by Ruth Rendell
Sheila removed Clytemnestra from her father’s chair and contemplated the mass of hairs the dog had moulted on to the cushion. ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with her myself,’ she said. ‘Sebastian’s supposed to be coming for her tonight.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘All right if I have the car to take him to the station?’
‘What, is he scared to cross those fields alone?’ Mabel, dear, listen here, there’s a robbery in the park… ‘I may want the car. He’s young and healthy. Let him walk.’
‘He’s got a verruca,’ said Sheila. ‘He had to walk here and back when he brought her a fortnight ago. I’d be meeting him now’ – she gave her father a disgruntled look – ‘only you’ve always got the car.’
‘It is my car,’ said Wexford absurdly, and then, because it was a game that he and Sheila played, ‘It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it…’
‘For a wilderness of verrucas! Oh, Pop, you’re a honey really. There’s Sebastian now.’
Mrs Wexford began calmly laying the table. ‘Don’t say anything about his hair,’ she said to her husband. ‘He’s got peculiar hair and you know what you are.’
Sebastian’s hair resembled Clytemnestra’s, only it wasn’t grey. It hung on to his shoulders in shaggy curls.
‘I hope the Swoofle Hound hasn’t been too much of a bore for you, Mr Wexford.’
Wexford opened his mouth to make some polite denial but Clytemnestra’s transports at the sight of her owner made speech impossible for a while. She hurled herself at his long legs and plummeted her body against his jacket, a garment which Wexford incredulously identified as part of the full dress uniform of a commander in the Royal Norwegian Navy.
‘You’ll stay and have a meal?’ said Mrs Wexford.
‘If it isn’t too much trouble.’
‘How was Switzerland?’
‘All right. Expensive.’ Wexford was beginning to nourish the unkind thought that the holiday would have been even more costly had he had to pay boarding kennel fees, when Sebastian disarmed him by producing from his haversack a large box of chocolates for Mrs Wexford.
‘Suchard!’ said Mrs Wexford. ‘How kind.’
Encouraged, Sebastian made short work of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, occasionally reaching under the table to fondle Clytemnestra’s ears.
‘I’ll drive you to the station,’ said Sheila and she gave her father a confident smile.
‘That’d be great. We might take Clytemnestra into that Olive place. She likes beer and it’d be a treat for her.’
‘Not in my car, you don’t,’ said Wexford firmly.
‘Oh, Pop!’
‘Sorry, sweetheart, but you don’t drink and drive.’
Sebastian’s expression combined admiration for the daughter and a desire to ingratiate himself with the father. ‘We’ll walk down.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s such a hell of a way to your station, though.’ He eyed the banana custard. ‘Yes, thanks, I will have some more. The trouble is I’ll have to walk Sheila back, unless she goes home by the road,’ he added unchivalrously. ‘We heard about your murder even in Switzerland. Down in those fields at the back, wasn’t it?’
Wexford seldom talked shop at home. Probably this young man wasn’t pumping him and yet… He gave a non-committal nod.
‘Odd,’ Sebastian said. ‘I went to the station that way a fortnight ago, across the fields.’
Wexford intercepted his wife’s glance, deflected it, said nothing. Sheila said it for him.
'What time was it, Seb? About ten?’
‘A bit after that. I didn’t meet a soul and I can’t say I’m sorry.’ He ruffled the dog’s curly coat. ‘If I hadn’t jumped smartly Out of the way, Clytemnestra, you mightn’t ever have seen your papa again. Big American car nearly ran me down.’
‘They do nip into that station approach,’ said Sheila. ‘Station approach, nothing. This was in the fields. In that lane that leads up to the stile thing. Great green car swept in at about forty and I practically had to dive into the hedge. I took the number actually but what with all the kerfuffle about my holiday I lost the bit of paper I wrote it on.’
‘A courting couple?’ said Wexford lightly.
‘Could have been. I was too busy taking the number to look and I was scared of losing my train.’
‘Well we won’t go by the fields this time, and I’ll trail all the way back by the road if it makes you happy, Pop.’
