A Talent For Destruction Read online

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  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Sheila Radley

  Foreword

  Part 1 – this winter

  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

  Part 2 – last summer

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Part 3 – this spring

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chater Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Part 4 – New Hampshire, last fall

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Sheila Radley

  A Talent for Destruction

  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.

  Canon Law of the Church of England, C.26.2

  Part 1 – this winter

  Chapter One

  The children had never seen so much snow.

  It began just in time for the start of the Christmas holidays, falling so lightly at first that it did no more than tickle their upturned faces as they ran out of school, tantalizing them with the possibility of a different world of play: snowballing in the streets, building snowmen in the gardens, tobogganing in Castle Meadow, even sliding on the ice if the Mere froze over. But although the darkening sky looked full of it, and the air tasted cold and thick and still, the first fall of snow was hesitant. From the gates of the primary school, built in the expansive 1960s on the outskirts of Breckham Market, the children looked out across ploughed fields and saw with disappointment that the snow had done no more than dust the dark earth, like caster sugar sprinkled on Christmas pudding.

  But that evening the wind rose, the snow beat down in a blizzard, and next morning the town – the whole of East Anglia – woke to pale empty skies and silence. Roads and paths and gardens were obliterated, houses were huddled under thick white thatch, every telegraph and electricity line supported a narrow wall of snow. Cars that had been left outside overnight were transformed into mobile igloos. In the centre of the small town the parish church of St Botolph, standing high on the top of Market Hill, pinnacled and battlemented and soaringly Perpendicular, had been softened and rounded into lines that made it seem almost Baroque.

  The children were overjoyed. They bounced outside; wellingtonbooted and plumped up with extra woollens and scarves, to do battle, or more peaceably to roll giant snowballs. Down by the slow black river, Castle Meadow – the site of a minor twelfth-century fortification whose grassed-over ruins no archaeologist had ever found time to excavate – provided useful slopes for toboggans improvised from melamine trays and plastic fertilizer sacks. Some children hastily amended their Christmas present lists to include proper toboggans. All of them crossed their fingers in the hope that the snow would stay at least until the end of the holidays.

  And the snow did stay, for weeks, bonded to the surfaces where it had fallen by exceptionally severe frosts. Ice covered the surface of the Mere to a depth of several inches, and made roads and paths hazardous. It was the hardest winter for eighteen years, a particularly difficult time for the old and infirm, for those who had to travel to work, and for farmers with livestock out in the fields.

  It was a cruel winter for wild creatures, too. Emboldened by hunger, everything that flew or ran or crawled began to draw near human habitation. Mallard ducks, dispossessed from the Mere by the ice, besieged the executive houses on Mere Road. Small birds braved cats in order to snatch crumbs thrown from back doors. Backyard hens were nudged from their feeding troughs by families of rats. A fox was seen in broad daylight, scavenging round the dustbins at the back of the golf club. Only the carrion crows lived well, gorging themselves on the carcases of whatever succumbed to hunger and cold.

  But for the children, the weather remained a delight. The start of the school term was an unwelcome intrusion upon their activities, because it seemed impossible that the freeze could last until the half-term holiday. Those who had managed to acquire proper toboggans felt a particular sense of frustration as they looked out of their classroom windows and saw all that snow going to waste.

  One of the chief mourners was Justin Muttock, aged ten. His grandfather, a carpenter by trade, had made him a toboggan for Christmas, and he had shared the rides with his friend Adrian Orris. Adrian was a little older and a little taller, the leader in all their ploys until now, and so Justin had a double reason for wanting the snow to remain: the unaccustomed power of patronage, generously bestowed or capriciously withheld, was as sweet to him as the swish of snow under the runners and the rush of cold air against his face.

  To his disappointment, a slow thaw began in mid-February. The sky lightened; the sun offered to shine. Trees became black rather than white, and the deceptively soft-looking paws of snow that had for weeks pressed down the branches of garden conifers, threatening to break them, gave up and slid limply off. Walls and roofs began to emerge, like buildings partially excavated from a bed of white lava. Justin’s front-garden snowman still retained its hard-packed dignity, but the white carpet it had stood on was beginning to look threadbare. Patches of deep snow lingered in places, but Castle Meadow was on a south-facing slope and the boys’hopes receded with the strengthening of the sun. Most of the other open spaces in or near the town were too flat for tobogganing.

  And then, on the first day of the half-term holiday, he remembered Parson’s Close.

  ‘Bet there’s still enough snow there!’ he told Adrian. ‘There’s a good slope, and big old trees at the top so the sun can’t shine through.’

