by Ruth Rendell
It was only when she wanted some clothes sent on that she had contacted her sister, six weeks later, by telephone. Thankfully, Loring crossed her off his list.
His last port of call was the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street and he was directed by its porter to the nurses’ home. This was a pleasant four-storey Regency house with white pillars flanking a bright blue front door liberally decorated with polished brass. A woman who called herself Home Sister came down to him and, before Loring could speak, she placed one pink finger against her lips.
‘Quiet as a mouse, please. We mustn’t forget the night staff are all getting their beauty sleep, must we?’
There was a deep silence in the hail and a sweet scent far removed from the strong antiseptic of the hospital proper. It made Loring think of young girls, bevies of girls, whose freshly bathed bodies, as they passed through this place, left behind a mingled memory of Jasmine and Russian Leather and French Fern and New Mown Hay. He tip-toed after this stout navy-blue woman, who seemed to him half wardress and half mother superior, into a little lounge where there were chintz-covered chairs and flowers and an old television set.
‘The girl who had the room next to Nurse Culross will be the best one to help you,’ said Home Sister. ‘Her name is Nurse Lewis, but of course it’s out of the question that she should be disturbed if she’s still sleeping.’ She fixed him with a fierce censorious eye. ‘Out of the question,’ she said again. ‘If you were the Home Secretary himself I wouldn’t do it.’ Apparently she was waiting for some show of defiance, and when Loring merely returned her look meekly, she lost some of her asperity and said, ‘I’ll make enquiries but I can’t promise anything. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d care to look at some books.’
By this she meant magazines. The Princess Louise Nurses’ Home was less sophisticated then Vigo’s waiting room and it offered instead of Nova and Elle the Nursing Mirror and two copies of Nursery World which Loring saw were fifteen years old. Left alone, he stared out into the street.
An annexe to the clinic was a maternity hospital, part of it but distinctly separate from the larger building. ‘While he waited, Loring saw a Bentley draw up and a young girl emerged leaning heavily on the arm of her husband. Her body was huge and unwieldy and evidently she was already in labour. Ten minutes passed and a Jaguar appeared. A similar little tableau took place, but in this case the potential mother was older and her maternity dress even more indicative of the couturière from whom it had come. The Princess Louise Clinic was busily fulfilling its function of replenishing the upper classes.
It was nearly five o’clock before the door opened slowly and Nurse Lewis came to him. Her eyes were heavy and she looked as if she had just wakened. She wore no make-up and she looked spotlessly clean, her blouse stiff and crisp from the launderer, her pale, almost cream-fair hair damp and streaked where a coarse-toothed comb had just passed through it.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve kept you. I’m on nights you see.’
‘That’s all right,’ Loring said. ‘I work nights myself some times. I know what it’s like.’
Nurse Lewis sat down and her bare legs gleamed. Her pink toes were like a little girl’s in a little girl’s sandals.
‘What did you want to know? I talked to the police before.’ She smiled earnestly. ‘I told them all I knew about Bridie Culross, but that wasn’t much, you see. Bridie didn’t make close friends with girls, she was a man’s girl.’
‘I’d like to hear anything you can tell me, Miss Lewis.’ Just let them talk. He had learnt that from Wexford. ‘About what sort of girl she was. She had a lot of boy friends?’
‘Well, this isn’t a teaching hospital so there aren’t any medical students. She’d been here for a year since she qualified and she’s been out with all the housemen.’
Loring wrote that down.
‘The man she was most keen on – well, I never knew his name. She called him Jay.’
‘As if it were an initial, do you mean? Like short for John or James or – Jerome?’
‘I suppose so. I told the police all this before, you know. They weren’t very interested.’
‘You see, we don’t usually bother very much about missing girls.’
‘Why are you bothering now?’
‘Let’s leave that for a moment, shall we, Miss Lewis? Tell me more about this Jay.’
She crossed her long bare legs. ‘I never saw him,’ she said. ‘He was married, I’m afraid. Bridie didn’t worry much about that sort of thing. Oh, and I remember her saying his wife had been a patient here.’
