A Talent For Destruction (22 page)

She started. For a moment her whole body drooped. Then she pulled herself together and gave him a nod, but said nothing.

‘There's a health visitor at the Dents',' he said, as she started to walk up the steps to their front door. ‘I've just been turned away.'

She bit her lower lip uncertainly. ‘Oh … I'll call back later, then, after I've been to the Over Sixties'Day Centre. My husband's gone to Yarchester, and when I saw the dreadful news in the paper I felt I had to see if there's anything I can do to help. The Bedingfields aren't churchgoers, but they're still our parishioners.'

Did she know about her friend Reynolds's confession, Quantrill wondered? Did she know about his involvement? ‘If you'd like to wait, Mrs Ainger,' he suggested, ‘you could sit in my car.'

She gave him a small, wry smile. ‘No thank you, Mr Quantrill.'

‘I wanted to ask about your father,' he said with peripheral truth. ‘How is he? Still as difficult?'

‘Not quite so bad, thank you.' She unlocked her bicycle again. ‘He's easier to deal with in the summer, when he can get out into the garden. It was being cooped up in the house because of the snow that made him so obstreperous.'

‘He doesn't go to the Boot, though?'

‘No. He's quite at liberty to go if he wants to, he knows that. He's physically capable of getting there. But he seems to prefer pottering about in the garden.'

‘Tell him I enquired after him,' said Quantrill. ‘I'll drop in for a chat with him one day – later this week, perhaps.'

She had been about to ride off, but she paused with her left foot on the pedal and looked defiantly at the Chief Inspector.

‘I hope you will do nothing of the kind. Oh, I'm sure my father would be pleased. He liked you. He thought he'd found a friend. He spoke of you as “Doug”. But he's eighty-three years old, and easily confused, and I don't for a moment think that he realizes you're a detective. And, frankly, I find your tactic of plying an old man with whisky in order to question him about our private lives entirely despicable. Good morning.'

It was not until she had cycled half-way down the road that Quantrill collected himself sufficiently to shut his sagging jaw.

He was in no mood, when he returned to the station to lunch off a canteen sandwich in his office, to be bounced upon outside the CID room by DC Wigby, with a doughnut partly in his hand and partly in his mouth, and to be asked, ‘Guess who's just been to see me?'

‘How the hell should I know?' snapped Quantrill. ‘If you've anything to report, do it properly.'

‘Sir,' acknowledged Wigby, gulping his mouthful and ostentatiously dropping the remainder of his doughnut into a waste-paper bin. But he was too ebullient to stay quashed. ‘It was Mrs Muttock – you know, the grandmother of one of the boys who found Athol Garrity's body in Parson's Close. You'd told her to contact me if she heard the boys saying anything about the place. Seems they saw the photograph of Kevin Bedingfield on the front page of today's paper, and recognized him as a man who'd frightened them away from Parson's Close last summer.'

‘Did they?' Quantrill beckoned the detective constable into his office. ‘All right, I'm interested. Tell me more.'

‘Well – sir – Mrs Muttock questioned the boys and it seems that they took it into their heads to go and play in Parson's Close one fine evening last summer. They saw the tent, and snooped round. It was closed up, but they found a pocket knife in the grass just outside, so they nicked it. That made them feel guilty. They ran away, through the long grass, and almost fell over a man and a girl. They assumed the man was the owner of the tent, and of the knife, but now they know it was Kevin Bedingfield.'

‘We've no need to wonder what he and the girl were doing, I suppose.'

‘Hard at it,' agreed Wigby; ‘though you've got to allow for a bit of embroidery on Mrs Muttock's part. She hasn't had so much excitement since the skeleton was found. Anyway, Kevin was furious about the interruption, and he swore at the boys and told them he'd give them a thrashing if he ever caught them in Parson's Close again. And that's all Mrs Muttock had to tell me, except that she insisted on handing the pocket knife in. But –'

Quantrill was already making his own deductions, but it seemed unjust to take them out of Wigby's mouth, and so he merely looked encouraging.

