The Best Man To Die

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Oh, no, sir; the aunt identified the girl.’

  ‘Well, it’s your problem, Sergeant. You’re the coroner’s officer.’ Wexford added annoyingly, ‘We all have our troubles and we must deal with them as best we can.’ He swung open the door and said over his shoulder, ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Martin, distracting the coroner’s officer in the execution of his duty. If you want a job just run upstairs and say McCloy to Mr Burden. I’m away to the dentist myself.’

  ‘Not in much pain, sir, I hope?’

  ‘You’re behind the times,’ said Wexford, chuckling. ‘You don’t go to the dentist these days because you’ve got tooth ache, you go for a check-up.’

  It was too fine a day for the car. Wexford crossed the road to Grover’s newspaper shop and turned into York Street. In the display window of Joy Jewels the sun set the rhinestone ropes and little gilt collarets ablaze, and the plane tree leaves shadowed the pavement in damask tablecloth patterns. After the petrol station and the little houses, in one of which George Carter lived, were left behind, the street petered out into a country lane. Such was the incline of the hills at this point and the arrangement of the trees that, looking straight ahead, nothing that was not absolutely pastoral could be seen. A stranger to the district, coming over the brow of the hill, would have stopped astonished and perhaps a little peeved to see Ploughman’s Lane lying beneath him.

  Not that there was anything to dismay the aesthetic purist. Through the centuries about twenty-five houses had been built in Ploughman’s Lane, first of all for the minor gentry, the widows and kinsmen, for instance, of the lord of the manor; in more recent times equally large and widely spaced dwellings had been put up for the professional class.

  From where he stood Wexford could see roofs, a yellow patch of new thatch on the far left, red tiles some fifty yards from it, then the pinnacled and turreted grey slate so dear to the heart of the Victorian bourgeoisie; next, half lost among the spread arms of a black cedar, the pinned-down tarred fabric that roofed a split-level ranch bungalow.

  He descended briskly, glad of the shade the thickening trees afforded. A Bentley swam out from behind the ranch house’s tamarisk hedge, accelerated arrogantly and, passing him, drove him back flat against the hedge.

  ‘And if I should chance to run over a cad,’

  Wexford quoted,

  ‘I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.

  So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho…’

  God Almighty, he was getting as bad as Maurice Cullam! He had noted the number of the Bentley. Very nice cars all had around here. There was another Bentley outside grey slate Gothic place with a smart yellow Cortina snuggling up against it. Married bliss, thought Wexford, grinning to himself. Even the wives’ cars were sizable. No minis and no second or third-hand jalopies. But women would never be equal, he reflected, pleased to have discovered a new profundity, until the day came when men stopped thinking natural that their wives should always have the smaller. And they always did, no matter how rich they were; no matter, come to that, if the wives were richer or bigger than the husbands. He tried to think of a wife who had a larger car than her husband’s and he couldn’t think of one. Not that he particularly wanted women to be equal. As far that went, he was quite satisfied with the status quo. But to have lighted upon a new yet universal truth amused him he went on thinking about it until he came to Jolyon Vigo’s house.

  The tall dark girl got off the London train and as she passed through the barrier at Stowerton station she asked the woman collecting tickets where she could get a taxi.

  ‘There’s only one. But he won’t be busy at this time day. You might be lucky. There you are! I can just see him, waiting on the rank.’

  She watched the girl march briskly down the steps. Very few women as smart and cocksure as that one arrived at Stowerton station, even from London, even in the height of summer. The ticket collector, who had just had a new perm, thought the girl’s geometrically cut and excessively short hair awful. It made her look like a boy, or how boys used to look in the days when men had some self-respect and went to the barber’s. Flat-chested and skinny too, like a stick all the way down. You had to admit, though, that that kind made a good clothes prop. The suit she was wearing was the colour and texture of sacking, a foreign-looking suit somehow with those buttoned pockets, but the ticket collector was willing to bet it hadn’t cost a penny less than forty guineas. It hardly seemed fair that a kid of – what would she be? Twenty- three? Twenty-four? – had forty quid to throw away on a bit of sacking. Money talks all right, she thought. It was money that gave that snooty lift of the chin, too, that masterful stance and walk and that stuck-up voice.