Charming, Loring thought. He visits his sick wife and picks up one of the nurses on his way out.
‘I know what you’re thinking’, said Nurse Lewis, ‘and it wasn’t very nice. He’d got lots of money and a nice car and all that, Bridie…‘ She hesitated and blushed. ‘Well, Bridie lived with him actually.’
‘Lived with him? In his house?’
‘I didn’t quite mean that.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Nurses, who ought to be used to the facts of life, were astonishingly prudish, he thought. ‘Er – she went to spend a weekend with this man on Saturday, May 18th? In Brighton, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right, with Jay.’ Nurse Lewis was still blushing at the implications of this weekend. ‘She didn’t come back. I heard Matron say she wouldn’t have her back this time if she came.’
‘She’d done it before, you mean?’
‘Well, she’d been late a good many times and sometimes she didn’t bother to come in after a late night. She said she wasn’t going to dress operations and cart bedpans around for the rest of her life. She was going to have it soft. That’s what she said. I thought she’d gone away with- Jay to live with him properly. Well, not properly, but you know what I mean.’
‘Tell me, did he give her presents? Did she have a very good black handbag with a Mappin and Webb label? This one?’
‘Oh, yes! He gave it to her for her birthday. She was twenty-two. Look…’ She frowned and leant towards him. ‘What is this? You’ve found her handbag but you haven’t found her?’
‘We’re not sure yet,’ said Loring, but he was.
Wexford would be displeased if he went back with just this and no more. Loring would have liked another day in London, but it was hardly worth facing Wexford’s rage, the necessary preliminary to granting it. He went into the main hospital building and rang the bell at the enquiry desk. While he waited he looked about him, reflecting that he had never been in a hospital like this one before. His impression was that he was the first person to enter it for a long time with less than five thousand a year and he thought of Stowerton Infirmary where the outpatients sat for hours on hard chairs, where the paint was peeling off the walls and where everyone seemed to be in a hurry.
Here, instead, was an atmosphere of lazy graciousness as in a large private house. A very faint odour of disinfectant was almost entirely masked by the scent of flowers, sweet peas in copper jugs and, on the enquiry desk, a single rose in a fluted glass. The floor was carpeted in dark red Wilton.
Loring glanced up the branched staircase and watched the receptionist descend. He asked for a list of all the patients who had entered the Princess Louise Clinic in the past year and his request was received with a look of outrage.
It took him nearly half an hour, during which he was passed from one official personage to another, before he got the permission he wanted.
The list was long and imposing. Loring had never seen Debrett but he felt that this catalogue might have been a section of it. Nearly half the names on it were preceded by a title and among the plain Misters he recognized a distinguished industrialist, a former cabinet minister and a television personality who was a household word. Among the women was a duchess, a ballet dancer, a famous model. Loring couldn’t find Dorothy Fanshawe. He searched all through the list again because he had been so certain her name would be there. It wasn’t there.
J for Jerome, but J also for John, James, Jeremy, Jo
nathan, Joseph. Was Bridget Culross’s lover the husband of the Hon. Mrs John Frazer-Bennet of Wilton Crescent or the husband of Lady James Fyne of The Boltons? Loring concluded and supposed Wexford would also conclude him to be the late husband of Dorothy Fanshawe.
Chapter 14
The young Pertwees were honeymooning in Jack’s father’s house. Their own flat wouldn’t be ready for a fortnight and Jack had cancelled the hotel booking. There was nowhere else for them to go and nothing much to do. Jack had taken his annual holiday, so here he was at home. Where else would he be? It was, after all, the only honeymoon he would ever get. Usually in his spare time he did a bit of painting or decorating or went to the dogs or down the Dragon. Marilyn made her dresses and giggled with her girl friends and went to meetings calculated to stir up social strife. These are not occupations for a honeymoon and the young Pertwees felt that to follow their old ways during this period, provided as it were for festive idleness and the indulgence of love, would be a kind of desecration. As Jack put it, you can’t stay in bed all day, so they spent most of the time sitting hand in hand in the little-used parlour. Marilyn was only articulate on the subject of politics and Jack was never talkative. Neither of them ever read a book and they were abysmally bored. Each would have died rather than confess this to the other and they knew in their hearts that their silence was no threat of future discord. Everything would be fine once Jack was back at work and they were in their own flat. When there were his workmates to discuss and the furniture and having her mother to tea. Now they filled their silences with sad reflections, on Charlie Hatton and although this too was no subject for a honeymoon, their shared memory of him expressed in hackneyed and sentimental phrases passed the time away and, because it was selfless and sincere, strengthened their love.
