will be different with them. Hope, she asserted, of an eventual happy ending is the supreme motivation without which life for many women might not seem worth living.

It was, quite clearly, ground which the two of them had covered before.

As soon as he could decently interrupt, Quantrill made getting-away noises. Jasmine Woods walked with him to the hall, explaining that she had arranged for Alison to see her the following day to discuss the possibility of a job. Quantrill was delighted. Having taken against Jasmine Woods sight unseen, he now found himself liking her; the more so as the other guests he had met had behaved so bitchily. She made him feel protective. Besides, he agreed with her about the importance of hope; in his job, he saw too often how the loss of it could ruin lives, and not just those of women.

While Alison was putting on her coat, the bell rang. Jasmine Woods opened the door. A couple stood on the step, an attractive fine-featured blonde girl in her mid-twenties, dressed in high boots and a long suede fur-lined coat, and a man a few years older.

‘Hallo, Jasmine,' said the girl in a quick, light, slightly breathless voice.

Jasmine Woods looked completely surprised. ‘Anne – my dear. How lovely to see you.'

Alison recognized the girl immediately as the writer's ex-secretary and felt, ridiculously, the pinch of jealousy. She had already begun to imagine herself in that role, and she was afraid that Anne Downing might have come to reclaim her job.

Jasmine Woods seemed to be equally unsure of the purpose of Anne's visit; she looked pleased to see her, but wary. She stepped back, inviting the couple in, and Anne drew her escort forward. He was tall and broad and tweedy, with a healthy red outdoor face. When he took off his flat cap he revealed a high, prematurely balding forehead that was in strangely white contrast to his weathered cheeks. A farmer, Quantrill guessed. He looked honest and shy and proud and pleased, and a little bewildered.

Anne Downing stood with her left hand tucked possessively through the crook of his arm, and the light from the hall winkled out flashes of brilliance from the half-hoop of diamonds and sapphires on her finger. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes shone. ‘This', she announced, ‘is my fiancé, Oliver Buxton. We knew each other years ago, then lost touch. But we met again last month, and we're getting married at Easter.'

‘Married – how wonderful for you!' Jasmine Woods stretched out her arms to take the girl by the shoulders and give her a warm, impulsive kiss. Anne released her fiancé for long enough to return her ex-employer's embrace, and then immediately seized his arm again as though it were a lifebelt.

‘Oliver farms in Norfolk,' she said, ‘and I'm staying with him and his parents at the moment, so I probably shan't see you again before the wedding. We drove over this evening to have dinner with Oliver's uncle in Breckham Market, and as we were so near I simply had to call. You'll get a proper invitation to the wedding, of course, but I wanted to tell you about it in person. You'll come, I hope?'

‘If I can, certainly. I do wish you both every happiness.' Jasmine Woods offered her congratulations to Buxton, then spoke again to his fiancée. ‘I'd like you to meet Alison Quantrill and her father. Alison may well be taking your old job—'

Introductions over, the women began to talk to each other in rapid, heightened voices as women do, Quantrill thought, when discussing emotional subjects like weddings. He turned to Oliver Buxton who stood tongue-tied, milking his cap with bucolic hands.

‘Well, congratulations,' said Quantrill heartily. Despite his own imperfectly rewarding experience, he was not cynical about marriage as an institution. ‘She's a very attractive girl.'

‘Isn't she?' Buxton's high-rise forehead had become pink and sweaty with joyful embarrassment. ‘I can hardly believe my luck, I can tell you. I just hope that she'll be happy with me on the farm. I know that she misses her job here already, but it's much too far for her to travel every day.'

At that moment Alison, having said good-bye to her hostess, ran up and – unusually – caught at her father's arm. Her eyes, like Anne's, shone with happiness. ‘I've got it!' she whispered exultantly. ‘I'll still have to come and see Jasmine tomorrow to finalize it, but from what she's told Anne there isn't much doubt that I've got the job!'

On Monday 6 April, at approximately 9.25 a.m., Alison Quantrill arrived on her bicycle at Yeoman's, Thirling, near Breckham Market, where she worked as secretary to the novelist, Jasmine Woods. Alison Quantrill had been employed in this capacity since the 20th February. She cycled daily from her home, 5 Benidorm Avenue, Breckham Market, and it was her usual practice to leave the bicycle in one of the outbuildings near the drive gate, and then to walk up to the house, ring the front-door bell twice, and go straight in.

On the 6th April she followed this practice, leaving her coat in the downstairs cloakroom and then going to the office, which was also on the ground floor. She was not aware of anything unusual. Sometimes her employer would already be at work in the office, but if she were not there Alison Quantrill would continue with whatever audio-typing or proof-reading she had on hand.

At approximately 10.30 a.m., at which time Jasmine Woods usually made coffee for them both, Alison Quantrill became concerned that her employer had not appeared. She went into the hall, called and listened, but could hear no sounds from any other part of the house. She opened the door to the sitting-room, and found that the curtains were closed over the windows. This was unusual. She drew back the curtains and knew immediately, without consciously noting why, that the room had been disturbed in some way. Then she saw some clothing scattered on the floor. She went towards it, and saw the body of her employer.

