The Best Man To Die Read online

  ‘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.’

  Chapter 6

  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.’

  ‘I don’t know. Honest I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t know who he is, but last night in the pub you asked Mr Hatton if he’d been seeing much of McCloy lately. You wouldn’t touch McCloy because you like to sleep quiet in your bed.’

  ‘I tell you, I don’t know who he is and I never saw him.’ Wexford removed his elbow from its dangerous proximity to a half-full plate of cold chips. ‘You didn’t like Mr Hatton very much, did you? You wouldn’t walk home with him, though he was going your way. So you went on ahead and maybe you hung about a bit under those trees.’ Pursuing the line, he watched Cullam’s big beefy face begin to lose colour. ‘I reckon you must have done, Cullam. A strong young fellow like you doesn’t take thirty-five minutes to get here from the Kingsbrook bridge.’

  In a low, resentful voice, Cullam said, ‘I was sick. I was nearly home and I come over queer. I’m not used to scotch and I went into the gents down by the station to be sick.’

  ‘Let me congratulate you on your powers of recovery. You were fit enough to be out on a country walk at seven-thirty this morning. Or were you just popping back to see you’d left Hatton neat and tidy? I want to see the clothes you wore last night.’

  ‘They’re out on the line.’

  Wexford looked at him, his eyebrows almost vanishing into the vestiges of his hair, and the implications in that look were unmistakable. Cullam fidgeted, he moved to the crock- filled sink, leaning on it compressing his lips.

  ‘I washed them’ he said. ‘Pullover and trousers and a shirt. They was – well, they were in a bit of a state.’ He shifted his feet.

  ‘Charming,’ Wexford said unkindly. ‘You washed them? What d’you have a wife for?’ For the first time he noticed the washing machine, a big gleaming automatic affair, and the only object in that kitchen that was not stained or chipped or coated with clotted food drips. He opened the back door and eyed the sagging clothesline from which the three garments Cullam had named hung between a row of napkins. ‘The blessings of modern mechanisation,’ he said. ‘Very nice too. I often remark these days how the roles of the sexes have been reversed.’ His voice became deceptively friendly and Cullam licked his thick lips. ‘A man can be dead tired after a week’s work but he can still give his wife a helping hand. One touch of a button and the family wash comes out whiter than white. In fact, a gadget like that turns chores into pleasure, you might say. Men are all little boys at heart, when all’s said and done, and it’s not only women that like to have these little playthings to make a break in the daily round. Besides, they cost so much, you might as well get some fun out of them. Don’t tell me that little toy cost you less than a hundred and twenty, Cullam.’

  ‘A hundred and twenty-five,’ said Cullam with modest pride. He was quite disarmed and, advancing upon the machine, he opened the gleaming porthole. ‘You set your programme…’ A last uneasy look at the chief inspector told him his visitor was genuinely interested, paying no more than a routine call. ‘Put in your powder,’ he said, ‘and Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘I knew a fellow,’ Wexford lied ruminatively, ‘a lorry driver like yourself. Big family too and we all know what inroads a big family makes. He got in bad company, I’m sorry to say. His wife kept on at him, you see, wanting more gear about the house. He’d already turned a blind eye when a couple of his lorries got hi-jacked. Well, you can’t call it a crime, can you, looking the other way in a café when some body’s nicking your vehicle from a lay-by?’ Cullam, closed the porthole, keeping his head turned. ‘They paid well, this bad company. Mind you, this fellow jibbed a bit when they offered him two hundred to knock off a bloke who wouldn’t play along with them, but not for long. He reckoned he’d a right to nice things the same as this bad company he’d got in with. And why not? We’re all equal th
ese days. Share and share alike, this fellow said. So he hung about in a lonely spot one night, just where the other fellow was due to pass by and – well, Bob’s your uncle, as you so succinctly put it. He’s doing twelve years, as a matter of fact.’

  Cullam looked at him, truculently disillusioned.

  ‘I saved up my overtime for that washer,’ he said.

  ‘Sure it wasn’t McCloy’s little dropsy for services rendered? Isn’t a man’s life worth a hundred and twenty nicker, Cullam? There’s a sump on that machine of yours, you know. I can’t help asking myself if there’s blood and hair and brains in that sump, you know. Oh, you needn’t look like that. We could find it. We can take that machine apart this afternoon, and your drains. They’re a funny council, Sewingbury. I knew a family – six children in that case there were – they got evicted neck and crop just because they cracked a drain-pipe. Vandalism, the council called it. We’ll get your drains up. Cullam, but we’re busy right now. I don’t reckon we could find the labour to get them put back again.’

  ‘You bastard,’ said Cullam.

  ‘I didn’t hear that. My hearing’s not what it was, but I haven’t got one foot in the grave. I’d like to sit down, though. You can take that rubbish off that chair and wipe it, will you?’

  Cullam sat on his washing machine, his long legs dangling. Behind the closed door the programme had changed from athletics to wrestling and once more the baby had begun to cry.

  ‘I told you,’ said its father, ‘I don’t know who McCloy is and I don’t. I just said that to Charlie to needle him. Always bragging and boasting, he got on my wick.’

  Wexford didn’t have to absorb any more of the squalor to see what Cullam meant. This house was the very embodiment of sleazy noisy discomfort. It was a discomfort which would have brief pause only while its inhabitants slept and it extended from the top to the lowest level. The man and his wife were weighed down by almost every burden known to the philoprogenitive, ill-paid artisan; their children were miserable, badly brought up and perhaps ill-treated; their home overcrowded, even their animals wretchedly tormented. The parents had neither the character nor the love to make coping and organization tenable. He remembered Charlie Hatton’s brand-new flat, the pretty young wife with her smart clothes. These two men did the same sort of job. Or did they?