Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  ‘You want to see me?’ His light, colourless voice was strangely at odds with his bloodied appearance.

  Quantrill beckoned him out into the sunshine, away from the worst of the noise, and introduced himself and Tait. ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Gedge, but we have to clear up one or two matters about your sister’s death.’

  Derek Gedge looked from one to the other and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Oh yes?’ he said dully.

  Quantrill decided to go straight to the point: ‘Did you see your sister last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At any time yesterday?’

  ‘No. We don’t—we didn’t meet.’

  ‘But you live in the same village,’ Tait pointed out. ‘You couldn’t help meeting her occasionally. When did you last see her?’

  Derek Gedge was irritated out of his composure. ‘I don’t know!’ he snapped. ‘A week, ten days ago—how the hell do you expect me to remember a detail like that? Yes of course we saw each other about the village sometimes, and when we met we’d say “Hallo”. But we didn’t socialise, and I certainly didn’t see her yesterday. OK?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ Quantrill spoke pleasantly, to take the edge off the questioning. ‘We have to try to trace your sister’s movements yesterday evening, you see. Your mother-in-law told us that Mary didn’t go to Jubilee Crescent, but we wondered whether you might have seen her elsewhere.’

  At the mention of Jubilee Crescent, Derek’s mouth twisted. ‘You’ve been there, have you?’

  ‘We thought we might find you there,’ said Quantrill, ‘in the circumstances.’

  Derek gave an abrupt, unamused laugh. ‘Well, now that you’ve had a good look at my domestic life, you’ll know why I prefer being at work.’

  ‘But in a place like this?’ asked Tait. ‘When you’ve just heard of your sister’s death?’

  Derek Gedge stared at the sergeant with dislike. ‘Look,’ he said with pale intensity. ‘I loved my sister, OK? Just because we had a family row and didn’t meet any more, it doesn’t mean that I’m not upset by her death. I’m shocked, sick, numbed—oh for God’s sake leave me alone.’

  He turned away, distressed, but Quantrill called him back. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Gedge, but the point is that someone might have been with Mary just before her death. We’ve spoken to your father and he says that she often went for walks down by the river. Tell me, who would she be most likely to go for walks with?’

  Derek stood with his eyes stubbornly downcast. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But surely she wouldn’t go alone?’ said Tait. ‘An attractive girl like Mary—come on, you must have some idea.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Derek Gedge pulled off his stained cotton cap in a gesture of exasperation and rubbed it over his damp forehead. ‘I haven’t talked to Mary since I got married—that’s nearly eighteen months ago, she’ll have done a lot of growing up since then. It’s no use asking me anything about her.’

  ‘But you haven’t been completely out of touch,’ said Tait. ‘You must have heard things about her, whether you met her or not; that she was going to Cambridge—to King’s—for example.’

  The bitter grin returned. ‘Oh yes, I heard about that, from several sources. You’d be amazed how many people wanted to be sure that I knew where she was going.’

  ‘Right—so you do hear about your sister. Come on, then, tell me—did she have a boy-friend in Ashthorpe?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Derek Gedge was sweating freely. He rubbed his cap over his smeared face again, and appealed to Quantrill. ‘Look, it’s no use your badgering me, I honestly can’t tell you anything about Mary. I’m shattered, that’s all I know. Can I go back to work now?’

  Quantrill nodded, but walked beside him towards the old engine shed. The powerful beat of the music and the barbaric smell of freshly fallen blood met them even before they reached the building.

  Tait came up quietly on Derek Gedge’s other side.

  ‘Lovely place, Cambridge,’ mused the sergeant, ‘particularly at this time of year. Delightful to be in a punt on the Backs just now, with a good friend and a couple of intelligent, attractive girls …’

  Gedge whirled on him with a look of hatred. ‘All right,’ he snarled, ‘don’t rub my nose in it! God, don’t you think I hate working here? But I’ll tell you something: everyone in Ashthorpe thinks that my mother made me give up Cambridge and marry Julie Pulfer against my will, but it isn’t true. I married her because I wanted to. I was blindly in love with her and I felt—well, chivalrous, if you want to know. Proud to be shouldering a man’s responsibilities. That’s what I tried to explain to Mary, but she didn’t understand. That’s why we had the row.’

