Death and the Maiden (7 page)

The woman peered over his shoulder, agog with interest, to see who else was in the shop. Quantrill kept his head well down.

‘Purely a routine visit,' the sergeant pointed out firmly. ‘Now if you'll please—'

‘Oh. Oh well, I'll just take half of bacon for now, Bob, seeing as you're busy,' said the woman graciously, ‘and a tin of rice pudding. The rest'll do tomorrow. Better take a tin of Chum an'all, though, can't let the poor dog starve.'

‘If you could just come back in half an hour, Daph,' pleaded Mr Gedge. ‘I haven't had time to bone the bacon yet, you see, and with the police here …'

‘Back in half an hour! Now look you here, Bob Gedge, I've been up and down this street like a yo-yo today, trying to get served—' She found herself impaled on one of Sergeant Tait's ice-pick glances, and changed her theme. ‘Well, all right, then, I'm sure I don't want to hinder the police. Tell Hilda I'm ever so sorry, Bob, will you? And I'll see about a whip-round for a wreath.' She backed from the door. ‘An accident, was it?' she asked Tait confidentially. ‘Only you never know what these young girls get up to these days, and you do hear such things …'

Tait shut the door on the bereaved father and caught at her sleeve as she turned to go. ‘What things?' he demanded.

She shook him off indignantly. ‘Well, things in the papers. Not that I've got anything against Bob's Mary, mind. Never heard a word of talk against her. But that's what I mean, it's not natural for a girl of her age not to have a bit of fun, and you can't tell me she spent all her time studying. After all, look at her brother. Butter wouldn't have melted in Derek's mouth, no interest in anything except his books—but we all know what
he
got up to on the quiet. Makes you wonder, eh? Makes you think. You know what they say, still waters run deep.'

Tait turned his back on her, went into the shop and locked the door.

Mr Gedge was sitting on the bentwood chair by the counter, passing his handkerchief over his face. ‘I'm sorry about that,' he was telling the chief inspector. ‘Sorry about the interruption. Only it's the goodwill, you see, you have to try not to offend.'

The policemen exchanged grimaces. ‘Of course, Mr Gedge,' said Quantrill. ‘I'm sorry we're keeping you so long, but we do have to try to build up an accurate picture. Did Mary receive or make any telephone calls yesterday?'

‘Not as far as I know.' The shopkeeper pushed himself up wearily from his chair, and began to pack the groceries in a cardboard box.

‘Can you tell me what sort of mood Mary was in yesterday evening? Was she depressed at all, or worried?'

‘Why, bless you no!' said Mr Gedge warmly. ‘That wasn't Mary's nature. She was quiet, yes, but she wasn't moody. And yesterday she was happy, just as usual. I mean, she'd got nothing to be worried about. She'd passed all her exams, and left school at Easter. I was going to pay her for helping me in the shop during the summer, so there was no call for her to be worried about money. She was on top of the world.'

‘Any—' Quantrill sought for the most delicate way to put it ‘—any family problems?'

Mr Gedge shrugged. ‘I suppose Charlie Godbold told you about Derek?' he said slowly. ‘He had to get married instead of going to Cambridge, and Mary was very upset about it at the time. She'd got over that, though.'

But had Derek? wondered Tait. He spoke casually: ‘Would your son have gone to the same college as Mary? To King's?'

‘Oh no.' Mr Gedge cut a piece of cheese, absently slipping a sliver of it into his mouth before weighing and wrapping it. ‘Derek was going to one of the other colleges, Selwyn.' He looked over his shoulder, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘I'd be greatly obliged if you didn't mention Derek to Mrs Gedge. She can't bring herself to forgive him, you see.'

Tait changed the subject. ‘Could Mary drive?'

‘No. Some of her friends could, I think—they'd sometimes come and pick her up by car if they'd got anything planned. But Mary always mentioned it if she was going out.'

Quantrill, conscious of the heaviness of Mrs Godbold's cheese and pickle sandwiches, helped himself to a packet of mints and placed the money on the till. ‘Did you know any of her friends, Mr Gedge?'