  The girl approached the taxi and said to the driver:

  ‘Will you take me to Stowerton Royal Infirmary, please?’ When they got to the hospital she opened her brown leather bag to pay him and he noticed that, as well as the English money, she had some funny-looking foreign notes in her wallet. He half hoped she would give him one of them by mistake so that he could make a scene, but she didn’t. He summed her up as a sharp little piece with a head on her shoulders. She was a stranger to the place but she knew where she was going. As he reversed, he saw her march confidently into the porter’s office.

  ‘Can you direct me to the private wing?’

  ‘Straight down the drive, madam, and you’ll see a notice with an arrow.’ The porter called her madam because she had asked the way to the private wing. If she had asked for Ward Five he would have told her morning visiting in the public wards was forbidden and he might, because he was feeling benevolent, have called her love. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine anyone like this ever wanting a public ward. She was madam, all right, a proper little madam.

  Nurse Rose was late with her bed-making on Tuesday morning. She had seen to Mrs Goodwin by nine o’clock and stopped for a chat and a bit of buttering-up. You were half way to being a lady’s maid with these private patients and if they wanted you to paint their fingernails while they told you their life histories you couldn’t choose but obey. Just the same, she would have been well ahead but for those police men turning up again and wanting to ask poor Mrs Fanshawe more questions. Of course she couldn’t make Mrs Fanshawe’s bed while they were poking about and it was nearly twelve before she managed to get the poor deluded creature into a chair and the sheets whipped off.

  ‘It might take a letter a week to get to Germany, mightn’t it?’ said Mrs Fanshawe, taking her rings off and amusing herself by making them flash in the sunlight right into Nurse Rose’s eyes.

  ‘Weeks and weeks,’ said Nurse Rose, blinking. ‘You don’t want to worry about that.’

  ‘I should have sent a telegram. I think I’ll get you to send one for me.’

  Once bitten, twice shy, thought Nurse Rose. She wasn’t even going to humour Mrs Fanshawe any more. Stick her neck out and her life would be a succession of errands for Mrs Fanshawe, running about the town sending crazy messages to a girl who didn’t exist.

  ‘Would you like me to brush your hair?’ she asked, pummelling the pillows.

  ‘Thank you very much, my dear. You’re a good girl.’

  ‘Back into bed then. Ooh! You’re as light as a feather. Don’t leave those lovely rings on the table, now.’

  Nurse Rose had really been very helpful, Mrs Fanshawe thought. She didn’t seem or look very intelligent, but she must be. She was the only one who didn’t keep up this nonsense about Nora being dead. And how she envied her those rings! Funny little thing… When Nora came she would get her to run up to the flat and root out that paste thing she’d once bought on a whim at Selfridges. It wasn’t worth more than thirty shillings, but. Nurse Rose wouldn’t know that and she decided she would definitely give it to Nurse Rose.

  She lay back comfortably while her hair was brushed.

  ‘While you’re getting my lunch,’ she said, ‘I’ll think how I’m going to word my telegram. Oh, and you might take my sister’s card away
. It’s getting on my nerves.’

  Nurse Rose was glad to escape. She came out of the room, pulling her bag of soiled linen, and because she wasn’t looking where she was going, almost cannoned into a tall dark girl.

  ‘Can you tell me where I can find Mrs Dorothy Fanshawe?’

  ‘She’s in there,’ said Nurse Rose. She had never seen any thing like the shoes the girl was wearing. They were of brown calf with a copper beech leaf on the instep and their shape was so strange and outlandish that Nurse Rose decided they must be the extreme of fashion. Nothing like them had ever been seen in Stowerton, nor, for that matter, Nurse Rose believed, in London. ‘Mrs Fanshawe’s just going to have her lunch,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters if that’s held up for ten minutes.’ Not to you, Nurse Rose thought indignantly, whoever you may be. But she couldn’t let those desirable shoes vanish without any comment and she said impulsively, ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but I do think your shoes are super. Where did you get them?’

  ‘Nobody minds a compliment,’ said the girl coldly. ‘They were made in Florence but I bought them in Bonn.’

