A Talent For Destruction

by Sheila Radley

  There were no pubs in St Botolph’s, but in Duck End there was the Maltster’s Arms. Wigby turned his car, drove back to the roundabout, and took the narrow road that led directly into the old town. He reached Duck End with a minute to spare before opening time.

  Sebastopol Street, built by a brewer named Gosling in the middle years of the nineteenth century, had long since been declared unfit for human habitation. Many of the houses were empty, their doors and windows boarded up, but the remainder were inhabited by elderly owner-occupiers who eked out their lives there, plagued by cockroaches and damp and rheumatism. Smoke rose from their chimneys, and fire-ash lay pink on the snow outside their doors so as to give the residents a firmer footing when they ventured outside.

  As Wigby approached the door of the Maltster’s Arms, the bolts were being drawn. ‘’Morning, Mrs Phelps,’ he said jovially to the landlady.

  Alice Enid Phelps, licensed to sell beer, wines and spirits to be consumed on or off the premises, gave him a narrow stare. She was small and thin and grey, but her eyes were as sharp as her tongue.

  ‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re that policeman who came here upsetting my customers.’

  ‘That was eighteen months ago,’ Wigby protested.

  ‘I never forget a face.’

  She was in her middle sixties, a widow who had applied for the licence to be transferred to her after her husband’s death not because she drank or enjoyed company, but because the pub was both her home and her livelihood. The local brewery had been closed for thirty years and so the pub was a free house which, within the licensing laws, she ruled as she pleased.

  ‘The last time you came nosing round here,’ she continued, keeping him on the doorstep, ‘was when you were looking for poor old Mrs Bedingfield’s Reggie’s Kevin. But he wasn’t the one you were after, because he’s going straight. His Granny would never have had him to live with her otherwise, because this is a respectable neighbourhood, and I keep a respectable house and I want no policemen poking about here and upsetting my customers. What do you want, anyway?’

  Wigby blinked at her, moon-faced with assumed innocence. ‘I was hoping for a Guinness, and a bit of a warm-up. I’ve been on duty in Parson’s Close ever since daylight, and it’s stingy old weather out there.’

  ‘I keep no Guinness,’ she said. ‘There’s no call for it in Duck End.’

  ‘Mild, then?’ suggested Wigby. ‘A half would go down well.’

  She allowed him, grudgingly, into the only bar. It was a cheerless room, the wallpaper yellow with age and tidemarked with rising damp, the paintwork brown, the wooden settles as unwelcoming as chapel pews. Mrs Phelps’s only concession to her customers’ comfort was a small fire that oozed smoke from between the bars of a narrow Victorian grate.

  ‘Ah, that’s better.’ Wigby welcomed it with exaggerated, hand-toasting enthusiasm. ‘That’s what I needed, after searching Parson’s Close.’

  Mrs Phelps failed either to soften or to rise to his hint. She drew his beer, took his money and kept her mouth tight.

  ‘’Spect you’ve heard about the skeleton,’ he prompted.

  ‘Yes. But it’s nobody from hereabouts, that I do know. And there’s nothing any of my customers can tell you about it, so you’re wasting your time.’

  ‘You keep a good drop of beer, though,’ he told her.

  Mrs Phelps seemed not entirely displeased. ‘Well, you must stay if you want, I suppose. But I’ll thank you to keep yourself to yourself. And don’t sit near the fire, neither.’

  Wigby removed himself to a draughty bar stool, and watched as the seats at the table near the fire slowly filled up with regulars. There were half a dozen of them, old men in cloth caps and woollen scarves and layers of waistcoats and jackets and overcoats. They greeted the landlady respectfully as they crept in, and she replied with a nod and their names, at the same time drawing half a pint of their preferred drink and wordlessly exchanging it for their money.

  The old men’s morning ritual unfolded, beginning with talk of the weather and of the deaths that had been announced in that day’s local paper. DC Wigby, who had been given some wary glances at first, leaned silently on the bar and stared out of the window at a corner shop that had been closed for so long that it still bore on its walls a battered tin advertisement with the message, Rinso saves coal on washdays.

