The Best Man To Die

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Or if mystery man was in fact driving in the fast lane and the body landed plumb in that lane, Fanshawe would have swerved to the left to avoid it and never hit that tree in the central strip. There’s only one possibility and we’ve proved that’s not tenable.’

  Burden was sick of being told his job. ‘Exactly,’ he said hastily. ‘If the girl was thrown out to the right and her head was towards the middle lane with her feet towards the central strip, only then might Fanshawe have swerved to the right. He would have swerved instinctively to avoid the head.’

  ‘But that, as we know, is impossible. If you’re driving a car you can only throw someone out from the passenger seat on the left, not from one of the back seats, and that means the victim is always going to land way over to the left.’

  ‘I’ll go back and tell him,’ said Burden thoughtfully, and he let the doctor take the wheel to drive them back along the runway between the lines of green leaves.

  ‘Chief Inspector gone out?’ Coming out of Wexford’s office, Burden encountered Loring in the corridor.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Isn’t he in his office?’

  ‘You imagine he’s hiding under his desk, do you, or maybe he’s filed himself away in the filing cabinet.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Loring raised a yellow venetian blind. ‘His car’s there.’

  ‘I know that.’ Burden had come up the stairs. He went towards the lift, pressed the button to summon it. When he had waited a minute and it hadn’t come, he shrugged and walked down to the ground floor. Sergeant Camb turned from the woman who had lost a Siamese cat.

  ‘Mr Wexford? He hasn’t gone out.’

  ‘Then where the hell is he?’ Burden never swore, even as mildly as that. Camb stared. ‘He was going to London. I’d reckoned he’d go on the two-fifteen.’

  It was half-past three. ‘Maybe he went out the back way.’

  ‘Why should he? He never does unless he’s going into court.’

  ‘Blue eyes,’ said the woman plaintively, ‘and a coffee coloured mark on his neck.’

  The sergeant sighed. ‘All Siamese cats have blue eyes and brown marks on their backs, madam.’ He picked up his pen and said to Burden, ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve been tied up all the afternoon, trying to get hold of the engineers to see to that lift. Inspector Letts said it wouldn’t come when he pressed the button. I reckon it’s stuck between floors.’

  ‘And I reckon,’ said Burden, ‘Mr Wexford is stuck in it.’

  ‘My God, you don’t mean it, sir?’

  ‘Give me that phone. D’you realise he’s been in there nearly two hours? Give me that phone.’

  It was afternoon visiting at Stowerton Infirmary. It was also consultants’ day. That meant an exodus of hundreds of cars which the woman on traffic patrol usually controlled efficiently. Today, however, a huge bluish-green car with battered fins, parked half across the drive, blocked the exit. It was locked, keyless, immovable, and behind it a traffic jam stretched nose to tail from the car park.

  In vain four ambulance men had tried to lift it and hump it against the gate of the porter’s lodge. Presently Vigo, the orthodentist, got out of his own car to lend a hand. He was bigger and more powerful than any of the ambulance men, but all their combined efforts couldn’t shift it.

  ‘Probably belongs to someone visiting a private patient,’ said Vigo to the consultant gynaecologist whose car had come to a standstill behind his.

  ‘Better get a porter to ring the private wing.’

  ‘And fast,’ said Vigo. ‘These people ought to be shot. I’ve got an appointment at four.’

  And it was five to when Nurse Rose knocked on Mrs Fanshawe’s door. ‘Excuse me, Mr Jameson, but your car’s blocking the drive. Could you move it please? It’s not just visitors that want to get out.’ Her voice took on an awed tone. Outrage had been committed. ‘Personal request of Mr Vigo and Mr Delauney. So if you wouldn’t mind…’

  Michael Jameson got up languidly. ‘I don’t know these guys.’ He gave Nurse Rose a long appraising look. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to get in bad with them, sweetheart. I’ll shift it.’

  Nora Fanshawe touched his sleeve. ‘You’ll come back for me, Michael?’

  ‘Sure, don’t fuss.’ Nurse Rose opened the door for him and he walked out ahead of her. ‘Dead bore, this hospital visiting,’ the women in the room heard him say.

  Mrs Fanshawe had painted her face for the first time since regaining consciousness. Now she touched up her thin lips with scarlet and rubbed at the eyeshadow which had settled in greasy streaks into the folds of her lids. ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Well what, Mother?’

