Final Beat of the Drum, page 17
‘Before we go about transferring valuable resources into that line of enquiry, I’d like to see a little more evidence to back up your theory,’ Dawson said.
And it suddenly occurred to Boyd that perhaps – for his own twisted reasons – Dawson didn’t want to get a result on this case.
With this new perspective in mind, he quickly ran through what options he was faced with.
It seemed to him to boil down to only two.
One: he could stick with his boss, like the loyal bagman he had always tried to be, and when blame was being dished out, he could accept his share of it, even though failure to solve this case was likely to put back his career advancement by at least two years.
Two: since Dawson had made the decision to fail, he himself was now free of any obligations, and could do whatever it took to survive.
It wasn’t exactly hard to decide which was the more attractive of the options.
When Roger Dalton left the office, his plan was to drive straight to his boss’s house in the country and find out exactly why Hadley had uncharacteristically absented himself from work, but his resolve was weakened by the sight of a cake shop on the outskirts of Whitebridge, and once he was inside, it was difficult to restrain himself from buying up half the shop. In fact, when he emerged he was feeling quite proud that he had restricted his purchase to four small cakes – or ‘fancies’ as they were known in Lancashire.
The knot of anxiety he had acquired when he first learned about his boss’s erratic behaviour seemed to have quite unravelled, and once he had driven past the sign announcing that he was leaving Whitebridge and wishing him luck, he pulled into the first lay-by that he saw. Opening his cardboard treasure chest, he gazed down lovingly at the contents. It would be excessive to eat them all in a single session, he told himself, so he would just have the one that seemed most appealing.
He frowned. The problem was that he didn’t dare let his wife see any of them, so he would have to dispose of the lot before he got home. He supposed he could sample a little of each of them, and throw the rest away, but it seemed a shame to waste good food.
Very well, a compromise was in order. He would eat two of the cakes in the lay-by, and two after he had seen Hadley.
He bit into the first one – a lemon drizzle cake – and felt his taste buds performing somersaults.
The week before, when his wife had banished cakes from his diet, she had given her reason as a fear that he was diabetic. Sweet things always made him go to sleep, she claimed, and one day they would send him into a coma from which there would be no return.
She was exaggerating as usual. Though he refused to be tested for it, he was sure he was not diabetic, and if he did fall asleep after eating cake, well, that only showed that he was well-contented.
He polished off the fancy in a little over a minute.
Too fast! he told himself. You shouldn’t just gobble it down – it was a work of art, and deserved to be savoured.
He would have a short pause before he attacked the next one, he decided. Then he closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Ruby Watkins would have preferred to supervise the birth of Lizzie Grimshaw’s baby under hospital conditions, but her room was clean, light and airy, and it would serve well enough. Lizzie herself was a perhaps little underweight, but otherwise in excellent health, and Ruby was not expecting any trouble delivering her baby.
The only problem was the wardrobe.
When Kate Meadows had promised Lizzie she could have it in her room, Ruby had gone along with it, because it seemed the only way to avoid a scene. Now, however, she was beginning to have her doubts about that decision. The wardrobe had been scrubbed down and sterilized, true, but it still felt slightly unhygienic. Besides, its very bulk was an impediment to good birthing practice.
It would simply have to go, she decided, and rather than come straight out with it, she would lead into the subject gently.
‘The baby should be born any day now,’ she said to Lizzie, who was lying on her bed after the examination. ‘Are you ready for it?’
‘More than ready,’ Lizzie replied. ‘Mrs Maybe’s made sure I’ve got all the nappies and dried milk I need, and I’ve got lots of toys for when the baby’s old enough to notice them.’
The midwife smiled. ‘I don’t have to ask if you’re excited,’ she said. ‘I can tell from your voice that you are.’
‘I am,’ Lizzie confirmed. ‘My baby girl will be the most beautiful baby in the world.’
‘You mustn’t assume it will be a girl,’ Ruby cautioned. ‘It could just as easily be a boy.’
