Fate Worse Than Death Page 7

  He demurred; he said that he couldn’t deprive his aunt of something she liked to keep hanging in her bedroom, something that would be perfectly easy to move to her new house. But he was careful not to refuse the offer.

  The fact was that Alison would love the sampler. Martin had thought of her as soon as he saw it, and now he longed for an opportunity to show it to her. He wanted to see and share her pleasure in it – and he hoped too that it would make her realize that he wasn’t the grasping, insensitive man she took him for. Surely, if she saw his appreciation of craft work and heard from him the moving story of Maria Bethell’s short life, Alison couldn’t help but soften towards him?

  That is, if she ever spoke to him again.

  ‘Of course,’ admitted Con, mistaking his unaccustomed quietness for reluctance, ‘I can quite see that the verse on the sampler isn’t exactly appropriate for a modern bachelor. I don’t want to embarrass you –’

  ‘On the contrary.’ He gave her his best smile. He liked the sampler anyway, and if Alison was fool enough to throw away the prospect of being his eventual wife, to hell with her. There were other pretty girls; and pretty girls with better – more suitable – family backgrounds than Alison’s. He’d been dreading the idea of having that dim, fussy, suburban little Mrs Quantrill as his mother-in-law.

  ‘In my job,’ he went on, ‘I have to spend a lot of time thinking about people who’ve come to untimely ends, so the verse is entirely appropriate. Really, Aunt Con, the sampler’s quite the nicest thing you could offer me. Yes please, I’d love to take it. And you can be sure –’

  ‘Constance!’

  They both started as an authoritative voice called up from below. Marjorie Braithwaite had as usual marched into the house without ceremony. ‘Constance, where are you? Your casserole’s burning!’

  Aunt and nephew exchanged grimaces. ‘You’re too late,’ called back Con, with some satisfaction. She went downstairs, turning her long feet cautiously sideways as she negotiated the narrow treads. ‘The casserole’s burned to a frazzle already. Yes … yes, as you said … we’ll be having a cold supper, which is what you suggested in the first place. Anyway, what brings you out now, Marjorie? Isn’t this your usual supper-time?’

  ‘Yes it is, but Howard’s not back from fishing yet. Not that it matters – that’s the advantage of having a cold meal, we can be flexible about our timing. But now look here, Constance, about the produce show: you really must –’

  Tired of lingering on the scruffy stairway, Martin stepped down into the sitting-room. Glad of his intervention, Con introduced him to her neighbour.

  ‘Ah yes, I remember you.’ Marjorie stood four-square and looked him over, the chains on either side of her cheeks swinging aggressively. ‘See here, young man, I know you’re a detective, so answer me this: why was it that when my sister Helen, who lives near Colchester, was burgled, it was over an hour before the police arrived in answer to her 999 call? And although she gave the detective a detailed list of the missing items, not one single thing has been recovered! It’s an absolute scandal –’

  It was a well-known hazard of police work, being cornered off-duty and held responsible for the activities of every criminal and every police force in the country. As his former boss – Alison’s father – Chief Inspector Quantrill had advised him, Tait smiled politely and said nothing. (‘They don’t want to listen to reasoned explanations,’ Quantrill had said. ‘They don’t want to listen at all. Let’em get it off their chests, and just be thankful that you don’t work as an income-tax inspector. Their social life must be hell.’

  ‘Excuse me, Marjorie,’ Con said firmly, going to his rescue, ‘but Martin is just off to the Flintknappers to collect some drink – I forgot to get in any lager for him. And while you’re there, Martin, please ask Phil Goodwin the landlord if he’s got that bottle of brandy I ordered.’

  ‘You don’t drink brandy,’ objected her neighbour.

  ‘It’s for cooking with,’ said Con grandly. She accompanied Martin to the back door. ‘Actually,’ she whispered, ‘I asked Phil to get me a good cognac – but not a word to Marjorie, it’s nothing to do with her.’

  Martin winked and went, glad to be out in the heat of the early evening sun instead of being cooped up and stifled indoors.

