A Talent For Destruction (2 page)

‘Cor, I'm hot,' said Justin, sitting up red-cheeked and pushing back the fur-lined hood of his parka. Then, ‘Blast, now I'm caught on a bramble.'

A long woody shoot, trailing out from the nearest bush, was hooked by its thorns to his hood. He turned and pulled himself free, and as he did so he noticed something round and yellowish-white lying beside a heap of rubbish under the bare purple branches of the bush.

‘Hey, there's a football!' he said excitedly. ‘Somebody must have lost it.'

Adrian got up to look. ‘That it's not,' he said, reasserting his authority. ‘How can it be? It's not round all over – and anyway, it's got a hole in it.'

‘What is it, then?'

‘I dunno. My legs are longer than yours, I'll see if I can get it out.'

Adrian reached one wellingtonned foot under the bush and hooked the object towards him. It was caught up in withered, snow-matted grass, and for a few moments it resisted. Then it rolled over, into full view.

The blood disappeared from Adrian's cheeks, leaving him almost as bleached as the thing that was staring sightlessly up at him. He made a small mewling sound and took several steps backwards. Then he turned and fled up the hill, floundering through the snow, yammering with fright.

In a second Justin was after him, sobbing and stumbling and screaming, ‘Wait for me!' His toboggan lay forgotten in the last of the snow. He, too, had peered into the bush and had seen the eyeless, noseless, sockets, the grinning teeth below the rounded cranium.

Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill was on the carpet. Specifically, he was on the doorstep of the grey-brick, early Victorian Rectory, having been summoned by the Rector to discuss several hundred pounds'worth of damage to the church hall, apparently sustained when the youth club got out of hand the previous evening. It was not a matter with which the head of Breckham Market CID would normally deal in person; he was there because the Rector suspected that one of the ringleaders was the Chief Inspector's son Peter.

The door was opened by the Rector's wife, Gillian Ainger. Quantrill was not a churchgoer, nor on social terms with the Aingers, but it was a small town and he knew her by sight, as she knew him.

‘Ah, Mr Quantrill – do please come in. I'm afraid my husband has been called away unexpectedly. He asked me to apologize if he wasn't back in time, but I'm sure he won't be long. A man from Furze Close was rushed into hospital at Yarchester last night with a heart attack, and his wife went with him in the ambulance. His condition has stabilized, fortunately, but his wife was stuck at the hospital so she rang Robin and asked him to fetch her.'

‘One of your husband's congregation?' Quantrill asked, wiping his shoes on the outsize doormat and hanging his overcoat where she indicated, on a row of hooks long enough to accommodate the coats of the entire parochial church council.

‘No. But no one else's either. The whole town's our parish, and in times of crisis people do tend to remember that they're nominally Church of England.'

‘A parson must have a lot of demands made on him,' commented Quantrill, offering heavily polite conversation rather than sympathy. He felt uneasy, anxious to get on with the interview.

One corner of her mouth lifted in a very strained smile. ‘Yes, he does.'

She was about thirty-five or -six, at least ten years younger than Quantrill. Her figure was sturdy, and she obviously took no interest in clothes. Her fair hair was tied back loosely at the nape of her neck in a style that suits a mature woman only if she has a particularly good bone structure, and Gillian Ainger had not. She gave the impression of having chosen her hair-style and her pale lipstick at the age of eighteen, and of having thought no more about them. And yet she had a pleasant open face, with smallish but widely spaced hazel eyes and a generous mouth. If she bothered, Quantrill thought, she could look attractive.

But perhaps her husband gave her no encouragement. As he himself had discovered – belatedly, after twenty-odd years of marriage – it seems to make a disproportionate amount of difference to a woman if her husband takes a bit of notice of her. For a start, it might make Mrs Ainger look happier. The lines at each side of her mouth were deeper than her age warranted, and she looked dark and tired round the eyes.

She had led him down the wide chilly hall, floored with Victorian encaustic tiles, and into a sparsely furnished study. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee while you're waiting?' she asked, as she lit the gas fire.