  Eventually the conversation turned to the discovery of the skeleton, but it seemed to arouse no great interest. The residents of Duck End were too old to be concerned with anything that did not touch their own lives. They knew that the bones were not those of a local man, and apart from expressing a certain amount of indignation that a stranger should choose Breckham Market to die in, they had little to say on the subject. One of them opened a box of dominoes, and they settled down to concentrate on their pastime.

  Wigby was about to drink up and go when the door opened again and another man came in, a hale sixty-five year old wearing a flat cap and a short motoring coat, but with cycle clips on his trousers.

  ‘Why, it’s the boy Walter!’ said one of the old men, and the atmosphere immediately brightened. Even Mrs Phelps permitted herself a smile of welcome. There was a good deal of chaffing, with the men addressing each other in the East Anglian way as ‘Bor’.

  The boy Walter, DC Wigby gathered, rented one of the allotments at the back of Duck End; born and brought up in the street, he now lived near the railway station. Evidently he made the Maltster’s Arms his headquarters during the gardening season, and liked to drop in occasionally during the winter. The bad weather had kept him away for weeks, and the regulars hailed him as the promise of spring.

  If Walter cycled from his home to his allotment, reasoned Wigby, visualizing the layout of the town, he probably approached the allotments from St Botolph Street, at the top end of Parson’s Close. He could be a useful man to talk to. Wigby sat tight, and bought a packet of peanuts to justify his continuing presence.

  Having greeted the old men individually, the boy Walter left them to their dominoes and went to the bar. He was a pensioner of a different generation, alert, well-fed, immensely good humoured; but Wigby knew better than to attempt to rush a Suffolk man by offering to buy him a drink before they had become acquainted.

  The detective waited until Walter had bought his own beer, and Mrs Phelps had retired to the back room, and then he gave the man a friendly nod: ‘’Morning.’

  Walter was non-committal: ‘How do.’

  ‘Real brass monkey weather, still.’

  This time Walter grinned. ‘Ar, that is. Better for getting about, though. First time I’ve been on the bike since afore Christmas.’

  ‘Do you come along St Botolph’s?’

  ‘Not today, not with snow on the ’lotments. Generally I do, though. Ar, I wouldn’t mind a pound note for every time I’ve biked along there.’

  Wigby knew that the expression was nothing more than a confirmation of the man’s acquaintance with the area; Walter would have been astonished and offended to be offered money. Instead, Wigby showed him his warrant card. ‘You’ve heard about the skeleton in Parson’s Close, I suppose?’ he asked.

  Walter nodded, his eyes rounding with interest. ‘How did that come to be there?’ he demanded.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. For a start, I want to know who it was. We know it was a tall chap, early twenties, died last summer. He wore a big silver ring on his left hand. Can you remember if you saw anyone like that, on your way to or from your allotment?’

  Walter shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t recall seeing anybody – any stranger, that is. There was a tent, though, in Parson’s Close last summer. Just one, a little orange thing, up near the trees. You couldn’t see it from St Botolph’s because of the fence, but I saw it from my ‘lotment. I thought it must belong to the Australian.’

  ‘What Australian?’

  ‘Why, the one with the car. I didn’t ever see anybody in it, but the car was parked along St Botolph’s at the top
end of Parson’s Close most of the time in the early part of last summer. It was a Jap car, a Datsun like my son’s, but there was a sticker saying Australia in the back window.’

  ‘Did you notice the number of the car? Or any part of the number?’

  Walter pushed back his cap and scratched the top of his greying head. ‘No, I didn’t take that much interest. I knew it was a Datsun from the shape, same as my son’s. His’n’s yellow, though. This one was red.’

  ‘And it was there in the early part of the summer, you say?’

  ‘Ar. I noticed it first in April, time I was putting in my peas. It was parked there on and off for a month or two, and then it seemed to be there all the time until we went on our holiday.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Beginning of August. Me and the missus go to a caravan at Yarmouth with my daughter and her family for the first full week in August every year. We got back home on the Saturday and I biked up to the ‘lotment after tea, just to see how everything was doing. And I remember noticing that the car wasn’t there, nor yet the tent. I never saw the car or the tent after that.’