  ‘Bonn? Bonn’s in Germany, isn’t it? Ooh, you can’t be! You can’t be Nora. You’re dead!’

  Earlier that morning Wexford had quoted Justice Shallow and now, as he contemplated Jolyon Vigo’s house, he thought that this was just the sort of place Shallow might have lived in. It would have been a mature house already in Shakespeare’s time, a ‘black and white’ house, timbered, solid, so perfect a place to live in that it seemed in advance to confer upon its owner grace and taste and superiority. A climbing rose with yellow satiny flowers spread across the black striped gables and nestled against the tudor roses, carved long ago by some craftsman on every square inch of oak. On either side of the front path a knot garden had been planted with low hedges and tufts of tiny blossom. It was so neat, so unnatural in a way, that Wexford had the notion the flowers had been embroidered on the earth.

  A coach-house of slightly later vintage served as a double garage. It had a small belvedere and a vertical sundial under its pediment. The garage doors were open – a single untidy touch – and within Wexford saw two cars. Again it amused him to note the general application of what he was beginning to think of as Wexford’s Law. A woman was in the act of opening the door of a pale blue Minor. She slammed it and, carrying a child in her arms, squeezed between the small vehicle and the huge, finned Plymouth, dragonfly blue, that stood a foot from it.

  The phrase ‘a woman with a child’ somehow suggested a peasant and a shawled baby. Eyeing her, Wexford thought that to say a lady with an infant would be better.

  ‘What d’you want?’ she said in the sharp high-pitched voice of the local gentry. Before she could add, as she was evidently about to, that she never bought anything at the door, he announced himself hurriedly and asked for her husband.

  ‘He’s in the surgery. You go round by the pleached walk.’ Marvelling that anyone could say this without a trace of self-consciousness or humour, Wexford looked her up and down. She was a plain young woman, thin and dark with a worn face. She put the child into a pram and wheeled it down the path. The boy was big and handsome, blue-eyed and fair-headed. He looked as though by being born he had sapped his mother’s strength and left her a used-up husk. Wexford was reminded of a butterfly, fresh and lusty, that has escaped from a dried chrysalis.

  He was not precisely sure what a pleached walk was, but when he came upon it there was no mistaking it and, smiling to himself, he descended a flagged step and passed into a green tunnel. The trees whose branches met and interwove above his head were apples and pears and already the young green fruit hung abundantly. The walk led to some green houses and what had once been a stable, now converted into a surgery. Amid all this sylvan glory the notice giving the dentist’s working hours struck a discordant note. Wexford opened a latched horse-box door and entered the waiting room.

  A pretty girl in a white coat came out to him and he reminded her of his appointment. Then, having no inclination for Elle or Nova, he sat down and viewed the room.

  It was a funny place for Charlie Hatton to have found himself in and Wexford wondered why he hadn’t attended the dentist in the town. On these walls were none of the usual posters bidding young mothers to drink milk in pregnancy and bring their toddlers for a twice-yearly check-up. Nor was there any notice explaining how to get dental treatment on the National Health Service. You couldn’t imagine anyone sitting here with a handkerchief pressed to a swollen jaw.

  The walls were papered in a Regency stripe and the one or two pieces of upholstered furniture looked like genuine antiques. The curtains were of dark chintz patterned with medallions. A small chandelier caught the sun and made rainbow spot patterns on the ceiling. Wexford thought the place was just like the sitting room of a person of taste. There were dozens like it in Kingsmarkham. But this was just a dentist’s waiting room and it made him wonder what the rest of the house would be like. He was in for a surprise. He was admiring a stylish flower arrangement, observing how cunningly a spray of jasmine had been made to tremble half in, half out of the vase and trail against the console table, when the girl came back and told him Mr Vigo would see him now.

  Wexford followed her into the surgery.

  There was nothing out of the ordinary here, just the usual chairs and trays of instruments and contraptions of tubes and clamps and wires. Ice-blue blinds were lowered to keep out the noonday sun.

  Vigo was standing beside one of the windows, fingering some instruments in a tray, and when Wexford came in he didn’t look up. Wexford smiled dryly to himself. This air of being always overworked, preoccupied by esoteric matters was, he knew, characteristic of some doctors and dentists. It was part of the mystique. In a moment Vigo would glance round, show surprise and make some swift apology for being engaged on matters beyond a policeman’s comprehension.

