Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (6 page)

   ‘Now back to the - er, accident,’ he said. ‘Just try and see if you can tell me what happened when you left Eastover. It was getting dark and there wasn’t much traffic on the road, it being a Monday. It had been raining and the road was wet. Now, Mrs Fanshawe?’

   ‘My husband was driving,’ she began and she wondered why the man’s face wore such a sloppy expression. Perhaps he had noticed her rings. She slid them up and down her fingers, suddenly remembering that the five of them were worth nearly twenty thousand pounds. ‘Jerome was driving. . .’ What a silly name it was. Like Three Men in a Boat. That made her giggle, although the sound came out like a harsh cackle. ‘I sat beside him, of course, and I was knitting. I must have been knitting. I always do when Jerome drives. He drives so fast,’ she said querulously. ‘Much too fast and he never takes any notice when I tell him to go slower, so I do my knitting. To keep my mind off it, you know.’

   Mean and selfish Jerome was. A man of fifty-five hadn’t any business to drive like a crazy teenager. She had told him that, but he had ignored her like he ignored everything else she ever said. Still, she was used to being ignored. Nora never took any notice of what she said either. When she came to think of it, the only thing she and Jerome had ever agreed about was what a difficult, trying and utterly maddening creature Nora was. It was exactly like her to go away and not get in touch with her parents. Jerome would have something to say about that. . . Then there swam pleasantly into her muddled mind the recollection that Jerome would never have anything to say about anything again, never drive at eighty-five or pick on Nora or do those other terrible and humiliating things. Tonight, when she felt better, she would write to Nora and tell her her father was dead. With Jerome out of the way and all that money for them selves, she felt they would have a much happier relationship. . .

   ‘I was knitting a jumper for Nora,’ she said. What a marvellous constitution she must have to remember that after all she’d been through! ‘Not that she deserved it, the naughty girl.’ Now, why had she said that? Nora had been naughty much naughtier than ever before, but for the life of her Dorothy Fanshawe couldn’t remember of what that naughtiness had consisted. She wished the policeman or whoever he was would wipe that mawkish sheeplike expression off his face. There was no need for anyone to feel sorry for her, Dorothy Fanshawe, of Astbury Mews, Upper Grosvenor Street, W. 1. She was a merry widow now, rich in her own right, soon to be well again, the mother of a good-looking talented only daughter. ‘I don’t remember what we talked about,’ she said, ‘my late husband and I. Nothing, probably. The road was wet and I kept telling him to go slower.’

   ‘Your daughter was in the back seat, Mrs Fanshawe?’

   Oh! really, how absurd the man was! ‘Nora was not in the car. I keep telling you. Nora went back to Germany. No doubt she is in Germany now.’

   To the sergeant the jerky bumbling words sounded like the raving of a madwoman. In spite of what the doctors said, it seemed to him probable that the accident had irremediably damaged her brain. He didn’t dare take it upon himself to enlighten her further. God knew what harm he might do! Sooner or later, if she ever got her reason back, she would realize that her daughter had resigned from this German job six weeks before the accident, that she hadn’t breathed a word to her aunt or her friends about the possibility of her returning to Europe. The girl’s body had been identified by her aunt, Mrs Browne. She was dead and buried.

   ‘I expect she is,’ he said soothingly. ‘No doubt she is. What made your husband swerve, Mrs Fanshawe?’

   ‘I was knitting.’

   ‘Did you hit something, did a tire burst?’

   ‘I told you, I didn’t look. I was knitting.’

   ‘Did your husband cry out, say anything?’

   ‘I think he said “My God”,’ said Mrs Fanshawe. She couldn’t really remember anything, only that she had been knitting and then she had woken up in this bed with her nosy, bossy sister sitting beside her. But Jerome was always saying ‘My God’ or even ‘My Christ’. He had a limited vocabulary and she had stopped telling him not to be blasphemous twenty years ago. ‘I don’t remember anything else,’ she said. That was all they were going to get out of her. She wasn’t going to waste her strength. She needed it for the letter she was going to write in a minute to Nora.

   Camb looked compassionately at the quivering febrile mouth and the long unfiled nails that played with those rings. Mrs Fanshawe had told him nothing. Perhaps he ought to have realized it was too soon, or his superiors ought to have realized. They would have to go now anyway. The young lady doctor had said ten minutes, but they must have been here twenty. Here was the nurse coming now. Funny uniforms they wear these days, he thought, eyeing the girl’s navy-blue nylon overall and hat like a white forage cap. Poor Mrs Fanshawe was staring at her desperately. No wonder, exhausted and broken-hearted as she was.

