The Best Man To Die

by Ruth Rendell

  Chapter 2

  Detective Chief Inspector Wexford didn’t care for dogs. He had never had a dog and now that one of his daughters was married and the other a student at drama school, he saw no reason why he should ever give one house-room. Many an anti-dog man joins the ranks of dog lovers because he is too weak to resist the demands of beloved children, but in Wexford’s household the demands had never been more than half-hearted, so he had passed through this snare and come out unscathed.

  ‘When therefore he arrived home late on Friday night to find the grey thing with ears like knitted dishcloths in his favourite chair he was displeased.

  ‘Isn’t she a darling?’ said the drama student. ‘Her name’s Clytemnestra. I knew you wouldn’t mind having her for just a fortnight.’ And she whisked out to answer the telephone.

  ‘Where did Sheila get it from?’ Wexford said gloomily.

  Mrs Wexford was a woman of few words.

  ‘Sebastian.’

  ‘Who in God’s name is Sebastian?’

  ‘Some boy,’ said Mrs Wexford. ‘He’s only just gone.’

  Her husband considered pushing the dog on to the floor, thought better of it, and went sulkily off to bed. His daughter’s beauty had never ceased to surprise the chief inspector. Sylvia, the elder one, was well-built and healthy, but that was the best that could be said for her; Mrs Wexford had a magnificent figure and a fine profile although she had never been of the stuff that wins beauty contests. While he… All he needed, he sometimes thought, was a trunk to make him look exactly like an elephant. His body was huge and ponderous, his skin pachydermatous, wrinkled and grey, and his three-cornered ears stuck out absurdly under the sparse fringe of colourless hair. When he went to the zoo he passed the elephant house quickly lest the irreverent onlooker should make comparisons.

  Her mother and sister were fine-looking women, but the odd thing about Sheila was that her beauty was not an enlargement or an enhancement of their near-handsomeness. She looked like her father. The first time Wexford noticed this – she was then about six – he almost hooted aloud, so grotesque was the likeness between this exquisite piece of doll’s flesh and her gross progenitor. And yet that high broad forehead was his, the little tilted nose was his, his the pointed – although in her case, flat – ears, and in her huge grey eyes he saw his own little ones. When he was young his hair had been that flaxen gold too, as soft and as fine. Only hope she doesn’t end up looking like her dad, he thought sometimes with a rich inner guffaw.

  But on the following morning his feelings towards his younger daughter were neither tender nor amused. The dog had awakened him at ten to seven with long-drawn howls and now, a quarter of an hour later; he stood on the threshold of Sheila’s bedroom, glowering.

  ‘This isn’t a boarding kennels, you know,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear her?’

  ‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound, Pop? Poor darling, she only wants to be taken out.’

  ‘What did you call her?’

  ‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound. She’s a mongrel really, but that’s what Sebastian calls her. She looks as if she’s made of man-made fibres you see. Don’t you think it’s funny?’

  ‘Not particularly. Why can’t this Sebastian look after his own dog?’

  ‘He’s gone to Switzerland,’ said Sheila. ‘His plane must have gone by now.’ She surfaced from under the sheets and her father saw that her hair was wound on huge electrically heated rollers. ‘I felt awful letting him walk all that way to the station last night.’ She added accusingly, ‘But you had the car.’

  ‘It’s my car,’ Wexford almost shouted. This argument he knew of old was hopeless and he listened to his own voice with a kind of horror as a note of pleading crept into it. ‘If the dog wants to go out, hadn’t you better get up and take her?’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve just set my hair.’ Downstairs Clytemnestra let out a howl that ended in a series of urgent yelps. Sheila threw back the bedclothes and sat up, a vision in pink baby doll pyjamas.

  ‘God almighty!’ Wexford exploded. ‘You can’t take your friend’s dog out but you can get up at the crack of dawn to set your hair.’

  ‘Daddy…’ The wheedling tone as well as the now seldom-used paternal appellation told Wexford that a monstrous request was to be made of him. He glared, drawing his brows together in the manner that made Kingsmarkham’s petty offenders tremble. ‘Daddy, duck, it’s a gorgeous morning and you know what Dr Crocket said about your weight and I have just set my hair…’

  ‘I am going to take a shower,’ Wexford said coldly.

