A Talent For Destruction (11 page)

The verger stood quite still and gave a discreet but firm cough behind his clenched fist. His eyes moved from the Chief Inspector's to the padlocked box that was fixed to the wall just inside the door. On the box was pinned a handwritten label:
Church Expenses
.

Shamed into giving, Quantrill scrabbled in his trouser pocket and emerged with a palmful of small bronze coins and a solitary ten-pence piece. He looked at them doubtfully, raised an eyebrow at the verger, saw the reproach in his gaze, took out his wallet and pushed a folded pound note into the box.

‘By the way, Mr Blore,' he said, deciding to put the money down against expenses and to extract as much information as possible on the strength of it, ‘that badly behaved brass-rubber you told me about – the young man you saw sitting on the altar: did you hear his voice? I'm wondering whether it could have been the Australian we're interested in.'

The verger twitched his moustache in thought, then shook his head. ‘No, I'm sorry. I couldn't face speaking to him myself, you see – I left it to the Rector, so I never heard the man's voice. You'll have to ask Mr Ainger. He's the one who can tell you.'

Quantrill didn't doubt it. But whether the Reverend Robin Ainger
would
tell him was, he knew, a different matter.

‘County operations room, Inspector Tait here.'

‘Quantrill, Breckham Market. Can we have a word?'

‘One moment.'

The Chief Inspector grinned to himself as he sat at his desk with the telephone receiver at his ear. There were times, he knew, when the operations room at county police headquarters could seem as busy as the control tower at Heathrow; but had there been a major incident in progress, the switchboard would not have put him through. Young Martin Tait, formerly his sergeant, was simply playing a power game.

‘… and let me know as soon as it comes up on the VDU,' he heard the new Inspector say in his clipped, efficient voice. Then, ‘Good to hear from you, sir. How can I help?'

‘I thought it was high time we met for a drink. You know how it is at Breckham – we're so busy hoeing our sugar-beet fields that we lose sight of the outside world. I'd be interested to hear what the view's like from county HQ.'

‘Oh.' Tait sounded disappointed, as though he had hoped that the Chief Inspector had a more significant motive for calling him. ‘I'd certainly like to meet, but life's very busy at the moment.'

‘I was afraid of that. Pity. I'd hoped we could arrange something between now and Friday – but if you're too busy it doesn't matter.'

‘What's special about Friday?'

‘A coroner's inquest … Well, never mind. We can have that drink some other time.'

‘Is that the resumed inquest on the Parson's Close skeleton? Look, I really would like to see you again, sir. I'm off duty tomorrow afternoon, and as it happens I'll be coming into your division. Could you meet me at the old airfield at Horkey – say half-past two?'

‘At Horkey? What in thunder are you going there for?'

‘I belong to the aero club that operates from there. I'm learning to fly.'

‘Good grief,' said Quantrill, conceding the round. ‘Well, yes. See you tomorrow then.'

‘Hang on! What about that skeleton? Was forensic able to establish the cause of death?'

‘No. So it looks as though it'll be an open verdict, and the file will be closed. But I'm not at all happy about it.'

‘And you'd like my help?'

‘Let's say that I thought it might be an idea if we were to talk it over.'

Inspector Tait's sigh of satisfaction came clearly along the line. ‘I began to think you'd never ask,' he said.

A little orange and white two-seater Cessna 152 aircraft, its cockpit considerably smaller than the front seats of a Mini, stood outside the premises of the Horkey aero club, rocking against its brakes in the March wind. One of its hangar companions had just taken off from the grass airfield, lurching drunkenly into the air under the control of a student pilot. Quantrill couldn't bear to look. It was just possible to believe that the frail contraption would get off the ground in one piece, but considerably more difficult to feel confident about the landing.

‘You'll never get
me
up in one of those things,' he declared.

Martin Tait laughed indulgently. ‘That was what the caterpillar said about the butterfly. You really can't stay earthbound all your life. Come on, admit it, you're longing to go up.'

