Death and the Maiden (3 page)

Tait smiled kindly. The DCI was talking too much; rattled, for some reason. It would be interesting to find out why. ‘I quite understand, sir,' he said.

He looked speculatively at Quantrill's square, heavily handsome face. The eyes were the colour of hard green plums, and Tait reminded himself that even out here in the sticks it wouldn't do to underestimate a chief inspector. ‘Frankly, sir,' he added, ‘I wasn't looking forward to being a station sergeant and dealing with lost dogs and drunks. I much prefer CID work, so I'm very glad to be here. It'll be good experience.'

Quantrill relaxed. It was a great relief to find that Tait hadn't come out to the country disgruntled. ‘Good,' he said heartily. ‘Well, you've got a nice day for a smelly job. Pig trouble, I believe?'

Tait looked down quickly. The ends of his trousers were still dark with damp, and there were splashes of dried mud on his shoes. ‘Does it smell? I'm sorry, I thought I'd wiped my shoes clean.'

It was Quantrill's turn to be kind. ‘It's not too bad.' He opened the box of cigarettes that he kept on his desk for use at interviews. ‘Do you smoke?'

‘No thank you, sir.'

‘Very wise.' Quantrill snapped the box shut, opened his tin of small cigars and lit one to drive away the faint but definable smell of pig. He was not particularly fond of cigars, but had forced himself to give up cigarettes after reading in a newspaper article that any man over the age of forty who had a tendency to overweight, took too little exercise, smoked heavily, ate irregular meals and worked under stress, was inviting a coronary.

He smiled cordially at Tait through the cigar smoke. ‘What you want to do,' he added helpfully, ‘is to carry a pair of rubber boots in your car.'

‘That's what Pc Godbold suggested.'

‘Oh, you've been out with Charlie Godbold, have you? He's a good man. You might call him old-fashioned, I suppose, but he's a good practical copper. I always find his advice worth listening to.'

‘Yes sir. Stupid of me not to go prepared, but it was a lovely morning when we left the town.'

‘Ah, but it had rained hard in the night. You have to watch that, in the country. Pavements dry soon enough, but the grass was bound to be wet, and it's always mucky round the farms. If you keep a pair of wellingtons and an old raincoat in your car, you'll be ready for anything.'

Tait did not possess a raincoat, of any vintage. He had thought that detectives in raincoats were extinct, a species recorded only on old film, and was intrigued to find one alive and apparently detecting well in East Anglia. But he continued alert and polite: ‘I'll remember that, sir.'

‘And have you found the pigs you were looking for?'

Quantrill's question came quietly, drifting out in the slow deep voice that had a Suffolk sing to it, but his eyes were suddenly difficult to evade. Taken by surprise, Tait floundered for a moment.

‘Er—well, not actually
found
them, sir. I've one or two leads—'

To Tait's surprise, the chief inspector chuckled. ‘Hi-jacked from outside a pub, I hear. Couple of young pigs, netted in the back of a pick-up truck, eh? That's the kind of crime that's going to keep you busy in this division, Sergeant Tait.'

It sounded, unfairly, like mockery.

‘Well, two pigs are quite valuable, sir,' protested Tait. ‘And then there's the truck itself … Anyway, it's the principle. Today it's pigs, tomorrow it might be whisky or cigarettes. It's a crime, whatever's involved.'

‘Quite so …' Quantrill sat back, staring meditatively at Tait through a drift of smoke. He had found the new sergeant unexpectedly easy to deal with; the young man's modesty and diffidence had taken him agreeably by surprise. Almost, he had been disarmed.

But the fact was that a policeman of Tait's calibre had no business to be diffident and modest. Quantrill leaned forward, his elbows on his desk, frowning at the tip of his cigar as he rehearsed, for Tait's benefit, the talk he had been asked to give at the next meeting of the Breckham Market Rotary Club.

‘Crime patterns,' he said, ‘are related to mobility. Now in this division, we get very little large-scale crime. The modern villain, the professional, is highly mobile. He operates in places he can get into and away from quickly, and since we've no motorways running through the Breckham Market division, we don't attract the big-time crooks. We'd catch'em in a traffic jam before they got outside the county. Oh, we've got crime, all right, thefts and burglaries and assaults and vandalism, but very little organised crime. From a police point of view it involves hours of tedious, painstaking investigation, and it needs a lot more men than we've got.'

