Fate Worse Than Death (2 page)

She hadn't attempted violence, but a direct attack on him was out of the question. The room, sparsely furnished for her captivity, contained nothing that she could use as a weapon. Besides, he was much too strong for her, even if she still had her health. But her weakness had given her one major advantage: he no longer kept her tethered to prevent her from trying to escape when he came to bring her food and change the buckets.

If she pretended to be amenable, ate enough to build up her strength, she might one day be able to dodge him and make a run for the door.

And then what?

She had no way of knowing exactly where she was. She could make guesses, based on distant and infrequent sounds of vehicles, but she couldn't be sure. She had heard no voices outside, but that didn't necessarily mean that there was no nearby habitation. If only she could get out of this building, she might find help before he caught up with her. It was worth trying, anyway. Anything was better than staying here to rot.

But if she took a chance and ran, she had to be prepared for the fact that he would do everything he could to stop her. He might even lose his head and use force.

She could be hurt. Or worse. Supposing that, in trying to stop her, he panicked and used too much force: supposing he killed her?

It was a hideous risk for her to take. But she felt so ill … Better a quick death, she thought, than this protracted dying.

Confident of her daughter's safety and eventual return, Beryl Websdell got over the loss of her gnome by the end of the following week.

‘Oh well, it was just a piece of foolishness,' she said, thinking of the kidnapper's potential for salvation. ‘I expect Willum's been put in someone else's garden for a joke. He's probably in another village, enjoying a change of scene,' she concluded, happily unaware that the gnome was no further away than the outskirts of Fodderstone, lying irretrievably damaged in a roadside ditch.

Somewhere above the remote corner of East Anglia where the counties of Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire meet, a light aircraft buzzed across the cloudless sky.

From the ground, it looked a beautiful day for flying. From 2,000 feet, it was not. The horizon was obscured by a heat haze, and visibility was also hampered by rising smoke from harvested cornfields, where farmers were burning surplus straw. The pilot, a fair sharp-featured man in his middle twenties, shirt-sleeved and wearing sun-glasses, silently cursed the farmers as he searched for the landmarks he needed. With an impressionable passenger beside him in the tiny cockpit, this was no time to be lost.

He checked his heading again, and looked out to the side. Below him was the unmistakable Breckland landscape of Forestry Commission plantations interspersed with large arable fields, grassy heath and older private woodlands. And yes, there was the railway line he was searching for … and there was the busy A11 road … and there was the bridge carrying the road over the railway. His airfield – the flying club's grass airfield at Horkey – ought to be visible now, south-east of the bridge. It must be there. He'd taken off from it only forty minutes ago.

He banked, and immediately saw the airfield just where it should be on the heading he was flying. His navigation was so exact that the field had been temporarily blocked from his view by the nose of the Cessna. Not bad, not bad at all …

He pressed a button on the control yoke and spoke into his headset microphone: ‘Horkey, this is Golf India Romeo Sierra Romeo, Cessna 152, inbound. Heading 350 at 2,000 feet on QNH 1015, estimating overhead at 20, over.'

The reply from the control tower came crackling over the radio. Alison Quantrill, the passenger, taking her first trip in a light aeroplane, marvelled that her pilot found the crackles intelligible. She knew that he wanted her to be impressed, and she was. There had been times in the past when she had found his self-assurance repulsive, but the thoroughness of his pre-flight checks and the quiet confidence with which he handled the aircraft filled her with admiration. Her father had often said, irritably, that the most maddening thing about Martin Tait was that he really was as good a detective as he thought he was. And as good a pilot, too, Alison intended to tell her father. Flying with Martin was exhilarating, the most exciting thing she'd done for years.

He repeated the runway and QFE instruction, reset his altimeter and then turned his head to glance at her, enjoying the sparkle in her eyes. Pity she looked so much like the old man, his former boss: same green eyes, same dark hair, except of course that Doug Quantrill's was now streaked with grey. But there the resemblance ended, thank God. Alison was lovely …

There was no need for him to touch her in order to draw her attention. He had given her a headset to wear so that they could speak through the intercom instead of having to pitch their voices against the throb of the engine. But she was wearing a sleeveless dress and he wanted to feel her cool bare arm under his fingers.