  He took it. When he emerged from the bathroom the dog was still howling and pop music was issuing from behind Sheila’s door. A degenerate male voice exhorted its hearers to give it love or let it die in peace.

  ‘There seems to be an awful lot of noise going on, darling,’ said Mrs Wexford sleepily.

  ‘You’re joking.’

  He opened Sheila’s door. She was applying a face pack. ‘Just this once, then,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I’m only doing it because I want your mother to have a quiet lie-in, so you can turn that thing off for a start.’

  ‘You are an angel, Daddy,’ said Sheila, and she added dreamily, ‘I expect Clytemnestra has spent a penny by now.’

  Clytemnestra. Of all the stupid pretentious names for a dog… But what else could you expect of someone called Sebastian? She had not, however, yet “spent a penny”. She flung herself on Wexford, yelping frantically, and when he pushed her away, ran round him in circles, wildly gyrating her tail and flapping her knitted ears.

  Wexford found the lead, obligingly left by Sheila in a prominent position on top of the refrigerator. Undoubtedly it was going to be a beautiful day, a summer’s day such as is unequalled anywhere in the world but in the South of England, a day that begins with mists, burgeons into tropical glory and dies in blue and gold and stars.

  ‘Full many a glorious morning,’ quoted Wexford to Clytemnestra, ‘have I seen, flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.’

  Clytemnestra agreed vociferously, leaping on to a stool and screeching hysterically at sight of her lead.

  ‘Bear your body more seemly,’ said Wexford coldly, switching from sonnet to comedy without varying his author. He looked out of the window. The sovereign eye was there all right, bright, molten and white-gold. Instead of mountain tops it was flattering the Kingsbrook meadows and turning the little river into a ribbon of shimmering metal. It wouldn’t do him any harm to take this ungoverned creature for a short jaunt in the fields and the experience would give him a splendid ascendancy over Inspector Burden when he walked into the station at nine-thirty.

  ‘Lovely morning, sir.’

  ‘It was, Mike. The best of it’s over now, of course. Now when I was down by the river at half seven…’

  He chuckled. Clytemnestra whimpered. Wexford went to the door and the dog screamed for joy. He clipped on the lead and stepped forth into the sweet peace of a summer Saturday in Sussex.

  It was one thing to boast afterwards of pre-breakfast hiking, quite another to be actually seen leading this freak of nature, this abortion, about the public streets. Observed in uncompromising midsummer light, Clytemnestra looked like some thing that, having long lain neglected at the bottom of an old woman’s knitting basket, has finally been brought out to be mended.

  Moreover, now that she had achieved the heart’s desire for which she had turned on her shameless, neurotic display, she had become dejected, and walked along meekly, head and tail hanging. Just like a woman, Wexford thought crossly. Sheila would be just the same. Hair out of curlers, face cleaned up, she was in all probability downstairs now calmly making her mother a cup of tea. When you get what you want you don’t want what you get… On a fait le monde ainsi.

  He would, however, eschew the public streets.

  From this side of town, the footpath led across the fields to the bank of the stream where it divided, one branch going to the new council estate and Sewingbury, the other to the centre of
Kingsmarkham High Street, at the Kingsbrook bridge. Wexford certainly wasn’t going to embark on a sabbath day’s journey to Sewingbury, and now they had mucked up the Kingsbrook Road with those flats, there was no longer any point in going there. Instead he would walk down to the river, take the path to the bridge and pick up his Police Review at Braddan’s on his way home. They always forgot to send it with the papers.

  In agricultural districts pastureland is usually fenced. These meadows were divided by hedges and barbed wire and in them great red cattle were grazing. Mist lay in shallow patches over the hollows and where the fields were lying fallow the hay was nearly ready to be cut, but it was not yet cut. Wexford, very much a countryman at heart, marvelled that the townsman calls grass green when in reality it is as many-coloured as Joseph’s coat. The grass heads hung heavy with seed, ochre, chestnut and powdery grey, and all the thick tapestry of pasture was embroidered and interlaced with the crimson thread of sorrel, the bright acid of buttercups and the creamy dairy-maid floss of meadowsweet. Over it all the fanning whispering seed and the tenuous mist cast a sheen of silver.

