Death and the Maiden (21 page)

Both policemen stared hard at Gedge. He examined his finger nails.

‘Did any of the neighbours see you in Jubilee Crescent this morning?' asked Tait eventually. ‘Is there anyone who can vouch for your whereabouts between three and six o'clock?'

‘I don't suppose so. Why?'

‘Because that's about the time when Mary was killed.'

The blood left Gedge's face. He turned to Quantrill. ‘But I don't know anything about it!' he protested.

‘I'm the one who's asking the questions,' snapped Tait. ‘Look at me: did you see your sister Mary at any time between nine o'clock last night and six this morning?'

‘No, I swear I didn't.'

‘Did you kill Mary?'

‘No!'

Sergeant Tait's jaws were stiff with anger. ‘I can't see why you let him go, sir, not at this time of night. I wanted to try another approach. We could perfectly well have held him until tomorrow morning without charging him.'

‘We haven't a shred of evidence against him,' Chief Inspector Quantrill growled, ‘any more than we have against Dale Kenward.'

‘I don't know why you let him go either,' complained Tait. ‘I wanted to have a go at him.'

‘I daresay you did. But in my judgement, we had no good ground for holding either of them—if you want to bring them in again, you'd better find some good stickable evidence first.'

Tait glowered.

Quantrill's eyes were beginning to feel boiled. He rubbed his hands over his face, and then looked at his watch. It was well after midnight, an uncongenial time to argue about hunches.

‘It's been a long day, Harry,' he said. ‘What we both need is some sleep. Stand your men down until daylight, and then I want two of them to check the regular early morning traffic crossing Ashthorpe bridge, while the rest comb the meadow. When they've covered the meadow once we'll split them, some to finish the house-to-house and some to sift through the bonfire where Mary Gedge's mother destroyed her letters and things. We're working blind until we can get some information about Mary's personal life, and that's what I want you to concentrate on. She must have kept at least an engagement diary, and that wouldn't burn easily. See what you can find.'

All very well for the old man, Tait thought; he hadn't seen the size of the bonfire. ‘Yes, sir,' he said reluctantly. ‘I suppose we've ruled out a random murder?' he asked.

‘You mean some passing nutter who happened to see a girl gathering flowers, and took it into his head to drown her? No, there'd have been an assault of some kind. This murder was done without any more violence than was necessary. I'm sure that it must have been someone who knew her well. So you concentrate on the Ashthorpe end in the morning, and I'll see what I can find out in Breckham. We still haven't traced her movements after eight forty-five last night.'

‘If you're seeing Denning again, sir, I'd like to come too. I've been hoping,' said Tait, ‘to have a go at him.'

‘You've already demonstrated your interviewing technique,' said Quantrill dryly. ‘You do as you're told, and get that bonfire sifted. It's evidence we want now, not amateur theatricals.'

The chief inspector was back in Ashthorpe soon after seven in the morning, physically refreshed by a few hours'sleep but depressed after a row with his wife.

He had explained his lateness by telling her briefly about the girl's murder, but had thought it prudent not to mention that Mary Gedge had been at the grammar school; Molly would have been agog, clucking with the sympathetic horror appropriate to the mother of grammar school daughters, but eager for details to put in her weekly letter to Jennifer and Alison, whether they wanted to read them or not.

Knowing nothing about the victim, or the manner of her death, Molly had taken it upon herself to assume that Mary Gedge's morals must have been questionable. Girls these days, she said virtuously, often asked for everything they got. And Quantrill was so incensed on Mary's behalf that he had reminded his wife sharply of her own youth, and of a summer evening they had spent together, soon after they first met, on the banks of the Ouse. Some girls, he pointed out, don't attract violence, if only because they don't say No.

It was unforgivable, of course. She should have slapped his face; she should have done that nearly a quarter of a century ago, when he first laid hands on her beside the Ouse. But Molly had always chosen softer weapons. Now, as then, she cried.

It was a bad start to the morning.

The meadow had been combed, and nothing useful had been found. There were very few regular early morning road users, and none of them had seen a car parked by the bridge the previous day. The house-to-house enquiries had been completed, and in the mobile information room the reports were being collated.