  ‘I take it you’re going to marry that waster?’

  ‘I am and you’ll have to get used to it.’

  ‘Your father would never have allowed it if he were alive,’ said Mrs Fanshawe, twisting her rings.

  ‘If my father were alive, Michael wouldn’t want to marry me. I wouldn’t have any money you see. I’m being quite frank with you. I thought that’s what parents wanted, frankness from their children.’ She shrugged and flicked a fair hair from the shoulder of her blue suit. Her voice was ugly, stripped bald of convention and pretence. ‘I wrote to him and told him my father was dead.’ She laughed. ‘He came down here like a shot. I’ve bought him,’ she said. ‘I tried the product and liked it and now I’m going to keep it. The principle is that of the mail order catalogue.’

  Mrs Fanshawe wasn’t shocked. She hadn’t taken her eyes from her daughter’s face and she hadn’t flinched. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop you. I won’t quarrel with you, Nora.’ Her voice didn’t waver. ‘You’re all I’ve got, all I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Then there is no reason why we shouldn’t be a happy little family, is there?’

  ‘A happy family! Frank you may be, but you’re deceiving yourself. He’s got his eye on that nurse already.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you think you’ve bought him!’ All Mrs Fanshawe’s self-control couldn’t stop the bitterness breaking through. ‘Buying people! You know where you get it from, don’t you? Your father. You’re your father all over again, Nora. God knows, I tried to keep you innocent, but he taught you, he taught you people could be bought.’

  ‘Oh, no, Mother,’ said Nora Fanshawe equably. ‘You taught me. Shall we have some more tea?’ And she rang the bell.

  At four-fifteen the lift slid down to the ground floor. The door began to slide and Burden felt sick, his bowels turned to water. He couldn’t look. The two engineers came down the stairs, running.

  The foyer was full of people. Grinswold, the Chief Constable, Inspector Lewis and Letts, Martin, Loring, Camb and, nearest the lift, Dr Crocker.

  The door was open. Burden had to look. He stepped for ward, pushing people aside.

  ‘Gangway!’ said the doctor.

  Wexford came out, grey in the face, the doctor’s arm about his shoulders. He took two heavy steps.

  ‘Bricked up,’ he said, ‘like a bloody nun!’

  ‘God, sir. Are you all right?’

  ‘It’s all in the book,’ Wexford gasped. ‘I’ve got it all down in the book. Nothing…’ he said, ‘nothing like a rarefied atmosphere for making the brain work. Cheaper than going up Everest, that lift.’

  And then he collapsed into the sling Crocker and Letts made with their arms.

  ‘I’m just going off duty,’ said Nurse Rose, ‘and the night staff are in the kitchen, so you won’t mind finding your own way, will you?’ She peered at him in the dim light of the corridor. ‘Didn’t you come visiting Mrs Fanshawe? I thought so. You’ll know where to go, then. He’s in room five, next door but one to hers.’

  Burden thanked her. Turning the corner, he came face to face with Mrs Wexford and Sheila.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s fine. No after-effects. They’re only keeping him in for the night to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Thank God!’

  ‘You really care
about poor old Pop, don’t you?’ When she smiled, he could have kissed her, she looked so like her father. Crazy, really, that this enchanting perfect face was the copy and the essence of the heavy wrinkled face that had been haunting him all the time he had made out his arrest and read out the charge. He didn’t want to seem sentimental and he managed a cheerful grin. ‘He’s dying to see you,’ she said. ‘We were just a stop-gap.’

  Wexford lay in bed in a room that was just like Mrs Fanshawe’s. He had an old red checked dressing gown across his shoulders and a fuzz of grey hair showed between the lapels of his pyjama jacket. A grin curled the corners of his mouth and his eyes snapped.

  Tip-toeing, Burden crossed to the bed. Everyone in hospital tip-toes, except the staff, so he did too, glancing nervously about him. The cooking smell and the disinfectant smell with which the corridor was redolent were drowned in here by the carnations Mrs Wexford had brought her husband.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Perfectly all right, of course,’ Wexford said impatiently. ‘All those damned flowers. Makes the place look like a chapel of rest. I’d come out now only that bloody Crocker and his henchmen keep getting at me, sapping my strength.’ He sat up with a jerk and scowled. ‘Open that beer, will you? Sheila brought those cans in for me. She’s a good girl, chip off the old block.’