  The dentist had a fine leonine head, the hair fair and abundant. His jaw was strong and prominent, the mouth thin. One day when he was old this would be a nutcracker face but that was a long way off. He seemed to be counting and when he had finished he turned and reacted as Wexford had expected he would.

  ‘Do forgive me, Chief Inspector. A little matter that couldn’t be left. I understand you want to talk to me about the late Mr Hatton. I’ve no more patients until after lunch, I so shall we go into the house?’

  He took off his white coat. Under it he was wearing a slate-blue suit in tussore, the cut, material and colour not quite masculine enough fur his height, and heavily muscled chest. He had the figure of a rugby international and he made Wexford, who was just on six feet, feel short.

  Wexford followed him through the pleached walk and they entered the house by a glazed garden door. It was like stepping into a museum. Wexford hesitated, dazzled. He had heard of Chinese rooms, heard of Chinese Chippendale, but he had never seen a room furnished in the style. The brilliance of its colours turned the remembered garden outside into monochrome. His feet sank into a carpet whose blues and creams evoked a summer sky and, at Vigo’s behest, he lowered himself uneasily into a chair with a yellow satin seat and legs of rearing dragons. The dentist moved with apparent carelessness between tables and cabinets loaded with china and jade and stood, a faint smile on his thin lips, under a long picture of red fish painted on silk.

  ‘I don’t know what you can have to ask me about Mr Hatton’s teeth,’ he said. ‘He didn’t have his own teeth.’

  Wexford had come to talk business and yet for a moment he could not. Talk of false teeth in this setting? His eye fell on a set of chessmen ranged on a table in a far corner. They were two armies, one of ivory, one of red jade, and the pawns were on horseback, the white armed with spears, the red with arrows. One of the red knights on a panoplied charger had a contemporary Western face, a raw sharp face which called to mind absurdly that of Charlie Hatton. It grinned at Wexford, seeming to prompt him.

  ‘We know that, Mr Vigo,’ he said, w
renching his eyes away and fixing them on an eggshell thin service, made to contain jasmine tea. ‘What surprises us is that a man of his means should have such superb false ones.’

  Vigo had an attractive, rather boyish laugh. He checked it with a shake of his head. ‘A tragedy, wasn’t it? Have you any idea who could have…? No, I mustn’t ask that.’

  ‘I’ve no objection to your asking, but no, we’ve no idea yet. I’ve come to you because I want you to tell me everything you can about Mr Hatton with particular reference to any thing you may know about the source of his income.’

  ‘I only know that he drove a lorry.’ Vigo was still savouring with pride and joy his caller’s astonishment. ‘But yes, I see what you mean. It surprised me too. I don’t know much but I’ll tell you what I can.’ He moved to a cabinet whose door handles were the long curved tails of dragons. ‘Will you join me in a pre-luncheon sherry?’

  ‘I don’t think so, thank you.’

  ‘Pity.’ Vigo didn’t press him but poured a glass of Manzanilla for himself and sat down by the window. It gave on to a shadowed court whose centrepiece was an orrery on a stone plinth. ‘Mr Hatton made an appointment with me at the end of May. He had never been a patient of mine before.’

  The end of May. On the 22nd of May Hatton had paid five hundred pounds into his bank account, his share, no doubt, of the mysterious and elusive hi-jacking haul.

  ‘I can tell you the precise date, if you like. I looked it up before you came. Tuesday, 21st May. He telephoned me at lunchtime on that day and by a fluke I had a cancellation, so I was able to see him almost immediately. He’d had dentures since he was twenty, very bad ill-fitting ones, by the way. They made him self-conscious and he wanted a new set. I asked him why he’d lost his own teeth and he said the cause had been pyorrhoea. Knowing a little of his circumstances by this time – at any rate, I knew what his job was – I asked him if he realized this would involve him in considerable expense. He said that money was no object – those were his actual words – and he wanted the most expensive teeth I could provide. We finally arrived at a figure of two hundred and fifty pounds and he was perfectly agreeable.’