Ruth Rendell - The Best Man To Die

Oh! withered is the garland of war! The soldier’s poll is fallen… Strange, Wexford thought, that when you considered Charlie Hatton you thought of war and soldiers and battles and Hatton had waged it with unscrupulous weapons, winning rich spoils and falling as he marched home with a song on his lips?

How sentimental he was getting! The man was a black mailer and a thief. If life was a battle and Charlie Hatton a soldier of fortune he, Wexford, stood in the position of a United Nations patrol whose job it was to prevent incursions on the territory of the defenceless.

‘I don’t want to ask you anything more now, Mrs Hatton,’ he said to the widow as he left her weeping among the dead man’s ill-gotten glories.

In the High Street he encountered Dr Crocker emerging from Grover’s with a copy of the British Medical Journal.

‘Been making any good arrests lately?’ asked the doctor cheerfully. ‘Now, now, mind your hyptertension. Want me to take your blood pressure? I’ve got my sphyg in the car.’

‘You know what you can do with your sphyg,’ said Wexford, proceeding to tell him in lurid detail. ‘I reckon just about the whole population of Kingsmarkham knew Charlie Hatton would be taking the field path home that night.’

‘No reason why it should be a local man, is there?’

‘I may not be a wizard with a sphygmomanometer,’ said Wexford derisively, ‘but I’m not daft. Whoever killed Charlie Hatton knew the lie of the land all right.’

‘How come? He’d only got to be told by Charlie that he’d be leaving the High Street by the bridge and walking along the local river.’

‘You think? You reckon Hatton would also have told him the river bed was full of stones one of which would make a suitable weapon for knocking off his informant?’

‘I see what you mean. There could be one or more brains behind the killing but whoever struck the blow, albeit a henchman, was Kingsmarkham born and bred.’

‘That’s right, Watson. You’re catching on. My old mate,’ Wexford remarked to no one in particular, ‘albeit a saw- bones, is coming on.’ Suddenly his voice dropped and tapping the doctor’s arm, his face hardening, he said, ‘D’you see what I see? Over there by the Electricity Board?’

Crocker followed his gaze. From Tabard Road a woman wheeling a pram had emerged in Kingsmarkham High Street and stopped outside a plate-glass display window of the Southern Electricity Board. Presently two more children joined her, then a man holding a third child by the hand and another in his arms. They remained in a huddle on the pavement, staring at the dazzling array of kitchen equipment as if hypnotized.

‘Mr and Mrs Cullam and their quiverful,’ said Wexford.

The family were too far away for their conversation, an apparently heated and even acrimonious discussion, to be audible. But it was evident that an argument was taking place between the adults, possibly as to whether their need of a refrigerator was greater than their desire for a mammoth room heater. The children were taking sides vociferously. Cullam shook one of his daughters, cuffed his elder son on the head, and then they all plunged into the showroom.

‘Will you do something for me?’ Wexford asked the doctor. ‘Go in there and buy a light bulb or something. I want to know what that lot are up to.’

‘What, spy on them and report back, d’you mean?’

‘Charming way you put it. That’s what I spend my life doing. I’ll Sit in your car. Can I have the keys?’

‘It’s not locked,’ Crocker said awkwardly.

‘Is that so? Well, don’t come screaming to me next time one of the local hippies pinches a load of your acid off you. Go on. A forty watt bulb and we’ll reimburse you out of petty cash.’

The doctor went unwillingly. Wexford chuckled to himself in the car. Crocker’s cautious approach to the electricity showroom, his quick sidelong glances, called to mind days long gone by when Wexford, then a sixth-form boy, had witnessed this same man as a child of ten, scuttling up to front doors playing ‘Knocking Down Ginger’. In those days the infant Crocker had run up paths lightly and gleefully to bang on a knocker or ring a bell and, elated with an enormous naughtiness, hidden behind a hedge to see the angry householder erupt and curse. There was no hedge here and Crocker was fifty. But as he entered the showroom, had he too experienced a flash of memory, a stab of nostalgia?

Jesu, Jesu, thought Wexford, once more evoking Justice Shallow, the mad days that I have spent! And to see how many of my old acquaintance are dead… Enough of that. On the lighter side it reminded him of Stamford and he wondered how Burden had got on. Somehow a little business in Deptford didn’t quite match up with his own ideas of McCloy’s origins.

Samantha Cullam scuttled out on to the pavement. Her mother came next, lugging the pram. When the whole brood were assembled their father regimented them with a series of fortunately ill-aimed blows and they all trailed off the way they had come. Then Crocker appeared, duplicity incarnate.

‘Well?’

‘Don’t snap at me like that, you saucy devil,’ said the doctor, immensely pleased with himself. ‘I set traps, as the Psalmist says, I catch men.’

‘What did Cullam buy?’

‘He didn’t exactly buy anything, but he’s after a refrigerator.’

‘Getting it on the H.P. is he?’

‘Money wasn’t mentioned. They had a bit of a ding-dong, Mr and Mrs, and one of the kids knocked a Pyrex dish off a cooker. That brute Cullam fetched him a four-penny one, poor little devil. They’re all dead keen on getting this fridge, I can tell you.’

‘Well, what about these traps you laid?’

‘That was just a figure of speech,’ said the doctor. ‘Didn’t I do all right? I bought the bulb like you said. One and nine if you don’t mind. I’m not in this for my health.’

‘They call themselves McCloy Ltd.,’ Burden said wearily, ‘but the last member of the firm of that name died twenty years ago. It’s an old established set-up, but I reckon it’s on its last legs now. In this so-called affluent society of ours folks buy new stuff, they don’t want this reconditioned rubbish.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Wexford, thinking of Cullam.

‘The Yard put me on to six other McCloys all more or less in the hardware business or on its fringes. Not a smell of anything fishy about one of them. Stamford have given me a list of local McCloys and there again not a sniff as far as they know. But I’ll be off to Stamford in the morning to have a scent round. The local force have promised me all the help I need.’

Wexford lounged back in his swivel chair and the dying sun played on his face. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘I wonder if we haven’t been starting from the wrong end. We’ve been looking for McCloy to lead us to his hired assassin. We might do better to find the hired assassin and let him lead us to McCloy.’

‘Cullam?’

‘Maybe. I want Martin to be Cullam’s shadow and if he goes and pays cash for that refrigerator we’re really getting somewhere. Meanwhile I’m going to make Hatton’s log book and Mrs Hatton’s engagement book my homework for tonight. But first, how about a quick one at the Olive and Dove?’

‘Not for me thanks, sir. I haven’t had an evening in for a week now. Divorce is against my wife’s principles but she might get ideas as to a legal separation.’

Wexford laughed and they went down in the lift together. The evening was warm and clear, the light and the long soft shadows more flattering to this market town High Street than the noonday sun. The old houses were at their best in it, their shabbiness, the cracks in their fabric veiled, as an ageing face is veiled and smoothed by candlelight. By day the alleys that ran into a scruffy hinterland were rat-hole rubbish traps but now they seemed romantic lanes where lovers might meet under the bracket lamps and as the sun departed, watch the moon ride over a Grimms’ fairy tale huddle of pinnacled rooftops.