The Chief Inspector's Daughter (16 page)

‘Yes. We talked, if you remember, about her netsuke – most of which you said she had bought from you at ridiculously low prices.'

The man's hands flew to his bow tie. He adjusted it, smiling unconvincingly. ‘I believe I did joke about the value of her collection. One likes to know that one's advice has benefited one's friends.'

Quantrill found the use of ‘one'irritating and pretentious. ‘Her jade and netsuke were stolen,' he said abruptly. ‘We're anxious to find the thief.'

‘Naturally,' Hussey agreed. ‘Of course, if anyone were to bring any of the pieces to me, I should recognize them immediately.' He took several short steps towards the policemen, evidently hoping to shepherd them back down the passage. ‘Rest assured that if I see or hear anything at all suspicious, Superintendent, I shall notify you at once. One does one's best to co-operate with the police.'

Quantrill elected to sit down, finding the Grecian sofa as unyielding as it looked. ‘Just Chief Inspector, thank you. Tell me, Mr Hussey, what was your Belgian customer buying?'

‘Er … Belgian?'

‘The man who went off in the jet-propelled BMW five minutes ago,' said Tait. ‘Weren't you busy with him while your assistant stayed to mind the shop?'

‘Oh –
that
Belgian. One has so many foreign customers. Mr Wouters visits me quite often, and I like to offer him a drink and a cigar in my sitting-room while we do business. He specializes in silver, and I had found a rather handsome pair of Georgian candelabra for him.'

‘Did you sell him any netsuke?' Quantrill asked. ‘Or jade?'

‘No! I told you, I haven't jade at all, or any netsuke that would interest him. Good heavens, do you want to search my premises?'

It was a waspish retort rather than an invitation, but Quantrill accepted it promptly. Not that he imagined there would be anything to find, but it was too good an offer to refuse. He sent Tait out to the car to call up a couple of men.

‘I couldn't help wondering why your Belgian friend was in such a hurry,' he told Hussey.

‘He had a boat to catch, I imagine.'

‘Probably. But just to be on the safe side I've sent word through to Customs to be on the lookout for him. We don't want any of Jasmine Woods's collection to slip out of the country without our knowledge.'

Hussey's head lifted, stretching its supporting fold of flesh. ‘Are you suggesting that I sold any of her collection to Mr Wouters? That I had it to sell?'

‘Not necessarily,' said Quantrill. ‘I expect he goes to other antique shops while he's over here. But the Customs men will talk to him. Sergeant Tait and I are more interested in Jasmine Woods.'

‘When did you last see her, Mr Hussey?' asked Tait, who had returned and was now standing with one elbow propped on the ledge next to Cicero.

Hussey went to the niche and moved the white bust to one side with ostentatious care. ‘As a matter of fact, yesterday afternoon. We've known each other for years, as I think I told you. Poor girl … Yes, a customer on Saturday sold me a delightful Victorian silver
porte-bouquet
, and I thought Jasmine might like it. I knew that Mr Wouters would be coming today and that he would be interested, so I wanted to give her first refusal. Such a charming girl – Thirling will be a desert without her.'

‘You knew her very well, then.'

‘Ah, no. Only moderately well. We saw each other, informally, quite often, but we didn't exchange confidences. We respected each other's privacy.'

‘About how long were you with her yesterday?' Quantrill asked.

‘Let me see – I went there about 1.30; Jasmine and I both live alone, and we keep irregular hours. I must admit that I hoped she'd suggest luncheon, and she did: a very palatable
omelette aux fines herbes
. After that we drank coffee and talked cookery and antiques for a while, and I left in mid-afternoon. I came back just before four o'clock.'

‘Was anyone else at Yeoman's while you were there?'

‘No-one – though Jonathan Elliott was leaving just as I arrived.'

‘Did she say anything about seeing anyone else yesterday, or about going out?'

‘She did mention that her sister had invited her to supper in Yarchester, but she wasn't sure whether she would go. She said that she hated to ruin her brother-in-law's Sunday – they didn't get on, you know. Besides, she wanted to work. When she had a book on the go, Jasmine usually worked every day, but yesterday had turned out to be rather more social than she'd expected. Apparently Smith – a tiresomely scruffy boy, I've always thought, but Jasmine was very kind-hearted and tolerant – invited himself in for coffee; and then the Elliotts went there for drinks; and then of course my own visit was unexpected. She didn't say for sure, but when I left my impression was that she intended to spend the evening working on her book.'

