Blood on the Happy Highway

by Sheila Radley

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Tait. ‘My A135 case,’ he reminded them when they frowned at him; ‘I must examine the place where the headless corpse was found.’

  Quantrill and Hilary agreed that after visiting the layby they would return to Angela Arrowsmith’s house at Nether Wickford. The news from Breckham Market Infirmary was that Mrs Nellie Arrowsmith was now out of danger, and had been moved from the intensive care unit into one of the wards. Her son, Angela’s husband, had returned to Tenerife; now that his anxiety over his mother had lessened, the detectives proposed to question him more closely about his wife’s death.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Tait. ‘I need to collect Angela’s mail-order account books.’

  They ignored him. ‘I must go to the infirmary, later this evening,’ remembered Hilary, ‘to check that Simon really was there all last night.’

  Quantrill, who had no idea that his sergeant was a former nurse, looked doubtful. ‘The infirmary’s chronically understaffed and overcrowded. I don’t see how the night staff could possibly confirm whether a visitor was there or not.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect them to, in the ordinary course of events,’ said Hilary, volunteering no information about her past. ‘But if Simon had some nefarious reason for wanting an alibi, he’d have made a point of drawing attention to himself in some way – the old ploy of asking the time, something like that. Not that I think he would have done so –’

  ‘I know,’ said Quantrill with good-humoured resignation, ‘you’re just checking. But don’t forget that there’s still the possibility of collusion with Harold Wilkes. Come to think of it, the fact that the man hasn’t a vehicle of his own isn’t really a problem. Young Gary mentioned that he has a bicycle; Wilkes could perfectly well have climbed out of his bedroom window and ridden to the A135 on that.’

  He paused to drink some beer. Tait, who had been fidgeting to contribute to the discussion, began to do so. Quick on the swallow, Quantrill interrupted.

  ‘We’re going to have a devil of a job piecing together what happened last night, Hilary. But there’s a possible short cut. We’re assuming that whoever killed Angela was the person who threatened her last weekend, right? So let’s tackle the enquiry from that angle, instead.’

  ‘Stage a reconstruction, you mean? Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Exactly. Saturday, just one week after the incident. The Saturday morning pattern of traffic is quite different from weekdays, much lighter. There’s a good chance that our witnesses will be able to recall it.’

  ‘That depends whether we can get hold of them all, at such short notice. For one thing, we don’t know whether Ross Arrowsmith is back from Japan yet.’

  ‘Then you’d better find out, right away. There’s a telephone in the passage behind the bar.’

  Quantrill spoke with deliberate bluntness. He was conscious that Martin Tait, temporarily silenced, was observing everything, and he wanted to indicate that his relationship with his female sergeant was strictly a working one.

  Hilary blinked. Her former boss, nice Harry Colman, would have made it a polite request. But remembering her relatively low rank she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and went out to find and ring the New Maltings number. She was back within a few minutes, looking as though she hadn’t enjoyed the call.

  ‘I spoke to Ross Arrowsmith – he got back yesterday evening. He wasn’t best pleased when I asked for his co-operation tomorrow. But he did say, grudgingly, that he’d be jogging at his usual time, and in the Wickford direction.’

  ‘Good. Well, you’re the one who knows him, Hilary. Are you going to jog along with him?’

  ‘No,’ she said. Besides preferring other forms of exercise, she was anxious not to snarl up her friendship with Jen Arrowsmith by irritating Jen’s husband any further. ‘Ross has taken a dislike to me, and he’s a difficult man to talk to at the best of times.’

  ‘I’ll do it, if you like,’ offered Tait, eager to make the acquaintance of the micro-electronics expert.

  ‘This is not your case,’ Quantrill reminded him, exasperated. ‘You get on with your own murder enquiry – when we want your help we’ll ask for it.’

  ‘We’re looking for someone who’s very careful,’ said Inspector Colman.

  He and Quantrill were sitting in the mobile information room, where a uniformed sergeant was collating reports as they were brought in by police officers manning the road blocks. It was 6.40 p.m.; still daylight on the A135, but the surrounding trees had brought a premature dusk to the layby. The interior of the police caravan was bright with strip lighting which gleamed on Harry Colman’s high, bald forehead. He was tired, after a long day’s attention to detail, and his normally vigorous Prince Consort side-whiskers and moustache seemed to droop a little.

