Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (21 page)

   Jack eased away his arm and patted the widow’s hand.

   ‘Charlie came down to the works but I couldn’t get away. I was off doing the wiring in them new houses over Pomfret way. He said he reckoned he’d found us a flat and I said, take Marilyn with you. I can see him now, old Charlie, pleased as punch and grinning like he always did when he was going to do something for you. Bobbing up and down he was like a monkey on a stick.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Old Charlie,’ he said.

   Impatiently, Wexford turned to the wife. ‘You went with him?’

   ‘Yeah, he came down to Moran’s.’ Moran’s was Kingsmarkham’s biggest draper’s. ‘That old bitch, that manageress, didn’t want me to go at first. Not that there’s much trade to speak of on a Monday morning. I’m leaving in a month anyway, I said, and if you don’t like it you can give me my cards and I’ll go now. Straight out I said it. I’d made her look real small in front of Charlie and she never said another word. Well, me and Charlie we went to look at this flat and there was this geezer who was leaving, a right queer if you ask me, wanted two hundred quid key money before he’d let us have it. I could have smacked his face then and there. In a dressing gown he was. There’ll be forced labour for his sort one of these fine days and I was just going to come out with it when Charlie said that was all right and we’d find the money somehow. He could see I was dead keen on the place.’

   ‘He paid over the money?’

   ‘Don’t be so daft. He said something about consulting with Jack, though if I wanted it Jack’d want it too all right, and then we went. I was fuming. I’ll put up the money, Charlie said when we was outside, and you can pay me back when you’re rolling. How about that, then?’

   ‘Yes,’ said Jack, ‘how about that?’

   ‘Did Hatton take you back to the shop?’

   ‘Of course he didn’t, he wasn’t my keeper. He walked up with me as far as the Olive and then he said he’d got to make a phone call. He went into that box outside the Olive and I never saw him again for a couple of days.’

   ‘Why would he make a phone call from a box when he had his own phone at home?’

   The married pair were thinking what he, under other circumstances might have thought. A married man with a phone of his own makes calls from a box to his mistress. Mrs Hatton looked innocent, subdued, armoured by her memories. Then Marilyn laughed harshly. ‘You’re crazy if you’re thinking what I think you are! Charlie Hatton?’

   ‘What do you mean, Marilyn?’ the widow asked.

   ‘I’m thinking nothing,’ said Wexford. ‘Did your husband come home for his lunch?’

   ‘About half-past twelve. I asked him what he was going to do with himself in the afternoon and it was then he said he was going to get his teeth seen to. He kept getting bits of food under his plate, you see. He was very ashamed of having false teeth was Charlie on account of being so young and all that. And on account of me . . . He thought I minded. Me mind? I wouldn’t have cared it . . . Oh, what’s the use? I was telling you about getting his teeth fixed. He’d often said he’d see about getting his teeth fixed. He’d often said he’d see about getting a real good set when he could afford it and he said he thought he’d go to Mr Vigo.’

   ‘I’d sort of recommended him, you see,’ Jack put in.

   ‘You?’ Wexford said rudely.

   Jack lifted his face and flushed a deep wine colour.

   ‘I don’t mean I went to him for my teeth,’ he muttered. ‘I’d been up at his place once or twice doing electrical work and I’d sort of described what the place was like to Charlie. Sort of about the garden and all the old things he’s got up there and that room full of Chinese stuff.’

   Mrs Hatton was crying now and she wiped her eyes, smiling reminiscently her tears. ‘Many’s the laugh Charlie and Jack used to have over that,’ she said. ‘Charlie said he’d like to see it. Like to have a dekko, he said, and Jack said Mr Vigo was rolling in money. Well, he’d have to be a good dentist to make all that, wouldn’t he? So Charlie thought he was the man for him and he phoned then and there. You’ll never get an appointment for today, I said, but he did. Mr Vigo had a cancellation and he said he’d see him at two.’

   ‘And then?’

   ‘Charlie came back at four and said Mr Vigo was going to fix him up with a new set. Mr Vigo was as nice as pie, he said, no side to him. He’d given him a drink in this said Chinese room and Charlie said when he was rich he was going to have stuff like that, rooms full of it and vases and ornaments and - and a little army of chess men and . . . Oh God, he’ll never have anything where he is!’

   ‘Don’t, Lily, don’t, love.’

   ‘When did Mr Hatton give you the key money for this flat of yours?’

   ‘It was a loan,’ said Marilyn Pertwee indignantly.

   ‘Lend it to you, then?’

