The Best Man To Die

Chapter 10

‘They call themselves McCloy Ltd.,’ Burden said wearily, ‘but the last member of the firm of that name died twenty years ago. It’s an old established set-up, but I reckon it’s on its last legs now. In this so-called affluent society of ours folks buy new stuff, they don’t want this reconditioned rubbish.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Wexford, thinking of Cullam.

‘The Yard put me on to six other McCloys all more or less in the hardware business or on its fringes. Not a smell of anything fishy about one of them. Stamford have given me a list of local McCloys and there again not a sniff as far as they know. But I’ll be off to Stamford in the morning to have a scent round. The local force have promised me all the help I need.’

Wexford lounged back in his swivel chair and the dying sun played on his face. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘I wonder if we haven’t been starting from the wrong end. We’ve been looking for McCloy to lead us to his hired assassin. We might do better to find the hired assassin and let him lead us to McCloy.’

‘Cullam?’

‘Maybe. I want Martin to be Cullam’s shadow and if he goes and pays cash for that refrigerator we’re really getting somewhere. Meanwhile I’m going to make Hatton’s log book and Mrs Hatton’s engagement book my homework for tonight. But first, how about a quick one at the Olive and Dove?’

‘Not for me thanks, sir. I haven’t had an evening in for a week now. Divorce is against my wife’s principles but she might get ideas as to a legal separation.’

Wexford laughed and they went down in the lift together. The evening was warm and clear, the light and the long soft shadows more flattering to this market town High Street than the noonday sun. The old houses were at their best in it, their shabbiness, the cracks in their fabric veiled, as an ageing face is veiled and smoothed by candlelight. By day the alleys that ran into a scruffy hinterland were rat-hole rubbish traps but now they seemed romantic lanes where lovers might meet under the bracket lamps and as the sun departed, watch the moon ride over a Grimms’ fairy tale huddle of pinnacled rooftops.

As yet it was only eight o’clock and the sun reluctant to leave without treating its worshippers to a pyrotechnic display of rose and gold flames that burnt up the whole western sky. Wexford stood on the south side of the bridge and listened to the river chuckling. Such an innocent river, for all that it knew a secret, for all that one of its stones had put a man out of sight of the sunset!

All the Street windows of the Olive and Dove were open, the curtains fanning out gently over window boxes and over fuchsias that dripped red flowers. On the forecourt a band of Morris dancers had assembled. They wore the motley coat of jesters and one of them was hopping around on a hobby horse. To his amusement Wexford picked out George Carter among the company.

‘Lovely night, Mr Carter,’ he said jovially. Rather shame facedly Carter waved at him a stick with ribbons and bells on. Wexford went into the saloon bar.

At a table in the alcove on the dining-room wall sat the girl Camb had brought to him earlier in the day, an elderly woman and a man. Wexford brought his beer and as he passed them the man got up as if to take his leave.

‘Good evening,’ Wexford said. ‘Have you decided to stay at the Olive?’

The girl was sparing with her smiles. She nodded sharply to him and said, naming his rank precisely, ‘I’d like you to meet my father’s solicitor, Mr Updike. Uncle John, this is Detective Chief Inspector Wexford.’

‘How do you do?’

‘And I don’t think you’ve met my aunt, Mrs Browne?’

Wexford looked from one to the other. Marvellous the way he always had to do Camb’s work for him! The aunt was looking pale but excited, the solicitor gratified. ‘I’m quite prepared to accept that you’re Miss Fanshawe now, Miss Fanshawe,’ Wexford said.

‘I’ve known Nora since she was so high,’ said Updike. ‘You need have no doubt that this is Nora.’ And he gave Wexford a card naming a London firm, Updike, Updike and Sanger of Ava Maria Lane. The chief inspector looked at it, then again at Mrs Browne who was Nora Fanshawe grown old. ‘I’m satisfied.’ He passed on to an empty table.

The solicitor went to catch his train and presently Wexford heard the aunt say:

‘I’ve had a long day, Nora. I think I’ll just give the hospital a ring and then I’ll go up to bed.’

Wexford sat by the window, watching the Morris dancers. The music was amateurish and the performers self-conscious, but the evening was so beautiful that if you shut your eyes to the cars and the new shop blocks you might imagine yourself briefly in Shakespeare’s England. Someone carried out to the nine men a tray of bottled beer and the spell broke.

‘Come into the lounge,’ said a voice behind him.

Nora Fanshawe had removed the jacket of her suit and in the thin coffee-coloured blouse she looked more feminine. But she was still a creature of strong straight lines and planes and angles and she was still not smiling.

‘May I get you a drink, Miss Fanshawe?’ Wexford said, rising.

‘Better not.’ Her voice was abrupt and she didn’t thank him for the offer. ‘I’ve had too much already.’ And she added with a dead laugh, ‘We’ve been what my aunt calls celebrating. The resurrection of the dead, you see.’

They went into the lounge, sat down in deep cretonne covered armchairs and Nora Fanshawe said:

‘Mr Updike wouldn’t tell me the details of the accident. He wanted to spare me.’ She beckoned to the waiter and said without asking Wexford first, ‘Bring two coffees.’ Then she lit a king-size cigarette and slipped it into an amber holder. ‘You tell me about it,’ she said.

‘You don’t want to be spared?’

