The Best Man To Die Read online

  ‘It’s different for men,’ said Wexford.

  ‘How did you guess? At any rate, for once my parents presented a united front. After my mother had obligingly betrayed all my confidences to him in my hearing, he said he would find the man – Michael, that is – and compel him to marry me. I couldn’t stand any more, so I locked myself in my bedroom and in the morning I went to Newhaven and got on the boat. I parted from my mother just about on speaking terms. My father had gone out.’

  ‘Thank you for unbending, Miss Fanshawe. Have you been suggesting that the dead girl might have been your father’s mistress?’

  ‘You think it impossible that my father would drive his wife and mistress together to London? I assure you it’s not unlikely. For him it would simply have been a matter of bringing the girl along, telling my mother she was coming with them and paying her handsomely for the hardship occasioned.’

  Wexford kept his eyes from Nora Fanshawe’s face. She was as unlike his Sheila as could be. They had in common only their youth and health and the fact, like all women, of each being someone’s daughter. The girl’s father was dead. In a flash of unusual sentimentality, Wexford thought he would rather be dead than be the man about whom a daughter could say such things.

  In a level voice he said, ‘You gave me to understand that as far as you know there was no woman at the time but your mother. You have no idea who this girl could be?’

  ‘That was the impression I had. I was evidently wrong.’

  ‘Miss Fanshawe, this girl clearly could not have been a friend or neighbour at Eastover whom your parents were simply driving to London. In that case her relatives would have enquired for her, raised a hue and cry at the time of the accident.’

  ‘Surely that would apply whoever she was?’

  ‘Not necessarily. She could be a girl with no fixed address or someone whose landlady or friends expected her to move away about that particular weekend. She may be listed some where among missing persons and no search have begun for her because the manner of her life showed that occasional apparent disappearances were not unusual. In other words, she could be a girl who led a somewhat itinerant life in the habit of taking jobs in various parts of the country or moving about to live with different men. Suppose, for instance, she had spent the weekend in some South Coast resort and tried to hitch a lift back to London from your father?’

  ‘My father wouldn’t have given a lift to anyone. Both he and my mother disapproved of hitch-hiking. Chief Inspector, you’re talking as if everyone in that car is now dead. Aren’t you forgetting that my mother is very much alive? She’s well on the way to recovery and her brain isn’t affected. She insists there was no one in the car but my father and herself.’ Nora Fanshawe lifted her eyes and her voice lost some of its confidence. ‘I suppose it’s possible she could be having some sort of psychological block. She wants to believe my father was a changed man, that no girl was with them, so she’s convinced herself they were alone. That could be it.’

  ‘I’m sure it must be.’ Wexford got up. ‘Good night, Miss Fanshawe. Thank you for the coffee. I take it you’ll be staying here a few days?’

  ‘I’ll keep in touch. Good night, Chief Inspector.’

  The next step, he thought as he walked home, would be to investigate the missing persons list in the holiday towns and London too, if those proved fruitless. That was routine stuff and not for him. Why, anyway, was he following this road accident that wasn’t even properly his province to distract his mind from the urgency of the Hatton affair? Because it had features so distracting and so inexplicable that no-one could simply explain them away?

  Of course it would turn out that the dead girl was merely someone Jerome Fanshawe had come across that weekend and who had taken his fancy. Nothing so dramatic as Nora Fanshawe had suggested need have happened. Why shouldn’t Fanshawe just have said to his wife, ‘This young lady has missed her last train and since she lives in London I said we’d give her a lift’? But in that case Mrs Fanshawe would hardly deny the girl’s presence.

  There was more to it than that. There was the handbag. Camb had searched that handbag and found in it nothing but make-up and a little money. That wasn’t natural, Wexford reflected. Where were her keys? Come to that, where were all the other things women usually stuff into bags, handkerchiefs, dress shop bills, receipts, tickets, pen, letters? The things which were there were anonymous, the things which were not there were the objects by which someone might be identified.

  Wexford let himself into his own house and the dog Clytemnestra galloped to meet him.