  Chapter Six

  Wigby bought the boy Walter a beer, and left. He drove into the centre of the town and went to one of his regular pubs, the Boot, for a small Guinness to wash down the Maltster’s peanuts. There was a good deal of speculation in the bar about the identity of the Parson’s Close skeleton, but no one had met or heard of an Australian in the town the previous summer. Wigby moved on, this time walking up to St Botolph’s parish hall, just behind the church. He had been there the previous day, when he made the initial investigation of the damage that had been done at the youth club meeting.

  ‘Morning, Mr Blore. How’s it going?’

  The caretaker of the hall, who was also the verger of the church, was a thin man in a zippered fawn cardigan, with mournful eyes and an anxiously neat moustache. He switched off his electric floor polisher and showed the detective constable what he had done to make the hall usable.

  ‘As you see, I’m getting the place clean and straight. But as for the actual damage …’ Heartbroken, he gestured to the shattered windows that he had blocked with hardboard, the broken legs of the table tennis table, the smashed stereo speakers. ‘It’s the waste of it all, Mr Wigby, the wicked waste …’

  Wigby commiserated with him and agreed with his strictures on the irresponsibility of youth, although he personally believed it to be a natural and healthy state. He was proud of having once been a holy terror. In his opinion, a boy who had never had the guts to buck authority would be too spineless to make an effective copper; and a boy who hadn’t got the sense to conceal his misdemeanours wouldn’t know how to start being a detective.

  ‘What I came to tell you,’ Wigby said, interrupting the verger’s woeful recital, ‘is that a sergeant from Yarchester is coming to do the investigation. He’ll be in to see you this afternoon. We can’t do it ourselves – it’s a bit awkward, with the DCI’s boy belonging to the youth club.’

  The verger nodded sadly. He led the way into the kitchen and switched on the electric kettle. ‘I’d never have thought it of young Peter Quantrill, not with his Dad a Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter who their Dads are,’ snorted Wigby. ‘Makes’em worse, sometimes. Doesn’t matter who anybody is, we’re all human.’

  Edgar Blore looked as though he would like to deny it, but Wigby led him on to the subject of the skeleton and asked whether he had seen either the tent in Parson’s Close, or the red Datsun with the Australia sticker in St Botolph’s Street, the previous summer.

  ‘A tent? That’s news to me.’ The verger picked up a damp-dry tea-bag from the saucer where he had parked it after an earlier brew-up, and made an insipid cup of tea. He offered it to Wigby, who declined it promptly.

  ‘The Rector never said anything about anyone camping in the meadow,’ went on Edgar Blore, returning the wrinkled corpse of the tea-bag to the saucer for further use, ‘but then he might not know about it either. That’s what I said to Mrs Blore this morning, when I read the piece in the paper: for all it’s Parson’s Close, anything could happen there without Mr Ainger’s knowledge. It’s my belief that the skeleton must have got there from the by-pass. It’s nothing to do with Breckham at all.‘

  ‘What about the car, then?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mr Wigby, I don’t go along St Botolph’s very often. I see the Rector a great deal, of course. This is a very busy parish and I try to help him as much as I can, but I usually see him either here or in the church. I try not to bother him at the Rectory, and when I do have to go there I’ve got too much on my mind to take any notice of parked cars.’

  ‘Well then, did you see a stranger about here last summer?’ Wigby began to describe the dead man, but the verger held up a mildly reproachful hand.

  ‘Come, come, that’s asking the impossible. We get no end of strangers visiting the church in the summer – we’re a tourist attraction here at St Botolph’s, you know. There’s no time to take notice of what they look like.’

  ‘What about what they sound like?’ said Wigby. ‘This man might have been Australian.’

  ‘Australia, America, Scandinavia – they come from all over. No, I’m sorry Mr Wigby but I can’t help you.’ He rinsed out his cup, put it upside down on the drainer and looked at his watch. ‘You must excuse me, but we’ve got a funeral at twelve. I must go and set out the bier.’