‘No, I'm not,' said Quantrill, holding on to his hat, ‘and certainly not in a little tin can like that.' He had never yet had occasion to travel by air, and although he had not entirely lost his boyhood longing to go up in an aeroplane he intended his first experience to be in something more substantial. ‘Anyway, you couldn't take me up. You haven't got your private pilot's licence yet.'

‘That won't take long,' said Tait confidently. ‘I've already done twenty hours'dual flying, and four solo. Another ten hours'dual and six solo, and that's it.'

‘That's all?'

‘Oh, there are exams to pass too. But forty hours is the minimum flying-time for a student pilot before qualification.'

‘And you think it won't take you more than the minimum?'

‘I shall be ashamed of myself if it does. Come and have a drink, we've got a club licence.'

Quantrill followed the former detective, a slight, sharp, fair young man, dapper in a good leather jacket and a roll-neck sweater, into the renovated wartime hut that served as a clubroom. He accepted a can of lager; Tait, who was due for a flying lesson in an hour's time, confined himself to machine-made coffee. The aero-club staff were in the control tower, and the two policemen had the slightly battered club lounge to themselves.

‘How are things at HQ?' asked Quantrill.

‘Interesting. Really interesting. I enjoy having so much technology at my disposal – computer terminal, visual display units, radio, telex, teleprinter, direct lines to all the neighbouring forces'control rooms, and to New Scotland Yard and Interpol … I can find out anything I want to know within a few minutes.'

‘Simpler than plodding round Breckham trying to dig out information at grass-roots level,' reflected Quantrill. ‘It took Yarchester less time to get confirmation that the skeleton in Parson's Close was Athol James Garrity, aged twenty-four, late of Queensland, Australia, than it did for Ian Wigby to track down which Breckham pub the man used. All the same, neither technology nor forensic science has been able to tell us how he met his death.'

‘What do we know about him?'

Quantrill passed on the information that he and Wigby had pieced together, adding, ‘It seemed at first that no one in the town had met him, apart from the Aingers. But then we found that he'd done his drinking in the Concorde, one of the pubs on the new estate. He could easily walk there from Parson's Close, across the by-pass. They remember him quite well at the Concorde – he drank a lot and was noisy, but never argumentative or belligerent. He certainly didn't make any enemies. He had several casual drinking companions, but he always came and went on his own.

‘He last went there on the evening of July 29th. The barman remembers the date because it was his first day back after his summer holiday. Garrity was at the Concorde at six o'clock, waiting for it to open. He'd been away too, he said, staying with Australian friends in London. He'd just hitched a lift back, the weather was warm, and he was thirsty. He downed four or five pints, possibly more, and by eight o'clock when the barmaid came on duty he was cross-eyed. Soon afterwards he mumbled something about going back to his tent for a kip, and staggered off. No one from the Concorde saw him after that.'

‘But someone might have seen him crossing the by-pass,' said Tait quickly. ‘If he was staggering drunk, he'd have been noticeable. Have you thought that he might have been struck by a hit-and-run driver, and then managed to crawl as far as the bushes before collapsing? Have you considered –?'

‘Yes,' snapped Quantrill, who had temporarily forgotten Tait's unfailing ability to get right up his nose. ‘We've done a thorough job – if you'll just wait until I've finished. Garrity was in fact seen again, later that same evening. The Rector and his wife say that they saw him by chance from the Rectory garden, at about half-past nine. They were standing in the drive, and they saw him weaving along St Botolph Street from the direction of the town, heading for the gate at the top of Parson's Close. That means that after he left the Concorde he must have gone up into the town – but that's where we've drawn a blank. We haven't been able to discover where he went or what he did.'

Inspector Tait's expression made it clear that had he still been CID Sergeant at Breckham Market, the investigation would have been more productive.

‘Didn't you discover that the Aingers had an Australian girl visitor last summer?' he said. ‘I met her one evening when I went there for coffee. They mentioned someone called Athol, and I gathered that he was making a nuisance of himself by hanging round the girl. He probably went to see her after he left the Concorde.'

