Death and the Maiden (22 page)

Gedge stood still, his head lowered. Then, suddenly, he whirled, spade in hand, eyes glinting; ‘You bastard!' he said through clenched teeth, ‘you smug bastard!'

He raised the spade. Tait, who had tensed himself, waiting for a reaction, saw the metal flash above his head. He flung himself to the ground in a rolling dive, protecting his head in his arms.

Slowly, Gedge lowered the spade. He laughed bitterly. ‘Oh no,' he said, ‘no, you're not getting me that way. You've been determined to pin Mary's death on me, haven't you, even before you were sure it was murder? But you've got no evidence against me—you can't have any, because I haven't seen or spoken to my sister this week, let alone done anything to harm her. But if I'd hit you just now, if I'd attacked a police officer in the execution of his duty, you could have had me for assault, couldn't you? And then who'd believe that I wasn't a violent man?' He turned away, throwing the spade down. ‘You're a bastard, Tait, just like I said.'

Sergeant Tait got up, and began brushing the tilth off his lightweight fawn trousers. ‘You have to be, in my job,' he said.

‘But do you have to get so much enjoyment out of it?'

Tait took a steadying breath. For a moment he had really been afraid that Gedge meant to smash him down with the spade, and his knees were taking time to strengthen. ‘Look,' he said. ‘Eighty per cent of murders are done by a close relative, did you know that? That's why we take a good hard look at the family first. All right, so you say you didn't kill your sister—then presumably you want us to find out who did?'

Gedge nodded.

‘But you want me to be
polite
about it? To say to suspects, “Excuse me, but do you by any chance happen to know anything about Mary Gedge's death? No? Right, I'll take your word for it, sorry to have troubled you, good-day.” Is that how you want me to deal with the bastard who killed your beautiful, talented sister?'

The two young men stood glaring at each other for a moment. Then Tait pulled off his jacket, and began to brush it down; Derek Gedge fetched a rake from the shed and tried to repair the damage that Tait's fall had done to his bed of onions. Above them in the branches of a solitary apple tree, two bullfinches began to peck at the pink and white blossom, dropping it on to the vegetable patch.

Derek Gedge looked up at them, dropped his rake and clapped his hands. ‘Whoosh!' he shouted, and the birds took off in a sudden explosion of leaf and twig and blossom.

He looked at Sergeant Tait. ‘Show you something,' he offered, a little sheepishly. He went into the jumbled shed, beckoned Tait to follow him, lifted some old sacking and drew a polythene lunch box from a hiding place.

He opened it. Inside was a savings bank book. He flicked through the pages, showing Tait the small but regular cash deposits made weekly in Breckham Market; the sum amounted to nearly four hundred pounds, before interest.

‘It may not seem much to you,' he said defensively, ‘but it's all honestly earned. I've worked every hour I could, round at that disgusting factory, and this is what I've saved after I've paid my way. This is my outlet—my let-out, rather. Five hundred's my target, and then I'm off.'

Tait crouched beside him on the floor of trodden earth, smelling the wet rot in the crumbling planks of the shed. ‘To take up your place at Selwyn?' he asked. ‘Five hundred won't last you more than a couple of terms, man.'

Derek Gedge laughed. ‘It's not for
me
! You've got me all wrong, you know. After what I've been through, I'm not a keen young student any more. I don't want to go to Cambridge and settle down to a routine of lectures and lab work and supervisions. I'm sick of routine, I want to be free. I want to get away from here, to travel. I've learned how to work with my hands and that's what I'm going to do, where and when I can find a job—and without a wife and a mother-in-law and somebody else's kid round my neck.'

‘So what's the money for?'

‘For them! Not that they're destitute, the old woman's got her widow's pension and Julie could get a job, but with me bringing in a good wage they've both been too bloody idle to think of working. They'll manage well enough without me. It's just that I feel … oh, they've given me a home of sorts, and the kid's not a bad little beggar when he's clean and quiet. I might even miss him.'

He put the bank book back into its hiding place, and followed Tait out into the sunlight. Female voices could be heard from the back of the house, raised in shrill altercation; a smell of frying onions drifted down to them on the sunlit May air.