  ‘Our man was lucky that it rained heavily, of course,’ he went on. ‘He couldn’t have relied on a downpour that would cover his tracks so completely. But I don’t doubt that he went to a lot of trouble to hide his tyre marks and footprints before he left the scene. We haven’t found any so far. He did make one big mistake, though – he got into his victim’s car.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’ asked Quantrill.

  ‘No, he was too careful. He wore gloves, and as if that wasn’t enough he cleaned out the inside of the car before he left it. Come and see the evidence of that.’

  Refreshed by his brief rest, Harry Colman bustled out of the caravan with Quantrill following. Hilary Lloyd joined them, after pointing out to Martin Tait where the headless corpse had been found. The search team had left when the light deteriorated, and Tait was now standing alone, studying the scene. His colleagues had no doubt, though, that his ears were pinned back to listen to their conversation.

  Angela Arrowsmith’s car had been taken away for forensic examination, but markers showed where it had stood.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Harry Colman, picking up a pale yellow leaf, recently fallen, but torn and bruised. There were a few similar leaves on the ground, lying close together. ‘They’re from a lime tree, if I’m not mistaken – but limes don’t grow in this wood. There’s one beside the driveway of Mrs Arrowsmith’s house at Nether Wickford, though, and I think that the leaves could well have been walked into her car. And now they’re lying level with the driver’s door of the car and a couple of feet away, just where you’d expect them to fall if someone stood at the open door and shook the rubber floor mat. I think that’s exactly what our man did, on both sides of the car. And he must have done it some time after midnight, when the rain started, because when we examined the car both mats were still slightly damp.’

  ‘It’s very helpful of him, to let us know that he was in the car,’ said Hilary. ‘Dusting the interior and shaking the floor mats may get rid of any obvious traces, but he has no idea what a thorough job forensic does – he hasn’t bargained for their vacuum-cleaner technique.’

  Inspector Colman nodded and smiled at her. Quantrill was sure that his old friend’s whiskers had perked up measurably in Hilary Lloyd’s presence.

  ‘True. And I’ve something else to show you.’ With the air of a Victorian uncle presenting a conjuring trick for the delectation and approval of his favourite niece, Colman produced a plastic evidence-bag. It contained a small plug of dried mud.

  ‘Our man wasn’t quite as careful as he thought. Although he shook the floor mats, he didn’t dislodge this scrape of mud from the mat on the passenger side – it was stuck in the rubber moulding. And it couldn’t have been there for more than a few hours before we found it, because although the outside was dry, the inside was still moist. So the chances are that it came from his shoes.’

  Quantrill, a countryman by birth and upbringing, regarded mud as his department. He took the envelope into the light of the caravan and identified the stiff blue-grey texture of its contents immediately. ‘Clay,’ he said. ‘Heavy clay. It can’t be from anywhere round Breckham, because this is light land. Even deep ploughing doesn’t bring clay to the surface round here. Mightn’t it have
come from Angela Arrowsmith’s own shoes, though? We can’t be sure that the floor mats weren’t switched when he shook them.’

  ‘I’ll have her shoes checked,’ said Hilary, ‘but I don’t think the mud came from them. I was the one who picked them up this morning – they’d been torn off by impact as she lay on the road. I didn’t look at them particularly closely, but they were flimsy and smooth-soled, and perfectly clean as far as I can remember – apart from rain and road damage, and the blood.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Inspector Colman. ‘I’ll send this mud to the lab for analysis, and with luck they’ll be able to tell us something about our man’s recent movements.’

  Quantrill thanked his colleague. ‘Oh, one other thing, Harry: we’ve been assuming that our man came here by car, but there’s now another possibility. When your team starts searching again tomorrow morning, ask them to keep their eyes open for any trace of bicycle tyres, will you?’

  At ten-thirty that night, Sergeant Lloyd made a return visit, alone, to Breckham Market Infirmary. She enquired first about Mrs Nellie Arrowsmith, and was told that her condition was satisfactory; her son Simon had spent most of the evening sitting at her bedside.