  The oak trees had not yet lost the vivid yellow-green of their late springtime, a colour so bright, so fresh and so unparalleled elsewhere in nature or in art that no one has ever been able to emulate it and it is never seen in paint or cloth or women’s dresses. In such things the colour would be crude, if it could be copied, but against this pale blue yet fixedly cloudless sky it was not crude. It was exquisite. Wexford drew in lungfuls of scented, pollen-laden air. He never had hay fever and he felt good.

  The dog, who had perhaps feared a pavement perambulation, sniffed the air too and became frisky. She poked about in the brambles and wagged her tail. Wexford undid the lead clip and let her run.

  With a kind of stolid tranquillity he began to reflect on the day’s work ahead. That grievous bodily harm thing was coming up at a special court this morning, but that ought to be all wrapped up in half an hour. Then there was the possibility of the silver on sale at the Saturday morning market being stolen goods. Someone had better go down and have a word… No doubt there’d been the usual spate of Friday night burglaries, too.

  Mrs Fanshawe had regained consciousness in Stowerton Royal Infirmary after her six-week-long coma. They would have to talk to her today. But that was the uniformed branch’s pigeon, not his. Thank God, it wasn’t he who had to break the news to the woman that her husband and her daughter had both been killed in the car crash that had fractured her skull.

  Presumably they would now resume the adjourned inquest on that unfortunate pair. Burden said Mrs Fanshawe might just recall why her husband’s Jaguar had skidded and over turned on the empty fast lane of the twin track road, but he doubted it. A merciful amnesia usually came with these comas and who could deny it was a blessing? It seemed downright immoral to torment the poor woman with questions now just for the sake of proving the Jaguar’s brakes were faulty or Fanshawe was driving over the seventy limit. It wasn’t as if any other vehicle had been involved. No doubt there was some question of insurance. Anyway, it wasn’t his worry.

  The sun shone on the rippling river and the long willow leaves just touched its bubbling golden surface. A trout jumped for a sparkling iridescent fly. Clytemnestra went down to the water and drank greedily. In this world of clean fast-running water, of inimitable oaks and meadows which made the Bayeux tapestry look like a traycloth, there was no place for somersaulted cars and carnage and broken bodies lying on the wet and bloody tarmac.

  The dog paddled, then swam. In the sunshine even grey knitted Clytemnestra was beautiful. Beneath her flat furry belly the big shallow stones had the marble veining of agate. Upon the water the mist floated in a golden veil, spotted with the dancing of a myriad tiny flies. And Wexford who was an agnostic, a profane man, thought, Lord, how manifold are thy works in all the earth.

  There was a man on the other side of the river. He was walking slowly some fifty yards from the opposite bank and parallel to it, walking from the Sewingbury direction to Kingsmarkham. A child was with him, holding his hand, and he too had a dog, a big pugnacious-looking black dog. Wexford had an idea, drawn partly from experience in looking out of his office window, that when two dogs meet they inevitably fight. Clytemnestra would come out badly from a fight with that big black devil. Wexford couldn’t bring him self to call his charge by her name. He whistled.

  Clytemnestra took no notice. She had gained the opposite bank and was poking about in a great drifting mass of torn grass and brushwood. Further upstream a cache of rubbish had been washed against the bank. Wexford, who had been lyrical, felt positively pained by this evidence of man’s indifference to nature’s glories. He could see a bundle of checked cloth, an old blanket perhaps, an oil drum and, a little apart from the rest, a floating shoe. Clytemnestra confirmed his low opinion of everything canine by advancing on this water logged pocket of rubbish, her tail wagging and her ears pricked. Filthy things, dogs, Wexford thought, scavengers and dustbin delvers. He whistled again. The dog stopped and he was just about to congratulate himself on his authoritative and successful method of summoning her, when she made a plunging dart forward and seized the mass of cloth in her mouth.

  It moved with a heavy surge and the dog released it, her hackles rising. The slow and somehow primeval erecting of that mat of grey hairs brought a curious chill to Wexford’s blood. The sun seemed to go in. He forgot the black dog, coming ever nearer, and his joy in the morning went. Clytemnestra let out an unearthly keening howl, her lips snarling back and her tail a stiff prolongation of her backbone.

