Ruth Rendell - The Best Man To Die

Wexford followed her into the surgery.

There was nothing out of the ordinary here, just the usual chairs and trays of instruments and contraptions of tubes and clamps and wires. Ice-blue blinds were lowered to keep out the noonday sun.

Vigo was standing beside one of the windows, fingering some instruments in a tray, and when Wexford came in he didn’t look up. Wexford smiled dryly to himself. This air of being always overworked, preoccupied by esoteric matters was, he knew, characteristic of some doctors and dentists. It was part of the mystique. In a moment Vigo would glance round, show surprise and make some swift apology for being engaged on matters beyond a policeman’s comprehension.

The dentist had a fine leonine head, the hair fair and abundant. His jaw was strong and prominent, the mouth thin. One day when he was old this would be a nutcracker face but that was a long way off. He seemed to be counting and when he had finished he turned and reacted as Wexford had expected he would.

‘Do forgive me, Chief Inspector. A little matter that couldn’t be left. I understand you want to talk to me about the late Mr Hatton. I’ve no more patients until after lunch, I so shall we go into the house?’

He took off his white coat. Under it he was wearing a slate-blue suit in tussore, the cut, material and colour not quite masculine enough fur his height, and heavily muscled chest. He had the figure of a rugby international and he made Wexford, who was just on six feet, feel short.

Wexford followed him through the pleached walk and they entered the house by a glazed garden door. It was like stepping into a museum. Wexford hesitated, dazzled. He had heard of Chinese rooms, heard of Chinese Chippendale, but he had never seen a room furnished in the style. The brilliance of its colours turned the remembered garden outside into monochrome. His feet sank into a carpet whose blues and creams evoked a summer sky and, at Vigo’s behest, he lowered himself uneasily into a chair with a yellow satin seat and legs of rearing dragons. The dentist moved with apparent carelessness between tables and cabinets loaded with china and jade and stood, a faint smile on his thin lips, under a long picture of red fish painted on silk.

‘I don’t know what you can have to ask me about Mr Hatton’s teeth,’ he said. ‘He didn’t have his own teeth.’

Wexford had come to talk business and yet for a moment he could not. Talk of false teeth in this setting? His eye fell on a set of chessmen ranged on a table in a far corner. They were two armies, one of ivory, one of red jade, and the pawns were on horseback, the white armed with spears, the red with arrows. One of the red knights on a panoplied charger had a contemporary Western face, a raw sharp face which called to mind absurdly that of Charlie Hatton. It grinned at Wexford, seeming to prompt him.

‘We know that, Mr Vigo,’ he said, wrenching his eyes away and fixing them on an eggshell thin service, made to contain jasmine tea. ‘What surprises us is that a man of his means should have such superb false ones.’

Vigo had an attractive, rather boyish laugh. He checked it with a shake of his head. ‘A tragedy, wasn’t it? Have you any idea who could have…? No, I mustn’t ask that.’

‘I’ve no objection to your asking, but no, we’ve no idea yet. I’ve come to you because I want you to tell me everything you can about Mr Hatton with particular reference to any thing you may know about the source of his income.’

‘I only know that he drove a lorry.’ Vigo was still savouring with pride and joy his caller’s astonishment. ‘But yes, I see what you mean. It surprised me too. I don’t know much but I’ll tell you what I can.’ He moved to a cabinet whose door handles were the long curved tails of dragons. ‘Will you join me in a pre-luncheon sherry?’

‘I don’t think so, thank you.’

‘Pity.’ Vigo didn’t press him but poured a glass of Manzanilla for himself and sat down by the window. It gave on to a shadowed court whose centrepiece was an orrery on a stone plinth. ‘Mr Hatton made an appointment with me at the end of May. He had never been a patient of mine before.’

The end of May. On the 22nd of May Hatton had paid five hundred pounds into his bank account, his share, no doubt, of the mysterious and elusive hi-jacking haul.

‘I can tell you the precise date, if you like. I looked it up before you came. Tuesday, 21st May. He telephoned me at lunchtime on that day and by a fluke I had a cancellation, so I was able to see him almost immediately. He’d had dentures since he was twenty, very bad ill-fitting ones, by the way. They made him self-conscious and he wanted a new set. I asked him why he’d lost his own teeth and he said the cause had been pyorrhoea. Knowing a little of his circumstances by this time – at any rate, I knew what his job was – I asked him if he realized this would involve him in considerable expense. He said that money was no object – those were his actual words – and he wanted the most expensive teeth I could provide. We finally arrived at a figure of two hundred and fifty pounds and he was perfectly agreeable.’

‘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.’