Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  ‘A little, thank you. I can’t tell you how dreadful it was … I shall never get over the shock, never …’

  The woman was entitled to a bit of exaggeration, Quantrill thought. The shock had been real enough, he could see that in her eyes. But what he couldn’t see there was fear.

  Sergeant Lloyd had reported, after her visit earlier in the morning, that Angela Arrowsmith seemed thoroughly frightened. It had been one of the reasons why Quantrill had come himself to talk to her. But if she really had been frightened then, she certainly wasn’t now; all she seemed concerned about was dramatising her distress over the cat.

  Her husband, mumbling round his pipe, tried to dissuade her from crying.

  ‘Here,’ he said on inspiration, ‘I’ll get you another drink.’

  He bent to pick up an almost empty glass and a bottle of brandy from the floor beside the chesterfield, where they had been out of view of the visitors. His wife shot him a steely glare, then said in a childish voice, ‘Well, perhaps a very tiny one …’ She turned a brave smile towards Quantrill: ‘Would you like something to drink?’

  The Chief Inspector refused. Angela took his refusal to include his colleague. Whether or not that was what he meant, Hilary Lloyd had no intention of being ignored.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Coffee would be lovely, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  Angela looked put out. Her husband, handing her the generously refilled brandy glass, raised an uncertain, smoke-wreathed eyebrow at her. ‘Go and tell Harold to bring some coffee,’ she muttered ungraciously, sending him lumbering from the room. She sipped her drink, leaned back and closed her eyes. ‘It was a terrible shock,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t tell you what Princess meant to me – she’s irreplaceable …’

  A scuffling noise came from the sun lounge, which was built as an extension to the sitting room. The rooms were divided by sliding glass doors which were not completely closed. In the sun lounge, a tall bespectacled boy could be seen ducking and peering behind the cane furniture, and making low grabbing motions. His grabs were evidently unsuccessful, because in a moment a leggy seal-point Siamese kitten, hugely eyed and eared but thin as a cardboard cut-out, squeezed through the gap in the doors and erupted into the sitting room.

  An unexpected encounter with Quantrill’s tweed trouser legs and size twelve leather shoes stopped it short, sideways on, its back and tail defensively arched. It took one brave, stiff-legged bounce forwards, still presenting its maximum profile, and then turned tail and fled, leaping for the long curtain that hung beside the sliding doors.

  ‘Sorry, Mum,’ gabbled the boy, opening the doors wider and trying to reach for the kitten, which promptly swarmed higher, its great eyes in the triangular head dark with devilment.

  ‘Blast you, Gary,’ snapped his mother, abandoning her langour. ‘I told you to keep her outside. Grab her, quick, before she breaks something –’

  Her son pursued the flying, bat-eared kitten round the room, from the curtain pelmet to the shelves of the wall unit. Angela issued shrill instructions and reprimands, pausing only to explain to the detectives that her husband had insisted on going out that morning to buy the kitten for her.

  ‘Simon!’ she shrieked, as it made a trapeze-artiste’s leap from the highest shelf to the window curtains, and clung there swinging. ‘Oh, there you are – always somewhere else when I need you. For God’s sake come and get her down –’

  Simon, hurrying in, made a nervous, clumsy grab. Evading him, the kitten fell into Gary’s hands.

  ‘Gotcha,’ the boy chuckled, pressing his cheek for a moment against the palpitating creamy fur. ‘I’m glad Mum made you go out and buy her,’ he said loudly and clearly to Simon, ‘she’s nice … Sorry about the interruption, Mum.’

  He backed quickly into the sun lounge, taking his capture with him. His apology had sounded genuinely contrite, but Quantrill was well acquainted with boys of that age. He had one of his own. Watching Gary’s face, he caught a brief glimpse of malicious satisfaction and knew that the boy had quite deliberately let the kitten loose in order to spike his mother’s tragic pose.

  ‘Did you buy the kitten in Nether Wickford, Mr Arrowsmith?’ asked Hilary. ‘We’ve heard that someone in Mill Road breeds Siamese.’