‘– what I think it means is that Kevin and the girl used Parson's Close regularly last summer when they wanted a bit of love-making. Kevin was living at the time with his Granny, just on the other side of the allotments from Parson's Close, and Carole lived on the new estate, across the by-pass, so it'd make an ideal meeting-place. They might well have seen or heard something going on while they were hidden in the long grass – something connected with Athol Garrity.'

‘That's it,' said Quantrill. ‘That's just the connection we needed. Get yourself another doughnut, to celebrate. I'm going back to Pine Tree Walk to find out what I can from Carole Bedingfield.'

He didn't relish the thought of having to revive, with a newly widowed girl, the memories of her pre-marital love-making. But her pink-haired mother assured him, in answer to his doorstep enquiry, that her daughter was quite calm.

‘Well, it's having the baby. It takes you that way for the first day or two. She's in another world. She knows about Kevin, of course, but she hasn't really grasped it yet. It's as if he's out at the pub – well, that's where he generally was. I wouldn't have minded so much if he'd gone to a nice place like the Concorde, where he could have taken Carole, but he would keep going back to that dirty old Boot in the town. Me and her Dad were against her marrying into local riff-raff, but she wouldn't listen. Not that we'd have wished him dead, mind. Carole was properly in love with him, and I dread to think what sort of state she'll be in when she realizes she'll never see him again.'

She took her visitors across a tiny, spotless hall and into an overheated living room. Carole Bedingfield, a plump and healthy eighteen, sat on a settee with her feet up, evidently luxuriating in her mother's care. She wore a pretty dressing gown and fluffy slippers, and she exuded milky warmth and pride and contentment. There was a vague soft smile on her face, and her ringed left hand was stretched out to rock the elaborately frilled reproduction of a Victorian bassinet that stood by her side.

Patsy Hopkins, tall, elegant, no baby-lover but an experienced policewoman, firmly diverted Mrs Dent's attention from the interview by admiring her sleeping grandson. Quantrill began to put his questions to Carole Bedingfield as delicately as he knew how, and she answered him with composure. Her voice was quieter than her mother's, though sharper than any native Suffolk girl's.

No, she'd had no idea where Kevin was going after he left the maternity home on Sunday night; to the Boot to celebrate, she supposed.

Yes, Kevin was worried sick about money when Breckham Plastics closed down. But for the past week or two he'd seemed happier about his prospects. He'd said he thought there might be something in the pipeline, though he didn't tell her what. When he was with her at the maternity home, just before the baby came, he had said she wasn't to worry about money because he'd definitely got something lined up.

She agreed that she knew Parson's Close, the field behind the street where Kevin's Granny lived. That was where they used to go last summer, she added, with a happily reminiscent smile. They saw a tent, up at the top of the field, and once or twice they saw a man near it, but they didn't bother him and he didn't bother them. ‘'Spect he never even saw us,' she said, giggling softly.

‘But did
you
see or hear anything – anything at all unusual – while you were in Parson's Close?'

Blushing, she told him about the untimely interruption from the children. Quantrill persisted, and eventually she remembered something else.

‘It was after dark, but moonlight, a lovely warm evening – the day after my birthday. I was eighteen on 28 July. Kevin and I were, well – you know – and we could hear something moving slowly down towards us from the top of the field. I was afraid it might be a bull but Kevin – he was on top so he could see what was happening – said it was a feller carrying something big and heavy on his back. Then Kevin said he'd fallen over, and we could hear him swearing. We were giggling like anything, and hoping he couldn't hear us. Then he got up, groaning and moaning, and started dragging whatever it was that he'd been carrying. He lugged it down as far as the road, and then we lost interest.'

‘Was it the man you'd seen near the tent?'

‘Oh no, he was young. This one was old. Kevin had an idea that he was an old man he'd seen once or twice in the Boot.'

‘And he was moaning and groaning, you said. Did you hear any words?'

‘Well, you know: “Oh, me back,” and things like that. And something about bloody ozzies …'

A small mew, no stronger than a kitten's began to emanate from the bassinet. Quantrill thanked the girl and moved into the hall. WPC Hopkins and Mrs Dent followed.

‘What I don't understand,' the policewoman said, as Mrs Dent opened the front door for them, ‘is why your daughter didn't report to us what she'd seen and heard in Parson's Close. We put out a public appeal only a few weeks ago, asking for just this kind of information.'

