A Talent For Destruction Read online

‘Are you all right?’ asked Quantrill, taking the stairs two at a time and putting one hand on his shoulder. The old man squinted up at him through ferociously tufted eyebrows, and immediately quietened. The slack folds of his face were unshaven, and he smelled of tobacco and, faintly, of urine.

  ‘She’s hidden me shoes,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I want me shoes, and she won’t let me have’em. I want to go out.’

  There was a ping as Mrs Ainger put down the telephone and came into the hall. Immediately, he resumed his noisy performance: ‘Oh, oh, oh, I’ve hurt me foot. I can’t find me shoes and me slippers are loose, and now I’ve fallen down the stairs and hurt me foot. Oh, it hurts.’ He spied down at her, assessing the effect he was having, and Quantrill retreated to ground level, out of the way.

  ‘Stop making such a fuss, Dad,’ she said evenly. ‘The pavements are still far too slippery. It’s not safe for you to go out on your own.’

  ‘I haven’t been out for months and months,’ he grumbled childishly. ‘Not for months.’

  ‘It’s been snowing since before Christmas,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Not for months before that, either. Not since last summer …’

  ‘But that,’ she reminded him, ‘was because you’d hurt your back. And anyway, you’re exaggerating. One or other of us has taken you out in the car at least once a week –’

  ‘That don’t count. I don’t want to be taken out by him and made to sit in a posh pub with a bloody carpet on the floor, and I don’t want to drink the fizzy muck he thinks is beer. I want to walk as far as the Boot and meet folks as’ll talk to me, and drink pints o’draught bitter and – and spit on the floor if I feel like it!’

  The old man’s face had coloured with genuine passion and now, suddenly and deliberately, he spat on the tiles of the hall. His daughter froze. She was white except for a splotch of angry colour on either cheek. Quantrill stood still, trying – as far as it was possible for a man of his height and weight – to pretend that he wasn’t there. Only his eyes moved, from father to daughter to the yellow gob that lay on the floor between them, at once a reproach, an insult, and a token of impotent defiance.

  But the old man’s rebellion collapsed as quickly as it had begun. He started to cry, almost silently, the tears oozing down the vertical creases of his face and mingling with residual dribble on his emery-paper chin. His daughter let out a long breath, bent to pick up his slippers, and carried them to where he sat hunched on the stairs, his big knotted workman’s hands hanging limp between his knees.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad,’ she said wearily. ‘Don’t upset yourself. Here, put your slippers on.’

  His lower lip trembled. ‘I’ve lost me other sock.’

  She retrieved it from where it had fallen, knelt down and eased his socks and slippers on to his stiff, shiny, purple feet. He wiped the cuff of his cardigan across his wet eyes.

  ‘Will you cut me toenails tonight, dear?’ he supplicated.

  Her hands were still shaking with tension, but she forced herself to smile. ‘That’s a farrier’s job, with nails as tough as yours! You’ve got an appointment with the chiropodist next week, so you won’t have long to wait.’

  ‘I might make holes in me socks afore then. I don’t want to give you extra work. I don’t want to be a burden.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. You go upstairs and get shaved, and then I’ll make your coffee.’

  ‘With hot milk?’

  ‘With hot milk.’

  ‘You’re a good daughter to me, our Gilly.’

  She said nothing, but watched him climb stiffly to his feet and shamble up the stairs, a great ruin of a man, his trousers slack round his bony haunches, his cardigan unevenly buttoned. Then she ran, set-faced, to the cloakroom that led off the hall, returned with a wad of toilet paper and a bottle of disinfectant, wiped the spittle off the floor, flushed the paper down the lavatory and scrubbed her hands. Only then did she acknowledge that Quantrill was still there.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said jerkily, without looking at him. ‘It seemed inappropriate to attempt an introduction, but that was my father, Henry Bowers. He’s been living with us for the past year, ever since my mother died.’ One corner of her mouth gave a wry twist: ‘Living and partly living … I hope you weren’t too shocked.’

  He shook his head reassuringly. ‘Policemen don’t shock so easily.’

  ‘Oh –’ Gillian Ainger coloured, suddenly confused. ‘I’d quite forgotten, for a moment, what your job is.’

