Shake Hands Forever, page 15
I61
Most people when asked that question reply that it all depends on what the favour is. But Lovat had virtues to offset his taciturnity. He took another crumpled cigarette from a damp and crumpled packet. 'Yes,' he said simply.
'You know that guy Hathall I'm always on about ? I think he worked a pay-roll fiddle while he was with Kidd's at Toxborough. That's why I was there when we met the other day. But I've no authority to act. I'm pretty sure it was like this . . .' Wexford told him what he was pretty sure it was like. 'Would you get someone along to those trustee savings banks and see if you can smell out any false accounts ? And quick, Brock, because I've only got ten days.'
Lovat didn't ask why he only had ten days. He wiped his spectacles which the fog had misted and readjusted them on his red snub nose. Without looking at Wexford or showing the least interest, he fixed his eyes on the men and said, 'One way and another I've had a lot to do with digging in my time.'
Wexford made no response. Just at the moment he couldn't summon up much enthusiasm for a League-Against-CruelSports homily. Nor did he repeat his request, which would only have annoyed Lovat, but sat silent in the damp cold listening to the sounds the spades made when they struck chalk, and the soft slump of earth lifted and slung heavily aside. Cans, waterlogged cartons, were lumped on to the growing heaps, to be followed by unearthed rose bushes, their roots scorpion-like and matted with wet soil. Was there a body under there ? At any moment a spade might reveal, not a clod of ancient mortar or another mass of brown root, but a white and rotting human hand.
The mist was thickening over the almost stagnant water. Lovat threw his cigarette end into an oil-scummed puddle. 'Will do,' he said.
It was a relief to get away from the river and its miasma -
I62
the miasma that had once been thought of as a breeder of disease - and up into the fashionable part of the Old Town where he had parked his car. He was wiping its misted windscreen when he saw Nancy Lake, and he would have wondered what she was doing there had she not, at that moment, turned into a little baker's shop, famous for its home-baked bread and cakes. More than a year had passed since he had last seen her, and he had almost forgotten the sensation he had felt then, the catching of breath, the faint tremor in the heart. He felt it now as he saw the glass door close on her, the shop's warm orange glow receive her.
Although he was shivering now, his breath like smoke on the cold haze, he waited there for her on the herb. And when she came out she rewarded him with one of her rich sweet smiles. 'Mr Wexford! There are policemen everywhere down here, but I didn't expect to see you.'
'I'm a policeman too. May I give you a lift back to Kingsmarkham ?'
'Thank you, I'm not going back just now.' She wore a chinchilla coat that sparkled with fine drops. The cold which pinched other faces had coloured hers and brightened her eyes. 'But I'll come and sit in your car with you for five minutes, shall I ?'
Someone, he thought, ought to invent a way of heating a car while the engine was switched off. But she didn't seem to feel the cold. She leaned towards him with the eagerness and the vitality of a young woman. 'Shall we share a cream cake ?'
He shook his head. 'Bad for my figure, I'm afraid.'
'But you've got a lovely figure!'
Knowing that he shouldn't, that this was inviting a renewal of flirtation, he looked into those shining eyes and said, 'You are always saying things to me that no woman has said for half a lifetime.'
I63
She laughed. 'Not always. How can it be "always" when I never see you ?' She began to eat a cake. It was the kind of cake no one should attempt to eat without a plate, a fork and a napkin. She managed it with her bare fingers remarkably well, her small red tongue retrieving flecks of cream from her lips. 'I've sold my house,' she said. 'I'm moving out the day before Christmas Eve.'
The day before Christmas Eve . . . 'They say that you're going abroad.'
'Do they? They've been saying things about me round here for twenty years and most of it has been a distortion of the truth. Do they say that my dream has come true at last ?' She finished her cake, licked her fingers delicately. 'Now I must go. Once - Oh, it seems years ago - I asked you to come and have tea with me.'
'So you did,' he said.
