Who Saw Him Die? (6 page)

But this morning, as she opened the doors of the ground-floor rooms to survey all that needed to be done, she steeled herself to confront her memories. She was no longer a frightened child, or a quaking adolescent. Her mother and father were long dead, safely buried in the family plot where Cuthbert would soon join them. She was free of them all.

Or so she tried to convince herself. But as soon as she set foot in that dreaded corridor, where she had gone only when summoned for her birthday ordeal or, more frequently, to explain some minor breach of conduct to her mother who had then referred her to her father for sentence, the years of independent adulthood might never have been. Everything – the cold black and white tiles on the floor, the dark brown paintwork, the stained-glass window that provided the corridor with such dismal light, the heavy silence, the pervasive smell of rising damp – reminded her of her youthful unhappiness. As she forced herself to walk past that former sitting room, Eunice recalled how her mother had been accustomed to sit there for hours with the door ajar, playing patience. And how, as she had passed the doorway, trembling, on her way to the tower, the
slap slap slap
of her mother's cards had presaged the punishment she was about to receive at her father's hands.

No. She had not been up in the tower for years, and there was no need for her to go there now. Before she could put her mind to clearing the house, she had to complete her family duty by burying Cuthbert. And she could not feel free to bury him until the police had properly investigated the suspicious circumstances of his death.

Douglas Quantrill left home to go to work in a state of domestic shock. He didn't
want
to be a grandfather. He wasn't ready for it yet. He was too young!

He had said as much to Molly, but there was no sympathy to be had from that quarter. She had merely told him not to be so selfish; and as for being too young, she declared, that was nonsense. ‘Think yourself lucky, Doug Quantrill, that Jennifer and Nigel didn't get married and start a family at the age we did, or you'd have been a grandfather at forty-one!'

It wasn't the most tactful of reminders. Starting a family had been the last thing he intended, as he had lain with his girl friend on a river bank one pre-pill summer's evening and persuaded her – just this once – to allow him a special twenty-first birthday privilege. Molly had been a most attractive girl, and he'd certainly wanted her; but not as a wife! Marriage hadn't entered his head. He was too young for it, he'd protested a few weeks later, when she told him tearfully that once had been enough to make her pregnant. But that hadn't stopped her parents from organising a very rapid wedding.

And now he was trapped again, pushed unprepared into a role that was even more ageing. He himself was certainly not going to tell anyone, but in a small town like Breckham (and with Molly tickled pink) the news would get out soon enough. So he might as well abandon all hope of ever furthering his relationship with Hilary Lloyd, because the fact that he was almost a grandfather was bound to put him, in her estimation, completely out of the running.

Quantrill's route to Tower House from Benidorm Avenue (a 1960s development by a local builder who had named it after his favourite holiday resort) took him past the school that Peter still attended. Built as the Alderman Thirkettle Secondary Modern School it was now Breckham Market Comprehensive, with a sixth form centre where, as far as Quantrill could make out, his son was passing his final year in ignorance and idleness.

Peter had been a great disappointment to his father. Much as he had loved his young daughters, Douglas Quantrill had naturally hoped for a son; and just as naturally he had hoped that the boy would do as well at school, if not better, than his sisters.

But Peter (as Molly, who had not been very clever but whose Church of England parents had sent her to a convent high school so that she could learn French and Art in the company of other nice girls, was sometimes provoked into pointing out) took educationally after his father. Douglas Quantrill had found his schooldays insufferably boring, and had thankfully bolted from the classroom at what was then the standard leaving age of fourteen.

He'd regretted it subsequently, of course. He was always conscious, particularly in the company of up-and-coming younger colleagues, of his lack of secondary education. But at least there'd been some excuse for his dislike of his village school, where an elderly headmistress had been in sole charge of the cavernous Big Room, filled with children between the ages of eight and fourteen, with a blackboard, a map of the world, a wireless set and a cane as her only teaching aids. No wonder he‘d been bored, he told himself defensively, suppressing the shame that accompanied the remembrance of the way he and the other boys had teased and harried the poor woman.