It was thus that Wexford found them.
Marilyn let him into the house, her only greeting a shrug. He, too, could be laconic and brusque and when Jack rose clumsily to his feet, Wexford said only, ‘I’ve come to talk to you about McCloy.’
‘You talk then. You tell me.’
The girl smiled at that. ‘Give us a cig, Jack,’ she said, and she gave her husband a fond proud look. ‘Yes,’ she said, coming up close to Wexford, ‘you give us a lecture. We’d like to know, wouldn’t we, Jack? We don’t mind listening, we’ve nothing else to do.’
‘That doesn’t sound too good on your honeymoon.’
‘Some honeymoon,’ Jack grumbled. ‘You think this is the way I’d planned it?’
Wexford sat down and faced them. ‘I didn’t kill Charlie Hatton,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even know him. You did. You were supposed to be his friend. You’ve got a funny way of showing it.’
A spasm of pain shivered the red from Jack’s face. He took his wife’s hand and he sighed. ‘He’s dead. You can’t be friends with a dead man. All you’ve got is his memory to hold on to.’
‘Give me a piece of your memory, Mr Pertwee.’
Jack looked him full in the face and now the blood returned, beating under the skin. ‘You’re always playing with words, twisting, being clever…’
His wife cut in, ‘Showing your bloody education!’
‘Leave it, love, I feel the same, but it’s no good. It’s…You’ve made up your mind Charlie was a crook, haven’t you? It wouldn’t be no good telling you what he was really like, generous, good-hearted, never let you down. But it wouldn’t be no good, would it?’
‘I doubt if it would help me to find who killed him.’
‘He found us our flat,’ Jack said. ‘D’you know what he did? The bloke that’s got it now, he wanted key money. Two hundred he wanted and Charlie put that up. On loan, of course, but he wouldn’t take no interest. May the 21st it was. I’ll never forget that date as long as I live. Charlie’d been driving all the day before, driving down from the north. But he come here in the morning to say he’d found this flat for us. I was at work but Marilyn got a couple of hours off from the shop and went down there with him. Promised the bloke the money, he did, more like he was her dad than – just a friend.
May the 21st. The day Hatton had ordered his teeth. Just after the robbery that never was. Here was another example of what Hatton had done with the small fortune he had somehow got out of McCloy.
‘I’ll let you have it whenever you want, Charlie said. Just say the word. You should have seen him when we did say the word! I reckon giving things away made him really happy.’
‘This place,’ said Marilyn, mildly for her, ‘well, it’s not the same without Charlie Hatton and that’s a fact.’
Sentimental twaddle, Wexford thought harshly. ‘Where did he get all his money, Mrs Pertwee?’
‘I could ask him that, could I? I could just come out with it like that? I may be common working class but I was brought up right. I’ve got manners. So, for God’s sake, leave me out of it.’
‘Mr Pertwee?’
He would have to answer, Wexford thought. He had said too much and been too self-controlled to plead distress as an excuse this time. Jack put his fist up to his forehead and leant on his elbow.
‘Where did he get it? Two hundred and fifty pounds for his teeth, two hundred for you…’ How it mounted up! ‘Money for his furniture, his wife’s clothes, your wedding present, money going week by week into the bank. He was earning twenty pounds a week, Mr Pertwee. What do you earn?’
‘Mind your own damn’ business.’
‘Come on now, love,’ said Pertwee miserably. He looked at Wexford, biting his lip. ‘Bit more than that,’ he said. ‘Bit more in a good week.’
‘Could you lend your best friend two hundred pounds?’
‘My best friend’s dead!’
