than mine,” and then he’d tell me about the new necklace he’d bought for his missus. “Plenty more where that came from,” he’d say. Christ, and I can’t find the money to buy my kids new shoes! Two kids I’d got when I’d been married as long as Hatton. Is it fair? Is it right? You tell me.’
‘I’ve listened to the party political broadcast,’ said Wexford. ‘I don’t give a damn for your envy. Envy like yours is a hell of a good motive for murder.’
‘Yeah? ‘What would I get for killing him? I wasn’t in his will. I’ve told you what I did. I took the money off his body. Five kids I’ve got and the milkman don’t come till eleven in the morning. You ever tried keeping milk for five kids with out a fridge in a heatwave?’ He paused and with a shifty, fidgety look, said, ‘D’you know what Hatton’d have done that Saturday if he hadn’t been killed? Wedding first, Pertwee’s wedding, and Hatton all got up in a topper with his tarty wife. Round the shops afterwards, not to buy anything, just to fritter. Charlie told me it wasn’t nothing for them to get through twenty nicker poking about in the shops. Bottle of wine here, some muck for her face there. Then they’d have some more booze at the Olive, have dinner. Off to the pictures in the evening and in the best seats. Bit of a contrast from me, isn’t it? If I want to relax I go out in the garden, anywhere to get away from the kids’ bawling.’
‘Are you a Catholic, Cullam?’
That surprised him. He had perhaps been expecting a tougher comment and he hunched his shoulders, muttering suspiciously, ‘I haven’t got no religion.’
‘Don’t give me that stuff about children then. Nobody makes you have children. Ever heard of the pill? My God, they knew how to plan families twenty years, thirty years before you were born.’ Wexford’s voice grew hard as he warmed to a favourite theme. ‘Having kids is a privilege, a joy, or it should be, and, by God, I’ll get the County down on you if I see you strike that boy of yours on the head again! You’re a bloody animal, Cullam, without an animal’s… Oh! what’s the use? What the hell are you doing anyway, cluttering up my office, wasting my time? Cut the sob stuff and tell me what happened that night. What happened when you left Hatton and Pertwee at the bridge?’
Stamford had promised to give Burden all the help they could and they were as good as their word. A sergeant and a constable went back with him to Moat Hall and the locks on the two outhouses were forced.
Inside they found oil on the concrete floor and, imprinted by that oil, a tracery of tire marks. Apart from that there was nothing to show a suspect occupancy but two crushed cardboard cases in one corner. Both had contained canned peaches.
‘No joy here,’ said Burden to the sergeant. He threw the flattened cardboard down in disgust. ‘I’ve got things like this in my own garage at home. The supermarket gives them to me to bring my wife’s shopping home in on Fridays.’
He came to the doorway and started across the deserted yard. As surely as if he could see them actually arriving, see them now, he pictured the stolen lorries driven in. The big doors would open for them and close on them and McCloy and the men who were ‘not quite up to his class’ would unload them and store the cargoes here. Back-slapping, laughing immoderately, Charlie Hatton would go into the house for a drink and a ‘bite to eat’ before driving the lorry away and abandoning it.
‘I’d like to go over the house,’ he said, ‘only breaking and entering’s not in my line. We’ll have to wait for permission from the expatriate lady in Sweden.’
Cullam got up and wandered to the window. He looked as if he expected Wexford to hinder him, but Wexford said nothing.
‘He was flashing all this money about in the Dragon. On and on about it he was when we walked up to the bridge.’ Cullam stood by the window, staring fixedly now at the road he had trodden with Hatton and Pertwee. The wet pavements cast back mirror reflections. Wexford guessed the Kingsbrook must have swollen now, its stones submerged under a mill-race. ‘Pertwee told me to wait for Charlie Hatton,’ Cullam said. ‘I wouldn’t do that. God, I was sick of him and his money.’ Slowly he pushed a hand through his thin tow coloured hair. ‘Anyway, I told you, I wasn’t feeling too good. I just walked along the path in the dark.’
