Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  ‘Yes, we did.’

  ‘Ah.’ Quantrill had learned to be a bit of an actor himself, and the opportunity to upstage his new sergeant was irresistible. ‘Didn’t happen to see a dead body in the river there, I suppose?’ he asked casually.

  Tait looked gratifyingly astounded. ‘Sir—?’

  Quantrill raised an understanding hand. ‘But you don’t go round looking for dead bodies, do you? That’s all right, sergeant, it wouldn’t be reasonable if you did. But it’s there all right, a girl, been there some hours in Godbold’s opinion. No sign of foul play, though. He’s pretty certain it must have been an accident.’

  Tait was alert, impatient. ‘Do you mean it’s Joy Dawson?’

  ‘No—and in a way I’m sorry. Like I said, you can come to terms with death—and you know as well as I do that she could have come to a far worse end than death by drowning … No, this is an Ashthorpe girl, Godbold knows her. He’ll break it to the relatives, so at least you’ll be spared that. Just satisfy yourself that there are no suspicious circumstances, and then make the usual enquiries about when she was last seen.’

  Tait stood up eagerly. He had thought that Quantrill meant to keep him permanently on lost pig duty, by way of retaliation. ‘You’re sending me, sir?’

  ‘Who else? You can send a constable after the pigs. But sergeant—’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Try not to look so pleased about it, will you? The poor girl didn’t die to provide you with a welcome change from routine. And don’t go there hoping that it’ll turn out to be murder, either. It’s enough that she died—don’t wish for it to be any worse than it is.’

  Tait sobered. He hurried from the office, down the stairs and through the main hall. Sergeant Lamb looked up as he passed the desk.

  ‘Hey—er—mate …’

  ‘Can’t stop,’ said Tait. ‘Fatality.’

  ‘I know, girl found drowned. Want to borrow a pair of wellies?’

  Tait hesitated, then looked down at his maltreated shoes. ‘Thanks very much,’ he said, ‘I’d be glad to.’

  Chapter Three

  Chief Inspector Quantrill believed in delegation. He had no intention of trying to cramp an ambitious young sergeant; and surely a police college graduate could be relied on to deal with a simple case of accidental death?

  But the Joy Dawson case was heavy on his mind. Because she had disappeared on a sunny February mid-morning, from a quiet country road within a mile of her own home, Quantrill had allowed the usual missing juvenile routine to take its course. It was five hours before he had appreciated that the disappearance was desperately serious, and in that time dusk had fallen and the trail—because there must have been a trail, there simply couldn’t have been no evidence at all—was ice-cold.

  Well, there was no reason to suppose that there was any connection between the death of the girl in the river at Ashthorpe and the disappearance of Joy Dawson twenty miles away and three months ago. But suppose there was some kind of connection? Or suppose that, despite Pc Godbold’s assurance, this death was not accidental?

  Quantrill gave Tait a half-hour’s start, then took his hat and his car and made for Ashthorpe. As he neared the turning from the main road to the village the mortuary van came towards him, travelling in the direction of the county hospital; obviously Tait had found nothing suspicious, but even so his Citroën was still at the scene of the fatality, parked on the grass verge well before the approach to Ashthorpe bridge.

  The chief inspector pulled his solid Austin in behind Tait’s car. The grass had dried but he changed into his rubber boots, tossing his hat on to the car seat in acknowledgement of the sunshine before he walked to the bridge.

  The shallow valley of the Dunnock was warm and quiet. A good place to be on a heady May morning: river running, insects humming, sun shining, buttercups gleaming, lark rising. Only the reason for being here was sober, with death all the more a tragedy for coming young, at the height of spring.

  He looked upstream. Some heifers, standing flicking their tails in muddy craters at the water’s edge, stared back and blinked their maiden lashes. In the river a dead branch had wedged itself across the upstream arch of the bridge, forming a surface dam which held back a jumble of castaway plastic ware embedded in a creamy-brown scum, and left the water to run through the arch clean and clear.

  Quantrill walked to the crest of the bridge and leaned on the downstream parapet, feeling the stone warm under his hands. Sergeant Tait, shirtsleeved and knee-deep in borrowed wellingtons, was searching the shallow river ten yards downstream.