  Tait raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘You mean you’ve no regrets about your marriage?’

  Gedge answered him contemptuously. ‘Don’t be a fool, man! I was telling you what I felt at the time, what made me give up Cambridge. But now—you’ve seen for yourself the pig-sty the Pulfers live in. And have you seen Jason, my unaccountably dark-eyed son? Have you taken a good look at this place? Well, all of this is the price I’m having to pay—not, as everyone thinks, for the sexual experience, but for being a romantic idiot. My sister told me that I was too young to marry and that I’d regret it, and I’ve never been able to forgive her for being right. That doesn’t mean that I don’t grieve over her death—but you know something? Even after what’s happened to her, even though she hasn’t lived to enjoy her success, I’m not sure that she isn’t still the lucky one.’

  He strode away, jamming his cap back on his head. The policemen watched as he leaped up on to the concrete platform at the end of the shed, the continuation of the ramp where the chickens were unloaded. The conveyor chain entered the shed at this end, dangling the wriggling black-eyed birds at regular intervals and bearing them to a place where a machine stood, and attendant youths with knives.

  Derek Gedge stood shoulder to shoulder with one of the youths, watching the sudden flurry of activity as each bird arrived, waiting to get back into the rhythm of the production line.

  Quantrill, knowing the process, would have left; but Tait lingered, watching with incredulous distaste as the birds, stunned by an electric shock from the machine, had their throats slit. The dead chickens flapped and jerked violently in their final nervous spasm, their wings beating the youths about the face, their down rising in a dusty cloud to cling wherever their falling blood had splattered.

  Sickened, Tait stood as though his shoes had been cemented to the bloodstained concrete floor. The grotesque chorus line of dead birds dipped and swayed on their hooks across the shed, plunging into tanks of scalding water, entering a plucking machine, and then emerging naked to be slapped down on another conveyor belt for evisceration and packing by a team of women. In a matter of minutes, living creatures were being transformed before his eyes into hunks of graded, quality controlled, hygienically packaged, inexpensive protein.

  Quantrill pulled at his sergeant’s sleeve and led him outside. They stood for a few minutes by the car, and the chief inspector considerately looked away to give Tait time to recover.

  ‘All right?’

  Tait nodded. The delicate green had disappeared from his cheeks, though he was almost as pale as Derek Gedge had been.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Quantrill. ‘Yes, it’s a brutalising job. God knows how anyone as sensitive as Derek Gedge could have contemplated it in the first place.’

  ‘If he’s stuck it for eighteen months,’ muttered Tait, ‘his sensibilities must be pretty well blunted by now.’

  They sat in the car and clipped on their seat belts. Quantrill glanced at Tait again and grinned.

  ‘There’s a lot to be said,’ he suggested, ‘for a station sergeant’s job in Yarchester …’

  But Tait was determined not to concede a single point. He swallowed. ‘Do you think so, sir?’ he said heroically. ‘I’ve found this a very interesting experience—I wouldn’t have missed it.’ />
  Quantrill accelerated out of the yard, still grinning. This was one he had to win. ‘But you won’t fancy eating chicken for a while,’ he prophesied confidently.

  Alan Denning, BSc (Econ), headmaster of Breckham Market comprehensive school, lived in one of the detached houses that had been built in the’sixties along Mere Road. Formerly, when Breckham was nothing but a declining market town, the road had been simply a farm track that skirted a circle of murky water in a rough meadow on the outskirts of the ancient borough. But then an arrangement with the London County Council had brought to the town an influx of factories, people and relative prosperity, and the meadow had quickly spawned an estate of desirable freehold properties.

  The houses on the Mere estate were built in a variety of sizes and designs, none of which harmonised in either style or materials with the original buildings of the town. The new roofs were pitched too low, the windows were disproportionately large, the brickwork was either too yellow or too pink; there were too many spurious external features in white plastic ship-lap and simulated Cotswold stone. The developers seemed not to know, and the planning authority of the time not to care, that the local building materials were flint and grey brick.