‘There's the airfield,' he told her. ‘When we're over it, we descend to 800 feet and then make a circuit before landing. And look, there's Fodderstone, the village where my aunt lives. You see how near it is to the aero club – less than ten minutes by car. An ideal place to come and spend a flying holiday.'

Martin Tait was looking forward to his leave. It had already been postponed twice on account of the demands of his job as a member of the Regional Crime Squad. An undisguisedly ambitious man, he was always ready to put work before pleasure; but this particular leave would have a special flavour. Although his current car was a used Alfa Romeo Alfasud 1.5 rather than the new 2000 CTV coupé he aspired to (on his way to the bachelor's dream, a Porsche 944) he had just acquired a more distinctive possession. Having recently qualified as a private pilot, he knew that he was the only police inspector in the county force to be part-owner – although his share was, admittedly, only a twentieth – of a two-seater aeroplane.

Not surprisingly, since his only income was his salary, he had no plans to marry in the near future. Time enough for that when he was thirty or a Chief Superintendent, whichever came sooner. It would be important to choose his future wife carefully, because he intended to be a man in the public eye: the youngest-ever Chief Constable in the country. After that, in due course, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary; or else Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Either job would earn him a knighthood. By the time he was ready to retire from the force, in his middle fifties, he and his wife would be Sir Martin and Lady Tait.

And by then, in thirty years' time – hopefully much sooner, within the next ten years, but it seemed indecent to anticipate the death of a member of his family of whom he was quite fond – he would have inherited a sizeable legacy. He wasn't sure what it would amount to, but at a guess at least a hundred thousand. Certainly enough to put him in the BMW bracket. Perhaps he'd even be able to afford to buy a Cessna of his own …

The airfield was directly below him. He called the control tower: ‘Horkey – Sierra Romeo overhead.'

‘Sierra Romeo, roger,'
crackled the radio.
‘Call downwind.'

The aircraft bucked a bit as Tait descended through the thermals to circuit height. ‘You'll get a very good view of Fodderstone as we fly the downwind leg,' he said to Alison. ‘My workload will be heavy at that stage so I shan't have time to point out Aunt Con's cottage, but it's one of a small group round a green just to the north of the village. Hers is the one with the row of beehives in the back garden. I told her that I'd be giving you a flight before presenting myself on her doorstep, so if you see her down there you might wave to her for me.'

Alison nodded, too eagerly intent on absorbing new experiences to reply.

Tait smiled to himself as he levelled at 800 feet and turned on to the crosswind leg. He liked the way Alison had matured since he'd first met her, two years before; but he loved the fact that maturity didn't inhibit her from showing her excitement over this flight. She really was an attractive girl. For the dozenth time in the past few weeks, ever since she'd returned from London to live and work in Yarchester and they had begun to see each other regularly, he wondered whether she would eventually make the right wife for him. Was she suitable material for the future Lady Tait?

If he had the money to marry now, instead of having to wait until he reached an adequately salaried rank, he might well be tempted to take a chance on her. With no money, marriage was out of the question; but he was coming to the conclusion that unless he put in some kind of claim, he would run the risk of losing her.

His immediate problem, though, was to get her safely to the ground. He turned the aircraft again. ‘Sierra Romeo downwind,' he radioed, before making routine checks on the Cessna's fuel supply and carburettor heat, and the security of his own and his passenger's harness.

He blew her a kiss as he tested the fastening of her seat belt. ‘Happy landing,' he said. ‘And many more to come.'

‘Hope so!' Alison agreed.

She gazed down at Fodderstone, fascinated by the unusual intimacy that the low-level overhead view provided. There was the main street, the crossroads, the church; a farm and its outbuildings; a pub and its car park. She could see how isolated the village was, miles from any other community, surrounded by large pale harvested fields, scattered copses and belts of woodland. But what intrigued her most was the detail that could never be seen from ground level: the layout of everyone's garden, and the pattern of unmetalled tracks and paths that linked the more isolated houses with the village and its adjoining hamlet.

