Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (16 page)

   He came to the doorway and started across the deserted yard. As surely as if he could see them actually arriving, see them now, he pictured the stolen lorries driven in. The big doors would open for them and close on them and McCloy and the men who were ‘not quite up to his class’ would unload them and store the cargoes here. Back-slapping, laughing immoderately, Charlie Hatton would go into the house for a drink and a ‘bite to eat’ before driving the lorry away and abandoning it.

   ‘I’d like to go over the house,’ he said, ‘only breaking and entering’s not in my line. We’ll have to wait for permission from the expatriate lady in Sweden.’

Cullam got up and wandered to the window. He looked as if he expected Wexford to hinder him, but Wexford said nothing.

   ‘He was flashing all this money about in the Dragon. On and on about it he was when we walked up to the bridge.’ Cullam stood by the window, staring fixedly now at the road he had trodden with Hatton and Pertwee. The wet pavements cast back mirror reflections. Wexford guessed the Kingsbrook must have swollen now, its stones submerged under a mill-race. ‘Pertwee told me to wait for Charlie Hatton,’ Cullam said. ‘I wouldn’t do that. God, I was sick of him and his money.’ Slowly he pushed a hand through his thin tow coloured hair. ‘Anyway, I told you, I wasn’t feeling too good. I just walked along the path in the dark.’

   Thinking of what you were going home to, Wexford thought, and what Hatton was. There would have been no sound down there but the sibilant trickle of water. Above Cullam, above the web of black branches, a tranquil galaxy, a net of stars. Greed and envy took from a man’s heart everything but - well, greed and envy. If Cullam had noticed anything as he walked it would have been the rubbish, the flotsam that the river sucked in and gathered on its journey through the meadows.

   ‘Did you wait for him?’

   ‘Wait, nothing!’ Cullam said hotly. ‘Why would I? I hated his guts.’ Wexford wondered how long since anyone had made so many damaging admissions in this office in so short a space of time. Cullam burst out violently. ‘I was sick then. I threw up under the trees. And I felt bloody, I can tell you.’ He shuddered a little, but whether at the memory of this vomiting by the water’s edge or of something even uglier Wexford could not tell. He watched the man narrowly, not caring for the wariness of his eyes and the way his hands had begun to twitch. ‘I’m not used to whisky. A half of bitter’s more my line.’

   ‘You’re not the only one,’ Wexford said sharply. ‘What happened then? Did you hear Hatton approach?’

   ‘I’d heard him for a bit by then. I could hear him whistling a long way behind. He was whistling that stupid little old song of his about the man who was scared to go home in the dark.’ Wexford looked up and met the shifty eyes. They slid away furtively, the pink lids blinking. Was Cullam a complete clod or did he realize how macabre his words had been? A man would have to be totally deficient in imagination to fail to be struck with a kind of horror and awe.

   ‘Mabel, dear, 

   Listen here, 

   There’s robbery in the park . . .’

   Burden, who had heard them, had memorized the words and repeated them to his chief. ‘Robbery in the park . . .’ How did it go on? Something about there being no place like home but he couldn’t go home in the dark. It was Wexford’s turn to shiver now. In spite of his age, his experience, he felt a cold thrill run through him.

   ‘Then it happened,’ Cullam said suddenly. His voice trembled. ‘You’re not going to believe this, are you?’

   Wexford only shrugged.

   ‘It’s the truth. I swear it’s the truth.’

   ‘Save your swearing for the dock, Cullam.’

   ‘Christ . . .’ The man made a sudden effort and the words tumbled out fast. ‘The whistling stopped. I heard a sort of sound . . .’ He had no descriptive power, few adjectives but hackneyed obscenities. ‘A kind of choking, a sort of - well, God, it was horrible! I felt so bloody bad, anyway. After a bit I got up and - and I went back. I was scared stiff. It was sort of creepy down there. I couldn’t see nothing and I - I stumbled over him. He was lying on the path. Could I have a drink of water?’

   ‘Don’t be a damned fool,’ Wexford snapped.

   ‘You needn’t be so rough with me,’ Cullam whined, ‘I’m telling you, aren’t I? I don’t have to tell you.’

   ‘You have to, Cullam.’

   ‘I struck a match,’ the man mumbled. ‘Charlie’s head was all bashed in. I turned him over and I got blood on me.’ The words slurred and he gabbled. ‘I don’t know what come over me. I put my hand inside his coat and took hold of that wallet. There was a hundred quid it it, just on a hundred. He was all warm . . .’

   Wexford stared at him aghast. ‘He was dead, though?’

