Death and the Maiden (26 page)

‘I used it as a nickname,' he said coldly.

‘I haven't a nickname,' said Tait, who had no intention of being saddled with one at the whim of a chief inspector.

‘Oh, well, if you feel like that about it …' Quantrill was huffed; if the man was going to be so toffee-nosed, their relationship could stay on a strictly formal basis. ‘All Taits are nicknamed Harry—that was what a Tait I knew in the RAF told me. He said that it was on account of a famous old music hall comedian.'

‘Really, sir?'

‘Yes, really.' Quantrill found his sergeant's supercilious look immeasurably irritating. ‘Surely you've been around long enough to know that some surnames have traditional nicknames: we've got Larry Lamb and Chalky White stationed here in Breckham, for a start. And then, Tuckers are called Tommy, and Carpenters are called Chips, and Millers—'

Tait was instantly alert. ‘Yes, sir?' he asked with gratifying attentiveness. ‘What are Millers called?'

A wide, unamused grin spread across Quantrill's face. ‘Millers,' he said, ‘are called Dusty …'

He rang his home number. Peter answered.

‘Hi, Dad. Hey, have you changed your mind about letting me have a portable telly?'

‘Not a hope. Tell you what, though, we might go fishing at Southwold at the weekend—it's my day off on Sunday.'

‘It's the weekend now. You mean we'll go fishing tomorrow?'

‘Oh—oh well, I'm likely to be a bit tied up tomorrow. But next time I have a day off at the weekend, that's what we'll do.'

Peter gave a cynical laugh. ‘I've heard that one before …'

Quantrill gave his son a hurried, elaborately casual reason for wondering whether the staff at Peter's school had nicknames. The boy co-operated cheerfully enough.

‘Well yes, there's Fred—that's Mr Wright, I don't know why he's called Fred because that isn't his name, but he is. Mr Parrott is Polly, Mr Bell's Ding-dong, Mr Miller's Dusty, Mr Brown's Kojak—guess why—Mr …'

Quantrill let his son ramble past the significant name before interrupting him. ‘Right, thanks very much, Peter. See you.'

He put down the receiver. ‘See you'—small chance of that. Police work ruined family life, and it was no use pretending it didn't. Heaven knew when he'd see Peter next; a fine thing, when the only communication a man had with his son was by telephone.

But even as he was grumbling to himself, Chief Inspector Quantrill was on his way to the door. ‘You check out Weston,' he told Sergeant Tait. ‘I'm going to see Dusty Miller.'

At the Old Bakery, Miller sat on the scuffed Habitat settee, in a rough-dried cotton shirt and youthfully flared trousers, and denied everything that the chief inspector put to him.

‘No, I did
not
make an arrangement to see Mary Gedge yesterday.'

‘My information is, Mr Miller, that when you went to the shop on Thursday night, you asked Mary if she would like a lift into Breckham the following day, yesterday.'

Miller jumped up, knocking a crumpled copy of
The Guardian
to the floor. ‘You can't bloody
breathe
in this village without being overheard,' he said bitterly. ‘And did your informant think fit to mention that Mary refused the lift I offered?'

‘Yes, sir. But it occurred to me that she might not have wanted an acceptance to be overheard.'

‘She said “No” and she nodded “Yes”, you mean?' asked Miller. He jerked the ring from a can of beer, and the ensuing ‘splltt' conveyed his derision. ‘Well, she didn't. I offered a lift, simply by way of neighbourliness, because I knew that the girl hadn't any transport, and she refused. That's all there was to it.' He tipped back his red-gold head and swallowed some beer.

‘I see.' Quantrill looked at the table, on which was the bachelor's meal that he had interrupted: a hunk of buttered brown bread, a pork pie and a jar of home-made chutney. The hand-written label was a reminder that Miller was not a bachelor, but a married man whose wife had left him. And Quantrill knew all about the needs of wifeless married men.

He suppressed his sympathy. ‘Would you like to explain, then,' he asked sternly, ‘how it is that on her calendar for yesterday, Friday the first of May, Mary had written the name Dusty?'

Miller sat down again abruptly. For the first time, he looked uneasy. ‘Dusty …?'

‘Your nickname at the school, I believe?'

