Nor did he bother to speculate about the drenched and tattered bundle that he could see at the side of the main road, just at the entrance to the layby. He was within a few yards of it before he noticed, lying on its side near the bundle, an empty shoe. He stopped and blinked and looked more closely.
It was only then that he realised that the rags contained a human body; and that what was running pink over his own shoes was rain-diluted blood.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Good to see you again, sir.’
Detective Inspector Martin Tait, recently returned from a CID refresher course and newly seconded to the regional crime squad, was back in Breckham Market. He entered the Chief Inspector’s office with consummate self-assurance.
As far as Tait was concerned, this morning’s unexplained road death couldn’t have happened at a better moment. Breckham CID were treating it as murder, which meant that they were going to be busy; too busy to continue with their obstinate claims that they were at last making progress towards solving the A135 murder, the case of the headless corpse. The Chief Constable had therefore – and about time too – decided to call in the regional crime squad to take over the earlier case.
It was exactly what Tait had been hoping for. Having previously served for a year in the Breckham Market division as CID sergeant, he was in his own opinion unarguably the best crime-squad detective for the job of sorting out the murder enquiry that had been baffling his old boss for weeks. He’d said as much – though putting it diplomatically – to the assistant regional co-ordinator, when the request for assistance came in this morning; and now here he was, back in his old division, ready to work in co-operation with, but no longer for, Chief Inspector Quantrill. A very satisfactory state of affairs, for an ambitious young police officer.
‘And good to see you again, Hilary. Believe it or not, I’ve missed you.’
He walked round to her side of her desk, which had been moved into the Chief Inspector’s office. Like Quantrill she was sitting in brooding silence with a mug of coffee clasped between her hands. When she failed to respond to his greeting, Tait propped his slim behind against the edge of her desk. He folded his arms, crossed his ankles, and looked down at her with a freshly appraising smile. ‘Settling in all right? New boss treating you well, is he?’
Martin Tait was 26, four years younger than Sergeant Lloyd. He was confident that by the time he reached her present age he would have been promoted via Chief Inspector to Superintendent, at least. By the time he was 40, to Chief Constable. And after that –
‘Do you mind not sitting on my desk?’ said Sergeant Lloyd.
Undeterred by her lack of welcome Martin Tait continued to smile at her, although he eased himself into a standing position. He was a slight, fair, sharp man, at five feet eight and a half inches only fractionally above the minimum height for members of the county force; not more than two inches taller than Hilary. But he carried himself with an air, confident that he was irresistible to women. His preference was in fact for women who were a little older than himself: young enough to be attractive, sufficiently well established to pay their own share if he took them out, and experienced enough not to become emotionally dependent. Hilary Lloyd fitted his temporary requirements exactly and he fully intended, in such time as he would be able to spare from solving the A135 case, to give her the benefit of his attention.
‘You’re looking extremely decorative, as always,’ he continued. ‘Breckham needed an attractive girl in plain clothes. And someone who knows how to make good coffee, too – that is the real thing you’re drinking, isn’t it, not canteen swill?’
Hilary raised her head. She looked exhausted. ‘I’m not here for decorative purposes,’ she told him wearily, ‘nor yet for making coffee. Dc Wigby is the one who’ll be working with you.’
‘Ian Wigby?’ Tait was no fonder of the detective constable than Wigby was of him. ‘That noisy oaf –’
‘He’s a very experienced detective,’ said Quantrill. It was the first time he’d spoken. He looked less distressed than Hilary, but equally sombre. ‘And you’ll find your office at the end of the corridor.’
‘You mean my old office? You shouldn’t have turned Hilary out of it –’
‘I didn’t. Hilary has moved in here because we’re agreed it’s easiest while we’re working on this case. And I don’t mean your old office – we’ve moved things round. You’re in what used to be the stationery store.’