   ‘I don’t know. . . I don’t . . . Christ, yes, he was dead! He must have been dead. What are you trying to do to me?’ The man put his head in his hands and his shoulders shook. Wexford took hold of his jacket roughly, pushing him so that his head jerked up. The tears on Cullam’s cheeks awoke in him a nausea and a rage so fierce that it was all he could do to prevent himself from striking him. ‘That’s all, everything,’ Cullam whispered, shuddering. ‘The body rolled down the slope into the water. I ran home then, I ran like hell.’ He put his fists into his eyes like a child. ‘It’s all true,’ he said.

   ‘The stone, Cullam, what about the stone?’

   ‘It was laying by him. By his legs. I don’t know why but I chucked it back in the water. There was blood on it and hair, bits of hair and - and other bits . . .’

   ‘A bit late in the day to get squeamish, wasn’t it!’

   Wexford’s tone was savage, its effect electric. Cullam sprang to his feet and let out a great cry, drumming his fists on the desk.

   ‘I never killed him, I never, never . . . ! You’ve got to believe me.’

Burden had just come in, damp and disgruntled, when Wexford erupted bull-like from the lift.

   'Where’s Martin?’

   ‘Don’t ask me. I’ve just driven close on two hundred miles and I . . .’

   ‘Never mind all that. I’ve got Cullam upstairs and he’s come out with a fine tale.’ Controlling his voice with an effort, he gave Burden a swift précis. ‘Says he took the money off Hatton’s corpse. Maybe that’s all he did. I just don’t know.’

   ‘But you’ll hold him? Keep him here on a charge of stealing the hundred quid and the pay packet?’

   ‘Something like that. Martin can deal with it. I want you and Loring and anyone else going spare over in Sewingbury to turn Cullam’s house upside down.’

   ‘In case he’s got McCloy’s blood money hidden away?’

   ‘Mike, I’m just beginning to wonder,’ Wexford said wearily, ‘if McCloy isn’t a myth, a fiction. Cullam’s a damned liar and all we know of McCloy rests on his word alone. Why shouldn’t he have fabricated McCloy as a neat little red herring?’ He sighed. ‘Only he hasn’t got any imagination,’ he said.

   ‘McCloy exists all right,’ Burden said emphatically. ‘He’s an elusive sort of bird but he exists.’

It was eleven when Wexford got home. They had searched Cullam’s house, grubbing through soiled unmade beds, cup boards full of clothes that smelt of food spills, drawers containing a jumble of broken rubbish. They had searched but the only money they had found was two and eight-pence in Mrs Cullam’s handbag, a white plastic handbag with black grease in its creases. And their only sinister discovery was bruises and contusions on the legs of one of the children . . .

   ‘Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,’ said Wexford to Clytemnestra, ‘to sweeten my imagination.’ In the belief that he had told her she was a good dog, Clytemnestra wagged her plumed grey tail. The door opened and Sheila came in. ‘What are you doing home on a Wednesday?’ said her father ungraciously.

   ‘That thing came off my tooth. I was eating a Milky Way and it collapsed. So I had to come down and see Mr Vigo.’ She gave him a disarming smile and kissed his cheek. Her hair was dressed in a pyramid of fat ringlets and she looked like a Restoration wench, maid to Millamant, scene stealer, fit to be kissed in corners.

   ‘Well, did he fix it up?’

   ‘Mm-hm. On the spot. He said he wouldn’t charge me.’

   ‘Charge you? Me, you mean. And I should hope not.’

   Wexford grinned, sloughing off the memory of Cullam’s filth like a soiled skin. ‘Now you’ve got false teeth,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t expect to eat toffee.’

   ‘I haven’t got false teeth. I’ve just got a crown. D’you want some of my coff-choc? It’s Nes and drinking chocolate mixed up. Quite groovy.’

   ‘I don’t think so, lovey, thanks all the same.’

   ‘Mr Vigo and I got quite matey,’ said Sheila. She dropped on the floor and, lying on her stomach with her elbows on the carpet, looked up into his face. ‘He gave me tea in that Chinese room of his. I was scared to move, he’s obviously so crazy about all that stuff. His wife came in and banged the door and he was furious because it made the china rattle; he said she just didn’t understand.’

   ‘How quaint. What you might call a new one.’

   ‘Oh, Pop, it wasn’t like that. When I went the receptionist was just leaving, and she walked down into the town with me. She said Mr Vigo had really married for money. She was an heiress and she had a hundred thousand pounds and Mr Vigo wanted money to collect that Chinese stuff. He only stays with his wife now because of the baby. And he goes away most weekends. Sometimes he doesn’t come back till quite late on a Monday night. The receptionist thinks he’s got a girlfriend in London. She seemed a bit jealous. D’you know, I got the idea he sleeps with her too.’

