The Chief Inspector's Daughter (20 page)

Molly leaned against him, rubbing her wet eyes with the heel of her hand.

‘It was all my fault,' she mourned. ‘I said she'd
have
to talk to you about it, whether she wanted to or not, and that was what really upset her. I can see that now.' Her body tensed. ‘I – I was only trying to help, trying to reason with her, but all I did was to drive her away …'

Quantrill held his wife more tightly, trying to soothe her. ‘No, it wasn't your fault! Good grief, it was mine if it was anybody's– I knew perfectly well how distressed she was, and I should have had more sense than to expect her to be prepared to talk. I should never have mentioned it.'

He felt a dampness against his chest as her tears soaked into his striped pyjama jacket, and he used his free hand to pull a handkerchief from the pocket and mop up a tear that was sliding down her cheek in the same direction. ‘Don't cry any more, Molly-mouse,' he said, reviving a foolish endearment that he hadn't used for years. ‘Alison'll be all right, truly. She needs time and quiet to get over the shock, that's all. She's always had an independent streak. Don't you remember that year we went on holiday to Lowestoft—'

He held her close, playing verbal Happy Families:
do you remember, don't you remember, wasn't it funny/awful when we …?

Gradually, Molly began to relax. Her fingers stopped plucking restlessly at the biscuit crumbs on the turned-over top sheet, and she burrowed her head into his shoulder as she used to do years ago. She rested one hand confidingly on his stomach and he stroked her soft fine hair and traced her profile with the tip of his forefinger. ‘We ought to do this more often,' he thought guiltily, wearily; ‘we ought to have more togetherness.' It was a sadness he'd observed in his job, the way it could take a tragedy in a family to bring its members together. Except that, please God, Alison's disappearance was no tragedy—

‘Hey, do you know what I had for supper?' he boasted lazily. ‘A large helping of Cliffie Hammond's fish and chips!'

Molly snuggled even closer. ‘Oh, Douggie—' she reprimanded him with a sleepy giggle, ‘and you a chief inspector!'

‘Even chief inspectors are human,' he murmured, rubbing his cheek against her hair. He would have liked to demonstrate the fact, but he had the wit to know that this was the wrong time. The approach was right, though, he remembered; this was how Molly liked it. This same gentle approach, and a happier occasion, and it might once more be possible to get the desired response.

He switched off his bedside light and lay in the dark, feeling her warm and soft against him. He was still a long way from solving the murder, and it seemed that he'd managed to drive his daughter away from home; but it began to look as though he might, with luck, have started a major repair job on his marriage.

Later, Quantrill woke with indigestion. He tossed and muttered, then slept heavily, right through the alarm. He got up in a rush, hollered at Peter for being in the bathroom when he wanted to use it, snapped at his wife for not rousing him earlier, and scalded the roof of his mouth with hot tea. It was a bad way to start the morning. But he took time, before he left the house, to give Molly the reassurance she needed; for himself, he found little enough to be optimistic about.

The route from Benidorm Avenue to Divisional Headquarters took him past one of the town's saleyards, where an old-established firm of auctioneers held a livestock market every Tuesday and Friday. The market always included entries of fat cattle, rabbits and poultry, but the biggest attraction, especially on the first Tuesday in every month, was pigs. There would be anything up to a thousand of them, the quality breeding-sows travelling to Breckham in the comparative comfort and exclusiveness of netted trailers, while the young stores and the fat pigs for slaughter were jostled there in three-tiered cattle trucks. By the time Quantrill passed the saleyard that morning it was after nine o'clock and the pigs had long since been unloaded and penned, but the farmers and butchers who converged on Breckham livestock market from all over the region were still arriving.

The Chief Inspector slowed his car, irritated that he had allowed himself to be caught in the traffic that inevitably built up near the entrance. He sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, seeing but paying little attention to the people who emerged from the neighbouring car park and walked the twenty yards or so down the road to the saleyard. His mind was preoccupied with practical details. To find Jasmine Woods's killer, he had to investigate her private life; to do that he needed to talk to her former secretary, Anne. To find Anne, who was staying with her husband-to-be and his parents, he had to remember, or find someone who had been at the party and would remember, the fiancé's name.

