Who Saw Him Die? by Sheila Radley Read Free Book Online Page B

pregnant. But that hadn’t stopped her parents from organising a very rapid wedding.
    And now he was trapped again, pushed unprepared into a role that was even more ageing. He himself was certainly not going to tell anyone, but in a small town like Breckham (and with Molly tickled pink) the news would get out soon enough. So he might as well abandon all hope of ever furthering his relationship with Hilary Lloyd, because the fact that he was almost a grandfather was bound to put him, in her estimation, completely out of the running.
    Quantrill’s route to Tower House from Benidorm Avenue (a 1960s development by a local builder who had named it after his favourite holiday resort) took him past the school that Peter still attended. Built as the Alderman Thirkettle Secondary Modern School it was now Breckham Market Comprehensive, with a sixth form centre where, as far as Quantrill could make out, his son was passing his final year in ignorance and idleness.
    Peter had been a great disappointment to his father. Much as he had loved his young daughters, Douglas Quantrill had naturally hoped for a son; and just as naturally he had hoped that the boy would do as well at school, if not better, than his sisters.
    But Peter (as Molly, who had not been very clever but whose Church of England parents had sent her to a convent high school so that she could learn French and Art in the company of other nice girls, was sometimes provoked into pointing out) took educationally after his father. Douglas Quantrill had found his schooldays insufferably boring, and had thankfully bolted from the classroom at what was then the standard leaving age of fourteen.
    He’d regretted it subsequently, of course. He was always conscious, particularly in the company of up-and-coming younger colleagues, of his lack of secondary education. But at least there’d been some excuse for his dislike of his village school, where an elderly headmistress had been in sole charge of the cavernous Big Room, filled with children between the ages of eight and fourteen, with a blackboard, a map of the world, a wireless set and a cane as her only teaching aids. No wonder he‘d been bored, he told himself defensively, suppressing the shame that accompanied the remembrance of the way he and the other boys had teased and harried the poor woman.
    For Peter, though, it ought to have been different. His school was modern, properly staffed, fully equipped, surrounded by playing fields. From the age of eleven the boy had been given the opportunity to learn any subject, to pursue any hobby, to take up any sport. His father had constantly urged him to make the most of his chances, but the more Quantrill urged, the less his son had been inclined to do.
    Perhaps, Quantrill admitted to himself, that was where he’d gone wrong. Molly had always said that he tried to push Peter too hard; but it had seemed to him that unless he pushed, the boy would have done nothing at all. The unfortunate result was that he’d managed to put a barrier of ill-feeling between himself and his son – a barrier that was strengthened by the nature of his own job.
    Everyone in Breckham Market associated the name Quantrill with the police, and there was no doubt that Peter must have taken a lot of stick on account of it. A copper’s son was bound to feel that he had to prove himself to his mates, and Peter had gone out of his way to do so. When he was fifteen he had appeared, to the shame of his parents, before a juvenile court on a charge of causing malicious damage to the church hall where the youth club met. A fine way for a chief inspector’s son to behave … and God knew, now, what the wretched boy got up to in the wasteland of his spare time.
    Quantrill was very worried about his son, though he tried not to let his wife know it. She doted so uncritically on Peter that there was no point in attempting to discuss him with her. Besides, knowing what he did about the