The Best Man To Die

Chapter 15

The news from Scotland came through at almost exactly the same time as Jack Pertwee’s revelation. Alexander McCloy had been sent to prison for two years on April 23rd, having been found guilty with two other men of organizing a break-in at a supermarket in Dundee on early-closing day, and stealing goods to the value of twelve hundred pounds. A caretaker had been slightly injured during the course of the robbery and McCloy would have received a heavier sentence but for his unblemished record.

‘So while Hatton was in Leeds that May weekend,’ said Wexford in the morning, ‘McCloy had already been safely locked up in Scotland for a month.’

‘It looks that way,’ said Burden.

‘And that not only means he wasn’t available to be black mailed, but also that Hatton’s source of – well, I was nearly going to say legitimate, income was cut off. In fact, in May Hatton found himself shorter of money than probably at any time since he was married.’

‘Mrs Hatton said that when he was ill during the previous week he hesitated about sending for the doctor privately. By that time he’d presumably spent whatever he’d made when they nicked Bardsley’s lorry in March.’

‘At his rate of expenditure,’ Wexford cut in, ‘he probably had. It must have given him quite a nasty feeling. Panicked him, I daresay. Can’t you imagine him, Mike, looking to the future when he wouldn’t be able to stand all those rounds in the Dragon or take his wife frittering on a Saturday after noon or cut a fine open-handed figure at his friend’s wedding?’

‘I imagine he quickly looked round for another source of supply.’

‘We’ll go up to the Stowerton By-pass,’ Wexford said, getting up, ‘and to do some reconnoitring. Our two cases are converging, Mike, and unless I’m mistaken, they’re soon going to bump.’

‘There was no suitcase,’ said Sergeant Martin, ‘but I want you to look at the clothes she was wearing. They’re in a bad way, Miss Lewis. You must try to keep calm.’

She was a nurse and trained to control herself. Martin took her into another room where the burnt torn clothes lay like rubbish heap rags on the table. Each blackened tattered garment lay separate from the others and there was some thing in this arrangement that suggested a parody of a draper’s window.

The bodice of the coat and of the dress were charred fragments, although their skirts were almost intact and patches of orange and yellow showed between the scorch marks. The dead girl’s brassiere was an ellipse of wire from which every shred of cotton and lace had been burnt away. Margaret Lewis shuddered, keeping her hands behind her back. Then she touched the orange shoes, the white lace stockings as wide-meshed and fine as a hair-net, and she began to cry.

‘I gave her those stockings,’ she whispered, ‘for her birthday.’

Their tops only were charred, but a long brown mark ran down to the knee of one of them where a flame had licked. Martin put his arm under the girl’s elbow and led her away.

‘I’ll tell you everything I can about Bridie,’ she said and she gulped the tea Loring had brought her. ‘And everything she told me about Jay. She met him in October while she was nursing his wife. The wife was in a long time on account of having a threatened toxaemia and Bridie used to go out with him after he’d visited her. She’d come off duty at eight-thirty, you see, and he’d just about be leaving.

‘Well, he dropped her after his wife left the clinic and I thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. He turned up again in May and the whole thing was on again. Bridie started talking about marrying him. Oh, it was awful, really, and I didn’t used to listen much. I wish I had now.’

‘Did you ever see him, Miss Lewis?’ Martin asked.

Margaret Lewis shook her head. The colour had come back into her cheeks and she wore no make-up to smear when she dabbed at the lids with a spotless handkerchief. ‘We weren’t working in the same department, you see. Lots of people must have. You’ll have to ask the other girls. Bridie said he was quite old, lots older than her, and that was the one thing that made her – well, hesitate, if you know what I mean.’

‘So you wouldn’t know if this is him?’ And Martin showed her a photograph of Jerome Fanshawe. It had been taken by flash at a company dinner and the face was hard, confident, heavily jowled, but because of its arrogance and its strength and despite its age, not unattractive to women.

She looked at it with the distaste of the very young and, not answering him, said, ‘I told you they went to Brighton on the 18th of May?’ Loring nodded. ‘Bridie was going to be met by him at Marble Arch. I saw her go off in that yellow coat and dress. She said she’d have to amuse herself during the daytime because Jay would be at his conference. That’s why he was going, you see, to be at this conference.’

Loring gave another encouraging smile. This was the sort of thing Wexford wanted. Then he remembered his search through the clinic’s patient list.