  ‘I hadn’t. And it’s very embarrassing, I can tell you, to know that your husband suspects my son of vandalism.’

  She relaxed a little, grateful that he had changed the subject; and then the front door opened and the Rector hurried in, apologizing for being late.

  The Reverend Robin Ainger was a very good-looking man, nearing forty but still slim, narrow-shouldered but almost as tall as Quantrill. There was however something dated about his looks. His particular style of handsomeness – regular features, perfect teeth and short, cleanly parted, evenly wavy light brown hair – was one that had gone out of fashion with baggy trousers, big band sounds and cries of ‘Anyone for tennis?’ The outdated impression was reinforced by his tweed jacket and roll-necked sweater. Even so, it was easy to see why St Botolph’s church always attracted such a loyal female congregation. The colour of the Rector’s sweater exactly matched, and emphasized, the unusually pale blue of his eyes.

  He greeted Quantrill with wary affability; presumably he wasn’t looking forward to the interview either. Then he turned to his wife, putting a hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘Everything all right, Gillian?’

  She hesitated, as though wondering whether to tell him. ‘Henry had a tantrum, I’m afraid – in front of Mr Quantrill.’

  Her husband’s hand tightened. ‘He would … What about, this time?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Wanting to go out to the pub on his own.’

  Robin Ainger looked at Quantrill defensively. ‘I expect you think we’re being over-protective –’ he began, but Quantrill interrupted him.

  ‘If you really want to know what I was thinking,’ he said bluntly, ‘it was “Thank God my poor old father didn’t live that long”. He died of a heart attack when he was playing bowls, at the age of sixty-eight. It was a shock for us at the time, and we grieved that he’d died so soon after retirement, but looking back I’m glad he went like that. I wouldn’t wish the humiliations of old age on him, and I wouldn’t want my wife to have the burden of looking after the old boy. Our Peter is quite demanding enough.’

  The Rector nodded, and released Gillian’s shoulder. ‘Yes. I know you’re a busy man, Mr Quantrill, and I’m grateful to you for calling.’ He gestured the Chief Inspector into his study. ‘Thank you for holding the fort,’ he said to his wife. ‘I think we’d all appreciate some coffee, wouldn’t we? And if you wouldn’t mind intercepting any calls for the next twenty minutes or so –?’

  Quantrill caught a glimpse of her face as her husband closed the door: tense, anxiety-ridden, near to breaking point. In that particular partnership, he thought, it looked as though Gillian Ainger was the one on whom the greatest demands were made.

  The interview was, on both sides, uncomfortable. They began with unnatural heartiness, agreeing that the church hall incident would never have occurred if the volunteer supervisor hadn’t suddenly gone down with flu. The Rector emphasized that he had as yet no firm evidence for his suspicion that Peter Quantrill was involved, and the Chief Inspector asserted that there would be no question of whitewashing the crime just because his son might have taken part. They further agreed, over watery coffee brought in almost immediately by Mrs Ainger, that Peter was one of the liveliest of the youth-club members, and currently anti-authority.

  There were, of course, mitigating circumstances. No doubt all the boys felt frustrated after weeks of being cooped up because of the bad weather; and Peter’s age, fifteen, was a particularly difficult one. And then, being a policema
n’s son was in itself a kind of challenge. As Robin Ainger put it sociologically, adolescents always seek the approbation of the peer group. As Douglas Quantrill put it bluntly, a copper’s son always feels that he has to prove himself to his mates.

