Fate Worse Than Death Read online

  ‘Another drink?’ he suggested. ‘While I tell you about an intriguing murder I investigated last year?’

  She handed him her empty glass. ‘Thank you, but I really have to dash. You must tell me some other time.’

  She unhitched her horse from the garden fence she had temporarily commandeered, ignoring the housebound elderly resident who was glaring at her from behind a windowbox of geraniums. Her animal had passed the time by chewing absently at a rambling white Alberic Barbier rose. It had however deposited a pile of steaming knobs of high-grade organic fertilizer immediately outside the garden gate, by way of compensation.

  Tait watched Annabel Yardley swing herself into the saddle. ‘I like your gelding,’ he said, hoping to sound knowledgeable.

  She looked at him. ‘Do you ride?’

  ‘Not since I was a boy.’ He had no intention of making a fool of himself in front of her. A horse was an unreliable beast, and uncomfortably tall: a long way up and – if it threw you – a hell of a long way down.

  ‘I haven’t time for riding now,’ he went on. ‘I spend every spare moment flying. I have a private pilot’s licence, and a two-seater Cessna. I keep it hangared on Horkey airfield, and I’m hoping to notch up a few flying hours while I’m here.’

  ‘Really?’ It was a very different ‘really’ from the one she had used on the landlord’s wife. She looked at Martin Tait with renewed interest.

  ‘Would you like to come for a flight?’

  ‘I don’t see why not …’ She gathered up the reins and smiled at him in a way that concealed the cold sore at the corner of her mouth. ‘Yes, that might be amusing. Call me on the telephone and we’ll arrange something.’ She pressed her calves against the horse and it began to walk, flicking Tait with its tail as it went.

  ‘Tomorrow morning?’ he called after her.

  ‘I don’t know when. Ring me.’

  ‘But what’s your number?’ he cried, running to catch up.

  She turned in the saddle and looked him over. The early evening sun was in his eyes and he squinted up at her, suddenly conscious that there was sweat on his upper lip and that flies were buzzing round his head.

  ‘I thought you were a detective,’ she mocked him. Then she leaned forward in the saddle and the horse broke into a canter, bearing her off with a clatter down the empty village street.

  She had made him feel like a stable lad. All the more reason, then, for him to prove that he wasn’t.

  Sandra Websdell had been penned so long in the gloom that the sun struck her like a physical blow. Its heat hurt her head, its light dazzled her eyes. She tried to run, but she could manage only a drunken stagger. She tried to scream for help, but all that emerged was rasping breath.

  He was coming after her. She could hear the thump of his feet on the sun-hardened earth. She tried to spurt through the burning kaleidoscope that surrounded her, but she tripped and fell. And once she was down she stayed down, her remaining strength seeming to ebb away from her into the dusty grass.

  Ants immediately swarmed over her skin, and the effort of brushing them away was beyond her. But at least her vision cleared. Lying with her cheek against the ground, her nostrils filled with the peppery smell of dry earth, she opened her eyes and observed with complete detachment the differing green-ness of each blade of grass, and the tiny, separate, coloured grains of which the dust was composed. She could see more ants, scurrying through their grass forest; a red ladybird with six black spots, swaying on a grass stem; a small brown butterfly, taking to the air …

  She raised her head a little, following the flight of the butterfly, and saw a wider world. Against the blue of the sky was an apple tree with apples on, and just beyond the tree was a fence. Beyond the fence, something was moving. No, not just something, someone. Someone passing by, on foot, on a horse, on a bicycle –

  She tried to push herself into a sitting position and call for help, but a dark shadow fell across her, blocking the sun. Her captor, his face and shirt smeared with the mess she had thrown, was gazing down at her.

  ‘No use trying to run away,’ he told her. ‘I need you too much to let you go.’

  She found a voice to plead with him. ‘Please – oh please.’

  He bent as if to lift her in his arms. He stank of stress and sweat, and his hands were slimy from wiping the mess out of his eyes.

  She began to scream. He slapped his open hand across her mouth. She looked up at him, and what she saw in his face reduced her voice to a whimper.

  First she said, ‘No no no.’

