Death and the Maiden

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• Sheila Radley
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  

Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

The river Dunnock rises without much enthusiasm in the northern uplands of Suffolk and sets out in the direction of the Wash, taking its time over the journey. A narrow, shallow brook of a river: not navigable at any point in its meanderings, nor deep enough to swim in; and nowhere deep enough for an eighteen-year-old girl to drown, unless she chose to end her life, or unless someone intended that she should die.

The body lay—barely afloat in the shallows, long hair waving indistinguishably among the river weed—some yards downstream from Ashthorpe bridge.

Ashthorpe is a village six miles south of Breckham Market, the small town where the Dunnock finally gives up all pretension to independence and joins a tributary of the Ouse. The narrow, humpbacked stone bridge about a mile out of Ashthorpe has always been regarded as a local beauty spot. A gap in the roadside hedge near the bridge leads down to a meadow, and older inhabitants of the village can remember walking here in couples on warm summer evenings in search of privacy under the willow trees on the bank of the river.

The meadow must be much the same, though the pollarded willows have grown arthritic. The hawthorn hedge still screens the meadow from passers-by on the road. Buttercups and cowslips and lady's smock and daisies embroider the grass in season, wild yellow iris flaunt among the reeds, birds sing, cuckoos call, the river noises are as agreeable as ever they must have been; but the lovers have gone, because there is nowhere for them to park their cars. The river bank below Ashthorpe bridge has been given over to children who paddle and make dams and hunt for birds'nests and water rats, and to an occasional small boy fishing in earnest for tench and gudgeon.

The fish flourish because the Dunnock is remarkably unpolluted. It runs through no town, and receives little sewage and no industrial effluent. Naturally, it collects its share of unnatural and non-degradable rubbish: old car tyres and cooking stoves, non-returnable bottles, empty aerosols and beer cans, plastic margarine tubs, squeezy detergent containers. But as rivers go, it is remarkably free from pollution. A clean place to die.

The girl lay face-down, arms outstretched, rushes woven among her fingers. She wore a long dress of cotton, sprigged with tiny flowers, and the hem of the dress swung and rippled round her legs with the motion of the water. Gathered flowers—enamelled buttercups, mauve lady's smock—floated about her body and clung to her hair and her dress wherever they touched. It looked a quiet way to die.

There had been heavy rain overnight and the morning was washed dazzlingly clean, but the two policemen were too busy watching where they put their feet to notice the blue and the green and the gold of the first day of May. One was a solidly middle-aged constable in uniform and flat cap; the other, elegant in plain clothes, was shorter, slimmer, much younger. They were retreating from a ramshackle stud and plaster farmhouse to their police van, seen off by a sardonic farmer whose Jack Russell terrier had yipped itself to the edge of hysteria.

‘Well then?' demanded Detective Sergeant Tait when he could make himself heard. ‘You're the local man. Do you believe what he said?'

The constable considered the question as he sploshed on down the muddy track that led from the house to the road. ‘About pigs,' he said eventually, ‘yes. I wouldn't trust anything he said about his neighbour, but he likes pigs.'

Tait laughed without amusement, side-stepping the last foul puddle and taking a leap on to the roadside grass, where he tried to wipe the mud off his fashionable, expensive shoes. Pc Godbold was watching him with a hardly-concealed grin, a look not unlike the one the farmer had just given him. It was a look that Tait had come to recognise and identify in the last two days, a countryman's way of looking at a townee, half derisive, half defensive.

‘What you want to do,' Godbold volunteered, pleasantly enough, ‘is to carry a pair of wellies in your car. Inspector Quantrill always does—
Chief
Inspector Quantrill, I should say.'

‘Does he?' said Tait coldly. He was growing a little tired of hearing his new chief's name.

‘That's right,' said the constable, lowering himself into the driver's seat of the van. ‘But then, of course, he's a countryman. Makes a difference.'

‘So I imagine.'

The road was narrow, and Godbold had pulled the van on to the verge after Tait had got out. He made no offer to move the van back to the road, and the long grass soaked the bottom of Tait's trouser legs as he pushed his way to the passenger door. Hedgerow sprays, curdled over with hawthorn blossom, slapped against him; the flower clusters were wet, almond-scented, sickly sweet. Tait wiped his splattered face and neck irritably.

