Who Saw Him Die? (20 page)

The girl who emerged into the corridor was, at twenty-three years old, almost as big and ungainly as her mother. Sharon was dressed in what might have been a leisure suit, or there again pyjamas, in bright blue thermal material. She had a lovely head of hair, with natural butter yellow curls, and the uncomplicated expression of a shy eight-year-old; but behind her blue eyes was a shadow of bewilderment.

She had been about to enter the living room, but as soon as she saw the visitors she backed away down the corridor. Her mother, pausing for the first time in her consumption of biscuits, coaxed her to return.

‘You'll make us a cup of tea, won't you my pet? Fill up the kettle, there's Mum's good girl, and switch it on.'

Sharon stood in the doorway, her eyes lowered, swinging her shoulders bashfully. ‘How many tea-bags, Mum?' she asked in a loud whisper.

‘Four – and mind you don't burn yourself on the hot kettle …'

Sharon disappeared into the kitchen. Doreen Goodrum turned back to the detectives, her voice hardening. ‘She wasn't always like that, my Sharon,' she said belligerently. ‘Two years ago she was the same as any other girl – not very clever, I grant you, but happily engaged to be married. And this is what Jack Goodrum – her own father – did to her!'

‘How did he do it?' asked Hilary, narrow-eyed, thinking immediately of criminal abuse.

‘Why, by leaving us and marrying that other woman! By cheating us out of our rights. Sharon was all set to marry her Dad's sales manager, but when the little runt realised we wouldn't ever get Jack's money, he left her. Flew off to Spain – on business, he said – then sent her a telegram the day before the wedding, calling it off. No wonder the poor child went nearly out of her mind.'

Hilary agreed that Sharon had been ill-used, and kept to herself the thought that she sounded well rid of the sales manager. ‘And what about your other daughter, Mrs Goodrum? What about Tracey?'

Doreen Goodrum's eyes shifted uneasily to the corridor. She seemed relieved that it was empty, and that her younger daughter was declining to put in an appearance. ‘Trace has been hard hit too,' she said. ‘Very hard hit. We all have.'

Her face suddenly flushed an exhausted red. She slumped into a chair. Sweat sprang out just below her hairline. She gasped for air, and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. ‘All that work …' she panted. ‘All them years of nothing but work, first me and then the girls as well … And what reward have we had for it?'

Her flush began to subside. She dragged a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown and mopped her face, then snatched up the packet of biscuits and began to cram them into her mouth for comfort, continuing the recital of her grievances through a splutter of crumbs.

‘Jack settled some money on us, but there's only just enough coming in each week to keep the three of us going. Mind you, his crafty lawyers made it
sound
good. I was being given the matrimonial home and all its contents, as well as the cash, they said, and the divorce judge got the idea we were set up in luxury for life … Oh, if I only I'd known where to find Jack Goodrum, this last year, I'd have made him pay for what he's done to us!'

‘Didn't you know where he was living?' said Quantrill.

‘Not till yesterday, when I heard he was dead. The old devil kept his head well down – we weren't the only ones who wanted to find him, and he knew it.'

‘But you read the Suffolk newspapers. Didn't you see his name and address a couple of weeks ago, in the report of an inquest at Breckham Market?'

‘No,' said Doreen Goodrum. ‘I never saw it.' She leaned back in her chair and called out to her elder daughter in the kitchen: ‘Can you manage, Sharon? Shall Mum come and help you with the tea, my lovey?'

‘But if you
had
seen it,' persisted Quantrill. ‘If you'd known where Jack was living, what would you have done?'

‘I'd have gone after the bastard.'

‘With a shotgun?'

She snorted. ‘No chance of that – he'd taken all his guns with him.'

‘But you could have got hold of one from somewhere, couldn't you? You could have asked someone to get hold of a shotgun for you.'

Doreen wiped her forehead again as another hot sweat afflicted her. ‘Look, I wasn't the only one who wanted to get Jack,' she said.

‘Name me some of the others, then.'

‘I dunno their
names
. I had nothing to do with keeping the books. But I know there were some businessmen he cheated – his suppliers, small firms that went bankrupt because he kept them waiting so long for the money he owed them. And he cheated on his taxes, too. The Inland Revenue was after him for years.'

