The Chief Inspector's Daughter (29 page)

It was one of the children who began the process of breaking down her habitual reticence. ‘Alison's crying
again
,' he reported to Polly, who was in the studio she had converted from a cowshed, generously slapping oil paint on to canvas.

‘Is she? Well, that's good, isn't it? We all need to cry sometimes.' She shooed the child away and went in search of Alison. ‘No, don't stop crying,' she told her. ‘It's therapeutic. Only don't keep your sorrows to yourself – it really does help if you share them.'

And so Alison had begun, haltingly, to tell Polly what she had told Roz. But whereas Roz's reaction had been practical and intellectual, her sister's was characteristically physical and emotional. Appalled by Alison's story, Polly swept the girl into her motherly arms. ‘Oh, my poor sweet child – you poor lamb …'

Alison felt so weakened that after a moment's hesitation she clung to her and gave way to a long slow flood of grief. Securely held as she had not been held since she was a child, she felt able to abandon herself to emotion and tell Polly everything.

When the tears eventually began to lessen Polly spoke, her cheek pressed warmly against the girl's. ‘I never met Jasmine, but I heard about her from Roz. Of course you're shattered – no don't move. It's all right, relax … Go on holding me, we all need other people to hold on to. And not just in times of grief – we ought to show warmth and affection, too. Our families and friends are precious, and they should be told so. That's the way we live here at Mill Farm, and that's how we're bringing up the children.'

It was not a way of life that Alison felt tempted to adopt, but Polly had been both comforting and enlightening. Alison hoped to be able to pass on some of that comfort to Gilbert Smith when she saw him, because she knew how grieved he must be over Jasmine's death. She began to look forward to the weekend, and to the probability of meeting him at Oxlip fair.

The Mill Farm family talked of little else but the fair while she was with them. An advance party went off on Good Friday to set up the stall and the camp site, travelling in a farm cart drawn by the family horse. On Saturday morning everyone else was up early, and Polly provided a ferry service to Oxlip in her old car, taking Alison and the older children last.

The fair was well under way by the time they arrived, and the children shrieked with pleasure at the sight. The air was filled with the sound of excitement, of guitars and flutes and folk songs. From a group of food stalls came the sizzle of cooking and appetizing smells of curry, kebabs and fried chicken. Woodsmoke drifted everywhere, faint but pervasive, a genuine breath of pre-industrial living.

Polly was cheerfully irreverent as they wandered through the fairground, pointing out with relish all the anachronisms. One Robin Hood smelled of aftershave. A family group with a very rough encampment, dressed in grubby sacking and looking decidedly Early English, was trying to sell orange squash from a plastic container. A monk was cooking corn on the cob, and serving it with butter from Danish foil packs; and a man frying chicken quarters on a barbecue, wearing a very short jerkin over his hose, had prudently protected himself from the hot fat with a PVC apron advertising Colman's mustard.

They made their way through the higgledy-piggledy rows of stalls that formed the streets of the temporary town, exchanging the smells of cooking for those of leather and incense. It was supposed to be an Oxlip rule that nothing offered for sale should be commercially mass-produced. As a consequence, there was nothing offered for sale that anyone actually needed. But the visitors were determined to join in, and so they bought pendants and candles and nettle shampoos and corn dollies and Papal indulgences and joss sticks and Oxlip Fair T-shirts and tarot cards and medieval love potions (‘Satisfaction guaranteed'called the manufacturer, ‘or your money back next year!').

Alison enjoyed it, catching the gaiety of Polly who wandered round with a grin on her face. She felt so happy that for a short time she forgot that only five days ago she had found her friend and employer lying murdered. She lingered beside one of the stalls, watching a woman at work on a loom while Polly took the children to an adventure playground among the trees on the side of the hill. And then she saw Gilbert Smith.

A large number of plain-clothes policemen discovered, at about 12.30, that the beer tent was on their beat. Real ale was being served from casks set up along the back wall of the marquee, and there were so many clamouring customers that the barman found it simplest to tap the beer into plastic watering cans and fill the mugs from those.