  ‘The boy was limping a bit when he came home last night, but he said nothing at all either then or this morning, so I’m grateful to you for getting in touch with me personally,’ said Quantrill. ‘It would have been very embarrassing if the first I knew about the damage was when I saw his name in a report from one of my men.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, otherwise I wouldn’t have troubled you.’ Robin Ainger flexed an ivory paperknife in his long thin fingers. ‘I’m very angry about this incident, Mr Quantrill,’ he went on, ‘very angry indeed. The youngsters themselves have put so much time and effort into the improvement and redecoration of the church hall over the years, and I find it intolerable that an anti-social minority should –’

  The Chief Inspector, for once on the wrong side of the desk, heard him out patiently with an expression that combined surrogate penitence with a reservation on his son’s behalf of the right to plead Not Guilty. Listening to the Rector’s tone of voice rather than to his words, he was puzzled that the two should be so much at odds. The impression that Quantrill had gained, in the four years in which Ainger had been at St Botolph’s, was of a vigorous, positive, outgoing man. Now, although the Rector was voicing angry sentiments, he appeared to be completely detached from what he was saying, like an incompetent amateur actor. His eyes seemed dead behind the blue. He neither looked nor sounded angry, but as though he no longer cared.

  But there were, without doubt, thought Quantrill, domestic reasons for the change in the man. Having his father-in-law living with them would be more than enough to try the charity of a saint.

  ‘And I take it very seriously too, Mr Ainger,’ the Chief Inspector concurred. ‘There will be a full investigation, of course, and I shan’t do it myself. I’ll report the incident to my Superintendent at Yarchester, and leave him to appoint the investigating officer.’

  Ainger nodded, apparently satisfied that he had made his point. ‘I’d be glad if Detective Sergeant Tait did the investigation. He gave a talk to the youth club on CID work a few months ago, and the members liked him. I’m anxious not to alienate them. There’s so little for them to do in the town, and if they stay away from the club because of the investigation it will have done more harm than good.’

  ‘That’s a risk we’ll have to accept, I’m afraid. I’ve no idea who’ll investigate, but it won’t be Martin Tait – he’s been promoted Inspector, put back into uniform and moved to Yarchester. I can assure you that the enquiry will be done sensitively, though – we all agree with you about the value of the youth club.’

  Quantrill rose to go. During the course of their conversation there had been one ring at the front door and two telephone calls, all dealt with by Mrs Ainger. Now the men heard the doorbell again, accompanied by a frenzied knocking. There were shrill voices in the hall, a moment of silence, and then the slap of running feet on the tiles.

  Gillian Ainger burst into the room, her face pale, her eyes wide. She addressed her husband. ‘Some boys – they say they’ve been playing in our meadow – they think they’ve found a body!’

  Robin Ainger’s handsome lower jaw dropped open. He focused his eyes with difficulty on his wife. He made a stammering noise, but Gillian held up her hand as if to press it against his mouth and prevent him from speaking. She shook her head vigorously, and made an effort to be calm and accurate. ‘No, not a body. But it sounds as though they’ve found a human skull.’

  Robin Ainger shut his eyes tight and swallowed hard. Quantrill strode to the door.

  ‘Same thing, Mrs Ainger, as far as the police are concerned. Just as well I was here, it’ll save you the trouble of ringing the station.’

  He disappeared into the hall to talk to the boys who had brought the news, leaving the Aingers staring at each other in horrified, guilty silence.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Rats,’ said Chief Inspector Quantrill. ‘Rats and carrion crows – it’s been a hard winter.’

  ‘Oh, but surely –?’

  Robin Ainger was standing with him in the snow at the bottom of Parson’s Close, staring at what lay under the bushes. The two boys, Justin and Adrian, having pointed out the spot from the top of the meadow, were being cared for by Mrs Ainger until a police car came to take them home. Quantrill, an investigating officer rather than a scene-of-crime specialist, was careful to disturb nothing while he waited for the arrival of his colleagues, but meanwhile he was making a few observations of his own.

  ‘I mean –’ Ainger had followed Quantrill dressed as he had been indoors, and his teeth were chattering with cold. The Chief Inspector, who was used to standing about in all weathers, had not only put on his overcoat and hat, but also changed his shoes for the wellingtons that he kept in the boot of his car. He would have thought that the Rector had conducted graveside services in winter sufficiently often to know enough to keep his feet dry; but perhaps it wasn’t done for a parson to wear welly boots under his cassock.

  Ainger made an effort to stop shivering, although his face was greenish-white with chill and nausea. ‘I don’t know how you can be so sure that it’s a comparatively recent death,’ he said. ‘The skeleton could be years old – half a century or more.’

