Who Saw Him Die?

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• Sheila Radley
  
• Dedication
  
• Epigraph
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  
• Chapter Twenty Three
  
• Chapter Twenty Four
  
• Chapter Twenty Five
  
• Chapter Twenty Six
  
• Chapter Twenty Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty One
  
• Postscript
  

Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote ten crime novels as Sheila Radley.

For Margaret

In a Bath Teashop

‘Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –
Let us hold hands and look.'
She, such a very ordinary little woman;
He, such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop's ingle-nook.

John Betjeman

His name was Cuthbert Redvers Fullerton Bell, but everyone in Breckham Market knew him as Clanger. He was fifty-two years old, and a bachelor. For most of his adult life he had been acknowledged and respected as the town's principal drunk. And now he was dead.

There was no mystery about his death. It occurred in public, in the soft damp light of early afternoon on a mild day in November. Three eye-witnesses saw him emerge unsteadily from the Boot, his favourite pub, at closing time and stand swaying at the edge of the pavement for a few moments before stepping out in the path of an oncoming vehicle. The driver, who was travelling down the one-way street at a lawful twenty-seven miles an hour, hadn't a chance of avoiding him. Bell sustained multiple injuries, and he was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

The manner of Clanger Bell's death caused no surprise to anyone in Breckham Market. The wonder was that it hadn't happened sooner. Clanger – a shambling, uncommunicative man, always either badly in need of a shave or badly shaven, habitually dressed in a homburg hat and a rumpled city suit, and carrying a bulging briefcase – had for years been a hazard to motorists in the centre of the town. It was his custom, when crossing the narrow streets on his meandering route from one pub to another, to play a solitary game of chicken: to stand on the pavement deliberately waiting for a vehicle to approach, and then to stagger across at the very last moment.

He had of course been given many a talking-to by the police, without effect. But he was such a well-known figure that every local driver kept an eye open for him, particularly when passing the pubs he was known to frequent, and slowed to a walking pace when he wavered into sight. It was Clanger's misfortune that John Reuben Goodrum, the driver of the Range Rover that hit him, was – although a Suffolk man – a newcomer to Breckham Market.

There were few to mourn Clanger Bell. His only near relative was his unmarried elder sister Eunice, with whom he shared the large Victorian house that had been their family home. Although he had lived in Breckham Market all his life, no one considered him as a friend. As a boy, he had been away at boarding school; as a young man he had spent four hours a day commuting by train to and from London, where he worked for a time in a city bank; as the town drunk, he drank alone.

His passing was, however, regarded with a widespread sense of regret. Eunice and Cuthbert Bell were the last representatives of one of the town's most respected families, property owners and civic leaders for a hundred years and more. Cuthbert had spoiled the family's reputation, but in doing so he had endeared himself to the local people who took pride in the fact that their town drunk was a gentleman. In the quarter of a century during which he had held the office, he had become an institution. Breckham Market wouldn't be the same without him.

Even the local police were sorry, despite the fact that Clanger had been a thundering nuisance for longer than the most long-serving of them could remember. They had always known that there was nothing to be done with him, and so the coppers had treated him with a patience and a tolerance that amounted almost to affection.

For most of the time he had wandered about the town in a dazed silence, doing no harm to anyone. When he became fuddled and began muttering aloud in the streets, the police had steered him in the direction of his home. When his mutterings turned to incoherent shouts, they had driven him there. When he fell down, legless, they had given him a night in the cells for his own protection. They had taken him into custody only on those occasions when, shouting wildly in an incomprehensible climax of frustration or anger, he had begun swinging his heavy, newspaper-crammed briefcase and had inadvertently smashed a shop window.

At his subsequent appearance in the magistrates'court, on average once every six weeks, the police would ensure that Clanger was not only sober but tidy and shaven. He would plead guilty, in his little-heard, well-bred voice, to having been drunk and disorderly, and would make courteous apology for the trouble he had caused. But as to why he had caused it – what memory, what hurt or fear had driven him to make his outburst – he refused to enlighten anyone. He had always paid the fine, costs and compensation, accepted a lift home in a police car, and immediately walked back to the nearest pub to begin the cycle over again.

The police were going to miss him. As soon as the news of his death reached the headquarters of the Breckham Market division of the county force, the station sergeant organised a whip-round for a wreath. The sergeant also requested permission for himself and a senior police constable to attend the funeral, as a mark of respect for their most regular client. And in view of the status of the Bell family, the divisional superintendent decided that he too might put in an official appearance and help to send Clanger off in style.

There was a good deal of sympathy – respectful rather than affectionate – from all quarters of the old town for the dead man's sister. Reserved, upright and fastidious, Eunice Bell was unmistakably a gentlewoman. Her brother's behaviour must have been a considerable embarrassment to her, and it was understandable that she had avoided involving herself in the public life of Breckham Market. She had always been a regular worshipper at the parish church, St Botolph's, but apart from that she had chosen to spend most of her time fifteen miles away in Saintsbury, where she did voluntary work for the Red Cross.

Miss Bell took the news of her brother's death with well-bred stoicism. She preferred not to attend the inquest, where a police officer provided formal evidence of the dead man's identity. The Coroner recorded the expected verdict of accidental death.

But the following day, Eunice Bell telephoned divisional police headquarters and demanded to speak to the superintendent as a matter of urgency. She told him that, having read the report of the inquest in the local newspaper, she had come to the conclusion that her brother's death was no accident. She had, she said, good reason to believe that Cuthbert had been murdered.

John Reuben Goodrum, the driver of the Range Rover in the path of which Clanger Bell had played his terminal game of chicken, was a lucky man. He told himself so as he stood in front of his dressing room mirror, in the big Georgian house he had recently acquired in Breckham Market, giving his massive slab of a chin a very close wet shave. (‘Desperate Dan'his wife had just teased him as she tried to avoid contact with his bristles during their customary final cuddle before getting up.)

‘By God, Jack, you're a lucky man!' he said aloud in the warm slow voice that, rising slightly at the end of each sentence, had an authentic Suffolk sing to it. He peered more closely into the mirror, parting his lips and crimping his mouth into temporary toothlessness, and contrived to scythe an outcrop of bramble from the tricky area just below his nostrils without flecking the shaving soap with a single drop of blood. He was making an expert job of it, these days, he reckoned, considering that he hadn't given a damn about his appearance until a couple of years ago.

Not that shaving himself cleanly had anything to do with luck. He'd put skill and judgement into it, as he had into the business enterprise by which, starting from nothing, he had made his fortune. But luck had always seemed to run his way, and evidently was still running. His first wife Doreen must have been right when she told him that the devil would always look after his own.

Satisfactorily shaven, Jack Goodrum turned his head from side to side and studied his profile. Yes, he was much less heavily jowled, now that he'd cut down on food and alcohol and taken up regular exercise. He was still well-thatched with brown hair, and he reckoned that having it tamed by a good barber, and getting rid of his shabby old sideburns, had improved his appearance no end. He looked younger and much fitter – and felt it, too, by God … He thumped his knuckles on his broad chest and gave his reflection a nod of vigorous approval.