Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  Quantrill looked alarmed.

  ‘Oh, only for myself and Patsy’s father and the best man. My brother’s going to take care of the ring, and make sure I get to the church on time. Bit nervous, as a matter of fact. Glad when all the fuss is over. Anyway, if I don’t see you before then, Doug –’ His eyes searched the corridor for his fiancée.

  ‘We’ll be in touch, no doubt. The A135 case,’ Quantrill reminded him.

  ‘Ah yes! Very interesting development this morning, eh? And now Hilary’s working with you –’

  ‘There isn’t necessarily a connection between the A135 case and the Arrowsmith incident,’ pointed out Quantrill, nettled.

  Mancroft looked pained. ‘Not necessarily, Doug, we all know that. A possibility, that’s all. But a new line of enquiry, you said that yourself. Don’t know why you’re not leaping on to it – you would’ve done, five years ago.’

  ‘We were both a lot younger then,’ said Quantrill sourly.

  Hilary Lloyd was waiting for him outside his office. He greeted her without a great deal of enthusiasm, and they spent five impersonal minutes discussing the action they proposed, and allocating areas of responsibility. Hilary rose to go as soon as she could, but turned back at the door.

  ‘I don’t enjoy being treated as the Chief Super’s blue-eyed girl detective, you know,’ she said. ‘It irritates me just as much as it irritates you. But it’s so recent that I’m taking Patsy’s advice and making allowances for engagement euphoria.’

  Quantrill thawed a little towards her. ‘Did you know Patsy before you came here?’

  ‘I met her once or twice, and I’m very sorry that she’ll be moving to Yarchester so soon after I’ve come here. I’d have liked her company. She’s been tremendously helpful, though, telling me the best place to have my hair done, and which electrician and plumber to call in an emergency.’

  For the first time since her arrival, Quantrill remembered that as a stranger in the town – and a working woman, at that – Hilary Lloyd would have a number of domestic problems to solve. Had she been an unmarried man, he would have thought of it sooner.

  ‘Settling in all right?’ he enquired gruffly. ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘One of the flats in Riverside Court. Martin Tait used to live there, and he gave me the agent’s address.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I’d forgotten that you would know Martin at Yarchester, even though he’s in uniform now. Haven’t seen him for months. What’s he up to, these days?’

  A twitch of her scarred eyebrow indicated that she wasn’t one of Tait’s admirers. ‘Beavering his way towards becoming the youngest Chief Constable in the country, I believe.’

  ‘Hah! That follows. It was the youngest Assistant Chief Constable when he was CID sergeant here. Still hankering after CID work, though, is he? I know he doesn’t find the same scope in Operations.’

  ‘He’s away on a CID refresher course at the moment.’

  ‘Is he?’ said Quantrill, jolted. ‘Well, I always thought him a good detective. And as long as he stays in Yarchester –’

  Hilary shook her head. ‘I heard on the county grapevine before I left that he’s been selected for secondment to the regional crime squad. I know he’s been longing to sort out the A135 case – he told me how much he envied my posting here. So if the Chief Constable should decide to call in the regional crime squad on the case, Martin’s knowledge of the area will make him the natural choice for the job.’

  ‘Reporting directly to the Chief Constable, rather than to me? Over my dead body …’ snorted Quantrill.

  For the first time since he’d met her, Hilary Lloyd gave him something like a real smile. It was partly sympathetic, but it also held more amusement than he cared for.

  ‘I doubt you’ll be given that option, sir,’ she said.

  Chapter Four

  Towards the end of the morning, when the sun had dried the dew from the immaculate lawns of Tenerife, the chalet bungalow at Nether Wickford, Angela Arrowsmith’s husband gave the remains of her Siamese cat a double inappropriate Christian burial.