Mrs Dent stared at her blankly. ‘I never knew anything about that. I don't suppose Carole did either.'

‘It was on the front page of the local paper.'

Trim and urban, Mrs Dent looked out from her maisonette doorway at the rows of low-cost housing and the parade of shops that formed one section of Breckham Market new town. It was characterless, anonymous. Its inhabitants might have been living in any part of England.

‘What would we want with the local paper?' she asked. ‘It's about nothing but Suffolk.'

The police officers walked down the concrete steps, just as a wail of panic and desolation arose from inside the house. Carole Bedingfield, left alone for the first time, had begun to sense the enormity of her loss.

‘Mum! Oh, Mum … oh Kevin …'

‘So now we know how Athol Garrity's body came to be in the bushes at the bottom of Parson's Close,' said Patsy Hopkins as they drove away.

‘Yes – and that's all we do know,' agreed Quantrill, grateful for the company of a junior colleague who didn't jump eagerly to conclusions. ‘We don't know why Reynolds was being blackmailed by Kevin Bedingfield, and we still don't know how Athol Garrity died.'

As Quantrill walked through the front office, the prematurely grey station sergeant called to him.

‘Message for you, sir. Mrs Ainger, the Rector's wife, rang ten minutes ago to say that her father is missing. She last saw him when she went out, about ten-thirty this morning. She returned just before one, but she spent some time searching the house and gardens before contacting us. I've sent a patrol car to tour the town. The old gentleman's over eighty, and –'

‘I know him, Larry.' With a sense of foreboding Quantrill added, ‘Someone called to see me this morning, when I was busy. Just after eleven, I think. “A gentleman”, so PC Phipps said. Did you see him?'

‘No, sir. He must have come in while I was in the charge room. I'll get hold of young Phipps for you.'

Young Phipps was summoned from the cells, where he was listening saucer-eyed to an older constable's hyperbolical account of what-you-want-to-look-out-for-when-dealing-with-some-of-thevillains-we-get-in-here. He was a lanky nineteen, desperately worried that he would not survive his probationary year.

Quantrill described old Henry Bowers.

‘That was him, sir,' agreed Phipps nervously, ‘but he wouldn't give me his name. He said it was a personal matter. He didn't seem to know your rank, and I wasn't sure at first who he meant. He just said “Doug”.'

‘Why on earth didn't you tell me he was old?' Quantrill demanded. ‘If I'd known that –'

PC Phipps reddened. ‘Sir, I couldn't say so in front of him. It wouldn't have been polite.'

‘Didn't you ask him to wait?'

‘Yes, sir. He sat down on the bench for a few minutes, but he was very fidgety. Then he said he couldn't wait any longer, but he'd like to leave a message for you.' The young constable took out his pocket book. ‘He didn't tell me that the message was urgent, sir,' he pointed out defensively. ‘He just said it was something he thought you'd want to know.
Tell Doug
,' he read out, puzzled,
‘that it wasn't too much beer. I used a cushion.'

‘Oh my God –' said Quantrill. ‘No, don't worry, Phipps, it's not your fault.' He turned to Sergeant Lamb. ‘Never mind about searching the streets. Try the trees at the top of Parson's Close. Try the spinney by the recreation ground. Try the Mere. Try the river.'

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Ainger.'

She stood with her back to him, staring out of the Rectory drawing-room window. ‘Where was he found?' she asked.

‘In the river, just below Castle Meadow. I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to make a formal identification.'

‘Can I leave it until my husband gets back from Yarchester?'

‘Yes, of course.'

She faced him, her head high. ‘My father was depressed by his increasing infirmity,' she said. ‘He loved gardening, but he hurt his back last year and since then –'

Quantrill shook his head. ‘There's no need to cover for him any more, Mrs Ainger. This is a private conversation, so let's be frank. I know how your father hurt his back, and I know why he took his own life. He came to tell me this morning.'

She sat down suddenly and began to weep, her tears a compound of grief, shock, and relief that the weeks of concealment were over. He walked to the window and looked out at the neglected April garden while he waited for her to compose herself.