‘You can take my car,’ said Wexford. ‘Stick to bitter lemon in the Olive, eh?’
Chapter 17
‘Here’s my theory,’ said Burden, ‘for what it’s worth. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and it’s the only possible solution. We’ve talked a lot about hired assassins but the only hired assassin in this case was Charlie Hatton, hired by Bridget Culross’s boy friend.’
‘Fertile,’ said Wexford, ‘but I’d like it amplified.’
Burden shifted his chair a little nearer those of Wexford and the doctor. The wind and the sunlight filled the office with a pattern of dancing leaves. ‘Jay is a rich man. He must be if he can afford to pay for three months in that clinic of yours just because his wife’s having a difficult pregnancy.’
‘Money down the drain,’ commented Crocker. ‘Do just as well on the N.H.S.’
‘He’s rich enough to pay someone to do his killing for him. You can bet your life he’s a one-time friend of McCloy’s. He arranges for Hatton to be waiting on that by-pass at the point where he’s going to drop the girl on their way back from this conference.’
‘Just what conference, Mike? Have we checked on Brighton conferences that weekend?’
‘The National Union of Journalists, the Blake Society and the Gibbonites all met there,’ said Burden promptly.
‘What are the last lot?’ put in the doctor, ‘a bunch of monkeys?’
‘Not gibbons,’ said Burden, unsmiling. ‘Gibbon. The Decline and Fall man, the historian. I reckon they’re just another collection of cranks.’
‘And Jay took a girl to Brighton, but left her alone all day while he gossiped about Gibbon?’ said Wexford thought fully. ‘Well, stranger things have happened. Go on.’
‘He faked a quarrel with her in the car on the way back to London and turfed her out of the car in a rage. Hatton was waiting for her, hit her over the head, emptied her handbag and made off back to his lorry. The next day Jay paid him his blood money. You can be sure that call Hatton made from a phone box was to Jay, telling him that the deed was done. And no one would have been any the wiser if Hatton hadn’t been greedy and started soaking Jay.’
The doctor made a derisive face. ‘Pardon me as a mere layman, but that’s a load of old rubbish. I’m not saying the girl couldn’t have been dead before the car hit her. She could have. But why should Hatton put her in the road? He couldn’t be sure a car would come along and hit her. Besides, he could so easily have been seen. And he was a small man. He wouldn’t have had the strength to carry her across the southbound highway. Why bother, anyway? If her death was supposed to look like the work of some vagrant maniac, why not kill her behind the hedge and leave her there?’
‘What’s your idea then?’ said Burden sourly.
Crocker looked uppish. ‘I don’t have to have theories. I’m not paid for this kind of diagnosis.’
‘Come down from your perch, Paracelsus,’ said Wexford ‘and put yourselves in our shoes for a moment. Have a shot at it.’
‘The trouble with you lot is you believe everything you’re told. I don’t. I know from experience people distort the truth because they’re afraid or they have a psychological block or they want to be over-helpful. They leave things out because they’re ignorant and when you tell them you want to know everything, they sort out what everything is to them. It’s not necessarily everything to the expert who’s asking the questions.’
‘I know all that,’ said Wexford impatiently.
‘Then, Mrs Fanshawe says the girl w
asn’t in the car, not because she’s ashamed to admit it but because she’s literally forgotten. Of course she was in the car. She hitched a lift a couple of miles before the crash and all that period is a blank to Mrs Fanshawe. Naturally she’s not trying to clear the blanks. The very word “girl” is a red rag to a bull to her.’
‘You’re bothered because there were no keys and no other identification in that expensive handbag. She left them in her suitcase and she left that suitcase in Jay’s car.’
‘Why?’
‘So that Jay would have to come back for her. It was on the seat and after a few miles he’d realise and come back. Or so she thought. When he didn’t she knew she could get it back all right at a later date. Presumably she knew where Jay lived. In extremis it would be an excuse for having it out with him and confronting the wife.’
‘But Jay didn’t come back and she got fed-up with waiting, so she hitched a lift from Fanshawe.’
‘That’s the simple natural solution, isn’t it?’
