Death and the Maiden

by Sheila Radley

  To Tait, it was immediately identifiable: discounting the toys, a bachelor’s pad on the day after a good party.

  That it had been—in bachelor terms—a good party was obvious. Miller had all the symptoms of a hangover: bleary eyes, slack cheeks, an aversion to movement and noise and light. In his normal condition he would have been a good-looking well-preserved middle-aged man, but at the moment his condition was abject. He closed the door behind them with exaggerated care and then stood swaying and blinking, rubbing his long fingers over the golden-grey stubble on his cheeks.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Had rather a thick night, and then topped up at lunch time—just been sleeping it off.’ His voice was slurred, but still beautifully modulated; a deep, actor’s voice. ‘Sit down,’ he suggested, as his knees deposited him abruptly on the crumpled colour-weave cushions of the settee. ‘If you can find anywhere to sit,’ he added, with a painful gesture at the cluttered room. ‘My wife’s away at the moment. Took the children to her mother’s for a holiday. You know how it is?’

  Quantrill knew how it was. He felt a totally unexpected sympathy. The newspapers that he shifted from a chair were a good three weeks’ accumulation; too long for a normal holiday visit. Even though he despised the youthful Breton cap that hung on the back of the door, he could look with fellow-feeling at the dust and the drink and the pathos of the pushed-aside toys.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said, and meant it. ‘We just wanted to have a word about one of your former pupils—Mary Gedge.’

  Miller looked from one policeman to the other, without moving his head. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ he said uncertainly. He massaged the back of his neck with his hand, grimacing over the discomfort. ‘That’s what they told me at the Ostritch at lunch time—that’s why I got tanked up again. Or have I been dreaming it?’

  Quantrill confirmed that he hadn’t. Miller rubbed his hands over his slack face. ‘Christ,’ he said thickly. He pushed himself to his feet. ‘Sha’n’t be a minute …’

  He stumbled from the room, and slammed the door. They heard a cistern flush, water being sluiced, a spluttering, more oaths. A few minutes later Miller returned to the room, his hair spiked and darkened by water, the front of his scalp showing pink, rubbing his face on a drab towel.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, his voice less thick, ‘that’s better. I only wish I had been dreaming about Mary, though—just for a minute there I hoped that it had all been a nightmare … Well, what do you want to see me about?’

  ‘Routine enquiries, sir,’ said Tait. ‘Did you know Mary well?’

  He’s at it again, Quantrill thought, as his sergeant darted in with the sharp question. This was obviously Tait’s speciality: needling people, trying to make them indignant and flustered and angry, so that they said more than they might soberly intend. It could be a successful technique, if you suspected anyone of villainy. And Tait was obviously determined to suspect anyone who knew Mary, until such time as the post-mortem proved conclusively that there had been neither foul play nor untoward circumstances at the time of her death.

  The chief inspector listened with half an ear to Miller’s protestations that Mary was not a personal friend, that he never saw her outside school, and looked surreptitiously at his watch. The post-mortem would be bound to take a long time, since he’d allowed Tait to persuade him that he had grounds for requesting more than a primary-cause-of-death investigation.

  Miller was getting annoyed now. One day, Quantrill foresaw, Sergeant Tait would go too far with someone of local self-importance, and find himself hauled before the assistant chief constable; and then he, Quantrill, would have to go to his defence. That was part of the responsibility of command, supporting a subordinate regardless of the fact that you didn’t like him or his methods.

  And the chief inspector disliked the deliberate provocation of anger. Anger can so easily lead to violence and God knows, Quantrill thought, there’s enough violence about without deliberately stirring it. He’d once had a chief inspector who liked to play the hard man. One of his suspects, an inoffensive man who proved to be perfectly innocent, had become so incensed by the questioning that he went home and broke his neighbour’s jaw in an argument over a garden bonfire.

  Quantrill himself preferred a calmer approach in questioning, one which allowed him either to make a diplomatic withdrawal or to cut the ground from beneath a suspect’s feet. But at least, with their different techniques, he and Tait should make a useful double act: the hard man and the sympathetic one; an effective combination.