‘It’ll be a girl,’ Lizzie said confidently. ‘I know it will.’
‘You won’t be disappointed if it’s a boy, will you?’ the midwife asked, anxiously.
Lizzie laughed. ‘Of course not, I’d love him just as much as if he was a girl – but that isn’t going to happen.’
It was moments like this that the midwife cherished – the warmth, the love, the happiness and the anticipation were a glorious, joyful mixture which couldn’t be found anywhere else.
‘I’m going to have to ask Ms Meadows to have that wardrobe removed,’ she said.
Instantly, the joyful mixture was gone, and an arctic chill filled the room.
‘What was that you just said?’ Lizzie demanded.
‘I’ll … I’ll ask Ms Meadows to have that wardrobe removed,’ the midwife repeated, and was surprised to discover that she was a little frightened.
‘It stays,’ Lizzie said coldly.
‘But it will be in the way when we’re trying to deliver your baby,’ the midwife protested.
‘Work around it,’ Lizzie told her.
‘If you’re keeping something in it that is very important to you, I’m sure we can move it elsewhere,’ the midwife assured her.
‘There’s nothing in it,’ Lizzie said. ‘It’s empty. Take a look, if you don’t believe me.’
‘Well, then, if it’s empty …’
‘If you can’t work with it in the room, I’ll find another midwife who can,’ Lizzie said. ‘And if I can’t find another midwife, then me and Mrs Maybe will deliver it. But the wardrobe stays. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ Ruby said, wonderingly.
Over the years, she had seen pregnancy affect women in all kinds of ways, sometimes even changing their whole personalities, but never before had she known a patient who changed from a girl frightened of her own shadow into a midwife-eating tiger.
‘So what is it you’re doing again?’ asked the red-headed girl in the tight uniform.
Jack Crane suppressed a sigh. ‘We’re doing a sociological study of how various businesses react to a traumatic change in their organizational structure,’ he explained. ‘To put it in terms of this company, we want to study what effect of Mr Lofthouse’s death has on the way things are run.’
The three women and one man who worked on the production line exchanged glances.
‘It doesn’t have any effect on us at all,’ said the man, who was in fifties and balding. ‘Whoever’s in charge, the conveyor belt keeps moving, and we have our job to do.’
‘So you’re saying things would stay the same if, for example, the Americans took over?’ Crane said.
‘Are you telling me they’ve sold the plant to the Yanks?’ the man asked, alarmed.
‘No, it’s a hypothetical question,’ Crane said.
‘We don’t need no hypothermic questions here,’ said a buxom brunette, who clearly had no idea what the word meant.
‘And we don’t want to work for no Yanks,’ said the third girl, a bottle blonde. ‘It was a Yank who put my great aunt Eunice in the club during the war, and she’s seen neither hide nor hair of him since.’
He was pitching this all wrong, Crane realized. It wasn’t a mistake he’d have made a few years earlier, when he’d been an active police officer, but now he was so used to talking almost exclusively to undergraduates that he was aiming this way above the heads of the people he was questioning.
‘Let me put it another way,’ he suggested. ‘You’ll all miss Mr Lofthouse, won’t you?’
Giving the circumstances, it was the kind of question to which there was only one possible answer, and the assembly line workers all agreed that yes, they would miss him, though it seemed to Crane that their enthusiasm was not wholehearted.
‘And you must have missed Mrs Lofthouse, while she was away,’ he said.
This time, the response was warmer.
‘We’ve all been with Miss Bright – Mrs Lofthouse I should say – since we left school, and she’s been a good boss to us,’ said the brunette.
‘I imagine everybody likes her – even her business rivals – but I can’t see Mr Lofthouse being quite so popular,’ Crane said, pushing his luck.
‘Now how would we know about their business rivals?’ asked the man. ‘We don’t see any business rivals while we’re at work, and we don’t mix in the same circles outside.’