‘Why yes. One of them came over here sometimes, Sally somebody, a nice girl. She was a school friend—most of them were, I think. I can't tell you anything about them, though. Mary spent a lot of time helping me here in the shop at weekends and holidays, and she'd chatter away about plays and tennis matches and swimming, and all these names would come out: Sally and Liz and Dale and Dusty and Miggy or Moggy or some such—to tell you the truth, I didn't listen half the time. It was all a bit beyond me. But whatever she was doing, I knew that I had nothing to worry about—Mary never gave me a moment's anxiety.'

It was a great deal more than Quantrill could say of his own daughters; and small enough comfort for the man, now that Mary was dead. The chief inspector would have liked to leave it at that but, recalling what young Godbold had said, there was one more question to be asked.

‘Do you happen to know if your daughter had a boyfriend, Mr Gedge?'

His conviction was absolute. ‘Oh, she didn't. Not a boyfriend in the sense of—of going courting,' he said, offering an expression that must have been current in his own youth. ‘Well, they'd had boys at the school since last year, so naturally she knew some of them. Dale, for one. But there was nothing serious. She didn't have any love affairs.'

Then, as though anxious not to appear to be denigrating his daughter, he added quickly, ‘Mind you, it's not that she wasn't pretty. Here—'

The colour print must have been on the counter in front of him all the time, propped up against a pyramid of canned fruit so that he could see it as he tried to work. It trembled between his fingers as he held it out for the policemen to see, and neither of them attempted to take it from him even for a moment.

Mary Gedge had been very attractive. Her drowned hair had looked brown to Tait, but now he saw that it had been blonde. Blonde shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, delicate features, a slight figure; not pertly pretty, but almost beautiful, with a look of serene happiness.

Quantrill said nothing. He thought of Alison, who was just a year older than Mary, and of how he might feel if Alison died, and he knew that there was nothing he could say.

‘I took the photo this spring,' Mr Gedge said in a thickening voice. ‘It was just after she'd heard she was going to Cambridge. She was so happy—it was what she'd been working for all these years at school, and why she hadn't minded not having much of a social life here. She'd set her heart on Cambridge—she once said to me, “That's when I'll really start living. Dad.”'

He stood with his head bowed over the box of groceries, trying to hold his shoulders rigid in an attempt to conceal his tears.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Gedge,' said Quantrill gently. ‘You've been very helpful. If we could just see your wife for a few moments, please, just to confirm …'

Mr Gedge straightened, blew his nose, and invited them round behind the counter. ‘Yes, of course. You'll find her down at the caravan. Through this door and across the yard and the lawn, and then you'll be able to see the caravan at the far end of the orchard. Mary always liked to keep it private, you see, and my wife thought she'd go and give it a bit of a turnout. Get rid of the rubbish, like.'

Quantrill's eyes bulged. ‘She
what
?'

He broke into a heavy run but Tait was ahead of him, the ends of his clover-pink trousers flapping as his legs scythed through the orchard grass.

The orchard was vulgar with colour. Only a bad amateur painter would have sprayed so much pink and white apple blossom against so blue a sky, and splattered so many brilliant sunbursts of dandelion yellow against such vivid green grass. The old caravan was the sole drab feature, erupting like a weather-stained giant puff-ball from a patch of buttercups near the boundary hedge.

As Tait ran up a hand emerged from the open doorway of the caravan to shake out a duster. It was followed by a suspicious head.

Mrs Gedge was a smaller version of her husband, but unmistakably tougher: back straight, hair scraped into an uncompromising knot, glasses flashing formidably in the sunlight.

‘And who may you be?' she demanded.

‘Detective Sergeant Tait, county police. This—' as his superior pounded up ‘—is Chief Inspector Quantrill.'

She nodded, partially reassured. ‘As long as you're not from the newspapers.'

‘Mrs Gedge,' said Quantrill, trying to control his panting breath, ‘may I ask what you're doing?'

An ugly red flush spread upwards from her throat. ‘If it's any concern of yours, I'm sorting out my daughter's things.'

Her voice was steady. At first glance Quantrill had thought her remarkably unmoved by Mary's death, but now he realised that what he had assumed to be bifocal lenses were in fact two small pools of tears, trapped against her high cheekbones by the frame of her glasses.