  ‘Nice day for a paddle,’ called Quantrill austerely.

  Tait looked up with a frown, irritated by the prospect of working with a DCI who didn’t know how to delegate. But on the other hand, now Quantrill was here it would be that much easier to make his point forcefully. He waded nearer.

  ‘Pc Godbold has gone to take the girl’s father to the mortuary for a formal identification, sir. He knows the family well. The girl’s a student, Mary Gedge, about seventeen or eighteen years old. Her parents keep a general store in Ashthorpe. I believe that Godbold reported that it looked as though the girl had slipped into the water and drowned while she was gathering flowers—and I agree that there’s nothing to indicate foul play.’

  ‘Well then? I saw the van going back to Breckham and I expected to find you in the village, establishing when she was last seen alive. What’s kept you here? You know we’re up to our ears in work.’

  ‘There’s an interesting query, sir,’ said Tait smoothly. ‘Since you’re here, I’d be very glad of your opinion.’

  Quantrill wavered. He suspected Tait of manufacturing the interesting query, but since the sergeant made no move to return to the road, he left the bridge and joined him in the meadow. Tait had climbed out of the water, and his wet boots were rapidly acquiring a lacquer of buttercup yellow.

  ‘Who found the body, and when?’ Quantrill asked.

  ‘It was found about eleven thirty, according to Godbold, by two local boys who came down here to play.’

  ‘Half a minute. It’s Friday, isn’t it?’ Quantrill tried to remember where his own schoolboy son would be that morning, and failed.

  ‘Yes, sir. Last day of the Easter holidays, so Godbold tells me.’

  ‘Ah.’ Of course, the school holidays, late on account of a very late Easter. He’d promised to take a few days off while Peter was at home; get to know the boy better, do something together—take him angling for bass from Southwold beach, perhaps, as his own father had taken him … Another good resolution down the drain. ‘Go on, then.’

  Tait pointed. ‘The body was just there, face down. She was wearing a long dress, she was barefoot, and there were gathered flowers floating round her in the water. No sign at all of violence or interference, and no way of telling how or where she entered the water. The ground’s damp, and the bare patches on the bank are covered with the prints and skid-marks the children made. But I suppose it’s possible that she could have slipped in while she was reaching for those yellow flowers growing at the edge of the water.’

  ‘Kingcups,’ said Quantrill absently. ‘Yes, I see. But I get your point—if she did slip in, how did she come to drown in water this shallow?’

  ‘Exactly, sir.’ Tait had more to say, but he saved it.

  Quantrill scratched the side of his jaw. ‘Hit her head on a stone, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s just what I’ve been looking for. I haven’t found one.’

  Quantrill thought for a moment. ‘There are one or two wilted buttercups lying on the parapet of the bridge. If she’d leaned over too far and fallen from up there she might have hit her head on the stonework.’

  Tait frowned. He hadn’t stayed long enough on the bridge to notice the wilted flowers. ‘No head injuries that I could see, sir. And then, the water’s hardly deep enough to float her down this far. It’s all bends and shallows.’

  The chief inspector agreed. ‘Suicide?’ he asked reluctantly. ‘An
y personal possessions left on the bank?’

  ‘Nothing I’ve found so far. There might be a note at the girl’s home, of course—but then, this river’s hardly deep enough for suicide.’

  ‘Depth’s not essential. I agree that it’d be difficult for a normal person to drown deliberately in shallow water—the instinct for self-preservation’s too strong, however much you may think you want to die. But depressives have been known to drown themselves in a few inches of water. Is there any suggestion that the girl was subject to depression?’

  ‘Not according to Godbold. He says she was a normal, happy girl; she’d just left school and was going to university in October—looking forward to it very much. Everything to live for.’

  ‘Unhappy love affair, perhaps?’

  ‘Nothing that Godbold had heard of. A possibility, of course.’