  The bundle she had disturbed eddied a few inches into the deeper water and as Wexford watched, a thin pale hand, lifeless as the agate-veined stones, rose slowly from the sodden cloth, its fingers hanging yet pointing towards him.

  He took off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers to his knees. The man and the child on the other side watched him with interest. He didn’t think they had yet seen the hand. Holding his shoes, he stepped on to the stones and crossed the river carefully. Clytemnestra came to him quickly and put her face against his bare leg. Wexford pushed aside the willows that hung like a pelmet and came to the rubbish pocket, where he knelt down. One shoe floated empty, the other was still on a foot. The dead man lay face-downwards and someone had smashed in the back of his head with a heavy smooth object. One of these very stones, Wexford guessed.

  The brambles shivered behind him and a footstep crunched.

  ‘Keep back,’ Wexford said. ‘Keep the child back.’

  He turned, shielding what lay in the water with his own big body. Downstream the child was playing with both dogs, throwing stones for them into the water.

  ‘Christ!’ said the man softly.

  'He’s dead,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m a police officer and…’

  ‘I know you. Chief Inspector Wexford.’ The man approached and Wexford couldn’t stop him. He looked down and gasped. ‘My God, I…’

  ‘Yes, it isn’t a pleasant sight.’ The thought came to Wexford that something very out of the way had happened. Not so much that here on a fine June morning a man lay murdered, but that he, Wexford had found him. Policemen don’t find bodies unless they are sent to look for them or unless someone else has found them first. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked. The newcomer’s face was green. He looked as if he was about to be sick. ‘Will you go down to the town, to the nearest phone box and-get on to the station? Just tell them what you’ve seen. They’ll do the rest. Come on, man, pull yourself together.’

  ‘O.K., it’s just that…’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better let me have your name.’

  ‘Cullam, Maurice Cullam. I’ll go, I’ll go right away. It’s just that – well, last night I was having a drink with him at the Dragon.’

  ‘You know who it is then? You can’t see his face.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I’d know Charlie Hatton anywhere.’

  Chapter 3

  He looked a right Charlie in
those tails and striped trousers. That would be something funny to say to his best man when he came.

  ‘You and me, we look a pair of right Charlies, Charlie Hatton.’

  Quite witty really. Jack often thought he wasn’t quick enough to match Charlie’s easy repartee, but now he had thought of something that would make his friend smile.

  Dear old Charlie, he thought sentimentally, the best friend a man ever had. Generous to a fault, and if he wasn’t always strictly above-board – well, a man had to live. And Charlie knew how to live all right. The best of everything he had. Jack was ready to bet all the crisp honeymoon pound notes he had in his pocket that Charlie would be one of the few guests not wearing a hired morning coat. He had his own and not off the peg, either.

  Not that he looked half bad himself, he thought, admiring his reflection. At his age boozing didn’t have much visible effect and he always had a red face anyway. He looked smashing, he decided, shyly proud, as good as the Duke of Edinburgh any day. Probably the Duke used an electric shaver though. Jack put another bit of cotton wool on the nick on his chin and he wondered if Marilyn was ready yet.

  Thanks to Charlie boy, they’d been able to splash a bit on the wedding and Marilyn could have the white satin and the four bridesmaids she’d set her heart on. It would have been a different story if they’d had to find the key money for the flat themselves. Trust Charlie to come up with a long-term interest-free loan. That way they’d be able to blow some of their own savings on having the flat done up nicely. How well it had all worked out! A fortnight away by the sea and when they came back, the flat all ready and waiting for them. And it was all thanks to Charlie.

  Moving away from the mirror, Jack looked into the future, twenty, thirty years hence. Charlie would be a really rich man by then. Jack would be very much surprised if his friend wouldn’t be living in one of those houses in Ploughman’s Lane like the one where he sometimes did electrical jobs with real old French furniture and real oil paintings and the kind of china you looked at but didn’t eat off. He and Charlie had had a good laugh over that particular house, but there had been something serious in Charlie’s laughter and Jack had guessed he aimed high.