Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (12 page)

   ‘Did the aunt recognise her voice?’

   ‘Seemed to. She was in a bit of a way, I can tell you. Frankly, I don’t have much faith in the aunt.’

   ‘Oh, bring her up,’ Wexford said impatiently. ‘Anything to make a change from lorries. And, Camb - use the lift.’

   He had never seen her mother or her aunt so he couldn’t look for family resemblances. But she was a rich man’s daughter. He looked at the bag, the shoes, the platinum watch and, more than anything, he sensed about her an air, almost repellent, of arrogance. She wore no scent. He took from her in silence the passport, the international driver’s licence and Mrs Fanshawe’s letter. It occurred to him as he turned them over that Nora Fanshawe - if she was Nora Fanshawe - probably stood to inherit a vast sum of money. Jerome Fanshawe had been an affluent stockbroker. It might be that this girl was a con woman and he and Camb the first victims of a colossal deception.

   ‘I think we had better have an explanation,’ he said slowly.

   ‘Very well. I don’t quite know what you want.’

   ‘Just a moment.’ Wexford took Camb aside. ‘Was there nothing but this Mrs Browne’s word to identify the dead girl?’ he asked rather grimly.

   Camb looked downcast. ‘There was a suitcase in the car with clothes in it,’ he said. ‘We went through the contents of two handbags we found in the road. One was Mrs Fanshawe’s. The other had nothing in it but some make-up, a purse containing two pounds and some silver and a packet of cigarettes.’ He added defensively, ‘It was a good expensive handbag from Mappin and Webb.’

   ‘My God,’ said Wexford in disgust, ‘I just hope you haven’t landed us with a female Tichborne claimant.’ He went back to the girl, sat down on the opposite side of the desk and gave a brisk nod. ‘You went on holiday with Mr and Mrs Fanshawe to Eastover?’ he asked. On what date was that?’

   ‘May the 17th,’ the girl said promptly. ‘I am a teacher of English at a school in Cologne and I gave up my job at the end of March and returned to England.’

   ‘Since when you have been living with Mr and Mrs Fanshawe?’

   If the girl noticed that he didn’t refer to them as her parents she gave no sign. She sat stiff and tense with her finely sculpted head held high. ‘Not at first,’ she said and he sensed a faint diffidence creep into her voice. ‘My parents and I hadn’t been on good terms for some time. I went back to live with them - or rather, to stay with them - in the middle of May. My mother wanted me to go down to the bungalow with them and because I wanted - I wanted our relations to improve - well, I said I would.’ Wexford nodded noncomittally and she went on. ‘We all drove down to Eastover on Friday, May 17th . . .’ Her shoulders stiffened and she looked down at her folded hands. ‘That night I had a disagreement with my parents. Is there any need for me to go into details?’ Without waiting for Wexford’s consent to her reticence, she swept the quarrel aside and said, ‘I felt it was useless to try and patch things up. We were worlds apart, we. . . The result was that on the Saturday morning, I told my mother there was nothing for me in England and I was going back to Germany to try and get my old job back. I took one of the suitcases of clothes I had brought with me and went to Newhaven to get the boat for Dieppe.’

   ‘And did you get your old job back?’

   ‘Fortunately I did. There’s a shortage of teachers in Germany as well as here and they were only too glad to see me. I even got my old room back in the Goethestrasse.’

   ‘I see. Now I should like the name and address of the authority who employ you, the name of your landlady and that of the school in which you’ve been teaching.’

   While the girl wrote this information down for him, Wexford said:

   ‘Weren’t you surprised to hear nothing from Mr or Mrs Fanshawe during the past six weeks?’

   She looked up and raised her straight, rather heavy, black eyebrows. ‘I told you we’d quarrelled. My father would have expected an abject apology from me, I assure you, before he condescended to write.’ It was the first show of emotion she had made and it did more to make Wexford believe her story than all the documentary evidence she had furnished him with. ‘These silences were commonplace with us,’ she said. ‘Especially after a set-to like the one we had that night. Six months could have gone by. Why should I imagine any harm had come to them? I’m not a clairvoyant.’

   ‘But you came as soon as Mrs Fanshawe wrote.’

   ‘She is my mother, after all. Now do you suppose I might go and get myself some lunch?’

   ‘In a moment,’ Wexford said. ‘Where are you planning to stay?’

   ‘I was going to ask you to recommend somewhere,’ the girl said a shade sardonically.

