A Talent For Destruction (20 page)

Robin was back at the Rectory shortly after nine o'clock, twitching with panic.

‘We went to a hotel for a meal, but she refused to stay. She says she intends to sleep here. She's just gone to collect her things from the tent, and then she's coming.'

Gillian had tried to go on staying calm, as Alec Reynolds had advised, but this was too much. Anger began to mount inside her, rising up in a red tide that made her feel ready to do battle with anyone; and to hell with being a parson's wife.

‘Oh no she's bloody well not,' she said.

She ran round the house, locking doors and closing windows. Robin hurried after her, protesting. ‘But you can't keep her out! You don't know what she'll do!'

‘She won't marry Michael Dade, I'm quite sure of that.'

‘She's not talking about that any more. But she says if we don't let her in, she'll make trouble. She'll wake the neighbours, smash windows –'

‘You know perfectly well we haven't any neighbours. And if she dares to do any damage, I'll send for the police.'

‘But then everything will come out! Everyone will know what's been happening! My whole career – our whole life – will be ruined. It's not that I want her here, I swear it. I'm trying to protect you, surely you can see that?'

She saw the sweat on his face, and smelled fear on his breath. ‘Having your mistress in my house isn't the kind of protection I want, Robin,' she said. ‘If you're really concerned about our life together – if you really don't want her here – then you must send her away.'

‘But I can't … she's too strong for me! Oh Gillian, please –' For the first time since his affair with Janey began, he looked his wife in the eyes. ‘I can't fight her alone. For the love of God, help me.'

They stood together at the top of the stairs listening to the ringing of the front-door bell, and then to the knocking at the side door, and at the back. There was a silence for ten minutes, and then the telephone began to ring. When Gillian answered it, the line went dead. After four such calls, she left the receiver off.

The assault on the doors started again half an hour later, with increased intensity. Handles were tried. Flung gravel rattled against the windows. Robin and Gillian, emerging from their separate bedrooms to meet in the upstairs corridor, found themselves clutching at each other in mutual alarm.

It was Henry Bowers who, unprompted, resolved the situation. Exasperated by the disturbance, he pushed up the sash window of his bedroom and bellowed into the warm night air, ‘Be off with you, you noisy trollop, or I'll come down and shut you up meself!'

To the Aingers'surprise and relief, Janey went.

Robin's Sunday was, as always, fully occupied, and Gillian accompanied him to all the morning services. Janey's Datsun disappeared from St Botolph Street during the course of the morning, and Gillian began to think that they had won a victory.

They were about to set off for Evensong when Alec Reynolds arrived on his way back from London, looking so drawn and ill that Robin agreed that Gillian must stay and listen to him. She offered him coffee, but all he needed was a glass. He produced a half-bottle of whisky from his pocket, poured himself a large double, and told Gillian that Lesley had decided to marry a man she had met in London; the weekend had been their last together. Her announcement had taken him completely by surprise. He felt, he said, that his life had now completely fallen apart. Nothing seemed to matter any more.

Gillian said what she could to console and encourage him. He was on his third whisky, and obviously unfit to drive, so she persuaded him to stay for a meal. She expected Robin back for supper by seven-thirty, but when he didn't appear by eight, she and her father and Reynolds ate without him.

It was nearly nine o'clock before Robin came back, in a state near to collapse. Janey had attended Evensong, walking up the aisle just as the service was about to begin, her hair lighting the gloom. She had sat in a front pew, where all the congregation could see her, and there had been whisperings and nudgings and murmurings of speculation when Robin panicked, stammered, and dried up. And after he had somehow stumbled his way through, she had met him outside the church, whisked him away in her car, and given him an ultimatum.

The congregation had now seen her, she said. During the course of the day she had made it her business to find out who the verger was, and the churchwardens, and the members of the parochial church council. If she wasn't taken back into the Rectory, she intended to call on them at their homes that evening and tell them that Robin had taken advantage of her loneliness in a foreign country, and had seduced her in the church.