No, it wasn’t Nora. Just for a split second Mrs Fanshawe thought it was. But Nora never wore an overall, she despised housework - and this girl was wearing an overall, not the rather smart dress for which Mrs Fanshawe had first taken it. She had a cap on her head too. Was it possible that her sister had taken on a new maid for the Fanshawes’ flat and not said anything about it? More than possible, considering how interfering her sister was. Interfering but irresponsible. A responsible person would have sent for Nora by now.

   ‘What’s your name?’ Mrs Fanshawe said sharply.

   ‘Rose, Mrs Fanshawe. Nurse Rose. I’ve come to make you more comfy and bring you your tea. You could drink a nice cup of tea, couldn’t you? I’m afraid you’ll have to run along now Sergeant. I can’t allow my patient any setbacks, you know.’

   Very talkative, thought Mrs Fanshawe. Takes a lot upon herself. She tried to sit up.

   ‘Rose,’ she said, ‘I want to write a letter to my daughter, my daughter in Germany. Will you fetch me writing paper and a pen, please?’

   She doesn’t know, Camb thought, she’s new. Nobody’s told her. Just as well. He intercepted the policewoman’s glance and crushed it with a frown.

   ‘We are getting better, aren’t we?’ said the nurse skittishly. ‘Writing letters! Well, I don’t know, I’m sure. I’m certain you haven’t got any paper of your own. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll just pop down the corridor and borrow some from Mrs Goodwin in number four. Then I’ll post your letter when I go off duty, shall I?’

   ‘That will be very kind of you,’ said Mrs Fanshawe austerely. ‘Then you can bring the tea.’

   A pert girl and probably untrainable, she thought. Time would show. At any rate, Jerome wouldn’t be there to upset this one, catch her in corners and smack her bottom like he had the Danish au pair. Jerome was dead. She’d always said he’d kill himself driving like that and now he had. Why hadn’t he killed her too? What good fortune had decreed that she be saved and be sitting here in her own bed in her own flat?

   But it wasn’t her own bed and her own flat. Very carefully Mrs Fanshawe marshalled her thoughts and her memories. Jerome was dead, Nora was in Germany and she was in Something-or-other Royal Infirmary. A hospital. Very thoughtful of someone to have engaged a maid for her in hospital.

   Unless this Rose was a nurse. Of course, she must be a nurse. What a fool I am, thought Mrs Fanshawe. I feel exactly as if I were having a very prolonged dream but every time I come out of it I’m so tired I fall back into it again.

   The inaccurate information given by all these busybodies didn’t help at all. People were so inefficient these days. First her sister had forgotten to inform Nora, then this policeman said Nora had been with her and Jerome in the Jaguar. They must all think she was out of her mind. As if a mother didn’t know where her own daughter was! Why, she even remembered Nora’s address.

   Goethestrasse 14, Köln, West Germany. Mrs Fanshawe was very proud of the way she wrote Köln like that instead of Cologne. What reserves of strength and intellect she must have to remember details like that! And after all she’d been through. Presently the nurse came back with the paper.

   ‘Thank you, Nurse,’ said Mrs Fanshawe to show what a fine grasp of things she had. She tried to hold the pen, but it zig-zagged all over the paper like that Planchette thing her father had used long ago.

   ‘Why not let me write it for you?’ said Nurse Rose.

   ‘Perhaps it would be better. I’ll dictate. Shall I begin?’

    Nurse Rose had to exercise all her powers of concentration to sort out from the mumblings and digressions exactly what Mrs Fanshawe wanted to say. But she was a kind-hearted girl and, besides, it always paid to be attentive to patients in the private wing. Last year when one of them had left after only a fortnight she had given Nurse Rose a travelling clock and a nearly full bottle of Rochas’ Femme.

   ‘“Dearest Nora”,’ she read aloud, ‘“I am almost well again and think you should come and see me. Poor Daddy would have wished it. I expect auntie has told you everything and you have been too busy to come, but please come now. We will let bygones be bygones. Love from Mummy”. That all right, Mrs Fanshawe? I’ve got some stamps, enough to make up to ninepence. I think I’ll pop it in the post now when I go for my tea.’

   Coming back from the pillar box at the end of Charteris Road, Nurse Rose met the Private Wing sister.