  ‘We can’t go to Parson’s Close,’ said his friend. ‘You know what that man said he’d do if he caught us there again.’

  ‘That was last summer – he won’t be there in this weather, stupid! Anyway, we only want to use the toboggan. We can’t get wrong for doing that.’

  ‘We might if the Rector sees us,’ objected Adrian. It was not a poss
ibility that really worried him, but Justin’s idea was a good one and because it was not his own he wanted to diminish it.

  But six weeks of uncontested leadership had heightened Justin’s estimation of himself by several inches. ‘He won’t see us, not from his house. I’m going anyway, even if you’re not.’

  Anonymous in their dark green parkas, the boys hurried through the streets one behind the other, carrying the toboggan so as not to scrape its runners on the bare patches of pavement that had begun to appear through the gritty slush. The sky was a cool clear blue, and the town smelled of wet wood. Melting snow dripped on to pedestrians from the timber-framed overhangs of the old shops in the Shambles, and trickled down the gutters of Market Hill.

  The boys stopped for a breather under the great tower of the church, then shifted their grip and set off again, leaving the shopping streets and turning right past a no-through-road sign on to less well-trodden, whiter slush; along the quietness of St Botolph Street, beside the flint wall that bordered first the churchyard, then the extensive gardens of the Rectory. On the opposite side of the road was a survival oddly rural so near the centre of the town: a high chestnut-paling fence, overhung by bare-branched trees. In the middle of the fencing was a five-barred gate, with a meadow beyond. The painted word PRIVATE on the top bar was faded, but still clearly visible.

  The boys ignored the gate, and continued along the cul-de-sac. Across the end of it was a hedge, with a gap in the middle opening on to a footpath that sloped down through some allotment gardens. As they drew level with the place where the roadway ended and the fence formed a right angle with the hedge, the boys took a swift glance round to make sure that they were not being watched, tugged two loose palings aside and pushed their way through the fence into Parson’s Close.

  As Justin had predicted, here was untrodden snow. The meadow faced north, sloping down from St Botolph Street towards the by-pass, and the snow was best at the top, where a row of mature copper beech trees cut off most of the sun. At the bottom of the meadow, where bramble bushes sprawled beside the ditch that separated Parson’s Close from the grass verge of the by-pass, the snow had almost gone; but there was still enough of it to make a longer toboggan run than Castle Meadow had ever offered.

  It proved to be hard work. The snow was powdery stuff, crusted on top, and at first the toboggan simply sank in. But the boys persevered, and by the end of the morning their solo runs had almost reached the bottom of the meadow.

  Their last ride before they went home in search of dinner was made together. Justin sat in front. Adrian gave him a running push and jumped on behind. The extra weight added to their momentum and they slid nearly the full length of the meadow, bumping and jolting and cheering until the toboggan finally hit a tussock of grass and overturned, tumbling them out almost in the bushes.

  They lay for some minutes where they had fallen, sprawled on a thin cushion of snow, gasping and laughing and throwing weak punches at each other, and kicking their legs in the air.

  ‘Cor, I’m hot,’ said Justin, sitting up red-cheeked and pushing back the fur-lined hood of his parka. Then, ‘Blast, now I’m caught on a bramble.’

  A long woody shoot, trailing out from the nearest bush, was hooked by its thorns to his hood. He turned and pulled himself free, and as he did so he noticed something round and yellowish-white lying beside a heap of rubbish under the bare purple branches of the bush.

  ‘Hey, there’s a football!’ he said excitedly. ‘Somebody must have lost it.’

  Adrian got up to look. ‘That it’s not,’ he said, reasserting his authority. ‘How can it be? It’s not round all over – and anyway, it’s got a hole in it.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘I dunno. My legs are longer than yours, I’ll see if I can get it out.’

  Adrian reached one wellingtonned foot under the bush and hooked the object towards him. It was caught up in withered, snow-matted grass, and for a few moments it resisted. Then it rolled over, into full view.

  The blood disappeared from Adrian’s cheeks, leaving him almost as bleached as the thing that was staring sightlessly up at him. He made a small mewling sound and took several steps backwards. Then he turned and fled up the hill, floundering through the snow, yammering with fright.

  In a second Justin was after him, sobbing and stumbling and screaming, ‘Wait for me!’ His toboggan lay forgotten in the last of the snow. He, too, had peered into the bush and had seen the eyeless, noseless, sockets, the grinning teeth below the rounded cranium.

