The Best Man To Die

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘You must have been surprised.’

  Vigo sipped his sherry reflectively. He touched one of the chessmen, a crenellated castle, caressing it with pride. ‘I was astonished. And I don’t mind telling you I was a little uneasy.’ He didn’t elaborate on this unease but Wexford thought he must have been worried lest the two hundred and fifty wasn’t forthcoming. ‘However, the teeth were made and fitted at the beginning of June. About a month ago it would have been.’

  ‘How did Mr Hatton pay you?’

  ‘Oh, in cash, he paid me on the same day, insisted on doing so. The money was in five-pound notes which I’m afraid I paid straight into my bank. Chief Inspector, I understand what you’re getting at, but I couldn’t ask the man where he got his money from, could I? Just because he came here in his working clothes and I knew he drove a lorry… I couldn’t.’

  ‘Did you ever see him again?’

  ‘He came back once for a check. Oh, and a second time to tell me how pleased he was.’

  Again Wexford was becoming bemused by the colours, by the seductive spectrum that caught and held his eye wherever he looked. He bent his head and concentrated on his own big ugly hands. ‘On any of his visits,’ he said stolidly, ‘did he ever mention someone called McCloy?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He spoke about his wife and his brother-in-law that he was in business with.’ Vigo paused and searched his memory. ‘Oh, and he mentioned a friend of his that was getting married. I was supposed to be interested. because the chap had sometimes been here doing electrical repairs. Hatton said something about buying him a record player for a wedding present. The poor fellow’s dead and I don’t know whether I ought to say this…’

  ‘Say on, Mr Vigo.’

  ‘Well, he did rather harp on what a lot of money he spent. I don’t want to sound a snob but I thought it vulgar. He only mentioned his wife to tell me he’d just bought her something new to wear and he tried to give me the impression his brother-in-law was something of a poor fish because he couldn’t make ends meet.’

  ‘But the brother-in-law was in the same line of business.’

  ‘I know. That struck me. Mr Hatton did say he had a good many irons in the fire and that sometimes he brought off a big deal. But frankly, if I thought about that at all, I imagined he had some side line, painting people’s houses perhaps or cleaning windows.’

  ‘Window cleaners don’t speak of bringing off big deals, Mr Vigo.’

  ‘I suppose not. The fact is I don’t have many dealings with people of Mr Hatton’s…’ Vigo paused. Wexford was sure he had been about to say ‘class’. ‘Er, background,’ said the dentist. ‘Of course you’re suggesting the side lines weren’t legitimate and this may be hindsight, but now I look back Mr Hatton did perhaps occasionally have a shady air about him when he talked of them. But really it was only the merest nuance.’

  ‘Well, I won’t trouble you any further.’ Wexford got up. It must be his over-sensitive suspicious mind that made him see a relieved relaxing of those muscled shoulders. Vigo opened the carved oak door for him.

  ‘Let me see you out, Chief Inspector.’ The hall was a largish square room, its flagged floor dotted with thin soft rugs, and every inch of burnished ancient wood caught the sunlight. There were Blake prints on the walls, the Inferno scenes, Nebuchadnezzar with his eagle’s talons, the naked Newton with his golden curls. Stripped of his blue tussore, Vigo himself might look rather like that, Wexford thought. ‘I had the pleasure of a visit from your daughter the other day,’ he heard the dentist say. ‘What a very lovely girl she is.’

  ‘I’m told she’s much admired,’ Wexford said dryly. The compliment slightly displeased him. He interpreted it as spurious and ingratiating. Also there had been a note of incredulity in Vigo’s voice as if he marvelled at such an old goose begetting a swan.

  The front door swung open and Mrs Vigo came in, holding the child. For the first time since his arrival, Wexford remembered that there was another child, a mongol, confined some where in an institution.

  The baby which Vigo now took in his arms was perhaps six or seven months old. No one could have doubted its paternity. Already it had its father’s jaw and its father’s athletic limbs. Vigo lifted the boy high, laughing as he chuckled, and there came into his face an intense besotted adoration.

  ‘Meet my son, Mr Wexford. Isn’t he splendid?’

  ‘He’s very like you.’