  Simon, busily relighting his pipe, nodded. Angela answered, speaking to Quantrill. ‘At least half a dozen people in the village have bought cats from Mrs Bailey, so I’m not the only one who has a Siamese. That’s why I think that what happened this morning must have been a mistake. Simon and I have discussed it, and we agree that the message couldn’t have been intended for me at all.’

  ‘It wasn’t directed to anyone by name,’ said Quantrill, ‘so that’s one of the possibilities we’re considering. On the other hand, neither of your neighbours has a cat of any kind, so it couldn’t have been meant for them. Possibly it was intended for you, but as nothing more than a piece of immediate unpleasantness. Although the context is alarming, Your turn next isn’t a specific threat. So tell me: can either of you think of anyone who might want to play a particularly cruel trick on you?’

  Simon Arrowsmith, watching his wife, made vigorous noises of dissent from behind an aromatically blue smokescreen.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Angela, her eyes the colour and strength of gunmetal. ‘It could only have been a mistake.’

  ‘You’ll be glad to know,’ said Hilary, relating some of the findings of the search and enquiry teams, ‘that your cat was killed entirely by accident. A regular traveller along this road hit it with his vehicle. It darted out in front of him, across the road towards the common, twenty yards from your gate. He tried to avoid it – there are skid-marks on the road to prove that – but he couldn’t help knocking it over. He stopped and went back, but found that it was dead. The man lives in this area –’ he was in fact a baker’s roundsman who lived less than half a mile away, but as a matter of policy Hilary concealed his identity ‘– but he didn’t know who the cat belonged to, so he lifted it to the side of the road and drove on.’

  A shadow of unaffected sorrow crossed Angela Arrowsmith’s face. Hilary recognised it, and spoke with sympathy. ‘Your pet wouldn’t have suffered. The vehicle must have hit her head, and she’d have died instantly. But the fact is that the person who subsequently found her – or who saw the accident, perhaps – knew where to bring the body. And that really does rule out the possibility that it could have arrived on your doorstep by mistake.’

  Simon Arrowsmith, sitting by his wife’s side on the pink velvet chesterfield, stared at her unhappily. Angela buffed her fingernails.

  ‘Would you both like to reconsider my question?’ asked Quantrill. ‘Do you know of anyone who would want to mutilate your cat, and threaten you?’

  ‘No,’ said Angela.

  ‘Certainly not,’ mumbled Simon, puffing hard. His features were almost invisible, his voice wretched.

  ‘I see. Then do you want to make an official complaint about the incident, Mrs Arrowsmith?’

  She shrugged. ‘What’d be the point? It wouldn’t bring Princess back.’

  As far as the Chief Inspector was concerned, that clinched it. From her attitude, it was clear that Angela Arrowsmith had decided that the threat wasn’t seriously intended. Presumably she knew – or thought she knew – who was responsible for the incident, and had reasons of her own for wanting to protect his identity. Therefore it was, as Quantrill had suspected when he entered the house, what he would class as a domestic dispute; and unless an official complaint was made by the injured or offended party, domestic disputes were no concern of the police.

  ‘Then I don’t propose,’ he said briskly, ‘to waste any more of your time, or my own. Or Sergeant Lloyd’s. What happened here this morning was unpleasant, but no crime was committed. We came to see you because of the reference to a murder we’re investigating – the A135 murder. I’m quite sure you’ve heard and read about the decapitated body that was found a few weeks ago beside the main Yarchester roa
d?’

  Simon reached protectively for his wife’s hand. They both nodded.

  ‘What we need to establish,’ Quantrill went on, ‘is whether there is any real connection between that murder and this morning’s incident. To do that, we must know who was responsible for what happened here. So if either of you knows, or guesses, we need the information. As long as we’re satisfied that it was an isolated incident, we can then go away and leave you alone.’

  ‘If the threat was directed at me, as you seem to think,’ said Angela sharply, ‘there’s no way it could possibly be connected with that murder. I told the detectives who came here asking questions a couple of weeks ago that I had no idea who that poor woman was, and I still haven’t. I keep on telling you: what happened this morning wasn’t intended for me at all. If you –’

  She was interrupted by the arrival of the coffee. It came in a ceramic pot, with matching cups and saucers, wheeled in on a trolley by a pale, heavy-eyed, thick-set man. His cropped sandy hair, closely shaven chin, crisp white shirt, dark trousers, polished shoes and deep, bewildered frown gave him the look of a ship’s steward permanently stranded half the world away from his home port.