‘What you’re saying amounts to that Jay is just a more or less harmless philanderer. Why didn’t he come forward when we found the girl?’
The doctor gave a sardonic and superior laugh. ‘Thanks to a spot of inefficiency on someone’s part, you told the Press the dead girl was Nora Fanshawe. Why should Jay stick his neck out? If he’d ditched the girl on the outskirts of Stowerton it was because he never wanted to see her again. He’s not likely to pop up and help you with your enquiries.’
Wexford said quietly, ‘Where does Charlie Hatton come into all this?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll answer that question with a question of my own. What makes you think he didn’t have a source of supply completely separate from McCloy or Fanshawe or Jay?’
Wexford looked at Burden and he saw uneasiness creep into the inspector’s face. He couldn’t allow for this sort of doubt. It was unthinkable. ‘He was behind that hedge,’ he said stoutly. ‘He saw that girl pushed into the road.’
‘Get away!’
‘Oh, not from the central strip of grass.’ Wexford paused for effect. The quivering leaf shadows played, danced and died as the sun went in. ‘From a car,’ he said, ‘she was thrown out of a car.’
The sunlight came and went intermittently. Alone now, Wexford watched the cloud masses drift above the High Street roofs and cast their shadows now on a house front, now on the road itself. The sun blazed briefly, appearing from time to time embedded in a golden nest.
Presently he took his railway timetable from his desk drawer and looked up the afternoon trains to London. There was a fast one at two-fifteen.
The lift was waiting for him, its door invitingly open. By now Wexford had lost all his inhibitions about it. He stepped inside and pressed the ground-floor button. The door closed with a whisper and sank on a sigh.
Someone on the first floor must have summoned it, for it trembled and its floor seemed to rise a fraction. Then it shivered and stopped. Wexford waited for the door to slide but nothing happened.
It was a solid door with neither glass nor grille. Impatiently Wexford tapped his foot. He glanced at the control panel and wondered why the light marked one hadn’t come on. Probably it had been summoned and whoever was waiting had got bored and used the stairs. In that case, why wasn’t the light on? He stuck his thumb on the ground-floor button. Nothing happened.
Or rather, the worst, what he had always feared, had happened. The damned thing had broken. It had got stuck. Very likely it was between floors. A tremor of panic touched one corner of his brain and he dismissed it with a fierce oath. He tapped smartly on the door.
Was the thing sound-proof? Wexford had never had much faith in sound-proofing methods, having lived during the early part of his career in a series of flats highly commended by their agents for the seaweed board allegedly incorporated in their walls and ceilings. They hadn’t stopped him being driven nearly mad by the piano from upstairs and the incessant drumming of children’s feet. They couldn’t sound-proof a dwelling house, he thought furiously. It would be just like ‘them’ to succeed in the utterly pointless achievement of sound-proofing a lift. He knocked on the door again and then he pressed the button market Emergency. If anything, the little black and gilt box settled into an even deeper immobility.
There was a little leather seat, like the extra seats in a taxi, folded into the wall. Wexford pulled it down. It creaked when he sat on it. Glancing about him with simulated ease, he assessed the volume of the lift. Seven by four by four. As far as he could see there was no means of letting air in or carbon dioxide out. He listened. He might have been stone deaf, the silence was so deep.
How long could anybody as big as he remain confined in a space seven by four by four? He had no idea. It was ten minutes to two. He got up and the seat snapped back into the wall. The sound made him jump. He brought both fists down against the panelling and pounded hard. The lift quivered and that disquieted him. For all he knew it was hanging by a thread.
It might be better to shout. But shout what? ‘Help, let me out!’ was too humiliating to consider.
‘Is there anyone there?’ he called, and because that sounded like a medium in a séance, ‘Hey, the lift’s stuck!’
Under the circumstances, it would be wiser to save his breath. It was possible that most of the rooms were empty. Burden and Martin and Loring were all out. Camb might be sitting downstairs (downstairs!) at his desk. Someone would be sitting there. It was equally certain that his cries were unheard.