‘And what did you do, after you returned here?' Tait asked. ‘How did you spend yesterday evening?'

Hussey bridled a little. ‘If it's of any interest to you, I took a nap. Then I cooked myself a steak, somewhere about seven o'clock, and watched television for the rest of the evening.'

‘Alone?'

‘Of course alone. I live alone, I told you.'

‘I thought you might have had company for the evening. Your young friend Christopher for example?'

Hussey's plump jaw tightened. He was angry, but he covered his anger with disdain. ‘My private life is my own concern, Sergeant,' he said, ‘but as it happens you have drawn quite the wrong conclusion. As I told you, I spent yesterday evening alone watching television: a Pinter play on BBC2. And don't start wondering whether I simply looked that up in the
Radio Times
, because I can tell you exactly what the set looked like and what the cast was wearing—'

‘Don't bother,' said Quantrill. ‘Not for the moment, anyway. We'll probably come back to you.'

‘We shan't find any of Jasmine Woods's jade or netsuke in his possession,' said Quantrill. ‘If he did handle them, with or without knowing anything about her death, he'll either have hidden them somewhere else or got rid of them as quickly as possible. He was shifty about something, that's for sure.'

‘No-one likes admitting that he was alone with a murder victim shortly before the event,' said Tait. ‘And there are all kinds of other reasons why he might have a guilty conscience. Perhaps he's been fiddling his income tax, or his VAT returns.' He stopped his car, a short distance down the street from the antique shop, and switched off the engine while they discussed their next move.

‘Anyway,' said Quantrill, heavy with disapproval, ‘it's going to be worthwhile keeping an eye on Mr Hussey and his friend Christopher.'

‘That sounds remarkably like prejudice,' said Tait, fingering the steering wheel of his Citroën with absent-minded pride.

‘I don't deny it. You didn't like the man either.'

‘I didn't like him socially. I couldn't stand his patronizing attitude. But I don't get uptight about anyone's propensities, as long as they're not illegal. As he said, people's private lives are their own concern. I provoked him quite deliberately, just to get his reaction, and you heard what he said: he was far more concerned with spitting in my eye than providing an alibi for himself. No, I'm inclined to believe him. I doubt if he's anything other than a lonely, fussy old bachelor. I'm sure he's far too fastidious to be an accessory to a crime like that.'

Quantrill drummed his fingers on the dashboard as he watched two uniformed constables who had appeared under a lamp on the other side of the street. Small as the village was, they were still trying to complete their house-to-house enquiries by calling on the people who had been out during the day. That was what most detective work consisted of, a time-consuming slog of questioning and checking facts. Judgement came into it, of course, but judgement without facts to back it – as he had cause to know, with Rodney Gifford – was irrelevant.

‘Hussey's an unlikely accessory, I grant you,' he stated. ‘But if murders weren't done by, or in connivance with unlikely people, they wouldn't be so difficult to detect. After all, we don't know what the circumstances of the murder were. I reckon that, given enough passion or greed or fear, almost anyone is capable of almost anything.'

‘And I was the one your daughter once reproved for thinking the worst of people!'

‘Let's say that we've both got nasty suspicious minds.'

Quantrill tore the wrapper from a packet of mild cigars, and took one out. Tait, a non-smoker, glared his disapproval and opened the car window to its fullest extent. The Chief Inspector coughed as the sharp evening air reached his lungs, paused with the cigar in one hand and his lighter in the other, and sniffed appreciatively.

‘Aha! Cliffie the chippy – just what we need.'

A tall old van, well known in and around Breckham Market, had trundled up behind them. In one side of the van body was a large sliding window; from the roof protruded a Flue that puthered aromatic smoke. The van parked a little further up the street. Immediately, the interior was lighted up and the driver's mate, a pale man in a soiled white apron, began to shovel raw potato chips from a plastic bucket into a vat of hot cooking-oil. Half the population of Thirling promptly emerged from their houses to collect fish and chips for supper.

Quantrill put away both cigar and lighter and gladly produced a pound note. ‘Have this on me,' he said.

‘Damn it, this isn't a police van,' protested Tait indignantly. ‘Fish and chips will stink my car out.'

