Fate Worse Than Death Read online

  The two men glared at each other across the bar counter. Phil Goodwin’s eyes slid in the reporter’s direction. ‘Oh well – I’ll ask Lois to do you a fry-up,’ he agreed sulkily.

  ‘What about you, sir?’ the reporter appealed to Charley Horrocks. ‘Do you remember Sandra Websdell?’

  Horrocks raised his nose from his mug and reached for his copy of the Sun. ‘Good-lookin’gel,’ he mused with some regret. ‘Well developed … Titillatin’, you might say. Pity about what happened to her, but there’s no doubt she arsked for it.’

  The reporter’s eyes popped. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He said it’, broke in Stan Bolderow, bristling ominously, ‘because he’s a dirty old fool.’ He advanced slowly on Horrocks, his bald head glistening with sweat, his muscular body stretching the holes in his string vest to their limit. Charley Horrocks was twice Stan’s size, and perched up on a bar stool; but Stan was younger and very fit. He took a sudden rush at the third Earl’s grandson, butting Charley’s beer-barrel of a body so hard that the man was knocked backwards, his purple face incredulous, his khaki arms and legs flailing as he fell.

  ‘And as for you, boy –’ said Stan, breathing hard as he turned; but the spotted cherub was already half-way to the door, having

  decided not to pursue this particular story until he had the support

  of an experienced reporter.

  ‘Did you have to do that, Stan?’ said Phil Goodwin angrily as he went round the counter to help heave Charley Horrocks on to his stool again. ‘The last thing we want is to draw attention to ourselves.’

  ‘The last thing we want is to have this stupid bugger shooting his mouth off to the press,’ Stan retorted. ‘He might say anything. Besides, I’m not going to stand by an’listen to his dirty talk about the girl. I was fond of her. If you want to know, I’m wholly upset that she died.’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ said Reg Osler.

  ‘We’re none of us exactly happy about it,’ snapped Howard Braithwaite. ‘It was extremely inconvenient for us, to say the least. There’ll be reporters and policemen all over the village now, and I for one am going to keep my head down. As far as I‘m concerned, the rest of the project’s cancelled.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s not!’ Phil Goodwin shouted. ‘We’ve gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to set it up, and there’s too much at stake to cancel it now.’

  ‘Then don’t attempt to include me. I’ve finished with it – and with all of you. We’ve never been equally involved, and I have no intention of being dragged down with you if you’re caught.’

  ‘Haven’t you, Mr Braithwaite?’ Reg gave a jeering laugh. ‘Well, you’d better have another think about that, because you are involved. Doesn’t matter which of us did what, or when or where. You played your part, and you’re not going to wriggle out of it.’

  ‘I’d like to see him try,’ threatened Stan.

  ‘He can’t get out of it,’ asserted Phil Goodwin. ‘He’s in as deep as we are, and he knows it. That’s why we’ve got to stick together. When the police come round asking questions, we must all be ready with the same story. Right?’

  He suggested a communal alibi for the previous evening. Braithwaite and Bolderow and Osler argued hotly, but could think of no better alternative.

  ‘Right, Charley?’ Goodwin demanded.

  The third Earl’s grandson lifted his nose from his mug and bayed his agreement.

  Chapter Twenty

  When Desmond Flood left Fodderstone the previous day, he had told his landlady that he expected to return on the 5.15 bus from Saintsbury on Wednesday afternoon.

  He could, of course, have been lying. That was one reason why Chief Inspector Quantrill had sent DC Wigby to Saintsbury in an attempt to trace the man. But on the off-chance that Flood would do as he’d said – either because he was innocent of Sandra Websdell’s abduction and death, or because he was cunning enough to try to avert suspicion from himself by returning – Quantrill decided to go to Horkey and wait for the bus to arrive.

  Horkey was a bigger, busier village than Fodderstone, with several shops, a post office, a school, and the invaluable bus service. The bus stop was outside a small brick and flint house in whose weedy garden a couple of tables and benches were parked in the shade of an elder bush. The garden was staked with hand-painted signs offering everything the owners could think of to tempt passers-by to stop and buy: Country Crafts, Bric-à-Brac, Herbs, Victoriana, Hamsters, Salads, Teas.