‘Breakfast,' said Derek Gedge lugubriously. He picked up his spade and rake and propped them against the wall of the shed. ‘You know, neither of them has ever had any prospect of getting her hands on as much as five hundred pounds, outside a pools win. I'm really looking forward to handing it over and telling them that I'm off. They'll be so excited, so full of arguments about whether to have a fitted carpet or a colour telly, that they won't even notice that I've gone.'

He walked with Sergeant Tait up the garden and round the side of the house to the junkyard in the front.

Tait chose his words carefully. ‘If I don't have to see you again,' he said—he grinned, a little self-consciously; ‘without prejudice, as they say—the best of luck.'

‘Thanks,' said Derek Gedge. ‘Mind you don't fall over Jason's pram on the way out.'

If Mary Gedge had left Denning's house, as he said, on foot and alone, Quantrill reasoned that someone must have seen her go. On a pleasant May evening there would certainly have been people about. The chief inspector put a house-to-house team to work in Mere Road; if that drew a blank, he could always try a public appeal.

Chief Superintendent Mancroft was coming from Yarchester for a ten o'clock briefing, before going on to Ashthorpe in an attempt to sort out Mrs Gedge. Quantrill looked at his watch and decided that he had time to walk to his office before ten, thinking about the briefing as he went. He left the enquiry team, skirted the Mere, crossed the Dunnock by an echoing iron footbridge, took the path through the grounds of a derelict watermill which was in process of conversion to an expense-account restaurant, and emerged on asphalt at the foot of Water Lane. The lane led up past the shuttered cinema, now opened once weekly for Bingo, to the market place.

He was passing the main post office, preoccupied, when he felt bony fingers on his arm.

‘Twice in one week, eh, Mr Quantrill? Don't usually see you so often, these days.'

He squinted into the sunlight. ‘Oh—hallo, Marje, you're about early.'

His would-be informant tucked a strand of her own greying hair back under her blonde wig, and gestured with her other thumb at the post office. ‘Just been to cash me Giro cheque, haven't I? Friday, that's the day I'm supposed to have it, but do them snotty social security people care? Does the post office care? “Oh” they say'—she put on an affected voice—‘“if it doesn't come Friday, you'll get it Saturday.” And what am I supposed to do for money on Friday, eh?'

Chief Inspector Quantrill removed her hand from his sleeve, for the second time; like one of the mechanical grabs in the fairground amusement machines of his boyhood, it kept coming back to the same place. ‘Yes, well,' he said pleasantly. ‘Now you'll only have to make it last six days instead of seven.' He moved smartly away, and then stopped dead as an idea came to him. He turned back. ‘Marje!'

Her seamed face brightened. ‘Yes, Mr Quantrill?'

‘What
do
you do for money when you're short?'

She bridled. ‘Well …'

He looked at his watch. There wasn't much time, but this might be important. ‘Come and have a cup of coffee,' he said.

He took her by the arm and pushed her through the Saturday morning shoppers towards the market coffee tavern. She tottered in front of him, excited and protesting, on her platform-sole shoes: ‘Ooh, Mr Quantrill!'

The coffee tavern was reputed to have been in the same hands for sixty years. Outside, it was distinguished from the other commercial properties fronting the market place by its sober brown paintwork and its original sash windows, the white lettering on them announcing C FFEE, OT BOVR L and RE RESHM NTS. Inside, to Quantrill's certain knowledge, it had not been redecorated for the last twelve of its sixty years, and the rooms had been dingy when he first saw them.

Incomers to Breckham Market turned their noses up in distaste, or their mouths down in amusement, at the continuing existence of the tavern; but its many regular patrons—farmers, market traders and local business and professional men—knew that it served the best hot drinks and homemade snacks in the whole county.

Quantrill pointed his companion to an empty corner table. ‘Tea or coffee?'

‘Oh, coffee, thanks ever so much, Mr Quantrill. It's more filling somehow—I didn't have time for any breakfast.'

He gave the order to the girl behind the counter. While she was filling the cups from a copper urn, an old woman shuffled in from a back room in carpet slippers and a clean cotton pinafore. She was carrying a wire rack of sausages, each one shawled in shortcrust pastry, succulent, hot from the oven.