  ‘And did you give Mary a lift into Breckham Market yesterday evening?’ Tait was demanding.

  Miller objected vigorously, flinging his damp towel to the floor. The wings of his nostrils were white with anger. ‘No I didn’t! Why the hell should you think that I did?’

  ‘Because we understand that you sometimes gave her a lift to school.’

  Miller scowled. ‘Is there a single thing you can do in this bloody village without someone informing on you?’ he said bitterly. ‘Yes, all right, I did sometimes give her lifts—so did Mrs Bloomfield. So?’

  ‘That’s all right, sir,’ Quantrill intervened pacifically. ‘Mary was seen in Breckham Market last night, but as long as we know that it wasn’t you who gave her the lift we can continue our enquiries elsewhere. Did you happen to see her in the village yesterday, though?’

  Miller turned his back and began rummaging about on the dresser. He found what he was looking for in the fruit bowl and sat down again composedly, a battery shaver in his hand. ‘Yes,’ he said. He switched on the shaver and buzzed it up and down his cheek. ‘Soon after six o’clock, I believe,’ he said eventually. ‘I went to the shop for some cigarettes and a bottle of whisky, and Mary was serving.’

  ‘You talked to her?’ Quantrill asked.

  ‘Naturally.’ Miller did some careful blind flying round his mouth. ‘I reckon to have a civilised exchange of conversation with people I know when we meet. We talked about a play we’d both seen on television the night before.’

  ‘And did she say what she intended to do yesterday evening? Did she say anything about meeting anyone?’

  ‘No,’ said Miller. He got up, blew the hairs out of his shaver, cased it and put it back in the fruit bowl. With his cheeks firmed and shaven and his hangover washed away, he began to look personable. ‘There’s nothing useful I can tell you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What about other people in the village?’ Quantrill persisted. ‘Can you suggest anyone who might have given her a lift into town?’

  Miller combed his hair forward with his fingers to camouflage his scalp. ‘Sorry, no. I’m not the right person to ask, though. I suggest you have a word with Jean—Mrs Bloomfield. She was Mary’s headmistress and she knew the girl a great deal better than I did. She was due back from the Dordogne today, so you’ll probably find her at home by now. She lives—’

  ‘Yes, I do know Mrs Bloomfield.’ Quantrill heaved himself to his feet from the low chair. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Miller.’

  Tait echoed him; ‘Thank you.’ He looked pointedly at the dirty glasses. ‘Quite a party you had last night,’ he said, smiling.

  Miller ignored him. ‘If you see Jean,’ he said to Quantrill, ‘tell her that I hope she feels better for her holiday, and give her my love.’

  The policemen walked back to their car. ‘Coburg House, sir?’ enquired Tait. ‘You’ll try Mrs Bloomfield again?’

  Quantrill nodded and turned the car in that direction, refusing to allow himself to admit that he knew exactly why he felt suddenly disconsolate.

  As he rang the bell of Coburg House for the second time that afternoon, Quantrill deliberately restrained himself from making a second nervous adjustment to his tie and his hair. It was not, he told himself, that he wanted to evade Tait’s quizzical eye; not even that he knew that he could never compete with so personable a man as Miller. But he had now remembered that in the four years since he last met Jean Bloomfield, his circumsta
nces had changed completely.

  He was no longer a despondent, never-likely-to-be-promoted detective sergeant, with a rapidly breaking-up marriage and two teenage daughters to look after on his own. He was no longer so wretched that when an attractive woman showed him sympathy and understanding, he was liable to find himself in love. That crisis had passed. He was his own man again, with his family intact, his financial pressures eased by promotion, his career prospects strengthening.

  It was true that, despite the improvement in his circumstances, he had never been able to recapture the glimpse of possible happiness that he had had four years ago. Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill was not a happy man. But then, he had been forced to spend the interminable Sundays of his boyhood penned in a Baptist chapel, where elderly lay preachers declaimed at length their Victorian working class nonconformist conviction that man is put on this earth to work and to suffer; happiness, they had propounded, was the reward reserved for the righteous in the hereafter.

