Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die (22 page)

   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.

   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.’

   ‘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.’