Ruth Rendell - The Best Man To Die

‘That’s right, with Jay.’ Nurse Lewis was still blushing at the implications of this weekend. ‘She didn’t come back. I heard Matron say she wouldn’t have her back this time if she came.’

‘She’d done it before, you mean?’

‘Well, she’d been late a good many times and sometimes she didn’t bother to come in after a late night. She said she wasn’t going to dress operations and cart bedpans around for the rest of her life. She was going to have it soft. That’s what she said. I thought she’d gone away with- Jay to live with him properly. Well, not properly, but you know what I mean.’

‘Tell me, did he give her presents? Did she have a very good black handbag with a Mappin and Webb label? This one?’

‘Oh, yes! He gave it to her for her birthday. She was twenty-two. Look…’ She frowned and leant towards him. ‘What is this? You’ve found her handbag but you haven’t found her?’

‘We’re not sure yet,’ said Loring, but he was.

Wexford would be displeased if he went back with just this and no more. Loring would have liked another day in London, but it was hardly worth facing Wexford’s rage, the necessary preliminary to granting it. He went into the main hospital building and rang the bell at the enquiry desk. While he waited he looked about him, reflecting that he had never been in a hospital like this one before. His impression was that he was the first person to enter it for a long time with less than five thousand a year and he thought of Stowerton Infirmary where the outpatients sat for hours on hard chairs, where the paint was peeling off the walls and where everyone seemed to be in a hurry.

Here, instead, was an atmosphere of lazy graciousness as in a large private house. A very faint odour of disinfectant was almost entirely masked by the scent of flowers, sweet peas in copper jugs and, on the enquiry desk, a single rose in a fluted glass. The floor was carpeted in dark red Wilton.

Loring glanced up the branched staircase and watched the receptionist descend. He asked for a list of all the patients who had entered the Princess Louise Clinic in the past year and his request was received with a look of outrage.

It took him nearly half an hour, during which he was passed from one official personage to another, before he got the permission he wanted.

The list was long and imposing. Loring had never seen Debrett but he felt that this catalogue might have been a section of it. Nearly half the names on it were preceded by a title and among the plain Misters he recognized a distinguished industrialist, a former cabinet minister and a television personality who was a household word. Among the women was a duchess, a ballet dancer, a famous model. Loring couldn’t find Dorothy Fanshawe. He searched all through the list again because he had been so certain her name would be there. It wasn’t there.

J for Jerome, but J also for John, James, Jeremy, Jonathan, Joseph. Was Bridget Culross’s lover the husband of the Hon. Mrs John Frazer-Bennet of Wilton Crescent or the husband of Lady James Fyne of The Boltons? Loring concluded and supposed Wexford would also conclude him to be the late husband of Dorothy Fanshawe.

The young Pertwees were honeymooning in Jack’s father’s house. Their own flat wouldn’t be ready for a fortnight and Jack had cancelled the hotel booking. There was nowhere else for them to go and nothing much to do. Jack had taken his annual holiday, so here he was at home. Where else would he be? It was, after all, the only honeymoon he would ever get. Usually in his spare time he did a bit of painting or decorating or went to the dogs or down the Dragon. Marilyn made her dresses and giggled with her girl friends and went to meetings calculated to stir up social strife. These are not occupations for a honeymoon and the young Pertwees felt that to follow their old ways during this period, provided as it were for festive idleness and the indulgence of love, would be a kind of desecration. As Jack put it, you can’t stay in bed all day, so they spent most of the time sitting hand in hand in the little-used parlour. Marilyn was only articulate on the subject of politics and Jack was never talkative. Neither of them ever read a book and they were abysmally bored. Each would have died rather than confess this to the other and they knew in their hearts that their silence was no threat of future discord. Everything would be fine once Jack was back at work and they were in their own flat. When there were his workmates to discuss and the furniture and having her mother to tea. Now they filled their silences with sad reflections, on Charlie Hatton and although this too was no subject for a honeymoon, their shared memory of him expressed in hackneyed and sentimental phrases passed the time away and, because it was selfless and sincere, strengthened their love.

It was thus that Wexford found them.

Marilyn let him into the house, her only greeting a shrug. He, too, could be laconic and brusque and when Jack rose clumsily to his feet, Wexford said only, ‘I’ve come to talk to you about McCloy.’

‘You talk then. You tell me.’

The girl smiled at that. ‘Give us a cig, Jack,’ she said, and she gave her husband a fond proud look. ‘Yes,’ she said, coming up close to Wexford, ‘you give us a lecture. We’d like to know, wouldn’t we, Jack? We don’t mind listening, we’ve nothing else to do.’

‘That doesn’t sound too good on your honeymoon.’

‘Some honeymoon,’ Jack grumbled. ‘You think this is the way I’d planned it?’

Wexford sat down and faced them. ‘I didn’t kill Charlie Hatton,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even know him. You did. You were supposed to be his friend. You’ve got a funny way of showing it.’

A spasm of pain shivered the red from Jack’s face. He took his wife’s hand and he sighed. ‘He’s dead. You can’t be friends with a dead man. All you’ve got is his memory to hold on to.’

‘Give me a piece of your memory, Mr Pertwee.’

Jack looked him full in the face and now the blood returned, beating under the skin. ‘You’re always playing with words, twisting, being clever…’

His wife cut in, ‘Showing your bloody education!’

‘Leave it, love, I feel the same, but it’s no good. It’s…You’ve made up your mind Charlie was a crook, haven’t you? It wouldn’t be no good telling you what he was really like, generous, good-hearted, never let you down. But it wouldn’t be no good, would it?’

‘I doubt if it would help me to find who killed him.’

‘He found us our flat,’ Jack said. ‘D’you know what he did? The bloke that’s got it now, he wanted key money. Two hundred he wanted and Charlie put that up. On loan, of course, but he wouldn’t take no interest. May the 21st it was. I’ll never forget that date as long as I live. Charlie’d been driving all the day before, driving down from the north. But he come here in the morning to say he’d found this flat for us. I was at work but Marilyn got a couple of hours off from the shop and went down there with him. Promised the bloke the money, he did, more like he was her dad than – just a friend.

May the 21st. The day Hatton had ordered his teeth. Just after the robbery that never was. Here was another example of what Hatton had done with the small fortune he had somehow got out of McCloy.

‘I’ll let you have it whenever you want, Charlie said. Just say the word. You should have seen him when we did say the word! I reckon giving things away made him really happy.’

‘This place,’ said Marilyn, mildly for her, ‘well, it’s not the same without Charlie Hatton and that’s a fact.’

Sentimental twaddle, Wexford thought harshly. ‘Where did he get all his money, Mrs Pertwee?’