Of course it wasn’t reasonable to expect them to be able to answer that sort of question, Crane thought. So maybe this whole sociological survey idea was turning out to be a non-starter.
‘Is Mr Hadley a business rival?’ the bottle blonde asked.
‘No,’ the man said, not unkindly, but certainly patronizingly. ‘Mr Hadley’s the feller who set up our security system. He’s nothing to do with bottling.’
‘Oh,’ the blonde said, somewhat discouraged.
‘Why did you ask about him?’ Crane said.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the blonde told him.
‘I’d really like to know,’ he persisted.
The blonde hesitated. ‘A few weeks ago, I was in a pub called the Ploughman’s Arms, over in Stockford …’ she said finally.
Stockford, Crane noted. That was a small village about ten miles from Whitebridge.
‘What were you doing way out there in the back of beyond, Ellen Atherton?’ the redhead asked.
‘I just fancied a change,’ the blonde said, evasively.
‘Were you on your own?’
‘No.’
‘So who were you with?’ the redhead asked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the blonde said.
‘I’d like to know,’ the redhead insisted. ‘We’ve never had no secrets from each other before, and we’re not going to start now.’
The blonde sighed. ‘If you must know, I was with Jerry Miller.’
‘He’s engaged to Linda Cowgill from packing, isn’t he?’ the redhead asked.
Yes,’ the blonde admitted, ‘but he was thinking of breaking it off.’
‘He didn’t though, did he?’ the redhead asked challengingly. ‘I know that for a fact, because I saw her yesterday, and she was still wearing her engagement ring.’
‘No,’ the blonde admitted, rather sadly, ‘as it happened, he changed his mind.’
‘You were telling me about Mr Hadley,’ Crane said.
‘That’s right, I was,’ the blonde agreed, gratefully. ‘Me and Jerry went into this pub, and I saw Mr Lofthouse sitting there all by himself. I almost went across to say hello, because it would have been rude not to, but then this woman came out of the toilets and sat down next to him. Well, I couldn’t do it then, could I?’
‘Why not?’
‘They were acting very friendly – if you know what I mean.’
‘Maybe they were friends,’ the man suggested.
‘Very, very friendly,’ the blonde countered. ‘They kept kissing, and passing a cocktail cherry from her mouth to his and then back again.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ the redhead said.
‘And all the time this was going on, Mrs Lofthouse was at the conference in Manchester, drumming up business for us,’ the blonde said.
‘He ought to be ashamed of himself,’ the brunette said.
‘It’s a bit too late to be ashamed now, isn’t it?’ the man pointed out. ‘He’s bloody dead.’
‘Yes, well, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be ashamed of himself if he wasn’t,’ the brunette said.
‘Who was this woman?’ the redhead asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘Oh, I know all right,’ the blonde said. ‘She was that solicitor who you see in the office now and again. I forget her name.’
‘Miss Maitland Williams?’ suggested the redhead.
‘That’s her,’ the blonde confirmed.
‘I’m not normally one to speak ill of the dead, but if that’s who it was then he wanted his head seeing to,’ said the man, ‘because who in his right mind would knock off a piece like her when he had a lovely wife like Mrs Lofthouse?’
‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with Mr Hadley,’ Crane said, in an effort to get the conversation back on the right track.
‘Ah well, you see, that’s when I noticed Mr Hadley,’ the blonde said. ‘He was sitting right at the other end of the room, and I don’t think Mr Lofthouse had even seen him …’
‘When a man’s trying to get his end away, the very last thing he notices is somebody watching him from the other side of the bar,’ the man said.
‘Don’t judge everybody else by your own standards,’ the blonde said cuttingly. ‘Anyway, the important thing is that he was watching Mr Lofthouse, and honestly, if looks could kill, they’d have had to carry Mr Lofthouse out of the pub in a box.’
At first, Roger Dalton had no idea where he was, but slowly his half-asleep half-awake brain began to collect up the clues and piece them together.
