Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (2 page)

   But I couldn’t go home in the dark!’

   ‘Yoo-hoo!’ yelled Jack in Wild Western imitation, but his voice tailed away as Inspector Burden of Kingsmarkham C.I.D. emerged from Queen Street and approached them across the forecourt of the Olive and Dove. ‘Evening, Mr Burden.’

   ‘Evening.’ The inspector viewed them with cool distaste. ‘We wouldn’t want you to do anything likely to lead to a breach of the peace, would we?’ He passed on and Charlie Hatton sniggered.

   ‘Copper,’ he said. ‘I reckon I’ve got more in this pocket than he gets in a month.’

   Maurice said stiffly, ‘I’ll say good night then, Jack.’ They had come to the Kingsbrook bridge and the beginning of the footpath to Sewingbury that followed the waters of the river. Maurice lived in Sewingbury, Charlie in one of the new council flats on the far side of the Kingsbrook Road. The footpath was a short cut home for both of them.

   ‘Wait for Charlie. He’s going your way.’

   ‘I won’t, thanks. I promised the missus I’d be home by eleven.’ Charlie had turned his back, making it plain he didn’t want Maurice’s company. ‘Powerful stuff, that,’ Maurice said, his face pale in the lamplight. ‘I don’t reckon I should have mixed it.’ He belched and Charlie sniggered. ‘Cheers, Jack, see you in church.’

   ‘Cheers, mate.’

   Maurice vaulted the stile and, by a miracle, landed steadily on his feet. He passed the wooden seats, ducked under the willows, and the last they saw of him was his undulating shadow. Jack and Charlie were alone.

   They had drunk a great deal and the night was warm, but on a sudden they were both stone-cold sober. Both of them loved women and in that love as in every emotion they were inarticulate, yet in no impulse of the heart were they so tongue-tied as in this great and pure friendship of theirs.

   As with the Greeks, they had found in each other an all-embracing spiritual compatibility. Their women were their pride and treasure, for bed, for hearth and home, for showing off, for their manhood. But without each other their lives would be incomplete, lacking, as it were, the essence and the fuse. They had never heard of the Greeks, unless you counted the man who kept the Acropolis restaurant in Stowerton, and neither could now understand the emotion which held each of them, preserving him in silence and a kind of despair.

   If Charlie had been a different man, a cultivated man or effeminate or living in a bygone age when tongues were more freely unloosed, he might now have embraced Jack and told him from a full heart how he entered wholly into his joy and would die for his happiness. And if Jack had been such another he would have thanked Charlie for his unstinted friendship, his generous loans, his hospitality and for bringing him Marilyn Thompson. But Charlie was a sharp little lorry driver and Jack was an electrician. Love was between a man and a woman, love was for marriage, and each would have died before admitting to anything more than that they ‘got on well’ together. They hung over the bridge, dropping stone chippings into the water, and then Charlie said:

   ‘I reckon you need your beauty sleep, so I’ll be on my way.’

   ‘We got your present, Charlie. I wasn’t going to say nothing till the others had gone, but it’s a real grand job that record-player. It quite knocked me back when I saw it. Must have set you back a bit.’

   ‘I got it cost, mate.’ Another stone dropped and splashed in the darkness beneath.

   ‘Marilyn said she’d be writing to Lilian.’

   ‘She has, too. A lovely letter come from her before I went up north. A real educated girl you got there, Jack. She knows how to put a letter together all right. You don’t grudge the outlay when you get a letter like that. I brought you two together and don’t you ever forget it.’

   ‘Ah, you know how to pick them, Charlie. Look at Lilian.’

   ‘Well, I’d better get looking at her, hadn’t I?’ Charlie turned to face his friend and his shadow was short and black against Jack’s long one. He raised his hard little hand and brought it down on Jack’s resoundingly. ‘I’ll be off, then.’

   ‘I reckon you’d better, Charlie.’

   ‘And if I don’t get the chance tomorrow - well, I’m no speechmaker like Brian, but all the very best, Jack.’

   ‘You’ll get the chance all right. You’ll have to make a speech.’

   ‘Save it up till then, eh?’ Charlie wrinkled his nose and winked quickly. The shadows parted, he negotiated the stile. ‘Good night, me old love.’

   ‘Night, Charlie.’

   The willows enclosed him. His shadow appeared again as the path rose and dipped. Jack heard him whistling, ‘Mabel, dear, listen here’ under the stars and then as the shadow was absorbed and lost in the many tree shadows, the whistle too faded and there was no sound but the gentle chatter of the stream, the Kingsbrook that flowed everlastingly over its bed of thin round stones.

