Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  He dodged impatiently between a chemical tanker and a refrigerated TIR truck with a Dutch registration and strode, ruffled, through the main doors. The desk sergeant, a prematurely grey forty-year-old, heaved himself to his feet. ‘’Morning, sir.’

  ‘’Morning, Larry. Get the cleaner to brush those steps down, will you? Wretched blossom makes the place look like a register office.’

  ‘Right, sir. How did it go in court this morning?’

  Quantrill cheered up. ‘Remanded in custody for a week,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Just what we wanted—get word through to Inspector Howell, will you? And when you’ve a man to spare, send him to take a look at the damage that’s been done to the children’s playground in the park. Oh, and tell him that it wouldn’t hurt to find out what Bert Framsden’s youngest and his mate have been up to recently. Is the new Ds in, by the way?’

  ‘Out on enquiries.’ Sergeant Lamb, who had taken a dislike to the new detective long before he met him, drew himself up and began to enunciate in his best courtroom manner: ‘When last seen, Detective Sergeant Tait was proceeding in the direction of a pig farm, wearing a pink suit with flared trousers and a pair of shoes with heels this high.’

  Quantrill’s thick dark eyebrows shot up an astounded inch, and Sergeant Lamb amended the gap between his out-stretched finger and thumb. ‘Well, this high, anyway. But the suit’s definitely pinkish.’

  A slow, countryman’s grin spread over Quantrill’s face. ‘And going to a pig farm, was he?’ he chuckled. Then he checked himself. ‘Now hold hard,’ he said severely, ‘we’ve got to give this chap a fair deal. Oh, I know it gets up your nose when a man’s given rank before he’s got the sense to keep his feet dry. How long did it take you to make sergeant?’

  ‘Seven years, sir,’ said Lamb gloomily, ‘and that was six years ago …’ He was up for the next promotion board, but was not confident.

  ‘Only seven?’ asked Quantrill briskly. ‘You’ve been quick, man! It was ten before they made me up, and then another eight before I got as far as inspector. You and I are doing it the hard way. But Tait won’t have had it easy, you know. The selection board’s tough, I hear, and Bramshill’s tougher. If he’s survived that, he’s got all the right qualities. What he needs now is experience, and that’s what he’s here for—and it’s up to us to help him. He’s not used to the country, so if you see him making an obvious mistake, give him a bit of friendly advice. Don’t wait to laugh behind his back—lend the man a pair of rubber boots if you know he’s going to need them.’

  ‘Sir,’ agreed Lamb, subdued. ‘He’s not easy to talk to, though.’

  ‘Well, try a bit harder.’ snapped Quantrill. ‘You’re the same rank, aren’t you? Have a bit of friendly conversation. You don’t have to treat him like a lord, just because he’s been to university and police college—but neither is there any call for you to go needling him deliberately. Treat him as you would any other new sergeant, and we’ll see what he’s like when he’s had time to find his feet. Right?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘All right, then. Send him up when he comes in, will you, Larry, I’d better have a word. And if you could organise a cup of coffee? Thanks.’

  As Quantrill went up to his first floor office, he admitted to himself that his own instinctive reaction was much the same as Sergeant Lamb’s. He was actually apprehensive about meeting the new sergeant, who would almost certainly resent being sent to this rural division. If Tait had been in the uniformed branch it would have been easier; you knew where you were with a uniform. Besides, a uniformed Tait would not have been his responsibility. But to have foisted on him a university graduate who had been hand-picked and intensively trained for accelerated promotion—well, it was a bit hard on a working detective who had left school at fourteen.

  Quantrill entered his narrow high-ceilinged office, hung his hat on the stand provided for the use of officers of the rank of chief inspector and above, and smoothed back his springy hair, dark lightly salted with grey. A young constable knocked and brought in a cup of coffee, and Quantrill sipped it as he glanced through the files in his in-tray.

