Free A Talent For Destruction by Sheila Radley

into view. Two plain-clothes policemen were an unsatisfactory substitute; but her neighbours were not to know that unless she revealed it by her demeanour on the doorstep, and so she greeted the men with considerably more enthusiasm than they were accustomed to.
    The boys, having told their brief story so often the previous day, had become blasé. Justin’s Gran had forbidden them to go out, in case the Anglia van should come, and so they were sprawled on the sitting-room floor playing a television game, an electronic ping-pong. DC Wigby joined them for a few noisy minutes while Mrs Muttock made a pot of tea, and then she switched off the set and Quantrill addressed the boys heartily.
    â€˜I expect the two of you often play in Parson’s Close?’
    Justin and Adrian glanced at each other. They were healthy and bright, tough in jeans and miniature army sweaters, but dutifully wearing slippers so as not to clump about on Justin’s Gran’s fitted carpet. They exuded innocence, but the look they exchanged had counselled caution.
    Adrian, the elder, cleared his throat. ‘Oh no,’ he said virtuously. ‘It’s private – it says so on the gate.’
    Quantrill tried to reassure them. ‘I never let a thing like that stop me when I was a boy,’ he said with heavy jollity.
    They stared at him with total disbelief, as though they imagined he had been born that age and size. Quantrill tried again, thinking they might find it easier to imagine Ian Wigby at junior school: ‘And as for the constable here, he was always up to mischief.’
    â€˜A young monkey, I was,’ agreed Wigby. ‘Nothing really wrong, mind,’ he added responsibly, ‘but generally naughty.’
    Mrs Muttock senior fluttered her mascara’d eyelashes at the detective constable over her teacup. ‘You were a proper little devil, I can tell that,’ she said with admiration.
    â€˜The point is,’ said Quantrill, ignoring her contribution, ‘that if we’d wanted to play in Parson’s Close when we were boys, we wouldn’t have worried about a Private notice. Private ,’ he explained, ‘means that you have no business to be there. You’ll get into trouble with the owner if he catches you, and quite right too. But it isn’t against the law. As long as you don’t do any damage, it’s no concern of the police.’
    â€˜But we don’t want to go into Parson’s Close,’ said Justin. ‘We only went there yesterday because of the snow. We always play in Castle Meadow, don’t we, Adrian?’ He reached up to the table for a cellophane packet of savoury snacks. A lurid red and green monster was printed on the packet. Weird green lettering, dripping red to represent blood, announced that the bag contained monster food. The creature’s jaws drooled green saliva, and in its talons it grasped a thigh bone.
    Mrs Muttock senior leaned over to poke DC Wigby in the ribs. ‘Did you ever?’ she demanded, half amused, half shocked. ‘It beats me how they can fancy that stuff, after they’ve found a skellington. Poor little dears …’ Unconcerned, the boys began to munch the contents of the packet, which looked and smelled like bone-shaped fragments of polyurethane fried in vegetable oil.
    â€˜Parson’s Close,’ said Quantrill firmly, trying to retain control of the interview. ‘We know that a man camped there last summer. He had a small orange tent, and he pitched it somewhere up near the trees. Now, what I’d like to know is whether either of you boys saw that man, at any time during the summer – saw him, or spoke to him, or heard him speaking to anyone else?’
    Justin and Adrian glanced sideways at each other, and then looked at the Chief Inspector over their monster food, with hugely guileless eyes.
    â€˜We always play in Castle Meadow,’ said Adrian.
    â€˜We don’t go into