  Quantrill crouched down to point out what he had observed. ‘No. If it had been here for any length of time, the brambles would have grown through the skull. And anyway, there’s quite a lot of clothing left, and jeans with copper rivets don’t date back very far. Forensic will tell us for sure, but I know that it’s perfectly possible for a corpse to be reduced to a skeleton, out of doors, within a matter of weeks, let alone months. I was brought up on my father’s gruesome stories of life in the trenches in the First World War, and I’ve had a horror of rats ever since.’

  He stood up, rubbing the small of his back which had stiffened in the cold. ‘A man, almost certainly, from the size of the skull; and young, I should guess, from the jeans. Well, man or woman, we’ve no Breckham Market people unaccounted for at present. Have we, Rector?’

  The formal address helped Ainger pull himself together. ‘No, not to my knowledge. If it’s as recent as you think, it can’t be anyone local.’

  He looked round. Just beyond the bushes was a barbed-wire fence, then the snowed-over grass verge of the by-pass, built in the 1960s when the Suffolk town became an overspill area for industries and people from the crowded inner districts of north-east London. The medieval centre of the town was too narrow to take the increased volume of traffic, and the by-pass had the effect of separating the old Breckham Market from the new. ‘The body could have come from anywhere,’ Ainger pointed out. ‘It could have been brought here by road and dumped over the barbed wire.’

  Quantrill nodded. ‘That sort of thing does happen – although when a body’s dumped it’s usually in woodland, where there’s less chance of its being found. Well, wherever it’s from, this one has landed on our doorstep so we’ll have to do the investigating.’

  Two police cars and a van pulled up on the verge, and half a dozen policemen encumbered with equipment climbed gingerly over the barbed wire. Quantrill gave them brief instructions and they went about their work in the snow, roping off the area and setting up screens and taking photographs.

  ‘It could have been a natural death, of course,’ said Quantrill to Ainger. ‘There’s still the odd vagrant about who sleeps rough in the summer. One of them might have fallen ill and died here.’

  ‘Is it possible to tell the cause of death, if the body’s been reduced to a skeleton?’ Ainger asked.

  ‘It all depends –’ Quantrill paused, watching for a moment as the photographer adjusted his lens for a close-up ‘– on what Inspector Colman and his team discover when they move the remains and search the area. There may be a meths bottle, or a hypodermic syringe, or a shot
gun. And if there isn’t, the pathologist may find a fracture on the skull or on the vertebrae of the neck, or a knife-nick on the ribs, that will indicate foul play. Or the chemist may find traces of poison when he analyses the soil from beneath the body. But if nothing significant is found, and there’s no forensic evidence, then even the experts won’t be able to tell us the cause of death.’

  ‘There’s not a lot that you personally can do, then?’ Ainger asked. His teeth were chattering again, and he turned up the collar of his jacket against his wind-reddened ears and rubbed his hands together.

  ‘Oh, there’s plenty. For a start, it’s my job to find out who the man was. Look, Mr Ainger, why don’t you go home? I’ll have to come and ask you some questions after I’ve seen Inspector Colman.’

  ‘Questions?’

  ‘Yes. This is your land, after all, so I’ll have to start with you.’

  ‘Ah, of course. Naturally, I’ll do whatever I can to help. I have to go to a meeting this afternoon, but I’ll be at home until about one-thirty.’ Ainger noticed the toboggan that lay abandoned near the bushes. ‘I may as well take this out of your way – I don’t imagine the boys will want to fetch it after the fright they’ve had. I’ll see you later, then, Mr Quantrill.’

  He nodded to the Chief Inspector, took a last glance at the remains of the body, and waded up the slope towards the Rectory, tugging the toboggan behind him. On the by-pass, an unmarked car pulled in behind the police van in a spray of slush. Quantrill, his boots creaking on the snow, went to hold down the barbed wire so that his colleague Inspector Colman could climb over and join him at the start of their investigation.

  Gillian Ainger was in the kitchen, going through the motions of ironing her way through a pile of her father’s thick vests and long-johns, but with all her senses expectant of her husband’s return. As soon as she heard him open the front door she ran into the hall and silently beckoned him to join her, hoping not to attract her father’s attention.