‘How the devil—oh, I know! Quantrill. You've got a boy who used to be at the Alderman T, haven't you? Yes, all right, the kids there used to call me Dusty. But most of the girls at the comprehensive call me Mike—Mary certainly did. You can check with her friends.' He got up, cut himself a slice of pork pie, carried his plate back to the settee and began to eat with more defiance than appetite. ‘If Mary put “Dusty” in her diary, it's nothing to do with me.'

Quantrill tried another tack. ‘You had a party here on Thursday night?'

‘I had a friend in for a drink.'

‘There were several dirty glasses about on Friday morning.'

‘I don't wash up very often.'

‘Did Mary Gedge come here on Thursday night?'

‘No.'

‘Who was the friend who came for the drink, then?'

‘I prefer not to say.'

Chief Inspector Quantrill pushed himself up from the uncomfortably low-slung armchair. ‘Mr Miller,' he said, ‘I am engaged on a murder enquiry. You knew Mary Gedge. At the moment, you are living alone in this house. If there is anyone who can vouch for your whereabouts on Thursday night and up to six o'clock on Friday morning, I suggest that you would do well to tell me who it is.'

Miller sat back, defeated. He pushed irritably at
The Guardian
with the toe of his battered suede boot. After a long pause he said gloomily, in his beautifully modulated voice, ‘It's a bugger, isn't it, to hold egalitarian beliefs and yet be lumbered with the instincts of a gentleman?'

‘It must be,' said Quantrill. He waited.

And then, suddenly, he took fright. Supposing the woman that Miller was presumably trying to protect was Jean Bloomfield? Supposing she had come home early from her holiday, and had spent the night with Miller? He couldn't bear the thought.

‘Is she a married woman?' he asked urgently.

Miller accepted the cue gratefully. ‘Yes. And I'm sufficiently fond of her not to want to smash up her marriage, however much I may want to get my own back on her husband. Come to that, I don't want to make it any more difficult than it already is for my wife and children to come back to me. So the last thing I want is publicity.'

Quantrill breathed again. ‘If you had nothing to do with Mary Gedge's murder, the question of publicity doesn't arise. If you're telling me the truth, I can promise discretion. But I shall need corroboration before I can eliminate you—I need the lady's name.'

Miller sat with his face in his shapely hands and struggled with his bourgeois conscience. Then he stood up abruptly, scattering pie-crust crumbs. ‘Of course! There's an independent witness—Dale Kenward, who used to be Mary Gedge's boy-friend. Do you know him?'

Quantrill's eyebrows lifted. ‘A witness to what?'

Miller began to move about the room with eager, graceful strides. ‘Look,' he explained, ‘Dale and Mary quarrelled some weeks ago. Dale was sick as hell and—stupidly—he started to be jealous of me because I sometimes gave her lifts. I've had the impression that he's been keeping an eye on me during the holidays, and late on Thursday night I saw that new sports car of his parked just down the road.'

‘When you were entertaining your visitor?'

‘Yes. I suppose he thought that it might be Mary, and hung around trying to find out. My visitor had planned to leave discreetly early in the morning, but when she went out just before six to get her car from the garage, he was still sitting in his car in the same place. She had to dash back before he recognised her.'

‘He would have recognised her, then?'

‘Oh yes. We just hope that he didn't! But he certainly would have seen enough of her to realise that it wasn't Mary—wrong colouring, very dark rather than fair. He must have been satisfied, anyway, because he'd gone when I looked out an hour later.'

‘That was when your visitor left?' asked Quantrill, who was beginning to think that he knew her identity.

‘No, there was too much activity in the village by then. To make it properly respectable, she had to wait until mid-morning so that she could pretend she'd called for coffee. Well, actually—' he gave a reminiscent leer ‘—what with one thing and another, it was lunch-time before she left.'

Quantrill nodded, and went to the door. ‘All right, then, Mr Miller—I'm obliged to you for your information. Just tell me—off the record, of course—how do you get on with the headmaster of the comprehensive?'

Miller's widened eyes showed a grudging appreciation of the chief inspector's accuracy. Then he grinned. ‘Alan Denning,' he said, ‘is a fascist pig. It's all, “In my school I …” with him. And he even has the temerity to tell a teacher of my experience what is and is not a suitable form of dress to wear in front of the kids!'