Quantrill looked up quickly, nailing Tait with a hard green stare as he added a rider he would not offer the Rotarians: ‘But from an individual detective's point of view, it's not what you might call an intellectual challenge. Tell me. Sergeant Tait—would you describe yourself as an ambitious man?'

Too late, Tait saw the pitfall. Impossible, given his background, to deny his ambition; but to affirm it would hardly be consistent with the character he had been at pains to build. The chief inspector had caught him neatly.

He sat straighter. ‘Sir,' he conceded.

Quantrill left his cigar in the ashtray, got up and walked to the window. Then he turned, scowling. He was a big man, six feet tall and broad with it.

Sergeant Tait thought it advisable to get to his feet and stand to attention, but Quantrill began mildly enough. ‘It's not that I mind your being an actor. It's a very useful thing for a policeman to be, a detective especially. But let's get this straight—'

Quantrill placed his hands flat on his desk and leaned across it intimidatingly. ‘I am not having any of my men putting on an act for my benefit—is that clear? If you're going to work with me, I want to know what you're thinking and why you're thinking it. Of
course
you didn't want to come to this division, a man with your background—but I'd have a hell of a lot more respect for you if you'd said so, instead of trying to soft-soap me.'

Sergeant Tait, who was barely half an inch above the stipulated minimum height for members of the county force, declined with steely courtesy to be intimidated. ‘I told you the truth, sir. I was glad to be sent to this division.'

Quantrill straightened warily. ‘You were, were you?' He thought for a moment, then bent across the desk again. ‘Is this the reason, by any chance?' His hand went out to a large framed photograph that stood on his desk. He turned it to face the sergeant.

Tait had assumed that the frame would contain a photograph of the chief inspector's wife. In his experience it was an ostentatious assertion of connubial harmony that most policemen affected when they reached senior rank, as much a status symbol as the hat stand and the carpet and the swivel armchair. But as soon as he saw the photograph, Tait knew that he had misjudged the chief inspector.

He knew, too, that he had an answer more effective than words. Taking a snapshot from his wallet, he placed it silently on the desk next to the framed photograph.

They were the same, except that Quantrill's was a bigger blow-up of the original. They showed a girl of about fifteen years old, dark curly hair blowing round her cheeks, laughing into the camera.

Quantrill slumped down, and waved Tait back to his chair. ‘Hoping to find her, are you?' he asked heavily.

‘Hoping to help, sir.'

Quantrill picked up his cigar, took a puff, grimaced and stubbed it out. ‘Yes, I understand. Joy Dawson's disappearance is the biggest unsolved case in the whole county at the moment. It's had national publicity. Naturally, you'd like to have a go at it … and it wouldn't do your career much harm if you were the one who found out what happened to her, would it?'

Tait gave him as blunt an answer as he'd asked for. ‘No, sir. And I think it can sometimes help, when an investigation gets bogged down, if someone who hasn't been involved takes a look at it—'

‘Involved!' Quantrill slammed his hand angrily on his desk. ‘Involved … my God you're right, we are involved, all of us who've been trying to find her! You're not married, are you?'

‘No sir.'

‘Well when you are, with children of your own to be fearful for, you'll begin to understand. You don't need to tell me that one of the rules of good police work is never to become personally involved in a case, but there are times when you can't help it. When a youngster dies, whether by accident or murder, it's tragic—but death happens all the time, and we have to learn to come to terms with it. Disappearance is different, though. It's a terrifying thing …'

Quantrill shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘Maybe you're right,' he went on slowly, ‘maybe it will help if someone new takes a look at it, someone who can read the evidence more objectively than any of us—though God knows there's little enough evidence. Still, you're welcome to read the file when you've got time. Take a look at the area when you're over on that side of the division, and then let me know what you think. But
don't
interview any of the witnesses.'