  The digging of the grave proved an unexpected problem, because the police had removed Simon’s garden tools, which he kept in an unlocked shed, for examination. The house was one of an obtrusively modern group of three, standing in isolation from the rest of the village, and Angela was not on sufficiently good terms with either of her neighbours to make it easy to approach them. Eventually Simon, a plump young man with fair bushy hair and a fair bushy beard, went back to Upper Wickford to borrow one of his father’s old spades from his mother. Then, extricating his curly-stemmed pipe from the middle of his beard, and grunting with combined emotional stress and exertion, he began to dig a deep hole where his wife had directed, under a silver birch tree.

  Angela’s son, Gary Hilton, dried the tears he had been shedding noisily over the dead cat, and lent a hand without being asked. His thin stooping shoulders and horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a scholarly, almost middle-aged air, but he was in fact very young for his age, shyly self-conscious of his gawky height, and interested in reading nothing more demanding than space-fiction comics. He liked his stepfather and his deaf Uncle Harold, but usually avoided his mother whenever possible. The shocking events of the morning had however made him more co-operative than usual.

  While Gary took over the digging, Harold Wilkes, grey-faced and bloodshot-eyed after a particularly bad night, scrubbed the bloodied front doorstep with a solution of bleach. Simon meanwhile transferred the pitifully limp component parts of the cat into a cardboard box that had once contained a bulk purchase of cans of its favourite food, middle-cut red salmon. With Gary’s help, and to the accompaniment of the boy’s sniffs and gulps, Simon lowered the box into the hole. Then he returned to the house to wash the blood from his hands, and to put on the brown velvet cord jacket that his wife particularly liked him to wear. When she was ready, he assisted her to the graveside.

  Angela’s shock and grief were genuine, but her sense of drama had made her demand a proper burial service for her pet, and the attendance of her entire household. Her husband could refuse her nothing, especially after the distress of last night’s quarrel. He performed the ceremony with sad reverence, despite being directly under the deadpan scrutiny of a uniformed constable who was standing on the other side of the hedge. As he had already indicated to Harold, Simon was thankful that the police were taking the threat to his wife seriously, and providing protection for her.

  Angela wore a black dress for the occasion, and cried a good deal. Afterwards, she felt much better.

  The threat, YOUR TURN NEXT, that had been paint-sprayed on the door had at first frightened her badly. She’d been threatened before. Her past – the old days at the Black Bull in Yarchester, and before that at the Goat and Compasses in Lowestoft – had flashed before her and she had caught a vivid glimpse of the face of the Lowestoft seaman who had threatened to carve her up when she’d refused to take him back to her flat. Fortunately, she’d had a protector at the time. She’d been frightened, though, and with good reason; the seaman had been jailed shortly afterwards for using violence against a prostitute.

  But that was all a long time ago. The past was over and done with. As soon as she met Simon, four years ago, and saw him as a potential husband, she’d given up work as a barmaid. She hadn’t been to either the Goat or the Bull since then.

  She’d told Simon about the pubs, though. She’d told him how hard it was to support herself and her son on her pay as a hair stylist, and how she’d been obliged to work in the evenings and at weekends too, getting whatever menial jobs she could and exhausting herself in the process.

  Dazzled by her attention, Simon had taken the bait immediately, offering with pride to look after her for the rest of her life. Naturally, she hadn’t spelled out to him any of the details of her past, and she didn’t want him – or the police – to know about it now. There was no reason why they should know. On reflection, she could see no possible connection between
her past life and what had happened this morning.

  As for the nasty business of the headless corpse in the layby, she knew nothing whatever about the woman, as she’d already told the police when they went from house to house making enquiries. Angela believed, as most local people wanted to believe, that the body had been brought into the county from a long way away. A murder near home didn’t bear thinking about.

  The killing of poor Princess was an entirely separate matter. Angela had soon guessed who must have done it: Len Pratt, the man she’d turned out of her bed early in the morning, about half an hour before she first got up, had obviously stayed nearby, hoping for an opportunity to take a cruel revenge. He’d objected to having the cat on the bed, and Princess had scratched him when he tried to throw her off, so no doubt he took great pleasure in attacking the innocent creature when she went out for her morning prowl. He’d then cut off her poor little head and sprayed his message on the door just as a vicious extra.

