When Chief Inspector Quantrill arrived at Yeoman’s six minutes later he found his daughter crouched in the orchard, sobbing and retching among the daffodils, and the first thing he did was to take her home.
Chapter Nine
The narrow country road that passed the gate of Yeoman’s was partially obstructed by police cars. Quantrill, returning after taking Alison home, edged his big Austin close to a hawthorn hedge that bristled with a four-day green beard. He nodded to the uniformed constable on traffic and gate duty, and strode past some brick outbuildings and on up the drive towards the house.
Yeoman’s was of typically Suffolk construction: timber framed, with the timbers – unlike those of equally old houses in the more decadent Home Counties – decently covered by an all-over cladding of pink-washed plaster. Massive brick chimney stacks buttressed the house at either end. The roof was thatched with reed that rose – as the Suffolk voice rises at the end of each sentence – to form a snout of thatch above each gable.
Untypically, the property was in immaculate condition. Thatch and plaster are ruinously expensive to maintain, and neglect soon shows. The thatch becomes colonized by birds and rodents; the lime plaster cracks and peels to expose walls made of clay lump, that friable pudding mixture of rubble and horse hair and clay and straw which was for centuries the basic East Anglian building material. But at Yeoman’s the thatch was thick and trim and the plaster – coloured a delicate magnolia pink rather than the commoner strawberry-ice-cream shade – unblemished.
Detective Sergeant Tait, who was examining the exterior of the window to the right of the front door, looked up as Quantrill approached.
‘How’s Alison, sir?’ he asked sympathetically.
‘Under sedation by now, I hope. She’s thoroughly shocked, poor child.’
‘No wonder, if she saw that body.’ Tait looked paler and a good deal more subdued than usual. With reason, Quantrill remembered; Tait had at one time fancied his chances with Jasmine Woods. Seeing her murdered body must have shaken him up. It wasn’t a duty that Quantrill himself was looking forward to, either.
Tait wiped his hand over his mouth and made an obvious effort to revert to his usual briskness. ‘Was Alison able to tell you anything?’
‘Nothing coherent. Understandably – she was fond of the woman. She used to talk at home about Jasmine Woods until we were sick of the sound of the name, so she’s bound to be in a bad way. I’ve left a policewoman with her to take a statement as soon as she’s up to giving it. Still, this is one case where we’ve plenty of information before we start.’ The Chief Inspector peered at the window that Tait had been examining. ‘A break-in, was it? Someone after her collection?’
‘The display case is broken open and the jade and netsuke have gone,’ Tait confirmed, ‘but nothing else has been disturbed and there’s no sign of a forced entry into the house. Presumably she opened the door to her killer, and the injuries suggest that it was a man. Rigor seems to be complete, by the way. Until the pathologist pins down the time of death I’m working on the hypothesis that it was yesterday.’
‘Sounds reasonable. Sunday … and it must have been someone she knew, or she wouldn’t have let him in to the house.’
‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Tait. ‘It was done by someone who really hated her.’
‘You can never be sure of that,’ argued Quantrill. ‘Murder’s often done in blind panic – the first blow may be intended just to keep the victim quiet, but then the attacker loses his head completely. That’s what’s so terrifying about violence; it fuels itself. You can’t assume that hatred is a motive.’
‘You haven’t seen the body yet,’ Tait said grimly. ‘Wait until you see what he did to her.’
Quantrill looked, and was appalled. He had seen death – and death by violence – often enough in his career to think himself incapable of being shocked by it, but this one was different; more vicious than any murder he had ever seen. That the victim was a woman he knew compounded the horror. He blinked as the photographer’s busy flash illuminated the corpse; and swallowed down his nausea. God help her, poor woman … and that child Alison, who had seen her friend like this …
‘Nasty one, eh chief?’ said an abominably cheerful voice.
