Fate Worse Than Death (16 page)

‘A proper old-established country business,' Quantrill approved. ‘Good to see it continuing. No one would have thought, thirty years ago, that there'd be any future for farriers – but then, no one realized how popular riding would become.'

A dismounted girl rider stood in the yard of the forge holding her horse's head. At the blunt end of the animal, examining its off hind hoof, was a broad-shouldered young man in jeans and a leather apron, with a widespread distribution of dark curly hair on his head and bare chest.

‘Andrew Stagg himself, presumably,' said Hilary, rising to join Quantrill. The young man now stood with his hands on his narrow hips, chatting and laughing with the girl as she remounted, and Hilary was looking at him in a way that Quantrill found disturbing and improper; that kind of frank appraisal of a member of the opposite sex was a man's prerogative.

‘I should think Andrew Stagg's services are very much in demand,' she went on, oblivious of – or disregarding – her companion's disapproval, ‘as far as all the female riders in this part of the county are concerned. He's a very well-built young man.'

Douglas Quantrill turned away, straightening his shoulders and sucking in his stomach muscles until they ached. ‘This dratted bus is late. We're wasting time,' he said irritably.

A loud buzzing somewhere up above drew their attention to a piston-engined aircraft flying downwind at 800 feet. Quantrill squinted up at it and identified the yellow and white high-wing monoplane as one of the Cessnas that flew from Horkey's old wartime airfield. He could just read – his eyesight would still be perfect if it weren't for the fact that there was more small print about now than there used to be – the letters on the aeroplane's wings: G-IRSR.

‘That's Martin Tait,' he complained. ‘Showing his skills to some girlfriend, no doubt …'

‘My impression, at the end of the briefing, was that he intended to do an aerial search for Sandra Websdell's car,' said Hilary.

Quantrill snorted. ‘If I know Martin, he'll be doing both. Showing off to a girl and trying to solve this case for us at the same time. Mind you,' he added fairly, ‘it'd be a great help if he could find Sandra's car, and I certainly wouldn't raise any objection because he'd done it unofficially. But he needn't think he can put in an expense sheet for a tankful of aircraft fuel!'

‘A light aeroplane isn't really the right machine for the job, though, is it?' said Hilary. ‘Couldn't we borrow an army helicopter? After all, this
is
a murder enquiry.'

Quantrill shook his head. ‘Not a chance. The force has to pay for the use of army machines, and you know how tight our budget is. The ACC would turn the request down flat. And I really couldn't argue with him – it'd be different if we were looking for a vicious murderer, a psychopath who might kill again. From what you've said about Flood –'

‘That he's lethargic? Yes, he moves as though he's trying to wade through treacle. The Websdells say he's been like that ever since they've known him, and so does his landlady. In fact, you know, it makes me doubtful that he's the man we want. Whoever abducted Sandra and held her for three weeks against her will would have needed a lot more energy than Desmond Flood seems to possess.'

‘Is he ill?' Quantrill demanded. ‘Mentally, I mean?'

Hilary Lloyd had qualified as a State Registered Nurse before joining the police force. The Chief Inspector knew it and was inclined, to her annoyance, to regard her as a medical authority.

‘I'm not a doctor,' she pointed out, ‘still less a psychiatrist. I simply don't know. It's textbook wisdom that people who are apathetic, or clinically depressed, are unlikely to use any form of violence against anyone else; but I'm not qualified to say whether or not that applies to Desmond Flood. I'm just guessing.'

‘But according to the pathologist,' persisted Quantrill, ‘whoever killed Sandra used a minimum of violence. And from the way he arranged her body on the bed, he was obviously filled with remorse over what he'd done. Couldn't that have been Flood, however lethargic he may seem?'

‘Yes, it's possible. That's the point I'm making – your guess is just as good as mine.' Hilary paused, thinking, her brow vertically ridged by the combination of frown and scar. ‘If Desmond Flood really is acutely depressed – and regardless of whether he was responsible for Sandra's death – we do need to find him for his own sake. Because the person a depressive is most likely to kill is himself.'

