Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  One look at the wedding photographs – she had been invited to attend, but her infirmity made that impossible – had confirmed May’s opinion.

  ‘That woman’s no more 29 than I am, Nellie,’ she’d protested. ‘Why, she looks nearly old enough to be his mother! And where did she get that long blonde hair from? You said it was jet black when he brought her to see you. And as for what she’s wearing … I’ll say nothing about a divorcee getting remarried in church, though I don’t hold with it myself. But no woman with a husband living and a son of that age has any business to go to her second wedding in a long white dress, with a veil and all. She ought to be ashamed … Oh, Nellie, what has your poor Simon let himself in for?’

  ‘But he loves her,’ Nellie had explained. ‘And I’m sure Angela loves him. She’s all over him when they’re together.’

  ‘She would be, wouldn’t she?’ May had said drily. ‘She knows when she’s on to a good thing.’

  But Simon had made his own choice, and as long as he was happy his mother had no qualms. When he’d told her, after their return from their Canary Island honeymoon, that Angela was not 29 but 36, Nellie didn’t even blink. The older the woman, she reasoned, the better Simon would be looked after.

  That Angela’s idea of looking after Simon did not coincide with her own was a fact that began to dawn on Nellie only gradually, from casual remarks her son made when he called in, alone, to see her. Nellie had absorbed the information and passed it on bit by bit, without comment, to May.

  It seemed that Angela wasn’t really cut out for domestic work. Her brother Harold had been a chef before his accident; he was better at cooking, and at cleaning and washing and ironing, than his sister, and as he was glad of the opportunity to repay Angela and Simon for providing him with a home, she let him do it. And Simon himself liked to take charge of the household budget, and the joint cheque book, so he made a regular Friday evening visit to the superstore in Breckham Market to buy the week’s provisions. He’d told his mother that he preferred to do the shopping on his own, without Angela; it was easier to concentrate, and to keep within his budget.

  But Angela wasn’t lazy, Nellie had assured her friend. She’d run a business of her own for years, in Yarchester, as a commission agent for some of the big mail-order firms. She had a large number of customers, who chose clothes and household goods from the catalogues she took to their doors and then paid her by instalments. That was why she’d needed a car of her own, after she married Simon and they set up house in Wickford, to keep her business going.

  She’d become a representative for Avon cosmetics, too, since her marriage, so she was on the go all the time. It was understandable that she had felt in need of a good holiday, about eighteen months after the wedding, and she’d chosen to go to the Bahamas; not with Simon, but with her twice-divorced sister from Liverpool.

  ‘But only because Simon’s too busy to go,’ Nellie had told May, after she and Fred had been on a rare visit for Sunday tea to their son’s home. And then, in an unusual outburst of frankness, she had added, ‘Angela wouldn’t have been my choice as a wife for him. Oh, her language … I’ve never heard a man use such words, let alone a woman. And yet she dresses so well, and smells lovely … Simon adores her. If she wanted the moon, I think he’d try to find some way of getting it for her.’

  Even now, four years after their marriage, when Simon had rushed in distraught the previous night and asked for the use of his old room because he and Angela had quarrelled, Nellie refused to condemn her daughter-in-law. She wanted for Simon only what he had told her he wanted for himself: a reconciliation with the woman he loved.

  Nellie had already been round to May’s house, immediately after breakfast, to tell her friend about Simon’s unexpected overnight stay. Now, as they sliced runner beans for storage in the freezer he had bought his mother, Nellie told May about his return visit to borrow a spade.

  ‘But surely to goodness,’ said May, ‘the boy’s got a spade of his own?’

  Nellie looked puzzled. Simon hadn’t told her why he wanted to borrow it, and she hadn’t thought to ask him.

  ‘Oh yes, he’s got a spade,’ she said. ‘Sure to have.’ Then her frown cleared. If Simon wanted to borrow a spade, it was because he wanted to borrow a spade, and that was all that concerned her. Besides, her illness had left her weakened, short of breath and subject to dizziness and blackouts, and she was increasingly conscious of her own mortality. ‘But he might as well have his Dad’s tools if he wants them. They’re doing no good here, and they’ll all be his when I’m gone.’