Keith Pulham, the duty divisional scene-of-crime officer, was a blond round-cheeked young civilian whose teenage ambition to join the force had been frustrated by his failure – despite his surreptitious enrolment for a postal body-building course – to grow an extra two and a half inches in height. Now, after a period of training at a forensic science laboratory, he held an appointment that gave him all the immediate technical interest of detective work with none of the foot-slogging enquiry routine, and he was as happy and eager as a newly trained police dog. While he waited for the arrival of Inspector Colman and the serious crimes team from Yarchester, Pulham padded round the periphery noting the whereabouts of every one of the far-flung spots of blood on the walls and furniture.
Quantrill, glad that he could leave the detailed examination of the body to the experts, stood back and took note of the position of other objects in relation to it: the shoes and trousers that had been torn off and flung on the floor, the broken bottle glass, and the orange blob that looked at first glance like a fallen jelly-baby, but proved to be a small piece of amber jade.
‘Seen anything useful yet, Soco?’ he asked.
‘This might come in handy.’ Pulham pointed to something on the floor below the wrenched-open doors of the display cabinet, some yards from the edge of the great crimson lake of blood – still tacky – that spread over the hand-knotted cream Bokhara carpet below and about the place where the body lay. The Chief Inspector crouched beside him to peer at some brownish-white splinters that had been trodden into the carpet.
‘I’m not sure what it was,’ continued Pulham, leaving the fragments exactly where they were for his senior colleagues to see, ‘but I imagine our villain must have trodden on it. Chances are that some of the bits will have stuck to his shoe.’
‘It’s probably ivory,’ said Quantrill. ‘She had a valuable collection of netsuke.’
Pulham’s forehead puckered like that of a puzzled Doberman. ‘Come again, chief?’
Quantrill stood up and glanced round. Tait, talking to the photographer on the far side of the room, was out of earshot; even so, the Chief Inspector was reluctant to air his recently acquired knowledge. ‘Ivory,’ he repeated off-handedly. ‘Japanese knick-knacks.’
Pulham nodded, pleased at the prospect of impressing his colleagues with the information. ‘Ah.’ He studied the corpse dispassionately. ‘Doesn’t look much like murder in furtherance of theft, though, does it? I mean—’
‘No,’ said Quantrill shortly, moving away. He had to suppress a completely unprofessional instinct to get the body decently covered.
The police surgeon came, pronounced the woman dead, agreed Tait’s hypothesis that the murder had been committed the previous day, and went. Inspector Colman and his team arrived and began their minutely detailed examination of the scene of the crime. Chief Inspector Quantrill sent for the mobile incident-room and sited it on the outskirts of the village, where it could be used as a centre for co-ordinating the activities of the enquiry team. He gave a briefing, and sent policemen along the winding road that ran from the village past the gates of Yeoman’s, to enquire at the scattered dwellings whether anyone had noticed a vehicle parked outside Jasmine Woods’s house the previous day. More policemen began to search the drive for tyre marks or footprints.
As soon as Jasmine Woods’s office had been checked over, Quantrill and Tait moved in to find out what they could about the dead woman. Quantrill had heard from his daughter that the room was called an office. He would have supposed that a romantic novelist might give it a cosier name, but having met this particular novelist he knew that she had an unromantic turn of mind. The room was, strictly, an office with two plain desks and swivel chairs, an electric typewriter, a tape recorder, filing cab
inets and reference books. Only exotically flowered curtains and a large bowl of hyacinths saved it from austerity.
A blank sheet of paper was in the typewriter, and some completed work lay beside it. Quantrill glanced at a neatly typewritten sheet, blinked over the hair-raising event it described in breathless prose, and decided that it had to be fiction. ‘Try the recorder,’ he told Tait. ‘There might be something relevant on it.’
The machine was not a model that Tait was familiar with. He talked to cover the fact that he was having to fiddle with it. ‘I imagine that this is what Alison was using this morning, before she found the body. Presumably Jasmine dictated her novels, and her secretary typed them from the tapes – ah—’ He picked up the earpiece and listened for a few moments, wide-eyed with amusement. ‘It seems to be all about an intrepid heroine protecting her virginity with one hand while she clings to the gargoyle on a church tower with the other.’
