Ruth Rendell - The Best Man To Die

‘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.

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 distasteful. 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.