  ‘What would you do,’ Wexford said to his wife, ‘if I brought a young girl home and offered you a thousand pounds to let her stay?’

  ‘You haven’t got a thousand pounds,’ said Mrs Wexford.

  ‘True. There’s always a fly in the ointment.’

  ‘On the subject of young girls and money, Mr Vigo has sent a whacking bill for your daughter’s tooth.’

  Wexford looked at it and groaned. ‘Pleached walks!’ he said. ‘Chinese Chippendale! I just hope one of my customers pinches his orrery, that’s all. Is there any beer in the house?’

  Suppressing a smile, his wife stepped over the now recumbent form of the knitted dog and went into the kitchen to open a can.

  A pewter tankard at his elbow, Wexford spent the next couple of hours studying Hatton’s log book and Mrs Hatton’s engagement diary.

  It was the week immediately preceding May 21st which interested him. On the 22nd Hatton had paid five hundred pounds into his bank and two days prior to that had either been in possession of a large sum of money or confident of acquiring it, for on the 21st, a Tuesday, he had ordered his new set of teeth.

  Mrs Hatton’s engagement diary was a calendar in the shape of a rectangular book. The left-hand pages bore a coloured photograph of some English beauty spot with an appropriate verse, both for the picture and the time of year, while the right-hand pages were each divided into seven sections. The days of the week were listed on the left side and a space of perhaps one inch by five was allowed for brief jottings.

  Wexford opened it at Sunday, May 12th.

  The photograph was of Kentish fruit orchards and the lines beneath it from As You Like It: ‘Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May while they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.’

  Not true of the Hattons, he thought. Now to see how Mrs Hatton had occupied herself during that particular week.

  Nothing for Sunday. Monday May 13th: C. left for Leeds. Mother to tea. Tuesday May 14th: Rang Gas Board. C. home 3 p.m. Pictures. And here in Hatton’s log book was the Leeds trip confirmed. He had stopped twice on the way up, at Norman Cross for lunch at the Merrie England café, and at Dave’s Diner near Retford for a cup of tea. His room in Leeds was with a Mrs Hubble at 21 Ladysmith Road, and on the return journey he had stopped only once and again at the Merrie England. There was nothing in the log book at this stage to make Wexford even pause. Hatton had done the journey in the shortest possible time, leaving no possible spare moment for undercover activities. He turned back to the diary.

  Wednesday, May l5th: C. off work. Rang doctor. Mem, N.H.S., not private. Interesting. Hatton had been ill and at that time apparently not in funds. Thursday May 16th: C. summer flu. Ring Jack and Marilyn put off dinner. There was no entry for Friday May 17th.

  Saturday, May 18th: C. better. Doctor called again. Jim and mother came.

  That completed the week. Wexford turned the page to Sunday, May 18th: C. left for Leeds. Mem, will ring me 8 p.m. J and M came for drinks and solo game. Opposite was a photograph of a large country house and the lines: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in pos session of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ Wexford smiled grimly to himself. Monday, May 20th: C. bad again. Left Leeds late. Home 10 p.m.

  Quickly Wexford checked with the log book. Yes, here was Hatton’s entry that he had been too ill to start the return journey until noon. He
had driven home slowly and stopped twice on the way at the Hollybush at Newark and at the Merrie England. But had he really been ill or had he been shamming, crafty sick to give himself extra time in Leeds? For however he acquired that money he must have acquired it, Wexford was certain, during the 19th or the 20th of May.

  Tuesday, May 21st C. fit again. Day off. Saw Jack and Marilyn. Appointment 2 p.m. with dentist.

  A precise little woman, Lilian Hatton, if not exactly verbose. Impossible to tell if she knew anything. The last place to which she would have confided her secrets was this calendar diary.

  It didn’t look as if Hatton had been up to much on that Monday morning in Leeds, but you never knew. There was always the night between Sunday and Monday to be considered. For all Wexford knew or could remember there might have been a bank robbery in that city at that time. It would all have to be checked. He wondered why the Fanshawe business kept intruding and upsetting his concentration, and then suddenly he knew.