‘Typical,’ grunted Quantrill. His sympathy with Jasmine Woods, alive and dead, did not extend to her works. ‘Well, that’s one book my wife will never get her head into. Pack up the tapes, anyway, we can run them through later if we’re stuck for ideas. You know, I’m puzzled about what happened this morning, Martin. The anonymous three-nines call, for one thing.’
‘I thought that might have been the man who looks after the garden,’ said Tait. ‘I met him at Jasmine’s party. Gilbert Smith – he lives somewhere in the grounds.’
Quantrill looked up quickly. ‘Does he? Yes, come to think of it, Alison did mention him once or twice. Very gentle, she said – won’t even exterminate the greenfly.’
‘Oh, he’s a left-over from the flower-power era,’ said Tait disparagingly. ‘Hair down to his shoulders, and peace and love to all – you know the kind of thing.’
‘You mean a druggy?’ Quantrill demanded. His eyebrows rose fiercely. ‘You knew this and you didn’t do anything about it – even though Alison has been working here?’
‘Certainly I did something,’ said Tait, irritated that the Chief Inspector should underestimate his professionalism. ‘I met Smith just once, at the party, and I spoke to Jasmine about him. Apparently they were old friends. She suspected that he smoked pot, and thought it was harmless, but I advised her either to tell him to stop it or to throw him out. I told her I’d have to pass his name to the drug squad, and I did, but I had no evidence and they’ve probably been too busy to follow him up. Damn it all – sir—’ he added, aggrieved, ‘I spoiled my chances with Jasmine by giving her a semi-official warning, so there’s no question of dereliction of duty. Besides, you were at the party too; for all I knew, you’d met Smith yourself. And Alison knew him and told you about him—’
‘Yes, well … as it happens I didn’t meet the man, and I don’t always listen to everything my daughter says. She was happy in her job, and that’s all I cared. What I’m concerned about is what happened this morning. Alison’s time for starting work here was 9.30; the three-nines call is logged at 11.24. I wonder why it took so long to find the body? And if it was Smith who made the call, why didn’t he give his name?’
‘I’ve sent a PC to find him,’ said Tait. ‘We shall want a statement from him anyway, since he lived on the property.’
Quantrill agreed. ‘Not that he’s likely to be the murderer, if he’s about the place this morning. Of course, the man who made the call might have been the first passer-by that Alison could find, or the milkman or the postman—’
‘Who did his duty but didn’t want to be involved—?’ said Tait doubtfully.
‘Well, it’s a possibility. We shall know as soon as we can get Alison’s statement. Or we may get the answer from one of the nearby houses.’
‘Did you meet any of her neighbours who were at Jasmine’s party?’ asked Tait. ‘I did, and they interest me. I don’t know what impression you got of the guests, but mine wasn’t favourable.’
‘Mine neither. I’m not much of a partygoer,’ understated Quantrill, ‘but I didn’t think it was usual for guests to be deliberately rude to their hostess.’ He recalled the people he had met at the party. ‘Bloody rude. In fact,’ he added, remembering Jasmine Woods’s drunkenly belligerent cousin, ‘I can think of one man I’d very much like to interview in connection with her murder.’
Tait took out his notebook. ‘Between us,’ he suggested, ‘we can probably compile a list …’
They did, and compared their impressions, and looked at their findings with surprise and interest.
‘Rum lot of friends, she had,’ mused Quantrill.
‘She did make a point of telling me that most of the guests were relations and neighbours rather than personal friends.’
‘I should hope so. With relations and neighbours like that, she’d need a few good friends somewhere. Well, this list is going to come in useful. Can you find her address book? And an engagement diary?’
Tait found both, and opened the diary at the page for Sunday 5 April.
‘Sociable day,’ he commented. ‘J and R drinks here 12. That could be Jonathan and Roz Elliott, she said they lived locally. Presumably she was alive at that time, or they’d have come in when she didn’t open the door, and would have found the body. Then it says Heather’s, supper query. Heather is her impoverished sister in Yarchester – the one with the envious husband. Why the query, I wonder? And did she keep the appointment? And if not—’
‘Heather must be her nearest relation, to our knowledge,’ said Quantrill. ‘I’ll go and break the news and find out what happened yesterday. And while I’m in Yarchester, it’ll be interesting to go and have a word with Rodney—’
He broke off as a middle-aged constable, as heavily moustached as Kitchener in the First World War posters, hurried in to the office.