Gillian drew a deep breath. ‘Where is she now?'

‘In the drive, waiting for me to fetch her. And this time she won't go away. We
must
take her in, Gillian, or we'll be finished.'

She walked out of the front door. Robin sat huddled at the foot of the stairs, his head in his hands. Henry Bowers and Alec Reynolds, who had both overheard Robin's story, stood in the hall listening shamelessly to what was going on in the drive.

The sun had gone down and dusk was gathering. The old man's roses and peonies and gladioli had closed their petals for the night, and Janey's hair was the brightest thing in the garden. She leaned gracefully against the inner side of the closed gate, waiting with confidence to be invited into the house.

Gillian paused when she was still some yards from the girl and spoke to her loudly and clearly. ‘It's no good, Janey. You can't blackmail us like this. You see, it's been tried before.' She knew that her voice was unsteady, but she plunged on. ‘It's a sad fact that some women fantasize about their relationship with clergymen. It's one of the recognized hazards of clerical life, particularly when the man is as good-looking as Robin.'

That was true. He had always, throughout his career, had an accompanying flotilla of admiring women parishioners. He was normally adept at fending them off, but one or two, more persistent or less well balanced than the others, had tried to manoeuvre him into compromising situations and then, disappointed, had spread their fantasies throughout the parish. It had been a great embarrassment for him, although Gillian had always felt more keenly for the unhappy women; but then, no one had ever taken their allegations seriously. Gillian knew that if Janey spoke out her story would be totally credible, but she stood her ground and denied it.

‘So no one would believe you. They know Robin's views on the sanctity of marriage, and they'd assume that you were upset because he'd rejected you. They'd think you were a silly, hysterical girl who was trying to take her revenge.'

Janey's stance had altered from graceful to taut. She started to say something, but she was interrupted by a cheerful shout of greeting from across the road. Athol Garrity, full of beer after his visit to the Concorde on his return from London, had flopped out for an hour in his tent before emerging from Parson's Close to see whether he could find her. After a moment's hesitation, Janey went out to talk to him. Gillian remained where she was. Her father and Alec Reynolds, both admiring her courage, walked out into the driveway and stood behind her. Robin, hardly daring to believe that her bluff would work, followed them.

Presently Janey returned to the gate. ‘All right,' she said, looking at the four who now faced her, her voice hard with contempt. ‘I don't care a toss one way or the other – I'm off to spend my last two nights in London, anyway. Breckham Market's the most boring place in this pathetic little country, and I'm tired of you whingeing Poms. But listen to this: perhaps people wouldn't believe
me
if I told them about Robin, but they'll believe Athol. They'll know he's got no reason to invent things. And they've all seen me in church, remember, they've seen Robin stutter and lose his nerve because I was there. So I've told Athol what to do, and he's promised to make a start first thing in the morning, as soon as he's slept the beer off. He's a good mate, Athol, and he'll do anything to please me. He'll drop you in it right up to your Pommy necks!'

She slammed the Rectory gate, kissed Athol Garrity good-bye, climbed into her red Datsun, and went. Garrity stood waving amiably after her, and then wandered back across St Botolph Street towards the gate that led into Parson's Close.

Drunk or sober, he knew Janey too well to agree to become involved in one of her feuds; knowing him equally well, she had not even asked. Her lie about her conversation with Athol was simply a parting exercise of power. She calculated that, in their emotional distress, her hearers would believe her implicitly. And they did.

The time was nine-thirty-two, the date was 29 July. Of the four people who stood in the Rectory drive and watched Garrity cross the road, three would never see him alive again.

For the best part of a month after Athol Garrity's remains were buried, Chief Inspector Quantrill kept a discreet eye on the activities of the Rector and his wife. He observed that their tensions seemed to increase rather than diminish with the passage of time, but he learned nothing new about them. Old Henry Bowers made no more excursions to the Boot, so there was no opportunity for conversation with him. Regretfully, Quantrill began to put Garrity's death out of his mind; he had crimes enough to investigate, without inventing others.

