and gasped. ‘My God, I…’
‘Yes, it isn’t a pleasant sight.’ The thought came to Wexford that something very out of the way had happened. Not so much that here on a fine June morning a man lay murdered, but that he, Wexford had found him. Policemen don’t find bodies unless they are sent to look for them or unless someone else has found them first. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked. The newcomer’s face was green. He looked as if he was about to be sick. ‘Will you go down to the town, to the nearest phone box and-get on to the station? Just tell them what you’ve seen. They’ll do the rest. Come on, man, pull yourself together.’
‘O.K., it’s just that…’
‘Perhaps you’d better let me have your name.’
‘Cullam, Maurice Cullam. I’ll go, I’ll go right away. It’s just that – well, last night I was having a drink with him at the Dragon.’
‘You know who it is then? You can’t see his face.’
‘I don’t need to. I’d know Charlie Hatton anywhere.’
Chapter 3
He looked a right Charlie in those tails and striped trousers. That would be something funny to say to his best man when he came.
‘You and me, we look a pair of right Charlies, Charlie Hatton.’
Quite witty really. Jack often thought he wasn’t quick enough to match Charlie’s easy repartee, but now he had thought of something that would make his friend smile.
Dear old Charlie, he thought sentimentally, the best friend a man ever had. Generous to a fault, and if he wasn’t always strictly above-board – well, a man had to live. And Charlie knew how to live all right. The best of everything he had. Jack was ready to bet all the crisp honeymoon pound notes he had in his pocket that Charlie would be one of the few guests not wearing a hired morning coat. He had his own and not off the peg, either.
Not that he looked half bad himself, he thought, admiring his reflection. At his age boozing didn’t have much visible effect and he always had a red face anyway. He looked smashing, he decided, shyly proud, as good as the Duke of Edinburgh any day. Probably the Duke used an electric shaver though. Jack put another bit of cotton wool on the nick on his chin and he wondered if Marilyn was ready yet.
Thanks to Charlie boy, they’d been able to splash a bit on the wedding and Marilyn could have the white satin and the four bridesmaids she’d set her heart on. It would have been a different story if they’d had to find the key money for the flat themselves. Trust Charlie to come up with a long-term interest-free loan. That way they’d be able to blow some of their own savings on having the flat done up nicely. How well it had all worked out! A fortnight away by the sea and when they came back, the flat all ready and waiting for them. And it was all thanks to Charlie.
Moving away from the mirror, Jack looked into the future, twenty, thirty years hence. Charlie would be a really rich man by then. Jack would be very much surprised if his friend wouldn’t be living in one of those houses in Ploughman’s Lane like the one where he sometimes did electrical jobs with real old French furniture and real oil paintings and the kind of china you looked at but didn’t eat off. He and Charlie had had a good laugh over that particular house, but there had been something serious in Charlie’s laughter and Jack had guessed he aimed high.
They’d still be mates of course, for there was no side to Charlie Hatton. It wouldn’t be beer and a hand of solo then, but dinner parties and bridge games with their wives in cocktail gowns and real jewellery. Jack grew dizzy as he thought of it, seeing them sitting with tall glasses on a shady patio and, strangely, seeing them too as they were now, untouched by the hand of time.
Abruptly he came back to the present day, his wedding day. Charlie was taking a hell of a time about coming. Maybe there was some difficulty about Lilian’s dress or he was waiting for her to get back from the hairdresser’s. Charlie was dead keen on Lilian doing him credit and she always did, always looked as if she’d just stepped out of a bandbox. After Marilyn, she’d be the best dressed woman at the wed ding, blonde, shapely, in the green dress Marilyn had got so superstitious about. Jack dabbed at his chin again and went to the window to watch for Charlie.
It was ten-thirty and the wedding was fixed for an hour’s time.
She was blonde, shapely, pretty in Sheila Wexford’s style but without Sheila’s transcending beauty. Her face was rather blunt, the features unfinished putty dabs, and now it was swollen with crying. After they had told her Wexford and Burden sat helplessly while she flung herself face-downwards on the sofa and sobbed into the cushions.
Presently Wexford moved over to her and touched her shoulder. She reached for his hand, clutched it and dug in her long nails. Then she struggled up, burying her face in his hand and her own. The expensive velvet cushions were blotched with her tears.
Wexford glanced quickly around the smartly, even luxuriously, furnished room. Over the back of one of the chairs hung a blue and green flowered dress, a green coat, long wrist-buttoning gloves. In the middle of the long teak dining table lay Lilian Hatton’s wedding hat, an elaborate confection of satin leaves and tulle as green and fresh as the real leaves he could see through the picture window in the Kingsbrook meadows.
‘Mrs Hatton,’ he said gently and she raised her face obediently, ‘Mrs Hatton, weren’t you worried when your husband didn’t come home last night?’
She didn’t speak. He repeated the question, and then she said in a voice choked with sobs, ‘I didn’t expect him home. I only half-expected him.’ She dropped Wexford’s hand, recoiling as if in taking it she had done something indecent.
‘When he didn’t come,’ she said, ‘I thought he hasn’t made it, he hasn’t made Jack’s party. He’s stopping off on the road, he’ll be in in the morning, I…’ The sobs were uncontrollable and she gave a long piteous cry.
‘I won’t trouble you any more now, Mrs Hatton. You say you mother’s coming? If I could just have Mr Pertwee’s address.’
‘Jack, yes,’ she said. ‘Jack’ll take this hard.’ She drew a long breath, twisting her hands. ‘They’d been pals since they were schoolkids.’ Suddenly she stood up, staring wildly. ‘Jack doesn’t know! It’s his wedding day and Charlie was going to be his best man. Oh, Jack, Jack, poor Jack!’
‘Leave it to us, Mrs Hatton,’ said Inspector Burden. ‘We’ll tell Mr Pertwee. Bailey Street, is it? We’ll tell him. There’s your front door bell now. I expect that’ll be your mother.’
‘Mum,’ said Lilian Hatton. ‘What am I going to do, Mum?’ The older woman looked past her, then put her arms around the shaking shoulders. ‘Marilyn said I shouldn’t wear green to a wedding, she said it was unlucky.’ Her voice was very low, a slurring mumble. ‘I bought that green coat just the same. I never got as far as the wedding, Mum, but it was unlucky, wasn’t it?’ Suddenly she broke into a terrible, loud and demented scream. ‘Charlie, Charlie, what am I going to do, Charlie?’ She held on to her mother, clawing at the lapels of her coat. ‘Oh my God, Charlie!’ she screamed.
‘I never get used to it, you know,’ said Burden quietly.
‘Do you think I do?’ Wexford had amiable, sometimes distinctly fond feelings for his subordinate, but occasionally Burden made him impatient, especially when he instituted himself keeper of the chief inspector’s conscience. He had a smug, parsonical face, Wexford thought unkindly, and now his thin mouth turned piously, down. ‘The worst is over anyway,’ he said crossly. ‘The bridegroom won’t go into transports of grief and you don’t put off your wedding because your best man’s been done in.’
You callous devil, said Burden’s look. Then the neat, well-modelled head was once more averted and the inspector re-entered his silent, respectful reverie.
It took only ten minutes to get from the Hatton’s flat to Bailey Street where, at number ten, Jack Pertwee lived with his widowed father. The police car stopped outside a tiny terraced house with no garden to separate its front door from the pavement. Mr Pertwee senior answered their knock, looking uneasy in a too large morning coat.
‘Thought you were our missing best man come at last.’
