The Best Man To Die

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘He entered the by-pass where at that time of night and during the week, the road was comparatively clear. Now he wouldn’t dare drive too fast – no one could open a car door and throw a body out at any speed – so he kept to the slow lane.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Things went according to plan. He drove along at twenty or thirty miles an hour and when there were no other vehicles in sight, he shot the girl out and she landed as he had expected with her head well over into the fast lane…’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘That’s not possible. It can’t be done. We tried it and…’

  ‘Wait a minute by all means,’ said Wexford, and in execrable French, ‘Pas devant les infirmieres.’

  ‘Tea, coffee, Ovaltine or Horlicks,’ said a bright voice whose owner had tapped on the glass panel in the door.

  ‘Ovaltine would be very wholesome,’ said Wexford blandly. ‘Thank you kindly.’

  ‘A chiel’s among ye, taking notes,’ said Wexford. ‘In other words, Charlie Hatton.’ He sipped his Ovaltine with an inscrutable expression. ‘He had parked his lorry in the lay-by just over the brow of the hill and was taking the air in the field on the other side of the hedge.’

  ‘You mean he saw Vigo push a girl out of his car and did nothing about it?’

  ‘Depends by what you mean by nothing. In my experience the Charlie Hattons of this world aren’t over-anxious to get involved with the police even as indignant observers. Hatton did something. He blackmailed Vigo.’

  ‘Can I have a couple of your grapes?’ said the doctor. ‘Thanks. The only grapes I ever taste are the ones I nick from my patients.’ He put one in his mouth and chewed it, seeds and all. ‘Did he know Vigo?’

  ‘By sight, I daresay, or else he knew the car. You’ll get appendicitis.’

  ‘Rubbish, old wives’ tale. Anyhow, I’ve had it. What happened next?’

  Wexford took another Kleenex and wiped his mouth.

  ‘Hatton went home to his wife. Five minutes later Jerome Fanshawe came along, driving like the clappers, spotted the girl in the road too late and shouted out, “My God!” She was lying, remember, with her body and legs in the middle lane and her head over the fast lane. Fanshawe swerved. Wouldn’t it be instinctive in those circumstances to avoid the head at all costs? So he swerved to the right, mounted the turfed centre section and crashed into a tree. That, I think, sums up the entire intervention of the Fanshawes into this case. For once in his life, Fanshawe was the innocent victim.’

  Burden nodded agreement and took up the tale. ‘On the following morning,’ he said, ‘Hatton mulled over the whole business. He made his telephone call about the flat for Pertwee and then went down to see it with the girl Marilyn.

  Immediately there was a call on his purse. The tenant of the flat wanted two hundred pounds key money.’

  ‘And that clinched it,’ said Wexford. ‘He left Marilyn at the Olive and Dove and she saw him go into a phone box. We may be sure he was phoning Vigo, making an appointment for the afternoon.’

  ‘I thought you said he made the appointment later from his own home?’ said the doctor.

  ‘He phoned again from his own home. That was just a blind for his wife. You may be sure he’d already made it clear to Vigo what he wanted and that he would phone again as if legitimately asking for an appointment. Of course it happened that way. If it hadn’t, do you suppose Vigo would have agreed to an appointment that same day, only an hour afterwards? He’s a busy man, booked up weeks in advance. Charlie Hatton wasn’t even a patient of his. I’ve no doubt that in the morning Charlie told him he wanted hush money out of him and he’d have the best set of false teeth Vigo could provide. Free of charge, of course.’

  ‘It must have been a hell of a shock to Vigo,’ said Crocker thoughtfully. ‘The night before he’d taken a risk and acted on the spur of the moment. The chances then of its coming out were fairly high, I’d have thought. But Fanshawe’s crash was an unforeseen stroke of luck for him. Seeing it in the morning paper and seeing that the girl had been identified as Nora Fanshawe made him safe. By the time the real Nora turned up things would be so confused, the truth would very likely never come out. Who would have imagined his actions had been seen?’

  ‘Naturally he paid up,’ said Wexford. ‘Paid and paid. My guess is that when he phoned the first time Hatton asked him to draw a thousand pounds immediately from his bank, a sum which he was to give to Hatton, and did give him, during his visit to Ploughman’s Lane that afternoon, the afternoon of May 21st. Must have been rather bizarre, mustn’t it, that consultation of Hatton’s? The mind boggles, as they say. You have to picture the blackmailer lying back in his chair with his mouth open while his victim, desperate, at bay, if you like, probed about, measuring him for his new teeth.’