She smiled with all her false teeth when she saw the chief inspector. ‘'Morning, Mr Quantrill.'

‘'Morning, Mrs Greenacre. My word, that's a terrible temptation to set in front of a man of my weight … thanks, Janet, and I'll have two of your grannie's famous pigs in blankets, please.'

He carried the tray to the table. Marje's eyes widened. ‘Ooh, Mr Quantrill, you're a real gentleman, I've always said so.'

‘No you haven't, and I'm not.' He snatched the plate out of her reach. ‘I'm in a hurry, so we talk first and you can eat afterwards, right?'

She nodded cautiously, looking at him over her cup with apprehension. ‘What do you want to know?'

‘Whether you were back on your old beat on Mere Road last Thursday evening?'

She spluttered into her coffee. ‘Mr Quantrill!'

‘Oh, come on, Marje, never mind
why
you were there. This is important. I'm asking you for information, and if you can give it to me it'll be worth your while. Now then: were you about in Mere Road last Thursday evening, between eight and nine?'

‘Well … I went out for a walk, yes. Nothing wrong with that. I often do, Thursdays, can't afford to go to a pub. So if it's a nice evening, I go for a walk; it's nice, down by the Mere.' She adjusted her wig, licked her second finger and smoothed it over her plucked eyebrows. ‘And of course, if a gentleman should happen to stop his car and ask me the way, I tell him. And if he's gentlemanly enough to invite me for a spin in his car, well …'

Quantrill was amused. ‘He did, did he?'

She scowled. ‘No, he didn't, the rotten so-and-so!' She gave a defeated shrug. ‘Can't blame him, I suppose. Took one look at me mug, and drove off.'

‘But it was a real compliment to your figure, Marje,' he consoled her. He drank some coffee. Chief Superintendent Mancroft could wait. ‘All right, you were down by the Mere on Thursday; we won't worry about what you were doing. What I want to know is whether you saw a girl of about eighteen there.'

‘Thursday … I don't suppose you've got a fag on you, Mr Quantrill?'

Quantrill strode impatiently to the counter, bought a packet of ten and slapped them down on the table. ‘Come on, Marje: a girl about five foot four, slim build, shoulder length fair hair and a long dress.'

She searched her bag for matches, absent-mindedly taking a cigarette from a packet of her own before slipping Quantrill's offering into the bag. ‘Ankle-length dress, do you mean?' She lit the cigarette. ‘Oh yes, I saw her a couple of times. Pretty kid she was, wandering along, in no hurry. Matter of fact, I got a bit riled—you know, thought she must be an amateur, trying to push her way in. But then I thought she couldn't be, because she was carrying a book. It's not a very convenient thing to carry, is it?'

‘I don't suppose it is, in your job. Right, then: where was the girl coming from, when you first saw her?'

‘Round from the far side of the Mere, as though she'd walked down from the town. She was carrying this book, and she walked on down Mere Road. I couldn't see where she went, there's this row of trees in the way. And then I saw her coming back again about a quarter of an hour later, without the book.'

‘On her own?'

‘Yes. Sauntering along, looking at her watch—waiting for somebody, I thought. And then this car came.'

‘Where from?'

‘From behind her, along Mere Road. That must have been who she was waiting for. She got straight in, then he drove off towards the main road.'

‘He?'

‘Ah, that I couldn't swear to. It was getting dusk, and I took it for granted it would be a man.' She took her cigarette out of her mouth in order to suck in some coffee. ‘Here, Mr Quantrill, why do you want to know?'

‘You'll be able to read about it in the Press tomorrow. Come on, now, Marje, you're doing fine; just tell me about the car.'

She looked doleful. ‘Oh, don't ask me, Mr Quantrill! I take no interest in cars, it's just a matter of whether they're going to stop for me. I can't tell you anything about it, really I can't.'

‘Try,' he urged. ‘Think. Was it large or small, new or old? What colour was it?'

The lines on her face were concentrated in one cerebral effort, but her eyes remained blank.

‘The number?' he persisted. ‘Just part of it, then? The final letter?'

‘I'm ever so sorry, Mr Quantrill, I really am.' She leaned towards him. ‘But I told you something helpful, didn't I? I gave you some info?'