For a start, he was sitting down rather than lying down, so he wasn’t in bed. Next, movement of the lower half of his body was restricted. When he shuffled his feet, they brushed against objects that had some movement in them, but were clearly anchored to some kind of base. When he raised his legs slightly, he knees pressed against a barrier which seemed quite thin and appeared to be curving outwards.
As an experiment, he opened his eyes, and discovered he was looking at a window. But it wasn’t the sort of window you find in a house, it was a … it was a windscreen!
He was awake now, and the whole situation had become clear to him. He was sitting on his car – somewhat cold and stiff – in a lay-by, with a box of fancies resting in his lap.
He checked his watch.
God, he had been asleep for hours! They would be wondering what had happened to him at the office, except that by now the office would be closed. And he still had no idea what had happened to the boss.
He brushed away the crumbs from around his mouth, put the box of cakes on the passenger seat, and switched on his engine.
Better late than never, he told himself – but it would have been better if he hadn’t been late at all.
The lay-by was a little over two miles from Hadley’s home – which Dalton thought of as Hadley’s ‘country pile’ – and so it was a matter of minutes before he found himself on the long driveway that led up to the place.
The house was impressive without being ostentatious. On the first floor, there were five bedrooms and two – or was it three? – bathrooms. On the ground floor, there were, as might be expected, a cloakroom, a kitchen, a dining room and two reception rooms.
There was also a magnificent games room which held a full-size snooker table and was totally wasted on Hadley, who much preferred to spend his time in his garage/workshop, trying out his new ideas. Some people, Dalton reflected, just didn’t know how to enjoy their money.
As he walked up to the front door – fine, polished Burmese teak – he noticed it was slightly ajar.
There was no point in spending a fortune on a security system and then leaving the front door open so that anybody could just walk in, he thought. Yet he could almost have filled a book with people – normally quite sensible people – who’d done just that. Even so, he was surprised to discover that his own boss, who earned his living from security, should have been guilty of such a cardinal sin.
He pressed the doorbell, and heard the chimes of Widdecombe Fair reverberating somewhere in the distance.
He was also conscious of another sound – a buzzing noise. He wondered what it could be.
He waited for about a minute, and when no one had come to the door, he rang again.
The seconds ticked by, and the buzzing persisted.
He had two choices, he decided – he could either turn around and go away, or he could enter the house uninvited. On balance, he favoured the latter, because he had to do something to justify his wasted afternoon, and anyway, someone should inform Hadley that he had neglected to close the door.
He stepped inside the entrance hall.
‘Mr Hadley?’ he called out – because he didn’t work for the kind of firm where you used your boss’s first name. ‘Mr Hadley! Do you know your front door is open?’
The buzzing noise was even louder now he was inside, and seemed to be coming from somewhere above head level.
Flies?
This was February. There weren’t supposed to be any flies about.
Yet the noise seemed to get even louder, as if his arrival had infuriated the creatures.
He looked up, and saw that a sack seemed to be hanging from the rail on the upstairs corridor. This was what was attracting the flies, and there were literally thousands of them.
And then he realized it wasn’t a sack at all!
He experienced a sudden, excruciating pain in his stomach, and felt his body jack-knife.
It couldn’t be Jim Hadley, he told himself. It simply couldn’t be.
But he knew that it was.
He opened his mouth and spewed most of the lemon drizzle cake on to the expensively tiled floor.
SIXTEEN
There was a bend in the driveway leading to Jim Hadley’s home, and so it was only when Crane rounded it that he could see the caravan of vehicles parked in front of the house. There were four of them – two patrol cars, an ambulance, and a Honda Accord. The Accord didn’t actually have the letters CID painted on its doors, but might as well have done.
Crane’s first instinct was to slam on the brakes, execute one of those U turns that always featured in American cop movies, and get the hell out of there. Then he checked in his rear-view mirror, and saw that there was another patrol car rounding the bend, and thus blocking his escape.
