Ruth Rendell - The Best Man To Die

‘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 when 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!’