‘That's what I was afraid of,' said Quantrill. ‘It's one reason why I asked the Saintsbury division to try to find him, with or without Ian Wigby's help.'

The Saintsbury police had failed to find Flood. So too had DC Wigby, though he was still enjoying the job of looking. But their failure gave the Chief Inspector no problem. Guilty or not, depressive or not, Desmond Flood was alive and a passenger on the 5.15 bus from Saintsbury to Horkey.

Flood was the last to alight, and the slowest. A man of medium height and slim build, he walked with dragging steps and bowed shoulders. His looks were potentially striking: strong features, a fine head of prematurely grey hair, dark eyebrows above dark eyes; but his head was down, his eyes dull, his demeanour defeated. He wasn't just wading through treacle, he seemed to be up to his neck in it.

Flood took the news of his fiancée's death without any change in his expression. Sitting in the back of the Chief Inspector's car, next to Sergeant Lloyd, he stared dully out of the open window at the tree they were parked under, and said nothing. His only reaction, after a few minutes, was a deep sigh.

‘You haven't asked us how or when Sandra died,' said Quantrill, turning sideways in the driving seat to look at the man. ‘Don't you want to know?'

‘I suppose you're going to tell me she was murdered,' said Flood, his voice so dreary that it made him sound indifferent. ‘It's what I expected, when she didn't get in touch with her parents.'

‘But why did you think that? Why should she have been murdered?'

‘Because it's what seems to happen to girls who go missing.'

‘Very often, yes. But usually they're killed almost immediately. Sandra wasn't though. She was kept against her will for three whole weeks before she died. What do you make of that, Mr Flood?'

He said nothing at first. Then he asked distantly, ‘Was she … ill-treated?'

‘Ill-treated?'
Quantrill made an effort to control his anger. ‘Good God, man, don't you count being held against her will as ill-treatment? Perhaps you'd like me to go over the details. For part of the time she was tethered with a rope, like an animal, and she bruised her back by tugging the rope forward in her attempts to unfasten it. She tore every one of her fingernails in her efforts to undo the knot. She –'

‘We know she wasn't sexually assaulted, Mr Flood,' Hilary said quietly. ‘Her captor didn't behave with brutality. But ill-treatment isn't necessarily physical, is it? Sandra must have gone through three weeks of mental torment. Mustn't she?'

Flood gave another of his deep sighs. Still staring out of the car at nothing he said dully, ‘Poor kid. She didn't deserve that …'

‘What did she deserve, then?' asked Quantrill quickly, leaning over to grip the man's shoulder in an attempt to seize his attention. ‘If she didn't deserve the anguish she must have gone through before she died, what
did
she deserve? Did you have some other punishment in mind for her because she'd rejected you?'

‘Rejected me?' Flood sounded puzzled. Then he gave a curious neighing sound, a kind of mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, you're wrong if you think I minded because she decided not to marry me. I liked Sandra – she was a nice girl. Very sweet, very kind. I suppose I was quite fond of her. Marriage to her would certainly have been a lot more comfortable than going on living on my own.

‘But I didn't want to remarry at all. For one thing, I couldn't afford it. My ex-wife took our house as part of the divorce settlement, and I haven't any money apart from what I can scrape up by selling my paintings. And for another thing, I don't want to acquire any new responsibilities. That was the whole point of getting a divorce and chucking my job. I'd had enough of pressures, of families and mortgages and clients and deadlines – I came here to be free.'

‘Then why did you ask Sandra to marry you?' said Hilary.

‘I didn't. It was her idea, not mine.'

Hilary frowned at him. ‘Why didn't you tell me all this when I spoke to you three weeks ago, Mr Flood? You said then that you and Sandra were happy about the marriage, and that there were no problems between you.'

Flood shrugged. ‘What I told you was the truth, in a way. There
were
no problems by then. We'd sorted things out, on the evening before she disappeared, and we parted happily, as friends.'

‘So why didn't you tell me that you'd agreed to part?'

‘Because I didn't think you'd believe me. If I'd told you the truth, you'd have imagined what you're imagining now, that we'd quarrelled and I'd abducted her. And I didn't want to be bothered by questions. I just want to be left alone.'

