Death and the Maiden

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Sheila Radley

  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

  Sheila Radley

  Death and the Maiden

  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.

  Chapter One

  The river Dunnock rises without much enthusiasm in the northern uplands of Suffolk and sets out in the direction of the Wash, taking its time over the journey. A narrow, shallow brook of a river: not navigable at any point in its meanderings, nor deep enough to swim in; and nowhere deep enough for an eighteen-year-old girl to drown, unless she chose to end her life, or unless someone intended that she should die.

  The body lay—barely afloat in the shallows, long hair waving indistinguishably among the river weed—some yards downstream from Ashthorpe bridge.

  Ashthorpe is a village six miles south of Breckham Market, the small town where the Dunnock finally gives up all pretension to independence and joins a tributary of the Ouse. The narrow, humpbacked stone bridge about a mile out of Ashthorpe has always been regarded as a local beauty spot. A gap in the roadside hedge near the bridge leads down to a meadow, and older inhabitants of the village can remember walking here in couples on warm summer evenings in search of privacy under the willow trees on the bank of the river.

  The meadow must be much the same, though the pollarded willows have grown arthritic. The hawthorn hedge still screens the meadow from passers-by on the road. Buttercups and cowslips and lady’s smock and daisies embroider the grass in season, wild yellow iris flaunt among the reeds, birds sing, cuckoos call, the river noises are as agreeable as ever they must have been; but the lovers have gone, because there is nowhere for them to park their cars. The river bank below Ashthorpe bridge has been given over to children who paddle and make dams and hunt for birds’nests and water rats, and to an occasional small boy fishing in earnest for tench and gudgeon.

  The fish flourish because the Dunnock is remarkably unpolluted. It runs through no town, and receives little sewage and no industrial effluent. Naturally, it collects its share of unnatural and non-degradable rubbish: old car tyres and cooking stoves, non-returnable bottles, empty aerosols and beer cans, plastic margarine tubs, squeezy detergent containers. But as rivers go, it is remarkably free from pollution. A clean place to die.

  The girl lay face-down, arms outstretched, rushes woven among her fingers. She wore a long dress of cotton, sprigged with tiny flowers, and the hem of the dress swung and rippled round her legs with the motion of the water. Gathered flowers—enamelled buttercups, mauve lady’s smock—floated about her body and clung to her hair and her dress wherever they touched. It looked a quiet way to die.

  There had been heavy rain overnight and the morning was washed dazzlingly clean, but the two policemen were too busy watching where they put their feet to notice the blue and the green and the gold of the first day of May. One was a solidly middle-aged constable in uniform and flat cap; the other, elegant in plain clothes, was shorter, slimmer, much younger. They were retreating from a ramshackle stud and plaster farmhouse to their police van, seen off by a sardonic farmer whose Jack Russell terrier had yipped itself to the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Well then?’ demanded Detective Sergeant Tait when he could make himself heard. ‘You’re the local man. Do you believe what he said?’

  The constable considered the question as he sploshed on down the muddy track that led from the house to the road. ‘About pigs,’ he said eventually, ‘yes. I wouldn’t trust anything he said about his neighbour, but he likes pigs.’

  Tait laughed without amusement, side-stepping the last foul puddle and taking a leap on to the roadside grass, where he tried to wipe the mud off his fashionable, expensive shoes. Pc Godbold was watching him with a hardly-concealed grin, a look not unlike the one the farmer had just given him. It was a look that Tait had come to recognise and identify in the last two days, a countryman’s way of looking at a townee, half derisive, half defensive.

  ‘What you want to do,’ Godbold volunteered, pleasantly enough, ‘is to carry a pair of wellies in your car. Inspector Quantrill always does—Chief Inspector Quantrill, I should say.’

  ‘Does he?’ said Tait coldly. He was growing a little tired of hearing his new chief’s name.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the constable, lowering himself into the driver’s seat of the van. ‘But then, of course, he’s a countryman. Makes a difference.’

  ‘So I imagine.’

  The road was narrow, and Godbold had pulled the van on to the verge after Tait had got out. He made no offer to move the van back to the road, and the long grass soaked the bottom of Tait’s trouser legs as he pushed his way to the passenger door. Hedgerow sprays, curdled over with hawthorn blossom, slapped against him; the flower clusters were wet, almond-scented, sickly sweet. Tait wiped his splattered face and neck irritably.

  ‘Where to now?’ asked Godbold.

  Tait checked his watch and decided with relief that he could justify a return to civilisation. ‘Back to your place to pick up my own car. I’d better see what’s happening at division.’

  ‘Right you are.’ Godbold turned the van towards Ashthorpe, where he lived in the police house. He drove silently for a few minutes and then, since he was old enough to be the new detective’s father and felt slightly guilty about Tait’s sodden trousers, he said conversationally, ‘Daresay you were riled about being sent to this division, Sergeant Tait?’