  Her friend scolded her.

  ‘Don’t you start talking like that, Nellie Arrowsmith! You’ve got years in you yet, my girl. And just remember that what your husband owned was all earned by the sweat of his brow, and now it’s yours you mustn’t start giving it away. Fred wouldn’t part with it, would he? You told me what he said when Simon tried to persuade him to sell the orchard to a builder, not long before he died. He hardly ever swore, poor old Fred, but when he did he meant it.’

  ‘He wasn’t himself, May. All those tablets he had to take upset him.’

  ‘He’d still have refused, even if he’d been well. It would have broken his heart to see his orchard being built over, and Simon must have known it. Oh, not that I’m blaming the boy. I love him as much as if he were my own grandson, you know that. If he’d wanted to borrow the money from the sale for himself, I’d say nothing. But asking to borrow it to set that Angela up in business with a beauty salon …’

  ‘She is a trained hairdresser, May. Don’t you remember, I told you that was how they met, when he went for a haircut in Yarchester one day.’

  ‘And got more than he bargained for, poor boy. His wife’s a woman who’s never satisfied, I can tell that even though I’ve never met her. Only four years married, and they’ve already moved house twice and had two or three different cars. And Simon had a good job in Ross’s firm, he was happy and doing well, but Angela pushed him into leaving and setting up on his own, and he’s been worried to death ever since. I know, I can see it in his eyes when he calls to ask me how I am. That woman is ruining him, Nellie, and if you give way to her she’ll ruin you, too. She’ll be after you for everything, land and house and money and all. And your poor Fred didn’t work hard all his life to keep her and her first husband’s son in luxury and idleness.’

  It was a subject on which May Cullen felt strongly. Having lived next door to Fred Arrowsmith, as friend and tenant, for almost the whole of her adult life, she knew far better than Nellie exactly how much sweat and toil had gone into the market garden that had been his livelihood. Fred and his first wife had married with no more than a few pennies between them, but Fred’s father-in-law had lent him a little money to put towards the house and land, and they’d borrowed the remainder on a mortgage. For over twenty years they’d both slaved to bring up their family and pay back every penny they owed.

  Fred had never stopped working until old age defeated him, but by the time his first wife died, prematurely worn out, when he was in his fifties, he was out of debt. His second wife, Nellie, had always known financial security in her marriage. Unlike her predecessor, she’d never been required to help Fred on the land. But that was no reason, in May’s view, for her to give Simon any of his inheritance while she was still alive, and May didn’t hesitate to say so.

  Nellie looked uneasy, but said nothing. They each sliced up another bean.

  ‘That spade Simon borrowed,’ May mused, resting her fiery finger joints again. ‘Perhaps he wants to hit Angela over the head with it, and bury her.’ She had a dry, earthy sense of humour.

  ‘Oh, really, May, how can you say such a thing?’ Nellie had no sense of humour at all. ‘Simon would never do that, and you know it.’

  But Nellie didn’t tell her friend how much her son had shocked and upset her the previous night, when he had knelt with his head on her lap sobbing his heart out over his wife’s verbal cruelty. Nor did she say that, ly
ing wakeful and unwell at dawn, she had heard Simon get up and leave the house, and that she had watched him for a short time from her window as he paced the road outside, staring set-faced across the common towards his own home.

  He had been back indoors by the time she was up and dressed. But then, just as she was trying to persuade him to eat some breakfast, a telephone call from Angela had sent him dashing off. When he returned, agitated, an hour or two later to borrow the spade, he had begged her not to tell anyone about his quarrel with his wife.

  ‘If anyone should ask you, Mother,’ he had said, ‘I wasn’t here last night. I was at home, with Angela.’

  Nellie didn’t tell her friend about that, either.

  In the sun lounge at Tenerife, Angela had just finished outlining her marvellous business idea to her husband. He sat in stunned silence, her tiny weight a millstone on his knees.

  ‘But – but I thought you wanted to open a beauty salon …’ he croaked eventually.