He opened the door for the chief inspector. ‘Can you think,' he asked, ‘of a better way to get even with Denning than having a torrid affair with his wife?'

Offhand, Quantrill couldn't.

Sergeant Tait was disappointed. Dickie Weston had artlessly offered his entire wardrobe and his car for inspection, and nothing of any significance had been found. What had looked like a strong lead had petered out.

There had to be some evidence somewhere, and Tait was determined to find it. He had instituted a second search of the river meadow, with no result, but the scraps from the bonfire were still being analysed. Forensic science ought to be able to come up with a lead of some kind.

Tait thought about the girl's body as he had first seen it, on the river bank. Pc Godbold had been right, of course, to pull her from the water and try resuscitation; at that stage, there had been no suggestion of foul play. But the removal of the body from the river had inevitably removed or distorted some possible evidence.

Tait thought hard about the body. Then, suddenly, he sprinted to his car and drove to the public mortuary.

It was a small, windowless Victorian building, tucked away behind a depressing shrubbery of laurel bushes in the grounds of the county hospital. Tait went to the attendant's office, and came out carrying a plastic bag containing Mary Gedge's clothing just as the pathologist came down the corridor to the white-tiled cubby-hole that served him as a wash-room.

‘Oh—excuse me, sir,' Tait said.

Dr Palgrave was a small thin harrassed man, wearing a plastic cover-all. He looked at Sergeant Tait with disfavour. ‘You again? Not another body?'

‘No, sir—still the same one.'

The pathologist snorted. ‘Lucky you, Sergeant, to have so much time to spend on one case!' He stripped off the protective plastic, rolled up his shirt sleeves and began to wash. Tait, standing in the doorway, was surprised by the condition of the cramped, ill-ventilated room. It looked like a particularly disreputable public lavatory, with cracked tiles, a chipped basin and a permanently damp cement floor; only the graffiti were missing. The police federation would have had something to say about it if it were police property—and Dr Palgrave was a hospital consultant, a man of importance. Tait felt glad that he had not pursued a childhood ambition to be a doctor.

‘Do you know,' the pathologist went on wearily, ‘I've done three post-mortems since the one you're working on? And police work is just an extra, something I've been lumbered with on top of all my other responsibilities simply because there was no one else to do it. So don't, please, try to unload any of your problems on to me, because I've enough of my own. I identified the homicide you suspected, I gave you my report, and as far as I'm concerned that's it. The Mary Gedge case is entirely your responsibility now.'

The whites of Dr Palgrave's eyes were dulled from lack of sleep, and his sallow face had a greenish tinge. Tait knew when he was unwelcome, but he declined to retreat.

‘I appreciate that, sir. I'm following a line of my own, and I didn't intend to trouble you, but since we've met I'd be very grateful if you would confirm something. Your report shows that the girl's head was held under water by the pressure of someone's right hand on her bare neck; now, if his right hand was on her neck, isn't it likely that his left hand would have been pressing down on her shoulder?'

The pathologist sighed, but he gave the question his full attention as he dried his hands. ‘Yes,' he agreed, ‘that's a reasonable assumption. From the position of the bruises on her neck, the assailant must have been on her left. Yes, he would almost certainly have borne down on her left shoulder or upper arm with his left hand.'

‘That's what I thought,' said Tait eagerly. ‘Our problem is, sir, that we have a number of suspects, but nothing to pin on any one of them. I know that there isn't yet a method of taking fingerprints from bare skin, but it
is
possible to take fingerprints from fabrics. That's why I've come for the girl's dress. I'm going to send it to the forensic lab for a radioactive sulphur dioxide test. We can then compare the prints with those of our suspects.'

Dr Palgrave paused in his drying and peered open-mouthed at Tait. ‘You've got a
number
of suspects and you're going to—? You mean you're going to ask the lab to run what is virtually an elimination test—?' He began to laugh, wheezing a little at first and then throwing back his head and bellowing with laughter so huge that the whole of his thin body was shaken.

Tait was offended. ‘Sir?' he said, when he could make himself heard.