this visit. Mrs Fanshawe knew what was due to her. Besides, she was glowing with the self-confidence of someone who, having been distressingly and obtusely disbelieved for days, has now proved her point. Nora was alive; Nora was here, or at least, a couple of miles away in Kingsmarkham. Probably this deputation, sent from whatever authority it was that had stupidly persisted in burying her, had been sent to apologise.
Hastily Mrs Fanshawe grabbed a handful of rings from the jewel case her sister had brought in and it was a lavishly decorated hand that she extended graciously to Wexford.
Wexford saw a discontented face with sagging chin muscles and lines pulling the mouth down at the corners. Mrs Fanshawe’s eyes were hard and bright and her voice acid when she said:
‘I’m not mad, you see. Everyone thought I was insane when I said my daughter was alive. Now, I expect, they’d like to apologize.’
‘Certainly, Mrs Fanshawe. We all apologize.’ Apologies cost nothing. He smiled blandly into the petulant’s face and suddenly he remembered what this woman’s daughter had told him. How her father had paid her mother to let him have his women in the house. ‘No one thought you were mad,’ he said, ‘but you’d been in a serious accident.’ She nodded smugly and Wexford thought, She’s no madder than she’s ever been. But what did that amount to? She had never, he considered, been very bright.
Nurse Rose scampered in with two more chairs and she bridled, giggling a little, when all three men thanked her effusively.
‘You can get me another cushion,’ said Mrs Fanshawe. ‘No, not a pillow, a proper cushion. And then you can ring my daughter.’
‘In ten minutes, Mrs Fanshawe,’ said Nurse Rose, tired but bright as ever.
‘Just as you like.’ Mrs Fanshawe waited until she was gone and then she said pettishly, ‘This is supposed to be a private room, not that anyone would think so the cavalier treatment you get. Half the time you ring the bell they don’t come.’
Wexford said dryly, ‘You don’t find it as comfortable as the Princess Louise Clinic?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I understand you were in the Princess Louise Clinic in Cavendish Street in London last year.’
‘You understood wrong then. The only time I’ve ever been in hospital was when my daughter was born.’ She sighed impatiently when the door opened and Nurse Rose entered with tea for four. ‘I thought you were under- staffed? These gentlemen are officials. They aren’t paying a social call.’
But Dr Crocker said, ‘Thank you very much, my dear,’ and he ogled Nurse Rose outrageously. ‘Will you be mother, Mrs Fanshawe, do the honours?’
The rings clinked as she poured the tea. She eyed him suspiciously. ‘Well, my daughter’s alive,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never been to the Princess Louise Clinic. What else d’you want?’
Wexford just glanced at Burden and Burden said, ‘Your daughter’s alive but there was a dead girl lying by the wreck age of your car. Any idea who she could be? The name Bridget Culross mean anything to you?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘She was a nurse.’ Mrs Fanshawe’s sniff told him eloquently what she thought of nurses. ‘She was twenty-two and a girl who might be she who was dead in the road with your husband.’
‘She was never alive in the car with my husband.’
‘Mrs Fanshawe,’ Wexford said carefully, ‘are you quite sure you gave no one a lift from Eastbourne, from Eastover?’
‘I am sick of this,’ said Dorothy Fanshawe. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve told you. There was no one else in the car.’
He looked at her and he thought, Would you tell me? Are you ashamed that your husband flaunted these women at you, paid you? Or is it that you don’t care any more, haven’t cared for years, and there really was no one in the car?
Dorothy Fanshawe watched her rings winking in the sunlight. She avoided meeting the eyes of these tiresome men. They thought her stupid or a liar. She knew very well what they were getting at. Nora had been talking to them. Nora hadn’t the decency and the discretion to keep silent about Jerome’s nasty habits.
How stupid these men were! Their faces were all embarrassed and prudish. Did they really suppose she cared what Jerome had done? Jerome was dead and buried deep. Good riddance. All the money was hers and Nora’s now, more money than all those foolish-looking men would earn between the lot of them in their lifetimes. As long as Nora didn’t do anything stupid like marrying that Michael, there was nothing in the world to worry about.
Dorothy Fanshawe drank her tea and put the cup down with a sharp tap. Then she rang the bell and as the door opened, said:
‘We shall want some more hot water.’
She had been going to say please, but she cut the word off and swallowed it. Suddenly Nurse Rose, so plump and pink and young, had looked just like that maid Jerome used to paw about when she was making the beds. She smiled a little, though, for Jerome was dead and there were no maids or nurses or soft young flesh where he had gone.
‘Exhumation!’ Burden exclaimed. ‘You couldn’t do it.’
‘Well, I could, Mike,’ said Wexford mildly. ‘I dare say we could get an order. Only she’s been dead so long and the face was in a mess then and… God, I could wring Camb’s bloody neck!’
‘The aunt was so sure,’ Burden said.
‘We’d best get that Lewis girl down from the Princess Louise Clinic, show her the clothes. But if the girl was Bridget Culross, what was she doing in Fanshawe’s car with Fanshawe’s wife?’
‘I believe Mrs Fanshawe, sir.’
‘So do I, Mike. So do I.’ Wexford said it again to convince himself. ‘I think Fanshawe was capable of taking the girl to his bungalow and sleeping with her while his wife was there. I believe Mrs Fanshawe would have stood it. As to the girl – well, we don’t know enough about her to say. But Nora Fanshawe knew nothing of it and Nora Fanshawe was with them until the Saturday. They thought she was going to stay on. So where does Culross come in? And where was she stowed away on the Friday night?’
‘It’s very disgraceful,’ said Burden and he made a face like someone who had been shown a disgusting mess of offal.
‘Never mind that. Leave the ethics and concentrate on the circumstantial evidence. The more I hear of them the more I go back to my old idea.’
'Which is?’
‘In the light of our fresh information, this: Bridget Culross never knew Fanshawe. His wife was never a patient at the Princess Louise Clinic, therefore he isn’t Jay. Probably she went to Eastbourne or Brighton with Jay, rowed with him and tried to get back to London on her own. Maybe she hitch-hiked. A lorry driver put her down on the Stowerton By-pass, she thumbed a lift from Fanshawe – maybe she stepped out into the road, he couldn’t stop, hit her head and crashed. How’s that?’
Burden looked dubious. ‘That means to thumb her lift she would have had to be standing on the soft verge between the two carriageways.’
‘And any normal hitch-hiker stands on the nearside and waits for someone coming down the slow lane?’
‘Mm-hm. On the other hand we do know that Mrs Fanshawe heard her husband call out “God!” just before the crash; in fact, that was the last thing he ever did say.’
‘I hope,’ said Wexford, ‘the cry was heard by Providence and interpreted as a plea for forgiveness.’ He chuckled sourly. ‘So he sees the girl standing on the road, cries out, swerves, hits her. Why did she have only a little loose change in her handbag, no keys, nothing to identify her? Why would a lorry driver put her down on the by-pass instead of in the town?’
‘It’s your theory, sir.’
‘I know it is, damn it!’ said Wexford.
But he kept thinking about that lorry driver. Charlie Hatton had passed that way a quarter of an hour before the accident. He couldn’t have seen the accident. Could he have seen the girl waiting to thumb a lift? Or could he have been the driver who had left her there? The trouble was Charlie Hatton had been driving in the other direction.
It had been May 20th and on May 21st Charlie Hatton was a rich man. There must be a connection. But where