  ‘So they tell me. Looks more than seven months, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Going to be a big chap,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Now that we’ve each complimented the other on his handsome offspring, I’ll take my leave, Mr Vigo.’

  ‘A mutual admiration society, eh?’ Vigo laughed heartily but his wife s face remained grave. She took the boy from him roughly as if so much exaggerated worship offended her. Again Wexford thought of the mongol whose fate no amount of money could change. Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with

  Wexford went out into the sunshine and the knot garden.

  Chapter 9

  The call from Scotland Yard came through half an hour after Wexford got back to the station. In the whole country only two lorries had been hi-jacked during the latter part of May and neither was on Hatton’s regular route. One had been in Cornwall, the other in Monmouthshire, and they had been loaded with margarine and tinned peaches respectively.

  Wexford looked at the memo Burden had left him before departing for Deptford:

  ‘Stamford say no records of any thefts from lorries in their area during April or May.’

  It was unlikely that Hatton could have had a hand in the Cornwall or Monmouthshire jobs. Margarine and tinned fruit! Even if there had been tons of it, a fourth or fifth share couldn’t have amounted to five hundred pounds. Besides, wasn’t he underestimating Hatton’s haul? He had banked five hundred on May 22nd, drawn out twenty-five pounds for the lamp. Another sixty had gone on clothes and the record player. And all this while, Wexford guessed, Hatton had been living like a king. True, the first and perhaps the second blackmail payments had come in before he was obliged to pay for his teeth at the beginning of June, but he had blithely paid two hundred and fifty for them in cash when the demand came.

  Surely that meant that although Hatton had banked only five hundred on May 22nd, he had in fact received more, perhaps even twice that sum. He carried notes about with him in his wallet, on one occasion, at any rate about a hundred pounds.

  Suppose there had been no mammoth hi-jacking at the end of May? That would mean that all Hatton’s wealth had been acquired through blackmail, and blackmail entered into not as the consequence of a hi-jacking but of something else.

  There was a lot more to this, Wexford thought with frustration, that met the eye.

  ‘There seems to be a lot more to this than meets the eye,’ said Sergeant Camb indignantly. ‘Mrs Fanshawe’s own sister identified the dead young lady as Miss Nora Fanshawe.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the girl said, ‘I am Nora Fanshawe.’ She sat down on one of the red spoon-shaped chairs in the station foyer and placed her feet neatly together on the black and white tiles, staring down at the shoes Nurse Rose had so gushingly admired. ‘My aunt was probably very strung up and you say the girl was badly burned. Very disfigured, I suppose?’

  ‘Very,’ said Camb unhappily. His immediate superior and his superintendent had departed ten minutes before for a conference at Lewes and he was more than somewhat at a loss. What the coroner was going to say to all this he dreaded to think.

  ‘Mrs Fanshawe’s sister seemed quite certain.’ But had she? He remembered the scene quite vividly, taking the woman into the mortuary and uncovering the faces, Jerome Fanshawe’s first and then the girl’s. Fanshawe had been lying on his face and the fire had scarcely touched him. Besides, the woman had recognized the silver pencil in his breast pocket, his wristwatch and the tiny knife scar, relic of some school boy ritual, on that wrist. Identifying the girl had been so extremely distaste
ful. All her hair had been burnt away but for the black roots and her features hideously charred. It made him shudder to think of it now, hardened as he was.

  ‘Yes, that’s my niece,’ Mrs Browne had said, recoiling and covering her own face. Of course he had asked her if she was quite certain and she had said she was, quite certain, but now he wondered if it was mere association that had made her agree, association and horror. She had said it was her niece because the girl was young and had black hair and because who else but Nora Fanshawe could have been in that car with her parents? Yet someone else had been. And what the hell was the coroner going to say?

  His eyes still seeing the charred appalling face, he turned to the young hard untouched face in front of him and said:

  ‘Can you prove you’re Nora Fanshawe, miss?’