Tait felt aggrieved. He hadn’t expected the red-carpet treatment, but this antagonism was childish. He was about to say so when he realised that the atmosphere in the room was not in fact antagonistic towards him. Quantrill and Hilary were so intensely, glumly preoccupied that they hardly knew that he was there. Neither of them attempted to drink the mugs of coffee they both held. Quantrill was not, as Tait knew, a man who was easily put off his food, but the plate of sandwiches on his desk was untouched.
‘This new murder case you’re working on –?’ suggested Tait more sympathetically. ‘A nasty one?’
‘Very,’ said Quantrill. Hilary put her mug on her desk.
‘Disguised to look like a road accident, I heard. Multiple injuries?’
‘Multiple injuries caused by a number of vehicles over a period of hours,’ said Quantrill.
‘Very nasty,’ Tait agreed.
‘A shovel job,’ said Quantrill.
Hilary left the room. Quantrill relapsed into brooding silence. Tait retreated to his office and sent Dc Wigby to fetch the files on the A135 murder.
She’d seen worse sights, Hilary reminded herself as she splashed cold water over her face in the women’s room. The trouble was that she’d never before felt partially responsible for the victim’s death.
Not that she’d known who it was, lying there at the edge of the wet road in a puddle of what looked like Mateus rosé, when she arrived at the scene shortly after seven o’clock that morning. Positive identification was difficult, but the empty car parked in the layby provided a lead. At that stage there was no reason for the patrol-car driver – who had been sent to the scene as the result of a telephone call received from a motorist who had been flagged down by a wild-eyed postman – to suspect murder. It looked to him like a hit-and-run killing. The car’s petrol tank was almost empty, and he thought it possible that the driver had been trying to hitch a lift.
He had called out the CID as a matter of routine, to establish the circumstances of the death. But as soon as Sergeant Lloyd learned the ownership of the parked car, she had called out the Chief Inspector as well. The two detectives exchanged guilty looks. Quantrill called out the pathologist, and as a result of his initial examination they had immediately set up a murder enquiry.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon, when they had retreated to divisional headquarters to draw breath, that they had begun to discuss their own part in what had happened. Their discussion had, with reason, plunged them both into gloom. Small wonder, thought Hilary as she redid her face and temporarily shook off her depression, that Inspector Tait had misinterpreted their failure to welcome him.
Hilary had never had occasion to work for Martin Tait, but when they were both at county headquarters she had found his effortless superiority tiresome. The really annoying thing about Tait, though, as everyone at Yarchester admitted, was the fact that he was as good at his job as he imagined himself to be. He would almost certainly solve the A135 case, particularly now they’d made what looked like a breakthrough over the origin of the dress that the headless woman had been wearing.
And that was her breakthrough, Hilary remembered. She’d been looking forward to following it up, before this new murder happened. But there was no point in being grudging about it. She decided to give him the information with a good grace, but in front of a witness so that he couldn’t afterwards claim the breakthrough as his own.
After consulting the Chief Inspector, she went in search of Tait. Making his presence known at Breckham had evidently been a priority; Dc Wigby, older
and beefier and blonder than his former sergeant, was in the process of fixing to a door at the end of the corridor a large notice on which he had been instructed to stencil REGIONAL CRIME SQUAD – INSPECTOR M. G. R. TAIT.
Wigby looked malevolent. ‘I’m surprised he didn’t tell me to put his bloody university degree as well,’ he grunted as Hilary approached.
‘Give him time,’ she murmured, with nicely judged ambiguity. She knocked, and walked in without waiting to be invited. ‘Settling in all right, sir?’ she asked briskly. ‘Dc Wigby looking after you well, is he?’
As a former stationery store, the room made a perfectly good office. True, the window was frosted, but everyone knew that Tait wasn’t a man for wasting his time on looking out. The Inspector had however rearranged the desks and telephones to his liking.
‘Sorry Mr Quantrill and I weren’t more welcoming when you arrived,’ Hilary went on. ‘We’d only just got in after having a bad morning. But I’ve made some fresh coffee – not because I think it’s a woman’s job, and I’m the only woman in the department, but simply because I happen to make the best coffee – and you’re welcome to join us. The DCI suggests that you may like to bring the file on the A135 case with you. We don’t think we’re looking for one murderer, but it’s possible that there’s an indirect link between this morning’s death and the headless corpse. We think you should know about our case before you start on yours.’