Everyone in Ashthorpe knew Mary Gedge.

No one in Ashthorpe had seen her since six-thirty on the evening before she was killed.

‘I reckon somebody's lying,' said Pc Godbold, who was red-eyed from lack of sleep.

‘But who, Charlie?' said Quantrill. ‘Look, we've got to narrow this down. Make up a list of the boys of her own age, will you? The ones she would have been at the village school with, the ones she knew best. One of them was probably a childhood sweetheart—perhaps he's been hankering after her ever since.'

‘A long shot, sir,' said Godbold doubtfully.

Quantrill recalled his own village sweetheart. Shirley, that had been her name, Shirley Howes. He'd hardly given her a thought, after he left school; but then, poor Shirley hadn't had much going for her, except a generous supply of sweets, a docile nature and white rather than navy blue knickers. There was a fair chance that Mary Gedge had inspired a much more lasting affection.

The chief inspector shrugged. ‘Try it. We've got nothing to lose.'

Sergeant Tait was nowhere to be seen, but he had followed Quantrill's instructions. Four policemen, shirtsleeved in the morning sunshine, were sifting with glum patience through a great mound of partially burned packaging material in the orchard at the back of Manchester House.

Quantrill watched them for a few minutes. They had stopped grumbling as he approached and now, in the quietness of the orchard, he could hear above his head a noise like a miniature racing circuit as the pure white blossom of a cherry tree was assaulted by a thousand drunken bees.

‘You know what you're looking for?' he asked. ‘Any luck?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘No sir.'

Quantrill waded through lush grass to Mary Gedge's caravan and unlocked the door. He was not hopeful that the dead girl's mother might have overlooked anything, but he searched every cupboard again, and took the bunks apart. Not a scrap of paper had been left in the caravan, apart from the calendar that hung from the knob of the locker.

And then he remembered that his wife kept no engagement diary, but used her kitchen calendar instead. Molly had big, sprawling handwriting; her calendar was so over-scored and scribbled on that it was difficult, from a distance, to see the dates. But as he knew from her notebooks, Mary Gedge's handwriting was tiny. He snatched down the calendar, and carried it to the window.

Yes, she had pencilled on it. Against several dates were capital letters, presumably the initials of names; and sometimes there were times, as of meetings.

The April page had gone. Torn off by Mary herself, before she left the caravan for the last time before her death? Or deliberately destroyed by her mother in an attempt to conceal all evidence of Mary's plans for April 30th, the last evening of her life?

Chief Superintendent Mancroft, head of the county CID, had been furious when Quantrill, telephoning to report the murder, had told him of Mrs Gedge's destructive foray. The chief super was coming to see her this morning, and it promised to be a sticky interview. Rather him than me, thought Quantrill.

He peered in the dim light of the old-fashioned caravan at the May page of the calendar. He looked for a consistent pattern, a recurrence of the same initial; there were several tees, but they were all lower case and accompanied by a time—games of tennis, perhaps. Otherwise there were one or two Ls—conceivably for Liz—and an M18 which could possibly be a reminder of the eighteenth birthday of a school friend run to earth by Tait the previous evening, a Breckham girl who went by the nickname of Miggy.

The pencilled letter against May 1st was different from all the others. It was a capital D.

Very helpful: D for Dale; D for Derek; come to that, D for Denning.

‘
Murdered
, Chief Inspector? But it was an accident, surely—she fell in the river and drowned.'

‘No, sir. That is, she might have fallen in, but her head was held forcibly under water.'

‘I can't believe it …' Denning subsided into his big executive chair. His agitated fingers scrabbled among his whiskers. ‘Who would have done such a thing?'

‘We're investigating that at the moment, sir. That's why I've come to see you.'

Denning bounced to his feet, placing his hands flat on his desk as he leaned over it to emphasise his words. ‘As I told you yesterday, Chief Inspector, at the time of her unfortunate death Mary had no connection with me or with my school. I can't help you in any way.'

Quantrill stared back at him. ‘I think you can, sir. Our information at the moment is that you were the last person to see Mary Gedge alive.'

Denning straightened, slowly. For the first time all his movements stilled, except for those of his eyes.

‘Would you like to add anything to what you told me yesterday?' Quantrill asked.