  She opened the large hide handbag she was carrying and produced a passport, handing it to Camb without a word. The photograph wasn’t much like the girl who sat on the other side of the desk, but passport photographs seldom are much like their originals. Glancing up at her uneasily and then back to the document in front of him he read that Nora Elizabeth Fanshawe, by profession a teacher, had been born in London in 1945, had black hair, brown eyes and was five feet nine inches tall with no distinguishing marks. The girl in the mortuary hadn’t been anything like five feet nine, but you couldn’t expect an aunt to tell the height of a prone corpse.

  ‘Why didn’t you come back before?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should I? I didn’t know my father was dead and my mother in hospital.’

  ‘Didn’t you write? Didn’t you expect them to write to you?’

  ‘We were on very bad terms,’ the girl said calmly. ‘Besides, my mother did write. I got her letter yesterday and I took the first plane. Look here, my mother knows me and that ought to be enough for you.’

  ‘Your mother…’ Camb corrected himself. ‘Mrs Fanshawe’s a very sick woman…’

  ‘She’s not mad if that’s what you mean. The best thing will be for me to phone my aunt and then perhaps you’ll let me go and have something to eat. You may not know it, but I haven’t had a thing to eat since eight o’clock and it’s half- past two now.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll phone Mrs Browne,’ Camb said hastily. ‘It wouldn’t do for her to hear your voice just like that. Oh dear, no.’ He was half convinced.

  ‘Why me?’ said Wexford. ‘Why do I have to see her? It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘You see, sir, the super and Inspector Letts have gone to Lewes…’

  ‘Did the aunt recognise her voice?’

  ‘Seemed to. She was in a bit of a way, I can tell you. Frankly, I don’t have much faith in the aunt.’

  ‘Oh, bring her up,’ Wexford said impatiently. ‘Anything to make a change from lorries. And, Camb – use the lift.’

  He had never seen her mother or her aunt so he couldn’t look for family resemblances. But she was a rich man’s daughter. He looked at the bag, the shoes, the platinum watch and, more than anything, he sensed about her an air, almost repellent, of arrogance. She wore no scent. He took from her in silence the passport, the international driver’s licence and Mrs Fanshawe’s letter. It occurred to him as he turned them over that Nora Fanshawe – if she was Nora Fanshawe – probably stood to inherit a vast sum of money. Jerome Fanshawe had been an affluent stockbroker. It might be that this girl was a con woman and he and Camb the first victims of a colossal deception.

  ‘I think we had better have an explanation,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Very well. I don’t quite know what you want.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Wexford took Camb aside. ‘Was there nothing but this Mrs Browne’s word to identify the dead girl?’ he asked rather grimly.

  Camb looked downcast. ‘There was a suitcase in the car with clothes in it,’ he said. ‘We went through the contents of two handbags we found in the road. One was Mrs Fanshawe’s. The other had nothing in it but some make-up, a purse containing two pounds and some silver and a packet of cigarettes.’ He added defensively, ‘It was a good expensive handbag from Mappin and Webb.’

  ‘My God,’ said Wexford in disgust, ‘I just hope you haven’t landed us with a female Tichborne claimant.’ He went back to the girl, sat down on the opposite side of the desk and gave a brisk nod. ‘You went on holiday with Mr and Mrs Fanshawe to Eastover?’ he asked. On what date was that?’

  ‘May the 17th,’ the girl said promptly. ‘I am a teacher of English at a school in Cologne and I gave up my job at the end of March and returned to England.’

  ‘Since when you have been living with Mr and Mrs Fanshawe?’

  If the girl noticed that he didn’t refer to them as her parents she gave no sign. She sat stiff and tense with her finely sculpted head held high. ‘Not at first,’ she said and he sensed a faint diffidence creep into her voice. ‘My parents and I hadn’t been on good terms for some time. I went back to live with them – or rather, to stay with them – in the middle of May. My mother wanted me to go down to the bungalow with them and because I wanted – I wanted our relations to improve – well, I said I would.’ Wexford nodded noncomittally and she went on. ‘We all drove down to Eastover on Friday, May 17th…’ Her shoulders stiffened and she looked down at her folded hands. ‘That night I had a disagreement with my parents. Is there any need for me to go into details?’ Without waiting for Wexford’s consent to her reticence, she swept the quarrel aside and said, ‘I felt it was useless to try and patch things up. We were worlds apart, we… The result was that on the Saturday morning, I told my mother there was nothing for me in England and I was going back to Germany to try and get my old job back. I took one of the suitcases of clothes I had brought with me and went to Newhaven to get the boat for Dieppe.’

