Fate Worse Than Death (30 page)

‘Where is she, Mr Thorold?' asked Hilary.

‘Why, in his old den in the woodyard, like as not. Place he made for hisself when he was a boy. Couldn't keep her in the house, or she might have called out when somebody came for eggs. He'd have put her in the barn, I daresay, if he wasn't afeared you'd look there. She's alive and well, I know that. Christopher means her no harm, Miss. He just needs a woman here. I reckon he thought if he picked her up and tended her, she'd be grateful enough to stay.'

‘But you told us you didn't want to have a woman here, Mr Thorold.'

‘No more I don't Miss – no offence to you. But I can't get about like I used to. My old legs won't go. There's things as have to be done for me, and the boy's afeared he won't be able to manage. He feels the want of a wife.'

‘And that was why he took Sandra Websdell, wasn't it?' said Quantrill.

Albert Thorold's lips trembled. ‘The boy was right fond of her,' he said. ‘He'd hoped for her ever since she was a little'un, only he was too shy to speak for her. He meant her no harm. She never should ha'died …'

‘Did you know at the time that your son had abducted Sandra?' Quantrill asked him.

There was a distant look in the old man's pale eyes. ‘Not at first, I didn't. Not'til he started taking food out to the barn. I couldn't stop him doing what he wanted, not without the use of my legs. I told him he couldn't keep her, but he was sure she'd settle.'

‘You knew your son was doing wrong, Mr Thorold,' said Quantrill sternly. ‘You knew that it was a wicked thing to take a girl away from her family and friends, and keep her shut up against her will. I believe you're related by marriage to Sandra's mother, so you knew perfectly well how anguished she'd be. Why didn't you try to get a message to Mrs Websdell? You could have done that easily enough, by way of someone who came here for eggs.'

The old man shook his head. ‘'Twouldn't have done. Christopher was too set on keeping Sandra. He wouldn't have given her up.'

‘All the more reason why you should have notified someone, Mr Thorold. Your son can't be allowed to behave in that way. You know that.'

Albert Thorold slowly straightened his back. The stiff old hands ceased their stroking of the pet hen. Looking directly at the Chief Inspector, he spoke with passionate, dignified reproach.

‘Even an ol'rat will look after his own, Mister. Even an ol'
rat
will look after his own.'

Somewhere in the woodyard, where swifts making the most of the evening light wheeled and swooped for insects, a chainsaw was screeching.

Following the sound past the piles of logs and the teepees of larch poles, Chief Inspector Quantrill and Sergeant Lloyd came upon Christopher Thorold. He was cutting up the trunk of a dead elm tree, his eyes protected by goggles from flying sawdust, his grip two-handed, his legs braced to control the weight and power of the petrol-driven saw.

Knowing that it would be dangerous to try to attract the man's attention while he was using the chainsaw, Quantrill waited. Christopher Thorold finished the cut he was making, and allowed the machine to idle while he pushed the goggles up on to his greying, tufted hair and wiped his sweating face with his shirt-sleeve.

Wasting no time on preliminaries, the Chief Inspector called to him, ‘Christopher! Where is she? Where is Mrs Yardley?'

Taken completely by surprise, Christopher gaped. Quantrill said it again, and the man turned his head sharply away, as a child does when it wants to pretend that it hasn't heard an inconvenient question.

Hilary, moving up on his other side, tried to coax him. ‘We do know that Mrs Yardley's here, Christopher. You can't keep her, you know. It would never do – she's one of the Horrockses. Her uncle's the Earl of Brandon, and he wants her back.'

Christopher stammered with astonishment, ‘I – I didn't know that …'

‘I'm sure you didn't. Where is she?'

Still holding his chainsaw, the man frowned and hung his head and shifted his boots. Hilary talked to him kindly, and eventually Christopher nodded with reluctance towards a distant pile of tree-trunks, in form not unlike a windowless log cabin. ‘She's all right,' he assured them. ‘Only she won't settle …'

Hilary used her personal radio to call up the uniformed men who were waiting out of sight in the lane. They hurried into the woodyard and released Annabel Yardley. She emerged from her prison dazed, dirty, but still elegant and extremely vocal, and was helped away to the police car. Christopher watched her go. ‘I – I meant her no harm,' he protested.