Tait followed her eagerly to the Chief Inspector’s office, his pointed nose scenting not so much coffee as the possibility that he might solve both cases while he was about it.
‘Who was it who was killed this morning?’ he asked.
Hilary’s depression returned, a thick dark cloud that chilled her and shadowed everything within her view.
‘A Mrs Angela Arrowsmith,’ she said.
Chapter Fourteen
‘So you’re off to a flying start with this enquiry,’ said Inspector Tait enviously, after Quantrill and Hilary had told him all they knew about Angela Arrowsmith. ‘You were in luck, to interview the murder victim just a week before it happened!’
The Chief Inspector and the Sergeant looked at him, sitting there in his pigskin safari jacket, commendably alert, deplorably single-minded.
‘That remark,’ said Hilary, ‘was in very poor taste.’
Quantrill was thunderous. ‘For God’s sake, man, doesn’t it occur to you that we feel indirectly responsible for her death? We knew that she’d been threatened. I ought to have provided her with protection. But I decided not to take the threat seriously –’
‘And I agreed with you, sir, once we’d investigated,’ Hilary reminded him. ‘In fact I told Simon Arrowsmith, when he pleaded with me to protect his wife –’ guilt caught her by the throat as she recalled the desperate look on the young husband’s face; she swallowed, and went on ‘– I told him that he had nothing to worry about, because she wasn’t in any danger …’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Tait. ‘You’ve just made it clear that the woman was asking for trouble. From what you’ve told me, she deserved whatever happened to her.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ snapped Quantrill. ‘Protecting the public is what we’re here for, whether we approve of them or not.’
‘Her husband was shattered, when I told him this morning,’ Hilary remembered. ‘Poor devil … he was blubbing like an eight-year-old, and the tears soaked into his beard. You could’ve wrung it out …’
‘Now you’re being sentimental,’ said Tait. ‘It was probably the husband who got rid of her, haven’t you thought of that?’
Chief Inspector Quantrill gave him an evil scowl. There were times – there always had been times – when the younger man irritated him beyond bearing. ‘Of course we’ve thought of it! Simon Arrowsmith has been our prime suspect from the start.’ He saw disagreement in Sergeant Lloyd’s eye, and amended ‘our’to ‘my’.
‘But as it happens,’ Quantrill went on, ‘he has an alibi. His elderly mother was rushed to hospital yesterday morning. She wasn’t expected to live, and Simon says he spent most of yesterday, and all of last night, at Breckham Market Infirmary with her.’
‘You’ll check his claim, of course?’
Hilary Lloyd thought for a moment that her new boss would explode as he struggled not to rise to Tait’s latest piece of provocation. His face went dark red, his jaw tightened, a vein at his left temple bulged. She intervened before he did himself an injury.
‘Mr Quantrill delegates the checking to me, just as he must have delegated it to you when you were his sergeant,’ she told the Inspector firmly. ‘I shall be seeing the night staff at the Infirmary tonight. But Angela’s brother, Harold Wilkes, is more of a problem. He claims to have been at home in bed, and that’s always a difficult one to disprove.’
Her intervention had given Quantrill’s complexion time to subside to its normal healthy colour. He leaned forward to take the mug that Hilary had just refilled for him from her electric filter coffee-maker, a piece of personal property that she had brought with her from Yarchester, and had warned all thirsty members of the Criminal Investigation Department to keep their thieving hands off. Really, Quantrill would have preferred tea – even canteen tea – at that hour in the afternoon, but he didn’t want to offend her. He liked the way she stood no nonsense from young Tait.
‘There could have been collusion between the husband and the brother,’ he said.
Hilary looked at him with disapproval, withholding the mug of coffee in a way that made the Chief Inspector wonder for a moment whether she intended to stand no nonsense from him either. ‘As you know, sir, I don’t believe that Simon would harm his wife in any way. Especially as he begged protection for her.’