It was no great coincidence that he should, in those few minutes while his car was held up, catch sight of the man himself; after all, the fiancé was a farmer. But Quantrill had not expected to see him, and he was too slow to call out to him before the man disappeared. And then, what can you call out with civility to someone whose name you can't remember? Quantrill parked his own car and hurried after him.

Although the man was wearing the uniform of the affluent young farmer, a green Husky jacket and a flat cap set well to the front of his head, he was taller than average and Quantrill was able to pick him out without too much difficulty. He was, however, among a crowd of pig-fanciers on the far side of one of the pens.

‘Ah, Wilfred – just the man I want to consult.' Quantrill put a hand on the shoulder of a passing stockyard attendant, a short man in a grubby long white coat who wore his flat cap, unfashionably but practically, well down on the back of his head. His cheerful snub-nosed face was so weather-worn that he might have been any age between thirty and sixty.

‘Wheey-up, Mr Quantrill,' cried the stockman, raising the knob of his stick in salute. Some years previously he had provided information that had helped Quantrill, then a sergeant, to trace some stolen heifers, and he had greeted the detective like an old colleague ever since. ‘Setting up in farming now, eh? You won't go far wrong with these sows – grand little Welsh cross Large Whites, in pig to a Welsh boar. They'll fetch a hundred quid apiece, and worth every penny.'

‘I'll start saving,' promised Quantrill. ‘Do you know that man over there, Wilfred? The big dark chap leaning on the rail and looking as though he hates the sight of pigs. I met him not long ago and I'd like a quick word with him now, but I'm hanged if I can remember his name.'

‘Why, that's Mr Oliver Buxton. He farms in Norfolk, at Littleover. One of our regulars, just like his father afore him – they keep pigs in a big way. If he wasn't here to buy and sell pigs on the first Tuesday in every month, I'd know the world was coming to an end. Mind you, I daresay he'll be arriving a bit later in the mornings in future. I hear he's getting married at Easter.' The stockman gave Quantrill a wink and a nudge. ‘Wheey-up! I reckon he'll have picked hisself a goer!'

‘I shouldn't be surprised,' Quantrill agreed. Privately, though, from what he could remember of Buxton's fiancée, he doubted it; she had seemed too fine-drawn to have the stamina the stockman evidently envisaged. ‘Well, thanks for your help. I only wanted to know where he lived, and I'm in a hurry so you've saved me from pushing my way round to ask him. Have one on me when you're in the Crown.'

The stockman pocketed the price of a pint that the Chief Inspector slipped him. ‘Much obliged, Mr Quantrill sir. I doubt you'd have got a civil reply from him, anyhow. I spoke to him not five minutes ago. “Morning, Mr Buxton,” I said, “a grand pen of breeders we've got here,” but he walked straight past me with a face as black as your hat. Never a word, and that's not like him at all. But there, if he's getting married Saturday I daresay he's got more on his mind than pigs, eh? Wheey-up, eh, Mr Quantrill?'

The stockman gave the Chief Inspector a parting nudge, flourished his stick and moved away to prod some squealing, reluctant baconers into the sale ring. Quantrill lingered for a moment, looking across at Buxton who was still leaning, dark-browed, on a rail and paying no attention to the sows in front of him. There was nothing at all of the happy prospective bridegroom about his looks and bearing.

But Quantrill found that entirely explicable. Cause and effect, he thought; getting married is, after all, a hell of an undertaking for any young man. He himself had been worried sick. He'd have given anything, in the week beforehand, to call his own wedding off.

If he had the time now, and if the pubs were open, he would have offered to buy Buxton a drink to cheer him up. He could tell him about the things that compensated for the loss of freedom: children, for example …

Alison—

He ran for his car. He had been out of contact with Divisional Headquarters for all of ten minutes, and in that time there might well have been some news of her. He was within a quarter of a mile of the office but, too anxious to wait, he radioed through.

There was still no news of his daughter.

