A Talent For Destruction (5 page)

Wigby stopped his car on the verge, behind a police van. He got out. It was still bitterly cold, and four uniformed policemen were engaged on the numbing task of scraping away snow from the grass at the lower end of the meadow, in the hope of bringing something significant to light. Wigby grinned to himself, turned up the dark fur collar of his sheepskin jacket and – having served in the Royal Marines before he joined the police force – assessed the area with a practised military eye.

On the far side of Parson's Close was an electricity sub-station, separated from the meadow by a high wire security fence. Access to Parson's Close could therefore be gained from three sides only: across the barbed wire from the by-pass at the lower end, from St Botolph Street at the top, or through the allotment hedge at the side. The allotments were still under snow, their makeshift huts giving them the look of an abandoned refugee camp, their footpaths invisible; but Wigby knew that the paths were there, and that one of them connected Parson's Close with Duck End. The street and the meadow were no more than a hundred yards apart.

If the man's body had been brought along the by-pass and dumped, that was not Wigby's immediate concern. But if he had entered Parson's Close alive last summer, either from St Botolph's or from Duck End by way of the allotments, then, Wigby calculated, somebody local had probably seen him.

There were no pubs in St Botolph's, but in Duck End there was the Maltster's Arms. Wigby turned his car, drove back to the roundabout, and took the narrow road that led directly into the old town. He reached Duck End with a minute to spare before opening time.

Sebastopol Street, built by a brewer named Gosling in the middle years of the nineteenth century, had long since been declared unfit for human habitation. Many of the houses were empty, their doors and windows boarded up, but the remainder were inhabited by elderly owner-occupiers who eked out their lives there, plagued by cockroaches and damp and rheumatism. Smoke rose from their chimneys, and fire-ash lay pink on the snow outside their doors so as to give the residents a firmer footing when they ventured outside.

As Wigby approached the door of the Maltster's Arms, the bolts were being drawn. ‘'Morning, Mrs Phelps,' he said jovially to the landlady.

Alice Enid Phelps, licensed to sell beer, wines and spirits to be consumed on or off the premises, gave him a narrow stare. She was small and thin and grey, but her eyes were as sharp as her tongue.

‘I know you,' she said. ‘You're that policeman who came here upsetting my customers.'

‘That was eighteen months ago,' Wigby protested.

‘I never forget a face.'

She was in her middle sixties, a widow who had applied for the licence to be transferred to her after her husband's death not because she drank or enjoyed company, but because the pub was both her home and her livelihood. The local brewery had been closed for thirty years and so the pub was a free house which, within the licensing laws, she ruled as she pleased.

‘The last time you came nosing round here,' she continued, keeping him on the doorstep, ‘was when you were looking for poor old Mrs Bedingfield's Reggie's Kevin. But he wasn't the one you were after, because he's going straight. His Granny would never have had him to live with her otherwise, because this is a respectable neighbourhood, and I keep a respectable house and I want no policemen poking about here and upsetting my customers. What do you want, anyway?'

Wigby blinked at her, moon-faced with assumed innocence. ‘I was hoping for a Guinness, and a bit of a warm-up. I've been on duty in Parson's Close ever since daylight, and it's stingy old weather out there.'

‘I keep no Guinness,' she said. ‘There's no call for it in Duck End.'

‘Mild, then?' suggested Wigby. ‘A half would go down well.'

She allowed him, grudgingly, into the only bar. It was a cheerless room, the wallpaper yellow with age and tidemarked with rising damp, the paintwork brown, the wooden settles as unwelcoming as chapel pews. Mrs Phelps's only concession to her customers' comfort was a small fire that oozed smoke from between the bars of a narrow Victorian grate.

‘Ah, that's better.' Wigby welcomed it with exaggerated, hand-toasting enthusiasm. ‘That's what I needed, after searching Parson's Close.'

Mrs Phelps failed either to soften or to rise to his hint. She drew his beer, took his money and kept her mouth tight.

‘'Spect you've heard about the skeleton,' he prompted.

‘Yes. But it's nobody from hereabouts, that I do know. And there's nothing any of my customers can tell you about it, so you're wasting your time.'

