‘Sorry,’ he said, withdrawing his hand immediately. His breath was shorter than usual. ‘Didn’t mean to make you jump. We’ll be arriving at Breckham Market in a few minutes. Thought I’d better wake you.’
‘Thanks.’ Hilary composed herself at a different angle, her legs unobtrusively out of his reach, and forced herself to give him a pleasant, non-committal smile. Undeterred, he continued to stare at her with the look of a man who hadn’t been properly fed for twenty years.
‘Let’s have supper together, Hilary,’ he urged. ‘We could go to that new place in Ashthorpe. No one knows us there.’
This time, she shook her head decisively. ‘No thank you. I’ve got a better idea, Douglas. Why don’t we both just go home?’
Chapter Twenty One
During the absence of Chief Inspector Quantrill and Sergeant Lloyd, the other members of the divisional CID had been following the only lead so far in the hunt for Jack Goodrum’s killer. Every pub, bikers’café and snooker hall in and near Breckham Market had been visited, with the object of interviewing every young man who could conceivably answer to the description of ‘a bit of a punk with one gold ear-stud’.
This description had been liberally interpreted by the CID to include those who wore any kind of visible metal adornment, on either their clothing or their skin. The incidental charges that arose ranged from possession of cannabis to riding a motor cycle without a licence, and Breckham CID felt that a useful Sunday’s work had been done. But only three of the interviewees could be justifiably suspected as the man who had gone into the Coney and Thistle at lunch time on Saturday November 15th – the day the shotgun was stolen – and asked where he could find Mr Goodrum.
At an identity parade held on Monday morning, the barmaid failed to identify any one of the three suspects. And as for the actual burglary at The Mount, the CID were still no nearer pinning it on anyone.
Chief Inspector Quantrill gave instructions for the search to be widened. He also enlisted the co-operation of the neighbouring police divisions. His opposite number at Saintsbury, Detective Chief Inspector Tait – recently promoted, so young and so ambitious that he chafed at the current dearth of serious crime in his own division – was eager to come straight over to Breckham Market and give his former boss the benefit of his advice. But Quantrill told him firmly that all he and Sergeant Lloyd needed from the Saintsbury division, thank you very much, was a round-up of semi-punks with gold ear-studs – preferably those who also wore size nine trainers with a ridged sole.
By the time Quantrill and Hilary were free to set off for their interview with the first Mrs Goodrum, Monday morning was more than half over. But it was still within school hours, and so they were surprised to see children wandering about the town doing some pre-Christmas window-shopping. In the market place a group of senior boys, most of them properly crash-helmeted, were on the bikers’favourite pitch opposite the chippy, revving up their scooters. Quantrill was not only amazed but furious to see his son among them. Peter, bareheaded and with a look of bliss on his face, was sitting astride a scooter revving with his mates.
Quantrill did an emergency stop. Abandoning the car to Hilary he threw off his seat belt, slammed out of the door and advanced menacingly on his son.
‘Peter! What the devil d’you think you’re doing?’
The rest of the young riders, some of whom recognised the Chief Inspector and all of whom recognised trouble, stopped extracting macho noises from their small engines and put-putted decorously away. The only other boy unable to escape was lanky Darren Catchpole, the owner of the Yamaha 125 that his friend Peter was trying for size.
‘Hallo, Mr Quantrill,’ said Darren guiltily, switching off the engine. He too was bareheaded, having taken off his helmet while he explained the controls. He couldn’t think offhand of any offence he was committing – it couldn’t be illegal to allow someone without a licence just to sit on his bike – but he’d heard from Peter what a totally unreasonable pig his old man was.
‘We can’t help not being in school,’ Darren added. ‘It’s not our fault.’ His helmet, a super model with a full-face tinted visor, had been snatched out of his hands by Peter and jammed on as soon as the Chief Inspector appeared. Peter was now deaf, unintelligible and facially invisible. All right for him.
‘A hot water pipe leaked, you see,’ Darren plunged on desperately. ‘All the cloakrooms are flooded. We were sent home as soon as we got there …’
Quantrill ignored him. He pointed an angry finger at Peter. Take that thing off, he mouthed.