Fodderstone Green, where Martin's Aunt Con lived, was unmistakable. But although Alison looked down into the back garden of every cottage, she could see no beehives, and no one stood there waving.

Lois Goodwin, wife of the landlord of the Flintknappers Arms at Fodderstone, hated serving behind the bar.

She didn't mind the hard work involved in running the pub, although she hadn't realized before she started how much sheer drudgery would be needed to keep the inconvenient old premises clean. Nor had she bargained for the permanent tiredness that would set in after she and her husband had worked sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for over a year without a break.

But Phil, who had worked as a salesman for a kitchen-unit manufacturer, had lost his job. His company had been taken over by a German firm with an unpronounceable name, and Phil had had a difference of opinion with the management in Mannheim. Using his severance pay to buy the tenancy of a country pub and work for himself had seemed to him a great idea; Lois had been reluctant, suspecting that it would be less idyllic than it sounded. But she had agreed, and so she saw no point in moaning about it now.

What she had come to dread, though, was being left alone behind the bar. She knew she wasn't good at being jolly with people. She'd never enjoyed going to pubs, and the prospect of standing behind the bar chatting to strangers for hours at a time alarmed her. She had told her husband so when he first began enthusing.

‘Don't worry about that, love!' Phil had exclaimed. ‘I'll serve the drinks. You concentrate on doing the food, and leave the talking to me!'

That was typical of him. All talk. He'd once been his company's Salesman of the Year. True, he always served behind the bar when it was mildly busy, in the evenings and at weekends; but he disliked the lunch-time regulars just as much as Lois did – although for a different reason – and so he had taken to rushing off in the middle of the day and leaving her on her own.

‘Must go to the bank!' he'd exclaim through his catfish moustache. Phil Goodwin still retained the facial hair and the tinted spectacles that had been fashionable among young executives when he'd won his award. He also retained the sense of urgency that had enabled him to outsell his colleagues. Staying in one place and waiting for customers to come to him was, as he quickly discovered once he became landlord of the Flintknappers, sheer frustration.

When he couldn't escape from his duties, he shed his surplus energy by hustling about the pub emitting noise. He never merely spoke. Verbalizing his natural aggressiveness, he chaffed the customers loudly, roared with laughter, cursed the brewery, hollered at the draymen, bawled out his children, shouted at or for his wife.

‘Just going to get some change for the till!' he'd yell to her as he took off in mid-morning, as though the bank were round the corner instead of fifteen miles away in Breckham Market. Or, ‘Just going to the cash-and-carry, must get another case of potato crisps!' Or, ‘Just going to get a haircut!' Useless for Lois to remind him that a local man did some part-time barbering in a back room of the Flintknappers Arms every Friday night; Phil was very particular about the cut of his thinning hair.

‘You'll be all right on your own!' he would cry encouragingly, lifting his moustache in the shape of a smile although his eyes usually slid guiltily away from hers. ‘Bound to be quiet at lunch-time. Love you!' he would call over his shoulder as he fled, by way of acknowledgement that whatever he might be after in Breckham Market, he couldn't do without his wife.

He was right about the quietness of the pub at midday. It wasn't the unlikely prospect of busy-ness that alarmed Lois; if new customers were suddenly to flock in, clamouring for beer and bar snacks, she would rush about to serve them, flustered but willing to work. What bothered her was the quietness itself, the fact that there were usually no more than four or five customers who had all the time in the world.

In the evenings and at weekends the pub attracted what Lois thought of as normal people: those inhabitants of the village who went out to work during the day, whose horizons – and therefore whose conversation – extended far beyond Fodderstone. But it seemed to her that the only customers who came in at lunch-time were eccentric, or idle, or both. She found them difficult to understand, and their attitude towards her was irritating and, ultimately, alarming.