‘You keep a good drop of beer, though,' he told her.

Mrs Phelps seemed not entirely displeased. ‘Well, you must stay if you want, I suppose. But I'll thank you to keep yourself to yourself. And don't sit near the fire, neither.'

Wigby removed himself to a draughty bar stool, and watched as the seats at the table near the fire slowly filled up with regulars. There were half a dozen of them, old men in cloth caps and woollen scarves and layers of waistcoats and jackets and overcoats. They greeted the landlady respectfully as they crept in, and she replied with a nod and their names, at the same time drawing half a pint of their preferred drink and wordlessly exchanging it for their money.

The old men's morning ritual unfolded, beginning with talk of the weather and of the deaths that had been announced in that day's local paper. DC Wigby, who had been given some wary glances at first, leaned silently on the bar and stared out of the window at a corner shop that had been closed for so long that it still bore on its walls a battered tin advertisement with the message,
Rinso saves coal on washdays
.

Eventually the conversation turned to the discovery of the skeleton, but it seemed to arouse no great interest. The residents of Duck End were too old to be concerned with anything that did not touch their own lives. They knew that the bones were not those of a local man, and apart from expressing a certain amount of indignation that a stranger should choose Breckham Market to die in, they had little to say on the subject. One of them opened a box of dominoes, and they settled down to concentrate on their pastime.

Wigby was about to drink up and go when the door opened again and another man came in, a hale sixty-five year old wearing a flat cap and a short motoring coat, but with cycle clips on his trousers.

‘Why, it's the boy Walter!' said one of the old men, and the atmosphere immediately brightened. Even Mrs Phelps permitted herself a smile of welcome. There was a good deal of chaffing, with the men addressing each other in the East Anglian way as ‘Bor'.

The boy Walter, DC Wigby gathered, rented one of the allotments at the back of Duck End; born and brought up in the street, he now lived near the railway station. Evidently he made the Maltster's Arms his headquarters during the gardening season, and liked to drop in occasionally during the winter. The bad weather had kept him away for weeks, and the regulars hailed him as the promise of spring.

If Walter cycled from his home to his allotment, reasoned Wigby, visualizing the layout of the town, he probably approached the allotments from St Botolph Street, at the top end of Parson's Close. He could be a useful man to talk to. Wigby sat tight, and bought a packet of peanuts to justify his continuing presence.

Having greeted the old men individually, the boy Walter left them to their dominoes and went to the bar. He was a pensioner of a different generation, alert, well-fed, immensely good humoured; but Wigby knew better than to attempt to rush a Suffolk man by offering to buy him a drink before they had become acquainted.

The detective waited until Walter had bought his own beer, and Mrs Phelps had retired to the back room, and then he gave the man a friendly nod: ‘'Morning.'

Walter was non-committal: ‘How do.'

‘Real brass monkey weather, still.'

This time Walter grinned. ‘Ar, that is. Better for getting about, though. First time I've been on the bike since afore Christmas.'

‘Do you come along St Botolph's?'

‘Not today, not with snow on the 'lotments. Generally I do, though. Ar, I wouldn't mind a pound note for every time I've biked along there.'

Wigby knew that the expression was nothing more than a confirmation of the man's acquaintance with the area; Walter would have been astonished and offended to be offered money. Instead, Wigby showed him his warrant card. ‘You've heard about the skeleton in Parson's Close, I suppose?' he asked.

Walter nodded, his eyes rounding with interest. ‘How did that come to be there?' he demanded.

‘That's what I'm trying to find out. For a start, I want to know who it was. We know it was a tall chap, early twenties, died last summer. He wore a big silver ring on his left hand. Can you remember if you saw anyone like that, on your way to or from your allotment?'

Walter shook his head slowly. ‘I don't recall seeing anybody – any stranger, that is. There was a tent, though, in Parson's Close last summer. Just one, a little orange thing, up near the trees. You couldn't see it from St Botolph's because of the fence, but I saw it from my ‘lotment. I thought it must belong to the Australian.'

‘What Australian?'