  Paper work. Ironic, really, when you stopped to consider it. Because he was a reasonably good detective—good with people, that is, good at understanding how they felt what they felt and why they did what they did—he had been promoted to a job that entailed spending most of his time in the office. And Quantrill was wistfully conscious, every time he found himself obliged to set down sentences that tended to slip awkwardly from his pen and twist their meaning, of his lack of formal education.

  He sighed, put down his cup and picked up his ballpoint pen. Five minutes later he was absorbed in his work. Presently a word eluded him, and he began to chase it through the well-used pages of his dictionary. There was a knock on the door, he called an absent ‘Come in’, and started almost guiltily as a sharply blue-eyed young man walked into his office and looked him over, dictionary and all.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Tait reporting, sir.’ The sun was in Tait’s eyes and he couldn’t see Quantrill’s expression, nor identify the book that the chief inspector slapped shut and pushed quickly into a drawer.

  Tait stood still, waiting, his eyes lowered against the sun. Chief inspectors had been two-a-new-penny at Bramshill, but he knew that out here in the sticks they rated high, and should be deferred to accordingly. It was for this reason, knowing that Quantrill would be in the office today, that Tait had chosen to dress formally in a suit instead of in casual clothes; for this reason he had had his thick fair hair trimmed. Modest eagerness, he had decided, would be the appropriate line to take.

  Quantrill surveyed the young man guardedly, but with a growing sense of relief. Larry Lamb had been exaggerating. The lightweight suit was an unexceptionable pale clover, the heels of the shoes no more than an inch higher than was strictly necessary. The clothes wouldn’t suit Quantrill himself, nor yet Lamb, but on a man of Tait’s age and figure they were perfectly acceptable; trendy, as Quantrill’s daughters would describe them, but not way out. There was nothing objectionable in the sergeant’s attitude, either; he looked, Quantrill thought, positively respectful.

  The chief inspector stretched a welcoming hand across the width of the desk that, like the hat-stand and the carpet, came in a certain size according to rank.

  ‘Glad to have you with us, Sergeant Tait. Sit down. Sorry I wasn’t here at the beginning of the week, when you arrived.’

  Now what on earth had made him say that? It wouldn’t have occurred to him to apologise to any other newly promoted, newly arrived sergeant. Quantrill twisted in his swivel chair to the window behind him, and altered the louvres of the blind to keep the sun out of Tait’s eyes. ‘You’re probably not too pleased about being sent here,’ he went on quickly. ‘I understand that you should have spent a year as station sergeant at Yarchester or Bishops Port as soon as you left Bramshill. But we’re badly under strength in this division. We haven’t had a CID sergeant since your predecessor retired a month ago, so as you’d had some CID experience before going to Bramshill …’

  Tait smiled kindly. The DCI was talking too much; rattled, for some reason. It would be interesting to find out why. ‘I quite understand, sir,’ he said.

  He looked speculatively at Quantrill’s square, heavily handsome face. The eyes were the colour of hard green plums, and Tait reminded himself that even out here in the sticks it wouldn’t do to underestimate a chief inspector. ‘Frankly, sir,’ he added, ‘I wasn’t looking forward to being a station sergeant and dealing with lost dogs and drunks. I much prefer CID work, so I’m very glad to be here. It’ll be good experience.’

  Quantrill relaxed. It was a great relief to find that Tait hadn’t come out to the country disgruntled. ‘Good,’ he said heartily. ‘Well, you’ve got a nice day for a smelly job. Pig trouble, I believe?’

  Tait looked down quickly. The ends of his trousers were still dark with damp, and there were splashes of dried mud on his shoes. ‘Does it smell
? I’m sorry, I thought I’d wiped my shoes clean.’

  It was Quantrill’s turn to be kind. ‘It’s not too bad.’ He opened the box of cigarettes that he kept on his desk for use at interviews. ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘No thank you, sir.’

  ‘Very wise.’ Quantrill snapped the box shut, opened his tin of small cigars and lit one to drive away the faint but definable smell of pig. He was not particularly fond of cigars, but had forced himself to give up cigarettes after reading in a newspaper article that any man over the age of forty who had a tendency to overweight, took too little exercise, smoked heavily, ate irregular meals and worked under stress, was inviting a coronary.