‘Smith’s hopped it, sir,’ he reported, breathing hard. ‘There was no sign of him in the garden, and there’s a patch of oil on the floor of the double garage, alongside the car. From the spares lying around, it looks as though a motor bike was kept there. I found his living quarters above the garage. The door was locked, so I forced an entry. There’s almost nothing left in the way of clothes and personal gear except—’
The constable took a deep breath, brushed his moustache with his knuckle and tried not to sound too pleased with the importance of the news he brought: ‘– except a pair of jeans and a pair of shoes. And they’re both soaked with blood.’
Chapter Ten
Alison Quantrill floundered up through layer after suffocating layer of sedation, heart pounding, limbs thrashing, voice crying out against the enormity of her nightmare. There was blood in it, and glass, and torn flesh, and the pain of what she saw ripped screaming through her skull: ‘No! No!’
To Beth Knowles, the busty policewoman who sat patiently near her in the bedroom with the Laura Ashley wallpaper at Number 5 Benidorm Avenue, it seemed merely that the girl twitched and murmured for a moment in her sleep.
Two detectives and three uniformed policemen converged on a building at the end of Jasmine Woods’s garden, near the gate. It was a two-storey red-brick structure that had presumably once been a stable; an exterior iron staircase led to the upper part, and the men clattered up it one after the other and burst into Gilbert Smith’s flat.
The door opened immediately on to an all-purpose room, with sloping walls that were lined with white-painted board. In one corner was a sink unit and a small calor gas cooker, and near them a table on which were the remains of a meal, although it was difficult to decide exactly which meal cornflakes, baked beans spooned cold from their tin, brown bread and canned lager added up to.
The room smelled of stale smoke, and dust was thick everywhere. An unmade divan bed stood against the far wall. The room was generously supplied with built-in cupboards, but most of them were closed and unused. All that remained in the wardrobe was an army surplus great-coat and a holed T-shirt that looked as though it might have been used for cleaning purposes. On the T-shirt was a blazing-sun motif circled by the legend A fair field f
ull of folk.
Of material possessions – other than the furniture, rugs and curtains, presumably supplied by Jasmine Woods – there was little evidence: a broken guitar, a few paperbacks, some posters stuck or pinned to the walls. Many of the posters were elderly, their edges curled and beginning to tear. Some were illustrations and maps of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, left-overs from the cult of Gandalf and the Lord of the Rings. On a bench were some pieces of wood in process of being carved into weird animals, half men, half beasts.
Above the bed, handwritten on the sloping wall with a red felt-tip, was a statement: ‘The higher you go, the more precise and intelligent must be your nagivation.’
A small shower-room led off the main room. The April sun, full on the window, filtered greenly through the leaves of the plants that flourished in pots on the sill. Hidden behind the shower curtain, where the constable had found them, were the gardener’s bloodstained jeans and shoes.
‘I thought you said soaked,’ grumbled Quantrill. ‘There’s nowhere near enough blood here.’
‘And anyway,’ said Tait, ‘fresh blood would saturate the fabric. Most of this is lying on the surface in clots.’
The two detectives stared accusingly at the constable, who shifted his weight from one foot to another and brushed at his moustache. ‘It’s significant evidence,’ he asserted indignantly.
‘So it is, Ron,’ Quantrill agreed. ‘Doesn’t seem to point to the murderer, though, does it? If it was Smith who killed her, his clothes really would be soaked. These aren’t. Still, this quantity of blood and the fact that Smith has gone is significant enough, as you say.’ He jerked his head at his sergeant. ‘Get him picked up, Martin.’
‘I’m doing so,’ said Tait, who had stopped to radio the instruction before racing up to Smith’s flat. ‘There are smears of blood on the doors and on the washbasin taps, so he must have had it on his hands as well. I’ll get the fingerprints from this flat checked against the ones in the house, and send these clothes to forensic. Then I’ll give this place a thorough going-over.’
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