Death and the Maiden Read online

  Her voice was steady. At first glance Quantrill had thought her remarkably unmoved by Mary’s death, but now he realised that what he had assumed to be bifocal lenses were in fact two small pools of tears, trapped against her high cheekbones by the frame of her glasses.

  He took a deep breath and started again. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Gedge. I’m very sorry about your daughter’s death, and I apologise for this intrusion—but I’m afraid that what you’re doing is very much our concern. In a case of sudden death it’s our duty to investigate the circumstances, and we’d have liked to see your daughter’s belongings just as she left them.’

  The girl’s mother stood straight and proud in the doorway of the caravan. ‘There’s nothing here to interest you. Chief Inspector. My Mary’s dead. Let her rest.’

  ‘I’m afraid that we have to find out how she died before we can do that,’ Quantrill pointed out quietly.

  ‘It was an accident. She went out early to pick flowers, slipped in the river and was drowned.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Tait asked. ‘Were you there, Mrs Gedge?’

  She turned on him. ‘Of course I wasn’t there! But what else could it have been? She didn’t jump in deliberately, if that’s what you mean—that would be sinful. And you’ve not come here to tell me that somebody killed her, because I know different. Charlie Godbold came and told us himself. A clean death, he said—she wasn’t harmed in any way.’

  ‘Yes. But we still need to know exactly what happened,’ Quantrill explained patiently. ‘There might have been witnesses, you see, and we have to find them.’

  Mrs Gedge shrugged. The movement released the tears from behind her glasses. They rolled down to her chin, gathering there for a moment before plopping singly on to the flat front of her cotton overall. ‘That’s no concern of mine. The Lord gave her to us, and in his wisdom he’s taken her away again. I don’t question his works, Chief Inspector.’

  There were times when the chief inspector wished that he didn’t have to question them either. ‘May we look inside the caravan, please?’ he asked.

  ‘If you must. Not that you’ll find anything. Mary was a good girl, and there’s nothing here will tell you any different.’

  ‘Then may I ask what you were doing here, Mrs Gedge?’ said Tait.

  She raised the corners of her downturned mouth, giving a momentary impression of satisfaction. ‘I was tidying up. She never let me give it a good turn-out, and I wanted to be sure that she’d kept it clean. And she had. Even folded up her sleeping bag and washed her crockery before she went out.’

  Mrs Gedge stepped down from the doorway and let the policemen in. She followed them. The caravan was old-fashioned, small-windowed and cramped with fittings, but scrupulously tidy. All the lockers and cupboards were open, their contents laid out for inspection: clean crockery, a jar of instant coffee and an opened packet of biscuits on the sink unit, a sleeping bag folded on the bunk beside a pile of clean underclothes, an assortment of blouses and skirts and jeans hanging from wire hangers on the outside of the wardrobe door, a heap of folders and books stacked on the table beneath the window. Apart from a transistor radio, and a calendar With Compliments and Thanks from R. J. Gedge, Draper and Family Grocer, Ashthorpe, hanging from the knob of a locker, there was nothing else at all.

  ‘Sellotape,’ muttered Tait, who spotted it first. Quantrill nodded.

  ‘What have you taken down, Mrs Gedge? Oh, come now. Look, there are bits of sellotape on the walls—obviously things were stuck here. What were they?’

  ‘Rubbish!’ she said vehemently. ‘Just rubbishy photographs. Actors and so-called singers.’

  ‘Any photographs of real people? I mean, friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you take them down?’

  ‘So that I could put them on the bonfire. Best place for them. A lot of silliness, not suitable for a girl of her education.’

  Quantrill riffled through the folders, but they appeared to contain nothing but essays and school work. ‘And what else did you remove? Any personal letters?’

  Two bright splotches warmed her cheeks. ‘A few. Just ordinary letters from school friends. No point in keeping them.’

  ‘Was there a letter from Mary herself? A note of any kind?’

  Her chin lifted. ‘No.’

  ‘A diary?’

  ‘No.’

  Tait intervened. ‘Where are the photographs and letters that you’re going to burn, Mrs Gedge?’