  Chapter Two

  Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill was on the carpet. Specifically, he was on the doorstep of the grey-brick, early Victorian Rectory, having been summoned by the Rector to discuss several hundred pounds’worth of damage to the church hall, apparently sustained when the youth club got out of hand the previous evening. It was not a matter with which the head of Breckham Market CID would normally deal in person; he was there because the Rector suspected that one of the ringleaders was the Chief Inspector’s son Peter.

  The door was opened by the Rector’s wife, Gillian Ainger. Quantrill was not a churchgoer, nor on social terms with the Aingers, but it was a small town and he knew her by sight, as she knew him.

  ‘Ah, Mr Quantrill – do please come in. I’m afraid my husband has been called away unexpectedly. He asked me to apologize if he wasn’t back in time, but I’m sure he won’t be long. A man from Furze Close was rushed into hospital at Yarchester last night with a heart attack, and his wife went with him in the ambulance. His condition has stabilized, fortunately, but his wife was stuck at the hospital so she rang Robin and asked him to fetch her.’

  ‘One of your husband’s congregation?’ Quantrill asked, wiping his shoes on the outsize doormat and hanging his overcoat where she indicated, on a row of hooks long enough to accommodate the coats of the entire parochial church council.

  ‘No. But no one else’s either. The whole town’s our parish, and in times of crisis people do tend to remember that they’re nominally Church of England.’

  ‘A parson must have a lot of demands made on him,’ commented Quantrill, offering heavily polite conversation rather than sympathy. He felt uneasy, anxious to get on with the interview.

  One corner of her mouth lifted in a very strained smile. ‘Yes, he does.’

  She was about thirty-five or -six, at least ten years younger than Quantrill. Her figure was sturdy, and she obviously took no interest in clothes. Her fair hair was tied back loosely at the nape of her neck in a style that suits a mature woman only if she has a particularly good bone structure, and Gillian Ainger had not. She gave the impression of having chosen her hair-style and her pale lipstick at the age of eighteen, and of having thought no more about them. And yet she had a pleasant open face, with smallish but widely spaced hazel eyes and a generous mouth. If she bothered, Quantrill thought, she could look attractive.

  But perhaps her husband gave her no encouragement. As he himself had discovered – belatedly, after twenty-odd years of marriage – it seems to make a disproportionate amount of difference to a woman if her husband takes a bit of notice of her. For a start, it might make Mrs Ainger look happier. The lines at each side of her mouth were deeper than her age warranted, and she looked dark and tired round the eyes.

  She had led him down the wide chilly hall, floored with Victorian encaustic tiles, and into a sparsely furnished study. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee while you’re waiting?’ she asked, as she lit the gas fire.

  ‘Thank you, but I’ve just had one.’ The Chief Inspector had already called at the church hall and seen the damage that had been done there. The allegation against Peter was serious, and he didn’t want either of the Aingers to think that he was treating the interview as a social occasion. And presumably Gillian Ainger knew about the trouble at the youth club. From all that he’d ever heard in the town, she played the conventional, supportive role of the parson’s wife. She was part of the team, sharing the social-work aspect
of the job with her husband and knowing as much if not more about the parish than he did.

  The telephone rang. Quantrill stood with his back to her while she answered it, looking out of the window at an expanse of virgin snow that was shrinking round the edges, but still covered most of the garden. The only footprints on it were those of birds and small animals, because the Aingers had no children. A shame to see all that unused snow, he thought; there had never been enough of it when he was a boy. Not that the appeal of snow lasted very long for youngsters. It was a thousand pities that young Peter wasn’t still content with the harmless pleasures of snowfights and tobogganing, instead of getting his kicks from helping to break up the church hall. Allegedly helping to break up the church hall.

  Behind him, Mrs Ainger was dealing competently and patiently with some kind of parish problem: listening, soothing, advising, co-operating. An ideal wife for a busy parson – she could probably take the services just as well as her husband, too, if anyone gave her a chance, Quantrill thought. Having been brought up in a Nonconformist family he was not even nominally C of E, and so he could afford to take a liberal view on the ordination of women.

  From the hall outside, there came a sudden irascible shout and a clattering noise. Mrs Ainger stopped in mid-sentence, the telephone receiver in her hand, and glanced with exasperation at the door. There was another cry, and this time it sounded like pain. Quantrill gave her an interrogative glance, but, without waiting for her reaction, took it upon himself to open the door and find out what was happening.

  A big-boned, scrawny old man sat at the turn of the wide staircase, fully dressed except that one foot was bare and the other was half in, half out of, a sock. One slipper, fallen or flung, lay on the hall floor, the other on the second step. He was rocking and wailing, nursing his bare mottled foot in both hands.