  Like a steward, with no part in the conversation, he began silently and deftly to serve the coffee, without looking at the people he was serving.

  ‘My brother, Harold Wilkes, bless him,’ Angela told the Chief Inspector, obviously welcoming the diversion. ‘He used to work as a chef on an oil rig off the Norfolk coast, until he lost his hearing in an explosion, poor old boy. But we’re very happy to have him as a member of our family, aren’t we, Si? We’re very fond of our Harold.’

  She attracted her brother’s attention by catching at his arm as he passed her, and repeated her last remark, mouthing and smiling and nodding at him.

  ‘We’re very fond of you, Harold. FOND, I said.’ She made a kissing mouth at him. ‘Bless his heart … I know it’s a handicap, being deaf, but I sometimes think that the deaf have a lot of advantages over the rest of us. Just imagine all that peacefulness – no aircraft screaming overhead, no telephone bells, no traffic noises … They don’t know how lucky they are, do they?’

  Hilary Lloyd’s scarred eyebrow puckered more deeply as she stared at the woman, marvelling at her complacent insensitivity. Harold Wilkes was also staring at his sister. It was impossible to tell how much he could lip-read, but Hilary could see that his eyes were raw with suffering.

  She touched his sleeve, lightly and unobtrusively. His bloodshot eyes moved to her face. ‘Thank you for the coffee,’ she said clearly; and smiled at him.

  Seeing her smile, Quantrill realised for the first time why his friend Harry Colman had been so enthusiastic about her appearance. Harry was right. When Hilary Lloyd gave a wholehearted smile, it really was a beauty.

  Quantrill’s eyes flicked to the deaf man’s face, interested to see his reaction. Yes, Wilkes had been bowled over. For a moment the permanent frown had lifted from his forehead as he brightened in response to her smile, irradiated with unexpected joy.

  Well, it would be no bad thing to have a member of the CID team who could charm potentially difficult male witnesses. Despite his initial reservations about working with a female sergeant, Quantrill began to think that there were occasions when it might have its advantages.

  Chapter Seven

  Chief Inspector Quantrill was too old a detective to think in terms of tying up loose ends. Life was too short, and the list of undetected crimes in the division too long, to allow him the luxury of tidying up as he went. He was reconciled to the fact that, in many of the enquiries he conducted, he would never know exactly what had happened. The Nether Wickford incident was a time-waster, but he persisted with it because he had nothing else that looked remotely like a lead in the A135 murder investigation.

  The Arrowsmiths were obviously not prepared to talk in front of each other and so he separated them, taking the husband outside. Simon was reluctant to leave his wife with Sergeant Lloyd, and there was no doubt that Angela would have preferred to go with the men; but the Sergeant, with the air of one who had all the time in the world, asked whether she might have another cup of coffee, and so Angela was obliged to stay with her.

  Quantrill marched Simon out to the garage, out of earshot of the rest of his family, and spoke to him briskly, man to man. Wives, he said, could sometimes be the very devil: irrational, demanding, ungiving, exasperating. There were times when even the most decent and reasonable husband might be tempted, given the opportunity, to win a bit of peace and quiet for himself by playing some kind of trick on his wife. Was that what Arrowsmith had done?

  Simon denied it; and went on denying it. ‘I love my wife,’ he protested.

  ‘That’s exactly what another man told me, last year,’ said Quantrill. ‘He meant it, too. But he’s now doing a life sentence for murdering her.’

  Simon’s eyes popped. ‘Who – who’s talking about murder?’

  ‘I am. That’s all I’m interested in, Mr Arrowsmith, the A135 murder. I’m not concerned with your domestic problems, I just want to know whether I can eliminate this morning’s incident from my enquiries. If you weren’t responsible for it, who was? Your brother-in-law? The boy? One of your wife’s friends?’

  Simon Arrowsmith, at bay behind his beard, reaffirmed his earlier statement that he knew no one who could possibly have a grudge against his wife.