  Young Douglas Quantrill, bored and resentful in his best grey flannel suit, the short trousers held up by a snake belt, his knee-length socks gartered with itchily tight elastic, had subconsciously absorbed the proposition together with the smell of varnished pine pews and Victory V cough lozenges. Certainly, the adult Quantrill conceded in his gloomier moments, any happiness he had ever found in this life had proved as transitory as those old preachers prophesied. Go looking for happiness and you’d be bound in the end to get hurt.

  As he waited for Jean Bloomfield to answer the door, Quantrill determined that this time he would keep his head. He would not repeat the follies of four years ago. There would be no craving for a smile from her, no wishful interpretation of light words, no fantasies; no fantasies, no painful withdrawal symptoms. This would be a short, straight interview, friendly but impersonal.

  Probably she wouldn’t even remember him.

  He rang the bell again.

  Perhaps it was the fact that she drove up just as he turned away from the door that threw him; or perhaps it was her instant smile of recognition. Quantrill didn’t stop to analyse the reason for his downfall. He hurried down the path towards her Renault, his breath catching in his throat, his heart seeming to trip its beat.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Bloomfield,’ he said, and knew that he had reddened like an adolescent.

  She looked older, of course. Her sunburned face was thinner than he remembered, the incipient lines on her forehead and at the outer corners of her eyes more marked, and she looked very tired and very sad; but he thought her even more beautiful.

  ‘Mr Quantrill!’ she said in her low, soft voice. ‘How good to see you.’

  Sergeant or chief inspector, Quantrill was lost again.

  Chapter Eleven

  She was wearing a tennis dress, its whiteness making her sunburned face and arms seem even browner. Her sun-bleached blonde hair was held back by a blue cotton scarf, which emphasised the flecks of blue in her dark-hollowed, dark-lashed grey eyes. A pair of sunglasses was pushed carelessly up on to her hair. She wore no make-up, but her lips were pink against her tan. Quantrill bent down so that he could talk to her through the open window of her car, surveying the contours of her face as avidly as a desert traveller, having at last topped a dune, might view the terrain that led to an oasis.

  ‘This is Liz Whilton,’ she said; and had to repeat it before Quantrill collected himself sufficiently to notice the girl sitting beside her. The chief inspector introduced Sergeant Tait who, whether from tact or inclination, went immediately to the other side of the car to talk to the girl.

  Mrs Bloomfield turned her head towards Quantrill so that her companion could not hear. ‘Have you come about Mary—Mary Gedge?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I’d like to have a word with some of her friends, and I thought that you might be able to tell me who they are.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to help if I can—though Liz will be far more use to you. I’m sure she’ll be able to give you all the information you need. Shall we go in?’

  As she spoke, she slid off the white sweater that had been slung across her shoulders, and let it fall casually on her lap. Quantrill started back, reddening, suddenly aware that he had been staring down at her slim bare brown thighs. He wrenched clumsily at the door handle and stood aside, his eyes gallantly averted, while she got out of the car.

  She seemed smaller. As he remembered it, she had reached the level of his jaw, but now her shoulders drooped a little from dejection and weariness. But she made an effort to smile generously at Quantrill as she stood on the path, holding her sweater negligently in front of her so that, without obvious intent, it compensated for the brevity of her tennis dress.

  ‘Liz and I are longing for some tea,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you and Mr Tait would like some too, if you can give me a minute to change first. Liz, would you take our guests round to the garden? I sha’n’t be long.’

  Liz was seventeen or eighteen, chunky, with dark hair and freckles, pleasantly upturned features, a very brief tennis skirt and no inhibitions at all about displaying her legs. Tait took her into protective custody and they disappeared round the side of the house, but Quantrill moved more slowly, making the most of the opportunity to watch Jean Bloomfield as she hurried up the path to the front door.