  ‘And not a bad cup of tea, either,’ Quantrill admitted with grudging surprise. On his own, he would not have gone near the place; but Hilary Lloyd had made straight for it, and he had followed out of courtesy and thirst. ‘I never trust anywhere that advertises “country crafts”,’ he went on. Suffolk born and bred, he recognized the hallmark of incomers and regarded them with the traditional countryman’s mixture of suspicion and derision. ‘You can bet it’s run by townies, playing at what they think is country life.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they can’t make a perfectly good cup of tea.’

  ‘Hmm. I expected it would turn out to be herbal.’

  Hilary had worked with him long enough to realize that she would never shift his prejudices, though she kept on trying. ‘I might have known you’d think that,’ she said.

  She smiled at him as she said it, and he took no offence. Although she was lively and womanly, she usually made a point of keeping her distance. She laughed easily, but she didn’t often give a wholehearted smile. And that was a pity.

  Quantrill knew that she’d been attacked, years ago when she was a uniformed policewoman in Yarchester, by a villain wielding a broken bottle. Although she wore her dark hair in a sideswept fringe, she couldn’t completely hide the faint residual scar on her forehead. It jagged down towards her nose, just missing her eyes, and puckered her right eyebrow in a way that gave her what seemed from a distance to be a permanent frown. Really, he thought, she looked quite plain much of the time; but her smile, when it came, was a beauty.

  Suddenly conscious that he had been looking at her for too long, he stood up and moved away. ‘Now there’s a real country craft,’ he said, pointing across the road to an old brick-built, pantile-roofed shed. It stood at a right angle to the road, facing an open yard that seemed to be part coal-dump, part ironmongery junk-heap. On the gable end of the shed, in painted letters so faded as to be barely legible, was the name STAGG, and underneath it the words VETERINARY SHOEING FORGE. And below, in bold paint on a modern display board: Andrew Stagg, Farrier.

  ‘A proper old-established country business,’ Quantrill approved. ‘Good to see it continuing. No one would have thought, thirty years ago, that there’d be any future for farriers – but then, no one realized how popular riding would become.’

  A dismounted girl rider stood in the yard of the forge holding her horse’s head. At the blunt end of the animal, examining its off hind hoof, was a broad-shouldered young man in jeans and a leather apron, with a widespread distribution of dark curly hair on his head and bare chest.

  ‘Andrew Stagg himself, presumably,’ said Hilary, rising to join Quantrill. The young man now stood with his hands on his narrow hips, chatting and laughing with the girl as she remounted, and Hilary was looking at him in a way that Quantrill found disturbing and improper; that kind of frank appraisal of a member of the opposite sex was a man’s prerogative.

  ‘I should think Andrew Stagg’s services are very much in demand,’ she went on, oblivious of – or disregarding – her companion’s disapproval, ‘as far as all the female riders in this part of the county are concerned. He’s a very well-built young man.’

  Douglas Quantrill turned away, straightening his shoulders and sucking in his stomach muscles until they ached. ‘This dratted bus is late. We’re wasting time,’ he said irritably.

  A loud buzzing somewhere up above drew their attention to a piston-engined aircraft flying downwind at 800 feet. Quantrill squinted up at it and identified the yellow and wh
ite high-wing monoplane as one of the Cessnas that flew from Horkey’s old wartime airfield. He could just read – his eyesight would still be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that there was more small print about now than there used to be – the letters on the aeroplane’s wings: G-IRSR.

  ‘That’s Martin Tait,’ he complained. ‘Showing his skills to some girlfriend, no doubt …’

  ‘My impression, at the end of the briefing, was that he intended to do an aerial search for Sandra Websdell’s car,’ said Hilary.

  Quantrill snorted. ‘If I know Martin, he’ll be doing both. Showing off to a girl and trying to solve this case for us at the same time. Mind you,’ he added fairly, ‘it’d be a great help if he could find Sandra’s car, and I certainly wouldn’t raise any objection because he’d done it unofficially. But he needn’t think he can put in an expense sheet for a tankful of aircraft fuel!’

  ‘A light aeroplane isn’t really the right machine for the job, though, is it?’ said Hilary. ‘Couldn’t we borrow an army helicopter? After all, this is a murder enquiry.’