  ‘On the following day, May 22nd, we know Hatton paid five hundred pounds into his own account, keeping two hundred for the Pertwees’ key money and the remaining three hundred for incidental expenses, furniture, clothes and other frivolity. The weekly payments of fifty pounds a time followed at once. I reckon Hatton got Vigo to leave the money in some prearranged hiding place down by the river on Friday nights somewhere along the route Hatton took on his way home from the darts club. And one Friday night…’

  ‘Yes, why that particular Friday?’

  ‘Who can say at what point the victim of blackmail reaches the end of his tether?’

  ‘Mrs Fanshawe,’ put in Burden unexpectedly. ‘You see, that wasn’t quite right, what you said about the Fanshawes’ intervention having come to an end. Mrs Fanshawe regained consciousness the day before Hatton was killed. It was in the morning papers, just a paragraph, but it was there.’

  ‘You’ve got something there, Mike. Nora was still missing, but once Mrs Fanshawe could talk, Vigo might believe she’d tell us the girl’s body couldn’t be that of her daughter. Hatton was an important witness with someone else now to back up his story. Once he’d had all he wanted out of Vigo…’

  The doctor got up, stood for a moment staring at Wexford’s flowers and then said, ‘It’s a good story, but it’s impossible. It couldn’t have happened that way.’ Wexford smiled at him. Crocker said irritably, ‘What are you grinning like that for? I tell you there’s an obvious flaw. If anyone throws a body out of a car, even feet first, it’s going to fall well over to the left. Vigo would have had to be driving right on the grass section itself for the girl’s head to have been in the fast lane. And as to that theory of yours about the head being on his lap to stop bloodstains getting on the passenger seat, it’s nonsense. That way her feet would have been in the fast lane and Fanshawe would have swerved to the left to avoid her head.’

  He stopped and gave a defiant snort as the nurse came back with a sleeping pill.

  ‘I don’t want that,’ said Wexford. He slid down in the bed and pulled up the covers. ‘I’ll sleep, I’m tired.’ Over the top of the sheet he said, ‘Nice of you two to come. Oh, and by the way, it’s a foreign car. Left-hand drive. Good night.’

  Chapter 19

  ‘Electrician,’ said Jack Pertwee on the doorstep. ‘You’ve got a switch that wants fixing.’

  ‘Not me,’ said the girl. ‘I only work here. Wait a bit… Is this it?’ She fumbled among some loose sheets of paper on a table beneath the mullioned window and her face reddened with indignation. ‘You was supposed to come last week.’

  ‘I was off last week. This is my first day back. Don’t work yourself up. I’ve been here before. I can find my own way.’

  His first day back. His first job on his first day, the first return to normal routine after the earthquake. Jack didn’t know why he had chosen to come here – there were a dozen names who needed him on his list. Perhaps it was because some unformed unrecognised hunger in his subconscious cried for the solace and the refreshment of looking on beautiful things; perhaps because this place was unique in his experience, alien, and remote from anywhere he had ever been with Charlie.

  Bu
t as always when he found himself at the house in Ploughman’s Lane, a clumsiness dragged at his feet and his deft fingers began to feel all thumbs. He was like a barbarian who, having entered a forsaken Roman villa, stood dazzled and amazed, overcome by the awe of ignorance. He crossed the hall and pretending to himself that he did not know the precise location of the switch – there was no need to, he was alone now – he opened door after door to peer in wonderment at the treasures within. A muttered ‘Pardon me, lady’ would have been his defence if one of them had been occupied but there was no one about and Jack looked his fill undisturbed at velvet and silk, dark tables inlaid with ivory, pictures in gilt frames, flowered china holding real flowers, a bust in bronze, a pomander whose orange spicy scent was brought to him on warm sunlight.

  Afterwards he was unable to say what had suddenly brought Charlie so vividly to his mind, except perhaps that the memory of his dead friend was never far from it. Maybe this flash of pain, sharper and more real than any he had yet felt, came when he opened the door of the Chinese room. It was here, just inside the door, that his task awaited him and he stepped for a moment on the threshold stunned into immobility by the strange rich colours. It was too early yet for the sun to have reached the back of the house but the reds and golds, the unearthly sea greens and citrus yellows, blazed fiercely enough in shadow. Jack put down his tool bag and gazed about him numbly. He had been here before and yet it seemed to him that he had never seen the room until this moment. It was as if his nerves had been stripped raw and, unprotected, received the impact of these glorious yet intolerable colours in a series of vibrations like electric shocks.