  The largest of the houses on the estate, the executive type with separate dining-room and downstairs cloakroom, had been built on Mere Road itself, facing the attractively tree-lined, dredged and deodorised Mere. Unfortunately for the owners of these houses, the Mere had immediately become a local beauty spot. On summer evenings and at weekends, strange cars were parked outside every house and the air pulsated with chimes from prowling ice-cream vans trying to steal each other’s pitches. Litter proliferated.

  As a consequence, the Mere Road residents felt themselves beleaguered. Quantrill was not entirely surprised, when he drew up outside the Dennings’house, to see a whiskered face glaring at him suspiciously from over the white ranch fencing. It was a face that he had seen on numerous occasions, in photographs in the local newspaper; Mr Denning was not averse to publicity, for himself or for his school.

  Denning reluctantly led the policemen up the weedless drive, past a regimented area of grass. He was, Quantrill knew, in his late thirties: of medium height, inclined to be porky, but dapper in neat, plain, casual clothes. His hands and feet were small and constantly active.

  ‘Chief Inspector, did you say?’ he demanded as he opened the front door.

  Quantrill confirmed it, and Denning looked slightly mollified. A sergeant on his own, both policemen guessed, would have been offered short shrift. Tait was sorry not to have been given the opportunity to take up the challenge.

  Denning darted in ahead of them, stopping abruptly to wipe his shoes on the mat with an exaggerated care that Quantrill interpreted as a hint and passed on to Tait, who chose to ignore it.

  ‘Quantrill,’ said Denning. His voice was crisp, authoritative. ‘I know the name.’

  ‘My son’s at your school,’ said Quantrill, without any expectation that the head of a school of nearly a thousand pupils would be personally acquainted with any particular thirteen-year-old; it was simply the name that people remembered.

  ‘Ah yes.’ Denning nodded rapidly, stroking his whiskers. He had a carefully groomed luxuriant brown growth on either side of his jaw, compensating for the prematurely bald swathe on either side of his crown. ‘Yes, now, let me think. Yes, Quantrill—a good lad, you must be pleased with his progress.’

  The chief inspector was not deceived. He could understand that a headmaster faced by a succession of importunate parents might well be tempted to deal, like an astrologer, in bland generalities. But Quantrill had not come in his rôle of parent, and he found the headmaster’s glib response distasteful.

  But then, he acknowledged, he was not predisposed to like the man. It had been assumed in the town that when the three secondary schools were amalgamated, the headship was likely to go to the head of either the boys’or the girls’grammar school. Quantrill had been a discreetly ardent supporter of Mrs Bloomfield. She had held her appointment for five years, was well-qualified, liked and respected in the town. It had seemed to him—and to most of the other parents he knew—a matter of natural justice that Mrs Bloomfield should be appointed in preference to Mr Denning, who was a newcomer to the area, no better qualified, slightly younger, and had been headmaster of the boys’school for only a year.

  Quantrill still felt aggrieved about the man’s appointment; less, now, for the sake of the school, which seemed to be settling down tolerably well, than on Mrs Bloomfield’s behalf.

  ‘Come into my study,’ Denning said. It was a command rather than an invitation.

  He led them into what must have been designed as the dining-room of the house; Mere Road executive houses were not, like the managerial type overlooking the golf course, in the separate study bracket. It had been made into a masculine room, dark-toned, well-ordered, furnished with PVC leatherlook armchairs and a polished desk considerably larger than Quantrill’s own.

  Denning stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked hard at Quantrill, while he rose and fell impatiently on the balls of his feet.

  ‘Well, Chief Inspector?’

  He made no suggestion that they should sit down, and Quantrill’s dislike increased. He studied the whiskers, deciding that they were less an expression of a naturally flamboyant personality than a consciously contrived feature, like the Cotswold stone cladding on the front of the house. But if Denning’s conservative style of dress ruled out natural flamboyance, there was no doubt about the man’s nervous energy; he fizzed with it.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Quantrill quickly, before Denning’s impatience could boil over, ‘that we have some bad news about one of your pupils.’