  Which only went to show, Angela reflected, that she’d been perfectly right in her assessment of his character. There were better ways of making money than taking a man like that as her third husband.

  She didn’t think it likely that the police would catch him unaided. Len was too clever. He’d had reasons of his own for approaching the house discreetly, late the previous night, and so she’d told him about the back lane where he could leave his car unobserved, and she’d arranged to flash her bedroom lights to let him know as soon as Simon had gone rushing off to his mother’s. Gary always slept like the dead, and Harold knew nothing about anything, so there was no one in the house or the neighbourhood who would be able to point a finger at Len.

  It would give her great satisfaction to put the police on to him herself, but there were two good reasons why she didn’t intend to. First, Len would make a bad enemy. He was a well-known Yarchester businessman, important in sporting and entertainment circles, and she had no doubt that he would be prepared to employ someone to give her a bad time if she made difficulties for him.

  And secondly, there was Simple Simon. She’d kept him in complete ignorance of her brief affair with Len, on the bird-in-the-hand principle, and now she had decided that he might still figure in her plans it was doubly important to assure him of her fidelity, and to be assured of his continuing devotion.

  ‘Oh, Si –’

  Leaving Harold and Gary to fill in the cat’s grave, she led her husband into the newly built sun lounge, and flung her arms round his neck. She was a petite woman, so slim and so dainty on her feet that from the back, or from a distance, she looked like a girl.

  From the front, because of rather than despite her deep suntan, it was immediately obvious that she was no longer young. The tan intensified every line on her face, emphasising her steely eyes and tight lips, but she spoke to her husband like a defenceless child.

  ‘Si, darling – you’re so sweet to me. Thank you for helping me through this dreadful morning, after I was so rotten to you last night.’ She pressed her face penitently against his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry we quarrelled. Big Boy forgive Angie?’

  Simon groaned with remorse, and hugged her to his barrel chest. He was of medium height but broad frame, and four years of marriage and rich cooking had begun to package his ribs in flesh.

  ‘Darling Angie, the quarrel was all my fault. I was a selfish swine.’ He rubbed his bearded face against her hair, and she remembered just in time not to protest that he was spoiling it. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for rushing off and leaving you alone like that.’

  ‘But you did come back right away when I rang you at your mother’s this morning, after the policeman came to tell us about poor little Princess. Thank you for doing as I suggested, Si, and driving up the back lane so that he couldn’t see you arriving. I didn’t want him to know that we’d quarrelled – he might have started suspecting you!’

  ‘You were a clever girl to think of that.’ Simon sat in a cushioned cane armchair, and drew her on to his knee. ‘The question is, though, who on earth could have done it? Who could possibly be so cruel to you?’ He shuddered, and tightened his arms about her. ‘And why? For God’s sake, why?’

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she said dully. She pressed herself against him, hiding her face in his beard. ‘Oh, Si, I’m frightened.’

  ‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right. I’ll look after you.’

  She sat up on his knee and fiddled with a curly strand of his hair. ‘But how can I rely on you any more?’ she asked in a pathetically small voice. ‘You’ll only go away and leave me all alone again, just as you did last night.’

  ‘I won’t! Angie, sweetheart, I promise I’ll never go away and leave you alone again, ever. As long as you want me, I’ll be there. And I’ll do anything I can to make up for last night. Anything.’

  That was what she wanted to know. She kissed her husband generously.

  Then, ‘Si –’ she said, stroking his hair with dextrous fingers, ‘I’ve had a marvellous business idea – a real money-spinner. All I need from you, dearest, is a little help to get it off the ground …’

  Chapter Five

  Three hundred yards away, on the Upper Wickford side of the common, two widows sat sunning themselves outside the back door of a small sixteenth-century timber-framed house, with lichened red pantiles on its roof and yellow washed plaster on its walls. Nellie Arrowsmith and May Cullen, both born and bred in Suffolk, and friends and neighbours for twenty-eight years, were as usual passing the morning in each other’s company.