‘Where to now?' asked Godbold.

Tait checked his watch and decided with relief that he could justify a return to civilisation. ‘Back to your place to pick up my own car. I'd better see what's happening at division.'

‘Right you are.' Godbold turned the van towards Ashthorpe, where he lived in the police house. He drove silently for a few minutes and then, since he was old enough to be the new detective's father and felt slightly guilty about Tait's sodden trousers, he said conversationally, ‘Daresay you were riled about being sent to this division, Sergeant Tait?'

He chose the formal address deliberately; you couldn't call a green youngster ‘Sarge'. ‘I mean,' he elaborated, ‘it's very quiet here. Oh, we've got more than enough to do, but mostly we're dealing with petty crime. A bit of a comedown after that high-powered stuff you must have learned at police college.'

Tait shrugged. ‘All good experience,' he said.

The sardonic grin again: ‘Looking for missing pigs?'

‘It's not just pigs that go missing.'

There was a silence. Both men, temporarily forgetting each other, were contemplating an impossibility. A quiet, home-loving fifteen-year-old girl simply does not vanish without trace from the mile-long stretch of road between her home and the village shop, not in broad daylight, not in the middle of the placid English countryside.

‘Hoping to find her?' asked Godbold. No derision now, but bitter hopelessness. ‘Mr Quantrill's been working on the case for three months, and if
he
can't find her …'

‘Don't get me wrong,' said Tait quickly. He knew that his graduate entry to the police force, his special police college training and his accelerated promotion, was going to take some living down. He expected and accepted a certain amount of needling. He knew that in the first few weeks after he left Bramshill the old hands would be watching him intently, hopeful that he would make a fool of himself; at best he would be tolerated, at worst despised. But Tait was anxious to be judged on what he actually achieved in those weeks, not on an unguarded retort made in his first few days in the division.

‘I haven't come here imagining that I can do any better than anyone else,' he went on. ‘But since the girl disappeared from this division, and I've been sent here, I'm glad of the chance to join in the search. Isn't that how you'd feel?'

Godbold seemed mollified. ‘Doesn't matter who finds her, does it, as long as she's found?' He sighed hugely, forgetting to be on the defensive; a father, consumed with vicarious anguish. ‘Her parents must be out of their minds with worry …'

He drove on silently, presently turning to the right, off the main Breckham Market road and on to the minor road that led to Ashthorpe.

‘You know what?' he burst out suddenly. ‘I blame this motorisation. Oh, I like having the van, all right—it's a sight more comfortable than being out in all weathers on a push-bike. And the radio contact's very handy. But you lose the personal touch.'

Sergeant Tait had been in the police force exactly two and a half years. He turned in his seat and looked at Godbold with interest, as though the constable were the sole survivor of a dead civilisation. ‘Did you really ride round on a bicycle?' he asked.

Godbold went dignified. ‘Certainly. I started on a town beat, but I was village bobby at Ashthorpe for fifteen years, before they put me in this van and gave me a district to cover. Well, it's more efficient in a lot of ways, I can see that—but I don't know what's going on in my own village any more. And I reckon that if there'd still been a local bobby in Joy Dawson's village, she'd never have disappeared like that.'

‘Oh, come on—that's expecting a lot of one policeman on two wheels!'

‘Maybe,' conceded Godbold. ‘All the same …'

He slowed as the road narrowed for Ashthorpe bridge.

‘Take this bridge we're coming to,' he went on. ‘I used to bike down here of a summer evening and sit on the parapet for a smoke, and I could reckon to see most of Ashthorpe going by. I'm not an Ashthorpe man myself, but you learn a lot about a place in fifteen years. I'd know who was sneaking past in a car with someone else's husband or wife, and who was mooning about alone and miserable, and who was looking for mischief. Now, I don't know half what they're up to—I'm too busy dashing about all over. And I can't even stop when I do come by, because there's no room to park the van. Hold tight for the bump.'