For Peter, though, it ought to have been different. His school was modern, properly staffed, fully equipped, surrounded by playing fields. From the age of eleven the boy had been given the opportunity to learn any subject, to pursue any hobby, to take up any sport. His father had constantly urged him to make the most of his chances, but the more Quantrill urged, the less his son had been inclined to do.

Perhaps, Quantrill admitted to himself, that was where he'd gone wrong. Molly had always said that he tried to push Peter too hard; but it had seemed to him that unless he pushed, the boy would have done nothing at all. The unfortunate result was that he'd managed to put a barrier of ill-feeling between himself and his son – a barrier that was strengthened by the nature of his own job.

Everyone in Breckham Market associated the name Quantrill with the police, and there was no doubt that Peter must have taken a lot of stick on account of it. A copper's son was bound to feel that he had to prove himself to his mates, and Peter had gone out of his way to do so. When he was fifteen he had appeared, to the shame of his parents, before a juvenile court on a charge of causing malicious damage to the church hall where the youth club met. A fine way for a chief inspector's son to behave … and God knew, now, what the wretched boy got up to in the wasteland of his spare time.

Quantrill was very worried about his son, though he tried not to let his wife know it. She doted so uncritically on Peter that there was no point in attempting to discuss him with her. Besides, knowing what he did about the darker side of life, Quantrill had always made a point of trying not to alarm Molly. It had seemed best to let her issue the necessary parental cautions about road safety, and later about smoking and alcohol, while he took secretively upon himself the tightrope tasks of warning the children against strangers without making them afraid of people, and forbidding them to experiment with drugs without arousing their curiosity.

Well, at least none of his three had been molested, thank God. And the two girls had grown up thoroughly wholesome. But Peter …

After his court appearance, the boy had become sullen and uncommunicative. The magistrates had given him a conditional discharge, and Quantrill had tried to impress upon his son the need to change his friends and to take up a healthy sport or hobby. Peter had certainly kept out of any further public mischief, but the nature of his current activities was a mystery to his parents. He treated the house as a hotel, and – apart from the occasions when his father hollered at him to answer when he was spoken to – withdrew from any participation in family life.

Naturally, Quantrill had begun to fear the worst. He had searched Peter's room and found neither smell nor sign of drugs or solvents – but if the boy was using them he would know better than to do so at home. Whenever he could get within reach of his son Quantrill peered suspiciously for tell-tale physical signs, but the only result of this policy was that Peter now kept out of his father's way as much as possible.

This morning's incident, when he had chased the boy upstairs to demand an apology from him, was in fact the first direct communication that they had had for months. Irritated as he had been at the time, Quantrill had begun on reflection to take heart from the episode. For a few moments Peter had looked and sounded like the cheerful young rascal of old. He'd been quite funny about Jennifer's weedy husband Nigel … probably right, too … If only Molly hadn't been there, looking embarrassed, they could have had a father-and-son laugh about it. Still, if it meant that Peter was beginning to come out of his self-imposed exile, that was something to be thankful for.

Quantrill felt almost light-hearted, until he recalled his son's cheeky punch-line.
Grandad
… What a humiliation to have to come to terms with! And there, as he drove along Victoria Road towards Tower House, was Hilary Lloyd waiting for him in her car … She was just thirty-one, only eighteen years younger than he was, but she would be bound to think of him as irretrievably middle-aged, once she knew.

Once she knew
. Quantrill's spirits began to lift again. Hilary didn't know, yet; almost certainly wouldn't, for some time. For the next few weeks, or months, he still had some credibility as a youngish man – so why not try to make the most of it?

He accelerated towards her, indulging in a moment's fantasy until he heard – faint but clear, and coming unmistakably from the direction of Benidorm Avenue – the voice of common sense telling him not to go making a silly fool of himself.

Quantrill brought his Maestro smartly to a halt at the kerb, nose to nose with Sergeant Lloyd's Metro. He got out of his car as athletically as possible, and went to speak to her through her open window.