  In the oven of her prison, Sandra Websdell shivered. The nervous sweat that had sprung as she stood poised in front of her captor, ready to blind him and run, now felt deathly cold on her skin. She huddled in a corner listening, sick and afraid.

  Would he come back with the dish of fruit and custard she had asked for? Would he come back that evening at all?

  If he didn’t, then she would have to wait a whole twenty-four hours before she had another opportunity to escape. By that time, would she still be capable of taking the opportunity? Would she be capable of taking it now, even if he came back?

  A sudden sound in the gloom startled her. But it was only a rustle, a scrabble of tiny feet and a squeaking as her room-mates found her supper. She wept again, in weakness and despair.

  And then, when she was no longer listening for it, a noise came from outside. With a pounding heart and a plug of fear in her throat she forced herself upright and waited for the door to be opened.

  Chapter Twelve

  When Phil Goodwin hadn’t returned home to the Flint-knappers Arms by six o’clock, his wife’s attitude of cross acceptance began to corrode into anger. As if it wasn’t bad enough of him to leave all the bar work to her at lunch-time – not to mention the subsequent clearing and washing-up, in this heat! And now it was time to open again for the evening … Damn Phil and his little bits on the side! Damn the woman, whoever she was …

  The fact that Charley Horrocks failed to make his usual entrance soon after six o’clock did nothing to cheer Lois. If anything, it deprived her of a really good reason for giving her husband a piece of her mind. If she’d had to put up with Charley twice in one day, or if she’d been run off her feet by an early-evening coachload of unexpected customers, how she would have been justified in letting fly at Phil when he returned!

  But at six-thirty the Flintknappers Arms was still empty. Lois went to the open doorway. The street was empty too. The whole of Fodderstone village, now that the day workers had returned home, had an air of exhaustion, as though it had been baked into silence by the unclouded sun.

  She flounced back into the bar, her neat medium-high heels clicking on the floor. It was such a complete waste of time, hanging about waiting for customers. The children had brought home two rumbustious friends, and she had had to leave them to forage for their own tea; heaven knew what they were all up to. But if she journeyed to the kitchen to sort them out, someone would immediately materialize in the bar and shout for service. Damn the customers, damn the Flintknappers Arms …

  By six-forty when her first customer – a young, fair, sharp-featured stranger – appeared, Lois could have screamed at him. ‘Yes?’ she snapped, her hamster cheeks crimson above the lilac pie-frill of her blouse.

  ‘Is the landlord anywhere about?’ asked the man.

  Lois would have enjoyed announcing exactly what she thought of her husband’s absence, but loyalty and discretion made her guard her tongue. ‘I’m afraid my husband isn’t in,’ she said, putting a belated welcome into her voice, though her neatly rounded buttocks were quivering with the effort of restraint. ‘He had to go into Breckham Market to see his accountant this afternoon, and he must have been held up. I’m expecting him back any moment.’

  Martin Tait told her that he had come about his aunt’s brandy. Lois recalled Mrs Schultz as an occasional buyer of a bottle of sherry, but she knew nothing about the brandy. Tait, who was in no hurry, bought a half-pint of lager to drink while he waited for the landlord to return, and carried his glass out into the sun.

  There were no benches outside the Flintknappers Arms, which fronted directly on to the quiet village street. He leaned with consciously negligent grace against the doorpost and watched a yo
ung woman who was dismounting from a fine black horse. She hitched it to a convenient garden fence and then walked across the street towards him, making straight for the pub.

  Tait moved away from the door with what appeared to be nothing more than casual courtesy, though the blood had begun to shift through his veins at an unprecedented gallop. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen a combination quite as stunning as this: natural ash-blonde hair, dark-blue eyes, slim body inside nothing but a thin shirt and cream-coloured stretch jodhpurs; and over all an air of expensively bred self-assurance.

