Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (3 page)

   The dog, who had perhaps feared a pavement perambulation, sniffed the air too and became frisky. She poked about in the brambles and wagged her tail. Wexford undid the lead clip and let her run.

   With a kind of stolid tranquillity he began to reflect on the day’s work ahead. That grievous bodily harm thing was coming up at a special court this morning, but that ought to be all wrapped up in half an hour. Then there was the possibility of the silver on sale at the Saturday morning market being stolen goods. Someone had better go down and have a word . . . No doubt there’d been the usual spate of Friday night burglaries, too.

   Mrs Fanshawe had regained consciousness in Stowerton Royal Infirmary after her six-week-long coma. They would have to talk to her today. But that was the uniformed branch’s pigeon, not his. Thank God, it wasn’t he who had to break the news to the woman that her husband and her daughter had both been killed in the car crash that had fractured her skull.

   Presumably they would now resume the adjourned inquest on that unfortunate pair. Burden said Mrs Fanshawe might just recall why her husband’s Jaguar had skidded and over turned on the empty fast lane of the twin track road, but he doubted it. A merciful amnesia usually came with these comas and who could deny it was a blessing? It seemed downright immoral to torment the poor woman with questions now just for the sake of proving the Jaguar’s brakes were faulty or Fanshawe was driving over the seventy limit. It wasn’t as if any other vehicle had been involved. No doubt there was some question of insurance. Anyway, it wasn’t his worry.

   The sun shone on the rippling river and the long willow leaves just touched its bubbling golden surface. A trout jumped for a sparkling iridescent fly. Clytemnestra went down to the water and drank greedily. In this world of clean fast-running water, of inimitable oaks and meadows which made the Bayeux tapestry look like a traycloth, there was no place for somersaulted cars and carnage and broken bodies lying on the wet and bloody tarmac.

   The dog paddled, then swam. In the sunshine even grey knitted Clytemnestra was beautiful. Beneath her flat furry belly the big shallow stones had the marble veining of agate. Upon the water the mist floated in a golden veil, spotted with the dancing of a myriad tiny flies. And Wexford who was an agnostic, a profane man, thought, Lord, how manifold are thy works in all the earth.

There was a man on the other side of the river. He was walking slowly some fifty yards from the opposite bank and parallel to it, walking from the Sewingbury direction to Kingsmarkham. A child was with him, holding his hand, and he too had a dog, a big pugnacious-looking black dog. Wexford had an idea, drawn partly from experience in looking out of his office window, that when two dogs meet they inevitably fight. Clytemnestra would come out badly from a fight with that big black devil. Wexford couldn’t bring him self to call his charge by her name. He whistled.

   Clytemnestra took no notice. She had gained the opposite bank and was poking about in a great drifting mass of torn grass and brushwood. Further upstream a cache of rubbish had been washed against the bank. Wexford, who had been lyrical, felt positively pained by this evidence of man’s indifference to nature’s glories. He could see a bundle of checked cloth, an old blanket perhaps, an oil drum and, a little apart from the rest, a floating shoe. Clytemnestra confirmed his low opinion of everything canine by advancing on this water logged pocket of rubbish, her tail wagging and her ears pricked. Filthy things, dogs, Wexford thought, scavengers and dustbin delvers. He whistled again. The dog stopped and he was just about to congratulate himself on his authoritative and successful method of summoning her, when she made a plunging dart forward and seized the mass of cloth in her mouth.

   It moved with a heavy surge and the dog released it, her hackles rising. The slow and somehow primeval erecting of that mat of grey hairs brought a curious chill to Wexford’s blood. The sun seemed to go in. He forgot the black dog, coming ever nearer, and his joy in the morning went. Clytemnestra let out an unearthly keening howl, her lips snarling back and her tail a stiff prolongation of her backbone.

   The bundle she had disturbed eddied a few inches into the deeper water and as Wexford watched, a thin pale hand, lifeless as the agate-veined stones, rose slowly from the sodden cloth, its fingers hanging yet pointing towards him.

He took off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers to his knees. The man and the child on the other side watched him with interest. He didn’t think they had yet seen the hand. Holding his shoes, he stepped on to the stones and crossed the river carefully. Clytemnestra came to him quickly and put her face against his bare leg. Wexford pushed aside the willows that hung like a pelmet and came to the rubbish pocket, where he knelt down. One shoe floated empty, the other was still on a foot. The dead man lay face-downwards and someone had smashed in the back of his head with a heavy smooth object. One of these very stones, Wexford guessed.

