Fate Worse Than Death

  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

  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

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thiryt Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Sheila Radley

  A Fate Worse than Death

  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 Kay and Barbara Crispin

  Chapter One

  Waking again to stifling, shuttered darkness, she despaired. If she had to endure much longer, she knew that she would die.

  Already she felt ill. After weeks – or was it only days? – of shouting and beating her fists on the door she was too exhausted to weep. Her chest was so tight that drawing breath was painful, her bruised hands throbbed, her head felt as light and inconsequential as a balloon. Her skin was clammy, crawled upon by flies. She kept shivering, despite the summer’s heat, and her limbs seemed too heavy to be moved without conscious effort.

  She could no longer eat. When food arrived, so too did her new room-mates, rustling and squeaking, their small eyes glowing at her in the dark. Fear and revulsion splattered out of her into the bucket in the corner, and the smell compounded her nausea. She would die if she stayed here. She was going to die.

  But dear God, how long would it take?

  Chapter Two

  In the hottest August for half a century, everyone wilted. So too did the old climbing roses, the yellow and apricot Gloire de Dijon, the fragrant pink Zephirine Drouhin, that clung to every wall in Fodderstone Green and gave the hamlet the reputation of being the prettiest in Suffolk.

  It was also reputedly the smallest and most remote. Fodderstone Green had been purpose-built by an early nineteenth-century Earl of Brandon to house some of his estate workers. The estate was in Breckland, then a tract of heath and twisted pine trees and flinty sheep pasture, haunted by stone curlews and the peewit cry of lapwings, that covered miles of sparsely populated upland to the west of Breckham Market.

  Although the estate had been broken up in the 1920s and the Earl’s great Hall demolished, the hamlet remained essentially unchanged. Fodderstone Green was officially listed in its entirety as being of Grade I architectural and historic interest. No new building was permitted and no exteriors could be altered, although planning restrictions were relaxed sufficiently in the latter part of the twentieth century to allow the inhabitants inconspicuous access to electricity, telephones, and plumbing.

  To outward appearance, Fodderstone Green remained a perfect example of a hamlet in the Gothic Revival style, designed for picturesque effect. It consisted of ten individual cottages, bowered among lime trees and dispersed about a village green. Each cottage was thatched, its roof steeply pitched and hipped, its pointed windows filled with interlacing lattices of lead, its arched front door sheltered by a thatched porch supported on rustic poles. The result was slightly absurd but entirely charming: a setting for a fairy-tale, a city-dwelling exile’s dream of age-old rural England.

  It was, of course, a sham. Age-old rural England had never looked like that. Fodderstone village proper, situated at a windswept Breckland crossroads a quarter of a mile from the Arcadian green, was far older and more authentic. But Fodderstone – a huddle of houses in different building-styles and materials, together with a plain eighteenth-century pub called the Flintknappers Arms and a church and a school, both now redundant because the population had shrunk – was not picturesque. No sightseers in search of Regency cottages ornés gave Fodderstone a second glance. They lingered instead on Fodderstone Green exclaiming, ‘Isn’t it delightful!’

  But that was in summer. In winter, when sightseers no longer came, the hamlet gave a different impression.

  The cottages were built entirely of local material: Suffolk reed for the thatch, Breckland flint for the walls. But Breckland flint is not like the rounded cobblestone flints that were once gathered from the shingle banks of the North Norfolk coast and used for building in that area: there, the pale-skinned stones, laid intact in regular rows, make cottage walls look as warm and chunky as a fisherman’s hand-knitted sweater.

  Breckland flint is different. In the days when it was used for building – or for making Neolithic axe-heads, or flintlocks for eighteenth-century muskets – it had to be hewn out of the underlying chalk in large, irregular nodules. Before use the nodules had to be split into manageable halves or quarters, exposing the black flint inside the thin chalk crust. And when facing material was wanted, for a mediaeval church tower and porch or, as at Fodderstone Green, for early nineteenth-century domestic buildings, small slices of flint were chipped off – knapped – and then mortared together like pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. The resulting wall surfaces were hard and flat and black.

  In summer, when the cottage walls were smothered by roses, little could be seen of the knapped flints except an occasional sparkle when the sunlight caught them. But the residents knew that when the roses were dead and the sun no longer shone, Fodderstone Green looked a cold, sombre place. Gloomy. Peculiar. Enough to give you the creeps.

  In the month preceding the hottest August for half a century, someone kidnapped Beryl Websdell’s gnome.