  At the back of the house, Quantrill found Gary Hilton lying on the lawn like a fallen beanpole, communicating with the Siamese kitten.

  He questioned the boy abruptly, getting the same answers that Sergeant Lloyd had been given: Gary had been asleep that morning until he heard his mother having hysterics after the motorcycle patrolman arrived; he didn’t know who had paintsprayed the message on the door, couldn’t imagine.

  ‘Do you know anyone who might want to play a nasty trick on your mother?’

  The boy, taking a kitten’s-eye view of a ladybird that was scaling a stem of grass, muttered an indistinct ‘No’.

  ‘How do you get along with her yourself, Gary? Are you on good terms?’

  ‘Yes … yes, ’course we are.’

  It wasn’t true, Quantrill had seen that for himself. On the other hand, how many adolescents were on good terms with their parents? How many parents, come to that, could put their hands on their hearts and say that they actually liked – as distinct from loving – their teenage children? His own son, Peter, frequently infuriated him, and compounded his youthful offences by making it clear that his father’s fury was reciprocated.

  But Peter had his good points, difficult though it sometimes was to appreciate them, and so no doubt had Gary. The fact that Gary was lying about his relationship with his mother didn’t necessarily mean that he had lied in answer to Quantrill’s other questions. The boy might well be as ignorant about this morning’s incident as he claimed to be.

  There was one other member of the family to question, and the Chief Inspector found him in a room at the back of the house. This was a large dining-kitchen, where it seemed that the Arrowsmiths did all their living so that they could keep their main room immaculate. Two-thirds of the kitchen was crammed with dining and television-watching furniture, and the usual untidy bits and pieces of family life. But the cooking area, formed by purpose-built units into a shape as compact as a ship’s galley, was evidently run by someone who knew how to combine constant use with orderliness.

  Something savoury was simmering in a pan on the ceramic hob of the split-level cooker. A pudding mixture was being whipped up in the bowl of the automatic mixer. Harold Wilkes, made temporarily redundant by kitchen technology, was standing hunched at the sink with his cropped head bowed in an attitude that made Quantrill wonder for a moment whether he might be ill.

  Wilkes gave an audible sigh, almost a groan, and turned towards the mixer. It was only then, with a blink of surprise, that he realised that someone was in the room with him.

  Not knowing whether the man understood wh
o he was, Quantrill showed him his warrant card. Wilkes glanced at it, his permanent frown deepening.

  ‘I knew you were another detective,’ he confirmed in his loud, uneven voice. ‘You’ve come about the cat, haven’t you?’

  Quantrill opened his mouth to speak, remembered that Wilkes was deaf, and took out his pocket book instead.

  The cat was killed accidentally, by a vehicle, he wrote. But someone found it lying at the side of the road and brought it back here. Was it you?

  Wilkes switched off the mixer and read the words. When he moved his head it was slowly and carefully, like a man with a pounding hangover. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t touch it.’

  The men were facing each other across the worktop of the unit that formed one side of the kitchen area. On it, next to the mixer, stood a chopping board, and on the board lay a large, thick-skinned vegetable marrow. The marrow had been cut clean in two. Beside it lay a cook’s knife with a broad, rigid, eight-inch carbon steel blade.

  Quantrill picked up the knife and balanced it in his hand. It was of French manufacture, high quality, fully-forged, its blade thinned by constant sharpening and cleaning. He raised his eyes from it and gave Harold Wilkes a questioning look.

  ‘I told you, I didn’t touch the cat,’ said Wilkes. ‘I certainly didn’t cut it up.’

  ‘I didn’t think you did,’ said Quantrill, enunciating clearly. ‘I’m sure you’d have made a better job of it.’

  He put the knife down, and wrote again: Do you know – have you any idea – who cut off the cat’s head and sprayed the message on the door?

  ‘No,’ said Wilkes flatly. He turned to the pan on the hob, stirred and tasted the contents and added a twist of black pepper from the mill. Quantrill, trying to ignore the aroma of chicken with mushrooms, green pepper and tomatoes that was liquefying his mouth, made a final attempt.