   ‘I’ve just been posting a letter for poor Mrs Fanshawe, Sister,’ she said virtuously. ‘I like to do what I can, you know. Anything to cheer them up. She was so keen to get a letter to her daughter off tonight.’

   ‘Her daughter’s dead.’

   'Oh, Sister, you don’t mean it! Oh God, how dreadful! I never dreamt, I never guessed . . . Ooh, Sister!’

   ‘You’d better get back on duty, Nurse, and do try not to be so impulsive.’

The child who opened the door to him was the one that had been out in the fields with his father. He was a boy of about seven, big for his age, aggressive looking and with food adhering to his face in greasy red and brown streaks.

   'Who is it, Dominic?’ came a voice from the sleazy depths of this small and totally inadequate council house.

   ‘A man,’ said Dominic simply.

   ‘What does he want?’

   To put an end to all this pointless colloquy, Wexford stepped into the hail, then the living room. Three more children were watching athletics on television. The remains of lunch were still on the stained crumb-scattered tablecloth and a woman sat at the table feeding a baby from a bottle. She might have been any age between thirty and sixty and Wexford set the lower limit so low only because of her young children. Her hair was thin and fair and long, caught back with an elastic band, and her face was thin and long too, wizened and pinched. A weariness that was as much chronic boredom as physical tiredness seemed the most dominant thing about her. It was the sordid exhaustion of poverty, of overwork, of perpetual near-incarceration, of eternal nagging demands, and to be left alone just to sit for perhaps only five minutes in unthinking apathy was her sole remaining desire. To this end she never wasted a word or a gesture and when she saw Wexford she neither greeted him nor even lifted her head, but said to one of her little girls:

   ‘Go and fetch your dad, Samantha.’

   Samantha jerked a thick black cat off her lap and trailed listlessly via the kitchen to the back garden. A middle-class woman, a woman with more money and fewer children might have apologized for the squalor and the smell of a hundred stale meals. Mrs Cullam didn’t even look at him and when he asked her at what time her husband had come home on Friday night she said laconically, ‘Quarter past eleven.’

   ‘How can you be so sure of the time?’

   ‘It was a quarter past eleven.’ Mrs Cullam put the baby on the table among the crumbs, removing its napkin which she dropped on the floor, and said in the same low economical tone, ‘Get me another nappie, Georgina.’ A strong smell of ammonia fought with the cabbage. The baby, which was female, began to cry. Mrs Cullam lit a cigarette and stood against the table, her hands hanging by her sides, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. Georgina came back with a grey rag, sat down and watched her brother poke his fingers in the cat’s ears. ‘Leave the cat alone, Barnabas,’ said Mrs Cullam.

   Her husband came in, drying his hands on a tea cloth, the black dog cowering at his heels. He nodded to Wexford and then he turned off the television.

   ‘Get up, Samantha, and let the gentleman sit down.’ The child took no notice and made no sound when her father slapped one arm and yanked her up by the other. He viewed the room helplessly, paying particular attention to the discarded napkin, but there was no disgust on his face, only a vaguely resentful acceptance.

   Wexford didn’t take the vacant seat and something in his expression must have told Cullam he wanted privacy, for he said to his wife. ‘Can’t you get them kids out of here?’

   Mrs Cullam shrugged and the ash from her cigarette fell into a plate of congealing gravy. She hoisted the baby on to her hip and dragging a chair close up to the television set, sat down and stared at the blank screen. ‘Leave the cat alone, I said,’ she remarked without heat.

   ‘What were you wanting?’ Cullam asked.

   ‘We’ll go into your kitchen, if you don’t mind, Mr Cullam.’

   ‘It’s in a right old mess.’

   ‘Never mind.’

   Mrs Cullam made no comment. She switched on the television without looking up. Two of the children began to fight in the depths of their armchair. Wexford followed their father into the kitchen. There was nowhere to sit so, pushing aside the handles of four encrusted saucepans, he leant against the gas cooker.

   ‘I only want to know who McCloy is,’ he said mildly.

   Cullam gave him a look of not altogether comfortable cunning. ‘How d’you know about McCloy, anyway?’

   ‘Come on now, you know I can’t tell you that.’ The children were screaming now above the sound of the racy athletics commentary. Wexford closed the door and he heard Mrs Cullam say, ‘Leave the bleeding cat alone, Barnabas.’ She had wasted a word. ‘You know who he is,’ Wexford said. ‘Now you can tell me.’