  May, white-haired and the elder by fifteen years, lived in a slate-roofed brick doll’s house, one up and one down with a lean-to kitchen at the back, which had been slapped up against one end of the old house by a nineteenth-century jerry-builder. May had lived there, as wife and widow, for over fifty years. She and her husband had been childhood friends of Nellie’s husband Fred and his first wife. Osteo-arthritis in her hips made it difficult for May to get about now, even with a walking frame, but she could manage the few yards from her own back door to Nellie’s.

  The friends sat on upright kitchen chairs, which rocked a little on the old, moss-edged, uneven slabs that paved the path. Round them – neglected for years, because it had become too much for Fred Arrowsmith to manage long before he died – two or three acres of garden and orchard rioted to ripeness. The sun, yellow as honey, drew out and mingled the spicy scent of mauve Michaelmas daisies with the fermenting smell of rotten windfall apples; wasps and red admiral butterflies tottered from fruit to flower, drunk on the wing.

  The two women were not idle, as they sat easing their bones in the warmth of the day. On a stool between them was a basket heaped with the last of the crop of runner beans that Simon had planted and staked for his mother earlier in the year, and they occupied themselves by slicing the beans into the colanders they held on their aproned laps.

  They worked slowly. May’s disease had forced her fingers stiffly sideways, at an angle from her swollen knuckles, like clifftop trees permanently bent by gales. Nellie, a buxom woman who wore her greying fair hair in a thick braid round her head, was a comparative youngster at 62, but she had recently come out of hospital after heart surgery and her fingers felt numbed.

  Like their work, their conversation was conducted with many pauses.

  ‘It must have been nice for you to have him back in his old bedroom last night, Nellie.’

  ‘Quite like old times. Except that he was so upset. I’d rather know that he was in his own home, and happy.’

  As usual, they were talking of Simon. Nellie idolised her only child, but without attempting to possess him. Simon was her pride; her joy lay not in his companionship, much as she valued it, but in the knowledge of his well-being.

  She had raised no objection, four years previously, to his proposed marriage at 23 to a divorcee of 29 with a son of 12. Nellie was at that time beginning to worry secretly about her health, and about who would look after Simon if she should die while he still l
ived at home. She wanted to see him happily married, and was concerned that he was shy and appeared to have no girl friends.

  His unexpected – and slightly defensive – announcement that he had found an ideal future wife delighted her. An older woman, Nellie had thought comfortably, would already be an experienced cook and housekeeper; she’d be able to look after Simon far better than some slip of a girl.

  Her husband, Fred, had had reservations. He knew that his first wife would have been horrified if their son Ross had made such a marriage. But Simon was Nellie’s boy, and Fred had always been too old to be of any consequence in his younger son’s upbringing.

  As long as Nellie and Simon were happy, Fred had minded his own business, and had taken his reservations with him to the grave.

  And Simon certainly was happy at first; immensely proud of the smartly dressed, petite young woman who had agreed to be his wife, although he took her home to meet his parents only once before the wedding, and had never taken her to see May Cullen at all. Nellie had been saddened to see so little of her future daughter-in-law, but she accepted Simon’s explanation that Angela was too busy to travel out from Yarchester to Wickford. She always accepted without question whatever her son said or did.

  May Cullen was more sceptical. For all her age and infirmity, she was the sharper, shrewder of the two. She looked a sweet old lady, her complexion pink and soft, her hair as wispy white as cirrus cloud, but she was nobody’s fool. She was very fond of Nellie, who had the kindest heart of anyone she knew, but sometimes she despaired over the younger woman’s trusting simplicity.

  Simon’s failure to bring Angela to meet her, even after the couple came to live just across the common, hurt May very much, but she guessed his reason. She was neither as soft-hearted nor as soft-headed as his mother, and Simon knew it; if he didn’t want her to meet Angela, it must be because he realised that he’d picked a wrong’un.