  ‘And did you get your old job back?’

  ‘Fortunately I did. There’s a shortage of teachers in Germany as well as here and they were only too glad to see me. I even got my old room back in the Goethestrasse.’

  ‘I see. Now I should like the name and address of the authority who employ you, the name of your landlady and that of the school in which you’ve been teaching.’

  While the girl wrote this information down for him, Wexford said:

  ‘Weren’t you surprised to hear nothing from Mr or Mrs Fanshawe during the past six weeks?’

  She looked up and raised her straight, rather heavy, black eyebrows. ‘I told you we’d quarrelled. My father would have expected an abject apology from me, I assure you, before he condescended to write.’ It was the first show of emotion she had made and it did more to make Wexford believe her story than all the documentary evidence she had furnished him with. ‘These silences were commonplace with us,’ she said. ‘Especially after a set-to like the one we had that night. Six months could have gone by. Why should I imagine any harm had come to them? I’m not a clairvoyant.’

  ‘But you came as soon as Mrs Fanshawe wrote.’

  ‘She is my mother, after all. Now do you suppose I might go and get myself some lunch?’

  ‘In a moment,’ Wexford said. ‘Where are you planning to stay?’

  ‘I was going to ask you to recommend somewhere,’ the girl said a shade sardonically.

  ‘The Olive and Dove is the best hotel. I suggest you get in touch immediately with your late father’s solicitors.’

  The girl got up and not a crease marked the skirt of her suit. Her self-confidence was almost stupefying. Camb opened the door for her and with a crisp ‘Good afternoon’ she took her leave of them. As her footsteps died away, the sergeant burst out miserably:

  ‘If she’s Nora Fanshawe, sir, who, for God’s sake, was the girl in the road?’

  ‘That’s your problem, Sergeant,’ Wexford said unkindly.

  ‘It could well be yours, sir.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of. Haven’t I got enough with a murder on my hands?’

  Lilian Hatton was an easier nut to crack than the girl who called herself Nora Fanshawe. She broke down and wept bitterly w
hen Wexford told her that her husband’s supplementary income had come from a criminal source. He was almost sure that it was all a revelation to her and he watched her in sad silence as she covered her face and shook with sobs.

  ‘I have been given your husband’s log hook by your brother, Mrs Hatton,’ he said gently as she recovered herself. ‘Now I also want to know if you keep any sort of diary or engagement book yourself.’

  ‘Just a pad by the phone,’ she gulped, ‘where I kind of jot things down.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you if you’ll kindly let me borrow that.’

  ‘You think,’ she began, dabbing at her eyes as she came back with the pad, ‘you think someone – someone killed my Charlie because he wouldn’t go on – go on doing these jobs for them?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Now was not the time to suggest to this woman that her husband had been a blackmailer as well as a thief. ‘Who knew Mr Hatton would pass along the Kingsbrook path that night?’

  She twisted the damp handkerchief in hands whose nails were still pitifully and bravely painted the way Charlie Hatton had liked them, red and shiny and glittering. ‘All the darts club,’ she said. ‘And me – I knew. My mum knew and my brother, Jim. Charlie always came that way back from the pub.’

  ‘Mrs Hatton, did your husband ever receive any callers in this flat that you didn’t know? Strangers, I mean, that he wanted to talk to alone?’

  ‘No, he never did.’

  ‘Perhaps when you were out? Can you ever remember your husband asking you to go out and leave him alone with anyone?’

  The handkerchief was torn now, sopping wet and useless as an absorbent. But she put it to her eyes and brought it away streaked black and green. ‘When he was home,’ she said, ‘I never went out. We always went out together. We was like – like inseparable. Mr Wexford…’ She gripped the arms of her chair and two red flame-like spots burned in her cheeks. ‘Mr Wexford, I’ve heard all you’ve said and I’ve got to believe it. But whatever my Charlie did, he did it for me. He was a husband in a million, a good kind man, a wonderful man to his friends. You ask anyone, Jack… He was one in a million!’