‘The Inland Revenue doesn't go after people with a shotgun,' said Quantrill. ‘But that's what somebody did to your former husband – and you've just told us how badly you wanted to get him.'

Doreen Goodrum lifted her head and looked straight at the Chief Inspector with anguished eyes. ‘But I wouldn't ever have killed him! All right, if I'd known where he lived, I'd have wanted to go after him. I'd have shown him up in front of his new wife and his neighbours – camped on his doorstep if I had to – to shame him into paying us what he owes us for all them years of work … But – but I wouldn't have wanted him
killed
.'

Tears began to roll from her eyes and wobble down her cheeks. Great sobs came wrenching up out of her chest. Blindly, she reached for the last of the biscuits.

Sergeant Lloyd, interpreting her tears as a lament for the husband who had left her, offered a word of guarded sympathy. But Doreen immediately stopped sobbing.

‘I'm not blubbing
for
the bastard,' she said indignantly, snuffling back her tears and wiping her wet cheeks with the palm of her hand. ‘Now he
is
dead, I hope he burns in hell. That's what he deserves, for all the people he's ruined.

‘But the last thing I wanted was for him to
die
. Can't you see that? As long as he was alive, there was a chance that I could get at him and make him give us the money that's our due. But now he's dead, everything will go to that new wife of his. And who's going to take care of his daughters?‘

The weather had changed from dull to a bone-chilling drizzle. A hot drink would have been welcome, but Chief Inspector Quantrill preferred to leave Factory Bungalow before Sharon Goodrum had finished brewing her pot of tea.

Instead of setting course immediately for Breckham Market, he decided to take a look at the empty factory. He drove past the side of the bungalow, and on up the mud-splashed concrete road that had served first the wartime airfield and then Jack Goodrum's empire. Now,
Industrial site for sale
boards (identifying the property rather than advertising it, since it was surrounded by sugar beet fields) referred prospective buyers to a London agent.

Quantrill got out of the car, dressed for the weather in mackintosh and tweed hat, and made a brisk tour. The former aircraft hangars had obviously been well maintained when they were owned by J.R.Goodrum Ltd, and further modern buildings – an office block and a large processing plant – had been added. There was no doubt that it had been a considerable business, and that one way or another – first in operating it, then in selling out – its owner must have made a packet. And there was growing evidence that much of it had been made at the expense of other people.

‘I thought my list of disgruntled ex-employees was going to be long enough,' said Hilary when Quantrill returned to the car, his tweed hat fuzzy with droplets of rain. She was too experienced a detective not to be appropriately dressed, but she saw no sense getting wet unless she had to. ‘But now it looks as though we need to add bankrupted suppliers as well.'

‘We'll go and talk to Goodrum's accountants about them,' said Quantrill. ‘His first wife's given us a useful line to follow, if we can believe her. But that's the catch, isn't it? I reckon she knows more about his death than she's letting on. For one thing, she takes the local newspaper regularly – there were back numbers lying about the living room – so the chances are that she'd seen the report of the inquest on Clanger Bell's death. If so, then she'll have known where to find her ex-husband. And the way she hated him, I don't see her planning to sit meekly on the doorstep of The Mount trying to shame him into giving her some extra cash.'

‘But I believe what she said about not wanting him killed,' said Hilary, ‘for the very good reason she gave. His death had obviously come as a shock and a disappointment to her. I agree with you, though, that she may well have something to hide. Perhaps she persuaded someone to do the burglary, and steal the gun. She might then have sent someone else, the following week, to threaten Jack with it. But if so she picked the wrong man for the job, because he turned out to be less interested in getting justice for her than in having his own revenge.'

Quantrill drove back down the service road, raising his hand to a tractor driver who was towing a trailer-load of newly lifted sugar beet across the adjoining field.

‘Either Doreen Goodrum knows nothing, as she wanted us to believe, or she's deeply involved,' he agreed. ‘She's so angry about the murder that if she's innocent I'm sure she'd have given us at least one name to try. Hullo –' he slowed to a stop as a stout figure in a headscarf, a man's old raincoat, and heavy wellington boots emerged from the back door of Factory Bungalow and came stumbling down the overgrown path to intercept them, waving something in her hand. ‘Perhaps she's decided to co-operate after all.'