‘Thank you, but I've just had one.' The Chief Inspector had already called at the church hall and seen the damage that had been done there. The allegation against Peter was serious, and he didn't want either of the Aingers to think that he was treating the interview as a social occasion. And presumably Gillian Ainger knew about the trouble at the youth club. From all that he'd ever heard in the town, she played the conventional, supportive role of the parson's wife. She was part of the team, sharing the social-work aspect of the job with her husband and knowing as much if not more about the parish than he did.

The telephone rang. Quantrill stood with his back to her while she answered it, looking out of the window at an expanse of virgin snow that was shrinking round the edges, but still covered most of the garden. The only footprints on it were those of birds and small animals, because the Aingers had no children. A shame to see all that unused snow, he thought; there had never been enough of it when he was a boy. Not that the appeal of snow lasted very long for youngsters. It was a thousand pities that young Peter wasn't still content with the harmless pleasures of snowfights and tobogganing, instead of getting his kicks from helping to break up the church hall.
Allegedly
helping to break up the church hall.

Behind him, Mrs Ainger was dealing competently and patiently with some kind of parish problem: listening, soothing, advising, co-operating. An ideal wife for a busy parson – she could probably take the services just as well as her husband, too, if anyone gave her a chance, Quantrill thought. Having been brought up in a Nonconformist family he was not even nominally C of E, and so he could afford to take a liberal view on the ordination of women.

From the hall outside, there came a sudden irascible shout and a clattering noise. Mrs Ainger stopped in mid-sentence, the telephone receiver in her hand, and glanced with exasperation at the door. There was another cry, and this time it sounded like pain. Quantrill gave her an interrogative glance, but, without waiting for her reaction, took it upon himself to open the door and find out what was happening.

A big-boned, scrawny old man sat at the turn of the wide staircase, fully dressed except that one foot was bare and the other was half in, half out of, a sock. One slipper, fallen or flung, lay on the hall floor, the other on the second step. He was rocking and wailing, nursing his bare mottled foot in both hands.

‘Are you all right?' asked Quantrill, taking the stairs two at a time and putting one hand on his shoulder. The old man squinted up at him through ferociously tufted eyebrows, and immediately quietened. The slack folds of his face were unshaven, and he smelled of tobacco and, faintly, of urine.

‘She's hidden me shoes,' he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I want me shoes, and she won't let me have'em. I want to go
out
.'

There was a ping as Mrs Ainger put down the telephone and came into the hall. Immediately, he resumed his noisy performance: ‘Oh, oh, oh, I've hurt me foot. I can't find me shoes and me slippers are loose, and now I've fallen down the stairs and hurt me foot. Oh, it hurts.' He spied down at her, assessing the effect he was having, and Quantrill retreated to ground level, out of the way.

‘Stop making such a fuss, Dad,' she said evenly. ‘The pavements are still far too slippery. It's not safe for you to go out on your own.'

‘I haven't been out for months and months,' he grumbled childishly. ‘Not for months.'

‘It's been snowing since before Christmas,' she pointed out.

‘Not for months before that, either. Not since last summer …'

‘But that,' she reminded him, ‘was because you'd hurt your back. And anyway, you're exaggerating. One or other of us has taken you out in the car at least once a week –'

‘That don't count. I don't want to be taken out by
him
and made to sit in a posh pub with a bloody
carpet
on the floor, and I don't want to drink the fizzy muck he thinks is beer. I want to walk as far as the Boot and meet folks as'll talk to me, and drink pints o'draught bitter and – and spit on the floor if I feel like it!'

The old man's face had coloured with genuine passion and now, suddenly and deliberately, he spat on the tiles of the hall. His daughter froze. She was white except for a splotch of angry colour on either cheek. Quantrill stood still, trying – as far as it was possible for a man of his height and weight – to pretend that he wasn't there. Only his eyes moved, from father to daughter to the yellow gob that lay on the floor between them, at once a reproach, an insult, and a token of impotent defiance.

But the old man's rebellion collapsed as quickly as it had begun. He started to cry, almost silently, the tears oozing down the vertical creases of his face and mingling with residual dribble on his emery-paper chin. His daughter let out a long breath, bent to pick up his slippers, and carried them to where he sat hunched on the stairs, his big knotted workman's hands hanging limp between his knees.