   Many waters cannot quench love, nor the floods drown it.

Detective Chief Inspector Wexford didn’t care for dogs. He had never had a dog and now that one of his daughters was married and the other a student at drama school, he saw no reason why he should ever give one house-room. Many an anti-dog man joins the ranks of dog lovers because he is too weak to resist the demands of beloved children, but in Wexford’s household the demands had never been more than half-hearted, so he had passed through this snare and come out unscathed.

   ‘When therefore he arrived home late on Friday night to find the grey thing with ears like knitted dishcloths in his favourite chair he was displeased.

   ‘Isn’t she a darling?’ said the drama student. ‘Her name’s Clytemnestra. I knew you wouldn’t mind having her for just a fortnight.’ And she whisked out to answer the telephone.

   ‘Where did Sheila get it from?’ Wexford said gloomily. 

   Mrs Wexford was a woman of few words.

   ‘Sebastian.’

   ‘Who in God’s name is Sebastian?’

   ‘Some boy,’ said Mrs Wexford. ‘He’s only just gone.’

   Her husband considered pushing the dog on to the floor, thought better of it, and went sulkily off to bed. His daughter’s beauty had never ceased to surprise the chief inspector. Sylvia, the elder one, was well-built and healthy, but that was the best that could be said for her; Mrs Wexford had a magnificent figure and a fine profile although she had never been of the stuff that wins beauty contests. While he . . . All he needed, he sometimes thought, was a trunk to make him look exactly like an elephant. His body was huge and ponderous, his skin pachydermatous, wrinkled and grey, and his three-cornered ears stuck out absurdly under the sparse fringe of colourless hair. When he went to the zoo he passed the elephant house quickly lest the irreverent onlooker should make comparisons.

   Her mother and sister were fine-looking women, but the odd thing about Sheila was that her beauty was not an enlargement or an enhancement of their near-handsomeness. She looked like her father. The first time Wexford noticed this - she was then about six - he almost hooted aloud, so grotesque was the likeness between this exquisite piece of doll’s flesh and her gross progenitor. And yet that high broad forehead was his, the little tilted nose was his, his the pointed - although in her case, flat - ears, and in her huge grey eyes he saw his own little ones. When he was young his hair had been that flaxen gold too, as soft and as fine. Only hope she doesn’t end up looking like her dad, he thought sometimes with a rich inner guffaw.

   But on the following morning his feelings towards his younger daughter were neither tender nor amused. The dog had awakened him at ten to seven with long-drawn howls and now, a quarter of an hour later; he stood on the threshold of Sheila’s bedroom, glowering.

   ‘This isn’t a boarding kennels, you know,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear her?’

   ‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound, Pop? Poor darling, she only wants to be taken out.’

   ‘What did you call her?’

   ‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound. She’s a mongrel really, but that’s what Sebastian calls her. She looks as if she’s made of man-made fibres you see. Don’t you think it’s funny?’

   ‘Not particularly. Why can’t this Sebastian look after his own dog?’

   ‘He’s gone to Switzerland,’ said Sheila. ‘His plane must have gone by now.’ She surfaced from under the sheets and her father saw that her hair was wound on huge electrically heated rollers. ‘I felt awful letting him walk all that way to the station last night.’ She added accusingly, ‘But you had the car.’

   ‘It’s my car,’ Wexford almost shouted. This argument he knew of old was hopeless and he listened to his own voice with a kind of horror as a note of pleading crept into it. ‘If the dog wants to go out, hadn’t you better get up and take her?’

   ‘I can’t. I’ve just set my hair.’ Downstairs Clytemnestra let out a howl that ended in a series of urgent yelps. Sheila threw back the bedclothes and sat up, a vision in pink baby doll pyjamas.

   ‘God almighty!’ Wexford exploded. ‘You can’t take your friend’s dog out but you can get up at the crack of dawn to set your hair.’

   ‘Daddy. . .’ The wheedling tone as well as the now seldom-used paternal appellation told Wexford that a monstrous request was to be made of him. He glared, drawing his brows together in the manner that made Kingsmarkham’s petty offenders tremble. ‘Daddy, duck, it’s a gorgeous morning and you know what Dr Crocket said about your weight and I have just set my hair. . .’

   ‘I am going to take a shower,’ Wexford said coldly.

   He took it. When he emerged from the bathroom the dog was still howling and pop music was issuing from behind Sheila’s door. A degenerate male voice exhorted its hearers to give it love or let it die in peace.