  Then she said nothing.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Sorry I’ve been so long, I – oh, sorry.’

  Martin Tait had talked his way into the sitting-room before he realized that his aunt was listening seriously to music. Con stood at the open window gazing towards the lime trees that surrounded the Green, their upper branches golden in the last of the light from the evening sun. She was listening to a small battery-operated cassette player, concentrating so intently on soaring strings, harp and voices that if she heard her nephew she took no notice.

  He sat down and waited quietly for the piece to finish. It was not his kind of music at all – too smooth, too choral, too full-bodied. Martin liked music to be modern and inventive, jazz for preference. The music that his aunt was listening to was solemn, even liturgical; yes, he could hear words in ecclesiastical Latin, ‘Pie Jesu’ and ‘sempiternam requiem’. Not what he wanted to listen to on a summer evening just when his social life was moving into top gear.

  He wouldn’t have thought the music would have any appeal for Aunt Con, either. When, in her younger days, he’d heard her singing as she went about the house, it had usually been something jolly from Gilbert and Sullivan. As for religion, she was – like all the Taits – plain Church of England and an infrequent attender.

  And yet, obliged as a matter of courtesy to keep quiet and listen, Martin found himself acknowledging that the music of her choice had its own beauty. The high pure voice of the boy soloist was strangely moving in its expression of innocent faith. It made him feel sad: dissatisfied with his rootless life, aware for the first time of the fact that he had already lived for more than a quarter of a century, and that he was not immortal.

  He thought of his newly acquired sampler, another expression of infant piety. And then he thought of the girl he had wanted the sampler for, because he knew she would love it. She would love this music, too.

  But his sentimental affair with Alison was over. ‘Now in the heat of youthful blood,’ the sampler said. Right: now in the heat of youthful blood he was going to make the most of whatever opportunities came his way, and he couldn’t ask for a more attractive opportunity than Annabel Yardley.

  So where did Aunt Con keep her telephone directory?

  The music faded and died. His aunt didn’t move; didn’t even know he was there. He slipped out quietly, and came in again talking.

  ‘Sorry I’ve been so long. The landlord of the Flintknappers was out and his wife knew nothing about your brandy, but she eventually found me a bottle. I hope it’s the one you wanted.’

  Con expelled her breath in a long sigh, then turned away from the window. ‘Thank you, I’m sure it will do,’ she said in a sad, strained voice. She switched off the player. ‘I’ve been listening to music.’

  ‘So I heard. What was it?’

  ‘The Fauré Requiem.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Martin, who hated to admit complete ignorance of anything.

  ‘It’s one of the most sublime pieces of music I know,’ she went on dreamily. ‘So reassuringly confident of the prospect of eternal rest …’

  The prospect of eternal rest held no attraction for Martin at all, but it seemed unkind to break his aunt’s mood by changing the subject. ‘May I?’ He took the cassette out of the recorder and looked at the label. ‘Ah, the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge – yes, it’s a beautiful performance.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Con gave her t
hin shoulders a shake and resumed the artificially bright voice she had used for most of the day. ‘I belonged to an amateur choir when I lived in Ipswich, and we did the Fauré just before I left – awfully well, too, though I sez it. But a female soprano had to sing the treble solo, and a boy’s voice is so much more moving. That’s why I love this recording. If you’d like to play it – or any of my other tapes or records, of course – do help yourself.’

  He thanked her, and settled for the immediate use of the telephone directory. Con switched on a table lamp, poured two glasses of sherry and took hers into the kitchen. There she found that Martin had brought back from the pub not only the cognac and lager she had sent him for, but a bottle of her favourite Amontillado sherry as well.

  Enjoying the sensation of generosity, he refused payment for any of the drinks: ‘A thank-you-for-having-me present,’ he insisted.

  ‘That’s jolly nice of you, Martin. You shouldn’t’ve, but thank you.’ Con began to break eggs into a bowl; despite – no, because of – Marjorie’s strictures, she intended to cook something for her nephew. The dratted boy was leaning against the kitchen dresser watching her, as he invariably did when she was trying to concentrate on cookery, but even so she thought she might be able to produce some edible scrambled egg.

