Blood on the Happy Highway Read online

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  Contents

  Sheila Radley

  Dedication

  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

  Sheila Radley

  Blood on the Happy Highway

  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 my sister Monica

  Chapter One

  14 September; a mellow autumn morning in north Suffolk. Mist hung about the countryside, waiting for the sun to make up its mind whether or not to break through.

  Saturday, 6.30 a.m.; few people up, and fewer on the roads. The principal activity in Breckham Market was in the yard behind the main post office where gummy-eyed postmen, up since just after four and at work in the sorting office since five, were loading scarlet Royal Mail vans with the morning’s deliveries.

  One of the vans also carried a passenger, a recently appointed postman who had been sent out to learn the Ecclesby-Wickford route. Brian Finch was in his thirties: quiet, neatly bearded, his uniform meticulously pressed, shoes polished, cap straight. The warehouse where he had been employed as a dispatch clerk ever since leaving school had closed during the recession, and he had suffered several harrowing months of unemployment. He knew that he was extraordinarily lucky to have been selected from dozens of applicants for the postman’s job, and he was nervously eager to learn all he could.

  ‘You’ll enjoy being on this route, as long as you’re an animal lover,’ said the driver of the van, Kenny Warminger, a large mop-haired young man who liked to demonstrate his four years’ experience as a postman by no longer bothering to wear his uniform cap at all. Amused by his passenger’s earnestness, he was unable to resist the temptation to tease him. ‘There aren’t more’n half a dozen dogs that’ll bite to hurt.’

  Finch, who disliked dogs, looked unhappy. He tightened his seat belt.

  ‘The customers are mostly harmless, though,’ said Warminger. ‘Some’ll grumble as though it’s your fault when you deliver bills, and one woman’ll hold you personally responsible if she doesn’t get a letter from her daughter every Tuesday. But the only ones who are likely to make trouble for you are the Arrowsmiths.’

  He had driven through the town centre, and out along the Saintsbury road. Now, still within the town boundary, he pulled off to the right and stopped on the recently cemented forecourt of a long two-story eighteenth-century brick building, with small barred windows set at close intervals. From behind the building rose the conical roof of a disused malt kiln. In the forecourt, a large new board displayed the name Arrowsmith MicroElectronics Ltd.

  ‘If everybody had their rights,’ said Warminger, ‘we shouldn’t have to deliver here. It’s on one of the town routes. But the owner, Ross Arrowsmith – you know, the man who’s made a fortune out of selling calculators and computers by mail order – reckoned he needed an earlier delivery. He made a fuss to the Head Postmaster, so we were lumbered with this stop on our way out to our own delivery area. And the problem is that there are a lot of Arrowsmiths on our route. Ross and his family live in the first village we deliver to, Ecclesby. Then there’s an old Mrs Arrowsmith a mile further on, in Upper Wickford, and a Mr and Mrs Arrowsmith across the common from her in Nether Wickford. And it’s the devil’s own job not to mix all their mail up.’

  Warminger took several big bundles of letters from the tray in the back of the van, where he had stacked all the mail in the right sequence for delivery.

  ‘Look, there’re at least a hundred letters here for this firm. You get so mesmerised by the name Arrowsmith when you’re sorting the incoming mail that it’s not surprising if you sometimes slip in a letter for one of the other Arrowsmiths by mistake. And if it’s addressed to the woman at Nether Wickford who keeps changing the colour of her hair, you’ll be in real trouble when she finds out that you’ve delivered it here instead. So you’ll have to watch it, if you don’t want her swearing at you and then ringing up the Head Postmaster to complain.’

  Finch promised, apprehensively, that he would watch it.

  Warminger fed the mail into the firm’s large letter box and drove on, turning out of Breckham Market on a minor road that led towards the village of Ecclesby. After two miles he halted at a crossroads surrounded by misty fields and hedges, and waited for a gap in the light Saturday morning traffic on the A135, one of the main roads leading towards the coastal towns of Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth.

  ‘I always used to think of this as a pleasant sort of road,’ he said, sounding idle but spying sideways to see how his new colleague would react to what he was going to say. ‘You know, busy in summer with happy holidaymakers. But it was just up there –’ he jerked his thumb to the left ‘– that they found that murdered woman.’

  Finch twitched, as Warminger had hoped. ‘You mean the one the papers were full of, a few weeks ago?’

  ‘That’s right. See the small wood at the top of the rise? The A135 used to run through that wood, until they built the straighter stretch of road beside it. The old road’s still there, though. I used to drive a lorry for a Saintsbury firm, and we sometimes pulled off there when we didn’t want to get back too early. It makes a hidden layby, handy if you want to stop for a kip, or a leak, or to dump some rubbish. So somebody decided that it’d be a nice quiet place to leave a corpse – all neatly trussed in plastic, but minus her head.’