‘It's all right, Dad,' she said wearily. ‘Don't upset yourself. Here, put your slippers on.'

His lower lip trembled. ‘I've lost me other sock.'

She retrieved it from where it had fallen, knelt down and eased his socks and slippers on to his stiff, shiny, purple feet. He wiped the cuff of his cardigan across his wet eyes.

‘Will you cut me toenails tonight, dear?' he supplicated.

Her hands were still shaking with tension, but she forced herself to smile. ‘That's a farrier's job, with nails as tough as yours! You've got an appointment with the chiropodist next week, so you won't have long to wait.'

‘I might make holes in me socks afore then. I don't want to give you extra work. I don't want to be a burden.'

‘Don't worry about that. You go upstairs and get shaved, and then I'll make your coffee.'

‘With hot milk?'

‘With hot milk.'

‘You're a good daughter to me, our Gilly.'

She said nothing, but watched him climb stiffly to his feet and shamble up the stairs, a great ruin of a man, his trousers slack round his bony haunches, his cardigan unevenly buttoned. Then she ran, set-faced, to the cloakroom that led off the hall, returned with a wad of toilet paper and a bottle of disinfectant, wiped the spittle off the floor, flushed the paper down the lavatory and scrubbed her hands. Only then did she acknowledge that Quantrill was still there.

‘Sorry about that,' she said jerkily, without looking at him. ‘It seemed inappropriate to attempt an introduction, but that was my father, Henry Bowers. He's been living with us for the past year, ever since my mother died.' One corner of her mouth gave a wry twist: ‘Living and partly living … I hope you weren't too shocked.'

He shook his head reassuringly. ‘Policemen don't shock so easily.'

‘Oh –' Gillian Ainger coloured, suddenly confused. ‘I'd quite forgotten, for a moment, what your job is.'

‘I hadn't. And it's very embarrassing, I can tell you, to know that your husband suspects my son of vandalism.'

She relaxed a little, grateful that he had changed the subject; and then the front door opened and the Rector hurried in, apologizing for being late.

The Reverend Robin Ainger was a very good-looking man, nearing forty but still slim, narrow-shouldered but almost as tall as Quantrill. There was however something dated about his looks. His particular style of handsomeness – regular features, perfect teeth and short, cleanly parted, evenly wavy light brown hair – was one that had gone out of fashion with baggy trousers, big band sounds and cries of ‘Anyone for tennis?' The outdated impression was reinforced by his tweed jacket and roll-necked sweater. Even so, it was easy to see why St Botolph's church always attracted such a loyal female congregation. The colour of the Rector's sweater exactly matched, and emphasized, the unusually pale blue of his eyes.

He greeted Quantrill with wary affability; presumably he wasn't looking forward to the interview either. Then he turned to his wife, putting a hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘Everything all right, Gillian?'

She hesitated, as though wondering whether to tell him. ‘Henry had a tantrum, I'm afraid – in front of Mr Quantrill.'

Her husband's hand tightened. ‘He would … What about, this time?'

‘Oh, the usual. Wanting to go out to the pub on his own.'

Robin Ainger looked at Quantrill defensively. ‘I expect you think we're being over-protective –' he began, but Quantrill interrupted him.

‘If you really want to know what I was thinking,' he said bluntly, ‘it was “Thank God my poor old father didn't live that long”. He died of a heart attack when he was playing bowls, at the age of sixty-eight. It was a shock for us at the time, and we grieved that he'd died so soon after retirement, but looking back I'm glad he went like that. I wouldn't wish the humiliations of old age on him, and I wouldn't want my wife to have the burden of looking after the old boy. Our Peter is quite demanding enough.'

The Rector nodded, and released Gillian's shoulder. ‘Yes. I know you're a busy man, Mr Quantrill, and I'm grateful to you for calling.' He gestured the Chief Inspector into his study. ‘Thank you for holding the fort,' he said to his wife. ‘I think we'd all appreciate some coffee, wouldn't we? And if you wouldn't mind intercepting any calls for the next twenty minutes or so –?'