  ‘Actually,’ she continued, ‘there is something I’d be awfully glad if you’d do for me while you’re here.’

  ‘Anything at all, Aunt Con.’ Martin inserted a finger between two pages of the directory he was holding, and prepared to combine gallantry with patience. He always felt obliged to keep his aunt company when she was working in the kitchen because he knew that she liked having him there to chat to.

  Con put two slices of bread under the grill. ‘Well, it’s my car –’

  ‘Not still the same white Ford Escort?’ Martin was always amused by his aunt’s reluctance to spend her money. All the more for him, eventually; but he felt that he could well afford to be generous with it. ‘Go on, be a devil and get yourself a new model!’

  ‘What ever for? She’s usually a very reliable car, and that’s all I need. But I’ve just had her serviced, and I’m not entirely happy with the result. When I slow right down, or go into neutral, the engine tends to stop.’

  ‘Sounds as though the timing needs adjusting. It’ll have to go back to the garage.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I’ve booked her in for 8.30 tomorrow morning. But dear old Mr Rudge who used to be their mechanic has retired, and I’m not very good at explaining things to the new man – he’s very young and impatient. So I’d be awfully grateful if you’d take the car in for me, and before you bring it back make absolutely sure that the engine won’t cut out when it’s in neutral. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not a bit. Glad to help. Hey, watch it, the toast’s burning –’

  ‘Oh gosh,’ said Con. She made it sound like a major disaster. Martin laughed, until he saw how her hands were shaking as she turned the bread over. If it wasn’t absurd to imagine that anyone would ever make a production number out of two slices of burnt toast, he could have sworn that she was very close to tears.

  Revived by a second glass of sherry, Con scraped the toast, buttered it and piled it with rubbery scrambled egg. They ate at the kitchen table, using limp linen napkins, clumsily hemmed, that had once been part of a tablecloth; another of Con’s endearingly absurd economies.

  ‘Right,’ said Martin, eager to get his aunt organized so that he could pursue his own affairs. ‘I’ll carry your boxes of rubbish down to the garden after supper, ready for your bonfire. And tomorrow morning I’ll get your car seen to. What else can I do for you while I’m here?’

  ‘Well, I would like you to come with me to look at the furniture in the cottage on the Horkey road. I know you said you don’t want any of it, but I shan’t be easy in my mind until you’ve seen it. Perhaps we could go there as soon as you bring back the car from the garage? But after that, you must go and fly your aeroplane and enjoy yourself. Did you find the telephone number you wanted, by the way?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I met a girl at the Flintknappers – I expect you know her, Annabel Yardley. She asked me to ring her, but forgot to give me her number, and it doesn’t seem to be in the book. Do you think she’s ex-directory?’

  ‘Annabel Yardley?’ Con looked wryly amused. ‘I’ve never met her, but I know who she is. She won’t be in the book because she’s living here only temporarily – she’s a friend of the Seymours. They’re away in New Zealand, and she’s come down from London to look after their horses. You’ll find her number under their name – the address is Beech House. Actually she has family connections with Fodderstone, because she was born a Horrocks. Her father is a brother of the present Earl of Brandon and her great-grandfather, the third Earl, was the last of the family to live at Fodderstone Hall. But I imagine she’s deliberately keeping quiet about her connections because there’s an uncouth Horrocks, Charley, still living in the village.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about her,’ said Martin, trying to conceal his elation at the prospect of becoming intimately acquainted with the niece of an earl. He wasn’t entirely surprised by his aunt’s knowledge because she had always taken a lively and respectful interest in those members of the aristocracy who lived in Suffolk. She knew none of them personally but she had – still had, apparently, despite her forgetfulness about more pertinent matters – an extensive knowledge of who was related to whom, how and when their peerages had been obtained (mostly in the nineteenth century, after they’d made fortunes from brewing beer or manufacturing carpets) and their reported social activities. Her table linen might be tatty, but she enjoyed spending money on glossy magazines like Country Life and Harpers & Queen.