  Quantrill flapped some persistent insects away from his face. He was uncomfortably hot in his dark courtroom suit, but since he had no intention of lingering—nothing to linger for—there was no point in removing his jacket. ‘Well, see what your enquiries turn up,’ he said briskly. ‘But the coroner won’t consider suicide unless there’s a note or some other definite evidence of intention. He’ll order a post mortem, of course, but if nothing unusual emerges from that he’ll probably bring in an open verdict.’

  ‘But there is another query, sir.’ Quantrill was already turning away, and Tait spoke quickly. ‘I can’t find her shoes. She was barefoot, and I can’t find any shoes either on the bank or in the water.’

  The chief inspector shrugged. ‘What makes you think she was wearing any? Some girls don’t, especially when they’re in those long dresses.’ He spoke disparagingly. He’d sometimes seen the womenfolk from a nearby rural commune, cotton skirts flapping round their ankles, padding barefoot along the dirty pavements of Breckham Market. Townies playing at country life, he thought; countrywomen had more sense—except that you could never be sure, with young girls.

  ‘Oh, I agree. I had a girl-friend last year who liked to go barefoot. It attracted me at first. Bare feet under a long dress are very sexy. But then I saw the soles of her feet—’

  Quantrill could imagine, but Tait spelled it out for him. ‘They were revolting, like grey leather, cracked and ingrained with dirt. It turned me right off. But Mary Gedge’s feet weren’t like that at all—I made a point of examining them.’

  ‘Callous young devil,’ Quantrill thought. His own first corpse, a suicide, had terrified him, and still had power to give him bad dreams; it had been a long time before he had been able to look at another with equanimity. But perhaps the preliminary examination of dead bodies was a routine part of the Bramshill curriculum.

  ‘I’d say that Mary Gedge had never made a habit of going barefoot out of doors,’ Tait continued. ‘Her feet—the toes especially—were quite badly grazed, as though she’d scrabbled to keep her footing in the gravel bed of the stream. Otherwise they were far too unmarked to indicate that she was used to going without shoes. Apparently it’s over a mile from her house, and I simply don’t believe that she walked here barefoot. What I would really like, sir, is to get a man out here in waders to search the river thoroughly. If we can’t find any shoes, then she must have come here in a vehicle, with someone else. And that suggests that it would have been some time during the night, perhaps after an evening out. And that’s not the time when people usually gather flowers.’

  Quantrill stared at him uneasily. ‘Now hold hard—’ he protested.

  ‘When I came past this morning,’ went on Tait firmly, ignoring the interruption, ‘I noticed that a vehicle had been standing at the side of the road, just by that gap in the hedge. The tyre marks were quite clear. I’ve since checked with Godbold, and he tells me that it had been dry here for several days, but that it had begun to rain hard just after eleven last night, as he was taking his dog for a walk. He could hear that it was still raining at midnight, but when he got out of bed an hour later it was fine and the sky was clear. So it’s likely that the vehicle was parked by the bridge some time after one o’clock this morning.’

  ‘And what evidence have you got to connect that with Mary Gedge?’ demanded Quantrill.

  Tait was unabashed. ‘None at all, sir. And of course we need to check on her movements. But it will be interesting to hear the pathologist’s expert opinion as to whether the girl could have walked over a mile barefoot to get here; and if he says she didn’t, and if we can’t find her shoes, it’ll then be a bit late to start making enquiries as to how she came.’

  Quantrill stood dark and heavy among the buttercups, silent except for some disgruntled breathing, shoulders hunched, hands deep in his jacket pockets. Tait, waiting for his reaction, was prepared for resentful scorn; but although Quantrill found it difficult to like the new sergeant, his respect for a Bramshill training was increasing by the minute.

  ‘How long would you say she’d been dead?’ he asked after a pause. He knew better than to make such guesses himself, but heaven knew what esoteric sciences were taught at police college.

  ‘I’ve no idea, sir,’ said Tait promptly. ‘It’s a matter of body temperature—an expert job for the pathologist.’

  Quantrill’s opinion of Bramshill soared. It was even better to know that its graduates were taught that their knowledge had clearly defined limits.

