Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  When his wife insisted on introducing Sergeant Lloyd, he acknowledged her with reluctance and undisguised irritation. Hilary briefly explained the reason for her visit, without naming the owner of the dead cat or revealing the wording of the paint-sprayed message. She made no mention of the A135 murder. Even so, Jen Arrowsmith was shocked. Her husband said nothing. Hilary would have preferred to speak to him alone, but she guessed that he would still have said nothing; he was distant, fidgeting, anxious to go.

  She put her question to him directly: had he seen anyone or anything unusual while he was out jogging on Wickford common that morning?

  Before he could answer, his wife burst into laughter. ‘Is that why you wanted to talk to Ross?’ she asked Hilary. ‘I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. It’s a family joke that if he were to meet any of us unexpectedly, away from home, he’d be so busy thinking about computers that he wouldn’t even see us. That’s right, isn’t it, love?’

  Her husband pushed back his hair and muttered something noncommittal.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Hilary. ‘I didn’t quite catch what you said?’

  Forced into making a reply he confirmed, grudgingly, what his wife had laughed about. He had noticed nothing that morning, he told Hilary, deepening his voice to make himself heard against the rising sounds of a childish quarrel. The twins were apparently in dispute over the proper care and maintenance of guinea-pigs; shrill assertions and denials were augmented by an unmistakably feminine squeal from the twin in the riding hat. Their mother went to sort them out, and Hilary took advantage of her absence to slip in a loaded question, sympathetically disguised.

  ‘Yes, I do realise that you must have a great deal on your mind, Mr Arrowsmith. Anyway, Wickford common is a large place. Perhaps you didn’t go anywhere near the house where the cat’s body was left?’

  But he was too sharp to be so easily trapped; or else he was telling the truth when, after the pause that usually preceded his words, he said, ‘I don’t know whether I did or not. I don’t know which house you’re talking about.’

  ‘Didn’t I say? Your brother’s house, the one called Tenerife.’

  ‘My half-brother,’ corrected Ross Arrowsmith distantly. ‘Simon’s my half-brother.’

  His wife, having assisted at the settlement of the twin’s dispute, returned in time to hear Hilary’s reference to Tenerife.

  ‘Do you mean that Angela was the owner of the dead cat? That someone was trying to –’

  She bit off the words and glanced uneasily at her husband. Ross frowned and gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ he said to Sergeant Lloyd. ‘I saw nothing this morning. And in fact I made a point of avoiding my half-brother’s house.’

  ‘Ah.’ Hilary smiled at him pleasantly. ‘You can remember doing that?’

  He shovelled a limp handful of hair off his forehead, and his lips worked with anger as he sought words for his reply. Eventually he said, ‘Only because I always make a point of avoiding it. I have no contact with Simon’s wife, and I want none. She’s just a tart – I haven’t seen her for six months, and I have no intention of seeing her ever again if I can help it.’ He excused himself curtly and loped back to the house.

  Hilary knew that she had outstayed her welcome, and she was sorry; it seemed unlikely that Jen would want to be on friendly terms with someone who had angered her husband. Ross Arrowsmith was obviously a difficult man to live with. In his presence, his wife’s cheerful face had become increasingly troubled. Hilary thanked her for her time, and made a tactful retreat towards her borrowed car.

  But Jen ran after her. ‘Don’t think too badly of us for avoiding Angela,’ she begged. ‘We’re not really such snobs as you must think. It’s true that we hardly know her – but that’s because she’s never accepted any of my invitations, or invited us to their home. I hear a lot about her from May Cullen, an old friend of Ross’s family who lives next door to Simon’s mother, and it’s clear that she’s not at all a good wife to the poor lad.’

  ‘That was the impression I got when I visited her this morning,’ agreed Hilary. What she knew of Angela’s past, she kept to herself. ‘But what makes your husband dislike her so much?’