  A car slowed outside. Denning hurried to the side window and craned to see it. The car picked up speed. He turned back and sat at his desk, motioning his visitors to sit down.

  ‘Mary Gedge?’ he asked, grooming his whiskers rapidly with small fingers. ‘Ah, I thought that might be the reason for your visit., Yes, I heard about her accident. My deputy, Mrs Bloomfield, lives in the same village, and she very properly rang me as soon as she heard the news. She thought that there might be some press enquiries. In fact I had a local reporter here just before you came.’

  He stood up abruptly, glaring out of the window again as a passing ice-cream van gave a quick burst of Oranges and Lemons. ‘Mary’s death,’ he went on, as smoothly as though he were repeating a prepared statement, ‘is a great shock, of course. A tragedy. I am deeply grieved, as I know the rest of the school will be.’

  ‘You knew her well, Mr Denning?’ Quantrill asked.

  ‘Not socially, Chief Inspector.’ His right hand went instinctively to the broad wedding ring he wore, twisting and turning it. ‘But in school, yes, of course. Mary was one of my most outstanding students.’

  ‘She was at Mrs Bloomfield’s school until last summer,’ Quantrill pointed out, irritated by the ‘my’and unprepared to let the girl’s new headmaster attempt to hog all the credit. ‘My daughters were at that school too—Mrs Bloomfield is an excellent teacher.’

  ‘She certainly brought Mary along very well, I agree. I have heard a number of reports of what a good teacher she used to be.’

  ‘“Used to be?”’ demanded Quantrill.

  Denning gave a deprecating shrug: ‘One doesn’t, of course, wish to criticise a colleague’s work, but frankly I’ve seen remarkably little of the great teaching ability that I’d been told Mrs Bloomfield possessed. I realise that her failure to get the headship of the comprehensive must have been a great disappointment to her, but it was not unexpected. She has considerable responsibility as my deputy, and I would have thought that this was ample recompense. But possibly she feels inhibited by the presence of male colleagues—she’d have done better, I think, to move to another small girls’school. She seems to find it difficult to adjust to the new circumstances—but then, perhaps, her age …’

  Quantrill fumed in
silence. Mrs Bloomfield was in her early forties, about the same age as his own wife, who would indignantly repudiate any suggestion that there was reason to make allowance for her on that account.

  Denning saw the chief inspector’s indignant look. ‘As for Mary Gedge,’ he went on quickly, ‘she was handicapped in the way common to all girls in single-sex education. I could see the girl’s academic potential as soon as I met her, but her mind lacked that—’ he smiled confidently at the policemen, assuming a male consensus as he gestured with his right hand, bringing his fingertips close together ‘—that edge. You know? I think that my extra tuition—the contact with a masculine mind—made a great deal of difference to her. After all, it was at my school that she gained her Cambridge entrance. That will still stand to the credit of the school, despite her death.’

  Quantrill stared at him, bemused. He had heard his daughters talk about male chauvinist pigs, and had been confident that they exaggerated. Now it seemed that he had met one.

  But Tait was not bemused. ‘You gave Mary extra tuition, sir?’

  Denning stroked his whiskers. ‘Oh yes, on a number of occasions.’

  ‘Private tuition, sir?’ enquired Tait.

  Chapter Nine

  Denning froze. The hairless areas of his face went white. His whiskers bristled.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he said, chipping each word out of ice. ‘Private tuition. During the autumn term, in my office at school, and during school hours. And not only to Mary Gedge, but to three other Oxbridge candidates. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Perfectly, thank you,’ said Tait equably.

  Denning turned his attention to Quantrill. The chief inspector had by now realised the function of the whiskers: they could make an angry man of otherwise insignificant appearance seem formidable. No wonder his son held the headmaster in awe.

  ‘Let me tell you, Chief Inspector,’ said Denning, ‘exactly what I told the newspaper reporter. Mary Gedge left my school at the start of the Easter holidays, two weeks ago. Her death has no connection with my school at all. I’m obliged to you for coming to break the news to me, but if that’s all—?’