‘Then, in the middle of our course, we were allowed out one Saturday afternoon. We all went into Manchester. It was a cold, damp, foggy day at the beginning of December, and the shops were lit up for Christmas. Most of us stuck together, but John went off on his own. He spent his money on Christmas presents, but he also bought a coil of rope.’
Jean Bloomfield had been listening quietly, reluctant but intent. Now, she sidestepped: ‘I don’t think I want to hear any more.’
He caught at her sleeve. ‘But I’m going to finish,’ he said. ‘This is something that has haunted me for years, and I’m going to tell you, just as you insisted on telling me how your husband was killed. Listen: that evening, we all went to the NAAFI, except John. He stayed by himself in the billet, and he wrapped up all his Christmas presents and wrote the labels—one for his girl-friend as well. He wrote a letter to his mother. Then he changed into working overalls and PT shoes, and polished his uniform boots and buttons and badges. Then, he laid all his kit out on the bed as though there was going to be an inspection, and he put the Christmas presents and the letter on his bed too, and he took the rope and went out.
‘I was on fire picquet later that evening. It was a hutted camp, with coke stoves in each hut, and there was always a danger of fire. We had to patrol round in twos, keeping our eyes open. It was quiet among the huts, with most of the boys either in the NAAFI or at the camp cinema; in fact it was a bit eerie, what with the quiet and the fog. And then, when we were walking past the water tower, I heard a bumping and a scraping and a kind of choking gurgle from above my head. I shone my torch, and saw something swaying from one of the iron girders.
‘We both panicked, though I tried to pretend not to. We knew it must be someone hanging, though we didn’t know who. I sent the other airman running off to fetch the orderly corporal, while I waited. Of course, I should have tried to cut the boy down, but I was only eighteen and I was frightened. I just waited for help to come, and prayed that the horrible noises above my head would stop.
‘Then the orderly corporal came, with the station duty officer. The corporal had been afraid to come on his own, but the officer was an older man and he knew what to do. He swore at me for not even trying to cut the boy down, and he made me follow him up the iron ladder and hold the torch while he cut the rope. So I could see everything.
‘I didn’t know it was John, even then. There was no way of recognising him. He wasn’t dead, you see, just slowly strangling to death. His knees were drawn up in the position of a foetus, and the weight of his body had stretched his neck. He had hooked his fingers under the noose, as though he had tried to loosen it, and there were livid scratches from his fingernails on his long white neck.
‘The officer kept shouting and swearing at me to hold the torch steady so that he could see what he was doing, and I had to watch the boy’s face jerking above me as the officer sawed at the rope. The face was dark and congested, except for the eyes which were rolled up and showed nothing but the whites. His tongue was protruding. He was coughing and snorting, choking his lungs up through his nose—’
‘Stop it!’
In the horror of total recall, he had almost forgotten Jean Bloomfield, and his purpose. Her face was distorted by distress, her hands were clapped to her ears.
‘Stop it, I don’t want to hear any more! Why did you have to tell me such a dreadful thing?’
Quantrill wiped his damp forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I had to tell you,’ he said, slowly and deliberately, ‘because I know that you have a horror of violent death. Not of death itself—you’re prepared to welcome that, as long as it’s for other people—but of the violence with which it came to your brother and your husband. I think that you imagined that by holding Mary’s head under water, you would be giving her a quick, clean, easy death.
‘But it couldn’t have happened like that. I don’t know whether you and Mary had been discussing the idea of dying young—perhaps you had, perhaps you’d encouraged her in that romantic nonsense you told me about the desirability of dying at the height of your happiness. Perhaps she even believed it.
‘But that doesn’t mean that Mary Gedge seriously wanted to die! And even if she did, or thought she did, the instinct for self-preservation would have been too strong. Think of poor John Sweeting: no one could have wanted to die more than he did. No one could have prepared himself more thoroughly for death. And yet, when he swung himself off the girder of the water tower and found that death wasn’t—as he must have imagined—instantaneous, he struggled instinctively to live. He gouged strips of skin from his neck with his fingernails in his efforts to loosen the noose.
‘And it was the same with Mary, wasn’t it? She was young and healthy and happy, she didn’t want to die. She didn’t simply lie in the water and go limp under your hand, she fought for her life. You were above and behind her, so all she managed to claw at was gravel and river weed. But she tore her finger and toe nails and lacerated her knees on the gravel in the struggle.
‘Poor Mary’s was no gentle death! I wonder what you thought, when you realised that you couldn’t kill her without using violence, and yet you’d gone too far to be able to stop? How did it feel, to be down there in the water with her, cutting your own knees on the gravel as you tried to hold her down? What did you think, as you forced her head under water while she kicked and clawed and thrashed in her struggle to live? How long did you have to hold her under? It must have seemed like an eternity. How long did it take her to die—three minutes, four—?’
‘No! You’re exaggerating, it wasn’t like that, it didn’t take so long!’
Quantrill’s physical reaction was not quick enough. By the time his legs got the message to move, she had reached her car.