  He smiled cordially at Tait through the cigar smoke. ‘What you want to do,’ he added helpfully, ‘is to carry a pair of rubber boots in your car.’

  ‘That’s what Pc Godbold suggested.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been out with Charlie Godbold, have you? He’s a good man. You might call him old-fashioned, I suppose, but he’s a good practical copper. I always find his advice worth listening to.’

  ‘Yes sir. Stupid of me not to go prepared, but it was a lovely morning when we left the town.’

  ‘Ah, but it had rained hard in the night. You have to watch that, in the country. Pavements dry soon enough, but the grass was bound to be wet, and it’s always mucky round the farms. If you keep a pair of wellingtons and an old raincoat in your car, you’ll be ready for anything.’

  Tait did not possess a raincoat, of any vintage. He had thought that detectives in raincoats were extinct, a species recorded only on old film, and was intrigued to find one alive and apparently detecting well in East Anglia. But he continued alert and polite: ‘I’ll remember that, sir.’

  ‘And have you found the pigs you were looking for?’

  Quantrill’s question came quietly, drifting out in the slow deep voice that had a Suffolk sing to it, but his eyes were suddenly difficult to evade. Taken by surprise, Tait floundered for a moment.

  ‘Er—well, not actually found them, sir. I’ve one or two leads—’

  To Tait’s surprise, the chief inspector chuckled. ‘Hi-jacked from outside a pub, I hear. Couple of young pigs, netted in the back of a pick-up truck, eh? That’s the kind of crime that’s going to keep you busy in this division, Sergeant Tait.’

  It sounded, unfairly, like mockery.

  ‘Well, two pigs are quite valuable, sir,’ protested Tait. ‘And then there’s the truck itself … Anyway, it’s the principle. Today it’s pigs, tomorrow it might be whisky or cigarettes. It’s a crime, whatever’s involved.’

  ‘Quite so …’ Quantrill sat back, staring meditatively at Tait through a drift of smoke. He had found the new sergeant unexpectedly easy to deal with; the young man’s modesty and diffidence had taken him agreeably by surprise. Almost, he had been disarmed.

  But the fact was that a policeman of Tait’s calibre had no business to be diffident and modest. Quantrill leaned forward, his elbows on his desk, frowning at the tip of his cigar as he rehearsed, for Tait’s benefit, the talk he had been asked to give at the next meeting of the Breckham Market Rotary Club.

  ‘Crime patterns,’ he said, ‘are related to mobility. Now in this division, we get very little large-scale crime. The modern villain, the professional, is highly mobile. He operates in places he can get into and away from quickly, and since we’ve no motorways running through the Breckham Market division, we don’t attract the big-time crooks. We’d catch’em in a traffic jam before they got outside the county. Oh, we’ve got crime, all right, thefts and burglaries and assaults and vandalism, but very little organised crime. From a police point of view it involves hours of tedious, painstaking investigation, and it needs a lot more men than we’ve got.’

  Quantrill looked up quickly, nailing Tait with a hard green stare as he added a rider he would not offer the Rotarians: ‘But from an individual detective’s point of view, it’s not what you might call an intellectual challenge. Tell me. Sergeant Tait—would you describe yourself as an ambitious man?’

  Too late, Tait saw the pitfall. Impossible, given his background, to deny his ambition; but to affirm it would hardly be consistent with the character he had been at pains to build. The chief inspector had caught him neatly.

  He sat straighter. ‘Sir,’ he conceded.

  Quantrill left his cigar in the ashtray, got up and walked to the window. Then he turned, scowling. He was a big man, six feet tall and broad with it.

  Sergeant Tait thought it advisable to get to his feet and stand to attention, but Quantrill began mildly enough. ‘It’s not that I mind your being an actor. It’s a very useful thing for a policeman to be, a detective especially. But let’s get this straight—’

  Quantrill placed his hands flat on his desk and leaned across it intimidatingly. ‘I am not having any of my men putting on an act for my benefit—is that clear? If you’re going to work with me, I want to know what you’re thinking and why you’re thinking it. Of course you didn’t want to come to this division, a man with your background—but I’d have a hell of a lot more respect for you if you’d said so, instead of trying to soft-soap me.’