The mugs were plastic too. It would spoil the taste of the Adnams, thought Quantrill, but with such a heaving press of customers it would be unreasonable to hope for glasses. He nodded amiably to a group of policemen as he pushed past them to down his drink in the open air. They had nothing significant to report, but the fair at least provided them with some entertainment: ‘…
and this feller, cheeky bastard, is carrying a placard reading “We're following the drug squad, follow us.” There's a couple of dozen people trailing after him, and Lenny Rundle, in uniform of course, tagging along behind red in the face with his notebook out
…' ‘
There's this stall, more of a home-made tent really, with a notice on it saying “Medieval Massage”. “How much?” I asked the girl. “That depends what you want,” she says, perfectly serious, “it's hands, 45p, feet 60p, and 90p for the body”
…'

Quantrill stood with his drink watching a crowd gathering to watch a circle of costumed adults dancing round the maypole. Among the crowd was a girl he thought he knew; so pregnant that he rapidly identified her as one of the students he had met at the Old Rectory at Thirling. She was with a girl of her own age, and two men. All of them wore costumes and appeared to be enjoying themselves thoroughly. They were accompanied by two children, a small curly-haired boy carrying a painted cardboard shield and a wooden sword, and a girl of about ten in a long yellow robe.

Quantrill recognized the children as the two youngest Elliotts, Vanessa and Toby. Neither of them seemed happy. Toby was being advanced upon by an adult dragon-headed figure with red hose; he looked apprehensive, as though not knowing whether to hit it with his sword or run. Vanessa, prim and neat, appeared to be trying to disassociate herself from the proceedings. ‘Personally,' Quantrill heard her say in her high, clear voice, ‘I think the whole thing is stupid.'

The Chief Inspector joined Tait who was soberly drinking bitter lemon from a bottle. ‘It's going to be more difficult than I thought, Martin,' Quantrill said. ‘I didn't realize that all the stalls and shelters were home-made. I thought they'd be proper market stalls and tents, not hovels botched up out of wood and tarpaulin and sacking. You can't possibly see what's going on inside them, or how many people are quietly sleeping off booze or pot. If Smith keeps his head down, he could stay here all weekend without being spotted.'

‘But he's got to come out sometime,' said Tait practically. He pointed to the urinal, a system of troughing protected from public view by a long canvas banner painted with male torsos in medieval garb. Strategically sited in an open part of the meadow near the beer tent, it formed part of the general entertainment; a woman was happily taking a photograph of the banner, with visiting heads and shoulders projecting above it and knees and feet below. ‘If the beat coppers are doing their job, they'll catch Smith when he comes down here.'

‘
If
he comes down here.' Quantrill, having a longer acquaintance with human nature than his sergeant, was even more practical. ‘It's a long way to come, and I reckon a lot of the people on the stalls are making use of the rectory shrubbery, up at the back there. Smith could just dodge through the stalls and nip over the fence – that's what most of the others seem to be doing.'

‘Dirty pigs,' said PC Timms, overhearing them. ‘I went along by that fence an hour ago, and it was starting to niff even then.'

‘That'll make it authentically medieval, anyway,' muttered Tait. ‘All right, I'll put someone on obbo up by the fence—'

‘Not me,' said Timms promptly, ‘I've got my work cut out watching this beer tent.' He turned to the Chief Inspector. ‘Is Mrs Quantrill here, at the fair, sir?'

‘Good grief no!'

‘Oh.' Timms looked slightly offended. ‘Well, I only asked on account of seeing your daughter.'

‘My
daughter
? Alison? Are you sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure. I wasn't near enough to speak to her, but it was definitely Alison. I ought to know her, she and my Paula were at school together—'

‘When was this? When did you see her?'

‘Oh … half an hour ago … three-quarters …'

Quantrill seized him by the shoulder. ‘My God, man, why didn't you say so! You know we're looking for her – she's our key witness in this case.'

‘But you'd found her, sir,' objected PC Timms. ‘I know she disappeared, but then she rang you and you called off the search. I didn't know you were still looking for her—'

He protested himself into silence. The DCI's face was grim and his grip was so tight as to be painful. ‘Where exactly did you see her?' he was saying. ‘Come on, man. Who was she with? What was she wearing?'