   ‘The Olive and Dove is the best hotel. I suggest you get in touch immediately with your late father’s solicitors.’

   The girl got up and not a crease marked the skirt of her suit. Her self-confidence was almost stupefying. Camb opened the door for her and with a crisp ‘Good afternoon’ she took her leave of them. As her footsteps died away, the sergeant burst out miserably:

   ‘If she’s Nora Fanshawe, sir, who, for God’s sake, was the girl in the road?’

   ‘That’s your problem, Sergeant,’ Wexford said unkindly.

   ‘It could well be yours, sir.’

   ‘That’s what I’m afraid of. Haven’t I got enough with a murder on my hands?’

Lilian Hatton was an easier nut to crack than the girl who called herself Nora Fanshawe. She broke down and wept bitterly when Wexford told her that her husband’s supplementary income had come from a criminal source. He was almost sure that it was all a revelation to her and he watched her in sad silence as she covered her face and shook with sobs.

   ‘I have been given your husband’s log hook by your brother, Mrs Hatton,’ he said gently as she recovered herself. ‘Now I also want to know if you keep any sort of diary or engagement book yourself.’

   ‘Just a pad by the phone,’ she gulped, ‘where I kind of jot things down.’

   ‘I’m going to ask you if you’ll kindly let me borrow that.’

   ‘You think,’ she began, dabbing at her eyes as she came back with the pad, ‘you think someone - someone killed my Charlie because he wouldn’t go on - go on doing these jobs for them?’

   ‘Something like that.’ Now was not the time to suggest to this woman that her husband had been a blackmailer as well as a thief. ‘Who knew Mr Hatton would pass along the Kingsbrook path that night?’

   She twisted the damp handkerchief in hands whose nails were still pitifully and bravely painted the way Charlie Hatton had liked them, red and shiny and glittering. ‘All the darts club,’ she said. ‘And me - I knew. My mum knew and my brother, Jim. Charlie always came that way back from the pub.’

   ‘Mrs Hatton, did your husband ever receive any callers in this flat that you didn’t know? Strangers, I mean, that he wanted to talk to alone?’

   ‘No, he never did.’

   ‘Perhaps when you were out? Can you ever remember your husband asking you to go out and leave him alone with anyone?’

   The handkerchief was torn now, sopping wet and useless as an absorbent. But she put it to her eyes and brought it away streaked black and green. ‘When he was home,’ she said, ‘I never went out. We always went out together. We was like - like inseparable. Mr Wexford . . .’ She gripped the arms of her chair and two red flame-like spots burned in her cheeks. ‘Mr Wexford, I’ve heard all you’ve said and I’ve got to believe it. But whatever my Charlie did, he did it for me. He was a husband in a million, a good kind man, a wonderful man to his friends. You ask anyone, Jack. . . He was one in a million!’

   Oh! withered is the garland of war! The soldier’s poll is fallen. . . Strange, Wexford thought, that when you considered Charlie Hatton you thought of war and soldiers and battles and Hatton had waged it with unscrupulous weapons, winning rich spoils and falling as he marched home with a song on his lips?

   How sentimental he was getting! The man was a black mailer and a thief. If life was a battle and Charlie Hatton a soldier of fortune he, Wexford, stood in the position of a United Nations patrol whose job it was to prevent incursions on the territory of the defenceless.

   ‘I don’t want to ask you anything more now, Mrs Hatton,’ he said to the widow as he left her weeping among the dead man’s ill-gotten glories.

   In the High Street he encountered Dr Crocker emerging from Grover’s with a copy of the British Medical Journal.

   ‘Been making any good arrests lately?’ asked the doctor cheerfully. ‘Now, now, mind your hyptertension. Want me to take your blood pressure? I’ve got my sphyg in the car.’

   ‘You know what you can do with your sphyg,’ said Wexford, proceeding to tell him in lurid detail. ‘I reckon just about the whole population of Kingsmarkham knew Charlie Hatton would be taking the field path home that night.’

   ‘No reason why it should be a local man, is there?’

   ‘I may not be a wizard with a sphygmomanometer,’ said Wexford derisively, ‘but I’m not daft. Whoever killed Charlie Hatton knew the lie of the land all right.’

   ‘How come? He’d only got to be told by Charlie that he’d be leaving the High Street by the bridge and walking along the local river.’

   ‘You think? You reckon Hatton would also have told him the river bed was full of stones one of which would make a suitable weapon for knocking off his informant?’