  ‘Oh well, I know the Seymours slightly. I usually help with Elizabeth Seymour’s fund-raising events for the RNLI,’ said Con. Having been brought up near the coast, she had always taken an interest in the lifeboat service. ‘Annabel Yardley’s married,’ she went on, offering her nephew a word of caution. ‘Her husband’s abroad with the army.’

  ‘I’m glad she is married,’ said Martin. ‘I couldn’t possibly afford to keep a woman like her entertained on a regular basis. But it could be amusing to see something of her during my leave.’

  Con put down her knife and fork. Her long narrow face was earnest, her eyes slightly unfocused. ‘You haven’t a regular girlfriend, then?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said without hesitation.

  ‘And no foreseeable plans to marry? I’m not just being inquisitive, I do have a good reason for asking.’

  He laughed and crunched burnt toast with his strong teeth, enjoying the knowledge that he had no ties, no encumbrances, and in the long term no financial problems. ‘Definitely no plans of that kind!’

  ‘And yours is a good career, isn’t it?’ Con persisted. ‘I mean, as a senior police officer you’ll be well paid? And eventually you’ll get a comfortable pension?’

  He’d never given much thought to it, knowing that he had his aunt’s money to come. He shrugged cheerfully, ‘Oh – we never think we’re well paid, considering the responsibilities society puts upon us. But at Chief Constable level the money’s not bad – and if I become Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police I can always make a small fortune when I retire by selling my memoirs.’

  ‘Oh good …’ said Con seriously. She had abandoned the greater part of her supper and was now concentrating her attention on some spilled grains of salt, pushing them about the table with her bony forefinger.

  ‘You see, Martin … the thing is this: if you had a steady girlfriend and were planning to marry, I might feel that I was being unfair to you by altering my financial arrangements. As I’m sure your mother has told you, I made a will in your favour when your father died. You were still a boy, and I wanted to make sure that your education would be safeguarded if I fell under a bus.

  ‘But the situation’s different now, isn’t it?’ She raised her eyes and peered at him anxiously
, urging him to agree with the logic of what she was saying. ‘You’re independent. You’re well established in your career, and you’ve a brilliant future. And now you’ve set my mind at rest by assuring me that you have no commitments, I’d better tell you what I’ve planned.’ She took a breath, and plunged. ‘I’m not going to leave you my godmother’s money after all.’

  Martin’s jaw stilled in mid-chew. He stared at her, rigid with disbelief.

  ‘I’m not cutting you out of my will, don’t think that,’ Con assured him with a nervous laugh. ‘But, well, £350,000 is an awful lot of money to leave to any one person, isn’t it? It doesn’t seem right, when it could be put to good use in helping people in distress, and saving lives. So now I know that you really aren’t in any need of the money, I feel a sort of moral obligation to give it to charity instead.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Con had given a great deal of thought, over the years, to the problem of what to do with her embarrassing inheritance.

  Her godmother, Alice Simpson, had been one of Con’s mother’s oldest friends and the wife of the owner of a large fishing-fleet that had sailed out of Lowestoft in the heyday of the herring. On her husband’s death, Alice had taken shrewd advice and sold up the fleet while the herring was still king. Childless, and with no near relatives, she had made a sizeable bequest to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution for the purchase of a boat in her late husband’s name, then willed the remainder of her fortune to her god-daughter Con Schultz, née Constance Alice Tait.

  When Con had inherited the money in middle age, she was astonished and alarmed to find that it amounted to over £200,000. She had known that her godmother intended to leave her something, and she had thought in terms of buying herself a car, and perhaps travelling a little. But £200,000 was more than she knew what to do with.

  At the time Con was living in the family home in Woodbridge, where she had returned after her brief marriage to help her mother care for her ailing father. She was able to meet all her living expenses from her salary as a deputy librarian, and though she bought a small car for journeying to work in Ipswich, and took holidays-of-a-lifetime with an old schoolfriend in Venice, Florence and Athens, she used very little of her godmother’s money. Her greatest extravagance had been to retain the services of a good accountant and a stockbroker. With sound investment advice, and the conscientious re-investment of most of the interest over a period of twenty years, her godmother’s money did nothing but grow.