Alison saw Gilbert Smith a few moments before he saw her. He was walking slowly between the stalls, his shoulders hunched, his hands crammed into the pockets of his ragged jeans, his bearded head held down. She ran to him immediately, stopping to block his path.

‘Gilbert!' she said. ‘Gil, dear—'

She had intended to show that she was fond of him. She had intended to hug him – or at least to touch his arm or his hand, as a way of acknowledging their mutual bereavement and her gratitude for the way he had coped with all the practicalities on that dreadful Monday morning. But as soon as he raised his head she realized that he was not the vague, kind, amiable man she had known. His face was white and set and his eyes seemed to be staring at some horrifying inner vision. It was Gilbert Smith, but he had become a stranger.

She stepped back, suddenly afraid. ‘Gil?' she faltered.

He blinked. ‘What—?' He shook the long hair out of his eyes and made an effort to focus on her face. ‘Alison … Oh God, and I thought no one would find me here! What are you doing? This isn't your scene. I thought this was one place where I could be among people of my own kind. No one asks questions at Oxlip, no one hassles us, we can just blow our minds in peace – and that's what I've got to do. I've got to forget, don't you see? I can't live with it, I've got to shut it out. But now you've found me, and your father's the fuzz. There'll be questions, and more questions, and I can't bear it – I can't bear to think of it—'

His long legs folded, almost in slow motion, until he was crouching close to the earth, shivering as though he had a fever.

Alison forgot her fear. She couldn't bring herself to touch him, but she felt a strengthening of their friendship. She crouched beside him on the grass underneath a black-budded ash tree, regardless of and unregarded by the stallholders shouting their wares above her head, and the passers-by.

‘But my father's not here, Gil! I haven't seen him for days – I can't bear to see him, because I can't face any questions either. I've left home and I'm here with some friends from a commune. I'm trying to forget, too. You can trust me, Gil, you know you can. I wouldn't tell my father about my friends – I've always known that you smoke pot, but I've never told Dad about it.'

He nodded a vague acknowledgement. ‘I had to have them,' he said, more to himself than to her. ‘They were so beautiful. And I could appreciate their beauty so much more than Jasmine could. Oh, she thought she could, but she'd never smoked, she'd never had windows opened in her mind … We used to argue about it sometimes.' He looked up, his eyes dark with horror. ‘But I wouldn't have harmed her. It was just that I had to have them. I can't show them to you because I've buried them. I'm staying with some friends, acid heads, they've rented a cottage out in the country. They're good friends, but if they knew I'd got the netsuke they'd want to sell them to buy acid. Then there'd be more violence, and I couldn't bear that, I couldn't bear any more blood …'

He rose to his feet, stiffly, like an elderly man. ‘I came out to get a pizza for us—' He gestured towards the huddle of stalls that climbed the side of the hill. ‘But I'll come back to talk to you. It's a relief to be able to talk. Don't go away, Alison, please.'

She got up slowly, using the grey trunk of the tree as a support, and watched him shambling away. She was appalled at what he had done. She felt white and she knew that she was trembling. But she thought that she could understand him; sickened as she was, she believed that she could follow the fuddled reasoning that made him take the netsuke when he went up to Yeoman's on Monday morning and found Jasmine dead.

She knew that she couldn't stay and talk to Gilbert, not after what he had done. She couldn't remain the friend of a man whose sense of beauty was stronger than his sense of compassion, of decency. How
could
he see Jasmine's mutilated body and think only in terms of picking the scattered netsuke off the bloodstained carpet …

But what was she to do? Go and talk to one of the uniformed policemen by the gate? But she'd told Gilbert he could trust her, and she couldn't betray that trust. Besides, if she made herself known to the police, that would be the end of her peace. There would be questions, and more questions.

The only thing for her to do was to rejoin Polly and the children, to run back to the sanctuary of the Mill Farm family. She turned, poised for flight, and found herself face to face with Martin Tait.