‘The man we had in mind,’ he said carefully, ‘we couldn’t find his name among the clinic’s patients, you know. His wife denies she was ever in there.’

The girl touched the photograph and looked up at him in bewilderment. ‘How old is she, for goodness’ sake?’

‘The wife? Fifty, fifty-five.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Margaret Lewis blushed. ‘I think this has been my fault. Jay’s wife was in the maternity department. They’re always separate, you know, the general and the maternity departments in hospitals. Always. Bridie had done her midwifery and she was nursing Jay’s wife when she was ill before the birth and while she was having the baby.’

Burden was driving. With the accident plan Camb had given him on his lap, Wexford looked up and said:

‘Park in the next lay-by, Mike, and we’ll walk.’

An ancient milestone which had always stood on the bank since this highway was the coaching road to London, by chance pin-pointed the crash spot. From it a slow incline wound down into the valley.

The northbound and southbound sections of the by-pass, opened a year before, were separated by a strip of grass on which grew clumps of thin birch trees. Fanshawe’s Jaguar had struck one of these trees, overturned and caught fire. Wexford and Burden waited for two cars and a van to pass and then they crossed the road to the centre strip.

A large area of this grass had been burnt but by now new growth had replaced it and there was nothing but a ragged black stump to show where the crash tree had been.

‘First,’ said Wexford, ‘we’ll work on the assumption that the girl was in the car with the Fanshawes, she was Jerome Fanshawe’s fancy piece and he was driving her back to London. Who sits where? Mrs Fanshawe in the back and her supplanter next to Don Juan or vice versa?’

‘Surely there must have been some amount of pretence, sir,’ said Burden, wrinkling his fastidious nose. ‘It can’t have been all open and above-board. The girl would have sat in the back.’

‘It’s the seat on the driver’s left that’s called the suicide seat, Mike, and whereas the girl died, Mrs Fanshawe is still alive. If the girl was there at all, she sat in the front.’ Wexford made a sweeping gesture with his right hand. ‘Up comes Fanshawe, driving like a maniac he was at eighty or so. Now there’s no evidence of a burst tire and the windscreen didn’t shatter. What did Fanshawe see that made him cry out “God!” and pull the wheel over?’

‘Something in the road?’

‘Yes, but what? A big piece of metal or a wooden box? He’d have sailed right over cardboard. Anyway, they didn’t find anything in the road afterwards.’

‘A dog?’

‘Fanshawe wouldn’t have crashed for the sake of a dog. And he didn’t hit one because there was no body.’

‘Then he saw the girl herself,’ said Burden carefully, ‘stepping out of the centre section to wave him down.’

‘But we’re assuming the girl was in the car. Don’t you agree with me now that she can’t have been?’

Burden walked a little way away from him and stopped by the black birch stump. ‘If the girl stepped off here,’ he said, taking a couple of paces towards the fast lane, ‘and Fanshawe thought he was going to hit her, why didn’t he swerve to the left, into the middle lane, instead of to the right? The road must have been clear as there were no witnesses to the accident. He swerved inwards, to the right, mounted this centre strip and hit the tree.’

Wexford shrugged. A car in the fast lane leapt past them at seventy. ‘Feel like experimenting, Mike?’ he said with a grin. ‘Just pop out into the road now, wave your arms and see what happens.’

‘You can, if you’re so keen,’ said Burden, involuntarily retreating from the edge. ‘I want to stay alive.’

‘Funny that girl didn’t. Mike, it couldn’t have been straight suicide, could it?’

Burden said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose it could have at that. Assume she has no connection with Fanshawe, assume she went to the South Coast with another boy friend who ditched her so that she had to hitch a lift as far as here. The driver that brought her to this point might then have dropped her at her own request. She crosses the centre section, waits until a fast car comes and steps out suddenly in front of it. Of course, that doesn’t explain why Fanshawe pulled to the right instead of to the left.’

‘And it doesn’t explain why everything that might have identified her was removed from her handbag. If she was a suicide, there’s, no possible reason why she should have removed it herself. Anyway, you seem to have forgotten our main reason for coming here. The crash occurred at ten to ten and Hatton passed on the other highway, going in the other direction, at approximately twenty to. Impoverished Hatton, desperate to replenish the empty coffers. Suppose he passed a little later than that and saw the girl step out? Now, if Fanshawe were still alive, if, say, he’d killed the girl without damage to his car, and had simply driven on, Hatton might have blackmailed him. But Fanshawe is dead, Mike.’