With an unpleasant sinking feeling, Wexford faced the fact that unless Burden returned two hours earlier than he had said, it was likely that no one would want to use the lift. Camb was at his post, Martin in Sewingbury. It hadn’t escaped Wexford’s notice that most of the uniformed branch preferred the stairs. He might be there till tea-time and if so, would he still be alive at tea-time?
Two o’clock. If he didn’t get out in five minutes he would miss that train. That didn’t matter too much. Without checking at the Princess Louise Clinic, he was almost sure he had the answer. Guesswork perhaps, but inspired guesswork. If he died they would never know…
Sick of shouting, he flapped down the seat again. Probably it was only his fancy that the air in the tiny box was growing thick. Panic would not help at all. It was outside the indulgencies he allowed himself. Outside them too was the thread of terror that told him he was a rat in a hole, a fox in a stopped earth. Briefly he thought of Sheila. No more of that, that way madness lies…
Two-fifteen, Wexford took out his notebook and a pencil. At any rate, he could write it all down.
‘I don’t know where he gets his crazy ideas,’ said the doctor indiscreetly. Burden gave him a neutral smile. ‘If I was in your place I’d want to try it out. Have you got something else on this afternoon?’
‘Nothing Martin and Loring can’t see to without me.’
‘Shall we take my car, then?’
‘Don’t you have a surgery?’ asked Burden, who thought the whole plan unorthodox.
‘My afternoon off. I rather like this dabbling in forensics.’ Burden didn’t. He wondered what Crocker would say if he suggested accompanying him to a patient’s bedside. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But not the by-pass, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Cheriton airfield,’ said the doctor.
The place hadn’t been used for years. It lay on the far side of Cheriton forest beyond Pomfret and it was a favourite haunt of L-drivers. Teenagers below the permitted age of provisional licence holders got their parents to bring them on to the disused runways where they kangaroo-hopped in comparative safety.
Today it was deserted. The greens between the runways had been ploughed up and used for a turnip and sugar beet crop. Beyond the rows of regularly planted beet the pine forest climbed over gently undulating hills.
‘You can drive,’ said the doctor. ‘I fancy the victim’s role.’
‘Rather you than I,’ said Burden, who was wearing his new Gannex.
&nbs
p; He shifted into the driving seat. The runway was as broad as the northbound highway of the Stowerton By-pass.
‘Presumably she was a strong healthy girl,’ said Crocker. ‘You couldn’t push anyone like that out of a moving vehicle if she was in full possession of her faculties. He must have hit her on the head first.’
‘You’re suggesting he had an unconscious girl beside him?’
‘They had a row and he’d socked her,’ said the doctor laconically. ‘Now I’m her and I’m unconscious. The road is clear. You wouldn’t do it from the fast lane, though, would you? Something might just come whizzing up behind you and that’d be awkward. So it’s the middle lane. Go on, move over.’
Burden eased into the centre of the runway. ‘That row of beet on the right corresponds to the central strip,’ he said. ‘Fanshawe swerved to the right to avoid the body.’
‘So he says.’
‘What do I do? Leave the passenger door on the latch?’
‘I reckon so. Trickle along and then push me out.’
Crocker rolled himself into a ball, his arms around his knees. Burden didn’t dare drive at more than a snail’s pace. He was doing five miles an hour. He leaned across, swung the door wide and gave the doctor a light push. Crocker rolled easily into the road, staggered and stood up. Burden stopped.
‘You see?’ Crocker dusted himself off with a grimace. ‘I told you he was crazy. See where I landed? Right in the slow lane. And you’d hardly got the car moving. Our mystery man was going at a fair lick. The girl would have rolled right over to the left, almost on to the grass verge.’
‘D’you want to try it in the fast lane, just for the record?’
‘Once is enough,’ said the doctor firmly. ‘You can see what would happen anyway. The girl mightn’t have rolled into the slow lane, but she’d have landed in the middle of the road. You just couldn’t get a body into the fast lane itself from a moving car.’
‘You’re right. Necessarily, having been thrown from the left, it would roll towards the left, in which case Fanshawe in the fast lane would have passed cleanly to the right of it.’