Slowly, with sullen resentment, Peter removed his headgear and returned it to its owner.
‘And now get off that bike.’
Peter gave his father a furious look, but complied.
‘This is your machine, I suppose, Darren?’ The Chief Inspector grilled the youngster, demanding to see his licence and insurance and checking the tax disc. Then he turned back to Peter and, with angry deliberation, blistered his son’s ears in front of his friend.
‘Don’t you ever’, he concluded, ‘let me catch you on a motor bike again, whether it’s on the road or not. You do as you’re told, my lad – or old as you are you’ll get the biggest hiding of your life!’
Quantrill travelled most of the way towards Ipswich in a silent fume. ‘Blast the boy …’ he muttered at intervals. ‘Blast the boy.’
Hilary maintained a discreet silence, until she needed to navigate the last few winding rural miles to Jack Goodrum’s former home.
On a dull winter’s day, Factory Bungalow looked particularly desolate. It had been painted up at some time within the last couple of years, but its immediate surroundings consisted of nothing but rough, rain-sodden grass and scrub. A dead-end concrete road led past it to a group of ex-wartime aircraft hangars, once presumably used for Goodrum’s poultry-processing enterprise but now standing abandoned in the November mist.
The door of the bungalow was opened to them by a big, slatternly woman. Although it was well after midday she wore a dressing gown over a nightdress, and bedroom slippers on her feet. Everything about her – her yellow-grey hair, her cheeks, her chins, her voice, her body – sagged. She held a newly opened packet of custard cream biscuits in one hand, and throughout the course of her conversation with the detectives she used the other hand as a semi-automatic conveyor between the packet and her mouth.
She agreed that she was Mrs Goodrum, Mrs Doreen Goodrum; she supposed, reluctantly, that the detectives had better step inside. Yes, that’s right, she was Jack’s first wife … Her voice as she said it was as sour as the air in the sketchily cleaned, electrical appliance-crammed living room.
The three of them stood round the table, on which was all the evidence of a permanently on-going makeshift meal. The local newspaper also lay on the table: SUFFOLK MURDER ran the banner headline; wealthy former businessman shot in front of wife.
‘You were notified yesterday, I believe?’ said Quantrill.
Doreen Goodrum nodded. Her conveying hand speeded up the transfer of biscuits to her mouth, cramming them in faster than she could chew. At the same time a fat tear rolled out of one eye and down her cheek, and plopped to join the various other stains on the front of her dressing gown.
A half-empty cup of stewed tea stood on the table in front of her. ‘What about some fresh tea?’ said Sergeant Lloyd. ‘Perhaps one of your daughters –?’ She had been watching out for the other members of the family, and now she began to move as she caught a glimpse of a wraith-like girl crossing the narrow corridor beyond the open inner door. ‘Shall I ask her?’
‘No,’ said Doreen, speaking hurriedly through a mouthful of biscuit. ‘Tracey won’t … she’s not much good at making tea … she’s not too well …’ Then, with relief as she heard the plug being pulled in the bathroom: ‘Oh, there’s my Sharon! She’ll do it – won’t you my lovely, eh?’
The girl who emerged into the corridor was, at twenty-three years old, almost as big and ungainly as her mother. Sharon w
as dressed in what might have been a leisure suit, or there again pyjamas, in bright blue thermal material. She had a lovely head of hair, with natural butter yellow curls, and the uncomplicated expression of a shy eight-year-old; but behind her blue eyes was a shadow of bewilderment.
She had been about to enter the living room, but as soon as she saw the visitors she backed away down the corridor. Her mother, pausing for the first time in her consumption of biscuits, coaxed her to return.
‘You’ll make us a cup of tea, won’t you my pet? Fill up the kettle, there’s Mum’s good girl, and switch it on.’
Sharon stood in the doorway, her eyes lowered, swinging her shoulders bashfully. ‘How many tea-bags, Mum?’ she asked in a loud whisper.