  ‘So I believe,’ said Finch, who had no stomach for such detail.

  Warminger let in the clutch and accelerated across the road. ‘There were police all over the place for days after the corpse was found,’ he remembered. ‘Dozens of’em, searching the layby and stopping every vehicle and asking questions. I wa
s stopped every day for a week.’

  ‘Did they ever find out whose the body was?’

  ‘Not as far as I know, and I’ve read every mention of it in the local paper. You interested in murder? I am. I’ve read quite a few books about it. As I see it, this has got to be a crime of passion – some feller doing away with his wife or girlfriend. That’s why he chopped her head off, ’cause he knew that if the police could identify her, they’d be on to him straight away.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Finch queasily.

  Kenny Warminger laughed, and drew up at a flintstone farmhouse, its front garden shaggy with damp autumnal asters. A small black and white terrier, peering through the bars of the garden gate, greeted their arrival with frenzied yaps.

  ‘This is where Ecclesby starts,’ Warminger instructed. ‘Limekiln Farm – here you are, Brian mate, I’ll pass you the letters, you hop out and deliver’em. Best way to learn the route. Don’t worry about the Jack Russell, the worst he’ll do is rip your trousers.’

  6.55 a.m. In a detached four-bedroomed chalet bungalow displaying the name Tenerife, overlooking Wickford common from the Nether Wickford side, the forty-year-old Mrs Arrowsmith who kept changing the colour of her hair lay wide awake, planning her future.

  Her only companion, resting with languid elegance beside her on the king-size double bed, was her seal-point Siamese cat. A man had shared the bed for part of the night, an acquaintance so recent that he assumed that Angela Arrowsmith’s hair was always dark gold with auburn highlights; but although Angela had, when she arranged his visit, believed that he might play a part in her future, she had taken against him and turned him out just before dawn. Nothing like spending a night with a man for finding out his true character.

  She’d thought Len Pratt generous, and found him mean; a pig in bed. But then, so were most men – except Si, of course. A sweeter second husband than young Simon Arrowsmith she couldn’t have wished for: loving, admiring, humbly grateful, as big and soft as a teddy bear, and just as boring.

  She was fond of him, though. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him quite so much yesterday evening, but she’d had to be sufficiently cruel to him to ensure that he’d take himself off to his mother’s for the night before his potential replacement arrived. A pity Len hadn’t passed the test she’d set him …

  Not that she’d go to the trouble of taking on a replacement, if it weren’t for the problem of money. Simon simply didn’t have enough. What she wanted was real money, the kind her husband’s half-brother Ross had. She’d put a proposition to Ross some months previously – a purely financial proposition, though with a hint that fringe benefits might be available – but he’d turned her down flat, with such a toffee-nosed look of dislike that she was determined to get even with him as soon as an opportunity arose.

  Meanwhile she had other plans, and Simon might still have his uses. He’d be back, of course, shambling and woebegone and begging for forgiveness …

  ‘Poor Simple Simon,’ she mused aloud, in the diddums-den voice she used when she was tickling her plump and blondly furry husband into total subjugation. ‘Poor Big Boy …’

  She reached across the bed to stroke the cat’s cream-and-deep-brown fur. ‘But you’re beautiful, Princess. You’re my lovely, lovely friend – we understand each other, don’t we? The best of everything, that’s what we want for each other, eh, Princess?’

  The cat rose to its feet and began to weave round Angela’s hand with sinuous grace, the great blue eyes in the delicate wedge-shaped head half closed in ecstasy. ‘Oh, your silken fur,’ crooned Angela, stroking ceaselessly. ‘Silken fur … that’s what I love, my beautiful, silk and fur, silk and fur –’

  But her stroking had aroused it beyond endurance. The highly-bred, highly-strung animal suddenly screamed, turned and lashed out, its slim paw become a vicious weapon. Angela shrieked, flinging the cat from the bed. ‘Christ, you spiteful little devil! Look what you’ve done –’

  Three shallow parallel scratches raked the inside of her left forearm. Beads of blood sprang up, conjoined, began to run. Angela scrambled out of bed and hurried to the bathroom, where she put her arm under the cold tap. The cat leaped down the stairs and stretched itself up against the front door, making piercing demands to be let out.

  The flow of blood lessened. Angela, in a silk kimono, her arm damp and sore, was on her way downstairs to open the door for the second time within an hour when Gary Hilton, the son of her first marriage and her only child, came shuffling out of his ground-floor bedroom, tall and coathanger-thin inside his pyjamas. His mother appealed to him for sympathy.

  ‘Look what that sodding cat’s done to me, Gary! Didn’t you hear me scream?’

  ‘No.’ Gary, just seventeen, barely awake, his face naked without his glasses, was groping myopically towards the downstairs lavatory.