On Monday 3 April, a morning of bright sun after a wet weekend, he was forty miles away from Breckham investigating a country-house burglary. It was Detective Constable Ian Wigby, minding the office, who took the telephone message that the body of a man had been found by a security guard behind one of the many empty factories on the industrial estate. Wigby radioed the news to the Chief Inspector, received instructions, and was on the scene within ten minutes. By the time Quantrill arrived, the police surgeon had certified the man dead, the photographer was making a record of the area, and the divisional scene-of-crime officer was measuring and marking off the footprints that had been left round the body on the damp sandy ground.

There was no doubt about the dead man's identity. Wigby knew him well; they were both regulars at the Boot.

‘One of the Bedingfields,' he reported. ‘Kevin, Reggie's youngest. Died some time yesterday, the Doc estimates, probably as a result of cracking his head open when he fell. He certainly went a cropper.'

Kevin Bedingfield's body – rain-sodden, open-eyed, open-mouthed – was lying sprawled on its back, the head on some of the broken bricks that lay scattered on the waste ground behind the abandoned factory. He was a young man, not much more than twenty, swarthy and well built. The bricks beneath his dark wet head, and the weeds and the sandy earth below the bricks, were rusted with trickles of blood.

‘Dr Thomson thinks there's a bruise on the side of the jaw that could be consistent with a heavy blow,' went on Wigby, ‘but he's not committing himself.'

‘Understandably,' said Quantrill, knowing the police surgeon's reluctance to trespass on pathologists'territory, ‘but we'll know for sure after the post-mortem. How does it look to you, Keith?'

‘Beautiful,' said the young civilian scene-of-crime officer. He was too short to join the force but full of compensatory, blinkered enthusiasm for his specialized work. ‘The footprints couldn't be clearer. Eliminating the victim's and the security guard's, there's just one set. The man you want to interview wears leather size tens, so he's tall, and as the prints aren't deep he's probably thin-to-medium in build. It looks as though he and the victim arrived here separately, and then had a short scuffle.'

‘During which it would seem that he knocked Kevin down … and that's odd,' said Quantrill. ‘The boy's big enough to have held his own, and the Bedingfields are a tough family.'

Wigby shook his head. ‘Kevin's always been a bit of a softy. He's been in trouble, like the rest of the family, but he's gone straight for the past couple of years, poor sod.' The phrase was careless, almost callous, but it was Wigby's way of expressing compassion for a fellow drinker and darts player. ‘He wouldn't have gone out looking for aggro, I'm sure of that. He got married last September, and he's been full of talk about the baby his wife's expecting.'

‘This'll go extra hard with her, then,' said Quantrill. He heard a car stop at the front of the building and saw that it contained his colleague from the county scene-of-crime squad. ‘I want to know everything you can tell me about Kevin Bedingfield, Ian, but we can talk later over a bite to eat. I'll brief Inspector Colman now, while you go and tell Kevin's family and see if you can find out what he was up to when he came here.'

‘Reggie Bedingfield cried when I told him,' said Wigby. ‘Sentimental old git. Considering the number of times we've done him for assault … Mind you, I found him in the Jolly Butchers, so I reckon his tears were all of 83 degrees proof.'

He looked unappreciatively at his cup of canteen coffee. He had anticipated that the Chief Inspector would buy him a pie and a pint while they talked in the comfort of a pub, but Quantrill, whose wife had sent him out that morning with a packet of crusty ham sandwiches to sustain him during his investigation of the country-house burglary, had elected to economize by lunching off them in his office.

‘So what did you find out from Reggie?' Quantrill asked.

‘Nothing useful. But his wife's tougher, and she talked. The baby's arrived, by the way – their umpteenth grandchild. Kevin called to tell his mother yesterday evening, somewhere round seven o'clock. He was over the moon about having a son. He'd been at the maternity home all day, and though he wasn't on speaking terms with most of the family he couldn't resist telling them the news.'