  Her mouth moved upward again, almost achieving the horizontal. ‘I’ve already put them on the bonfire. It’s in the middle of the orchard. Burned out by now, I should think.’

  Quantrill jerked his head at Tait, but the sergeant was already on his way out of the caravan. The chief inspector looked hard at the woman, trying to balance compassion against anger. ‘I must point out to you, Mrs Gedge, that it’s a serious offence to conceal evidence from the police.’

  She trembled with anger. ‘Evidence of what? What have you got against my daughter? I’ll tell you—nothing at all! She lived clean and she died clean, and there’s nothing here will tell you any different!’

  Quantrill could believe her. She had done her job with appalling thoroughness, destroying—with or without criminal intent—all evidence of her daughter’s private life.

  He stepped down from the caravan and walked over to the thickly blossomed hawthorn hedge. A gap, closed by a tattered section of wicker fencing, led on to a narrow country road; the fencing was wired to a branch of the hedge on one side, forming a crude gate. There were no houses within sight. On the opposite side of the road, as far as the eye could see, stretched a prairie farner’s lush green acreage of winter barley. It was an ideal back gate for someone who valued independence, a private exit where Mary could have come and gone without the knowledge either of family or of village gossips.

  Quantrill turned again to the orchard. Tait was returning from the bonfire, and the chief inspector went to meet him.

  The sergeant pulled a face. He held out a plastic evidence bag containing a few charred scraps of paper. ‘Not much chance of turning up anything there,’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s a big permanent bonfire, a mound of ashes about six feet across—I should think they burn cartons and posters and the rest of the shop rubbish on it. I salvaged these pieces because they still felt warm, but forensic may find that they’re just advertising material. Mrs Gedge made a thorough job of it.’

  They both glanced at her. She was standing outside the caravan, surreptitiously wiping her eyes as though ashamed to be caught displaying her grief. As soon as she saw them turn towards her she resumed her glasses and flashed them a challenging look. Quantrill sighed, and walked over to her.

  ‘Can you tell me?’ he asked gently, so as not to arouse her antagonism, ‘when you last saw Mary?’

  She tucked the handkerchief into the sleeve of her hand knitted cardigan, folded her hands together and answered steadily: ‘Last night, about half past seven. She helped her father, then came in and had tea and watched something on television. I didn’t watch it myself, I’ve got better things to do. The programme changed about half past seven, and she switched it off and went.’

  ‘Back to the caravan?’

  ‘I suppose so, I didn’t ask her.’

  ‘Did she say what she was going to do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did she say she was going out?’

  ‘No. I didn’t beg for her confidences. You must ask her father, she talked enough to him.’

  ‘Did you see a light in the caravan last night?’ Tait asked.

  Mrs Gedge looked at him contemptuously. ‘How could I? It’s too far to see from the house when the leaves are on the trees. I didn’t pry into Mary’s affairs. Not that there was any reason to, she did nothing I could be ashamed of, nothing.’

  ‘But you must have been worried when she didn’t come in for breakfast this morning,’ Quantrill commented.

  Mrs Gedge shrugged. ‘I didn’t exp
ect to see her. She never ate breakfast, just made herself a cup of coffee in the caravan.’

  Tait brought out his notebook. ‘Did you know any of Mary’s friends, Mrs Gedge?’

  ‘Yes, she brought one of them here. Sally Leggett—she seemed a decent kind of girl.’

  ‘Do you happen to know her address?’

  ‘She lived somewhere in Breckham Market, that’s all I know. She hasn’t been here since last summer—I don’t know why not, I always made her welcome.’

  ‘What about the other people Mary knew?’ Quantrill asked. ‘Did she have any special friends here in Ashthorpe?’

  ‘No. All her friends were girls from the school. I’ve told you, Chief Inspector, Mary was a respectable girl. There’s nothing for you to find out about her.’

  Quantrill decided that it would serve no useful purpose to suggest that Mary had had a boy-friend. ‘One last question,’ he said. ‘What was your daughter wearing when you last saw her?’