  He moved away, and then remembered something. ‘Wait a minute, though. There was an Australian girl about here last summer. A friend of Mrs Ainger. Spent a lot of time at the Rectory. Not that I saw her myself, except once in church, but my wife saw her several times. Mrs Blore helps at the Rectory two mornings a week, and she said that the girl lived there for most of July, before she went off on her travels again. Perhaps she had some connection with this man you’re talking about.’

  ‘It’s worth following up. Thanks for the information, Mr Blore. We’ll talk to Mrs Ainger, then.’

  The verger looked worried, in a protective way. ‘She’ll be over in the new town today, at the community centre. It’s one of her busiest days – but I think it would be more considerate if you were to see her there rather than at the Rectory. Mrs Blore and I often say that Mr and Mrs Ainger get no peace at home. There’s always somebody bothering them about something, wanting them to witness wills or sign passport applications or give character references, and ninety per cent of them aren’t even churchgoers.’

  DC Wigby, one of the ninety per cent, went away well satisfied with the progress of his enquiries. He knew that the Chief Inspector was in touch with the Aingers, and would want to do the follow-up himself; but with a skeleton as subject, there was no need to report back in a hurry. The DCI had told him to find out what was being said in the town, and it was a pity to waste good drinking time. Wigby moved across the road to the Coney and Thistle, and ordered the other half of his Guinness.

  The customers at the Coney had several improbable and ribald theories about the origin of the skeleton, but no one seemed to know anything about the tall man with the ring, the red Datsun or the tent in Parson’s Close. Wigby congratulated himself on his strategy. He’d certainly ferreted out as much information as that jumped-up Sergeant Tait – an Inspector now, dammit – could have done, for all Tait’s university and police college background. Experience was worth ten times more than paper qualifications and he, Wigby, had been a detective while Master Tait was still at school.

  He finished his drink and returned to the station, anticipating Chief Inspector Quantrill’s approval. But he was too late.

  ‘The Rector’s already been to see me,’ said Quantrill. ‘He came soon after you left this morning. He thinks the skeleton may belong to an Australian who camped on and off last summer in Parson’s Close.’

  ‘I’ve been wasting me time, then,’ complained Wigby, crestfallen.

  ‘Not the way it smells from here. Besides, you’ve told me a couple of intere
sting things the Rector didn’t mention. We won’t make any more enquiries until I’ve cleared them up with him, so you’ll be free to brief Sergeant Tuckswood on the church hall incident as soon as he arrives from Yarchester. Give him whatever help he needs – short of driving for him. I don’t want him going back to HQ saying that Breckham CID needs breathalyzing.’

  The February sun was low and watery but at least it was doing its best, and for the first time since the snow had begun Chief Inspector Quantrill went out voluntarily, just before twelve, for an hour’s walk through the town. It was something he always enjoyed: an opportunity to get away from his desk, to clear his head and to keep in touch with the everyday life of Breckham.

  It was market day, and the town was busier than usual; certainly busier than it had been during the weeks of snow and ice, when the shoppers had been unable to come in from the surrounding villages. Cold as it still was, the contrast with the preceding weeks was so great that people paused in the streets to chat as though it were spring. The main roads and pavements were clear, although wet and dirty, but the grey remains of the snow still blocked the gutters.

  The funeral bell was tolling as Quantrill passed the church, its muffled clang sounding out high above the market place while the buying and selling and talking and chaffing, and the frying and munching at the fish-and-chip van, went on exactly as usual. This higgledy-piggledy juxtaposition of church and market was a part of country town living that he particularly valued: the in-the-midstof-death-we-are-in-life factor that reminded people of their own mortality but prevented them from being permanently overawed by the inevitability of it.

  He edged across the market place through a narrow passage between crates of cabbage and a rail of outsize crimplene dresses in pastel colours, and then stood for a few moments with his back to the massive oak corner post of the medieval Coney and Thistle, observing the scene. The church was just across the road, rising high from its walled churchyard in which the ground had been lifted by generations of unmarked burials. A cemetery had been established on the outskirts of the town in the late nineteenth century, and so St Botolph’s churchyard, no longer used, was still white with untouched snow.