Who Saw Him Die? Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Sheila Radley

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Postscript

  Sheila Radley

  Who Saw Him Die?

  Sheila Radley

  Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

  She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

  Dedication

  For Margaret

  Epigraph

  In a Bath Teashop

  ‘Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –

  Let us hold hands and look.’

  She, such a very ordinary little woman;

  He, such a thumping crook;

  But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

  In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

  John Betjeman

  Chapter One

  His name was Cuthbert Redvers Fullerton Bell, but everyone in Breckham Market knew him as Clanger. He was fifty-two years old, and a bachelor. For most of his adult life he had been acknowledged and respected as the town’s principal drunk. And now he was dead.

  There was no mystery about his death. It occurred in public, in the soft damp light of early afternoon on a mild day in November. Three eye-witnesses saw him emerge unsteadily from the Boot, his favourite pub, at closing time and stand swaying at the edge of the pavement for a few moments before stepping out in the path of an oncoming vehicle. The driver, who was travelling down the one-way street at a lawful twenty-seven miles an hour, hadn’t a chance of avoiding him. Bell sustained multiple injuries, and he was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

  The manner of Clanger Bell’s death caused no surprise to anyone in Breckham Market. The wonder was that it hadn’t happened sooner. Clanger – a shambling, uncommunicative man, always either badly in need of a shave or badly shaven, habitually dressed in a homburg hat and a rumpled city suit, and carrying a bulging briefcase – had for years been a hazard to motorists in the centre of the town. It was his custom, when crossing the narrow streets on his meandering route from one pub to another, to play a solitary game of chicken: to stand on the pavement deliberately waiting for a vehicle to approach, and then to stagger across at the very last moment.

  He had of course been given many a talking-to by the police, without effect. But he was such a well-known figure that every local driver kept an eye open for him, particularly when passing the pubs he was known to frequent, and slowed to a walking pace when he wavered into sight. It was Clanger’s misfortune that John Reuben Goodrum, the driver of the Range Rover that hit him, was – although a Suffolk man – a newcomer to Breckham Market.

  There were few to mourn Clanger Bell. His only near relative was his unmarried elder sister Eunice, with whom he shared the large Victorian house that had been their family home. Although he had lived in Breckham Market all his life, no one considered him as a friend. As a boy, he had been away at boarding school; as a young man he had spent four hours a day commuting by train to and from London, where he worked for a time in a city bank; as the town drunk, he drank alone.

  His passing was, however, regarded with a widespread sense of regret. Eunice and Cuthbert Bell were the last representatives of one of the town’s most respected families, property owners and civic leaders for a hundred years and more. Cuthbert had spoiled the family’s reputation, but in doing so he had endeared himself to the local people who took pride in the fact that their town drunk was a gentleman. In the quarter of a century during which he had held the office, he had become an institution. Breckham Market wouldn’t be the same without him.

  Even the local police were sorry, despite the fact that Clanger had been a thundering nuisance for longer than the most long-serving of them could remember. They had always known that there was nothing to be done with him, and so the coppers had treated him with a patience and a tolerance that amounted almost to affection.

  For most of the time he had wandered about the town in a dazed silence, doing no harm to anyone. When he became fuddled and began muttering aloud in the streets, the police had steered him in the direction of his home. When his mutterings turned to incoherent shouts, they had driven him there. When he fell down, legless, they had given him a night in the cells for his own protection. They had taken him into custody only on those occasions when, shouting wildly in an incomprehensible climax of frustration or anger, he had begun swinging his heavy, newspaper-crammed briefcase and had inadvertently smashed a shop window.

  At his subsequent appearance in the magistrates’court, on average once every six weeks, the police would ensure that Clanger was not only sober but tidy and shaven. He would plead guilty, in his little-heard, well-bred voice, to having been drunk and disorderly, and would make courteous apology for the trouble he had caused. But as to why he had caused it – what memory, what hurt or fear had driven him to make his outburst – he refused to enlighten anyone. He had always paid the fine, costs and compensation, accepted a lift home in a police car, and immediately walked back to the nearest pub to begin the cycle over again.