  Quantrill shook his head. ‘Not a chance. The force has to pay for the use of army machines, and you know how tight our budget is. The ACC would turn the request down flat. And I really couldn’t argue with him – it’d be different if we were looking for a vicious murderer, a psychopath who might kill again. From what you’ve said about Flood –’

  ‘That he’s lethargic? Yes, he moves as though he’s trying to wade through treacle. The Websdells say he’s been like that ever since they’ve known him, and so does his landlady. In fact, you know, it makes me doubtful that he’s the man we want. Whoever abducted Sandra and held her for three weeks against her will would have needed a lot more energy than Desmond Flood seems to possess.’

  ‘Is he ill?’ Quantrill demanded. ‘Mentally, I mean?’

  Hilary Lloyd had qualified as a State Registered Nurse before joining the police force. The Chief Inspector knew it and was inclined, to her annoyance, to regard her as a medical authority.

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ she pointed out, ‘still less a psychiatrist. I simply don’t know. It’s textbook wisdom that people who are apathetic, or clinically depressed, are unlikely to use any form of violence against anyone else; but I’m not qualified to say whether or not that applies to Desmond Flood. I’m just guessing.’

  ‘But according to the pathologist,’ persisted Quantrill, ‘whoever killed Sandra used a minimum of violence. And from the way he arranged her body on the bed, he was obviously filled with remorse over what he’d done. Couldn’t that have been Flood, however lethargic he may seem?’

  ‘Yes, it’s possible. That’s the point I’m making – your guess is just as good as mine.’ Hilary paused, thinking, her brow vertically ridged by the combination of frown and scar. ‘If Desmond Flood really is acutely depressed – and regardless of whether he was responsible for Sandra’s death – we do need to find him for his own sake. Because the person a depressive is most likely to kill is himself.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of,’ said Quantrill. ‘It’s one reason why I asked the Saintsbury division to try to find him, with or without Ian Wigby’s help.’

  The Saintsbury police had failed to find Flood. So too had DC Wigby, though he was still enjoying the job of looking. But their failure gave the Chief Inspector no problem. Guilty or not, depressive or not, Desmond Flood was alive and a passenger on the 5.15 bus from Saintsbury to Horkey.

  Flood was the last to alight, and the slowest. A man of medium height and slim build, he walked with dragging steps and bowed shoulders. His looks were potentially striking: strong features, a fine head of prematurely grey hair, dark eyebrows above dark eyes; but his head was down, his eyes dull, his demeanour defeated. He wasn’t just wading through treacle, he seemed to be up to his neck in it.

  Flood took the news of his fiancée’s death without any change in his expression. Sitting in the back of the Chief Inspector’s car, next to Sergeant Lloyd, he stared dully out of the open window at the tree they were parked under, and said nothing. His only reaction, after a few minutes, was a deep sigh.

  ‘You haven’t asked us how or when Sandra died,’ said Quantrill, turning sideways in the driving seat to look at the man. ‘Don’t you want to know?’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she was murdered,’ said Flood, his voice so dreary that it made him sound indifferent. ‘It’s what I expected, when she didn’t get in touch with her parents.’

  ‘But why did you think that? Why should she have been murdered?’

  ‘Because it’s what seems to happen to girls who go missing.’

  ‘Very often, yes. But usually they’re killed almost immediately. Sandra wasn’t though. She was kept against her will for three whole weeks before she died. What do you make of that, Mr Flood?’

  He said nothing at first. Then he asked distantly, ‘Was she … ill-treated?’

  ‘Ill-treated?’ Quantrill made an effort to control his anger. ‘Good God, man, don’t you count being held against her will as ill-treatment? Perhaps you’d like me to go over the details. For part of the time she was tethered with a rope, like an animal, and she bruised her back by tugging the rope forward in her attempts to unfasten it. She tore every one of her fingernails in her efforts to undo the knot. She –’

  ‘We know she wasn’t sexually assaulted, Mr Flood,’ Hilary said quietly. ‘Her captor didn’t behave with brutality. But ill-treatment isn’t necessarily physical, is it? Sandra must have gone through three weeks of mental torment. Mustn’t she?’