  ‘Not really, not any more. It’s such an ordinary thing to do, and the profit margin’s not high enough. But a restaurant will be a goldmine.’

  Ever since she had worked as a barmaid at the Black Bull, chatting up the manager and the groups who performed there, as well as the more affluent customers, Angela had dreamed of running a bar of her own. Not a pub, where any roughneck could get in for the price of half a pint of beer, but somewhere more exclusive.

  Len Pratt, the man she’d turned out of her bed that morning, had owned just such a place, a restaurant club in Yarchester. She had met him there a few weeks previously, when one of her mail-order customers whose husband was the club bouncer had invited her along one evening for a drink and a giggle. Angela had picked up a lot of information from Len about the running of the business, and it had been her hope, before she took a dislike to the man, that he would be prepared to set her up with a restaurant club of her own.

  But Len, the pig, had laughed at her ambitions. He’d thought that it would be enough for her to have the prospect – when they were both divorced – of becoming his wife. He couldn’t understand that, much as Angela liked and needed money, she didn’t want to be given it at any man’s whim. She wanted to make money of her own, to be rich and of consequence in her own right.

  Simon wouldn’t laugh at that. He wouldn’t dare. He’d always been too humbly in love with her, too deeply hooked on the erotic games she’d taught him to risk incurring her displeasure by opposing her in any way. That was why he’d bought her a car, so that she could continue her mail-order business, and why he’d never objected to the amount of time she spent visiting her clients. And now that she’d made him feel so desperately worried and guilty over spending a night away from her, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get his support for her new venture.

  He was still gaping like a goldfish. ‘A restaurant? Angie, sweetheart, you don’t even like cooking …’

  ‘I don’t need to cook. There’s a trained chef in the family.’

  ‘But Harold’s not a fit man. Has he agreed to this?’

  ‘I haven’t told him yet. But he’ll do it. He knows that it’s been my ambition for years to have a night spot of my own.’

  Simon, his mind blowing, clutched at his curly hair as though to hold it on. ‘A night spot? I thought you said –?’

  ‘A restaurant club, then. A late-night restaurant, with a bar and a bit of space for dancing.’

  He began to sweat. ‘Angie, for God’s sake be reasonable! A small coffee shop, yes. Even a small daytime restaurant, if Harold’s willing and able to work on a regular basis, though I doubt that. But a restaurant club would be a much bigger undertaking, and you know nothing at all about running a place like that.’

  ‘Oh yes I do! I worked in clubs and pubs before we were married, and I know exactly how they should be run. It needs experience and flair, and I’ve got both. As you well know, Big Boy, don’t you? Eh? Don’t you, eh?’

  He squirmed as her deft fingers worked between the buttons of his shirt and began to tug and tease the curly hairs on his damp chest.

  ‘No, Angie, don’t, please … you must think seriously about this. I mean, it’ll take a lot of money, too. We’re already overstretched, with the mortgage, and the hire purchase on your car, and the bank loan we needed to build this sun-lounge extension. You know that Ross won’t help, and I can’t ask Mother about selling the land, not after Dad was so upset when I asked him last time. So how could we possibly raise the money to start the kind of business you’re thinking of?’

  She told him. Simon listened appalled, knowing that in any prudent businessman’s terms her plan invited financial disaster; knowing, too, that if she’d made up her mind he was not only powerless to stop her, but too much in thrall to deny her the support she demanded.

  Chapter Six

  Midday was golden, but the grass on Wickford common was too long to dry out completely. The three or four solitary women who were walking their dogs over the common in the sunshine, along invisible private paths, were all suitably and soberly dressed in green wellington boots and green quilted jackets or jerkins.

  ‘Not what I’d think of as Angela Arrowsmith territory,’ said Hilary Lloyd as the Chief Inspector drove her towards Nether Wickford. ‘Unless she’s changed completely since she was a barmaid at the Black Bull, she must be bored rigid in a quiet place like this.’