He guessed that she would head for the river; not the inadequate Dunnock but the Dodman, which runs west from Breckham Market, slow but moderately deep, towards the Ouse. Quantrill followed, radioing for support. She drove recklessly fast along a minor road, skidded her car to a halt, scrambled out and began to run along the river bank towards a footbridge that spanned one of the deeper reaches.
Quantrill abandoned his car behind hers and pounded after her, forcing himself far beyond a reasonable speed for a man of his age and bulk. He knew that he had to catch her before she reached the bridge. He disapproved of heroics; besides, he couldn’t swim.
He tried to spurt. His arms and legs pumped in protesting rhythm, his chest swelled to bursting.
He reached out a hand towards her. She glanced over her shoulder, stubbed her toe against a tree root, and went sprawling on the grass of the river bank. She might have fallen into the water if she had not, instinctively, grabbed at a tuft of grass to save herself.
Quantrill collapsed beside her. There was a red haze in front of his eyes; his heart was thumping against his rib-cage with the ferocity of a badly loaded spin dryer.
Jean Bloomfield turned her back on him and covered her face with her hands. ‘Go away,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘Leave me alone …’
He drew in enough knife-edged air to enable him to gasp out an answer. ‘You can’t run away from yourself. You’ve got to learn to live with what you’ve done.’
‘But I don’t want to live! I want to die.’
It was an effort to find the right words, too much of an effort to speak them in more than an exhausted monotone: ‘No you don’t, you know you don’t. You’re not one of the born victims. You’re too strong-minded, you’ve survived too much. You’ll go on clinging to life, just like your friend Dorothy Parker, however unhappy it makes you.’
Her shoulders began to shake. She was crying silently, her head on her arms. Beside her, Quantrill lay flat on his back, spent.
Gradually, the mist began to clear from in front of his eyes. His heart-beat steadied, the pain in his chest began to lessen. His unacknowledged fear that the sudden exertion might have brought on a heart attack receded, to be replaced by an awareness of his surroundings and a pervasive melancho
ly.
He listened to the slow gurgle of the water and the hum of a dragon fly, smelled the dankness of river weed, felt the rough grass of the bank under his hands. All his sensations had a surprising familiarity, as though somewhere, at some time, he had been through this before.
He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up the past.
Twenty-odd years ago … that was it, a turning point in his life. And now he could recall it vividly: another early summer evening, another river bank, another bout of exertion, another sense of energy drained; another girl who had turned from him and cried, another victory that had tasted of defeat.
‘Have you arrested her, sir?’
‘Not yet.’ Quantrill stood in his office, staring out of the window. The sun, setting red in a thick evening haze, looked like nothing so much as a giant fluorescent lolly of the kind sucked by his son’s favourite New York television detective. He turned back to Tait. ‘She’s with Patsy Hopkins, writing out a statement.’
‘Was it jealousy? Of a middle-aged woman for a young one?’
The chief inspector was too weary to try to explain. ‘A lot more complicated than that. But I’ve no doubt she’ll put it clearly in her statement. She’s good with words.’
Tait felt mystified, excluded. ‘Sir, what about Joy Dawson? Do you think Mrs B. killed her?’
‘Joy Dawson?’ Quantrill rounded on his sergeant, incensed. ‘Of course not! Good God, what kind of person do you think Mrs Bloomfield is?’
Tait was affronted. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said stiffly. ‘But then, I haven’t the advantage of being a personal friend of the murderer.’
As soon as he spoke the words, Tait knew the enormity of them. The old man was in a bad way, there was no doubt about that: shattered. It was indefensible to make capital out of it.
The sergeant stood to attention. ‘Sir,’ he said, genuinely contrite, ‘I apologise. I shouldn’t have said that.’
The flash of anger faded from Quantrill’s eyes. He nodded dully. ‘And I shouldn’t have jumped on you,’ he said. ‘Of course you’re right to bear Joy in mind, and to consider every possibility.’
He looked at the photograph of the missing girl that stood on his desk, and tried to shake off his depression. A newly promoted chief inspector had no business not to be positive; a good detective had to keep on trying.
‘Not that we’ve any reason to believe that Joy is dead,’ he said briskly. ‘A good many girls run away from home, wanting to cut loose. It takes months, years even, for them to face up to going back, but some of them do. And did you hear about the girl who went missing from the other side of the county seven years ago, and was traced last January?
‘There’s an even chance that Joy has been one of the lucky ones, and is alive and well somewhere. Take a good look at her file on Monday, will you? I’d be glad of your opinion—you may well spot something that I’ve missed. Oh, and will you make the formal arrest in the Mary Gedge case?’
‘Me, sir?’ Sergeant Tait boggled at the prospect of being credited with the arrest of a murderer in his first week in the division. ‘Oh, but that seems hardly fair—’
‘I’d consider it a favour, Martin. I’d like to get away. It’s my day off tomorrow, and I want to take my boy fishing—if nothing else turns up between now and then, of course. If it does, you’ll know where to find me.’
Chief Inspector Quantrill brushed a few stray blades of grass from his suit, and went home to his wife.
Copyright
First published in 1978 by Hamilton
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Sheila Radley, 1978
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