  Half in a trance he approached the chessmen that Charlie had called an army and saw in the face of one of them, a red knight, the perfect facsimile of his dead friend’s face, sharp, cunning, astute and kind. A longing to possess and preserve it seized him but he was afraid even to touch the delicate carved jade and he heard himself give a low sob.

  It was his awed and perhaps childlike descriptions of this house which had, he supposed, led Charlie here. Just as he, Jack, might have gone to the grocer’s, so Charlie Hatton had come here to buy the best. Jack’s sorrow dissolved in admiration of that audacity. His friend had penetrated this museum too and that not as a servant or a workman but as a customer. Vigo had brought him into this room and drunk with him. Jack could imagine Charlie’s cocky poise, his hard brown hands even daring to lift a cup or finger a silk picture while he commented on its quality, its desirability, with brash impudence. Had he recognised himself at the head of that scarlet army? And the Philistines slew Jonathan… How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!

  Jack turned away from the sharp little faces that seemed to scrutinise him and, opening his bag, squatted down in front of it. He felt worn out, exhausted at ten in the morning, and the girl’s voice behind him made him jump.

  ‘Thought you might fancy a cup of tea.’

  He could guess his own expression and he didn’t want her to see his face. ‘Mr or Mrs about?’ he asked. ‘I’d better see one of them.’

  ‘Haven’t you heard then? She’s gone away and taken the boy. The police arrested him yesterday for killing that lorry driver.’

  There had been tears in Jack’s eyes and now his eyelids burned as they sometimes did after an evening with Charlie in the smoke-filled bar of the Dragon. He was staring into the heap of tools but not seeing them. His brain had become an empty red space. He got to his feet and there was a hammer in his hand, although he couldn’t remember selecting it from the heap.

  The red light before his eyes split into a spectrum of insane red and gold and sea green that roared as it twisted and leapt about him, as if a kaleidoscope could make sound as varied and as fantastic as its changing pictures. Behind him another, shriller noise echoed. The girl had begun to scream.

  ‘A bull in a china shop,’ said Wexford.

  He picked his way through the fragments which littered the carpet, stopping occasionally to lift between finger and thumb a sliver of transparent porcelain. His expression was impassive and cold but a little heat entered it as he approached the table where the chessmen had been. Not a piece remained intact, but here and there among the red and white gravel he found a delicate spear with an amputated hand still grasping it, a fragment of ivory lace, a horse’s hoof.

  Burden was kneeling down, smoothing out torn remnants of the silk pictures. A big rough footprint scarred the scales of the painted fish, the print of the same foot that had ground sake cups to dust.

  ‘Frightening, isn’t it?’ said Wexford. ‘Barbarity is frightening. I’m glad I don’t know…’

  ‘What all this stuff was worth?’ Burden hazarded.

  ‘Not so much as all that. I meant I’m glad I don’t know it’s uniqueness, its age, its quality really; looting must be like this, I suppose, wanton, revengeful.’

  ‘You said Charlie Hatton was a soldier of fortune.’

  ‘Yes. Is there any point in going to talk to his comrade-in-arms? I suppose we have to.’

  Jack Pertwee was in the kitchen with Sergeant Martin. He was sitting down, his arms spread and his body slumped across the table. Wexford shook him roughly and jerked his head back. Their eyes met and for a moment Wexford still held on to the electrician’s coat collar, shaking it as might a man who has brought a destructive dog under control. Jack’s jowls shook and his teeth chattered.

  ‘You’re a fool, Pertwee,’ Wexford said scornfully. ‘You’ll lose your job over this. And for what? For a friend who’s dead and can’t thank you?’

  His voice almost inaudible, Jack said, ‘The best… The best friend a man ever had. And it was me sent him here.’ He clenched his fist, drove it hard against the table.

  ‘Oh, take him away, Sergeant.’

  Jack dragged himself to his feet. His fist opened and some thing fell to the floor, rolled and came to rest at Wexford’s feet. The chief inspector stared downwards. It was the knight’s decapitated head. The wicked sharp face, tricked into expression by a ribbon of sunlight, grinned widely and showed its teeth.

  ‘Charlie,’ Jack whispered. He tried to say it again but great agonised sobs tore away the name.

  Ruth Rendell

  ***

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: fbd-da6555-5fd3-2c4d-e69e-6400-e879-16d561

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 26.07.2012

  Created using: Fiction Book Designer software

  Document authors :

  Source URLs :

  About

  This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.

  (This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)

  Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.

  (Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)

  http://www.fb2epub.net

  https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/