  ‘A pair of jeans,’ Mrs Gedge answered, tight-lipped with disapproval. ‘I never liked them, but she wouldn’t listen to me.’

  The chief inspector softened his voice. ‘Did you know that she was wearing a long dress when she was found?’

  Mrs Gedge looked up at him, and for the first time during the interview the lines on her face quivered and crumpled. She shook her head, closing her eyes. ‘I did wonder,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I couldn’t find it here, and I didn’t like to ask her father …’ She dragged her handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose fiercely. ‘A shameful extravagance, that dress,’ she declared, ‘no sense in it at all, but her father would indulge her. Well, then, she got up very early this morning and put on the dress to go out and pick flowers for May Day, and she slipped and fell in the river just like Charlie Godbold said. You don’t need to waste your time looking for any other cause.’

  She turned away dismissively. ‘And a final question from me, Mrs Gedge,’ said Tait quickly. ‘Would Mary have been wearing shoes when she went out?’

  She stared at him with indignation. ‘Of course Mary would have been wearing shoes! What do you think we are, heathens? Well, not shoes, but a pair of flip-flap sandal things. She lived in them during the summer.’

  ‘You haven’t found them here?’

  Mrs Gedge went back into the caravan and checked her inventory. Quantrill followed her. She shook her head: ‘No, they’re not here. Like I said, she’d have been wearing them … why—wasn’t she?’

  Quantrill shook his head. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard.

  ‘Charlie said she wasn’t harmed,’ she said hoarsely. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite true,’ Quantrill said, with a confidence that he felt obliged to qualify: ‘as far as we know.’ He offered as much reassurance as he could. ‘She was fully clothed, apart from her shoes, and we may well find them somewhere else in the meadow. Well, thank you for answering our questions, Mrs Gedge. I’m sorry we had to bother you at such a distressing time.’

  He waited for her to leave the caravan, then gathered up the pile of folders and passed them to Tait. He closed the door of the caravan behind him and turned the key in the lock. ‘I’m afraid that I shall have to take these papers, and keep the key for a day or two—we may need to take another look inside. I hope we shan’t have to trouble you again, but I must warn you that we may have some more questions to ask about the things you’ve destroyed. You understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, Chief Inspector.’ She stood straight and self-contained under the apple blossom, her hands folded in front of her; only the red patches on her cheeks and the pools of tears that had collected again behind her lenses gave evidence of her emotion. ‘You’ll find me at home whenever you want me.’

  ‘Yes—well, thank you. We’ll see ourselves out by the back way.’ Disconcerted by her composure, Quantrill fumbled clumsily with the loop of wire that fastened the makeshift gate. Tait came to his rescue with deft fingers. They stepped out into the narrow road, and fastened the gate behind them. To their left, the road wound away across the vast open field of young barley towards the church tower of the next village. They turned right, walking beside the hedge that bounded the orchard, on a course roughly parallel with the village street.

  ‘Interesting …’ said Detective Sergeant Tait.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Chief Inspector Quantrill. ‘Not,’ he added quickly, ‘that I think that the mother was concealing a suicide note, or anything like that. Though she would have done, of course, if she’d found one. What did you make of her?’

  ‘I agree, sir. I don’t believe that there was a note of that kind, or her attitude would have been different. I very much doubt whether Mrs Gedge found anything that seemed to her significant at all—though whether the things she burned would have been useful to us is another matter. I’d like to have seen those letters and photographs, but from what that bag Daph said to me outside the shop, it seems that Mary Gedge had certainly led a virtuous life. There’s no gossip in the village about her at all.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Quantrill sardonically. ‘There’d be gossip in a village about the Archangel Gabriel. If nothing’s known against Mary, it’ll be a matter of nods and winks and “Still waters run deep” and “What’s behind it, eh?” Villages can be unpleasant places to live in. I expect you think that country life’s idyllic, but you’ll soon find that there’s a surprising amount of spare hatred about.’

  Tait, who had always found the idea of country life as attractive as that of a meal of limp lettuce, was interested to hear that it had more substance than he had supposed.