‘That's Sharon,' said Hilary. ‘I recognise the knees of her pyjamas.' She got out of the car, turned up the collar of her trench coat and picked her way across the muddy road to the wire fence that separated it from the Goodrums'piece of rough land.

‘Sorry we couldn't stay for tea, Sharon,' she said with a friendly smile. ‘What's that you've got – something for us?'

The girl cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the bungalow, and then held out a crumpled scrap of paper. ‘It's from our Trace,' she said in her loud whisper. ‘She wants you to know about Uncle Dave.'

Hilary smoothed out the paper. On it was written, in shaky capitals, DAVE WHEELER.

‘I see. He's your mother's brother, is he, Sharon?'

‘No, I don't think so …' Eyes lowered, the girl swung her sturdy shoulders in embarrassment. ‘Me and Trace called him uncle when we were little. He used to work with Dad, up at the factory. He was ever so nice …' Her voice trailed wistfully away.

‘And what about him? What is it that Tracey wants us to know about Uncle Dave?' prompted Hilary gently.

‘I don't know …' The girl looked up for a moment, her blue eyes bewildered; then she returned to her study of the unoccupied toes of her man-sized wellington boots. ‘He used to bring us presents, sometimes,' she said, wistful again.

‘Ah –' Hilary thought for a few seconds, then returned to the car. Quantrill had his window down, listening to their conversation. ‘This may be a profitable use for that large bar of fruit and nut chocolate you keep in your door pocket,' she said. ‘The one you think I don't know about …'

‘That's my iron rations!' he protested. ‘Emergencies only. Besides, I doubt you'll get anything out of her.'

‘It's worth a try. Oh, come on Douglas, hand it over. I'll buy you a replacement.'

Chuffed that she'd called him by his first name, he did as Hilary asked. Sharon received the chocolate with evident pleasure. But as he'd suspected, she refused – or was unable – to say where Dave Wheeler lived, or anything else about him. Shyly smiling her thanks, she turned and lumbered towards the bungalow.

Hilary, looking back as they drove away, saw a front window curtain twitch. But whether they were being watched by Tracey, or by Doreen Goodrum, or both; and whether the lead was genuine or they were being craftily misled, she had no means of knowing.

The Chief Inspector, who had been putting his mind to the quickest method of finding out who Dave Wheeler was and where he lived, came up almost immediately with the answer.

‘No sense in wasting time trying to get hold of the personnel records of J.R.Goodrum Limited. We'll go straight to the best source of information in any firm – she's bound to live somewhere local.'

‘Who is?'

‘The tea lady.'

An enquiry at a shop in the village half a mile away sent them to another bungalow, far less lavishly equipped than the Goodrums' but clean and budgerigar-neat. Its occupant, Mrs Alice Fulcher, a widow who greatly missed the companionship she had had at Goodrum's, was delighted to receive her visitors. She had just had an early dinner, she said – there was an emptied mug and a slightly used small plate on the kitchen table, together with two opened packets, one of individual servings of instant soup powder, the other of cream crackers – and she assured them that it would be a pleasure to have someone to drink a cup of coffee with.

Yes, she'd read about Jack Goodrum's death. A shocking business. Mind you, she wasn't entirely surprised, the way Jack had treated everybody, his own poor wife and girls as well – a slave driver if ever there was one. But there was no call for anyone to go and shoot him. Two wrongs would never make a right.

Yes, she'd known Jack most of his life. Knew him when he was a little terror of a boy, knew him when he was a young tearaway, knew him when he first started his poultry processing business and hadn't got a penny to pay his bills with. Let the b .… . . s wait, he used to say. Didn't care for anybody except himself.

And yes, she certainly knew Dave Wheeler. Poor Dave – the last she'd heard of him he was unemployed, his wife had left him, and he was living with his mother in a village the other side of Ipswich. Clayford, that's where he went back to live. He and Jack Goodrum had been mates for years – Dave used to have a small poultry farm in the village here, and they'd often gone out shooting together.