  He chose the formal address deliberately; you couldn’t call a green youngster ‘Sarge’. ‘I mean,’ he elaborated, ‘it’s very quiet here. Oh, we’ve got more than enough to do, but mostly we’re dealing with petty crime. A bit of a comedown after that high-powered stuff you must have learned at police college.’

  Tait shrugged. ‘All good
experience,’ he said.

  The sardonic grin again: ‘Looking for missing pigs?’

  ‘It’s not just pigs that go missing.’

  There was a silence. Both men, temporarily forgetting each other, were contemplating an impossibility. A quiet, home-loving fifteen-year-old girl simply does not vanish without trace from the mile-long stretch of road between her home and the village shop, not in broad daylight, not in the middle of the placid English countryside.

  ‘Hoping to find her?’ asked Godbold. No derision now, but bitter hopelessness. ‘Mr Quantrill’s been working on the case for three months, and if he can’t find her …’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Tait quickly. He knew that his graduate entry to the police force, his special police college training and his accelerated promotion, was going to take some living down. He expected and accepted a certain amount of needling. He knew that in the first few weeks after he left Bramshill the old hands would be watching him intently, hopeful that he would make a fool of himself; at best he would be tolerated, at worst despised. But Tait was anxious to be judged on what he actually achieved in those weeks, not on an unguarded retort made in his first few days in the division.

  ‘I haven’t come here imagining that I can do any better than anyone else,’ he went on. ‘But since the girl disappeared from this division, and I’ve been sent here, I’m glad of the chance to join in the search. Isn’t that how you’d feel?’

  Godbold seemed mollified. ‘Doesn’t matter who finds her, does it, as long as she’s found?’ He sighed hugely, forgetting to be on the defensive; a father, consumed with vicarious anguish. ‘Her parents must be out of their minds with worry …’

  He drove on silently, presently turning to the right, off the main Breckham Market road and on to the minor road that led to Ashthorpe.

  ‘You know what?’ he burst out suddenly. ‘I blame this motorisation. Oh, I like having the van, all right—it’s a sight more comfortable than being out in all weathers on a push-bike. And the radio contact’s very handy. But you lose the personal touch.’

  Sergeant Tait had been in the police force exactly two and a half years. He turned in his seat and looked at Godbold with interest, as though the constable were the sole survivor of a dead civilisation. ‘Did you really ride round on a bicycle?’ he asked.

  Godbold went dignified. ‘Certainly. I started on a town beat, but I was village bobby at Ashthorpe for fifteen years, before they put me in this van and gave me a district to cover. Well, it’s more efficient in a lot of ways, I can see that—but I don’t know what’s going on in my own village any more. And I reckon that if there’d still been a local bobby in Joy Dawson’s village, she’d never have disappeared like that.’

  ‘Oh, come on—that’s expecting a lot of one policeman on two wheels!’

  ‘Maybe,’ conceded Godbold. ‘All the same …’

  He slowed as the road narrowed for Ashthorpe bridge.

  ‘Take this bridge we’re coming to,’ he went on. ‘I used to bike down here of a summer evening and sit on the parapet for a smoke, and I could reckon to see most of Ashthorpe going by. I’m not an Ashthorpe man myself, but you learn a lot about a place in fifteen years. I’d know who was sneaking past in a car with someone else’s husband or wife, and who was mooning about alone and miserable, and who was looking for mischief. Now, I don’t know half what they’re up to—I’m too busy dashing about all over. And I can’t even stop when I do come by, because there’s no room to park the van. Hold tight for the bump.’

  The road rose over the sharp hump of the bridge. Tait caught a glimpse of gold in the meadow below, a flash of sunlight on water. He also had time to notice that there were tyre marks in the damp earth at the roadside just over the bridge, where a gap in the hedge led down to the river meadow.

  ‘Looks as though somebody parked there recently,’ he commented.

  ‘Duzzy fool,’ said Godbold dispassionately. ‘It’s asking for an accident, parking so close to that blind hump. Hadn’t better let me catch him doing it again.’

  The road climbed gently towards the village, between creamy hawthorn hedges and verges misted knee-high with cow parsley in full bloom. At the top of the rise was a tall-towered church, all flint and flushwork, with a neighbouring rectory that had been built for a family of Georgian size. Then the road dipped down again: past the pantiles and pink plaster of Church Farm and the thatch and white plaster of the Chequers, past a row of mean-windowed inter-war council houses, past a wooden shed that proclaimed itself the post office, past the willow-shaded pond and along the length of the narrow green with the war memorial in the centre; then sharply round to the left and past more thatch and plaster, some of it tatty; past a red brick nineteenth century terrace, a garage offering quadruple trading stamps on petrol, a county council Gothic school, a Georgian manor house, a general store, a gaunt Baptist chapel, an eruption of new bungalows and finally a post-war council estate, more generous as to windows but meaner with gardens. Godbold drew up outside the only detached house on the estate. The name County Police was incised above the doorway, and Tait’s own car was parked on the lay-by.