   ‘He came round with it to Jack’s dad’s place on the Wednesday.’

   ‘That would have been the 22nd?’

   ‘I reckon. We handed it over to this bloke as had the flat the next day.’ Jack Pertwee stared hard at Wexford. The dull eyes were glazed now, the face pallid yet mottled. Wexford could hardly suppress a shiver. God help the man who murdered Charlie Hatton, he thought, if Pertwee gets on to him before we do.

‘Isn’t it about time we got shot of that thing?’

   Sheila removed Clytemnestra from her father’s chair and contemplated the mass of hairs the dog had moulted on to the cushion. ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with her myself,’ she said. ‘Sebastian’s supposed to be coming for her tonight.’

   ‘Thank God for that.’

   ‘All right if I have the car to take him to the station?’

   ‘What, is he scared to cross those fields alone?’ Mabel, dear, listen here, there’s a robbery in the park . . . ‘I may want the car. He’s young and healthy. Let him walk.’

   ‘He’s got a verruca,’ said Sheila. ‘He had to walk here and back when he brought her a fortnight ago. I’d be meeting him now’ - she gave her father a disgruntled look - ‘only you’ve always got the car.’

   ‘It is my car,’ said Wexford absurdly, and then, because it was a game that he and Sheila played, ‘It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it . . .’

   ‘For a wilderness of verrucas! Oh, Pop, you’re a honey really. There’s Sebastian now.’

   Mrs Wexford began calmly laying the table. ‘Don’t say anything about his hair,’ she said to her husband. ‘He’s got peculiar hair and you know what you are.’

   Sebastian’s hair resembled Clytemnestra’s, only it wasn’t grey. It hung on to his shoulders in shaggy curls.

   ‘I hope the Swoofle Hound hasn’t been too much of a bore for you, Mr Wexford.’

   Wexford opened his mouth to make some polite denial but Clytemnestra’s transports at the sight of her owner made speech impossible for a while. She hurled herself at his long legs and plummeted her body against his jacket, a garment which Wexford incredulously identified as part of the full dress uniform of a commander in the Royal Norwegian Navy.

   ‘You’ll stay and have a meal?’ said Mrs Wexford.

   ‘If it isn’t too much trouble.’

   ‘How was Switzerland?’

   ‘All right. Expensive.’ Wexford was beginning to nourish the unkind thought that the holiday would have been even more costly had he had to pay boarding kennel fees, when Sebastian disarmed him by producing from his haversack a large box of chocolates for Mrs Wexford.

   ‘Suchard!’ said Mrs Wexford. ‘How kind.’

   Encouraged, Sebastian made short work of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, occasionally reaching under the table to fondle Clytemnestra’s ears.

   ‘I’ll drive you to the station,’ said Sheila and she gave her father a confident smile.

   ‘That’d be great. We might take Clytemnestra into that Olive place. She likes beer and it’d be a treat for her.’

   ‘Not in my car, you don’t,’ said Wexford firmly.

   ‘Oh, Pop!’

   ‘Sorry, sweetheart, but you don’t drink and drive.’

   Sebastian’s expression combined admiration for the daughter and a desire to ingratiate himself with the father. ‘We’ll walk down.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s such a hell of a way to your station, though.’ He eyed the banana custard. ‘Yes, thanks, I will have some more. The trouble is I’ll have to walk Sheila back, unless she goes home by the road,’ he added unchivalrously. ‘We heard about your murder even in Switzerland. Down in those fields at the back, wasn’t it?’

   Wexford seldom talked shop at home. Probably this young man wasn’t pumping him and yet . . . He gave a non-committal nod.

   ‘Odd,’ Sebastian said. ‘I went to the station that way a fortnight ago, across the fields.’

   Wexford intercepted his wife’s glance, deflected it, said nothing. Sheila said it for him.

   'What time was it, Seb? About ten?’

   ‘A bit after that. I didn’t meet a soul and I can’t say I’m sorry.’ He ruffled the dog’s curly coat. ‘If I hadn’t jumped smartly Out of the way, Clytemnestra, you mightn’t ever have seen your papa again. Big American car nearly ran me down.’

   ‘They do nip into that station approach,’ said Sheila. ‘Station approach, nothing. This was in the fields. In that lane that leads up to the stile thing. Great green car swept in at about forty and I practically had to dive into the hedge. I took the number actually but what with all the kerfuffle about my holiday I lost the bit of paper I wrote it on.’

   ‘A courting couple?’ said Wexford lightly.