  Hilary then went into the intensive care unit, where Nellie had been treated the previous night. The unit, purpose-built in the new accident and emergency wing of the hospital, had its own small waiting room, an enlarged section of corridor equipped with chairs and ashtrays. This corridor led direct from the reception hall, which was unstaffed at night. Other public areas, including cloakrooms and a large waiting room, also led off the hall. With so many places where he might legitimately have been, there was no chance at all that any one member of the staff would be able to vouch for Simon’s continuous presence at the hospital between the hours of eleven the previous night and one o’clock that morning.

  But Simon had made his presence known.

  ‘Mrs Arrowsmith’s son?’ said the staff nurse who spared a few moments to answer Hilary’s query. She was West Indian in features and colouring, but second-generation English; and not only English, but Suffolk. Like Quantrill’s, her voice was slow and her vowels broad.

  ‘You mean the cuddly one with the beard?’ she went on. ‘We couldn’t get rid of the man! He’d been here all day, and he hung about all night as well. We told him half a dozen times to go home, but he’d disappear for a bit and then sneak back. His brother had more sense.’

  ‘His brother?’

  ‘Yes – you know, the computer man. Ross Arrowsmith. I recognised him from his photograph in the local paper. Apparently he’d only just got back from abroad and he rushed here in a panic, afraid that he’d be too late to see his mother.’

  Hilary saw no point in correcting the staff nurse’s minor misapprehension about the Arrowsmith family’s relationship. ‘What time would that have been?’

  ‘Oh, early. Half past ten-ish, something like that. He hung about for a short time, but when I reassured him that his mother’s condition was stable, he had the sense to go home. The cuddly brother disappeared too, for a while, but he was back again before very long.’

  ‘Before how long?’

  ‘Before we wanted him back, that’s for sure! Don’t ask me to be definite. From eleven o’clock onwards it’s usually hectic in this wing, what with the pubs closing and drink-driving accidents –’

  ‘I can remember what it was like. I did an SRN at Addenbrooke’s.’

  ‘Did you?’ The staff nurse, who had been poised to go, relaxed for a few moments. She smiled, her teeth brilliantly white against her dark skin. ‘Well, you know all about it, then. Lucky you, to do your training in Cambridge … Hey, what happened? Why did you change careers? And how did you get that scar – did an ungrateful patient throw a bed bottle at you?’

  Hilary touched her forehead ruefully. ‘It was a beer bottle, as a matter of fact. I’d fancied myself more in police uniform than in a cap and apron, until I tried to arrest a man who had a grudge against the police. I’ve learned to duck, since then. But about Simon Arrowsmith – the one with the beard. It really is important for us to know where he was last night. You can remember having seen him somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven, yes? And after that –?’

  ‘After that? Let’s see …’ The dark eyes rolled, doing a professional count. ‘One cardiac arrest, one young motor cyclist with multiple injuries, one pedestrian with a fractured skull and suspected brain damage after being knocked down by a car. We reversed the cardiac arrest; the pedestrian’s still unconscious. The motor cyclist died just before one-thirty this morning. I went for a break soon after that, and saw the cuddly Arrowsmith brother in the reception hall. He hurried to ask me how his mother was – he said he’d been asleep in the main waiting room.’

  ‘How did he look?’

  ‘Pretty good, in comparison with the eighteen-year-old who’d just died. Sorry, but you know how it is. I didn’t take much notice of him. He’d looked rough all night, as far as I can remember. I had another go at sending him home but soon afterwards I saw him sitting in the corridor again. And that’s as much as I can tell you, I’m afraid. As I said, there was a lot happening between eleven last night and one o’clock this morning.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  21 September; a cool, bright, clear morning. Too clear to stay dry for long. Rainclouds were already moving in from the west, but for the moment the rising sun shone brilliantly on the hedgerows, illuminating the ripening wild fruit: purple clusters of blackberry and elderberry, scarlet wild rose-hips, and crimson hawthorn berries. The air smelled of damp earth, wet grass and mushrooms.