‘Sorry,’ said Quantrill, ‘but I’m not prepared to rule him out on that account.’
The initial shock of Angela Arrowsmith’s death, and his own contributory negligence, had seemed to numb his mind. He’d done a lot of work so far that day, but all of it could equally well have been done by a robotic Detective Chief Inspector programmed to set up a murder enquiry. But now he had begun to think for himself again. His appetite had returned too, and he embarked belatedly on his lunch of ham sandwiches.
‘From what Angela’s son told us,’ he said, swallowing his first mouthful and gesturing with the remainder of the sandwich to emphasise his point, ‘she was pushing her husband unmercifully. He couldn’t have had far to go to cracking point, and at cracking point the most unlikely person can resort to violence. When he asked you to provide her with protection, it could have been because he was afraid of what he might do if she pushed him too far. Or it could have been a bluff. Perhaps he asked us to protect her, knowing that we wouldn’t, in order to avert suspicion from himself.’
‘I still don’t think that Simon Arrowsmith would be a party to hurting his wife, let alone murdering her,’ said Hilary. But she finally gave the Chief Inspector his coffee.
‘Have we any proof at this stage that she was murdered?’ asked Tait.
‘We’ve proof of deliberate intent to cause grievous harm,’ said Quantrill. ‘I told the pathologist our suspicions when he came out to the scene, and he found fingertip-type bruising on her throat. He says it wasn’t the cause of death, but it was certainly an attempt at manual strangulation.’
‘And you think that the most likely assailants were her husband and – or – her brother?’
‘They’re the ones with the motive. Both of them had good reason to want to prevent Angela from going any further with her restaurant project. I happened to see them all in the town on Wednesday evening, as I was walking down Bridge Street. She was giving directions to her husband and her brother while they fixed an advertising banner inside the window of the old chapel. Both men looked worried sick, and no wonder. I sent a photographer down there this morning, so that we could all see what she’d been planning.’
He handed Hilary a blown-up colour print. Tait looked over her shoulder, bending closer than was s
trictly necessary. Hilary leaned unobtrusively in the opposite direction. They both studied the photograph.
It showed the modern plate-glass window of the former chapel, almost completely filled by a banner that shrieked, in three colours embellished with pink fluorescent stars:
ARROWSMITHS RESTAURANT AND NITE SPOT * GREAT FOOD * GREAT ENTERTAINMENT * GALA OPENING OCTOBER 10TH * ARROWSMITHS OF BRECKHAM * THE INN PLACE *
Tait winced. ‘I thought she wanted to open a restaurant. All she’d have offered in a tacky place like this would have been scampi and chips and blue jokes.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with scampi and chips,’ said Quantrill. It was what his wife usually chose on the rare occasions when he took her out for a meal at the buttery of the Rights of Man, Breckham’s main hotel. ‘The point is that this is the wrong town for a night club. She’d have been lucky to have the place half-full for the gala opening, and even if the customers thought she gave value for money they wouldn’t consider going back there for at least six months. Commercially, it would have been a disaster. She’d have stood a better chance of making a profit if she’d fed all her money into a one-armed bandit. But of course it wasn’t her own money she was gambling with …’
Hilary read the advertising banner again. Arrowsmiths Restaurant and Nite Spot appealed no more to her than it did to the men; but she knew someone to whom it would appeal even less.
‘Ross Arrowsmith must be absolutely furious about the Arrowsmiths of Breckham bit. Angela was obviously making a deliberate attempt to associate the place with his company.’
Quantrill looked up quickly. ‘Would it have made him furious enough to attack her, do you think?’
‘No–o. I can’t really see him going to that extreme. Anyway, he flew off to Japan last Saturday. Even if he came back before last night, he probably wouldn’t have seen this advertisement.’
‘A man of Ross Arrowsmith’s calibre,’ said Tait authoritatively, ‘wouldn’t waste his time on such a petty issue. He’d simply instruct his solicitor to issue an injunction restraining Angela from using the name for her commercial venture.’
Blood on the Happy Highway Page 12