  The police were going to miss him. As soon as the news of his death reached the headquarters of the Breckham Market division of the county force, the station sergeant organised a whip-round for a wreath. The sergeant also requested permission for himself and a senior police constable to attend the funeral, as a mark of respect for their most regular client. And in view of the status of the Bell family, the divisional superintendent decided that he too might put in an official appearance and help to send Clanger off in style. />
  There was a good deal of sympathy – respectful rather than affectionate – from all quarters of the old town for the dead man’s sister. Reserved, upright and fastidious, Eunice Bell was unmistakably a gentlewoman. Her brother’s behaviour must have been a considerable embarrassment to her, and it was understandable that she had avoided involving herself in the public life of Breckham Market. She had always been a regular worshipper at the parish church, St Botolph’s, but apart from that she had chosen to spend most of her time fifteen miles away in Saintsbury, where she did voluntary work for the Red Cross.

  Miss Bell took the news of her brother’s death with well-bred stoicism. She preferred not to attend the inquest, where a police officer provided formal evidence of the dead man’s identity. The Coroner recorded the expected verdict of accidental death.

  But the following day, Eunice Bell telephoned divisional police headquarters and demanded to speak to the superintendent as a matter of urgency. She told him that, having read the report of the inquest in the local newspaper, she had come to the conclusion that her brother’s death was no accident. She had, she said, good reason to believe that Cuthbert had been murdered.

  Chapter Two

  John Reuben Goodrum, the driver of the Range Rover in the path of which Clanger Bell had played his terminal game of chicken, was a lucky man. He told himself so as he stood in front of his dressing room mirror, in the big Georgian house he had recently acquired in Breckham Market, giving his massive slab of a chin a very close wet shave. (‘Desperate Dan’his wife had just teased him as she tried to avoid contact with his bristles during their customary final cuddle before getting up.)

  ‘By God, Jack, you’re a lucky man!’ he said aloud in the warm slow voice that, rising slightly at the end of each sentence, had an authentic Suffolk sing to it. He peered more closely into the mirror, parting his lips and crimping his mouth into temporary toothlessness, and contrived to scythe an outcrop of bramble from the tricky area just below his nostrils without flecking the shaving soap with a single drop of blood. He was making an expert job of it, these days, he reckoned, considering that he hadn’t given a damn about his appearance until a couple of years ago.

  Not that shaving himself cleanly had anything to do with luck. He’d put skill and judgement into it, as he had into the business enterprise by which, starting from nothing, he had made his fortune. But luck had always seemed to run his way, and evidently was still running. His first wife Doreen must have been right when she told him that the devil would always look after his own.

  Satisfactorily shaven, Jack Goodrum turned his head from side to side and studied his profile. Yes, he was much less heavily jowled, now that he’d cut down on food and alcohol and taken up regular exercise. He was still well-thatched with brown hair, and he reckoned that having it tamed by a good barber, and getting rid of his shabby old sideburns, had improved his appearance no end. He looked younger and much fitter – and felt it, too, by God … He thumped his knuckles on his broad chest and gave his reflection a nod of vigorous approval.

  Whistling, he stepped into the shower cubicle and began to soap his body, enjoying the feel of rediscovered muscles under the thickets of greying hair. Soaped clean, he turned the shower to full volume and gasped with satisfaction as the water sluiced over him, running in streams down his strong, full thighs. Then. on an impulse of happiness, he inflated his lungs, flung back his head, and shouted his pleasure aloud. He had finally got rid of every trace of his former existence. At fifty-one years old, and thanks to his new wife Felicity, he felt that his life was just beginning.

  Jack Goodrum knew enough now to acknowledge that for the past twenty-five years he had been a slob. For most of that time he’d been working so hard to build up his poultry products business that he hadn’t cared what he looked like. Life had been nothing but work – hard physical, messy, smelly work – and fried meals and exhausted sleep. His only form of relaxation had been beer-drinking, and if that gave him – as it did – a sagging gut, what had that mattered?

  Even when his business had prospered and expanded, he had taken no care of his appearance. He had the height to carry his weight, and his opinion at the time was that his size helped to establish him as a man to be reckoned with. He’d demanded rock-bottom prices from his suppliers, and as much work from his employees as from himself. To achieve these aims he had cultivated a loud voice, an aggressive manner and a menacing presence. He’d frightened the living daylights out of some of the cheating, idle bastards, but by God he’d got what he wanted out of’em!