  Garden gnomes are not indigenous to rural Suffolk. Mrs Websdell’s Willum, who
had sat on a stone toadstool beside a lily pond in the front garden of her cottage on Fodderstone Green for more than twenty years, was a foreigner from Great Yarmouth. But Beryl was fond of him because her husband Geoff had won him at a fairground shooting-gallery while they were on their honeymoon, and so she gave the plaster gnome an annual spring clean, repairing his weather-beaten features with Polyfilla, repainting his hat green and his jacket red, and fixing an encouraging new string to his fishing-rod even though the goldfish in the lily pond had long since been eaten by a heron.

  When the gnome disappeared, in mid-July, Beryl was upset. She didn’t think it funny that a ransom note had been spiked on a rose bush by the garden gate, demanding a pound of jelly babies for his safe return. Her friends and neighbours didn’t think it funny either; nor did the police. It seemed a particularly cruel trick for anyone to play on a woman whose only daughter had disappeared without explanation two days earlier, just before she was to have been married.

  Geoff Websdell had called in the police as soon as the girl disappeared, but they had found no reason to fear for her safety. Her honeymoon clothes had gone with her, and everyone who knew her – with the exception of her understandably aggrieved fiancé – thought that Sandra had found that she couldn’t face the marriage, and had cut and run.

  Beryl, a joyful Christian ever since she had attended a Revivalist meeting on a more recent holiday in Great Yarmouth, was philosophical about the cancelled wedding. About her daughter she was entirely optimistic, convinced that Sandra would telephone or write just as soon as she had sorted herself out.

  But the kidnapping of the gnome was a blow. Beryl’s eyes, usually shining with born-again happiness, were temporarily dulled.

  ‘It’s only a silly joke,’ she said with forced brightness to her neighbours, Constance Schultz and Marjorie and Howard Braithwaite; but she and her husband couldn’t help wondering whether it might have some connection with their daughter’s disappearance.

  The police wondered the same thing. But on the more probable assumption that it had been nothing more than a casual prank, they advised Beryl to buy the jelly babies and leave them on the stone toadstool on the appointed night. Geoff Websdell kept watch; but the ransom was not collected and Willum was never returned. The jelly babies were still there in their limp paper bag three weeks later, congealed by the heat into a mono-coloured gunge.

  Ill as she felt, Sandra Websdell could not passively wait there to die.

  She knew now that although he intended her no physical harm, he would never voluntarily let her go. She had of course refused to co-operate, but at the same time she had tried to reassure him by promising that if only he would let her go she would tell no one what had happened. She intended to leave Fodderstone anyway, she told him, and she would say nothing to anyone before she went. But he refused to listen to reason, and everything else she tried – pleading, cajoling, weeping, screaming – all had the same negative result.

  She hadn’t attempted violence, but a direct attack on him was out of the question. The room, sparsely furnished for her captivity, contained nothing that she could use as a weapon. Besides, he was much too strong for her, even if she still had her health. But her weakness had given her one major advantage: he no longer kept her tethered to prevent her from trying to escape when he came to bring her food and change the buckets.

  If she pretended to be amenable, ate enough to build up her strength, she might one day be able to dodge him and make a run for the door.

  And then what?

  She had no way of knowing exactly where she was. She could make guesses, based on distant and infrequent sounds of vehicles, but she couldn’t be sure. She had heard no voices outside, but that didn’t necessarily mean that there was no nearby habitation. If only she could get out of this building, she might find help before he caught up with her. It was worth trying, anyway. Anything was better than staying here to rot.

  But if she took a chance and ran, she had to be prepared for the fact that he would do everything he could to stop her. He might even lose his head and use force.

  She could be hurt. Or worse. Supposing that, in trying to stop her, he panicked and used too much force: supposing he killed her?

  It was a hideous risk for her to take. But she felt so ill … Better a quick death, she thought, than this protracted dying.

  Confident of her daughter’s safety and eventual return, Beryl Websdell got over the loss of her gnome by the end of the following week.

  ‘Oh well, it was just a piece of foolishness,’ she said, thinking of the kidnapper’s potential for salvation. ‘I expect Willum’s been put in someone else’s garden for a joke. He’s probably in another village, enjoying a change of scene,’ she concluded, happily unaware that the gnome was no further away than the outskirts of Fodderstone, lying irretrievably damaged in a roadside ditch.