   ‘Could have been. I was too busy taking the number to look and I was scared of losing my train.’

   ‘Well we won’t go by the fields this time, and I’ll trail all the way back by the road if it makes you happy, Pop.’

   ‘You can take my car,’ said Wexford. ‘Stick to bitter lemon in the Olive, eh?’

‘Here’s my theory,’ said Burden, ‘for what it’s worth. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and it’s the only possible solution. We’ve talked a lot about hired assassins but the only hired assassin in this case was Charlie Hatton, hired by Bridget Culross’s boy friend.’

   ‘Fertile,’ said Wexford, ‘but I’d like it amplified.’

   Burden shifted his chair a little nearer those of Wexford and the doctor. The wind and the sunlight filled the office with a pattern of dancing leaves. ‘Jay is a rich man. He must be if he can afford to pay for three months in that clinic of yours just because his wife’s having a difficult pregnancy.’

   ‘Money down the drain,’ commented Crocker. ‘Do just as well on the N.H.S.’

   ‘He’s rich enough to pay someone to do his killing for him. You can bet your life he’s a one-time friend of McCloy’s. He arranges for Hatton to be waiting on that by-pass at the point where he’s going to drop the girl on their way back from this conference.’

   ‘Just what conference, Mike? Have we checked on Brighton conferences that weekend?’

   ‘The National Union of Journalists, the Blake Society and the Gibbonites all met there,’ said Burden promptly.

   ‘What are the last lot?’ put in the doctor, ‘a bunch of monkeys?’

   ‘Not gibbons,’ said Burden, unsmiling. ‘Gibbon. The Decline and Fall man, the historian. I reckon they’re just another collection of cranks.’

   ‘And Jay took a girl to Brighton, but left her alone all day while he gossiped about Gibbon?’ said Wexford thought fully. ‘Well, stranger things have happened. Go on.’

   ‘He faked a quarrel with her in the car on the way back to London and turfed her out of the car in a rage. Hatton was waiting for her, hit her over the head, emptied her handbag and made off back to his lorry. The next day Jay paid him his blood money. You can be sure that call Hatton made from a phone box was to Jay, telling him that the deed was done. And no one would have been any the wiser if Hatton hadn’t been greedy and started soaking Jay.’

   The doctor made a derisive face. ‘Pardon me as a mere layman, but that’s a load of old rubbish. I’m not saying the girl couldn’t have been dead before the car hit her. She could have. But why should Hatton put her in the road? He couldn’t be sure a car would come along and hit her. Besides, he could so easily have been seen. And he was a small man. He wouldn’t have had the strength to carry her across the southbound highway. Why bother, anyway? If her death was supposed to look like the work of some vagrant maniac, why not kill her behind the hedge and leave her there?’

   ‘What’s your idea then?’ said Burden sourly.

   Crocker looked uppish. ‘I don’t have to have theories. I’m not paid for this kind of diagnosis.’

   ‘Come down from your perch, Paracelsus,’ said Wexford ‘and put yourselves in our shoes for a moment. Have a shot at it.’

   ‘The trouble with you lot is you believe everything you’re told. I don’t. I know from experience people distort the truth because they’re afraid or they have a psychological block or they want to be over-helpful. They leave things out because they’re ignorant and when you tell them you want to know everything, they sort out what everything is to them. It’s not necessarily everything to the expert who’s asking the questions.’

   ‘I know all that,’ said Wexford impatiently.

   ‘Then, Mrs Fanshawe says the girl wasn’t in the car, not because she’s ashamed to admit it but because she’s literally forgotten. Of course she was in the car. She hitched a lift a couple of miles before the crash and all that period is a blank to Mrs Fanshawe. Naturally she’s not trying to clear the blanks. The very word “girl” is a red rag to a bull to her.’

   ‘You’re bothered because there were no keys and no other identification in that expensive handbag. She left them in her suitcase and she left that suitcase in Jay’s car.’

   ‘Why?’

   ‘So that Jay would have to come back for her. It was on the seat and after a few miles he’d realise and come back. Or so she thought. When he didn’t she knew she could get it back all right at a later date. Presumably she knew where Jay lived. In extremis it would be an excuse for having it out with him and confronting the wife.’

   ‘But Jay didn’t come back and she got fed-up with waiting, so she hitched a lift from Fanshawe.’

   ‘That’s the simple natural solution, isn’t it?’

   ‘What you’re saying amounts to that Jay is just a more or less harmless philanderer. Why didn’t he come forward when we found the girl?’