‘No.' Denning dropped back into his chair and began to swivel it from side to side. What could be seen of his face, among the whiskers, had turned pale, but he seemed to have recovered his natural buoyancy. ‘Mary called here last night, that is true. But as I told you, it was simply to return a book. She left at about a quarter to nine.'

‘And you watched her go? From the window, or the door?'

Denning put the tips of his fingers together and looked at the chief inspector with disapproval. ‘From the door of course. It's a matter of courtesy, don't you think?'

‘Quite. It was still daylight at that time?'

‘Dusk, to be accurate.'

‘Did Mary meet anyone? Did she speak to anyone?'

‘No, she just walked away down the road.'

‘To the left or to the right?'

‘To the right.'

‘And did anyone see her? Was anyone passing the house at the time, either on foot or by car?'

‘I don't remember. Probably—it was a warm evening, there must have been people about. I didn't happen to notice.'

‘I see. Then if I were you, Mr Denning, I'd make a point of trying to remember. If Mary left here, we need to know where she went.'

The whiskers bristled. ‘If! You have my word for it, Chief Inspector. And besides, my wife—'

‘We met Mrs Denning yesterday, I'm sure you remember that. She told us that she'd been staying overnight with a friend. She saw Mary come, but she was in a hurry—she didn't stay long enough to see her go.'

One of Denning's pudgy little hands shot out to the tooled leather address pad, the other to the telephone. ‘I intend to ring my solicitor. Your insinuations are intolerable.'

‘Less so than murder,' pointed out Quantrill.

Sergeant Tait had decided to have another go, alone, at Derek Gedge. Like a terrier, once he got his teeth into something, Tait was inclined to hang on.

At number seven Jubilee Crescent the bedroom curtains were still drawn. From behind one of them came sounds that could only emanate from the practised lungs of dark-eyed Jason. Tait picked his way round to the long narrow strip of back garden and found Derek Gedge at the far end, spending his Saturday morning earthing up row after row of potential fried potatoes.

Gedge looked up as the sergeant approached, resting for a moment with his hands on the handle of his spade. ‘You again?'

‘Full marks for perception.'

Gedge shrugged and bent to his work. Tait prowled round, looking at the well-tilled earth from which onions were beginning to hoist delicate green spears, and carrots their feathers.

‘Do it all yourself?' he asked. Tait was no gardener.

‘Keeps me out of mischief.'

‘So you say.' Tait folded his arms and stood watching. ‘Came out here yesterday morning, did you? A lovely morning, and you had plenty of time to fit in an hour's digging before breakfast.'

Gedge went on working. ‘No,' he said, ‘I didn't.'

‘Why not? Too busy elsewhere? Out for a walk, perhaps, down by the river?'

Gedge straightened his back, scowling. ‘I had gut-ache,' he said. ‘Good grief, man, I was in no condition to go any further than the bog, just outside the back door. After that I drank tea and read and rested, getting ready to do a bloody hard day's work.'

‘A well-chosen adjective,' said Tait. He leaned with conscious elegance, one ankle crossed over the other, against the door of the ramshackle garden shed. ‘Are you using it literally, or figuratively?'

‘Both,' said Gedge shortly.

‘I can imagine. I can't think of a bloodier job. And I sympathise, honestly. Let's face it, you've got yourself in one hell of a mess, haven't you? I mean, anyone can have a go at a tough job on a temporary basis. I did all sorts of manual jobs during vacations, working on building sites, clearing a derelict canal. But I knew that it wouldn't last more than a month or so, and I didn't mind. But you're stuck with it, aren't you? Stuck with the chicken factory, and your wife and your mother-in-law and somebody else's kid … you've had a raw deal, haven't you?'

Derek Gedge turned the earth slowly, methodically, keeping his head down. Tait watched him, and spoke softly. ‘Oh, yes—I can imagine the kind of pressure that must have been building up inside you during these past months. And then, Mary's getting a place at Cambridge must have put the lid on. You had to find an outlet, didn't you? You had to give vent to all your frustration and anger. You couldn't bear the thought of Mary's happiness, and so you put an end to it. That was it, wasn't it? Well, wasn't it?'