  ‘Care to come in for a cup of coffee?’ Godbold offered.

  ‘No thanks,’ Tait replied, a shade too promptly. ‘I’d better get back to the station.’

  ‘Toffee-nosed pipsqueak,’ thought Godbold, but without malice; the invitation had been no more than a polite formality.

  Tait realised that his refusal had been interpreted accurately. ‘Thanks very much for your help, though,’ he added quickly, softening his fair sharp features into amiability: ‘I’d never have found my way round the farms without you.’

  ‘Nor persuaded the farmers to talk, neither,’ thought Godbold; but since he was within a few months of half-pay retirement and already had a nice little security job lined up at a plastics factory on the industrial estate at Breckham Market, he could afford to be cordial. ‘Any time. Now then, if you keep straight on from here you’ll get to Breckham what we call the back way, through Lillington and Fair Green. But if you want the quickest way, it’s back through the village and over the bridge to the turnpike. All right?’

  ‘Thanks again. See you.’ Tait gave him a nod, then did a quick U-turn in his small, aspiring Citroën. ‘A real old-timer’, he thought disparagingly, as he left the village and slowed for the hump-backed bridge. ‘Bobbies on bicycles, for heaven’s sake!’

  Downstream from the bridge the flies clustered and hummed, and

  the flowers that were caught in the dead girl’s hair began to wilt

  under the sun.

  Chapter Two

  Breckham Market divisional police headquarters, a monument to the Festival of Britain taste for neo-Georgian architecture embellished with spiky ironwork balconies, stands beside the main road that divides the old town from the new. Its neighbour on one side is the fire station, on the other the local branch of the county library; there were grandiose plans for a new town hall, but the money ran out.

  And no bad thing either, thought Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill as he left the Victorian Italianate town hall in the market place and walked briskly through the streets towards his office. Not that better courtroom accommodation wouldn’t be useful, but the five minute walk was good exercise and gave him the opportunity to sniff the atmosphere of the town, to keep in touch at street level.

  He listened with patient sympathy to an indignant town councillor’s story of vandalism in the public park, and noticed with interest that two apprentice layabouts turned and walked smartly in the other direction when they saw him coming. He passed the time of day with a number of market traders, acquiring from one the side-of-the-mouth information that a local villain was newly out of prison, and from another a hint that a rival’s cut-price groceries might well have fallen off the back of a lorry.

  The market was busy. Quantrill had a wide acquaintance, and he tipped his hat impartially to the wife of the Methodist minister and to a retired pr
ostitute who, feeling the lack of an occupational pension, tried to supplement her social security by selling information.

  She accosted him with an eager greeting: ‘Morning, Mr Quantrill!’

  ‘Morning, Marje. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ She was thin, her wig and clothes girlish; her voice was hoarse and her seamed upper lip was stained nicotine yellow.

  ‘I say.’ She glanced round, then leaned towards him conspiratorially, breathing stale gin. He turned his face away, as if to offer her his ear. ‘I might have something to tell you later in the week, Mr Quantrill.’

  He doubted it. ‘Well then, you’ll know where to find me,’ he said pleasantly, evading a detaining claw. He stepped into a tobacconist’s to buy a tin of small mild cigars, then set course for the office again, tweed hat in hand, enjoying the mid-morning air.

  The sunshine of early May warmed the streets, drawing out the shop window blinds and the middle-aged women in their white cardigans and summer dresses. A pity, Quantrill thought, that so many girls no longer bothered to wear pretty dresses; jeans and skinny tops were more revealing, but he found them less alluring than the tight-waisted, full-skirted summer dresses that girls had worn twenty-odd years ago.

  River water gleamed tantalisingly at the foot of Market Hill. Nice to be going out into the country now, he thought—on an enquiry, of course, strictly on duty, but nice to be able to stay out in the open air with something positive to pursue, instead of having to return to his office and face the paper work that would have accumulated during the past two days while he was at county headquarters.

  That was the trouble with promotion, he decided, resisting a passing temptation to have a word with the landlord of the Coney and Thistle. The higher you climbed, the further removed you were from the action; just as, the older you became, the more remote were the girls in their summer dresses.

  Which made it all the harder, he remembered, returning to one of his perennial irritations as he waited to cross the main road which took the heavy flow of traffic between London and Yarchester, that the council should have planted a row of such feminine double-flowering pink cherry trees outside police headquarters. Not that he had anything against ornamental cherry trees in their proper place, a park or a small garden. But here, outside the bulk of the fire station and the police station and the library they were merely pathetic, ridiculously out of scale. Why couldn’t the council have planted two or three proper trees, something that would grow to a reasonable height and make a positive contribution to the area, instead of these pink frilly things that dropped their blossom like fistfuls of confetti all over the steps of the police station?