  ‘Trust you! I could be murdered in my bed, and you wouldn’t hear a thing.’ She unlocked and unbolted the front door, giving her pet a quick caress before she let it out to show it that she bore no malice. ‘There you go, Princess. Mind what you get up to, and don’t cross the road.’

  By the time she had relocked the door, her son had emerged from the lavatory. ‘My arm hurts like anything,’ she complained. She attempted a gesture of fondness, reaching up to brush his limp, tangled hair off his forehead with her right hand. ‘How about making me a cup of tea, Gary love?’

  The boy sidestepped, jerking his head away and lifting his upper lip in a sneer. ‘Make it yourself, for once,’ he mumbled thickly. He ducked the slap she aimed at his face, and groped back to his room.

  Angela scowled after him, and then opened the door of the other ground-floor bedroom. It was occupied, but there was no point in knocking. Harold Wilkes, her brother who lived with them, had been involved some years previously in an accident that had left him totally deaf.

  She switched on the light and shook him awake. For a moment, seeing the pallor of exhaustion on the broad face under the close-cropped sandy hair, she felt remorseful; Harold so rarely complained that she forgot he slept badly. But then, with Simon to attend to her wants, there was normally no need for her to wake her brother. It wouldn’t hurt him, for once.

  She held out her left forearm, and allowed her lower lip to tremble. Harold, struggling to sit up, peered blearily at the scratches.

  ‘That wretched cat again?’ he asked in his loud, unmodulated voice. The Princess was accustomed to express displeasure by drawing blood from the nearest human being.

  Angela nodded, making her little-sister’s-hurt face.

  ‘It’s not deep,’ said Harold. He’d had less than an hour’s sleep that night, and his head was ringing with tinnitus. ‘Just bathe it with antiseptic, it’ll be all right.’

  His sister flinched, as though he’d hit her. ‘Oh, Harold …’

  He sighed, heaved himself out of bed and pulled his dressing gown round his thick-set body. ‘All right, I’ll do it for you,’ he said flatly.

  Angela gave him a radiant smile. ‘Bless you, love!’ Then, ‘Cup of tea?’ she mouthed at him hopefully.

  Harold Wilkes was not an expert lipreader, but some of his sister’s requests were uttered so frequently during the course of the day that he had no difficulty in understanding them. With a steam whistle shrieking in his head, and pain stabbing at the back of his eyeballs like forks of lightning, he dragged himself towards the kitchen.

  7.20 a.m. Overhead, through brightening mist, the sun’s disc was visible, pale as a morning moon. On Wickford common the vapour had begun to lift, leaving the grass white with dew. A man was running along the road that circled the common, and whenever he crossed a grass verge he left a trail of green footsteps behind him.

  Ross Arrowsmith, founder, chairman, managing director and technical director of Arrowsmith MicroElectronics Ltd, was out for his morning jog. It was a practice he’d taken up for the sake of his health on his thirtieth birthday, and in nine years he’d rarely missed a day. Like cleaning his teeth, it had bec
ome a habit.

  But the benefits were not merely physical. An early morning jog, when his mind was at its freshest, gave him a valuable opportunity for uninterrupted thought, and what he usually thought about was micro-electronics. As his wife Jen told him with exasperated affection, he was a workaholic; in or out of his office and design laboratory, he rarely concentrated for long on anything other than silicon wafers, photolithography, binary codes and sequential circuits.

  He was always so preoccupied when he went jogging that he took little notice of his surroundings. They were familiar to him, because he had been born and brought up in Upper Wickford. Occasionally he varied the direction of his run, more in accordance with the season of the year and the taste of the air than with any conscious decision, but usually he ran from his newly built house at Ecclesby up towards Wickford common.

  Since his father’s death, six months ago, Ross no longer made dutiful calls at the old house overlooking the common, where his widowed stepmother Nellie now lived alone. He was grateful to Nellie for the way she had looked after his father, but he could never think of anything to say to her. He found any kind of purely social conversation difficult. Fortunately Jen made up for this as well as his other social shortcomings, and regularly took the twins to visit Nellie just as she had taken them when their grandfather was alive.

  As he jogged past the small house where he had been born, his mind was reviewing the design of his latest microprocessor control system; it would, he hoped, make Arrowsmith as big a name in home computers as Sinclair or Commodore. But despite this preoccupation, he took a moment’s conscious pleasure in the evocative smells of the orchard where he had played as a boy, though he noticed how small and scabby the apples on the neglected trees had become.

  He turned off the asphalt on to the dirt footpath that connected the villages of Upper and Lower Wickford by a short cut across the common. Mist still lingered in patches, hiding the house three hundred yards away, on the outskirts of Nether Wickford, where his half-brother Simon lived. But the knowledge that the house was there reminded him of Simon and, disagreeably, of Simon’s wife Angela.