  Burden rinsed the glass from Wexford’s supper tray and from the washbasin took the toothglass for himself. ‘A private room, eh? Very grand.’

  Wexford chuckled. ‘Not my idea, Mike. They were heading for the general ward when Crocker remembered Monkey Matthews was in, having his veins done. We came to the conclusion it might be an embarrassment for him after I did him a couple of years ago for stealing by finding. Don’t worry, I’ll take care to tell him what saving his face has cost me.’ He looked round him complacently. ‘Eight quid a day, this room. Good thing I wasn’t in that lift any longer.’ He drank his beer, wiped his mouth with a man-size Kleenex. ‘Well, have you done the deed?’

  ‘At five-thirty.’

  ‘Pity I wasn’t there.’ Suddenly he shivered. ‘The skin of my teeth…’ Then he laughed. ‘Teeth!’ he said. ‘That’s funny.’

  Footsteps that didn’t tip-toe sounded outside and Crocker marched in. ‘Who gave you leave to have a booze-up?’

  ‘Sit down, not on the bed. Nurse Rose doesn’t like it. We were just going to have a post-mortem. Interested?’

  The doctor fetched himself a chair from the empty room next door. He flopped into it. ‘I’ve heard who it is over the grapevine. By God, you could have knocked me down with a feather.’

  ‘I leave that to others,’ said Wexford. ‘The intemperate fellows who aren’t content with feathers. They use stones.’ He met the doctor’s eyes and saw there the astonishment and the eagerness for enlightenment he loved to see. ‘Murderers aren’t unknown among the medical profession,’ he said. ‘What about Crippen? Buck Ruxton? This time it happened to be a dentist.’

  Chapter 18

  ‘It’s always a problem,’ said Wexford, ‘to know where to begin. Where’s the beginning? I often think novelists must have my trouble. Well, I know they do. I used to know a chap who wrote books. He said it was easy to end and the middle just happened naturally, but he never knew where to begin. How far do you have to go back in a man’s life to find what makes him do things? To his childhood, to his parents, to Adam?’

  ‘Let’s not go back that far,’ said Burden. ‘We’ll be here all night.’

  Wexford grinned at him. He banged his pillows and pulled their corners round his shoulders. ‘I think I’ll begin ten years ago,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. You know how time flies.’

  ‘Vigo wasn’t here ten years ago.’

  ‘He was getting married. He married a rich girl, probably not entirely for her money. But the money set him up in practice here and bought his house for him. They had a child.’

  ‘It was mongoloid,’ said the doctor. ‘Been in an institution since it was six months old. Vigo took it very hard.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ said Wexford. ‘Look at Vigo. What Hitler would have called the perfect Aryan type and clever with it. If you were stud farming humans, wouldn’t you choose Vigo as your ideal stallion?’ The doctor gave a grudging nod.

  ‘And if you were Vigo, wouldn’t you expect to sire splendid progeny?’

  ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘Maybe. Everyone hopes, let’s say, and sometimes the most unexpected people are lucky.’ He smiled to himself and finished the last drop of beer Sheila had brought. ‘I reckon Vigo blamed his wife. Don’t tell me that was unfair. Life’s unfair. They didn’t have any more children for eight years.’

  The doctor leant forward. ‘They’ve got a son now,’ he sighed. ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘If he’s poor it’s his father’s fault,’ Wexford snapped. ‘Don’t give me that sentimental stuff. This is the real beginning, Mrs Vigo’s second pregnancy. She had high blood pressure, she got toxaemia.’

  ‘A threatened toxaemia, surely,’ the doctor corrected him pedantically.

  ‘Whatever it was, she was admitted to the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street two months before the birth. You can imagine Vigo’s feelings, was it going to go wrong again?’

  ‘Toxaemia doesn’t lead to mongoloid babies.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ said Wexford irritably. ‘People don’t reason in cases like that. He was scared and depressed and he took up with one of the nurses he met when he was visiting his wife. Maybe he’d always been a bit of a philanderer. I’ve got my own reasons for thinking that.’