  Fanshawe had crashed his car on Monday, May 20th; an unidentified girl had died on May 20th and also on May 20th something big had happened to Charlie Hatton.

  But there couldn’t be a connection. Fanshawe was a wealthy stockbroker with a flat in Mayfair and, apart from a bit of moral nastiness, not a stain on his character. Charlie Hatton was a cocky little lorry driver who had probably never set foot in Mayfair all his life.

  It was just a curious coincidence that Hatton had been killed on the day following that of Mrs Fanshawe’s regaining consciousness.

  Wexford closed the books and emptied his tankard for the third time. He was tired and fanciful and he had drunk too much beer. Yawning ponderously, he put Clytemnestra outside the back door and while he waited for her, stood staring emptily at the cloudless, star-filled sky.

  Chapter 11

  ‘Good morning, Miss Thompson,’ Wexford said with a heartiness he didn’t feel.

  ‘Mrs Pertwee, if you don’t mind.’ She picked up one of the wire baskets that were stacked outside the supermarket and gave him a selfconscious, defiant stare. ‘Jack and me got married very quietly yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘May I be among the first to offer my congratulations?’

  ‘Thanks very much, I’m sure. We didn’t tell no one about it, just went off to church quietly by ourselves. Jack’s been so cut up about poor Charlie. When are you going to catch his killer, that’s what I want to know? Not putting yourselves out, I reckon, on account of him being a working fella. Been different if he was one of your upper crust. This capitalist society we live in makes me spit, just spit it does.’

  Wexford backed a little, fearing she might suit the action to the word. The bride snapped her toothbrush eyelashes at him. ‘You want to pull your socks up,’ she said relentlessly. ‘Whoever killed Charlie, hanging’d be too good for him.’

  ‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Wexford mildly, ‘and I thought you progressives were dead against capital punishment.’

  She banged into the supermarket and Wexford went on his way, smiling wryly. Camb eyed him warily as he entered the police station.

  ‘Getting interested in this Fanshawe business, I gather, sir. I met Miss Fanshawe on my way in.’

  ‘So interested,’ Wexford said, ‘that I’m sending Detective Constable Loring down to find out who’s missing in the holiday towns and it might be worth our while to check with London too.’

  Burden had left for Stamford. Stepping into the lift, Wexford decided to do the London checking himself. Young women were beginning to get on his nerves. There were so many of them about, and it seemed to him they caused as much trouble to a policeman as burglars. Now to see how many of them were missing in London. This task was for him somewhat infra dig, but until Burden and Sergeant Martin brought him some information he had little else to do, and this way he could, at any rate, be certain it was well done.

  By lunchtime he had narrowed his search down to three out of the dozens of girls missing in the London area. The first was a Carol Pearson, of Muswell Hill, interesting to him because she had worked as a hairdresser’s improver at a shop in Eastcheap. Jerome Fanshawe’s office was in Eastcheap and the hairdresser’s had a barber’s shop attached to it. Hers was also a significant name because she had black hair and her disappearance was reported on May 17th.

  The second girl, Doreen Dacres, was like Carol Pearson, black-haired and aged twenty, and his interest was aroused because she had left her room in Finchley on May 15th to take a job in Eastbourne. Nothing further had been heard of her either in Finchley or at the Eastbourne club address.

  Bridget Culross was the last name with which he felt he need concern himself. She was twenty-two years old and had been a nurse at the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street. On Saturday May 18th she had gone to spend the weekend with an unnamed boy friend in Brighton, but had not returned to the clinic. It was assumed that she had eloped with her boy friend. Her hair was also dark, her life erratic and her only relative an aunt in County Leix.

  Young women! Wexford thought irritably, and he thought also of his own daughter who was making him scrape the bottom of his pocket so that at some future possible never- never time she might be able to smile without restraint before the cameras.