Quantrill stared at Tait irritably. ‘Yes, of course we found out about Janey Rolph. I'd very much like to talk to her, but she's left the country. The Aingers say that she was with them for the whole of that evening – but the question is, are they telling the truth? So what's all this about your going there for coffee? Ainger told me that he knew you, but I assumed it was in your official capacity. Why the hell didn't you say sooner that you knew them socially? They're the biggest puzzle in this enquiry.'

‘And how was I supposed to know that? Anyway, I assumed that you knew them as well as I did. It's part of the job, as I see it, to establish a good relationship with the leaders of the community. If you'd told me that the Aingers were puzzling you, I'd have come over to help as soon as you started the enquiry.'

It would be a waste of time to take umbrage. Quantrill helped himself to another can of lager at Tait's expense instead, and told him his grounds for suspicion. ‘I've now talked to them, together or separately, at least five times,' he concluded, ‘and understandably they're getting restive. They've volunteered a certain amount of information, but I'm inclined to think that they're simply trying to cover themselves by anticipating what we might find out from other sources. They now insist that they know nothing more than they've already told me. I think that's a lie, but there's damn all I can do about it. When a man's a parson, it's hard to suggest to him that he's not telling the whole truth.'

‘The real trouble,' said Tait, going straight to the point, ‘is that forensic hasn't been able to establish whether or not a crime has been committed. If this was a murder enquiry you could pull Robin Ainger in, parson or not, and persuade him to talk.'

‘Him or her. I'm certain they're in this together – not necessarily concealing a crime, but concealing
something
from us. They're both under considerable stress at the moment – though that's partly accounted for by Gillian's father. He's infirm, and becoming childish.'

‘The old man must have deteriorated a lot since last summer, then,' said Tait. ‘He was lively enough when I saw him, and working in the garden.'

‘He's had back trouble, so his daughter said, and the bad weather didn't help him. He knows, or suspects, something too – though he dislikes his son-in-law, so perhaps he's just being malicious. Anyway, he's being cussed with his daughter, and she's nearly at the end of her tether. But even if we make allowances for their domestic problems, and for the strain of their job, it doesn't account for the way they're behaving. You know them better than I do, Martin; what was your impression of them?'

Tait shied his empty coffee beaker into a waste-bin. The aero club was chronically short of funds, and members were expected to clear away their own empties.

‘The Aingers have been under considerable stress for months,' he said. ‘Marital problems. They were hospitable enough, but it seemed a desperate kind of hospitality. I felt that they were beginning to grab at people in order to avoid being alone with each other. It was an interesting situation to observe, but it didn't make for a comfortable evening out. The tension between them was hardly disguised on my last visit.'

‘When was that?'

‘The last week in June, just before I started my summer leave. I kept out of their way after I came back. I'd promised Robin that I'd talk to the youth club in September about CID work, but I never went back to the Rectory. I wouldn't have been at all surprised to hear that their marriage had broken up by now.'

‘A parson can't very well admit to that kind of human frailty,' said Quantrill. ‘A divorce would put an end to his career. Even a separation would ruin his credibility – after all, if he can't keep his marriage going, what hope is there for the rest of us? But from what I've seen in the past few weeks, the Aingers'partnership seems to be working reasonably well now. What did you think was their trouble?'

‘He bullied her, and she let him. That must have been what drew them together in the first place,' said Tait, an observant bachelor who liked to think himself something of an expert on marriage. ‘I don't know what had happened to intensify their difficulties, but it seemed that when anyone or anything in the parish upset Robin, he'd come home and direct his anger at Gillian. She spent her time trying to placate him, offering herself as a doormat in an attempt to keep him happy. She even encouraged him to talk to the Australian girl because he so obviously liked her. Anyone could see what a fool thing that was for her to do, but I suppose she imagined that because her husband was a parson –'