questions, but you haven’t even met me half-way. This afternoon you came to my office as if you were doing me a favour. Don’t you think it’s time you unbent a little?’
She flushed at that and muttered. ‘I don’t unbend much.’
‘No, I can see that. You’re twenty-three, aren’t you? Don’t you think all this upstage reserve is rather ridiculous?’
Her hand was small, but, ringless and with short nails as it was, it was like a man’s. He watched it move towards the cup and saucer and for a moment he thought she was going to take her coffee, get up and leave him. She frowned a little and her mouth hardened.
‘I’ll tell you about my father,’ she said at last. ‘It might just help. I first knew about his infidelities when I was twelve,’ she began. ‘Or, let me say, I knew he was behaving as other people’s fathers didn’t behave. He brought a girl home and told my mother she was going to stay with us. They had a row in my presence and when it was over my father gave my mother five hundred pounds.’ She took the cigarette stub from her holder and replaced it with a fresh one. This sudden chain smoking was the only sign she gave of emotion. ‘He bribed her, you understand. It was quite direct and open. “Let her stay and you can have this money”. That was how it was. The girl stayed six months. Two years later he bought my mother a new car and at just the same time I caught him in his office with his secretary.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘On the floor,’ she said coldly. ‘After that it was an understood thing that when my father wanted a new mistress he paid my mother accordingly. By that I mean what he thought the girl was worth to him. He wanted my mother to stay because she was a good hostess and kept house well. When I was eighteen I went up to Oxford.'
‘After I got my degree I told my mother I could keep her now and she should leave my father. Her response was to deny everything and to tell my father to stop my allowance. He refused to stop it – mainly because my mother had asked him to, I suppose. I haven’t drawn it for two years now, but…’ She glanced swiftly at her bag, her watch. ‘You can’t always refuse to take presents,’ she said tightly, ‘not when it’s your own mother, not when you’re an only child.’
‘So you took a job in Germany?’ Wexford asked.
‘I thought it would be as well to get away.’ The flush returned, an unbecoming mottled red. ‘In January,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I met a man, a salesman who made business trips to Cologne from this country.’ Wexford waited for her to talk of love and instead heard her say with a strange sense of shock, ‘I gave up my job, as I told you, and came back to London to live with him. When I told him that if we were to be married I wouldn’t ask my father for a penny he… well, he threw me out.’
‘You returned to your parents?’
Nora Fanshawe raised her head and for the first time he saw her smile, an ugly harsh smile of self-mockery. ‘You’re a cold fish, aren’t you?’ she said surprisingly.
‘I was under the impression you despised sympathy, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘Perhaps I do. Want some more coffee? No, nor do I. Yes, I went back to my parents. I was still sorry for my mother, you see. I thought my father was older now and I was older. I knew I could never live with them again, but I thought… Family quarrels are uncivilized, don’t you think? My mother was rather pathetic. She said she’d always wanted a grown-up daughter to be real friends with.’ Nora Fanshawe wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘Even upstage reserved characters like myself have their weak spots, Chief Inspector. I went to Eastover with them.’
‘And the quarrel, Miss Fanshawe?’
‘I’m coming to that. We’d been on surprisingly good terms up till then. My father called my mother darling once or twice and there was a kind of Darby and Joan air about them. They wanted to know what I was doing about getting another job and all was serene. So serene, in fact, that after we’d had a meal at the bungalow and a few drinks my mother did something she’d never done before. My father had gone off up to bed and she suddenly began to tell me what her life with him had been, the bribery and the humiliation and so on. She really talked as if I were a woman friend of her own age, her confidante. Well, we had about an hour of this and then she asked me if I had any romantic plans of my own. Those were her words. Like a fool I told her about the man I’d been living with. I say like a fool. Perhaps if I hadn’t been a fool I would have been the dead girl in the road.’
‘Your mother reacted unsympathetically?’
‘She goggled at me,’ said Nora Fanshawe, emphasizing the verb pedantically. ‘Then, before I could stop her she got my father out of bed and told him the whole thing. They both raved at me. My mother was hysterical and my father called me a lot of unpleasant names. I stood it for a bit and then I’m afraid I said to him that what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose and at least I wasn’t married.’ She sighed, moving her angular shoulders. ‘What do you think he said?’
‘It’s different for men,’ said Wexford.
‘How did you guess? At any rate, for once my parents presented a united front. After my mother had obligingly betrayed all my confidences to him in my hearing, he said he would find the man – Michael, that is – and compel him to marry me. I couldn’t stand any more, so I locked myself in my bedroom and in the morning I went to Newhaven and got on the boat. I parted from my mother just about on speaking terms. My father had gone out.’
‘Thank you for unbending, Miss Fanshawe. Have you been suggesting that the dead girl might have been your father’s mistress?’
‘You think it impossible that my father would drive his wife and mistress together to London? I assure you it’s not unlikely. For him it would simply have been a matter of bringing the girl along, telling my mother she was coming with them and paying her handsomely for the hardship occasioned.’
Wexford kept his eyes from Nora Fanshawe’s face. She was as unlike his Sheila as could be. They had in common only their youth and health and the fact, like all women, of each being someone’s daughter. The girl’s father was dead. In a flash of unusual sentimentality, Wexford thought he would rather be dead than be the man about whom a daughter could say such things.
In a level voice he said, ‘You gave me to understand that as far as you know there was no woman at the time but your mother. You have no idea who this girl could be?’
‘That was the impression I had. I was evidently wrong.’
‘Miss Fanshawe, this girl clearly could not have been a friend or neighbour at Eastover whom your parents were simply driving to London. In that case her relatives would have enquired for her, raised a hue and cry at the time of the accident.’
‘Surely that would apply whoever she was?’
‘Not necessarily. She could be a girl with no fixed address or someone whose landlady or friends expected her to move away about that particular weekend. She may be listed some where among missing persons and no search have begun for her because the manner of her life showed that occasional apparent disappearances were not unusual. In other words, she could be a girl who led a somewhat itinerant life in the habit of taking jobs in various parts of the country or moving about to live with different men. Suppose, for instance, she had spent the weekend in some South Coast resort and tried to hitch a lift back to London from your father?’
‘My father wouldn’t have given a lift to anyone. Both he and my mother disapproved of hitch-hiking. Chief Inspector, you’re talking as if everyone in that car is now dead. Aren’t you forgetting that my mother is very much alive? She’s well on the way to recovery and her brain isn’t affected. She insists there was no one in the car but my father and herself.’ Nora Fanshawe lifted her eyes and her voice lost some of its confidence. ‘I suppose it’s possible she could be having some sort of psychological block. She wants to believe my father was a changed man, that no girl was with them, so she’s convinced herself they were alone. That could be it.’
‘I’m sure it must be.’ Wexford got up. ‘Good night, Miss Fanshawe. Thank you for the coffee. I take it you’ll be staying here a few days?’
‘I’ll keep in touch. Good night, Chief Inspector.’
The next step, he thought as he walked home, would be to investigate the missing persons list in the holiday towns and London too, if those proved fruitless. That was routine stuff and not for him. Why, anyway, was he following this road accident that wasn’t even properly his province to distract his mind from the urgency of the Hatton affair? Because it had features so distracting and so inexplicable that no-one could simply explain them away?
Of course it would turn out that the dead girl was merely someone Jerome Fanshawe had come across that weekend and who had taken his fancy. Nothing so dramatic as Nora Fanshawe had suggested need have happened. Why shouldn’t Fanshawe just have said to his wife, ‘This young lady has missed her last train and since she lives in