  Jen grimaced. ‘That was because of the way she behaved in February this year. We gave a reception at the Old Maltings to celebrate the company’s move. Simon still worked for Ross then, and Angela surprised us by coming with him to the reception. She was abominable – she came overdressed and plastered with make-up; she drank too much, fluttered her false eyelashes at all the men, and tried to give the impression that Simon was Ross’s partner. She even managed to be in the centre of the photograph that went into the local paper. We wouldn’t have minded so much if her vocabulary hadn’t been so obscene … Ross was furious.’

  ‘Was that the occasion your husband mentioned, when he said that he last saw her six months ago?’

  ‘No, that would have been in March, at his father’s funeral. To be fair, Angela behaved perfectly well, and went to a lot of trouble to help Nellie provide us all with tea afterwards. But then she tried to proposition Ross. Do you know what she wanted from him? A loan of £10,000! It was after that episode that he swore he’d never speak to her again.’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ said Hilary. ‘I can well believe she’d try a thing like that. From what I saw of her this morning, she’s big on ideas but very short on judgement.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’ve always thought about her, from the moment I first saw her at her wedding.’ Jen told Hilary about Angela’s virginal dress and veil, and they shared an unkind giggle until Hilary remembered that she’d left the Chief Inspector stranded beside the A135. And all she would be able to tell him was that she’d learned a little more about Angela, but not enough about Ross to know for sure whether she could definitely eliminate him from the Nether Wickford enquiry. Her only achievement seemed to be personal, the striking up of a friendly relationship with Jen.

  ‘I say, do you swim?’ said Jen. ‘Because that –’ she pointed to where the yellow JCB digger loomed over the earth it had excavated at the back of the house ‘– is where we’re having a pool made.

  It’ll be covered and heated, so we’ll be able to use it during the winter. You must come and share it.’

  ‘Thanks, I love swimming. I was wondering where I could find a pool.’

  ‘We go to a country club at the moment, about ten miles away. There are squash courts, too. Do you play? Wonderful – do let me know when you have a day off, and we can go there for a game and a swim.’

  Hilary thanked her, and started the car. Jen Arrowsmith had resumed her cheerful look after her husband had disappeared indoors, but now as she bent down to speak to Hilary through the open window her pleasant face was troubled again.

  ‘Look – all those things I’ve been telling you about Angela, and the way Ross feels about her … I hope you don’t think that he might have been responsible for what happened this morning. Because Ross wouldn’t mutilate anyone’s pet, he simply isn’t that kind of man. You didn’t come here thinking of him as a suspect, did you?’

  Hilary gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Of course I didn’t!’ she said warmly. ‘Just routine enquiries, that’s all.’

  This was one of the times when she resented being a detective. It was all wrong when a likely friendship, and the possibility of some kind of social life in Breckham Market, could be founded only on the basis of a lie.

  Chapter Twelve

  Early the following Friday morning, it rained.

  The week so far had been dry and sunny, but on Wednesday evening the television weatherman forecast a change. On Thursday afternoon, in a hazy cirrostratus sky, a halo could be seen round the sun. In the evening, the weatherman warned of increasing cloud cover as a frontal depression approached; it brought with it, he said, the probability of rain during the course of the night.

  In the event, it came down pouring.

  The rain r
eached Suffolk shortly after midnight, carried on a rising wind that dashed it against the windscreens of vehicles travelling south on the A135. There was very little traffic on the road at that time. Most of the haulage contractors’ lorries that carried fruit, vegetables and poultry to the London markets overnight had already left the county, and the remaining traffic was local.

  The combination of wind and rain made it difficult for drivers to identify anything – and particularly anything dark – that might be picked out by their headlights as it lay on the wet road ahead. There were always things lying about on country roads: lumps of mud, squashed rabbits and pheasants, sugar beet spilled from farm trailers, branches blown from overhanging trees. There was also, as on any road, the occasional split and crushed carton that had genuinely fallen off the back of a lorry. And then there were the usual mysterious roadway oddments, oil-stained sheets of canvas and items of clothing that flapped and rolled on the asphalt until they were thwacked flat by the passage of heavy tyres.