‘I'll have plaice,' said Quantrill, ‘if Cliffie's got any, otherwise cod. Not too many chips. Plenty of salt, but go easy with the vinegar.'

Tait muttered insubordination.

‘Stop making a fuss,' said Quantrill, ‘and go and join the queue. I'll do the same for you when you're Chief Constable.'

‘This looks like a dead end, at the moment, Martin. I've just been talking to the incident-room, and no-one they've interviewed saw any person or vehicle going to or coming from Yeoman's after the time when Hussey says he left. So presumably, as he suggested, Jasmine Woods decided to spend the rest of the day at home. And presumably the next visitor was her killer.'

Tait, having decided that the only way he could bear the smell in his car would be to succumb to the Chief Inspector's offer, blew on a hot chip.

‘No word from Yarchester about Smith, I suppose?'

Quantrill crunched a piece of fishy batter. ‘No. They're all sitting on their behinds having refreshments instead of going out looking for him.'

‘I'm interested in the fact that Smith called on Jasmine yesterday morning, and was interrupted by the Elliotts,' said Tait. ‘Oh, I know that he lived in the garden, so he must have been in and out of her house a good deal; but he'd been there a couple of years, and if he had any part in her murder something must have happened yesterday to trigger it off. We know that he spent money on drugs, and he might have got to the stage where he needed more money than he earned. Perhaps he went to see Jasmine yesterday morning to try to get a loan. But I know that she disapproved of hard drugs, and I think she'd refuse. And then the Elliotts arrived, and after them Hussey. By the evening, Smith would have been getting desperate.'

‘It's a possibility,' agreed Quantrill. ‘We badly need Smith, but until Yarchester finds him, or forensic comes up with some evidence that definitely ties him in with the murder, we can't be sure that he did it. So we have to go on looking elsewhere and I was thinking, while you were getting the fish and chips – by the way, was there any change from my pound?'

‘You've been overtaken by inflation. I had to put in another 10p.'

Quantrill grumbled about the cost of Cliffie's newfangled white wrapping paper and cardboard trays. ‘When I was a kid we ate fish and chips out of newspaper. Very educational, especially when it was the
News of the World
. Anyway, it occurs to me that we might have been concentrating too hard on the people we met at that party. On the face of it, several of them had motives that might have led them to kill her. And Gilbert Smith and her brother-in-law Paul Pardoe and Hussey all had the opportunity.'

‘So did Jonathan Elliott,' said Tait. ‘That study of his has a patio-door – he could have slipped out of there after dark and walked down to Yeoman's without anyone else in the family knowing that he'd gone.'

‘All right, they all had the opportunity. But if we hadn't known Jasmine Woods, and met those men at her party, I think we'd have paid more attention to the way the murder was done.'

‘With hatred, you mean. Yes, it wasn't simply murder in furtherance of theft, we all saw that right away. Whoever killed Jasmine might have wanted her jade and netsuke; alternatively he might have taken them just to make us think that was why he did it. But we could see for ourselves that there was a much stronger motive for the murder than that. And – excluding Smith, because druggies might do anything – the men we've interviewed haven't really been sufficiently strongly motivated to do that kind of murder.'

‘With the exception of Rodney Gifford,' Quantrill amended, chip in hand. ‘He was strongly motivated, all right. With half a bottle of her wine inside him, he was licking his lips over the prospect of making her suffer. The only snag is that he lives seventeen miles away, there's no public transport out here on Sunday evenings, he doesn't own a vehicle and he's got his dear old mother as an alibi …'

Quantrill brooded for a moment. Tait ignored the interruption.

‘Jasmine told me, at her party, that most of the guests were relations and neighbours rather than personal friends. In other words, we haven't yet met any of the people she was really involved with. We know nothing about her private life. While I was at Yeoman's this afternoon there was a telephone call from her publisher, asking for news. I spoke to him myself. He was shocked by the murder. He'd known her for years and regarded her as a friend, but he didn't seem to know much more about her than George Hussey did. He knew that she had friends in London, but he couldn't tell me who they were. And I don't think there was any doubt that Jasmine had an active private life – she told me once that she thought we were all entitled to our private pleasures. So presumably there's a lover about somewhere, and possibly an ex-lover or two. There's certainly an ex-husband, name of Potter—'