Free Past Mortem by Ben Elton Page B

when we were all young but sadly Queen decided not to replace Freddie Mercury with me and there aren’t many coal mines any more, so I never got to take over from Arthur Scargill. I’m with the Met, a detective in fact, which sounds more exciting than it is. I’d love to get in touch with anybody who remembers me, so why not drop me a line?
     
    He considered adding a PS to say that he was single, but decided it might look a bit desperate, besides which the fact that he hadn’t mentioned a partner would probably do the trick.
     
    Newson had never visited Stratford-upon-Avon before. He’d expected an entirely half-timbered town filled with perfectly preserved Elizabethan buildings. Though there is much of this to be found in Stratford, it also has considerable modern developments away from the centre, and it was from one of these streets on a quiet Sunday afternoon that Neil Bradshaw had been spirited while walking home from the newsagent with his copy of The Sunday Times . From there he was taken to a seed shed on a farm two or three miles along the Birmingham Road, near a village called Snitterfield, and it was in this shed that he died.
    Newson met Natasha at the gates to the farm. She had driven up from London earlier in the day to talk to the local police.
    ‘They know when he was lifted because he’d been out to the newsagent and hadn’t come back.’
    ‘His family missed him?’
    ‘No, there was no family. He was divorced, three times. He lived alone, between girlfriends, I suppose. The neighbour said he knows Bradshaw never came back because he was in the front garden waiting for him.’
    ‘Sunday drink?’
    ‘Hardly. They were in dispute over a hedge. Our Bradshaw had been growing one of those things that do a metre every five minutes and the bloke next door was going to have it out with him.’
    ‘But he never got the chance.
    ‘No, because Neil Bradshaw never came back from the newsagent.’
    The seed shed in which Neil Bradshaw had been found dead stood alone, isolated from the other farm buildings by a large field, and it was here that Newson and Natasha met Douglas Goddard, the farmer who had rented the shed to the killer.
    ‘We never met,’ Goddard told them. ‘He only dealt with me over the phone. Said he was an artist, he needed privacy to work and apparently my shed had perfect ambience.’ Goddard was standing in the shadow of a dilapidated combine harvester around which many weeds had grown, weeds that were now stealing their way up into its mechanism.
    ‘He left cash in an envelope in my post-box down at the road and made it very clear that if he was disturbed he’d be off and take his money with him. I didn’t mind a bit, a quiet tenant’s a good tenant as far as I’m concerned, and he paid well over the odds. I’d like to add, Inspector, that I intended to declare the cash in my tax return, and I still do, of course, although it seems funny now, almost like blood money. I’ve thought about giving it all to charity, as a matter of fact.’
    From the way this last sentence was left hanging in the air it was clear to Newson that thinking about it was as far as Goddard would ever get with his charitable instincts. Newson had already learnt from the original interview notes taken by the Stratford police that Mr Goddard had been at great pains from his first interview to stress his intention to declare the rent he had received. Indeed, he seemed to view the whole affair as an effort by an anonymous murderer to get him into trouble with the Inland Revenue.
    ‘I was happy to let the seed shed out because I don’t need any seeds at the moment, seeing as how the whole farm’s lying fallow. Look at my combine, sunflowers in the cab. Strange sort of farming, I call it, but then these are very strange times. Did you know that the Department of the bloody Environment pay me to sow meadows? I mean, what’s the use of a meadow when it’s at home? You can’t eat dandelions.’
    ‘Meadows