   The brambles shivered behind him and a footstep crunched.

   ‘Keep back,’ Wexford said. ‘Keep the child back.’

   He turned, shielding what lay in the water with his own big body. Downstream the child was playing with both dogs, throwing stones for them into the water.

   ‘Christ!’ said the man softly.

   'He’s dead,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m a police officer and . . .’

   ‘I know you. Chief Inspector Wexford.’ The man approached and Wexford couldn’t stop him. He looked down and gasped. ‘My God, I . . .’

   ‘Yes, it isn’t a pleasant sight.’ The thought came to Wexford that something very out of the way had happened. Not so much that here on a fine June morning a man lay murdered, but that he, Wexford had found him. Policemen don’t find bodies unless they are sent to look for them or unless someone else has found them first. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked. The newcomer’s face was green. He looked as if he was about to be sick. ‘Will you go down to the town, to the nearest phone box and-get on to the station? Just tell them what you’ve seen. They’ll do the rest. Come on, man, pull yourself together.’

   ‘O.K., it’s just that . . .’

   ‘Perhaps you’d better let me have your name.’

   ‘Cullam, Maurice Cullam. I’ll go, I’ll go right away. It’s just that - well, last night I was having a drink with him at the Dragon.’

   ‘You know who it is then? You can’t see his face.’

   ‘I don’t need to. I’d know Charlie Hatton anywhere.’

He looked a right Charlie in those tails and striped trousers. That would be something funny to say to his best man when he came.

   ‘You and me, we look a pair of right Charlies, Charlie Hatton.’

   Quite witty really. Jack often thought he wasn’t quick enough to match Charlie’s easy repartee, but now he had thought of something that would make his friend smile.

   Dear old Charlie, he thought sentimentally, the best friend a man ever had. Generous to a fault, and if he wasn’t always strictly above-board - well, a man had to live. And Charlie knew how to live all right. The best of everything he had. Jack was ready to bet all the crisp honeymoon pound notes he had in his pocket that Charlie would be one of the few guests not wearing a hired morning coat. He had his own and not off the peg, either.

   Not that he looked half bad himself, he thought, admiring his reflection. At his age boozing didn’t have much visible effect and he always had a red face anyway. He looked smashing, he decided, shyly proud, as good as the Duke of Edinburgh any day. Probably the Duke used an electric shaver though. Jack put another bit of cotton wool on the nick on his chin and he wondered if Marilyn was ready yet.

   Thanks to Charlie boy, they’d been able to splash a bit on the wedding and Marilyn could have the white satin and the four bridesmaids she’d set her heart on. It would have been a different story if they’d had to find the key money for the flat themselves. Trust Charlie to come up with a long-term interest-free loan. That way they’d be able to blow some of their own savings on having the flat done up nicely. How well it had all worked out! A fortnight away by the sea and when they came back, the flat all ready and waiting for them. And it was all thanks to Charlie.

   Moving away from the mirror, Jack looked into the future, twenty, thirty years hence. Charlie would be a really rich man by then. Jack would be very much surprised if his friend wouldn’t be living in one of those houses in Ploughman’s Lane like the one where he sometimes did electrical jobs with real old French furniture and real oil paintings and the kind of china you looked at but didn’t eat off. He and Charlie had had a good laugh over that particular house, but there had been something serious in Charlie’s laughter and Jack had guessed he aimed high.

   They’d still be mates of course, for there was no side to Charlie Hatton. It wouldn’t be beer and a hand of solo then, but dinner parties and bridge games with their wives in cocktail gowns and real jewellery. Jack grew dizzy as he thought of it, seeing them sitting with tall glasses on a shady patio and, strangely, seeing them too as they were now, untouched by the hand of time.

   Abruptly he came back to the present day, his wedding day. Charlie was taking a hell of a time about coming. Maybe there was some difficulty about Lilian’s dress or he was waiting for her to get back from the hairdresser’s. Charlie was dead keen on Lilian doing him credit and she always did, always looked as if she’d just stepped out of a bandbox. After Marilyn, she’d be the best dressed woman at the wed ding, blonde, shapely, in the green dress Marilyn had got so superstitious about. Jack dabbed at his chin again and went to the window to watch for Charlie.

   It was ten-thirty and the wedding was fixed for an hour’s time.