‘Of course not. I’m not a child and I didn’t like my father.’ Wexford gave a slight cough. ‘At about ten o’clock on May 20th,’ he began, ‘a man driving a petrol tanker on the north to south highway of Stowerton by-pass saw a car overturned and in flames on the fast lane of the south to north track. He reported it at once and when the police and ambulance got there they found the bodies of a man and a girl lying on the road and partially burned. A woman – your mother – had been flung clear on to the soft shoulder. She had multiple injuries and a fractured skull.’

‘Go on.’

‘What remained of the car was examined but, as far as could be told, there was nothing wrong with the brakes or the steering and the tires were nearly new.’

Nora Fanshawe nodded.

‘The inquest was adjourned until your mother regained consciousness. The road was wet and your mother has suggested that your father may have been driving exceptionally fast.’

‘He always drove too fast.’ She took the coffee that the waiter had brought and handed a cup to Wexford. He sensed that she would take it black and sugarless and he was right. ‘Since the dead girl wasn’t I,’ she said with repellently fault less grammar, ‘who was she?’

‘I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell us that.’

She shrugged, ‘How should I know?’

Wexford glanced at the curled lip, the hard direct eyes. ‘Miss Fanshawe,’ he said sharply, ‘I’ve answered your questions, but you haven’t even met me half-way. This afternoon you came to my office as if you were doing me a favour. Don’t you think it’s time you unbent a little?’

She flushed at that and muttered. ‘I don’t unbend much.’

‘No, I can see that. You’re twenty-three, aren’t you? Don’t you think all this upstage reserve is rather ridiculous?’

Her hand was small, but, ringless and with short nails as it was, it was like a man’s. He watched it move towards the cup and saucer and for a moment he thought she was going to take her coffee, get up and leave him. She frowned a little and her mouth hardened.

‘I’ll tell you about my father,’ she said at last. ‘It might just help. I first knew about his infidelities when I was twelve,’ she began. ‘Or, let me say, I knew he was behaving as other people’s fathers didn’t behave. He brought a girl home and told my mother she was going to stay with us. They had a row in my presence and when it was over my father gave my mother five hundred pounds.’ She took the cigarette stub from her holder and replaced it with a fresh one. This sudden chain smoking was the only sign she gave of emotion. ‘He bribed her, you understand. It was quite direct and open. “Let her stay and you can have this money”. That was how it was. The girl stayed six months. Two years later he bought my mother a new car and at just the same time I caught him in his office with his secretary.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘On the floor,’ she said coldly. ‘After that it was an understood thing that when my father wanted a new mistress he paid my mother accordingly. By that I mean what he thought the girl was worth to him. He wanted my mother to stay because she was a good hostess and kept house well. When I was eighteen I went up to Oxford.'

‘After I got my degree I told my mother I could keep her now and she should leave my father. Her response was to deny everything and to tell my father to stop my allowance. He refused to stop it – mainly because my mother had asked him to, I suppose. I haven’t drawn it for two years now, but…’ She glanced swiftly at her bag, her watch. ‘You can’t always refuse to take presents,’ she said tightly, ‘not when it’s your own mother, not when you’re an only child.’

‘So you took a job in Germany?’ Wexford asked.

‘I thought it would be as well to get away.’ The flush returned, an unbecoming mottled red. ‘In January,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I met a man, a salesman who made business trips to Cologne from this country.’ Wexford waited for her to talk of love and instead heard her say with a strange sense of shock, ‘I gave up my job, as I told you, and came back to London to live with him. When I told him that if we were to be married I wouldn’t ask my father for a penny he… well, he threw me out.’

‘You returned to your parents?’

Nora Fanshawe raised her head and for the first time he saw her smile, an ugly harsh smile of self-mockery. ‘You’re a cold fish, aren’t you?’ she said surprisingly.

‘I was under the impression you despised sympathy, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Perhaps I do. Want some more coffee? No, nor do I. Yes, I went back to my parents. I was still sorry for my mother, you see. I thought my father was older now and I was older. I knew I could never live with them again, but I thought… Family quarrels are uncivilized, don’t you think? My mother was rather pathetic. She said she’d always wanted a grown-up daughter to be real friends with.’ Nora Fanshawe wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘Even upstage reserved characters like myself have their weak spots, Chief Inspector. I went to Eastover with them.’

‘And the quarrel, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘I’m coming to that. We’d been on surprisingly good terms up till then. My father called my mother darling once or twice and there was a kind of Darby and Joan air about them. They wanted to know what I was doing about getting another job and all was serene. So serene, in fact, that after we’d had a meal at the bungalow and a few drinks my mother did something she’d never done before. My father had gone off up to bed and she suddenly began to tell me what her life with him had been, the bribery and the humiliation and so on. She really talked as if I were a woman friend of her own age, her confidante. Well, we had about an hour of this and then she asked me if I had any romantic plans of my own. Those were her words. Like a fool I told her about the man I’d been living with. I say like a fool. Perhaps if I hadn’t been a fool I would have been the dead girl in the road.’

‘Your mother reacted unsympathetically?’

‘She goggled at me,’ said Nora Fanshawe, emphasizing the verb pedantically. ‘Then, before I could stop her she got my father out of bed and told him the whole thing. They both raved at me. My mother was hysterical and my father called me a lot of unpleasant names. I stood it for a bit and then I’m afraid I said to him that what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose and at least I wasn’t married.’ She sighed, moving her angular shoulders. ‘What do you think he said?’

‘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.