‘Why, the one with the car. I didn't ever see anybody in it, but the car was parked along St Botolph's at the top end of Parson's Close most of the time in the early part of last summer. It was a Jap car, a Datsun like my son's, but there was a sticker saying
Australia
in the back window.'

‘Did you notice the number of the car? Or any part of the number?'

Walter pushed back his cap and scratched the top of his greying head. ‘No, I didn't take that much interest. I knew it was a Datsun from the shape, same as my son's. His'n's yellow, though. This one was red.'

‘And it was there in the early part of the summer, you say?'

‘Ar. I noticed it first in April, time I was putting in my peas. It was parked there on and off for a month or two, and then it seemed to be there all the time until we went on our holiday.'

‘When was that?'

‘Beginning of August. Me and the missus go to a caravan at Yarmouth with my daughter and her family for the first full week in August every year. We got back home on the Saturday and I biked up to the ‘lotment after tea, just to see how everything was doing. And I remember noticing that the car wasn't there, nor yet the tent. I never saw the car or the tent after that.'

Wigby bought the boy Walter a beer, and left. He drove into the centre of the town and went to one of his regular pubs, the Boot, for a small Guinness to wash down the Maltster's peanuts. There was a good deal of speculation in the bar about the identity of the Parson's Close skeleton, but no one had met or heard of an Australian in the town the previous summer. Wigby moved on, this time walking up to St Botolph's parish hall, just behind the church. He had been there the previous day, when he made the initial investigation of the damage that had been done at the youth club meeting.

‘Morning, Mr Blore. How's it going?'

The caretaker of the hall, who was also the verger of the church, was a thin man in a zippered fawn cardigan, with mournful eyes and an anxiously neat moustache. He switched off his electric floor polisher and showed the detective constable what he had done to make the hall usable.

‘As you see, I'm getting the place clean and straight. But as for the actual damage …' Heartbroken, he gestured to the shattered windows that he had blocked with hardboard, the broken legs of the table tennis table, the smashed stereo speakers. ‘It's the
waste
of it all, Mr Wigby, the wicked waste …'

Wigby commiserated with him and agreed with his strictures on the irresponsibility of youth, although he personally believed it to be a natural and healthy state. He was proud of having once been a holy terror. In his opinion, a boy who had never had the guts to buck authority would be too spineless to make an effective copper; and a boy who hadn't got the sense to conceal his misdemeanours wouldn't know how to start being a detective.

‘What I came to tell you,' Wigby said, interrupting the verger's woeful recital, ‘is that a sergeant from Yarchester is coming to do the investigation. He'll be in to see you this afternoon. We can't do it ourselves – it's a bit awkward, with the DCI's boy belonging to the youth club.'

The verger nodded sadly. He led the way into the kitchen and switched on the electric kettle. ‘I'd never have thought it of young Peter Quantrill, not with his Dad a Chief Inspector.'

‘Doesn't matter who their Dads are,' snorted Wigby. ‘Makes'em worse, sometimes. Doesn't matter who anybody is, we're all human.'

Edgar Blore looked as though he would like to deny it, but Wigby led him on to the subject of the skeleton and asked whether he had seen either the tent in Parson's Close, or the red Datsun with the
Australia
sticker in St Botolph's Street, the previous summer.

‘A tent? That's news to me.' The verger picked up a damp-dry tea-bag from the saucer where he had parked it after an earlier brew-up, and made an insipid cup of tea. He offered it to Wigby, who declined it promptly.

‘The Rector never said anything about anyone camping in the meadow,' went on Edgar Blore, returning the wrinkled corpse of the tea-bag to the saucer for further use, ‘but then he might not know about it either. That's what I said to Mrs Blore this morning, when I read the piece in the paper: for all it's Parson's Close, anything could happen there without Mr Ainger's knowledge. It's my belief that the skeleton must have got there from the by-pass. It's nothing to do with Breckham at all.‘

‘What about the car, then?'

‘To tell you the truth, Mr Wigby, I don't go along St Botolph's very often. I see the Rector a great deal, of course. This is a very busy parish and I try to help him as much as I can, but I usually see him either here or in the church. I try not to bother him at the Rectory, and when I do have to go there I've got too much on my mind to take any notice of parked cars.'