‘Probably not,' said Quantrill heavily. ‘I don't suppose you meant any harm to Sandra Websdell, either. But that poor girl's dead, and we need to know how and why. You'd better switch that chainsaw off, and go and tell your Pa you're coming with us.'

It seemed to take a few minutes for his words to sink in. Christopher Thorold turned his unshaven face from one detective to the other, at first uncomprehending, then with growing anguish. Finally he gave his head a stubborn shake, and pulled down his goggles. Turning his back on them – childishly, Quantrill thought – he put the engine up to full speed and raised the chainsaw shoulder-high over the tree-trunk.

It was only then that Hilary remembered the previous conversation she'd had with Christopher Thorold: how he'd told her that he loved his home in the forest, and that he would rather die than leave it.

Whether or not that remark was significant, neither she nor Quantrill would ever know. With Christopher's burly back to them, it was impossible for them to see what he was doing.

It could have been an accident. Chainsaws are notoriously dangerous. A moment's inattention, an unbalanced stance, an encounter with a nail embedded in the wood, and the saw can leap out of the user's control with the chain blades still whizzing round at a speed designed to cut through a hardwood tree in a matter of seconds.

All the detectives could see, as Christopher's chainsaw began to scream through a solid object, was that the jet-stream flying from it was not composed of sawdust.

On the day of Constance Schultz's funeral, it poured with rain.

Martin Tait drove to the Saintsbury crematorium alone. His mother – Con's sister-in-law – had pulled a calf muscle while overdoing her exercises, and was unable to attend. Apart from two old cousins in Eastbourne who were too frail to travel, Con had no other relatives.

Tait had tried to get in touch with his aunt's best friend, an old school chum, Eileen Farleigh. He knew that the two women had often taken holidays together and usually visited each other at least once a year. Mrs Farleigh, a widow, lived in Shropshire. Martin wrote to tell her of her friend's death but received no reply. Expecting that she would want to be present at the funeral service – and hoping that he would not have to be the sole immediate mourner – he tried on two occasions to telephone her, without success.

It seemed, though, that there would be no lack of other mourners. The newspaper notices of Constance Schultz's death had brought messages that a number of her friends and former colleagues from Woodbridge and Ipswich intended to be present. She had evidently been well regarded, and Tait was surprised, touched and ultimately ashamed to receive so many letters of condolence.

He had decided, after all, to put
‘dear aunt of Martin'
in the notices. Not to do so might, he thought, be interpreted in some quarters as an admission of guilt.

From the residents of Fodderstone he had heard nothing but an accusatory silence. Despite the fact that the coroner had returned a verdict of suicide on his aunt, as far as the local community was concerned Marjorie Braithwaite's allegations had stuck.

Thank God he didn't live in the village. At least he need never see any of them again.

But what he hadn't taken into consideration was that, whatever they might feel about him, her Fodderstone friends would want to pay their last respects to Constance Schultz. The first thing he noticed, as he paced into the crematorium chapel behind her coffin, was the complete emptiness of the immediate mourners'pews on the right-hand side, were he would have to sit. The second thing was that the left-hand pews, almost full, contained many of the villagers he had hoped not to see; among them Mrs Braithwaite, looking at her most formidable.

Martin Tait went to his conspicuous place in the front row. Most of the Fodderstone people had turned their heads away from him as he walked past, but he had seen nudges, and heard sharp inhalations of breath. Perhaps they'd thought he wouldn't have the nerve to come? Standing exposed, with his back to them, he sensed that they were watching him with undisguised hostility.

And then, just as the service was about to start, three late-comers hurried in and chose to stand behind him; two rows back, in acknowledgement of the fact that they were not family mourners, but at least on his side of the chapel. It would have been impolite for him to turn and look, but he recognized two sets of footsteps as women's. Moving his head slightly, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the third newcomer was Douglas Quantrill.

