‘Seems a bit mean, that’s all, with the poor geezer dead. Then someone else was telling a joke and he sort of – well, humiliated him, if you know what I mean. He was like that, always had to be top dog. He drank my drink because I said something about all the money he was always flashing around and then he made a dirty crack about… Well, that doesn’t matter. It was personal. He got at our chairman too and he left with a couple of the others. Geoff had already gone. There was me and Charlie and Maurice and Jack left and we went when they closed. And that’s the lot.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I told you there was nothing much. I can’t think of any more… Oh, wait a minute. But it was nothing.’
‘We’ll have it just the same, Mr Carter.’
George Carter shrugged impatiently. ‘I don’t even know what it was about. Nothing, I reckon. Maurice said – it was after the others had gone – Maurice said, “Seen much of McCloy lately, Charlie?” I think those were his words. I know the name was McCloy but it didn’t mean nothing to me. Jack didn’t like it and he was a bit shirty with Maurice. I reckon Charlie looked a bit sick. God, it was all so… well, it was nothing. But Charlie’d always rise. I expected him to rise. I don’t know why. He didn’t. He just made a crack about Maurice needing to sleep quiet in his bed. Said it was time he did, meaning that Maurice had so many kids and… well, you can get the message.’
‘Not altogether,’ said Wexford. ‘Had Cullam suggested that Hatton couldn’t sleep quiet in his?’
‘That’s right. I forgot that bit. I wish I could remember his words. Something like “I don’t have nothing to do with McCloy, I like to sleep quiet in my bed”.’
Very interesting Wexford thought. Far from being popular, Hatton had evidently had a host of enemies. He had spent less than an hour in the Dragon and during that time he had succeeded in needling at least four men.
‘You mentioned all the money Hatton used to flash around,’ he said. ‘What money?’
‘He always had wads of it,’ said Carter. ‘I’ve known him three years and he was always flush. But he’d had more lately. He bought four rounds of double scotches last night and it didn’t even make a hole in what he’d got.’
‘How much had he got, Mr Carter?’
‘I didn’t count it, you know,’ Carter said with asperity. He blew his nose on his clean white wedding handkerchief. ‘He’d got his pay packet, but he didn’t touch that. Then he had this roll of notes. I told you I didn’t count them. How could I?’
‘Twenty pounds, thirty, more?’
Carter wrinkled his forehead in an effort of concentration. ‘He paid for the first round out of a fiver and the third with another fiver. He’d got two fivers left, then. As well as that there was a wad of oncers.’ He indicated with two parted fingers a quarter of an inch. ‘I reckon he was carrying a hundred quid besides his pay.’
Chapter 4
By lunchtime Wexford and Burden had interviewed all those members of the darts club that had been present at Jack Pertwee’s stag party with the exception of Maurice Cullam, but none of them had been able to do more than confirm that Hatton had been aggressive, vain and malicious and that he had been carrying a great deal of money.
They returned to the police station, passing the parish church on whose steps a June bride and her attendants were being photographed. The bridegroom moved out of the throng and Wexford felt a strange sentimental pang because it was not Jack Pertwee. Then he pulled himself together and said, as they mounted the station steps under the concrete canopy:
‘Now if we were cops inside the covers of a detective story, Mike, we’d know for sure that Hatton was killed to stop Pertwee getting married today.’
Burden gave a sour smile. ‘Easier to kill Pertwee, I’d have thought.’
‘Ah, but that’s your author’s subtlety. Still, we aren’t and he wasn’t. The chances are he was killed for the money he was carrying. There was nothing in his wallet when I found him.’
The foyer of the police station enclosed them. Behind the long black sweep of counter Sergeant Camb sat fanning himself with a newspaper, the sweat dripping down his fore head. ‘Wexford made for the stairs.
‘Why not use the lift, sir?’ said Burden.
The police station was not yet half a dozen years old, but ever since its completion the powers that be, like fussy housewives, had been unable to let well alone, adding innovation after innovation, perpetually trying to improve their handiwork. First there had been the stone tubs on the fore court, a constant temptation to vandals who got a more than commonly satisfying kick from ravishing these particular flowers. Then came the consignment of houseplants for the offices, tradescantia and sanseveria and ficus elastica that were doomed from the start to dehydration and ultimately to have their pots serve as repositories for cigarette ash.
Last year it had been glass sculpture, a strange green tree, a very Yggdrasil, for Burden’s sanctum, and for Wexford an inky-blue, amorphous pillar that in some lights grossly resembled the human figure. These, too, had been fated, Wexford’s broken by a pretty young woman who was helping him with his enquiries and Burden’s one day inadvertently put out with the rubbish.
That should have been the end of it. And then, just as the foyer was beginning to take on a shabby, comfortable look, the lift arrived, an elegant black and gilt box with a sliding door.
‘It isn’t working yet,’ Wexford said, a shade nervously.
‘That’s where you’re wrong. Been operating since this morning. Shall we try it?’
‘I should just like to know what’s wrong with the stairs,’ Wexford exploded. ‘It’s a downright disgrace wasting the ratepayers’ money like this.’ He stuck out his lower lip. ‘Besides, Crocker says walking upstairs is the best exercise in the world for me with my blood pressure.’
‘Just as you like,’ said Burden, turning his face away so that Wexford should not see him smile.
By the time they reached the third floor they were both out of breath. The flimsy yellow chair behind Wexford’s rosewood desk creaked as he lowered his heavy body into it.
‘For God’s sake open a window, Mike.’
Burden grumbled that opening windows upset the air conditioning but he complied, raising the yellow venetian blind and letting in a powerful shaft of noonday sunshine.
‘Well, sir,’ he said. ‘Shall we re-cap on what we know about Charlie Hatton?’
‘Thirty years old, born and bred in Kingsmarkham. Two years ago he got married to a Miss Lilian Bardsley, sister of the man he’s in business with. Bardsley’s got his own firm, transporting small electrical goods.’
‘Was Hatton a full partner?’
‘We’ll have to find out. Even if he was, I can’t see he could get that flush driving loads of irons and heaters up to Leeds and Scotland a couple of times a week. Carter says he had a hundred quid on him, Mike. Where did he get the money from?’
‘Maybe this McCloy.’
‘Do we know any McCloys?’
‘Not that I can recall, sir. We shall have to ask Maurice Cullam.’
Wexford wiped his brow with his handkerchief and, following Camb’s example, began to fan himself with the morning paper. ‘The philoprogenitive Cullam,’ he said. ‘He had one of his quiverful with him when I found Hatton this morning. He’s a lorry driver too, Mike. I wonder… Hatton had his lorry hi-jacked twice this year.’
Burden opened his pale-blue eyes. ‘Is that so?’
‘I remembered,’ said Wexford, ‘as soon as Cullam told me whose the body was. Both times were on the Great North Road and no one was ever done for it. Hatton got knocked on the head the first time but the second time he wasn’t hurt, only tied up.’
‘Once,’ said Burden thoughtfully, ‘is fair enough. Occupational hazard. Twice looks fishy. I want to hear what the doctor has to say. And if I’m not mistaken that’s him outside now.’
Dr Crocker and Wexford had been at school together. Like Jack Pertwee and Charlie Hatton, they were lifelong friends, but their friendship was a casual business and their manner to each other, dry, irreverent, often caustic. Crocker, some six years the chief inspector’s junior, was the only man Burden knew who could get the better of