  At 7.07 a.m. Ross Arrowsmith, in singlet and running shorts, his lank forelock already flopping, padded down the drive of New Maltings. A tall young man in track suit and training shoes, who had been brought to Ecclesby by police car a few minutes earlier, greeted him at the gateway. He was carrying a small clipboard.

  ‘Good morning, sir. Detective Constable Bedford. Sergeant Lloyd asks me to thank you for your co-operation.’

  Ross Arrowsmith muttered something noncommittal, turned right and jogged up the road towards Wickford common. James Bedford, a fresh-faced twenty-year-old who, according to his colleagues, had been promoted to the CID only because he looked so young in uniform that he destroyed the credibility of the whole county constabulary, eased alongside him and picked up his rhythm.

  Bedford had been given the assignment by Sergeant Lloyd because he was a keen young detective who was also known to be a jogger. Fortuitously, he was a computer enthusiast as well; he had taken a part-time course in computer science at Yarchester Technical College, and the computer he owned was an Arrowsmith. He was delighted to have been given the opportunity to meet the micro-electronics expert, and immediately began to ask about the latest Arrowsmith model.

  Recognising that the detective’s interest was genuine, Ross abandoned some of his normal taciturnity. Without going so far as to enter into a conversation, he consented to give audible replies. And when Dc Bedford, eventually recollecting Sergeant Lloyd’s briefing, asked him as a matter of routine how he had spent Thursday night, Ross gave him civil answers.

  ‘Thursday? That was the evening I returned from Japan. My wife told me that my stepmother was critically ill, so I went to the infirmary to see her. My brother? He’s not my brother, he’s my half-brother. Yes, he was there too. We had a conversation. There was nothing either of us could do, but he insisted that he was going to stay there all night. I left about eleven o’clock.

  ‘After that? The road home passes my office, so I decided to call in and look through my mail. Then I realised how jet-lagged I felt, and decided to stay there the night. No, no, in bed; I have a small private suite there. I often work late, and don’t like to disturb my wife by going home in the early hours.’

  It was a perfectly reasonable, co-operative reply, and Bedford wondered why Sergeant Lloyd had warned him that he’d be lucky to get a word out of Ross Arrowsmith. Predisposed as he was to like the comp
uter man, Bedford would have accepted his account of his movements without further question. But Sergeant Lloyd had also said that Ross was on the list of possible suspects. Phrasing the question carefully, James Bedford sought for some kind of confirmation of Ross’s story.

  ‘Is your office easily accessible at night, sir? I mean, with all the high-tech equipment you must have in the building, I hope you don’t leave it unguarded?’

  ‘Good God, no. I employ a security firm, and even I can’t get in without being vetted. Quite apart from professional thieves, there are too many people wandering round the town looking for mischief, so I leave nothing to chance. I don’t even park my car on the forecourt after dark – I drive it into the yard, and the guards keep the gates locked. And then of course there are electronic alarm devices on all the doors and windows.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, sir. I wish other businessmen were equally security-conscious. Now, if you wouldn’t mind thinking back to last Saturday morning … If we can piece together what happened then, it may throw some light on Mrs Angela Arrowsmith’s death.’

  ‘So I understand.’ The exercise was bringing up a light sweat on Ross Arrowsmith’s thin face and high forehead, but his movements were easy, his voice almost cheerful. He flicked his dark hair out of his eyes. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to help, of course. But don’t think it odd – still less significant – that I’m not disposed to mourn for Simon’s wife. If he had any sense, neither would he. Frankly, he and his brother-in-law are well rid of her.’

  At Tenerife, Simon was not disposed to consider himself well rid of his wife. Those parts of his face that were visible above his curly beard were blotched with grief; and now that he had been told that the police suspected foul play, he was overcome with indignation and bitterness.

  ‘But you knew she was being threatened! I specifically asked you to provide protection for her, and you refused.’

  Chief Inspector Quantrill, standing with his hands behind his back and shifting his considerable weight uncomfortably from one foot to another, acknowledged his error. ‘I regret that deeply, Mr Arrowsmith. The fact is, though, that your wife herself didn’t ask for protection. That was what misled us. If Mrs Arrowsmith had been alarmed, that would have been a different matter.’