  She stepped through the door without appearing to notice his existence, let alone returning his smile. Tait was momentarily crestfallen, realizing that he’d just been on the receiving end of an upper-class put-down. But to hell with that: she was probably no more than upper-middle, and he was middle class himself – only middle-middle, perhaps, but old middle-middle, with family silver to prove it. His public school, Framlingham College, might not be in the Eton and Winchester league, but it had a good solid reputation in East Anglia. And with a university degree behind him and a Chief Constable’s appointment somewhere up ahead, he had no intention of being put down socially by anyone.

  He followed her into the bar, where she was buying cigarettes.

  ‘You’re not, by any chance, Charlotte Spencer-Davenport?’ he asked, inventing a name that sounded like a pedigree.

  ‘No,’ said the horsewoman, picking up the packet of cigarettes. The negative, expressed in two drawling syllables, could have been a further put-down, but Tait had calculated that his public-school voice would save him from that fate. She turned to him and looked him over, from his properly cut hair to his shoes that passed for Guccis, and evidently decided that he was sufficiently civilized to merit a longer reply. ‘No – I don’t think I know Charlotte Spencer-Davenport, actually.’

  At close quarters she was a little less stunning than he had thought: in her early thirties rather than her twenties, with a wedding ring, hooded lids that made her eyes seem permanently supercilious, and a sharp-angled jaw. Her otherwise healthy skin was marred by a cold sore at one corner of her mouth. But she couldn’t help having suffered from a summer cold, and none of those minor defects could detract from her style.

  ‘Ah, sorry to bother you, then,’ he said pleasantly. ‘One of Charlotte’s friends told me that she might be staying in Fodderstone, and asked me to look out for her.’ Inventing cover stories was on occasion an essential part of a detective’s job; Martin Tait did it fluently, and with enjoyment. It was a practice that infuriated Alison, who called it lying. That had been one cause of their first parting, two years ago.

  Alison … He recalled the girl with a sudden, painful vividness: so lovely, so warm, so young, so sweetly serious. But so uncompromisingly honest about everything, so stubborn, so censorious! She’d disapproved of him and said that she never wanted to see him again. Well, she needn’t. He drove her out of his mind and concentrated on making a good impression on the woman in the second-skin jodhpurs.

  ‘I’m here for a few days’duty visit to an elderly aunt,’ he went on. He avoided mentioning Aunt Con’s undistinguished foreign surname, which would cut no social ice at all. ‘I don’t expect you know her – she lives very quietly on Fodderstone Green, and isn’t able to introduce me to anyone but equally elderly neighbours. My name’s Tait, Martin Tait. May I buy you a drink?’

  The ash-blonde woman looked him over again. He looked back at her, frankly but without being pushing; if she should snub him, he wanted to be able to retreat without undue loss of face.

  But although she was hardly enthusiastic, she didn’t put him down. ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Gin and tonic, with ice and lemon?’

  She gave him a nod of probationary approval. ‘But we’ll drink outside,’ she said with piercing clarity, moving to the door. ‘It’s foully stuffy in here.’

  Imprisoned behind the bar counter, Lois Goodwin twitched with fury. First Phil’s defection, and now the ultimate insult from that Mrs Annabel Yardley. Oh the arrogance of the woman, treating people beneath her own class as if they weren’t there! And all the time, while her husband was abroad, she was using her borrowed house to entertain men at weekends. She brought her noisy friends to the Flintknappers for drinks on Saturday mornings – sometimes a mixed party, sometimes just one man. And not always the same man either.

  But in spite of her air of superiority, Mrs Yardley wasn’t too particular – if you could believe the drunken boasts of young Andrew Stagg, the farrier from Horkey – about keeping to her own class, as long as the man was sufficiently good-looking. And if she could get away without paying for any of her pleasures, she would.

  ‘Mrs Yardley!’ shrilled Lois. ‘You didn’t give me the money for your cigarettes!’

  ‘Really?’ The voice that floated back from the doorway conveyed disbelief rather than apology, together with a suggestion that the woman behind the bar was being tiresomely petty. ‘Oh – see to it for me while you’re there, will you – ah – Martin?’

  Tait observed the affronted look on the landlady’s round flushed face, and smiled an apology as he made what he hoped would prove to be a good investment. Then he hurried outside, carrying a large gin and tonic and his own refilled glass.

