The first was a Carol Pearson, of Muswell Hill, interesting to him because she had worked as a hairdresser’s improver at a shop in Eastcheap. Jerome Fanshawe’s office was in Eastcheap and the hairdresser’s had a barber’s shop attached to it. Hers was also a significant name because she had black hair and her disappearance was reported on May 17th.
The second girl, Doreen Dacres, was like Carol Pearson, black-haired and aged twenty, and his interest was aroused because she had left her room in Finchley on May 15th to take a job in Eastbourne. Nothing further had been heard of her either in Finchley or at the Eastbourne club address.
Bridget Culross was the last name with which he felt he need concern himself. She was twenty-two years old and had been a nurse at the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street. On Saturday May 18th she had gone to spend the weekend with an unnamed boy friend in Brighton, but had not returned to the clinic. It was assumed that she had eloped with her boy friend. Her hair was also dark, her life erratic and her only relative an aunt in County Leix.
Young women! Wexford thought irritably, and he thought also of his own daughter who was making him scrape the bottom of his pocket so that at some future possible never- never time she might be able to smile without restraint before the cameras.
The long day passed slowly and it grew very hot. Clouds massed heavily, dense and fungoid in shape, over the huddled roofs of the town. But they did nothing to diminish the heat, seeming instead to enclose it and its still, threatening air under a thick muffling lid. The sun had gone, blanked out by sultry vapour.
To an observer Wexford might be thought only to be sitting, like many other inhabitants of Kingsmarkham, waiting for the storm to break. He did nothing. He lay back by the open window with his eyes closed and the warm breath less air came to him just as in another cooler season heat fanned from the grid lower down the wall. No one disturbed him and he was glad. He was thinking.
In Stamford, where it was raining, Inspector Burden went to a country house supposedly occupied by a man named McCloy and found it deserted, its doors locked and its garden overgrown. There were no neighbours and no one to tell him where McCloy had gone.
Detective Constable Loring drove along the promenades of the south coast towns, calling at police stations and paying particular attention to those clubs and cafes and amusement halls where girls come and go and pass each other. He had found a club where Doreen Dacres had been engaged but where no Doreen Dacres had arrived and this comforted him. He even telephoned Wexford to tell him about it, his elation subsiding somewhat when he heard the chief inspector had also found this out three hours before.
The storm broke at five o’clock.
For some time before this heavy clouds had increased and in the west the sky had become a dense purplish- black, a range of mountainous cumulus against which the outlines of buildings took on a curious clarity and the trees stood out livid and sickly bright. In spite of the clammy heat, shoppers began to hurry, but the rain which fell so readily when rainy days preceded it, now, after a fortnight’s drought, held off as if it could only be squeezed out as a result of some acute and agonising pressure. It was as though the clouds were not themselves mere vapour but impermeable sagging sacks, purposely constructed and hung to contain water.
The first whispering breeze came like a hot breath and Wexford closed his windows. Almost imperceptibly at first the trees in the High Street pavement began to sway. Most of the merchandise outside greengrocers’ and florists’ had already been taken in and now it was the turn of the sun-blinds to be furled and waterproof awnings to take their place. The air seemed to press against Wexford’s windows. He stood against them, watching the dark western sky and the ash-blue cumulus now edged with brilliant white.
The lightning was the forked kind and it branched suddenly like a firework and yet like the limb of a blazing tree. As its fiery twigs flashed out and cut into the inky cloud, the thunder rolled out of the west.
Wexford dearly loved a storm. He liked the forked lightning better than the zig-zag kind and now he was gratified by a second many-branched display that seemed to spring and grow from the river itself, blossoming in the sky above the Kingsbrook meadows. This time the thunder burst with a pistol-shot snap and with an equal suddenness, as if at last those swollen vessels had been punctured, the rain began to fall.
The first heavy drops splashed in coin shapes on the pavement below and in their tubs the pink flowers on the fore court dipped and swayed. For a brief moment it seemed that the rain still hesitated, that it would only patter dispiritedly on the dust-filled gutters where its drops rolled like quicksilver. But then, urged on as it were by a series of multiple lightning flashes, it hesitated no more and, instead of increasing gradually from the first tentative shower, the water gushed forth in a vast fountain. It dashed against the windows, washing off dust in a great cleansing stream, and Wexford moved away from the glass. The sudden flood was more like a wave than rain and it blinded the window as surely as darkness.
He heard the car splash in and the doors slam. Burden, perhaps. The internal phone rang and Wexford lifted the receiver.
‘I’ve got Cullam here, sir.’ It was Martin’s voice. ‘Shall I bring him up? I thought you might like to talk to him.’
Maurice Cullam was afraid of the storm. That didn’t displease Wexford. With some scorn he eyed the man’s pale face and the bony, none-too-steady hands.
‘Scared, Cullam? Not to worry, we’ll all die together.’
‘Big laugh,’ said Cullam, and he winced as the thunder broke above their heads. ‘I don’t reckon it’s safe being so high up. When I was a kid I was in a house that got struck.’
‘But you got out unscathed, eh? Well they say the devil looks after his own. Why have you brought him here, Sergeant?’
‘He’s bought that refrigerator,’ said Sergeant Martin. ‘And a room heater and a load of other electrical bits and pieces. Paid cash for them, a couple of quid short of a hundred and twenty pounds.’
Wexford put the lights on and behind the streaming glass the sky looked black as on a winter’s night. ‘All right, Cullam, where did you get it?’
‘I saved it up.’
‘I see. When did you buy that washing machine of yours, the one you washed your gear in after Hatton died?’
‘April.’ As the storm receded and the thunder became a distant grumbling, Cullam’s shoulders dropped and he lifted sullen eyes. ‘April, it was.’
‘So, you’ve saved another hundred and twenty pounds in just two months. What do you get a week? Twenty? Twenty- two? You with five kids and council house rent to pay? You’ve saved it in two months? Come off it, Cullam. I couldn’t save it in six and my kids are grown up.’
‘You can’t prove I didn’t save it.’ Cullam gave a slight shiver as the overhead light flickered off, then on again. A rolling like the banging of many drums, distant at first, then breaking into a staccato crackling, announced the return of the storm to Kingsmarkham. He shifted in his chair, biting his lip.
Wexford smiled as a zig-zag flash changed the gentle illumination of the office into a sudden white blaze. ‘A hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘That’s pathetic payment for a man’s life. What’s yours worth, Sergeant?’
‘I’m insured for five thousand, sir.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant, but we’ll let it pass. You see, an assassin is paid according to his own self- valuation. Never mind what the victim’s life’s worth. If a road sweeper kills the king he can’t expect to get the same gratuity as a general. He wouldn’t expect it. His standards are low. So if you’re going to employ an assassin and you’re a mean skinflint you pick on the lowest of the low to do your dirty work. Mind you, it won’t be so well done.’
Wexford’s last words were drowned in thunder. ‘What d’you mean, lowest of the low?’ Cullam lifted abject yet truculent eyes.
‘The cap fits, does it? They don’t come much lower than you, Cullam. What, drink with a man – drink the whisky he paid for – and then lie in wait to kill him?’
‘I never killed Charlie Hatton!’ Cullam leapt trembling to his feet. The lightning flared into his face and, covering his eyes with one hand, he said desperately, ‘For God’s sake can’t we go downstairs?’
‘I reckon Hatton was right when he called you an old woman, Cullam,’ Wexford said in disgust. ‘We’ll go down