Police officers have an inbuilt disinclination to believe people who have previously lied to them.

And what, they asked Desmond Flood suspiciously, was he doing yesterday afternoon and evening?

Flood said that he had gone to London. He travelled from Saintsbury by coach and went to see his ex-wife, who lived in Camden; but she was not at home. Quite possibly she was away on holiday. He still had a key – after all, he'd worked hard enough to buy the house – so he let himself in and spent the night there. This morning he went to the Tate Gallery for a couple of hours – no, there hadn't been an admission ticket – and then returned by coach to Saintsbury.

‘Why did you have this sudden urge to visit your ex-wife?' asked Quantrill.

‘It wasn't sudden. I'd been contemplating going back ever since Sandra called off our marriage.'

Hilary's feminism surfaced sharply. ‘What makes you think your ex-wife would want you back?'

Flood knotted his dark eyebrows in an attempt to understand what evidently seemed to him a superfluous question. ‘I was the one who left,' he said. ‘I was the one who wanted my freedom.'

‘Then why on earth are you thinking of giving it up?' demanded Quantrill, genuinely wanting to know. He was a little younger than Desmond Flood, not yet fifty, and freedom was something he had dreamed of at intervals throughout his humdrum married life.

Flood looked at Quantrill for the first time. ‘You should give it a try yourself,' he advised sardonically. ‘When you get your freedom, it isn't what you thought it was going to be. I used to despise my job and resent the fact that I never had time to paint – but now I've got all the time in the world, I've lost the urge. I used to row with my wife and hate the waste of spirit involved. But when you've got someone to be angry with, you do at least know that you're alive.'

The Chief Inspector drove Flood to his studio, a small flint barn in the main street of Fodderstone village. Flood had rented it for the summer from a retired farmer. It suited him well enough – it was cheap, and the skylight gave a good north light for painting. Yes, he got his own meals, after a fashion. He used to eat lunch at the Flintknappers Arms, but he gave up going there after Sandra disappeared. He couldn't put up with Lois Goodwin's relentless sympathy.

Quantrill took a cursory look inside the barn. It was basically a single high room, with whitewashed walls and a wooden half-loft reached by a ladder. On an easel in the middle of the room was a half-finished, half-hearted canvas; the portrait of a woman, though not of Sandra Websdell. Other unfinished canvases, chiefly Breckland landscapes, were propped against the walls. The palette looked dusty, the paint on it dry and cracked.

Presumably Flood slept in the loft, but Quantrill had no intention of climbing the ladder. Ladder-climbing was an ungainly activity for a man of his size, and Hilary Lloyd was watching.

‘I don't imagine you've held Sandra here in secret for the past three weeks, Mr Flood,' he said. ‘It's too close to other houses for that.'

‘I haven't held her anywhere,' said Flood. ‘I told you, I didn't want her.'

‘So you say. But you admit to being fond of her – and so was the man who was responsible for her death. We have evidence of that. If it wasn't you, then you must have had a local rival.'

‘Half a dozen, for all I know …'

‘But who? Did she mention any names?'

‘If she did, I didn't listen. I didn't take a
personal
interest in the girl. We discussed painting most of the time – she had a good eye for line and colour. That was why she did well in the florist's shop. You'd better try talking to the woman in charge of the business, she knew Sandra better than I did.'

‘I was told that the owner of the shop is away in New Zealand,' said Hilary.

‘There's another woman, then. She's in Fodderstone for the summer.'

‘Would that be Mrs Annabel Yardley?'

But Desmond Flood was deep in treacle again. ‘I don't know …'

Beech House, the home of Mrs Elizabeth Seymour who owned the Saintsbury florist's shop, was an early nineteenth-century gentleman's residence of grey brick, with a hipped slate roof and a pedimented porch on two Tuscan columns. It stood on its own about half a mile out of Fodderstone on the Saintsbury road. On one side of the house, a beech hedge concealed the garden from the quiet road; on the other side was a paddock in which two horses were grazing. A large beech tree grew beside the open entrance gates, and parked on the gravel drive in front of the house was a red Alfa Romeo Alfasud.