  By the time he’d finally made his pile, two years ago, by selling out to a national food manufacturer for a cool three-quarters of a million, it had seemed too late to bother about his appearance. Why should he? He was proud of being what he was, a self-made man. He had no hobbies other than propping up the bar of his local pub, in the village near Ipswich where he had lived all his life and had established his chicken-meat empire, and after his early retirement he began to do that for much of his time. The only difference in his habits was that he started buying drinks all round, to provide himself with companionship; and the fist that held his beer mug was newly bedecked with heavy gold rings.

  But then he’d met Felicity Napier. That really was a piece of luck, the best thing that had happened to him in the whole of his life.

  Towelling himself dry, revelling in cleanliness, he wondered with wry disgust what she’d thought of him at that first meeting. He must have stunk of beer – and probably of sweat, too, because in those days he’d thought himself clean if he wallowed in a bath and changed his underclothes once a week. It was still difficult to believe that a woman like Felicity could have entrusted herself and her teenage son to him with so little hesitation.

  He’d asked her about it, as soon as they were safely married, but her answer had baffled him. ‘All I could see, when you came to our rescue,’ she had said in her light, precise, middle-class voice, ‘was the shining armour.’ Then she had added, by way of explanation: ‘Half a dozen cars had swished straight past us. You were the only driver who was kind enough to stop.’

  It had been a filthy night, he remembered. The pub had just closed, and he was driving – as he always did, whatever the weather, because he was too fat and lazy to walk – the half-mile to his outlying home. He had seen ahead of him the flashing warning lights of a stationary car, and then his headlights had picked up two white, wet, scared faces …

  ‘’Course I stopped,’ he had replied gallantly. ‘The minute I clapped eyes on you, I could see that you were special.’

  ‘Nonsense, you did it because you were kind. That was why I trusted you, Jack. No one but a truly kind man would have stopped in all that rain to help a bedraggled middle-aged woman and her great tall son. I felt secure with you. And when I blurted out my problem and you realised I had good reason to be panic-stricken, you took charge of us completely – even to the extent of driving us to a hotel and registering us in your own name, so that if my husband was following he wouldn’t be able to find us. Then you had our car towed away and repaired, and you brought it to the hotel next day and stayed to enquire whether we were all right … I thought then that you were the kindest man I’d ever met in my whole life. I still think so.’

  That had astonished Jack Goodrum when he heard it. He didn’t believe in kindness. He’d always considered it a form of weakness, and he certainly hadn’t made his fortune by showing that to anyone.

  But he had been able to relax, since selling his business. There was no longer any need for him to hustle and be aggressive, and for that reason he’d felt he could afford to stop and help the stranded motorist. The reason why he’d stopped, though, was simply that he’d been in no hurry to return home. There was nothing to go home for.

  It wasn’t kindness that had taken him back to the hotel the next day, either. He’d felt sorry for Mrs Napier and her son, but he’d never before gone out of his way to help anyone. She wasn’t even much of a looker – thin, pal
e, jumpy, her eyes smudged round with weariness and big with fright. But she’d fascinated him, all the same. What she had was something that Jack Goodrum admired above all else in a woman: class.

  His first girl friend had had class too. Not by a long way the first he’d mucked about with, experimenting behind the hedges on the way home from village school on summer afternoons, but the first girl he’d badly wanted. For a long time she had held herself aloof … but then he’d caught her looking at him from under speculative virgin eyelids, and he’d known that he could have her if he made the right approach.

  Eventually he’d manoeuvred her into a secluded spot, with her back to a tree. Hot and urgent, he’d pressed himself against her. But her look of desire had changed abruptly to one of disgust, and she’d pushed him away. ‘You smell!’ she had said.

  After that, Jack Goodrum had stuck to his own class of girl. He’d thought he had completely forgotten that early incident. But something about Mrs Napier – her voice, her behaviour – had drawn him strongly. And this time he intended to make no mistakes.

  On the morning after he had rescued the fugitives he’d astonished his wife by taking a bath and demanding clean socks and a clean white shirt. He’d then put on a new, sharply tailored light grey suit that he had purchased to celebrate the sale of his business. Before presenting himself at the hotel where he had established Mrs Napier and her son, he had bought and used a mouthwash, and had his hair shampooed and blow-dried.

  He’d still looked all wrong, he knew it now. That suit was the wrong colour, the wrong cloth, the wrong cut. His tie was gaudy, his gold rings were flashy, his sideburns were ridiculous. He must have ponged of aftershave. But thankfully, none of this had seemed to put Felicity Napier off when he’d asked if he could see her again; and over the next twelve months, with her help, he had transformed his whole appearance.