  ‘Pc Godbold did suggest that she died early this morning,’ added Tait sceptically. ‘In his opinion, she probably came down alone to gather flowers at sunrise—an old country custom on May Day, he said.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, it’s possible. But what you’re trying to make out is that she was brought here in the early hours—’

  ‘I’m not “trying to make out” anything, sir,’ Tait retorted. ‘I do suggest, from the available evidence, that she may well have come by car—and if so, then someone else was with her. The most likely time for that would be after an evening out. There’s another point, too: the girl’s fingers and knees were badly grazed. I agree that this doesn’t necessarily indicate foul play, because if she fell in she’d obviously try to save herself. But if she fell in as a result of some fooling about, it’s possible that her companion—or companions—panicked and left her. The significant point is, sir, that if she didn’t walk down here alone, then someone else almost certainly knows something about her death. Don’t you agree?’

  Tait looked enviably, irritatingly cool in his grey shirt and dusky pink tie. Quantrill pulled off his own jacket, slung it over his arm and waded through wild flowers to the water’s edge. The river bank at this point, under a willow tree, was bare with long-established use but the only identifiable prints on the damp earth were those of juvenile wellingtons.

  The chief inspector stepped heavily down into the water and swished out to the place where the body had lain grounded, brushing past a clump of thick-stemmed yellow kingcups and stirring up the smell of river-rotten vegetation. The bed of the stream was gravelly, reedy and weedy in patches, but with no stones large enough to cause concussion. The water ran cool against his wellingtons, no more than eighteen inches deep. It was difficult to see how a simple fall into the Dunnock could kill anyone.

  He sighed. ‘She could have been dead before she got here, if it comes to that,’ he said gloomily, without any expectation that Tait would have overlooked the possibility.

  ‘Quite. And either way, the flowers could have been thrown in afterwards in an attempt to make it look like an accident. There’s another point, though, sir. If we assume that she was here with a friend or friends and fell in accidentally, it still doesn’t explain how she drowned in such shallow water. But if the post mortem revealed that she’d been drinking, or taking drugs …’

  Quantrill clambered up the bank. ‘If if if—’ he growled irritably. ‘It’s nothing but supposition!’

  ‘Based on the fact of the missing shoes,’ Tait reminded him. ‘All right, I’m speculating, I agree. The post mortem may well show up a simple death by drowning, and if it does
I’ll be satisfied that it was an accident—as long as we can find the shoes. But I don’t see that we can wait for the pathologist’s report before looking for the shoes. If they’re in someone’s car, the sooner we know about it the better. So if I could have two men with waders—’

  Quantrill rounded on him, an indignant figure in size twelve wellingtons that had suddenly, incongruously, turned to gold. ‘One man and that’s all!’ he snapped. ‘Good grief, you know how under-strength we are—if it’s a two-man job you’ll have to stay here and help him while I make a start on the enquiries myself.’

  Tait assured him that one man would be perfectly adequate.

  ‘Carry on, then,’ said Quantrill. He hesitated, remembering his intention to delegate. Sergeant Tait was obviously more than competent to carry out routine enquiries into the dead girl’s last movements, and to follow up anything that might seem significant. But Quantrill could never forget Joy Dawson. He’d left those preliminary enquiries to his sergeant too. Not that he blamed the sergeant, or that he himself could have done anything more to find the missing girl; but his lack of immediate concern, his preoccupation with paperwork at the critical time, stabbed at his conscience as frequently as cold air strikes the exposed nerve of a decaying tooth.

  ‘Might as well come along with you, since I’m here,’ he explained, almost apologetic.

  Tait gave him a cool smile. ‘Please do, sir,’ he said politely, ‘if you can spare the time.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘A cup of coffee, Mr Quantrill?’

  ‘Thanks very much, Mrs Godbold. Very kind of you.’

  It had been Quantrill’s intention to meet Pc Godbold at the Ashthorpe Chequers before going to interview the dead girl’s parents, but the constable had forewarned his wife to provide coffee and sandwiches. Preferable, anyway, on this occasion, to a pub snack; bad enough to have to go badgering the bereaved, without breathing beer all over them. Quantrill bit into a cheese and pickle sandwich and waited patiently for the constable’s stout wife to stop fussing and leave them alone in the front room of the police house, where family photographs stood on top of the official filing cabinet.