more, perhaps even twice that sum. He carried notes about with him in his wallet, on one occasion, at any rate about a hundred pounds.
Suppose there had been no mammoth hi-jacking at the end of May? That would mean that all Hatton’s wealth had been acquired through blackmail, and blackmail entered into not as the consequence of a hi-jacking but of something else.
There was a lot more to this, Wexford thought with frustration, that met the eye.
‘There seems to be a lot more to this than meets the eye,’ said Sergeant Camb indignantly. ‘Mrs Fanshawe’s own sister identified the dead young lady as Miss Nora Fanshawe.’
‘Nevertheless,’ the girl said, ‘I am Nora Fanshawe.’ She sat down on one of the red spoon-shaped chairs in the station foyer and placed her feet neatly together on the black and white tiles, staring down at the shoes Nurse Rose had so gushingly admired. ‘My aunt was probably very strung up and you say the girl was badly burned. Very disfigured, I suppose?’
‘Very,’ said Camb unhappily. His immediate superior and his superintendent had departed ten minutes before for a conference at Lewes and he was more than somewhat at a loss. What the coroner was going to say to all this he dreaded to think.
‘Mrs Fanshawe’s sister seemed quite certain.’ But had she? He remembered the scene quite vividly, taking the woman into the mortuary and uncovering the faces, Jerome Fanshawe’s first and then the girl’s. Fanshawe had been lying on his face and the fire had scarcely touched him. Besides, the woman had recognized the silver pencil in his breast pocket, his wristwatch and the tiny knife scar, relic of some school boy ritual, on that wrist. Identifying the girl had been so extremely distasteful. All her hair had been burnt away but for the black roots and her features hideously charred. It made him shudder to think of it now, hardened as he was.
‘Yes, that’s my niece,’ Mrs Browne had said, recoiling and covering her own face. Of course he had asked her if she was quite certain and she had said she was, quite certain, but now he wondered if it was mere association that had made her agree, association and horror. She had said it was her niece because the girl was young and had black hair and because who else but Nora Fanshawe could have been in that car with her parents? Yet someone else had been. And what the hell was the coroner going to say?
His eyes still seeing the charred appalling face, he turned to the young hard untouched face in front of him and said:
‘Can you prove you’re Nora Fanshawe, miss?’
She opened the large hide handbag she was carrying and produced a passport, handing it to Camb without a word. The photograph wasn’t much like the girl who sat on the other side of the desk, but passport photographs seldom are much like their originals. Glancing up at her uneasily and then back to the document in front of him he read that Nora Elizabeth Fanshawe, by profession a teacher, had been born in London in 1945, had black hair, brown eyes and was five feet nine inches tall with no distinguishing marks. The girl in the mortuary hadn’t been anything like five feet nine, but you couldn’t expect an aunt to tell the height of a prone corpse.
‘Why didn’t you come back before?’ he asked.
‘Why should I? I didn’t know my father was dead and my mother in hospital.’
‘Didn’t you write? Didn’t you expect them to write to you?’
‘We were on very bad terms,’ the girl said calmly. ‘Besides, my mother did write. I got her letter yesterday and I took the first plane. Look here, my mother knows me and that ought to be enough for you.’
‘Your mother…’ Camb corrected himself. ‘Mrs Fanshawe’s a very sick woman…’
‘She’s not mad if that’s what you mean. The best thing will be for me to phone my aunt and then perhaps you’ll let me go and have something to eat. You may not know it, but I haven’t had a thing to eat since eight o’clock and it’s half- past two now.’
‘Oh, I’ll phone Mrs Browne,’ Camb said hastily. ‘It wouldn’t do for her to hear your voice just like that. Oh dear, no.’ He was half convinced.
‘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.’
