on.’
‘A courting couple?’ said Wexford lightly.
‘Could have been. I was too busy taking the number to look and I was scared of losing my train.’
‘Well we won’t go by the fields this time, and I’ll trail all the way back by the road if it makes you happy, Pop.’
‘You can take my car,’ said Wexford. ‘Stick to bitter lemon in the Olive, eh?’
Chapter 17
‘Here’s my theory,’ said Burden, ‘for what it’s worth. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and it’s the only possible solution. We’ve talked a lot about hired assassins but the only hired assassin in this case was Charlie Hatton, hired by Bridget Culross’s boy friend.’
‘Fertile,’ said Wexford, ‘but I’d like it amplified.’
Burden shifted his chair a little nearer those of Wexford and the doctor. The wind and the sunlight filled the office with a pattern of dancing leaves. ‘Jay is a rich man. He must be if he can afford to pay for three months in that clinic of yours just because his wife’s having a difficult pregnancy.’
‘Money down the drain,’ commented Crocker. ‘Do just as well on the N.H.S.’
‘He’s rich enough to pay someone to do his killing for him. You can bet your life he’s a one-time friend of McCloy’s. He arranges for Hatton to be waiting on that by-pass at the point where he’s going to drop the girl on their way back from this conference.’
‘Just what conference, Mike? Have we checked on Brighton conferences that weekend?’
‘The National Union of Journalists, the Blake Society and the Gibbonites all met there,’ said Burden promptly.
‘What are the last lot?’ put in the doctor, ‘a bunch of monkeys?’
‘Not gibbons,’ said Burden, unsmiling. ‘Gibbon. The Decline and Fall man, the historian. I reckon they’re just another collection of cranks.’
‘And Jay took a girl to Brighton, but left her alone all day while he gossiped about Gibbon?’ said Wexford thought fully. ‘Well, stranger things have happened. Go on.’
‘He faked a quarrel with her in the car on the way back to London and turfed her out of the car in a rage. Hatton was waiting for her, hit her over the head, emptied her handbag and made off back to his lorry. The next day Jay paid him his blood money. You can be sure that call Hatton made from a phone box was to Jay, telling him that the deed was done. And no one would have been any the wiser if Hatton hadn’t been greedy and started soaking Jay.’
The doctor made a derisive face. ‘Pardon me as a mere layman, but that’s a load of old rubbish. I’m not saying the girl couldn’t have been dead before the car hit her. She could have. But why should Hatton put her in the road? He couldn’t be sure a car would come along and hit her. Besides, he could so easily have been seen. And he was a small man. He wouldn’t have had the strength to carry her across the southbound highway. Why bother, anyway? If her death was supposed to look like the work of some vagrant maniac, why not kill her behind the hedge and leave her there?’
‘What’s your idea then?’ said Burden sourly.
Crocker looked uppish. ‘I don’t have to have theories. I’m not paid for this kind of diagnosis.’
‘Come down from your perch, Paracelsus,’ said Wexford ‘and put yourselves in our shoes for a moment. Have a shot at it.’
‘The trouble with you lot is you believe everything you’re told. I don’t. I know from experience people distort the truth because they’re afraid or they have a psychological block or they want to be over-helpful. They leave things out because they’re ignorant and when you tell them you want to know everything, they sort out what everything is to them. It’s not necessarily everything to the expert who’s asking the questions.’
‘I know all that,’ said Wexford impatiently.
‘Then, Mrs Fanshawe says the girl wasn’t in the car, not because she’s ashamed to admit it but because she’s literally forgotten. Of course she was in the car. She hitched a lift a couple of miles before the crash and all that period is a blank to Mrs Fanshawe. Naturally she’s not trying to clear the blanks. The very word “girl” is a red rag to a bull to her.’
‘You’re bothered because there were no keys and no other identification in that expensive handbag. She left them in her suitcase and she left that suitcase in Jay’s car.’
‘Why?’
‘So that Jay would have to come back for her. It was on the seat and after a few miles he’d realise and come back. Or so she thought. When he didn’t she knew she could get it back all right at a later date. Presumably she knew where Jay lived. In extremis it would be an excuse for having it out with him and confronting the wife.’
‘But Jay didn’t come back and she got fed-up with waiting, so she hitched a lift from Fanshawe.’
‘That’s the simple natural solution, isn’t it?’
‘What you’re saying amounts to that Jay is just a more or less harmless philanderer. Why didn’t he come forward when we found the girl?’
The doctor gave a sardonic and superior laugh. ‘Thanks to a spot of inefficiency on someone’s part, you told the Press the dead girl was Nora Fanshawe. Why should Jay stick his neck out? If he’d ditched the girl on the outskirts of Stowerton it was because he never wanted to see her again. He’s not likely to pop up and help you with your enquiries.’
Wexford said quietly, ‘Where does Charlie Hatton come into all this?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll answer that question with a question of my own. What makes you think he didn’t have a source of supply completely separate from McCloy or Fanshawe or Jay?’
Wexford looked at Burden and he saw uneasiness creep into the inspector’s face. He couldn’t allow for this sort of doubt. It was unthinkable. ‘He was behind that hedge,’ he said stoutly. ‘He saw that girl pushed into the road.’
‘Get away!’
‘Oh, not from the central strip of grass.’ Wexford paused for effect. The quivering leaf shadows played, danced and died as the sun went in. ‘From a car,’ he said, ‘she was thrown out of a car.’
The sunlight came and went intermittently. Alone now, Wexford watched the cloud masses drift above the High Street roofs and cast their shadows now on a house front, now on the road itself. The sun blazed briefly, appearing from time to time embedded in a golden nest.
Presently he took his railway timetable from his desk drawer and looked up the afternoon trains to London. There was a fast one at two-fifteen.
The lift was waiting for him, its door invitingly open. By now Wexford had lost all his inhibitions about it. He stepped inside and pressed the ground-floor button. The door closed with a whisper and sank on a sigh.
Someone on the first floor must have summoned it, for it trembled and its floor seemed to rise a fraction. Then it shivered and stopped. Wexford waited for the door to slide but nothing happened.
It was a solid door with neither glass nor grille. Impatiently Wexford tapped his foot. He glanced at the control panel and wondered why the light marked one hadn’t come on. Probably it had been summoned and whoever was waiting had got bored and used the stairs. In that case, why wasn’t the light on? He stuck his thumb on the ground-floor button. Nothing happened.
Or rather, the worst, what he had always feared, had happened. The damned thing had broken. It had got stuck. Very likely it was between floors. A tremor of panic touched one corner of his brain and he dismissed it with a fierce oath. He tapped smartly on the door.
Was the thing sound-proof? Wexford had never had much faith in sound-proofing methods, having lived during the early part of his career in a series of flats highly commended by their agents for the seaweed board allegedly incorporated in their walls and ceilings. They hadn’t stopped him being driven nearly mad by the piano from upstairs and the incessant drumming of children’s feet. They couldn’t sound-proof a dwelling house, he thought furiously. It would be just like ‘them’ to succeed in the utterly pointless achievement of sound-proofing a lift. He knocked on the