‘'Morning, Hilary!' And then, because he hadn't seen her for several days, and because she looked in some way different, he added impulsively, ‘How are you?'

‘Peeved,' said Sergeant Lloyd. She spoke pleasantly enough, but the smile he had hoped for – the rare whole-hearted smile that lit up her strong-boned face in a way that invariably dazzled him – failed to appear. ‘This allegation of murder sounds a time-waster, but I'd have liked to handle it myself. There was no need for you to give up your rest day to come and take charge.'

‘Not my idea,' Quantrill assured her hastily. ‘And it's certainly no reflection on you, Hilary. Apparently Miss Bell went over all our heads to the Super – and you know how he jumps when he's spoken to by anyone who's likely to be acquainted with the Chief Constable. I suppose he promised her that he'd put his senior CID officer on to the inquiry, so here I am whether I like it or not.'

Liking it – or at least this part of it – he opened her car door. Reassured by his explanation, Hilary Lloyd gave him a workaday smile of thanks and got out. As she stood up – tallish, gracefully straight-backed, but regrettably thin for his taste – he widened his eyes and stared at her. The difference in her appearance that he had noticed while she was still in her car was now fully revealed.

‘You've had your hair cut!' he accused her.

This time she laughed. ‘I don't deny it. Though I can't imagine which section of what act you're proposing to charge me under.'

‘No, no, I'm not objecting!' He continued to stare, fascinated by the change in her appearance. She had previously worn her dark hair with a sideswept fringe that was obviously designed to hide a scar on her forehead. But the scar – the result of an attack made on her when she was a uniformed policewoman by a Yarchester villain wielding a broken bottle – had always been impossible to conceal. The lower end of it, just missing the inner side of her left eye, puckered her eyebrow in what appeared from a distance to be a permanent frown.

But the irregular line of the scar above her nose had now faded and she had, it seemed, stopped trying to hide it. Her hair was now smoother, brushed well clear of her forehead, shaped more closely to her head. Quantrill thought he might approve, once he had a chance to get used to it.

‘No, I'm not complaining at all,' he assured her. ‘It looks –'

‘It looks a monstrosity of a house, doesn't it?' Hilary said, turning his attention firmly to the place they had come to visit. ‘So this is where Clanger Bell lived … It's like a scaled-down version of the Town Hall – almost as big, twice as ornate, and probably even more uncomfortable.'

Quantrill pulled himself together and gave his attention to his job. For the first time ever, he took a good look at Tower House. Whenever he had driven past it along Victoria Road he had seen nothing but the stiffly aggressive monkey puzzle tree in the front garden, and the foreign-looking shallow-roofed tower – as Hilary said, a smaller version of the Town Hall's – rising behind it.

Now, from the iron-gated entrance to the drive, he could see that she was right about the rest of the house. It was every bit as narrow-windowed and uncosy as the Town Hall, but whereas the public building had been constructed in good plain local grey brick, Tower House was built in yellow brick decorated with bands and lozenges of red and blue. There was nothing about the house that was typical of Suffolk; nothing that fitted in with the rest of Breckham Market. But then, the same could have been said of poor old Clanger.

‘The Bell family were builders, so I've heard,' he said. ‘One of them was responsible for building the Town Hall in the middle of the last century. Then he became Mayor, and proceeded to show off by building himself a new house in the same style, but with more elaborate brickwork. Mind you, they've always been a very public-spirited family by all accounts, doing a lot of voluntary work in the town. I daresay Miss Bell would have been a town councillor and a magistrate, and taken her own turn as Mayor, if it hadn't been for her brother.'

‘Are you acquainted with her?' asked Hilary.

‘Only by sight. My wife does some Red Cross work, lending out walking frames and wheelchairs, and she knows her to say good morning to. Miss Bell's one of the top Red Cross people in the county, though, and Molly finds her a bit awe-inspiring. But then, I believe Eunice Bell's like that. It was typical of her to make a direct approach to the Super about her brother's accident. We'll probably find that she thinks she's summoned us to an interview with
her
.'