   ‘I see what you mean. There could be one or more brains behind the killing but whoever struck the blow, albeit a henchman, was Kingsmarkham born and bred.’

   ‘That’s right, Watson. You’re catching on. My old mate,’ Wexford remarked to no one in particular, ‘albeit a saw- bones, is coming on.’ Suddenly his voice dropped and tapping the doctor’s arm, his face hardening, he said, ‘D’you see what I see? Over there by the Electricity Board?’

   Crocker followed his gaze. From Tabard Road a woman wheeling a pram had emerged in Kingsmarkham High Street and stopped outside a plate-glass display window of the Southern Electricity Board. Presently two more children joined her, then a man holding a third child by the hand and another in his arms. They remained in a huddle on the pavement, staring at the dazzling array of kitchen equipment as if hypnotized.

   ‘Mr and Mrs Cullam and their quiverful,’ said Wexford.

   The family were too far away for their conversation, an apparently heated and even acrimonious discussion, to be audible. But it was evident that an argument was taking place between the adults, possibly as to whether their need of a refrigerator was greater than their desire for a mammoth room heater. The children were taking sides vociferously. Cullam shook one of his daughters, cuffed his elder son on the head, and then they all plunged into the showroom.

   ‘Will you do something for me?’ Wexford asked the doctor. ‘Go in there and buy a light bulb or something. I want to know what that lot are up to.’

   ‘What, spy on them and report back, d’you mean?’

   ‘Charming way you put it. That’s what I spend my life doing. I’ll Sit in your car. Can I have the keys?’

   ‘It’s not locked,’ Crocker said awkwardly.

   ‘Is that so? Well, don’t come screaming to me next time one of the local hippies pinches a load of your acid off you. Go on. A forty watt bulb and we’ll reimburse you out of petty cash.’

   The doctor went unwillingly. Wexford chuckled to himself in the car. Crocker’s cautious approach to the electricity showroom, his quick sidelong glances, called to mind days long gone by when Wexford, then a sixth-form boy, had witnessed this same man as a child of ten, scuttling up to front doors playing ‘Knocking Down Ginger’. In those days the infant Crocker had run up paths lightly and gleefully to bang on a knocker or ring a bell and, elated with an enormous naughtiness, hidden behind a hedge to see the angry householder erupt and curse. There was no hedge here and Crocker was fifty. But as he entered the showroom, had he too experienced a flash of memory, a stab of nostalgia?

   Jesu, Jesu, thought Wexford, once more evoking Justice Shallow, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead. . .  Enough of that. On the lighter side it reminded him of Stamford and he wondered how Burden had got on. Somehow a little business in Deptford didn’t quite match up with his own ideas of McCloy’s origins.

   Samantha Cullam scuttled out on to the pavement. Her mother came next, lugging the pram. When the whole brood were assembled their father regimented them with a series of fortunately ill-aimed blows and they all trailed off the way they had come. Then Crocker appeared, duplicity incarnate.

   ‘Well?’

   ‘Don’t snap at me like that, you saucy devil,’ said the doctor, immensely pleased with himself. ‘I set traps, as the Psalmist says, I catch men.’

   ‘What did Cullam buy?’

   ‘He didn’t exactly buy anything, but he’s after a refrigerator.’

   ‘Getting it on the H.P. is he?’

   ‘Money wasn’t mentioned. They had a bit of a ding-dong, Mr and Mrs, and one of the kids knocked a Pyrex dish off a cooker. That brute Cullam fetched him a four-penny one, poor little devil. They’re all dead keen on getting this fridge, I can tell you.’

   ‘Well, what about these traps you laid?’

   ‘That was just a figure of speech,’ said the doctor. ‘Didn’t I do all right? I bought the bulb like you said. One and nine if you don’t mind. I’m not in this for my health.’

‘They call themselves McCloy Ltd.,’ Burden said wearily, ‘but the last member of the firm of that name died twenty years ago. It’s an old established set-up, but I reckon it’s on its last legs now. In this so-called affluent society of ours folks buy new stuff, they don’t want this reconditioned rubbish.’

   ‘You can say that again,’ said Wexford, thinking of Cullam.

   ‘The Yard put me on to six other McCloys all more or less in the hardware business or on its fringes. Not a smell of anything fishy about one of them. Stamford have given me a list of local McCloys and there again not a sniff as far as they know. But I’ll be off to Stamford in the morning to have a scent round. The local force have promised me all the help I need.’