  The long day passed slowly and it grew very hot. Clouds massed heavily, dense and fungoid in shape, over the huddled roofs of the town. But they did nothing to diminish the heat, seeming instead to enclose it and its still, threatening air under a thick muffling lid. The sun had gone, blanked out by sultry vapour.

  To an observer Wexford might be thought only to be sitting, like many other inhabitants of Kingsmarkham, waiting for the storm to break. He did nothing. He lay back by the open window with his eyes closed and the warm breath less air came to him just as in another cooler season heat fanned from the grid lower down the wall. No one disturbed him and he was glad. He was thinking.

  In Stamford, where it was raining, Inspector Burden went to a country house supposedly occupied by a man named McCloy and found it deserted, its doors locked and its garden overgrown. There were no neighbours and no one to tell him where McCloy had gone.

  Detective Constable Loring drove along the promenades of the south coast towns, calling at police stations and paying particular attention to those clubs and cafés and amusement halls where girls come and go and pass each other. He had found a club where Doreen Dacres had been engaged but where no Doreen Dacres had arrived and this comforted him. He even telephoned Wexford to tell him about it, his elation subsiding somewhat when he heard the chief inspector had also found this out three hours before.

  The storm broke at five o’clock.

  For some time before this heavy clouds had increased and in the west the sky had become a dense purplish-black, a range of mountainous cumulus against which the outlines of buildings took on a curious clarity and the trees stood out livid and sickly bright. In spite of the clammy heat, shoppers began to hurry, but the rain which fell so readily when rainy days preceded it, now, after a fortnight’s drought, held off as if it could only be squeezed out as a result of some acute and agonising pressure. It was as though the clouds were not themselves mere vapour but impermeable sagging sacks, purposely constructed and hung to contain water.

  The first whispering breeze came like a hot breath and Wexford closed his windows. Almost imperceptibly at first the trees in the High Street pavement began to sway. Most of the merchandise outside greengrocers’ and florists’ had already been taken in and now it was the turn of the sun-blinds to be furled and waterproof awnings to take their place. The air seemed to press against Wexford’s windows. He stood against them, watching the dark western sky and the ash-blue cumulus now edged with brilliant white.

  The lightning was the forked kind and it branched suddenly like a firework and yet like the limb of a blazing tree. As its fiery twigs flashed out and cut into the inky cloud, the thunder rolled out of the west.

  Wexford dearly loved a storm. He liked the forked lightning better than the zig-za
g kind and now he was gratified by a second many-branched display that seemed to spring and grow from the river itself, blossoming in the sky above the Kingsbrook meadows. This time the thunder burst with a pistol-shot snap and with an equal suddenness, as if at last those swollen vessels had been punctured, the rain began to fall.

  The first heavy drops splashed in coin shapes on the pavement below and in their tubs the pink flowers on the fore court dipped and swayed. For a brief moment it seemed that the rain still hesitated, that it would only patter dispiritedly on the dust-filled gutters where its drops rolled like quicksilver. But then, urged on as it were by a series of multiple lightning flashes, it hesitated no more and, instead of increasing gradually from the first tentative shower, the water gushed forth in a vast fountain. It dashed against the windows, washing off dust in a great cleansing stream, and Wexford moved away from the glass. The sudden flood was more like a wave than rain and it blinded the window as surely as darkness.

  He heard the car splash in and the doors slam. Burden, perhaps. The internal phone rang and Wexford lifted the receiver.

  ‘I’ve got Cullam here, sir.’ It was Martin’s voice. ‘Shall I bring him up? I thought you might like to talk to him.’

  Maurice Cullam was afraid of the storm. That didn’t displease Wexford. With some scorn he eyed the man’s pale face and the bony, none-too-steady hands.

  ‘Scared, Cullam? Not to worry, we’ll all die together.’

  ‘Big laugh,’ said Cullam, and he winced as the thunder broke above their heads. ‘I don’t reckon it’s safe being so high up. When I was a kid I was in a house that got struck.’

  ‘But you got out unscathed, eh? Well they say the devil looks after his own. Why have you brought him here, Sergeant?’