Jasmine Woods was lying on the floor behind a sofa. The body was partly clothed and on its side, with one knee drawn up. The right side of the skull had been crushed, and a broken Loire wine bottle lay eighteen inches away. A further bottle, intact, had been used as an instrument of rape.

A 999 call was made from the Yeoman's number. The caller was male. He declined to identify himself. The call was logged by the police at 11.24 and a patrol car reached the house at 11.32.

When Chief Inspector Quantrill arrived at Yeoman's six minutes later he found his daughter crouched in the orchard, sobbing and retching among the daffodils, and the first thing he did was to take her home.

The narrow country road that passed the gate of Yeoman's was partially obstructed by police cars. Quantrill, returning after taking Alison home, edged his big Austin close to a hawthorn hedge that bristled with a four-day green beard. He nodded to the uniformed constable on traffic and gate duty, and strode past some brick outbuildings and on up the drive towards the house.

Yeoman's was of typically Suffolk construction: timber framed, with the timbers – unlike those of equally old houses in the more decadent Home Counties – decently covered by an all-over cladding of pink-washed plaster. Massive brick chimney stacks buttressed the house at either end. The roof was thatched with reed that rose – as the Suffolk voice rises at the end of each sentence – to form a snout of thatch above each gable.

Untypically, the property was in immaculate condition. Thatch and plaster are ruinously expensive to maintain, and neglect soon shows. The thatch becomes colonized by birds and rodents; the lime plaster cracks and peels to expose walls made of clay lump, that friable pudding mixture of rubble and horse hair and clay and straw which was for centuries the basic East Anglian building material. But at Yeoman's the thatch was thick and trim and the plaster – coloured a delicate magnolia pink rather than the commoner strawberry-ice-cream shade – unblemished.

Detective Sergeant Tait, who was examining the exterior of the window to the right of the front door, looked up as Quantrill approached.

‘How's Alison, sir?' he asked sympathetically.

‘Under sedation by now, I hope. She's thoroughly shocked, poor child.'

‘No wonder, if she saw that body.' Tait looked paler and a good deal more subdued than usual. With reason, Quantrill remembered; Tait had at one time fancied his chances with Jasmine Woods. Seeing her murdered body must have shaken him up. It wasn't a duty that Quantrill himself was looking forward to, either.

Tait wiped his hand over his mouth and made an obvious effort to revert to his usual briskness. ‘Was Alison able to tell you anything?'

‘Nothing coherent. Understandably – she was fond of the woman. She used to talk at home about Jasmine Woods until we were sick of the sound of the name, so she's bound to be in a bad way. I've left a policewoman with her to take a statement as soon as she's up to giving it. Still, this is one case where we've plenty of information before we start.' The Chief Inspector peered at the window that Tait had been examining. ‘A break-in, was it? Someone after her collection?'

‘The display case is broken open and the jade and netsuke have gone,' Tait confirmed, ‘but nothing else has been disturbed and there's no sign of a forced entry into the house. Presumably she opened the door to her killer, and the injuries suggest that it was a man. Rigor seems to be complete, by the way. Until the pathologist pins down the time of death I'm working on the hypothesis that it was yesterday.'

‘Sounds reasonable. Sunday … and it must have been someone she knew, or she wouldn't have let him in to the house.'

‘One thing's for sure,' said Tait. ‘It was done by someone who really hated her.'

‘You can never be sure of that,' argued Quantrill. ‘Murder's often done in blind panic – the first blow may be intended just to keep the victim quiet, but then the attacker loses his head completely. That's what's so terrifying about violence; it fuels itself. You can't assume that hatred is a motive.'

‘You haven't seen the body yet,' Tait said grimly. ‘Wait until you see what he did to her.'

Quantrill looked, and was appalled. He had seen death – and death by violence – often enough in his career to think himself incapable of being shocked by it, but this one was different; more vicious than any murder he had ever seen. That the victim was a woman he knew compounded the horror. He blinked as the photographer's busy flash illuminated the corpse; and swallowed down his nausea.
God help her, poor woman … and that child Alison, who had seen her friend like this
…

‘Nasty one, eh chief?' said an abominably cheerful voice.

Keith Pulham, the duty divisional scene-of-crime officer, was a blond round-cheeked young civilian whose teenage ambition to join the force had been frustrated by his failure – despite his surreptitious enrolment for a postal body-building course – to grow an extra two and a half inches in height. Now, after a period of training at a forensic science laboratory, he held an appointment that gave him all the immediate technical interest of detective work with none of the foot-slogging enquiry routine, and he was as happy and eager as a newly trained police dog. While he waited for the arrival of Inspector Colman and the serious crimes team from Yarchester, Pulham padded round the periphery noting the whereabouts of every one of the far-flung spots of blood on the walls and furniture.