   ‘There seems to be an awful lot of noise going on, darling,’ said Mrs Wexford sleepily.

   ‘You’re joking.’

   He opened Sheila’s door. She was applying a face pack. ‘Just this once, then,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I’m only doing it because I want your mother to have a quiet lie-in, so you can turn that thing off for a start.’

   ‘You are an angel, Daddy,’ said Sheila, and she added dreamily, ‘I expect Clytemnestra has spent a penny by now.’

Clytemnestra. Of all the stupid pretentious names for a dog . . . But what else could you expect of someone called Sebastian? She had not, however, yet “spent a penny”. She flung herself on Wexford, yelping frantically, and when he pushed her away, ran round him in circles, wildly gyrating her tail and flapping her knitted ears.

   Wexford found the lead, obligingly left by Sheila in a prominent position on top of the refrigerator. Undoubtedly it was going to be a beautiful day, a summer’s day such as is unequalled anywhere in the world but in the South of England, a day that begins with mists, burgeons into tropical glory and dies in blue and gold and stars.

   ‘Full many a glorious morning,’ quoted Wexford to Clytemnestra, ‘have I seen, flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.’

   Clytemnestra agreed vociferously, leaping on to a stool and screeching hysterically at sight of her lead.

   ‘Bear your body more seemly,’ said Wexford coldly, switching from sonnet to comedy without varying his author. He looked out of the window. The sovereign eye was there all right, bright, molten and white-gold. Instead of mountain tops it was flattering the Kingsbrook meadows and turning the little river into a ribbon of shimmering metal. It wouldn’t do him any harm to take this ungoverned creature for a short jaunt in the fields and the experience would give him a splendid ascendancy over Inspector Burden when he walked into the station at nine-thirty.

   ‘Lovely morning, sir.’

   ‘It was, Mike. The best of it’s over now, of course. Now when I was down by the river at half seven . . .’

   He chuckled. Clytemnestra whimpered. Wexford went to the door and the dog screamed for joy. He clipped on the lead and stepped forth into the sweet peace of a summer Saturday in Sussex.

   It was one thing to boast afterwards of pre-breakfast hiking, quite another to be actually seen leading this freak of nature, this abortion, about the public streets. Observed in uncompromising midsummer light, Clytemnestra looked like some thing that, having long lain neglected at the bottom of an old woman’s knitting basket, has finally been brought out to be mended.

   Moreover, now that she had achieved the heart’s desire for which she had turned on her shameless, neurotic display, she had become dejected, and walked along meekly, head and tail hanging. Just like a woman, Wexford thought crossly. Sheila would be just the same. Hair out of curlers, face cleaned up, she was in all probability downstairs now calmly making her mother a cup of tea. When you get what you want you don’t want what you get . . . On a fait le monde ainsi.

   He would, however, eschew the public streets.

   From this side of town, the footpath led across the fields to the bank of the stream where it divided, one branch going to the new council estate and Sewingbury, the other to the centre of Kingsmarkham High Street, at the Kingsbrook bridge. Wexford certainly wasn’t going to embark on a sabbath day’s journey to Sewingbury, and now they had mucked up the Kingsbrook Road with those flats, there was no longer any point in going there. Instead he would walk down to the river, take the path to the bridge and pick up his Police Review at Braddan’s on his way home. They always forgot to send it with the papers.

   In agricultural districts pastureland is usually fenced. These meadows were divided by hedges and barbed wire and in them great red cattle were grazing. Mist lay in shallow patches over the hollows and where the fields were lying fallow the hay was nearly ready to be cut, but it was not yet cut. Wexford, very much a countryman at heart, marvelled that the townsman calls grass green when in reality it is as many-coloured as Joseph’s coat. The grass heads hung heavy with seed, ochre, chestnut and powdery grey, and all the thick tapestry of pasture was embroidered and interlaced with the crimson thread of sorrel, the bright acid of buttercups and the creamy dairy-maid floss of meadowsweet. Over it all the fanning whispering seed and the tenuous mist cast a sheen of silver.

   The oak trees had not yet lost the vivid yellow-green of their late springtime, a colour so bright, so fresh and so unparalleled elsewhere in nature or in art that no one has ever been able to emulate it and it is never seen in paint or cloth or women’s dresses. In such things the colour would be crude, if it could be copied, but against this pale blue yet fixedly cloudless sky it was not crude. It was exquisite. Wexford drew in lungfuls of scented, pollen-laden air. He never had hay fever and he felt good.