  ‘You can see what worried Mrs Gedge,’ Quantrill went on. ‘She didn’t know what her daughter got up to, and so she suspected the worst. After all, her son had let her down badly. In a village, you see, everybody is expected to be the same—anyone who gets on in the world is disliked for it. When I was a boy, a family of three girls in my village worked their way to grammar school and university, and you should have heard the envy and nastiness there was about it! I reckon there must have been a lot of righteous glee in Ashthorpe when Derek Gedge was caught and tied down, and the gossips would have had a marvellous time if it turned out that his sister hadn’t been virtuous either. No wonder her mother wanted to sort her things out before we came! Oh, she knew the burning was wrong, but she was more relieved than guilty. I agree with you, I don’t think she found anything to Mary’s discredit.’

  The road swung sharply to the right, rounded the back of some farm buildings, passed between the walls of the garage and the junior school playground, and then formed a dusty T-junction with the main street of the village. There were no cars in the garage forecourt, no children in the playground. A dog barked in the distance, but otherwise all was quiet. Across the street, in front of the Ostrich inn, was an island of grass, and on it an old man sat on a seat beneath a white-candled chestnut tree; like Ashthorpe, he dozed in the early afternoon sun.

  The policemen stood surveying the scene. ‘So Mary Gedge went out on the quiet, wearing her long dress and a pair of sandals, some time after seven thirty last night,’ said Tait with relish. ‘Well, someone must know a great deal more than either of her parents … the boy-friend. Dale Kenward, for one. But while we’re still in the village, I’d like to have a word with her brother.’

  ‘According to Godbold,’ Quantrill pointed out, ‘Mary and her brother haven’t been seeing each other since he married.’

  ‘According to Godbold,’ said Tait briskly, ‘motorised policemen no longer have any idea of what’s going on in their own villages. If Mary and Derek were once very close, I think it would be worth having a word with him while we’re here.’

  ‘We need to check with anyone who might have seen her,’ Quantrill agreed. ‘Certainly the boy-friend, and the girl Sally Leggett too.’ He hesitated. ‘Since the school’s on holiday, we can probably get their addresses from Mrs Bloomfield, the deputy headmistress. She’ll be able to tell us where to
find the school secretary, anyway. We might as well call, since we’re so close.’

  ‘Would it save time, sir?’ asked Tait, ‘if I go to see Derek Gedge while you call on Mrs Bloomfield?’

  The question was innocuous enough, but Tait observed that an extraordinary change seemed to be coming over the chief inspector: the back of his neck was reddening; he looked uncomfortable, almost embarrassed.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Quantrill hastily, ‘as a matter of fact I think it will be quicker if you come with me. Mrs Bloomfield can probably give us some useful information, a number of names, and it’ll be simpler if you’re there to write them down. Come on, we might as well walk, it’s only just round the corner.’

  He squared his shoulders and strode down the road and round the corner to the green. Tait followed him, hitching Mary Gedge’s folders underneath his arm and raising a thoughtful eyebrow. So the chief inspector knew Mrs Bloomfield, and was embarrassed by the prospect of being alone with her …

  Not only were there significant enquiries to be made about Mary Gedge’s death; it seemed that an interesting sidelight on Chief Inspector Quantrill’s personality was about to be uncovered too.

  Detective Sergeant Tait took a deep breath of country air, and found that it tasted unexpectedly piquant.

  Chapter Seven

  Two small detached early Victorian villas stood side by side on the far edge of the narrow village green, almost opposite the war memorial. They were as neat, pretty and symmetrical as the houses that small girls used dutifully to cross-stitch on contemporary samplers. Each house had two chimneys, one at either end of the shallow slated roof, a central front door, a sashed window on either side of the door and three sashed windows above. They were faced with grey brick and bright with white paint except for their doors, one of which was dark blue, the other primrose yellow. Both had neat front gardens behind iron railings, though the owner of the blue door went in for time-consuming bedding plants while his neighbour preferred the simplicity of gravel and hydrangea bushes.