Thinking of what you were going home to, Wexford thought, and what Hatton was. There would have been no sound down there but the sibilant trickle of water. Above Cullam, above the web of black branches, a tranquil galaxy, a net of stars. Greed and envy took from a man’s heart everything but – well, greed and envy. If Cullam had noticed anything as he walked it would have been the rubbish, the flotsam that the river sucked in and gathered on its journey through the meadows.
‘Did you wait for him?’
‘Wait, nothing!’ Cullam said hotly. ‘Why would I? I hated his guts.’ Wexford wondered how long since anyone had made so many damaging admissions in this office in so short a space of time. Cullam burst out violently. ‘I was sick then. I threw up under the trees. And I felt bloody, I can tell you.’ He shuddered a little, but whether at the memory of this vomiting by the water’s edge or of something even uglier Wexford could not tell. He watched the man narrowly, not caring for the wariness of his eyes and the way his hands had begun to twitch. ‘I’m not used to whisky. A half of bitter’s more my line.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Wexford said sharply. ‘What happened then? Did you hear Hatton approach?’
‘I’d heard him for a bit by then. I could hear him whistling a long way behind. He was whistling that stupid little old song of his about the man who was scared to go home in the dark.’ Wexford looked up and met the shifty eyes. They slid away furtively, the pink lids blinking. Was Cullam a complete clod or did he realize how macabre his words had been? A man would have to be totally deficient in imagination to fail to be struck with a kind of horror and awe.
‘Mabel, dear,
Listen here,
There’s robbery in the park…’
Burden, who had heard them, had memorized the words and repeated them to his chief. ‘Robbery in the park…’ How did it go on? Something about there being no place like home but he couldn’t go home in the dark. It was Wexford’s turn to shiver now. In spite of his age, his experience, he felt a cold thrill run through him.
‘Then it happened,’ Cullam said suddenly. His voice trembled. ‘You’re not going to believe this, are you?’
Wexford only shrugged.
‘It’s the truth. I swear it’s the truth.’
‘Save your swearing for the dock, Cullam.’
‘Christ…’ The man made a sudden effort and the words tumbled out fast. ‘The whistling stopped. I heard a sort of sound…’ He had no descriptive power, few adjectives but hackneyed obscenities. ‘A kind of choking, a sort of – well, God, it was horrible! I felt so bloody bad, anyway. After a bit I got up and – and I went back. I was scared stiff. It was sort of creepy down there. I couldn’t see nothing and I – I stumbled over him. He was lying on the path. Could I have a drink of water?’
‘Don’t be a damned fool,’ Wexford snapped.
‘You needn’t be so rough with me,’ Cullam whined, ‘I’m telling you, aren’t I? I don’t have to tell you.’
‘You have to, Cullam.’
‘I struck a match,’ the man mumbled. ‘Charlie’s head was all bashed in. I turned him over and I got blood on me.’ The words slurred and he gabbled. ‘I don’t know what come over me. I put my hand inside his coat and took hold of that wallet. There was a hundred quid it it, just on a hundred. He was all warm…’
Wexford stared at him aghast. ‘He was dead, though?’
‘I don’t know… I don’t… Christ, yes, he was dead! He must have been dead. What are you trying to do to me?’ The man put his head in his hands and his shoulders shook. Wexford took hold of his jacket roughly, pushing him so that his head jerked up. The tears on Cullam’s cheeks awoke in him a nausea and a rage so fierce that it was all he could do to prevent himself from striking him. ‘That’s all, everything,’ Cullam whispered, shuddering. ‘The body rolled down the slope into the water. I ran home then, I ran like hell.’ He put his fists into his eyes like a child. ‘It’s all true,’ he said.
‘The stone, Cullam, what about the stone?’
‘It was laying by him. By his legs. I don’t know why but I chucked it back in the water. There was blood on it and hair, bits of hair and – and other bits…’
