Ruth Rendell - The Best Man To Die

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, he couldn’t have. McCloy’s inside. You’re a copper, aren’t you? You know what I mean. McCloy’s in prison.’

The news from Scotland came through at almost exactly the same time as Jack Pertwee’s revelation. Alexander McCloy had been sent to prison for two years on April 23rd, having been found guilty with two other men of organizing a break-in at a supermarket in Dundee on early-closing day, and stealing goods to the value of twelve hundred pounds. A caretaker had been slightly injured during the course of the robbery and McCloy would have received a heavier sentence but for his unblemished record.

‘So while Hatton was in Leeds that May weekend,’ said Wexford in the morning, ‘McCloy had already been safely locked up in Scotland for a month.’

‘It looks that way,’ said Burden.

‘And that not only means he wasn’t available to be black mailed, but also that Hatton’s source of – well, I was nearly going to say legitimate, income was cut off. In fact, in May Hatton found himself shorter of money than probably at any time since he was married.’

‘Mrs Hatton said that when he was ill during the previous week he hesitated about sending for the doctor privately. By that time he’d presumably spent whatever he’d made when they nicked Bardsley’s lorry in March.’

‘At his rate of expenditure,’ Wexford cut in, ‘he probably had. It must have given him quite a nasty feeling. Panicked him, I daresay. Can’t you imagine him, Mike, looking to the future when he wouldn’t be able to stand all those rounds in the Dragon or take his wife frittering on a Saturday after noon or cut a fine open-handed figure at his friend’s wedding?’

‘I imagine he quickly looked round for another source of supply.’

‘We’ll go up to the Stowerton By-pass,’ Wexford said, getting up, ‘and to do some reconnoitring. Our two cases are converging, Mike, and unless I’m mistaken, they’re soon going to bump.’

‘There was no suitcase,’ said Sergeant Martin, ‘but I want you to look at the clothes she was wearing. They’re in a bad way, Miss Lewis. You must try to keep calm.’

She was a nurse and trained to control herself. Martin took her into another room where the burnt torn clothes lay like rubbish heap rags on the table. Each blackened tattered garment lay separate from the others and there was some thing in this arrangement that suggested a parody of a draper’s window.

The bodice of the coat and of the dress were charred fragments, although their skirts were almost intact and patches of orange and yellow showed between the scorch marks. The dead girl’s brassiere was an ellipse of wire from which every shred of cotton and lace had been burnt away. Margaret Lewis shuddered, keeping her hands behind her back. Then she touched the orange shoes, the white lace stockings as wide-meshed and fine as a hair-net, and she began to cry.

‘I gave her those stockings,’ she whispered, ‘for her birthday.’

Their tops only were charred, but a long brown mark ran down to the knee of one of them where a flame had licked. Martin put his arm under the girl’s elbow and led her away.

‘I’ll tell you everything I can about Bridie,’ she said and she gulped the tea Loring had brought her. ‘And everything she told me about Jay. She met him in October while she was nursing his wife. The wife was in a long time on account of having a threatened toxaemia and Bridie used to go out with him after he’d visited her. She’d come off duty at eight-thirty, you see, and he’d just about be leaving.

‘Well, he dropped her after his wife left the clinic and I thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. He turned up again in May and the whole thing was on again. Bridie started talking about marrying him. Oh, it was awful, really, and I didn’t used to listen much. I wish I had now.’

‘Did you ever see him, Miss Lewis?’ Martin asked.

Margaret Lewis shook her head. The colour had come back into her cheeks and she wore no make-up to smear when she dabbed at the lids with a spotless handkerchief. ‘We weren’t working in the same department, you see. Lots of people must have. You’ll have to ask the other girls. Bridie said he was quite old, lots older than her, and that was the one thing that made her – well, hesitate, if you know what I mean.’

‘So you wouldn’t know if this is him?’ And Martin showed her a photograph of Jerome Fanshawe. It had been taken by flash at a company dinner and the face was hard, confident, heavily jowled, but because of its arrogance and its strength and despite its age, not unattractive to women.

She looked at it with the distaste of the very young and, not answering him, said, ‘I told you they went to Brighton on the 18th of May?’ Loring nodded. ‘Bridie was going to be met by him at Marble Arch. I saw her go off in that yellow coat and dress. She said she’d have to amuse herself during the daytime because Jay would be at his conference. That’s why he was going, you see, to be at this conference.’

Loring gave another encouraging smile. This was the sort of thing Wexford wanted. Then he remembered his search through the clinic’s patient list.

‘The man we had in mind,’ he said carefully, ‘we couldn’t find his name among the clinic’s patients, you know. His wife denies she was ever in there.’

The girl touched the photograph and looked up at him in bewilderment. ‘How old is she, for goodness’ sake?’

‘The wife? Fifty, fifty-five.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Margaret Lewis blushed. ‘I think this has been my fault. Jay’s wife was in the maternity department. They’re always separate, you know, the general and the maternity departments in hospitals. Always. Bridie had done her midwifery and she was nursing Jay’s wife when she was ill before the birth and while she was having the baby.’

Burden was driving. With the accident plan Camb had given him on his lap, Wexford looked up and said:

‘Park in the next lay-by, Mike, and we’ll walk.’

An ancient milestone which had always stood on the bank since this highway was the coaching road to London, by chance pin-pointed the crash spot. From it a slow incline wound down into the valley.

The northbound and southbound sections of the by-pass, opened a year before, were separated by a strip of grass on which grew clumps of thin birch trees. Fanshawe’s Jaguar had struck one of these trees, overturned and caught fire. Wexford and Burden waited for two cars and a van to pass and then they crossed the road to the centre strip.

A large area of this grass had been burnt but by now new growth had replaced it and there was nothing but a ragged black stump to show where the crash tree had been.

‘First,’ said Wexford, ‘we’ll work on the assumption that the girl was in the car with the Fanshawes, she was Jerome Fanshawe’s fancy piece and he was driving her back to London. Who sits where? Mrs Fanshawe in the back and her supplanter next to Don Juan or vice versa?’

‘Surely there must have been some amount of pretence, sir,’ said Burden, wrinkling his fastidious nose. ‘It can’t have been all open and above-board. The girl would have sat in the back.’

‘It’s the seat on the driver’s left that’s called the suicide seat, Mike, and whereas the girl died, Mrs Fanshawe is still alive. If the girl was there at all, she sat in the front.’ Wexford made a sweeping gesture with his right hand. ‘Up comes Fanshawe, driving like a maniac he was at eighty or so. Now there’s no evidence of a burst tire and the windscreen didn’t shatter. What did Fanshawe see that made him cry out “God!” and pull the wheel over?’

‘Something in the road?’