  Sergeant Tait, who was barely half an inch above the stipulated minimum height for members of the county force, declined with steely courtesy to be intimidated. ‘I told you the truth, sir. I was glad to be sent to this division.’

  Quantrill straightened warily. ‘You were, were you?’ He thought for a moment, then bent across the desk again. ‘Is this the reason, by any chance?’ His hand went out to a large framed photograph that stood on his desk. He turned it to face the sergeant.

  Tait had assumed that the frame would contain a photograph of the chief inspector’s wife. In his experience it was an ostentatious assertion of connubial harmony that most policemen affected when they reached senior rank, as much a status symbol as the hat stand and the carpet and the swivel armchair. But as soon as he saw the photograph, Tait knew that he had misjudged the chief inspector.

  He knew, too, that he had an answer more effective than words. Taking a snapshot from his wallet, he placed it silently on the desk next to the framed photograph.

  They were the same, except that Quantrill’s was a bigger blow-up of the original. They showed a girl of about fifteen years old, dark curly hair blowing round her cheeks, laughing into the camera.

  Quantrill slumped down, and waved Tait back to his chair. ‘Hoping to find her, are you?’ he asked heavily.

  ‘Hoping to help, sir.’

  Quantrill picked up his cigar, took a puff, grimaced and stubbed it out. ‘Yes, I understand. Joy Dawson’s disappearance is the biggest unsolved case in the whole county at the moment. It’s had national publicity. Naturally, you’d like to have a go at it … and it wouldn’t do your career much harm if you were the one who found out what happened to her, would it?’

  Tait gave him as blunt an answer as he’d asked for. ‘No, sir. And I think it can sometimes help, when an investigation gets bogged down, if someone who hasn’t been involved takes a look at it—’

  ‘Involved!’ Quantrill slammed his hand angrily on his desk. ‘Involved … my God you’re right, we are involved, all of us who’ve been trying to find her! You’re not married, are you?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Well when you are, with children of your own to be fearful for, you’ll begin to understand. You don’t need to tell me that one of the rules of good police work is never to become personally involved in a case, but there are times when you can’t help it. When a youngster dies, whether by accident or murder, it’s tragic—but death happens all the time, and we have to learn to come to terms with it. Disappearance is different, though. It’s a terrifying thing …’

  Quantrill shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he went on slowly, ‘maybe it will help if someone new takes a look at it, someone who can read the evidence more objectively than any of us—though God knows there’s little enough evidence. Still, you’re welc
ome to read the file when you’ve got time. Take a look at the area when you’re over on that side of the division, and then let me know what you think. But don’t interview any of the witnesses.’

  ‘Oh, but sir—’

  ‘You heard what I said, and that’s an order. The parents have had enough, they’re ill with worry. The last thing they want is a cool, uninvolved young detective trampling about all over their feelings for the sake of furthering his own career, and I won’t have them badgered. If you can see a possible new line of enquiry from the file, bring it straight to me.’

  Tait’s jaw tightened. ‘Selfish bastard,’ he thought.

  ‘Sorry,’ went on Quantrill, not unsympathetically, ‘but I’ve got my orders too. The moment I get a new lead, I’m to tell the chief super—it isn’t a divisional matter any more, there’s a line of senior officers interested in the case and I’m afraid that detective sergeants go to the far end. So it looks as though you’re stuck with the missing pigs—’

  The internal telephone rang. Quantrill answered it, sat up abruptly, then relaxed. He put down the receiver, and began to scratch the side of his jaw with his forefinger.

  ‘Radio message from Charlie Godbold at Ashthorpe,’ he said conversationally. ‘When you were out with him this morning, did you happen to go over Ashthorpe bridge—narrow stone hump-backed affair?’