‘Four – and mind you don’t burn yourself on the hot kettle …’
Sharon disappeared into the kitchen. Doreen Goodrum turned back to the detectives, her voice hardening. ‘She wasn’t always like that, my Sharon,’ she said belligerently. ‘Two years ago she was the same as any other girl – not very clever, I grant you, but happily engaged to be married. And this is what Jack Goodrum – her own father – did to her!’
‘How did he do it?’ asked Hilary, narrow-eyed, thinking immediately of criminal abuse.
‘Why, by leaving us and marrying that other woman! By cheating us out of our rights. Sharon was all set to marry her Dad’s sales manager, but when the little runt realised we wouldn’t ever get Jack’s money, he left her. Flew off to Spain – on business, he said – then sent her a telegram the day before the wedding, calling it off. No wonder the poor child went nearly out of her mind.’
Hilary agreed that Sharon had been ill-used, and kept to herself the thought that she sounded well rid of the sales manager. ‘And what about your other daughter, Mrs Goodrum? What about Tracey?’
Doreen Goodrum’s eyes shifted uneasily to the corridor. She seemed relieved that it was empty, and that her younger daughter was declining to put in an appearance. ‘Trace has been hard hit too,’ she said. ‘Very hard hit. We all have.’
Her face suddenly flushed an exhausted red. She slumped into a chair. Sweat sprang out just below her hairline. She gasped for air, and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘All that work …’ she panted. ‘All them years of nothing but work, first me and then the girls as well … And what reward have we had for it?’
Her flush began to subside. She dragged a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown and mopped her face, then snatched up the packet of biscuits and began to cram them into her mouth for comfort, continuing the recital of her grievances through a splutter of crumbs.
‘Jack settled some money on us, but there’s only just enough coming in each week to keep the three of us going. Mind you, his crafty lawyers made it sound good. I was being given the matrimonial home and all its contents, as well as the cash, they said, and the divorce judge got the idea we were set up in luxury for life … Oh, if I only I’d known where to find Jack Goodrum, this last year, I’d have made him pay for what he’s done to us!’
‘Didn’t you know where he was living?’ said Quantrill.
‘Not till yesterday, when I heard he was dead. The old devil kept his head well down – we weren’t the only ones who wanted to find him, and he knew it.’
‘But you read the Suffolk newspapers. Didn’t you see his name and address a couple of weeks ago, in the report of an inquest at Breckham Market?’
‘No,’ said Doreen Goodrum. ‘I never saw it.’ She leaned back in her chair and called out to her elder daughter in the kitchen: ‘Can you manage, Sharon? Shall Mum come and help you with the tea, my lovey?’
‘But if you had seen it,’ persisted Quantrill. ‘If you’d known where Jack was living, what would you have done?’
‘I’d have gone after the bastard.’
‘With a shotgun?’
She snorted. ‘No chance of that – he’d taken all his guns with him.’
‘But you could have got hold of one from somewhere, couldn’t you? You could have asked someone to get hold of a shotgun for you.’
Doreen wiped her forehead again as another hot sweat afflicted her. ‘Look, I wasn’t the only one who wanted to get Jack,’ she said.
‘Name me some of the others, then.’
‘I dunno their names. I had nothing to do with keeping the books. But I know there were some businessmen he cheated – his suppliers, small firms that went bankrupt because he kept them waiting so long for the money he owed them. And he cheated on his taxes, too. The Inland Revenue was after him for years.’
‘The Inland Revenue doesn’t go after people with a shotgun,’ said Quantrill. ‘But that’s what somebody did to your former husband – and you’ve just told us how badly you wanted to get him.’
Doreen Goodrum lifted her head and looked straight at the Chief Inspector with anguished eyes. ‘But I wouldn’t ever have killed him! All right, if I’d known where he lived, I’d have wanted to go after him. I’d have shown him up in front of his new wife and his neighbours – camped on his doorstep if I had to – to shame him into paying us what he owes us for all them years of work … But – but I wouldn’t have wanted him killed.’
Tears began to roll from her eyes and wobble down her cheeks. Great sobs came wrenching up out of her chest. Blindly, she reached for the last of the biscuits.
Sergeant Lloyd, interpreting her tears as a lament for the husband who had left her, offered a word of guarded sympathy. But Doreen immediately stopped sobbing.