  ‘Do we know why she and her husband are living out here?’ asked Quantrill. The possible connection with the A135 case had made him anxious to see Angela Arrowsmith for himself, but he had first made a circuit of the common, stopping to hear verbal reports from the search and enquiry teams who had been working through the area all morning. They had paid particular attention to the Arrowsmiths’ two neighbours, but had acquired no information of any significance beyond the fact that Angela was regarded with staid disapproval.

  ‘Apparently Simon Arrowsmith’s elderly widowed mother lives in Upper Wickford,’ said Hilary, ‘and he likes to be near enough to keep an eye on her.’

  Quantrill grunted, the outward expression of an inward wince.

  His own mother had also been left an elderly widow. She would have liked nothing better than for Douglas, her only son, to settle with his family somewhere near her, but despite the fact that he was working in the same county he had declined to do so. And ever since her death, last year, he’d been haunted by guilt.

  He’d kept in touch throughout her lifetime, of course. Had a telephone installed for her and paid the bills, travelled the twenty-seven miles to visit her when he could find the time, and always remembered her birthday, which was more than he’d done for his wife. Harassed as he was by the demands of his job and his immediate family, he had thought this enough. But in retrospect how could it have been enough, to visit his ailing mother once every few weeks, tell her warmly to look after herself, and then go off and leave her to the care of the home-help and meals-on-wheels services?

  The result was that because he could never think of her without remorse, he had formed the habit of trying to avoid all remembrance of her. And that wasn’t right, either. Had there been any way, after her death, in which he could have made up for his neglect and proved his love for her, he would have seized upon it gladly, whatever the cost.

  But there was no way of doing that; and so when he met someone like Simon Arrowsmith, who kept a properly filial eye on his elderly parent, Quantrill was predisposed to regard him with a mixture of approval and resentful suspicion. The man might be a good son, but that didn’t make him spotless. It certainly didn’t mean that he knew nothing at all about this morning’s threat to his wife.

  It was Simon Arrowsmith who opened the front door to them. He had been expecting the woman detective to return, but not that she would be accompanied by a masculine Chief Inspector. Little of the fair skin of Simon’s face was visible, between the tangle of curls on his forehead and the fine fuzz of beard on his cheeks, but what could be seen reddened immediately when Quantrill introduced himse
lf.

  Hilary Lloyd had described him to her boss as a chubby, shy, inarticulate man who used his beard as a refuge. He was holding a curly-stemmed pipe in his hand as he opened the door, and having uttered a strangled invitation to come in he thrust the pipe quickly into a recess in his facial hair, and puffed out a smokescreen.

  Mumbling at their heels, he manoeuvred them into a room so immaculately furnished that it looked as though it had been ordered in its entirety straight from the display window of a department store. There was no evidence that the room was ever in actual use. Even the books, sharing the shelves of the wall unit with decorative objects in glass and metal, looked as though they might be showroom dummies.

  Angela Arrowsmith, her dark gold hair eye-catching above her black dress, was curled small in one corner of a clover-pink velvet chesterfield. She was restlessly buffing her fingernails, colourless but – to Quantrill’s eye – almost as long as a Balinese temple dancer’s. Though her suntan made it impossible for her to look pale, her smile and her voice were both wan as she invited the detectives to sit down; but her extravagantly madeup eyes immediately fastened on Quantrill. As Hilary had guessed, Mrs Arrowsmith was a woman who had no time for other women when there was a man about.

  The Chief Inspector’s initial, carefully concealed, reaction was one of surprise at her age. Sergeant Lloyd had reported that Angela Arrowsmith was married to a younger man, but not that he was so very much younger. As he went to stand beside his wife, with every appearance of protective concern, Simon Arrowsmith looked like an overgrown schoolboy wearing a false beard. A rift between such an ill-assorted couple seemed to Quantrill to be natural and inevitable.

  ‘You’ve had a very unpleasant shock, Mrs Arrowsmith,’ he began. ‘I’m fond of cats myself –’ he was only moderately fond, and then only of ordinary domestic moggies, but it was one way of encouraging her to talk ‘– so I can understand how upset you were. I hope you’re feeling better now?’