How very decent of the old man to come and give him such public support! Surprised and gratified, Tait sensed some of the tension of the past few weeks draining away. He hardly heard the opening prayers as he recalled what a hell of a time it had been: the row with Aunt Con, her death, the sticky interview with the Assistant Chief Constable, the ordeal of the inquest – and now this final ordeal of the funeral service.

But it was a great help to feel that his back was covered. Tait held his head high, and opened the hymn book. Having realized that there would be a sizeable congregation he had arranged for the inclusion in the service of all the music Aunt Con had wanted: not only part of the Fauré
Requiem
, but also the favourite hymn that, with characteristic diffidence, she had thought there would be too few people to sing.

The Taits had always been a musical family, and Martin knew that he had a pleasant light baritone voice. Thinking of nothing but the impression he wanted to make on the rest of the congregation, he opened his lungs and sang.

Dear Lord and Father of mankind
Forgive our foolish ways:
Reclothe us in our rightful mind;
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.

It was not until somewhere in the third verse that he found his thoughts dwelling on his aunt. There had been so many other things for him to think about that he had not taken into account the fact that he might be moved by her funeral service. But now, unexpectedly, the lines

The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love

caught him by the throat.

Too choked to continue, he stared dumbly at Aunt Con's plain coffin, with his wreath of her favourite pink Zephirine Drouhin roses on it. He remembered the lifetime of kindness he had had from her, her funny awkwardnesses, the final embrace she had given him. He thought with remorse of their quarrel, and with guilt of the way she had died.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress –

Her friends – more of them than he or she had imagined – sang

on, subdued. Martin was beyond singing. He stood stiff, his eyes tightly closed, his tongue pressed hard against the roof of his mouth, trying to hold back the seeping tears. Ashamed to be seen to pull out his handkerchief, he wiped his cheeks furtively with his fingers.

It was then that he became aware that someone had moved out from the pew behind and was coming to stand beside him. He glanced sideways, and his heart lifted as he glimpsed Alison Quantrill's sweet grave face, and the beautiful eyes that were damp with sympathetic tears.

Neither of them managed to sing the final verse, but they gave each other silent support by sharing the same hymn book.

‘It's been a long time …'

They were at last alone together, having tea in the lounge of the Angel hotel at Saintsbury. Realizing that he ought to have made some provision of refreshment after the funeral service, Martin had felt obliged to ask Hilary Lloyd and Douglas Quantrill as well; but they both said they had to get back to work.

Even so, there had been a delay while Martin stood at the chapel doors during the Fauré
In Paradisum
to thank his aunt's friends for coming. The attitude of the Fodderstone contingent varied. Some, like Marjorie Braithwaite, swept out into the rain pretending not to see him. Others, like Geoff Websdell and Lois Goodwin, gave him a non-committal nod. Only Beryl Websdell pressed his hand warmly and said, ‘God bless you'; but then she would have done the same to any sinner.

And now he faced Alison Quantrill over the teacups, talking to her for the first time since their stupid quarrel. That, he remembered, had been about his aunt … ‘It's no use avoiding the subject,' he said. ‘A lot of people still think I killed Aunt Con for her money.'

‘
I
don't,' protested Alison. ‘Neither does Dad, nor Hilary. Besides, you've been officially cleared – the coroner said he was satisfied that your aunt had taken her own life.'

‘That's not the point,' said Tait. ‘There is such a thing as getting away with murder, if you're clever enough to destroy all the evidence against you. You may be officially innocent, but some people will go on thinking – and saying – you did it for the rest of your life.'

‘Oh, who cares about a pack of busybodies,' said Alison.

‘It's not the Marjorie Braithwaites of this world I'm worried about. It's my colleagues in the police force. Not all of them are as fair-minded as your father and Hilary Lloyd. Being selected for accelerated promotion has never made me popular with the PC Plods of this division, and you can bet they'll make sure the whole county force hears of this allegation against me.'