‘I’m not blubbing for the bastard,’ she said indignantly, snuffling back her tears and wiping her wet cheeks with the palm of her hand. ‘Now he is dead, I hope he burns in hell. That’s what he deserves, for all the people he’s ruined.
‘But the last thing I wanted was for him to die. Can’t you see that? As long as he was alive, there was a chance that I could get at him and make him give us the money that’s our due. But now he’s dead, everything will go to that new wife of his. And who’s going to take care of his daughters?‘
Chapter Twenty Two
The weather had changed from dull to a bone-chilling drizzle. A hot drink would have been welcome, but Chief Inspector Quantrill preferred to leave Factory Bungalow before Sharon Goodrum had finished brewing her pot of tea.
Instead of setting course immediately for Breckham Market, he decided to take a look at the empty factory. He drove past the side of the bungalow, and on up the mud-splashed concrete road that had served first the wartime airfield and then Jack Goodrum’s empire. Now, Industrial site for sale boards (identifying the property rather than advertising it, since it was surrounded by sugar beet fields) referred prospective buyers to a London agent.
Quantrill got out of the car, dressed for the weather in mackintosh and tweed hat, and made a brisk tour. The former aircraft hangars had obviously been well maintained when they were owned by J.R.Goodrum Ltd, and further modern buildings – an office block and a large processing plant – had been added. There was no doubt that it had been a considerable business, and that one way or another – first in operating it, then in selling out – its owner must have made a packet. And there was growing evidence that much of it had been made at the expense of other people.
‘I thought my list of disgruntled ex-employees was going to be long enough,’ said Hilary when Quantrill returned to the car, his tweed hat fuzzy with droplets of rain. She was too experienced a detective not to be appropriately dressed, but she saw no sense getting wet unless she had to. ‘But now it looks as though we need to add bankrupted suppliers as well.’
‘We’ll go and talk to Goodrum’s accountants about them,’ said Quantrill. ‘His first wife’s given us a useful line to follow, if we can believe her. But that’s the catch, isn’t it? I reckon she knows more about his death than she’s letting on. For one thing, she takes the local newspaper regularly – there were back numbers lying about the living room – so the chances are that she’d seen the report of the inquest on Clanger Bell’s de
ath. If so, then she’ll have known where to find her ex-husband. And the way she hated him, I don’t see her planning to sit meekly on the doorstep of The Mount trying to shame him into giving her some extra cash.’
‘But I believe what she said about not wanting him killed,’ said Hilary, ‘for the very good reason she gave. His death had obviously come as a shock and a disappointment to her. I agree with you, though, that she may well have something to hide. Perhaps she persuaded someone to do the burglary, and steal the gun. She might then have sent someone else, the following week, to threaten Jack with it. But if so she picked the wrong man for the job, because he turned out to be less interested in getting justice for her than in having his own revenge.’
Quantrill drove back down the service road, raising his hand to a tractor driver who was towing a trailer-load of newly lifted sugar beet across the adjoining field.
‘Either Doreen Goodrum knows nothing, as she wanted us to believe, or she’s deeply involved,’ he agreed. ‘She’s so angry about the murder that if she’s innocent I’m sure she’d have given us at least one name to try. Hullo –’ he slowed to a stop as a stout figure in a headscarf, a man’s old raincoat, and heavy wellington boots emerged from the back door of Factory Bungalow and came stumbling down the overgrown path to intercept them, waving something in her hand. ‘Perhaps she’s decided to co-operate after all.’
‘That’s Sharon,’ said Hilary. ‘I recognise the knees of her pyjamas.’ She got out of the car, turned up the collar of her trench coat and picked her way across the muddy road to the wire fence that separated it from the Goodrums’piece of rough land.
‘Sorry we couldn’t stay for tea, Sharon,’ she said with a friendly smile. ‘What’s that you’ve got – something for us?’
The girl cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the bungalow, and then held out a crumpled scrap of paper. ‘It’s from our Trace,’ she said in her loud whisper. ‘She wants you to know about Uncle Dave.’
Who Saw Him Die? Page 15