  He admired her even more for her moment of self-consciousness, her instinctive modesty. And it was nothing but modesty, he was sure of that. From what he had seen in the car and from what he could see now, from the back, there could be no possible reason for her to be ashamed of her legs.

  He looked at their length under the absurdly short white dress, their smooth unblemished skin, their suntanned firmness—and then turned away, hot and angry with himself.

  It was unfair to make the comparison. His wife was the same age but she’d had three children, she was shorter and more heavily built, she hadn’t the benefit of a French sun-tan and regular exercise. It was unfair to compare her fat white thighs, so heavily veined that they reminded him irresistibly of the marble top of his mother’s old wash-stand, with Jean Bloomfield’s thighs … to compare anything about her with Jean Bloomfield.

  Besides, he’d put on weight himself. He had no way of being certain that Jean had found him attractive four years ago, and even had she done so then, she might not now.

  He made the best of his appearance, checking his suit and smoothing back his hair, and then walked round to the garden to join Tait and the girl.

  They were sitting in the late afternoon sun on a garden seat on a stone-flagged terrace at the back of the house, closer together than was called for in the line of duty. Quantrill paused discreetly beside a lilac bush and watched his sergeant at work. Tait might be hard with men, but with girls he practised a different technique.

  ‘It’s awful—’ Liz was saying bleakly. ‘I still can’t believe that Mary’s dead … I mean—’ She hiccoughed with grief and a tear fell with a splat on to her plump knee. Tait took from an inner pocket of his jacket a handkerchief that he carried for the purpose of comforting attractive girls in distress but—prudently aware of what might technically constitute an assault—resisted the temptation to mop up the fallen tear. Instead, he put the handkerchief in her hand and slid his arm round her shoulder.

  ‘I know,’ he said gently. ‘And you were one of her closest friends?’

  The girl dabbed her eyes and sniffed. ‘Well,’ she said earnestly, as if anxious not to be accused of misrepresentation, ‘I wasn’t her best friend. That was Sally Leggett—she’s gone to the USA to work in a summer camp, lucky thing.’ She sniffed again. Tait decided that it sounded more like a deplorable habit than an emotional reaction, and unobtrusively retrieved his handkerchief while he continued his sympathetic questioning.

  There was very little that Liz Whilton could tell him. She had just returned from a visit to her grandmother, and had not seen Mary since the beginning of the holidays; as far as she knew, Mary had not seen Dale Kenward since they parted
; as far as she knew, Mary had no other boy-friend.

  ‘But I live on a farm at Lillington, you see, I always get out of touch during the holidays. I think that was why Mrs Bloomfield came to break the news to me this afternoon. She knew that I was Mary’s friend, and she didn’t want me to read about the accident in the local paper. And she made me go straight with her to Breckham Market to play tennis, to take my mind off it. Very nice of her, really, because she didn’t get back from France until this morning. She crossed on the night boat and drove up from Southampton, so she must be awfully tired. I don’t think she wanted to play tennis at all, really, it was just for my sake.’

  Quantrill stepped forward. ‘Mrs Bloomfield is very kind,’ he agreed. He smiled at the girl, trying to raise her spirits again: ‘And so you beat her at tennis, I imagine?’

  ‘Well, only because she was so tired, and out of practice. She used to play awfully well when we were at the grammar school, considering how old she is. She didn’t run much, of course, but then she didn’t need to—she had this tremendous first serve, and even Sally and Mary couldn’t often beat her. Today was just a fluke—I’m useless, really.’

  She gave a deprecating shrug, smiled at Tait and nibbled at a wandering strand of dark hair with engagingly gap-fronted teeth. Her brown eyes were huge and soft, thickly lashed. Tait decided to give her the benefit of the doubt about the sniffs, grinned and took out his notebook. ‘I don’t believe that for a minute! Well, then, if I could just have your name and address, in case I want to get in touch with you again—’

  The girl gave them eagerly: ‘And the number’s Ashthorpe five eight six.’