  ‘In your notes,’ said Burden, who had the book open on his lap, ‘you said he dropped Bridget Culross after the child was born healthy and normal.’

  ‘That’s conjecture. Let’s say he was too taken up with the child – he’s crazy about that child – to bother about outside interests. Did you check with the clinic?’

  ‘I did. Mrs Vigo was admitted last October and remained in the clinic until two weeks after the child was born at the end of December. Bridget Culross was on duty in the ward where her room was from November 1st until January 1st.’

  Wexford leaned back. ‘It had to be someone with a Christian or surname beginning with J, you see. Jerome Fanshawe, we thought at first, but that couldn’t be because Mrs Fanshawe was past the age of childbearing. I seriously considered Michael Jameson. It wouldn’t at all surprise me to know he’s got a wife somewhere.’ He lowered his voice. Mrs Fanshawe was two doors down the corridor. ‘A Michael Jameson might just as well call himself Jay as Mike and he had the right kind of car. But we’ll come to that later. Anyway, it wasn’t either of them. It was Jolyon Vigo. With a name like that you’d be glad of a convenient abbreviation sometimes.’

  ‘You say he dropped the girl. Why did he take up with her again?’

  ‘A man has a child,’ said Wexford. ‘If he worships the child it may, for a while, bring him closer to his wife. But these things wear off. Can the leopard change his spots? The girl thought she’d a chance of getting him to marry her. No doubt, he’d even considered that when he thought his wife wasn’t ever going to give him a child. Now he wanted his bit of fun on the side but he wasn’t going to lose his son for it. Not on your life. And that’s the crux.’

  The doctor crossed his legs and shifted his chair a little. ‘Where does Charlie Hatton come into all this?’

  Wexford didn’t answer him directly. Instead he said, ‘Vigo and Culross were carrying on their affair intermittently. If it wasn’t all that of a regular thing, that’s probably because the girl nagged him about marriage and he stalled.’

  ‘You can’t possibly know that,’ Burden objected.

  Wexford said loftily, ‘I understand human nature. On the 18th of May Bridget Culross had a long weekend off and, by chance, the Blake Society were also having their weekend conference in Brighton over the next three days. Vigo picked Culross up at Marble Arch and drove her to Brighton in his car, a big Plymouth sedan.’
r />   ‘How do you know it was the Blake Society? Why not the Gibbonites?’

  ‘Vigo’s got Blake drawings all over his hall walls. Did you check their room bookings?’

  ‘They booked in at the Majestic in their own names. Two adjoining rooms. They vacated them on Monday afternoon, Monday May 20th.’

  Wexford nodded. ‘Perhaps it was their first weekend together. Bridget Culross spent it pressurising Vigo into agreeing to divorce his wife. Or trying to. I don’t know what happened. How could I? I’ll make a guess that she knew they’d have to pass through Kingsmarkham, or near it, on their way back to London, and she tried to persuade Vigo to take her back with him to the house in Ploughman’s Lane and confront his wife together.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Men don’t like that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘They had a fight. Want to know where? I guess she put the pressure on really hard when they reached the point where the road passes nearest to Kingsmarkham. That’s about three miles south of the spot where the body was found. No doubt they got out of the car and my guess is the girl said she’d make her way to Ploughman’s Lane on her own if he wouldn’t come with her. Vigo’s a big powerful man. They struggled, she fell and hit her head. He had an unconscious, perhaps dead, girl on his hands. You see his dilemma?’

  ‘Whatever he did next, his wife would find out, divorce him and get custody of the child,’ said Burden.

  ‘Exactly. He began some quick thinking. First remove all identification from the expensive handbag he had given her himself. No doubt, a good many people knew where she had gone, but she had assured him no one knew his name. Vigo’s an intelligent man, a medical man who knows something about police methods. They wouldn’t search for a girl with a reputation like Bridget Culross’s and no near relatives to give a damn. Suppose she was found dead in the road, knocked down by a passing vehicle? It would be assumed she’d quarrelled with her boy-friend, hitched a lift to Stowerton and been knocked down crossing the road or trying to hitch a second lift. He put her on the passenger seat, laying her flat with her head on his lap so as not to mark the seat with blood. Probably he had a newspaper or an old rug to cover his knees, something he could burn when he got home.’