‘Oh, but sir—'

‘You heard what I said, and that's an order. The parents have had enough, they're ill with worry. The last thing they want is a cool, uninvolved young detective trampling about all over their feelings for the sake of furthering his own career, and I won't have them badgered. If you can see a possible new line of enquiry from the file, bring it straight to me.'

Tait's jaw tightened. ‘Selfish bastard,' he thought.

‘Sorry,' went on Quantrill, not unsympathetically, ‘but I've got my orders too. The moment I get a new lead, I'm to tell the chief super—it isn't a divisional matter any more, there's a line of senior officers interested in the case and I'm afraid that detective sergeants go to the far end. So it looks as though you're stuck with the missing pigs—'

The internal telephone rang. Quantrill answered it, sat up abruptly, then relaxed. He put down the receiver, and began to scratch the side of his jaw with his forefinger.

‘Radio message from Charlie Godbold at Ashthorpe,' he said conversationally. ‘When you were out with him this morning, did you happen to go over Ashthorpe bridge—narrow stone hump-backed affair?'

‘Yes, we did.'

‘Ah.' Quantrill had learned to be a bit of an actor himself, and the opportunity to upstage his new sergeant was irresistible. ‘Didn't happen to see a dead body in the river there, I suppose?' he asked casually.

Tait looked gratifyingly astounded. ‘Sir—?'

Quantrill raised an understanding hand. ‘But you don't go round looking for dead bodies, do you? That's all right, sergeant, it wouldn't be reasonable if you did. But it's there all right, a girl, been there some hours in Godbold's opinion. No sign of foul play, though. He's pretty certain it must have been an accident.'

Tait was alert, impatient. ‘Do you mean it's Joy Dawson?'

‘No—and in a way I'm sorry. Like I said, you can come to terms with death—and you know as well as I do that she could have come to a far worse end than death by drowning … No, this is an Ashthorpe girl, Godbold knows her. He'll break it to the relatives, so at least you'll be spared that. Just satisfy yourself that there are no suspicious circumstances, and then make the usual enquiries about when she was last seen.'

Tait stood up eagerly. He had thought that Quantrill meant to keep him permanently on lost pig duty, by way of retaliation. ‘You're sending me, sir?'

‘Who else? You can send a constable after the pigs. But sergeant—'

‘Sir?'

‘Try not to look so pleased about it, will you? The poor girl didn't die to provide you with a welcome change from routine. And don't go there hoping that it'll turn out to be murder, either. It's enough that she died—don't wish for it to be any worse than it is.'

Tait sobered. He hurried from the office, down the stairs and through the main hall. Sergeant Lamb looked up as he passed the desk.

‘Hey—er—mate …'

‘Can't stop,' said Tait. ‘Fatality.'

‘I know, girl found drowned. Want to borrow a pair of wellies?'

Tait hesitated, then looked down at his maltreated shoes. ‘Thanks very much,' he said, ‘I'd be glad to.'

Chief Inspector Quantrill believed in delegation. He had no intention of trying to cramp an ambitious young sergeant; and surely a police college graduate could be relied on to deal with a simple case of accidental death?

But the Joy Dawson case was heavy on his mind. Because she had disappeared on a sunny February mid-morning, from a quiet country road within a mile of her own home, Quantrill had allowed the usual missing juvenile routine to take its course. It was five hours before he had appreciated that the disappearance was desperately serious, and in that time dusk had fallen and the trail—because there must have been a trail, there simply couldn't have been no evidence at all—was ice-cold.

Well, there was no reason to suppose that there was any connection between the death of the girl in the river at Ashthorpe and the disappearance of Joy Dawson twenty miles away and three months ago. But suppose there was some kind of connection? Or suppose that, despite Pc Godbold's assurance, this death was not accidental?

Quantrill gave Tait a half-hour's start, then took his hat and his car and made for Ashthorpe. As he neared the turning from the main road to the village the mortuary van came towards him, travelling in the direction of the county hospital; obviously Tait had found nothing suspicious, but even so his Citroën was still at the scene of the fatality, parked on the grass verge well before the approach to Ashthorpe bridge.

The chief inspector pulled his solid Austin in behind Tait's car. The grass had dried but he changed into his rubber boots, tossing his hat on to the car seat in acknowledgement of the sunshine before he walked to the bridge.