‘I leave that to others,’ said Wexford. ‘The intemperate fellows who aren’t content with feathers. They use stones.’ He met the doctor’s eyes and saw there the astonishment and the eagerness for enlightenment he loved to see. ‘Murderers aren’t unknown among the medical profession,’ he said. ‘What about Crippen? Buck Ruxton? This time it happened to be a dentist.’
Chapter 18
‘It’s always a problem,’ said Wexford, ‘to know where to begin. Where’s the beginning? I often think novelists must have my trouble. Well, I know they do. I used to know a chap who wrote books. He said it was easy to end and the middle just happened naturally, but he never knew where to begin. How far do you have to go back in a man’s life to find what makes him do things? To his childhood, to his parents, to Adam?’
‘Let’s not go back that far,’ said Burden. ‘We’ll be here all night.’
Wexford grinned at him. He banged his pillows and pulled their corners round his shoulders. ‘I think I’ll begin ten years ago,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. You know how time flies.’
‘Vigo wasn’t here ten years ago.’
‘He was getting married. He married a rich girl, probably not entirely for her money. But the money set him up in practice here and bought his house for him. They had a child.’
‘It was mongoloid,’ said the doctor. ‘Been in an institution since it was six months old. Vigo took it very hard.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ said Wexford. ‘Look at Vigo. What Hitler would have called the perfect Aryan type and clever with it. If you were stud farming humans, wouldn’t you choose Vigo as your ideal stallion?’ The doctor gave a grudging nod.
‘And if you were Vigo, wouldn’t you expect to sire splendid progeny?’
‘Everyone does.’
‘Maybe. Everyone hopes, let’s say, and sometimes the most unexpected people are lucky.’ He smiled to himself and finished the last drop of beer Sheila had brought. ‘I reckon Vigo blamed his wife. Don’t tell me that was unfair. Life’s unfair. They didn’t have any more children for eight years.’
The doctor leant forward. ‘They’ve got a son now,’ he sighed. ‘Poor kid.’
‘If he’s poor it’s his father’s fault,’ Wexford snapped. ‘Don’t give me that sentimental stuff. This is the real beginning, Mrs Vigo’s second pregnancy. She had high blood pressure, she got toxaemia.’
‘A threatened toxaemia, surely,’ the doctor corrected him pedantically.
‘Whatever it was, she was admitted to the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street two months before the birth. You can imagine Vigo’s feelings, was it going to go wrong again?’
‘Toxaemia doesn’t lead to mongoloid babies.’
‘Oh, shut up!’ said Wexford irritably. ‘People don’t reason in cases like that. He was scared and depressed and he took up with one of the nurses he met when he was visiting his wife. Maybe he’d always been a bit of a philanderer. I’ve got my own reasons for thinking that.’
‘In your notes,’ said Burden, who had the book open on his lap, ‘you said he dropped Bridget Culross after the child was born healthy and normal.’
‘That’s conjecture. Let’s say he was too taken up with the child – he’s crazy about that child – to bother about outside interests. Did you check with the clinic?’
‘I did. Mrs Vigo was admitted last October and remained in the clinic until two weeks after the child was born at the end of December. Bridget Culross was on duty in the ward where her room was from November 1st until January 1st.’
Wexford leaned back. ‘It had to be someone with a Christian or surname beginning with J, you see. Jerome Fanshawe, we thought at first, but that couldn’t be because Mrs Fanshawe was past the age of childbearing. I seriously considered Michael Jameson. It wouldn’t at all surprise me to know he’s got a wife somewhere.’ He lowered his voice. Mrs Fanshawe was two doors down the corridor. ‘A Michael Jameson might just as well call himself Jay as Mike and he had the right kind of car. But we’ll come to that later. Anyway, it wasn’t either of them. It was Jolyon Vigo. With a name like that you’d be glad of a convenient abbreviation sometimes.’
‘You say he dropped the girl. Why did he take up with her again?’
‘A man has a child,’ said Wexford. ‘If he worships the child it may, for a while, bring him closer to his wife. But these things wear off. Can the leopard change his spots? The girl thought she’d a chance of getting him to marry her. No doubt, he’d even considered that when he thought his wife wasn’t ever going to give him a child. Now he wanted his bit of fun on the side but he wasn’t going to lose his son for it. Not on your life. And that’s the crux.’
The doctor crossed his legs and shifted his chair a little. ‘Where does Charlie Hatton come into all this?’
Wexford didn’t answer him directly. Instead he said, ‘Vigo and Culross were carrying on their affair intermittently. If it wasn’t all that of a regular thing, that’s probably because the girl nagged him about marriage and he stalled.’
‘You can’t possibly know that,’ Burden objected.
Wexford said loftily, ‘I understand human nature. On the 18th of May Bridget Culross had a long weekend off and, by chance, the Blake Society were also having their weekend conference in Brighton over the next three days. Vigo picked Culross up at Marble Arch and drove her to Brighton in his car, a big Plymouth sedan.’
‘How do you know it was the Blake Society? Why not the Gibbonites?’
‘Vigo’s got Blake drawings all over his hall walls. Did you check their room bookings?’
‘They booked in at the Majestic in their own names. Two adjoining rooms. They vacated them on Monday afternoon, Monday May 20th.’
Wexford nodded. ‘Perhaps it was their first weekend together. Bridget Culross spent it pressurising Vigo into agreeing to divorce his wife. Or trying to. I don’t know what happened. How could I? I’ll make a guess that she knew they’d have to pass through Kingsmarkham, or near it, on their way back to London, and she tried to persuade Vigo to take her back with him to the house in Ploughman’s Lane and confront his wife together.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Men don’t like that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘They had a fight. Want to know where? I guess she put the pressure on really hard when they reached the point where the road passes nearest to Kingsmarkham. That’s about three miles south of the spot where the body was found. No doubt they got out of the car and my guess is the girl said she’d make her way to Ploughman’s Lane on her own if he wouldn’t come with her. Vigo’s a big powerful man. They struggled, she fell and hit her head. He had an unconscious, perhaps dead, girl on his hands. You see his dilemma?’
‘Whatever he did next, his wife would find out, divorce him and get custody of the child,’ said Burden.
‘Exactly. He began some quick thinking. First remove all identification from the expensive handbag he had given her himself. No doubt, a good many people knew where she had gone, but she had assured him no one knew his name. Vigo’s an intelligent man, a medical man who knows something about police methods. They wouldn’t search for a girl with a reputation like Bridget Culross’s and no near relatives to give a damn. Suppose she was found dead in the road, knocked down by a passing vehicle? It would be assumed she’d quarrelled with her boy-friend, hitched a lift to Stowerton and been knocked down crossing the road or trying to hitch a second lift. He put her on the passenger seat, laying her flat with her head on his lap so as not to mark the seat with blood. Probably he had a newspaper or an old rug to cover his knees, something he could burn when he got home.’
‘He entered the by-pass where at that time of night and during the week, the road was comparatively clear. Now he wouldn’t dare drive too fast – no one could open a car door and throw a body out at any speed – so he kept to the slow lane.’
‘What then?’
‘Things went according to plan. He drove along at twenty or thirty miles an hour and when there were no other vehicles in sight, he shot the girl out and she landed as he had expected with her head well over into the fast lane…’
‘Wait a minute,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘That’s not possible. It can’t be done. We tried it and…’
‘Wait a minute by all means,’ said Wexford, and in execrable French, ‘Pas devant les infirmieres.’
‘Tea, coffee, Ovaltine or Horlicks,’ said a bright voice whose owner had tapped on the glass panel in the