  Flood gave another of his deep sighs. Still staring out of the car at nothing he said dully, ‘Poor kid. She didn’t deserve that …’

  ‘What did she deserve, then?’ asked Quantrill quickly, leaning over to grip the man’s shoulder in an attempt to seize his attention. ‘If she didn’t deserve the anguish she must have gone through before she died, what did she deserve? Did you have some other punishment in mind for her because she’d rejected you?’

  ‘Rejected me?’ Flood sounded puzzled. Then he gave a curious neighing sound, a kind of mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, you’re wrong if you think I minded because she decided not to marry me. I liked Sandra – she was a nice girl. Very sweet, very kind. I suppose I was quite fond of her. Marriage to her would certainly have been a lot more comfortable than going on living on my own.

  ‘But I didn’t want to remarry at all. For one thing, I couldn’t afford it. My ex-wife took our house as part of the divorce settlement, and I haven’t any money apart from what I can scrape up by selling my paintings. And for another thing, I don’t want to acquire any new responsibilities. That was the whole point of getting a divorce and chucking my job. I’d had enough of pressures, of families and mortgages and clients and deadlines – I came here to be free.’

  ‘Then why did you ask Sandra to marry you?’ said Hilary.

  ‘I didn’t. It was her idea, not mine.’

  Hilary frowned at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this when I spoke to you three weeks ago, Mr Flood? You said then that you and Sandra were happy about the marriage, and that there were no problems between you.’

  Flood shrugged. ‘What I told you was the truth, in a way. There were no problems by then. We’d sorted things out, on the evening before she disappeared, and we parted happily, as friends.’

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me that you’d agreed to part?’

  ‘Because I didn’t think you’d believe me. If I’d told you the truth, you’d have imagined what you’re imagining now, that we’d quarrelled and I’d abducted her. And I didn’t want to be bothered by questions. I just want to be left alone.’

  Police officers have an inbuilt disinclination to believe people who have previously lied to them.

  And what, they asked Desmond Flood suspiciously, was he doing yesterday afternoon and evening?

  Flood said that he had gone to London. He travelled from Saintsbury by coach and went to see his ex-wife, who lived in Camden
; but she was not at home. Quite possibly she was away on holiday. He still had a key – after all, he’d worked hard enough to buy the house – so he let himself in and spent the night there. This morning he went to the Tate Gallery for a couple of hours – no, there hadn’t been an admission ticket – and then returned by coach to Saintsbury.

  ‘Why did you have this sudden urge to visit your ex-wife?’ asked Quantrill.

  ‘It wasn’t sudden. I’d been contemplating going back ever since Sandra called off our marriage.’

  Hilary’s feminism surfaced sharply. ‘What makes you think your ex-wife would want you back?’

  Flood knotted his dark eyebrows in an attempt to understand what evidently seemed to him a superfluous question. ‘I was the one who left,’ he said. ‘I was the one who wanted my freedom.’

  ‘Then why on earth are you thinking of giving it up?’ demanded Quantrill, genuinely wanting to know. He was a little younger than Desmond Flood, not yet fifty, and freedom was something he had dreamed of at intervals throughout his humdrum married life.

  Flood looked at Quantrill for the first time. ‘You should give it a try yourself,’ he advised sardonically. ‘When you get your freedom, it isn’t what you thought it was going to be. I used to despise my job and resent the fact that I never had time to paint – but now I’ve got all the time in the world, I’ve lost the urge. I used to row with my wife and hate the waste of spirit involved. But when you’ve got someone to be angry with, you do at least know that you’re alive.’

  The Chief Inspector drove Flood to his studio, a small flint barn in the main street of Fodderstone village. Flood had rented it for the summer from a retired farmer. It suited him well enough – it was cheap, and the skylight gave a good north light for painting. Yes, he got his own meals, after a fashion. He used to eat lunch at the Flintknappers Arms, but he gave up going there after Sandra disappeared. He couldn’t put up with Lois Goodwin’s relentless sympathy.

  Quantrill took a cursory look inside the barn. It was basically a single high room, with whitewashed walls and a wooden half-loft reached by a ladder. On an easel in the middle of the room was a half-finished, half-hearted canvas; the portrait of a woman, though not of Sandra Websdell. Other unfinished canvases, chiefly Breckland landscapes, were propped against the walls. The palette looked dusty, the paint on it dry and cracked.