‘Don’t stall, please.’ Wexford said sharply. ‘You knew what Hatton’s life was, Pertwee. Don’t tell me you never asked yourself where all that money came from. You asked yourself and you asked him. How did Hatton get to be a rich man on May 21st?’
And now Pertwee’s brow cleared. He sighed and there was a tiny gleam of triumph in his eyes. ‘I don’t know. You could ask me from now till Doomsday. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.’ He hesitated. ‘You asked me about McCloy,’ he said. ‘Charlie didn’t get no money from McCloy on May 21st. He couldn’t have.’
Then Wexford questioned him and probed and used all the subtlety years of experience had given him. Pertwee held his wife’s hand, shook his head, answered monosyllabically and at last he dried up.
At the special court held to give his case its preliminary hearing, Maurice Cullam pleaded guilty to stealing one hundred and twenty pounds from the dead body of Charlie Hatton and was remanded in custody. Further charges might be preferred against him, Burden intimated.
He didn’t believe Cullam was a murderer. His house had been searched from top to bottom but no money had been found. Cullam had no bank account and no more than a few shillings in the Post Office. The only effect of the search was the incidental discovery of such savage bruises on the legs of Samantha Cullam as to necessitate her removal into the care of the county authority. Further charges would be preferred against her father, but they would not be in the nature of murder or larceny.
‘What’s your next step?’ said Dr Crocker idly, on his way back from examining the little girl’s injuries. ‘A bastard who’s beat up a kid like that wouldn’t stop at murder, if you ask me.’
‘It doesn’t follow.’
‘The trouble with you lot you’re always looking for complications. Here’s the boss now. I’ve just been asking Mike here if you’ve got a vacancy for me on your staff, seeing how I’ve helped you with your enquiries.’
Wexford gave him a sour look. ‘Cullam’s no killer.’
‘Maybe not. Prefers his victims undersized and female,’ and the doctor launched into a heated tirade against the arrested man.
‘Oh, I’m sick of the whole bloody thing,’ Wexford shouted suddenly. ‘I’ve spent the entire morning trying to pump Pertwee. Sentimental fool! Everyone knows Hatton was a thief and
a twister, but Pertwee won’t talk because he doesn’t want to sully the fellow’s memory.’
‘It’s not a bad principle,’ said Burden.
‘Any principle’s bad, Mike, if putting it into practice means a murderer goes free. Hatton did jobs for McCloy and one weekend in May he started squeezing his old employer. He squeezed him pretty hard, I can tell you. Two hundred pounds for Pertwee, two hundred and fifty for Vigo… Oh, I can’t go into it all again.’
‘So you’re giving up?’ said the doctor.
Burden looked deeply shocked and he clicked his tongue old-maidishly. But Wexford said calmly, ‘I’m going to try another line for the present and I’m relying on you to smooth the path. You’re supposed to be a doctor, after all.’
Mrs Fanshawe was alone when they got back to the Infirmary, but she was out of bed. Wrapped in a black nylon negligee – afterwards Crocker called it a peignoir – she was sitting in an armchair reading Fanny Hill.
‘A chief inspector and an inspector and a doctor to see you,’ said Nurse Rose. Mrs Fanshawe tucked Fanny Hill under her new copy of Homes and Gardens. She knew now that Nurse Rose was a nurse and not a maid and that she was in hospital. But that was no reason why the girl should take the attitude that her patient was honoured by this visit. Mrs Fanshawe knew what was due to her. Besides, she was glowing with the self-confidence of someone who, having been distressingly and obtusely disbelieved for days, has now proved her point. Nora was alive; Nora was here, or at least, a couple of miles away in Kingsmarkham. Probably this deputation, sent from whatever authority it was that had stupidly persisted in burying her, had been sent to apologise.
Hastily Mrs Fanshawe grabbed a handful of rings from the jewel case her sister had brought in and it was a lavishly decorated hand that she extended graciously to Wexford.
Wexford saw a discontented face with sagging chin muscles and lines pulling the mouth down at the corners. Mrs Fanshawe’s eyes were hard and bright and her voice acid when she said:
