The Best Man To Die

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘I struck a match,’ the man mumbled. ‘Charlie’s head was all bashed in. I turned him over and I got blood on me.’ The words slurred and he gabbled. ‘I don’t know what come over me. I put my hand inside his coat and took hold of that wallet. There was a hundred quid it it, just on a hundred. He was all warm…’

  Wexford stared at him aghast. ‘He was dead, though?’

  ‘I don’t know… I don’t… Christ, yes, he was dead! He must have been dead. What are you trying to do to me?’ The man put his head in his hands and his shoulders shook. Wexford took hold of his jacket roughly, pushing him so that his head jerked up. The tears on Cullam’s cheeks awoke in him a nausea and a rage so fierce that it was all he could do to prevent himself from striking him. ‘That’s all, everything,’ Cullam whispered, shuddering. ‘The body rolled down the slope into the water. I ran home then, I ran like hell.’ He put his fists into his eyes like a child. ‘It’s all true,’ he said.

  ‘The stone, Cullam, what about the stone?’

  ‘It was laying by him. By his legs. I don’t know why but I chucked it back in the water. There was blood on it and hair, bits of hair and – and other bits…’

  ‘A bit late in the day to get squeamish, wasn’t it!’

  Wexford’s tone was savage, its effect electric. Cullam sprang to his feet and let out a great cry, drumming his fists on the desk.

  ‘I never killed him, I never, never…! You’ve got to believe me.’

  Burden had just come in, damp and disgruntled, when Wexford erupted bull-like from the lift.

  'Where’s Martin?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I’ve just driven close on two hundred miles and I…’

  ‘Never mind all that. I’ve got Cullam upstairs and he’s come out with a fine tale.’ Controlling his voice with an effort, he gave Burden a swift précis. ‘Says he took the money off Hatton’s corpse. Maybe that’s all he did. I just don’t know.’

  ‘But you’ll hold him? Keep him here on a charge of stealing the hundred quid and the pay packet?’

  ‘Something like that. Martin can deal with it. I want you and Loring and anyone else going spare over in Sewingbury to turn Cullam’s house upside down.’

  ‘In case he’s got McCloy’s blood money hidden away?’

  ‘Mike, I’m just beginning to wonder,’ Wexford said wearily, ‘if McCloy isn’t a myth, a fiction. Cullam’s a damned liar and all we know of McCloy rests on his word alone. Why shouldn’t he have fabricated McCloy as a neat little red herring?’ He sighed. ‘Only he hasn’t got any imagination,’ he said.

  ‘McCloy exists all right,’ Burden said emphatically. ‘He’s an elusive sort of bird but he exists.’

  It was eleven when Wexford got home. They had searched Cullam’s house, grubbing through soiled unmade beds, cup boards full of clothes that smelt of food spills, drawers containing a jumble of broken rubbish. They had searched but the only money they had found was two and eight-pence in Mrs Cullam’s handbag, a white plastic handbag with black grease in its creases. And their only sinister discovery was bruises and contusions on the legs of one of the children…

  ‘Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,’ said Wexford to Clytemnestra, ‘to sweeten my imagination.’ In the belief that he had told her she was a good dog, Clytemnestra wagged her plumed grey tail. The door opened and Sheila came in. ‘What are you doing home on a Wednesday?’ said her father ungraciously.

  ‘That thing came off my tooth. I was eating a Milky Way and it collapsed. So I had to come down and see Mr Vigo.’ She gave him a disarming smile and kissed his cheek. Her hair was dressed in a pyramid of fat ringlets and she looked like a Restoration wench, maid to Millamant, scene stealer, fit to be kissed in corners.

  ‘Well, did he fix it up?’

  ‘Mm-hm. On the spot. He said he wouldn’t charge me.’

  ‘Charge you? Me, you mean. And I should hope not.’

  Wexford grinned, sloughing off the memory of Cullam’s filth like a soiled skin. ‘Now you’ve got false teeth,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t expect to eat toffee.’

  ‘I haven’t got false teeth. I’ve just got a crown. D’you want some of my coff-choc? It’s Nes and drinking chocolate mixed up. Quite groovy.’

  ‘I don’t think so, lovey, thanks all the same.’

  ‘Mr Vigo and I got quite matey,’ said Sheila. She dropped on the floor and, lying on her stomach with her elbows on the carpet, looked up into his face. ‘He gave me tea in that Chinese room of his. I was scared to move, he’s obviously so crazy about all that stuff. His wife came in and banged the door and he was furious because it made the china rattle; he said she just didn’t understand.’

  ‘How quaint. What you might call a new one.’

  ‘Oh, Pop, it wasn’t like that. When I went the receptionist was just leaving, and she walked down into the town with me. She said Mr Vigo had really married for money. She was an heiress and she had a hundred thousand pounds and Mr Vigo wanted money to collect that Chinese stuff. He only stays with his wife now because of the baby. And he goes away most weekends. Sometimes he doesn’t come back till quite late on a Monday night. The receptionist thinks he’s got a girlfriend in London. She seemed a bit jealous. D’you know, I got the idea he sleeps with her too.’

  Wexford kept his face unmoved, but for the faintest flicker of what he hoped looked like sophisticated amusement. He wasn’t shocked by what he had been told; he was astonished that it should have been said to him by his own daughter. In a way he was proud and grateful. Nearly forty years had passed since he was Sheila’s age. Could he have spoken such words to his father? He would rather have died.

  Sheila stretched, got up easily. ‘Since I’m home,’ she said, ‘I may as well do my duty. Fancy ten minutes down by the river, dog?’

  Wexford said quickly, ‘No, not there, sweetheart.’ ‘What, allow his child to walk alone by those dark waters? ‘I’ll take the dog.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Go on. Get off to bed. That hair looks as though it’ll take a lot of coping with.’

  Sheila giggled. ‘You’d be surprised.’ He stared, somewhat appalled, as she lifted the wig like a hat and dropped it over a cut-glass vase.

  ‘My God, it’s a wise father that knows his own child!’ He eyed her eyelashes suspiciously, her long fingernails. How many more bits were take-off-able? Wexford, who was hardly ever shaken from his equilibrium by the devious excesses of criminals, was perpetually astonished by his own daughter. Smiling wryly, he fetched the lead and yanked Clytemnestra from the best armchair.

  The night air was fresh, washed by the storm into a cool clarity. Hardly a star showed, for the sky was veiled by a lacy wrack, bleached snow-white by the moon that rose in a clear unclouded patch. The meadow grass he had compared to a tapestry had since that earlier walk been cut and the land had become a pale stubbly desert. It was cold for the time of year. When he came to the river he saw that it was much swollen. In places the stones were totally submerged under the racing water.

  Wexford whistled up the dog and stepped on briskly. He could see the bridge now, its stones gleaming silver and the hart’s tongue ferns between them like shivering slivers of metal. Someone was standing on the parapet, leaning over and looking down. It was some time before Wexford could decide whether it was a man or a woman and when he realized it was a woman he called out a brisk, cheerful good night so that she should not be afraid.

  ‘Good night, Chief Inspector.’ The voice was low, ironic, immediately identifiable. Wexford approached Nora Fanshawe and she turned to face him.

  ‘A fine evening after the storm,’ he said. ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘She’ll live,’ the girl said coolly. A reserve that was part distaste blanked her features. Wexford knew that look. He had seen it hundreds of times on the faces of people who fancied that they had said too much to him, opened their hearts too wide. Presumably they imagined their confidences led him to regard them with disgust or pity or contempt. If only they knew
that to him their revelations were but bricks in the house he was trying to build, rungs on the ladder of discovery, twisted curve-edged pieces in the current puzzle!

  ‘Nothing fresh come back to her?’

  ‘If you mean about the girl in the car, she says there was no girl. I know when she’s telling the truth.’

  ‘People never remember what happened immediately before they got hit on the head,’ Wexford said cheerfully, ‘especially when their skulls are fractured. It’s a medical fact.’

  ‘Is that so? I mustn’t keep you, Chief Inspector. Did you know your dog’s out in the road?’

  Wexford retrieved Clytemnestra from the path of a solitary oncoming car. The driver wound down his window and cursed him, adding that for two pins he’d tell the police.

  ‘Blooming thorn in my flesh, you are,’ Wexford said to the dog as he clipped the lead on. ‘A source of humiliation.’ He watched the girl retreat into the Olive and Dove, the moonlight casting her shadow black, straight and attenuated.

  Chapter 13

  Detective Constable Loring was delighted at the prospect of a day in London. He was mortally afraid of Wexford who, he felt, treated him with a just but unremitting harshness. Someone had told Loring of the chief inspector’s almost paternal fondness for his predecessor, Mark Drayton, and of his disillusionment when Drayton had come to grief. It had been over some mess with a girl and a bribe. Drayton, they told him, had worn his hair long, had been surly and sarcastic and clever and a devil with the women. Loring, therefore had his own hair cropped eccentrically close and was as eager, as bright and cheerful as he could be. Cleverness, he felt, must come hereafter. At present he couldn’t compete with Wexford and Burden who were constantly being clever all over the place. As for the women… Loring was healthily keen. It afforded him considerable pleasure to be going to London on a quest for three missing girls. Wistfully he thought how very gratifying it would be to find the right one and perhaps hear an appreciative Wexford call him Peter. Drayton had frequently been favoured by the use of his Christian name.

  For all his dreams and his naiveté, Loring was a perfectly competent officer. He made his mistakes and he was frank about them. At twenty-one he was six feet tall, as thin as he had been at fourteen, and desperately anxious for the day to come when he had finally grown out of his acne. For all that – the spots were far less noticeable than he believed – the girls he asked out usually accepted his invitations and the older women he interviewed patted their hair and smiled when he began his questions. With luck, he sometimes thought, when he put on a bit of weight and got rid of those damned spots, he might one day look rather like John Neville. He was surprised and somewhat chagrined by his reception at the Eastcheap hairdresser’s.

  Carol Pearson was the girl whose disappearance he was investigating and he had already called on her mother in Muswell Hill. A skittish lady of forty with the mental age and taste in dress of eighteen, she had simpered over him and offered him gin. God knew, you were only young once – Mrs Pearson looked as if she intended to be young several times over – and if Carol chose to pop off with her boy friend for a couple of months, she wasn’t one to stand in her way. The boy friend was married, so what else could poor Carol do? The fact was she was sick to death of that job of hers, threatening to leave any time. Did Loring know the miserable wages they paid, the fact that the girls practically had to live on their tips! The boy friend had money. He was a travelling salesman, Mrs Pearson said vaguely. But she couldn’t recall his name, hadn’t been able to tell the police when they asked before. Jack, Carol had called him. She never wrote letters. Easy come, easy go like her mother she was, and Mrs Pearson gave him an ingratiating smile. She’d turn up one of these fine days.

  So Loring had taken the tube to Tower Hill, getting lost a couple of times on the way. He walked up Eastcheap and picked out the office of the late Jerome Fanshawe by the brass plate on its marble doorway. Roma, the hairdresser’s where Carol Pearson had worked, was diagonally opposite. Loring went in.

  Never in his life had he seen anything like that receptionist. She wasn’t the sort of girl you would dare to kiss, supposing you wanted to. Her hair was an artfully and deliberately tangled mass of red curls, the face beneath a miracle of paintwork, an artist’s achievement of cream and amber light and shade with sooty eyes and blanked-out mouth. She wore a near-ankle-length black skirt, backless red boots and a short red caftan embroidered in gold.

  Both her white telephones rang simultaneously as Loring entered. She lifted the receivers one after the other, said into each, ‘Good morning. Roma. Will you hold the line one moment?’ before resting them side by side on her enormous appointments book: ‘Can I help you?’

  Loring said he was a police officer and produced his card. She betrayed no surprise. ‘One moment, please.’ The telephone conversations were consecutively resumed, appointments made in the book. Loring glanced down the salon. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Kingsmarkham where clients still sat isolated in separate cells. Here the walls were lined in what looked like huge slices of pumpernickel. The chandeliers were black and silver mobiles and the floor a seemingly frozen lake of scarlet. Most of the assistants were men, tired worn-looking young men in light-weight suits drifted all over with many-coloured hair.

  ‘If you’ve come about Carol Pearson,’ the receptionist said contemptuously, ‘you’ll want Mr Ponti. One moment, please.’ The left-hand phone had rung again. ‘Good morning. Roma. Will you hold the line a moment, please? He’s in the gentleman’s salon and he’s styling so you can’t… Just one moment.’ She lifted the second phone. ‘Good morning. Roma. Just one…’

  ‘Thank you for all your help,’ Loring said. He retreated into the street and entered the door to what he would have called the barber’s. It was not very different from its Kingsmarkham equivalent. Things in the world of fashion evolve more slowly for men than for women.

  Mr Ponti looked more like a master at a public school than a hairdresser. He was tall and thin and he wore a perfectly plain, almost ascetic dark Suit. The only indication that he had in fact been ‘styling’ was the handle of a pair of scissors protruding from his breast pocket and which Loring, so overpowering was the pedagogic impression, had at first taken for the rims of spectacles.

  The other stylists leapt aside deferentially as he wove his way along the aisle between the chairs. The daylight from the door showed suntan powder on his cheekbones and now that he was close to, Loring saw him as an actor made up to play some academic part. The stoop was there, the vague though sharp expression, the myopic eyes.

  A very faint trace of an Italian accent came through as he spoke. ‘Carol?’ he said. ‘We have had the police here before and I told them, we cannot help.’ He took the black leather handbag from Loring and fingered it appreciatively. ‘This is very nice quality, very good.’ With a shrug, he swept shut a concertina-style folding door that partly closed off the shop. ‘Listen, she would not have this. I don’t like to be cruel, but she was a cheap little girl. No style, no elegance. Ha!’ From the interior of the bag he took out the Woolworth compact and the lipstick in its grazed metal case. ‘These she might have, this cheap rubbish.’ His long thin nose quivered disdainfully.

  Loring thought him an odious man. ‘Have you ever had a Mr Jerome Fanshawe among your clients?’

  The name was evidently familiar. ‘The stockbroker from across the street? I am told he is dead in a car accident.’ Loring nodded. ‘He has never been here.’

  ‘Sure of that?’

  ‘I never forget a client’s name. All my clients are personally known to me.’ Ponti snapped the bag shut and leant against the counter, looking bored.

  ‘I’m wondering if Miss Pearson knew him,’ Loring said, flinching from the scent of the man’s after-shave. ‘Did she ever mention him or did you ever see her go into his office?’

  ‘I know nothing.’ Ponti slid the door aside an inch and snapped his fingers. ‘Those shots of Carol,’ he called authoritative
ly, adding to Loring, ‘I showed them to the other police men. You may care to look at them.’ He fixed his pale brown eyes on Loring’s own haircut and studied it reflectively and with faint distaste.

  The photographs were pushed round the edge of the door and Loring took them. ‘I used her once as a model,’ said Ponti. ‘She was no good, no damn’ good at all.’

  They looked all right to Loring. He had a simple taste in feminine beauty, demanding no more than that a girl should be pretty and fresh and smiling. For these shots Carol Pearson’s hair had been dressed in fantastic pyramids of sausage curl, some of which spiralled to her shoulders. She looked ill-at-ease as if she wore instead of her own hair a Britannia helmet and she seemed to be shrinking beneath the weight, peering upwards with a nervous half-smile. Her eyes were painted ridiculously with diagonal lines radiating from the lower lids and her ear lobes dragged down by encrusted pendants. Under the maquillage she was a pretty girl, classically lovely, and Loring recalled sickeningly that it might be she who had come to her death, hideously disfigured, in blood and fire and water.

  ‘No damn’ good at all,’ the hairdresser said again.

  Doreen Dacres had turned up.

  It was a curious story Loring heard from her married sister in Finchley. Doreen had gone to take up her club job in Eastbourne, arrived early and been kept waiting in a deserted lounge. There a well-informed cleaner had enlightened her as to what some of her new duties might consist of and Doreen, taking fright, had debunked into the street.

  She had only five pounds in the world. Room and job in London having been abandoned, she took stock of her situation. The married sister had made it clear she wouldn’t be welcome as a lodger with her and her husband, and their parents were in Glasgow, a city to which Doreen had sworn she would never return. Finally she had taken her luggage to a boarding house and, nervous that the club might catch up with her, booked herself in as Doreen Day and taken a shop assistant’s job in the same name.