  Lois Goodwin watched him go. Another man running after her like a puppy dog, she thought. I wonder how far he’ll get?

  The fair-haired stranger’s accent would help him, of course. But he wasn’t particularly good-looking, and Lois didn’t imagine that a posh voice alone would take him very much further with Annabel Yardley than Phil had ever got; or any of their customers – with the possible exception of Andrew Stagg – though they all kept trying.

  The vexatious thing about so many men was that they didn’t know when to give up. Phil hadn’t a ghost of a chance with Mrs Yardley, but he was too vain to see it. Despite the number of times she’d snubbed him, he always preened himself and tried to chat her up when she came into the pub.

  Male arrogance, concluded Lois crossly as she wiped the bar counter, was every bit as infuriating as social arrogance. Once men had set their sights on something – or someone – there seemed no way of convincing them that it was out of their reach.

  Her captor re-entered Sandra’s prison carrying a small bowl in blue and white willow-patterned earthenware. She pressed her hands flat on the table, trying to keep her trembling body upright. The combination of heat and nervous strain had exhausted her.

  ‘I – I didn’t think you’d come back,’ she whispered.

  He told her that he had brought what she wanted. He reminded her that he had promised to look after her.

  He stood there holding out the bowl, and smiled at her. Sandra pushed herself away from the table and moved towards him without being conscious of movement, banging her shin against the chair but feeling no pain.

  She was still trembling, but she no longer worried about the physical difficulty of making good her escape. She was beyond rational thought. Her brain had switched off, leaving only instinct. The whole of her attention was concentrated on the weapon he was offering her, the blue and white bowl and its nauseatingly yellow contents.

  She reached out her right hand. Smiling still, he gave her the bowl. As she took it, feeling its weight and the snug fit of the base in the palm of her hand, her nerves calmed and she sensed for a moment an extraordinary detachment. There was just such a bowl at home, and when she was a child her mother had taught her a verse about it. Even in the gloom of her prison, Sandra could pick out the details of the pattern with perfect clarity: the swallows, the Chinese temple, the bridge with three men – or was it four?

  She raised her eyes to look dispassionately at her captor’s face, judging angle and distance. Her pulse quickened, her mouth fell open as she breathed more deeply. Realizing what she intended, his expression started to change, but the change acted as a split-second trigger to her adrenalin supply. Before he could move she
flung the bowl, heard his spluttering shout and glimpsed the viscous mess that covered his face. Then she tugged open the door and stumbled out, gasping, into the hottest August day for half a century. And ran, or tried to run; and screamed for help, or tried to.

  ‘You’re a detective? You mean you’re what the Americans call a private eye? How very amusing.’

  ‘No,’ said Tait, nettled but taking care not to show it. Casual self-assurance, that was the only attitude that would impress a woman like Annabel Yardley. ‘I’m a police officer – a detective inspector in the regional crime squad.’

  The hooded dark-blue eyes widened with genuine interest. ‘But how riveting! You mean you investigate murders, and rapes and so on?’

  ‘Frequently. We’re called in by the county police forces to handle their difficult cases.’ It was not entirely true; the squad’s primary job was to gather information about professional criminals engaged in organized crimes that extended beyond individual county boundaries, and most of the cases concerned burglary or breaking and entering. But crimes against the person were always more fascinating to the civilian mind, and Tait was out to fascinate.

  He had already discovered that, whatever Annabel Yardley’s relationship with her husband, she felt perfectly free to encourage other men. The only problem as far as Tait was concerned was that she appeared to be outrageously choosy. She had quizzed him about his background, and had then made it clear that the combination of Framlingham College and the University of Sussex was amusing rather than socially acceptable. She had also made it clear that she found him no more than mildly attractive.

  But Tait had too much masculine pride to abandon hope. Annabel Yardley presented a challenge that he couldn’t resist. She was, he guessed, easily bored; meeting a detective was obviously a new experience for her, and he intended to exploit the interest he had aroused. He would have to work fast, though, because he could spare her only this one week of his leave.