  It was a local man, a twenty-year-old farm worker returning with his girl friend from a Beccles disco, whose old banger of a car was one of the first to hit the dark bundle that lay at the edge of the southbound carriageway of the A135. The time was approximately twelve-thirty. He saw it – saw something – in his headlights as he came over the brow of the hill on the recently built stretch of road just north of the Breckham Market-Wickford crossroads. It was lying at the entrance to a layby where he’d often pulled in for a quiet cuddle, before its romantic seclusion was ruined by the news of the discovery there of a headless corpse.

  What with poor visibility, and the fact that he had just come over the hill, there had been no chance of avoiding the object. He had caught a glimpse in his headlights of a wet bundle of clothes stabbed by rain, and had felt a bump; nothing more.

  Of the small number of travellers who passed that way during the course of the night, not all were driving so close to the edge of the road. Not all of them saw the bundle, not all of them hit it; or at least were conscious of hitting it. But towards six-thirty in the morning, when the rain eased and the dawn came up bedraggled, the sodden heap of clothes was flatter than it had been six hours earlier.

  Friday 20 September was to be Brian Finch’s first solo day as postman on the Ecclesby-Wickford route.

  The finding, on the previous Saturday, of the mutilated cat on the doorstep of the Mrs Arrowsmith who kept changing the colour of her hair, had shaken him badly. His wife had suggested that he should ask to be moved to another route, but on reflection Brian knew that he was more afraid of making a fuss than of returning to Nether Wickford. And once he had made the acquaintance of the new Siamese kitten at Tenerife, he began to feel a little happier.

  As the end of the week approached, he looked forward to getting rid of his irritatingly joky tutor, Kenny Warminger. He felt sure that he could manage the job perfectly well on his own; it wasn’t even as though he had to rely on memorising his delivery route, because while he was under tuition he had carried a notebook with him and had written down everything he needed to know. There was absolutely nothing he needed to worry about, he told his wife as he went to bed at nine-thirty on Thursday night, after polishing his shoes in readiness for the morning and checking that his alarm system was set for four-fifteen.

  But – as his wife had cause to know – Brian Finch was a born worrier. To begin with, there was the problem of early rising. It wasn’t so much that he minded the prospect of getting up at four-fifteen in the morning, six days a week, for the rest of his working life; what really worried him was the possibility that he might not wake early enough, and that he would be late for work. If he were to be persistently late he would almost certainly be dismissed before the end of his probationary period, and he despaired at the thought of being unemployed again.

  Ever since he had started work as a postman, Brian had lain awake at nights worrying that he might oversleep. After the first tormented night, when he had woken in a sweat just after midnight convinced that there had been an electricity failure and that his electric alarm had stopped, he had supplemented it with an old-fashioned clockwork alarm, placed on a tin tray for maximum effect. Even so, he would wake several times each night to reassure himself by peering at the luminous dials on his wrist watch and both of his clocks.

  The night before the first solo duty was the worst yet. To his chronic worries about oversleeping were added the problems that he had learned he might expect to encounter during the course of his work. He thought of hostile dogs, and the mistakes he might make as he tried to deliver letters with illegible addresses to houses which displayed neither numbers nor names. He anticipated the complaints that would be made to the Head Postmaster if his anxious guesswork was wrong. Dozing uneasily, he dreamed of letters by the thousand, all of them for one or other of the Arrowsmiths but most of them so bizarrely addressed that he couldn’t possibly deliver them, didn’t know what to do with them, waded knee deep in them while the Mrs Arrowsmith who kept changing the colour of her hair accused him hysterically of decapitating her cat …

  Stress went straight to Brian Finch’s stomach. He spent most of the next hour in the bathroom, not knowing whether to sit down or stand up, and at three-thirty he decided to cancel the remainder of the night. Drained and shaky, he nevertheless managed to shave round his neat beard and to put on his uniform with his usual care.