He took a deep breath and started again. ‘I'm sorry, Mrs Gedge. I'm very sorry about your daughter's death, and I apologise for this intrusion—but I'm afraid that what you're doing is very much our concern. In a case of sudden death it's our duty to investigate the circumstances, and we'd have liked to see your daughter's belongings just as she left them.'

The girl's mother stood straight and proud in the doorway of the caravan. ‘There's nothing here to interest you. Chief Inspector. My Mary's dead. Let her rest.'

‘I'm afraid that we have to find out how she died before we can do that,' Quantrill pointed out quietly.

‘It was an accident. She went out early to pick flowers, slipped in the river and was drowned.'

‘How do you know that?' Tait asked. ‘Were you there, Mrs Gedge?'

She turned on him. ‘Of course I wasn't there! But what else could it have been? She didn't jump in deliberately, if that's what you mean—that would be sinful. And you've not come here to tell me that somebody killed her, because I know different. Charlie Godbold came and told us himself. A clean death, he said—she wasn't harmed in any way.'

‘Yes. But we still need to know exactly what happened,' Quantrill explained patiently. ‘There might have been witnesses, you see, and we have to find them.'

Mrs Gedge shrugged. The movement released the tears from behind her glasses. They rolled down to her chin, gathering there for a moment before plopping singly on to the flat front of her cotton overall. ‘That's no concern of mine. The Lord gave her to us, and in his wisdom he's taken her away again. I don't question his works, Chief Inspector.'

There were times when the chief inspector wished that he didn't have to question them either. ‘May we look inside the caravan, please?' he asked.

‘If you must. Not that you'll find anything. Mary was a good girl, and there's nothing here will tell you any different.'

‘Then may I ask what you were doing here, Mrs Gedge?' said Tait.

She raised the corners of her downturned mouth, giving a momentary impression of satisfaction. ‘I was tidying up. She never let me give it a good turn-out, and I wanted to be sure that she'd kept it clean. And she had. Even folded up her sleeping bag and washed her crockery before she went out.'

Mrs Gedge stepped down from the doorway and let the policemen in. She followed them. The caravan was old-fashioned, small-windowed and cramped with fittings, but scrupulously tidy. All the lockers and cupboards were open, their contents laid out for inspection: clean crockery, a jar of instant coffee and an opened packet of biscuits on the sink unit, a sleeping bag folded on the bunk beside a pile of clean underclothes, an assortment of blouses and skirts and jeans hanging from wire hangers on the outside of the wardrobe door, a heap of folders and books stacked on the table beneath the window. Apart from a transistor radio, and a calendar With Compliments and Thanks from R. J. Gedge, Draper and Family Grocer, Ashthorpe, hanging from the knob of a locker, there was nothing else at all.

‘Sellotape,' muttered Tait, who spotted it first. Quantrill nodded.

‘What have you taken down, Mrs Gedge? Oh, come now. Look, there are bits of sellotape on the walls—obviously things were stuck here. What were they?'

‘Rubbish!' she said vehemently. ‘Just rubbishy photographs. Actors and so-called singers.'

‘Any photographs of real people? I mean, friends?'

‘No.'

‘Why did you take them down?'

‘So that I could put them on the bonfire. Best place for them. A lot of silliness, not suitable for a girl of her education.'

Quantrill riffled through the folders, but they appeared to contain nothing but essays and school work. ‘And what else did you remove? Any personal letters?'

Two bright splotches warmed her cheeks. ‘A few. Just ordinary letters from school friends. No point in keeping them.'

‘Was there a letter from Mary herself? A note of any kind?'

Her chin lifted. ‘No.'

‘A diary?'

‘No.'

Tait intervened. ‘Where are the photographs and letters that you're going to burn, Mrs Gedge?'

Her mouth moved upward again, almost achieving the horizontal. ‘I've already put them on the bonfire. It's in the middle of the orchard. Burned out by now, I should think.'

Quantrill jerked his head at Tait, but the sergeant was already on his way out of the caravan. The chief inspector looked hard at the woman, trying to balance compassion against anger. ‘I must point out to you, Mrs Gedge, that it's a serious offence to conceal evidence from the police.'

She trembled with anger. ‘Evidence of what? What have you got against my daughter? I'll tell you—nothing at all! She lived clean and she died clean, and there's nothing here will tell you any different!'