Sergeant Tait was on the road early in search of Jasmine Woods's ex-husband, weaving his Citroën through the Suffolk lanes while the sprouting hedgerows looked grey rather than green, and the only other vehicles on the move were mail delivery vans and milk tankers making bulk collections from farms. By seven o'clock he had reached the first of the three addresses provided by the Essex police; but the R.J. Potter who lived in the prosperous-looking bungalow was not Robert John but Ronald James, a self-employed long distance haulier who was, his wife estimated crossly, probably at that moment ogling a belly-dancer in Istanbul while she was stuck in Chelmsford with the kids.

At the second address, a maisonette in Witham, the door was opened by a man who agreed that he was Robert Potter. A pyjama'd and toothless seventy-odd, he was understandably puzzled and indignant at being disturbed so early in the morning. Behind him hovered an equally elderly wife, clutching a teapot to the bosom of her flannel dressing gown with such protective closeness that Tait concluded that it must contain either their life savings or very cool tea. He apologized handsomely for having come to the wrong house, and retreated in a hurry.

By the time he approached the third address, in the breezy blackcurrant and strawberry-growing flatlands north of the Blackwater estuary, he had begun to give up hope of finding his man in Essex. Robert John Potter might well have moved several times in the nine or ten years since his divorce from Jasmine Woods; he might have left the country; he might be dead.

Tait found the address, a small modern detached house in a maze of small modern detached houses that had almost entirely obliterated the Essex village which gave them their identity. His ring was answered by a bespectacled young woman in jeans and a shiny apron that advertised a long-defunct brand of cocoa. She had short straight fair hair, a plain open face and an instantly aggressive manner.

‘Robert John Potter – yes, that's my husband. But if you're from his union, you can go to blazes. He voted to call off the strike because he's fed to the teeth with being off work and because we need every penny he can earn, and you needn't think you can talk him into changing his mind. It's outrageous that men who want to work should be prevented from doing so just because a few troublemakers—'

‘I'm
not
from any union,' insisted Tait. They both had to raise their voices to be heard above the morning noises from inside the house: children squabbling, excited yelps from a dog, light music and blarneying chat from a radio, and the whirring of a washing machine. ‘I'm—'

But as soon as she knew what he was not, her manner softened. ‘Phew, that's a relief. I can't be doing with shop stewards on the doorstep at this hour of the morning.' Then she flinched as the crash of something falling or breaking augmented the domestic symphony. ‘Oh Lord – look, come in whoever you are, while I go and sort somebody out.'

The small metal and glass front porch led straight to an untidy sitting-room, from which rose an open staircase. The room had originally been furnished in young executive style, with teak-look wall units and a low-slung suite upholstered in striped tweed, but it was now shabby after years of being gambolled over by children and pets. It was strikingly different from Jasmine Woods's gracious-life sitting-room at Yeoman's.

‘Bob!' bawled his wife up the stairs as she rushed for the kitchen. ‘Someone to see you!'

The man who came blundering down was large and blond and healthy, with the chunky, homespun good looks of the men who model sweaters for the covers of knitting patterns. Too unsophisticated to be Jasmine Woods's type, Tait thought – presumably that was one of the factors that had driven them apart – but personable enough to make their marriage understandable. He couldn't have chosen a more different second wife. This one was undoubtedly loyal, but otherwise not even in the same league as Jasmine.

Potter looked at his visitor suspiciously. ‘Are you from the union?' he demanded.

‘Your wife would never have let a union official in. My name's Tait, I'm a detective sergeant from Breckham Market. I'm investigating—'

He paused. His sharp, restless eyes had noticed, among a litter of children's comics and do-it-yourself magazines on the coffee table, a copy of the previous month's
House and Owner
. He recognized the cover of the issue that Jasmine had shown him when he first visited her.

‘You're Jasmine Woods's ex-husband? You've probably heard that she's been murdered.'

Potter nodded, compressing his lips into a straight line.

Tait picked up the magazine and flicked it open. So Potter had recently been brought up to date about his first wife's success; and the article had told him, within a few miles, where she lived. It must have been galling for the man, who was evidently short of money, to read about Jasmine's affluence. It must have been tantalizing for him to see photographs of the strikingly attractive woman he had once been married to.