  His wife made sleepy enquiries from the adjoining bed, but he refused her offer of a cooked breakfast. The thought of food nauseated him, and all he wanted was a sip of water. But he could hear rain beating against the windows of his terraced house, and thinking that he might be glad of a hot drink later in the morning he made himself a flask of coffee. Then he pulled his oilskins over his uniform and set off for the post office through the rain, carrying his flask in a plastic bag slung over the handlebars of his bicycle.

  As he stood at his place in front of the sorting-office bench, Brian began to feel slightly better. For one thing, he had plenty of time; for another, it was easier to concentrate without Kenny Warminger’s constant chat. He sorted slowly and conscientiously, with frequent reference to his notebook, and by the time he had worked his way through all the incoming mail for Ecclesby and Upper and Nether Wickford, he was confident that he had put it into the correct sequence for delivery. Then, having loaded it into his van just before six-thirty, he allowed himself a short unscheduled break in the washroom; after the bad night he’d had, he needed to fortify himself with hot coffee from his flask before going out to make his deliveries in the rain.

  The coffee alone might not have upset his stomach, if it hadn’t been for the Arrowsmiths’mail. There had, as usual, been dozens of letters for Arrowsmith MicroElectronics, and he’d sorted through them carefully, twice, before bundling them with elastic bands. When he reached the Old Maltings, in Saintsbury Road, he had been anxious to avoid getting the bundled letters wet, and so he’d pushed them into the firm’s letter box without another glance.

  But as he drove on, out of Breckham Market on the Ecclesby road, he began to wish that he’d looked through the contents of the bundles again, in the shelter of the van, before delivering them. He ought to have double-checked. Supposing he’d made a slip, become so mesmerised by the name Arrowsmith that he’d included by mistake a letter for the Mrs Arrowsmith at Nether Wickford? What a fool he’d been not to check! He was sure, now, that there had been a letter for her among the others; he could see it, see her address quite clearly, Mrs Angela Arrowsmith, Tenerife, Nether Wickford … There was no excuse for his mistake, none at all …

  Anxiety curdled the coffee in his stomach. As he drove up to the crossroads with the A135, he was gripped by a recurrence of the night’s pain. He knew that he had to stop the van somewhere, and as soon as possible. But there was nowhere to go, out here in the middle of the countryside, except behind a hedge – and that would mean leaving the scarlet mail van by the roadside, in full view of any passing vehicles. Someone was bound to see it
and report him …

  And then he remembered what Kenny Warminger had told him: that there was a layby on the A135 just a few hundred yards to his left, up among the trees at the top of the hill, on the far side of the road. The fact that a headless corpse had been found there entered Brian’s mind for a moment, but the prospect of concealment both for himself and for the mail van was of more immediate concern.

  By the time he reached the lower end of the layby, his need was so pressing that he was not deterred by the empty car that was already parked under the trees. Someone with the same problem as himself, perhaps … He drove past the car, stopped the van, threw his uniform cap on the seat and stumbled out. Conscious of the need to safeguard the mail, he paused just long enough to lock the van before he tottered, whimpering with misery, into the wet undergrowth.

  When he emerged, he was pale and damp and shaken. He leaned for a few minutes against the side of the van, thankful at least for privacy. There was still no sign of the driver of the other vehicle, but Brian was too glad of the fact to be curious about it.

  Conscientious though he was, he knew that he couldn’t hurry back to his delivery route immediately. He had to steady himself first, to make sure that he didn’t need to take to the bushes again before leaving their shelter. His knees were still weak, and to get them going he began to walk slowly up the layby to the northern end.

  The rain had stopped, but there was still a lot of water on the surface of the old road. It ran down from the top of the hill in rivulets, channelled and diverted by accumulations of leaf mould that had been formed into miniature mudbanks by the rain. Normally, Brian Finch would have tried to keep his carefully polished shoes out of the water, but they were already so wet that he had ceased to care. He noticed, as he plodded forward, that the rivulets were tinged with pink, but he was too unwell to wonder why.