Now it was Burden’s turn to shrug and look baffled. He eyed the other highway, the southbound section, the hedge that bounded it, the meadows behind that hedge. The road came to a crest some fifty yards to the north of where they stood and above this ridge nothing but the pale milky sky was visible.

‘If there was some sort of foul play,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘if, for instance, the girl was pushed into the road… Oh, I know it’s fantastic, but haven’t you got something of the sort in mind yourself? If she was pushed and Hatton, approaching over the brow of the hill, was a witness, why didn’t whoever it was doing the pushing, see him first? His lorry was an outsize very high van and anyone standing here would see the top of it appearing over the crest seconds before its driver could see him. Look, here comes a lorry now.’

Wexford turned his eyes towards the brow of the hill. The lorry’s roof loomed above it and it seemed that some seconds passed before the cab came into view.

‘It was dark,’ he said.

‘Anyone standing where we are could see its headlights at precisely the same time as its driver saw him.’

The same thought striking each man simultaneously, they walked towards the crest. Beneath them half Sussex lay spread, broad meadows, green and gold, the dense bluish shadows of woodland and in the folds between, farmhouses and the occasional pointing spire of a church. Through this pastoral landscape the road wound its twin white ribbon, hummocking here, dipping there, and sometimes entirely concealed by the green swelling land.

Not more than twenty yards beyond the crest, the south bound section widened into an arc and in this lay-by the occupants of two cars sat picnicking.

‘Perhaps he parked here for a bit,’ Burden said. ‘Walked up this way for – well, a natural purpose or just because he needed air. He hadn’t been well, after all.’

But Wexford looked at the view and said presently, ‘Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.’

The huge American car with its splayed fins dwarfed every other vehicle in the Olive’s car park. Crossing the forecourt with Burden, Wexford saw on closer scrutiny that it was neither new nor well cared for. One of its headlamps was broken and the rust on its chrome rim showed that it had been broken a long time. Scratches marred the bluish-green finish on its wings. Here in this tiny car park in a small country town it was an unwieldy mass of metal that doubt less gave a poor return for the petrol it devoured. It took up an immense amount of space but its seating capacity was small.

‘Reminds me of one of those prehistoric monsters,’ said Wexford, ‘all brawn and no brain.’

‘Must have been grand once, though.’

‘That’s what they said about the dinosaurs.’

They sat in the saloon bar. In the far corner Nora Fanshawe sat on a leather settle beside a huge fair man with a small head. His expression was vapid, his shoulders of Mister Universe proportions. Another dinosaur, Wexford thought, and suddenly he was sure this was the owner of the car.

‘We keep running into each other, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘You keep running into me,’ said the girl dryly. She wore another of her finely tailored, neatly stitched suits, navy blue this time and as slick and business-like as a uniform. ‘This is Michael Jameson. You may remember, I mentioned him to you.’

The hand that took Wexford’s had a damp palm. ‘Nice little place this, if a bit off the map.’

‘Depends where you make your maps.’

‘Come again? Oh, I see. Ha ha!’

‘We were just going,’ said Nora Fanshawe. Then her strong masculine voice quavered a little as she said, ‘Ready, Michael?’ Suddenly she was vulnerable. Wexford knew that wistful pleading look. He had seen it before in the eyes of plain women, the pathetic terror of rejection that, because it deprives them of confidence, makes them plainer.

Jameson got up sluggishly, reluctantly; he winked at Wexford and that wink was as eloquent as words.

‘Off to see your mother, Miss Fanshawe?’

The girl nodded and Jameson said, ‘The old girl keeps her on her toes.’

‘Let’s go, Michael.’ She linked her arm in his and held it tight. Wexford watched them go, telling himself he was a fool to let the scene upset him. She was gruff, rude, unfeminine. She was also peculiarly honest and she lacked the talent of self-deception. Not for a moment did Wexford doubt that she knew this man was quite unworthy of her, in intelligence, in probity, in character. But he was good looking and she had money.

‘A bit of an oaf,’ said Burden.

Wexford lifted the curtain and between the fuchsias he saw Jameson get into the huge car and start the engine. Nora Fanshawe was not the kind of woman who looks on courtesy from men as her right. The car was already in motion before she got herself into the passenger seat. Jameson had not even opened the door for her from the inside.