She was blonde, shapely, pretty in Sheila Wexford’s style but without Sheila’s transcending beauty. Her face was rather blunt, the features unfinished putty dabs, and now it was swollen with crying. After they had told her Wexford and Burden sat helplessly while she flung herself face-downwards on the sofa and sobbed into the cushions.

   Presently Wexford moved over to her and touched her shoulder. She reached for his hand, clutched it and dug in her long nails. Then she struggled up, burying her face in his hand and her own. The expensive velvet cushions were blotched with her tears.

   Wexford glanced quickly around the smartly, even luxuriously, furnished room. Over the back of one of the chairs hung a blue and green flowered dress, a green coat, long wrist-buttoning gloves. In the middle of the long teak dining table lay Lilian Hatton’s wedding hat, an elaborate confection of satin leaves and tulle as green and fresh as the real leaves he could see through the picture window in the Kingsbrook meadows.

   ‘Mrs Hatton,’ he said gently and she raised her face obediently, ‘Mrs Hatton, weren’t you worried when your husband didn’t come home last night?’

   She didn’t speak. He repeated the question, and then she said in a voice choked with sobs, ‘I didn’t expect him home. I only half-expected him.’ She dropped Wexford’s hand, recoiling as if in taking it she had done something indecent.

   ‘When he didn’t come,’ she said, ‘I thought he hasn’t made it, he hasn’t made Jack’s party. He’s stopping off on the road, he’ll be in in the morning, I . . .’ The sobs were uncontrollable and she gave a long piteous cry.

   ‘I won’t trouble you any more now, Mrs Hatton. You say you mother’s coming? If I could just have Mr Pertwee’s address.’

   ‘Jack, yes,’ she said. ‘Jack’ll take this hard.’ She drew a long breath, twisting her hands. ‘They’d been pals since they were schoolkids.’ Suddenly she stood up, staring wildly. ‘Jack doesn’t know! It’s his wedding day and Charlie was going to be his best man. Oh, Jack, Jack, poor Jack!’

   ‘Leave it to us, Mrs Hatton,’ said Inspector Burden. ‘We’ll tell Mr Pertwee. Bailey Street, is it? We’ll tell him. There’s your front door bell now. I expect that’ll be your mother.’

   ‘Mum,’ said Lilian Hatton. ‘What am I going to do, Mum?’ The older woman looked past her, then put her arms around the shaking shoulders. ‘Marilyn said I shouldn’t wear green to a wedding, she said it was unlucky.’ Her voice was very low, a slurring mumble. ‘I bought that green coat just the same. I never got as far as the wedding, Mum, but it was unlucky, wasn’t it?’ Suddenly she broke into a terrible, loud and demented scream. ‘Charlie, Charlie, what am I going to do, Charlie?’ She held on to her mother, clawing at the lapels of her coat. ‘Oh my God, Charlie!’ she screamed.

‘I never get used to it, you know,’ said Burden quietly.

   ‘Do you think I do?’ Wexford had amiable, sometimes distinctly fond feelings for his subordinate, but occasionally Burden made him impatient, especially when he instituted himself keeper of the chief inspector’s conscience. He had a smug, parsonical face, Wexford thought unkindly, and now his thin mouth turned piously, down. ‘The worst is over anyway,’ he said crossly. ‘The bridegroom won’t go into transports of grief and you don’t put off your wedding because your best man’s been done in.’

   You callous devil, said Burden’s look. Then the neat, well-modelled head was once more averted and the inspector re-entered his silent, respectful reverie.

   It took only ten minutes to get from the Hatton’s flat to Bailey Street where, at number ten, Jack Pertwee lived with his widowed father. The police car stopped outside a tiny terraced house with no garden to separate its front door from the pavement. Mr Pertwee senior answered their knock, looking uneasy in a too large morning coat.

   ‘Thought you were our missing best man come at last.’

   ‘I’m afraid Mr Hatton won’t be coming, sir.’ Wexford and Burden edged themselves courteously but firmly past him into the narrow hall. ‘I’m very sorry to tell you we have bad news.’

   ‘Bad news?’

   ‘Yes, sir, Mr Hatton died last night. He was found down by the river this morning and he’d been dead since midnight or before.’

   Pertwee went pale as chalk. ‘By gum,’ he said, ‘Jack’ll take this hard.’ His mouth trembling, he looked at them both and then down at the knife-edge creases in his trousers. ‘D’you want me to go up and tell him?’ Wexford nodded. ‘Well, if that’s the way you want it. He’s getting married at eleven-thirty. But if I’ve got to tell him, I suppose I’ve got to tell him.’