  Chapter Three

  Somewhere above the remote corner of East Anglia where the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire meet, a light aircraft buzzed across the cloudless sky.

  From the ground, it looked a beautiful day for flying. From 2,000 feet, it was not. The horizon was obscured by a heat haze, and visibility was also hampered by rising smoke from harvested cornfields, where farmers were burning surplus straw. The pilot, a fair sharp-featured man in his middle twenties, shirt-sleeved and wearing sun-glasses, silently cursed the farmers as he searched for the landmarks he needed. With an impressionable passenger beside him in the tiny cockpit, this was no time to be lost.

  He checked his heading again, and looked out to the side. Below him was the unmistakable Breckland landscape of Forestry Commission plantations interspersed with large arable fields, grassy heath and older private woodlands. And yes, there was the railway line he was searching for … and there was the busy A11 road … and there was the bridge carrying the road over the railway. His airfield – the flying club’s grass airfield at Horkey – ought to be visible now, south-east of the bridge. It must be there. He’d taken off from it only forty minutes ago.

  He banked, and immediately saw the airfield just where it should be on the heading he was flying. His navigation was so exact that the field had been temporarily blocked from his view by the nose of the Cessna. Not bad, not bad at all …

  He pressed a button on the control yoke and spoke into his headset microphone: ‘Horkey, this is Golf India Romeo Sierra Romeo, Cessna 152, inbound. Heading 350 at 2,000 feet on QNH 1015, estimating overhead at 20, over.’

  The reply from the control tower came crackling over the radio. Alison Quantrill, the passenger, taking her first trip in a light aeroplane, marvelled that her pilot found the crackles intelligible. She knew that he wanted her to be impressed, and she was. There had been times in the past when she had found his self-assurance repulsive, but the thoroughness of his pre-flight checks and the quiet confidence with which he handled the aircraft filled her with admiration. Her father had often said, irritably, that the most maddening thing about Martin Tait was that he really was as good a detective as he thought he was. And as good a pilot, too, Alison intended to tell her father. Flying with Martin was exhilarating, the most exciting thing she’d done for years.

  He repeated the runway and QFE instruction, reset his altimeter and then turned his head to glance at her, enjoying the sparkle in her eyes. Pity she looked so much like the old man, his former boss: same green eyes, same dark hair, except of course that Doug Quantrill’s was now streaked with grey. But there the resemblance ended, thank God. Alison was lovely …

  There was no need for him to touch her in order to draw her attention. He had given her a headset to wear so that they could speak through the intercom instead of having to pitch their voices against the throb of the engine. But she was wearing a sleeveless dress and he wanted to feel her cool bare arm under his fingers.

  ‘There’s the airfield,’ he told her. ‘When we’re over it, we descend to 800 feet and then make a circuit before landing. And look, there’s Fodderstone,
the village where my aunt lives. You see how near it is to the aero club – less than ten minutes by car. An ideal place to come and spend a flying holiday.’

  Martin Tait was looking forward to his leave. It had already been postponed twice on account of the demands of his job as a member of the Regional Crime Squad. An undisguisedly ambitious man, he was always ready to put work before pleasure; but this particular leave would have a special flavour. Although his current car was a used Alfa Romeo Alfasud 1.5 rather than the new 2000 CTV coupé he aspired to (on his way to the bachelor’s dream, a Porsche 944) he had just acquired a more distinctive possession. Having recently qualified as a private pilot, he knew that he was the only police inspector in the county force to be part-owner – although his share was, admittedly, only a twentieth – of a two-seater aeroplane.

  Not surprisingly, since his only income was his salary, he had no plans to marry in the near future. Time enough for that when he was thirty or a Chief Superintendent, whichever came sooner. It would be important to choose his future wife carefully, because he intended to be a man in the public eye: the youngest-ever Chief Constable in the country. After that, in due course, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary; or else Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Either job would earn him a knighthood. By the time he was ready to retire from the force, in his middle fifties, he and his wife would be Sir Martin and Lady Tait.

  And by then, in thirty years’ time – hopefully much sooner, within the next ten years, but it seemed indecent to anticipate the death of a member of his family of whom he was quite fond – he would have inherited a sizeable legacy. He wasn’t sure what it would amount to, but at a guess at least a hundred thousand. Certainly enough to put him in the BMW bracket. Perhaps he’d even be able to afford to buy a Cessna of his own …

  The airfield was directly below him. He called the control tower: ‘Horkey – Sierra Romeo overhead.’