   Wexford kept his face unmoved, but for the faintest flicker of what he hoped looked like sophisticated amusement. He wasn’t shocked by what he had been told; he was astonished that it should have been said to him by his own daughter. In a way he was proud and grateful. Nearly forty years had passed since he was Sheila’s age. Could he have spoken such words to his father? He would rather have died.

   Sheila stretched, got up easily. ‘Since I’m home,’ she said, ‘I may as well do my duty. Fancy ten minutes down by the river, dog?’

   Wexford said quickly, ‘No, not there, sweetheart.’ ‘What, allow his child to walk alone by those dark waters? ‘I’ll take the dog.’

   ‘Really?’

   ‘Go on. Get off to bed. That hair looks as though it’ll take a lot of coping with.’

   Sheila giggled. ‘You’d be surprised.’ He stared, somewhat appalled, as she lifted the wig like a hat and dropped it over a cut-glass vase.

   ‘My God, it’s a wise father that knows his own child!’ He eyed her eyelashes suspiciously, her long fingernails. How many more bits were take-off-able? Wexford, who was hardly ever shaken from his equilibrium by the devious excesses of criminals, was perpetually astonished by his own daughter. Smiling wryly, he fetched the lead and yanked Clytemnestra from the best armchair.

   The night air was fresh, washed by the storm into a cool clarity. Hardly a star showed, for the sky was veiled by a lacy wrack, bleached snow-white by the moon that rose in a clear unclouded patch. The meadow grass he had compared to a tapestry had since that earlier walk been cut and the land had become a pale stubbly desert. It was cold for the time of year. When he came to the river he saw that it was much swollen. In places the stones were totally submerged under the racing water.

   Wexford whistled up the dog and stepped on briskly. He could see the bridge now, its stones gleaming silver and the hart’s tongue ferns between them like shivering slivers of metal. Someone was standing on the parapet, leaning over and looking down. It was some time before Wexford could decide whether it was a man or a woman and when he realized it was a woman he called out a brisk, cheerful good night so that she should not be afraid.

   ‘Good night, Chief Inspector.’ The voice was low, ironic, immediately identifiable. Wexford approached Nora Fanshawe and she turned to face him.

   ‘A fine evening after the storm,’ he said. ‘How’s your mother?’

   ‘She’ll live,’ the girl said coolly. A reserve that was part distaste blanked her features. Wexford knew that look. He had seen it hundreds of times on the faces of people who fancied that they had said too much to him, opened their hearts too wide. Presumably they imagined their confidences led him to regard them with disgust or pity or contempt. If only they knew that to him their revelations were but bricks in the house he was trying to build, rungs on the ladder of discovery, twisted curve-edged pieces in the current puzzle!

   ‘Nothing fresh come back to her?’

   ‘If you mean about the girl in the car, she says there was no girl. I know when she’s telling the truth.’

   ‘People never remember what happened immediately before they got hit on the head,’ Wexford said cheerfully, ‘especially when their skulls are fractured. It’s a medical fact.’

   ‘Is that so? I mustn’t keep you, Chief Inspector. Did you know your dog’s out in the road?’

   Wexford retrieved Clytemnestra from the path of a solitary oncoming car. The driver wound down his window and cursed him, adding that for two pins he’d tell the police.

   ‘Blooming thorn in my flesh, you are,’ Wexford said to the dog as he clipped the lead on. ‘A source of humiliation.’ He watched the girl retreat into the Olive and Dove, the moonlight casting her shadow black, straight and attenuated.

Detective Constable Loring was delighted at the prospect of a day in London. He was mortally afraid of Wexford who, he felt, treated him with a just but unremitting harshness. Someone had told Loring of the chief inspector’s almost paternal fondness for his predecessor, Mark Drayton, and of his disillusionment when Drayton had come to grief. It had been over some mess with a girl and a bribe. Drayton, they told him, had worn his hair long, had been surly and sarcastic and clever and a devil with the women. Loring, therefore had his own hair cropped eccentrically close and was as eager, as bright and cheerful as he could be. Cleverness, he felt, must come hereafter. At present he couldn’t compete with Wexford and Burden who were constantly being clever all over the place. As for the women . . . Loring was healthily keen. It afforded him considerable pleasure to be going to London on a quest for three missing girls. Wistfully he thought how very gratifying it would be to find the right one and perhaps hear an appreciative Wexford call him Peter. Drayton had frequently been favoured by the use of his Christian name.