'Will you come ? Say - next Friday ?' When he nodded, she said, 'And we'll have the last of the miracle jam.'
'I wish you'd tell me why you call it that.'
'I will, I will . . .' He held the car door open for her and she took the hand he held out. 'I'll tell you the story of my life. All shall be made clear. Till Friday, then.'
'Till Friday.' It was absurd, this feeling of excitement. You're old, he told himself sternly. She wants to give you plum jam and tell you the story of her life, that's all you're fit for now. And he watched her walk away until her grey fur had melted into the river mist and was gone.
'I can't follow him on the Tube, Reg. I've tried three times, but each night the crowds get worse with the pre-Christmas rush.'
'I can imagine,' said Wexford, who felt he never wanted to hear the word 'Christmas' again. He was more aware of the
I64
season's festive pressures than he had ever been in the past. Was Christmas more christmassy this year than usual7 Or was it simply that he saw every card which flopped on to his front door mat, every hint of the coming celebrations, as a threat of failure ? There was a bitter irony in the fact that this year they were going to fill the house with more people than ever before, both his daughters, his son-in-law, his two grandsons, Howard and Denise, Burden and his children. And Dora had already begun to put up the decorations. He had to hunch in his chair, the phone on his knees, to avoid prickling his face on the great bunch of holly that hung above his desk. 'That seems to be that then, doesn't it?' he said. 'Give it up, finish. Something may come out of the pay-roll thing. It's my last hope.'
Howard's voice sounded indignant. 'I didn't mean I want to give it up. I only meant I can't do it that way.'
'What other way is there ?'
'Why shouldn't I try to tail him from the other end?'
'The other end ?'
'Last night after I'd lost him on the Tube, I went up to Dartmeet Avenue. You see, I'd reckoned he may stay all night with her some nights, but he doesn't always stay there. If he did, there'd be no point in his having a place of his own. And he didn't stay last night, Reg. He came home on the last ~8 bus. So I thought, why shouldn't I also get on that last bus ?'
'I must be getting thick in my old age,' said Wexford, 'but I don't see how that helps.'
'This is how. He'll get on at the stop nearest to her place, won't he ? And once I find it I can wait at it the next night from five-thirty onwards. If he comes by bus I can follow him, if he comes by Tube it'll be harder, but there's still a good chance.'
165
Kilburn Park, Great Western Road, Pembridge Road, Church Street . . . Wexford sighed. 'There are dozens of stops,' he said.
'Not in Notting Hill, there aren't. And it has to be Notting Hill, remember. The last z8 bus crosses Notting Hill Gate at ten to eleven. Tomorrow night I'll be waiting for it in Church Street. I've got six more weekday evenings, Reg. six more watching nights to Christmas.'
'You shall have the breast of the turkey,' said his uncle, 'and the fifty-pence piece from the pudding.'
As he put the phone down, the doorbell rang and he heard the thin reedy voices of young carol singers.
'God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay . . .'
IS
The Monday of the week before Christmas passed and the Tuesday came and there was nothing from Lovat. Very likely he was too busy with the Morag Grey case to make much effort. Her body hadn't been found, and her husband, remanded in custody for a week, was due to appear in court again solely on the shop-breaking charge. Wexford phoned Myringham police station on Tuesday afternoon. It was Mr Lovat's day off, Sergeant Hutton told him, and he wouldn't be found at home as he was attending something called the convention of the Society of Friends of the British Badger.
No word came from Howard. It wasn't awe that stopped Wexford phoning him. You don't harass someone who is doing you the enormous favour of giving up all his free time to gratify your obsession, pursue your chimera. You leave him alone and wait. Chimera: Monster, bogy, thing of fanciful conception. That was how the dictionary defined it, Wexford discovered, looking the word up in the solitude of his office. Thing of fanciful conception . . . Hathall was flesh and blood all right, but the woman ? Only Howard had ever seen her, and Howard wasn't prepared to swear that Hathall - the monster, the bogy - had been her companion. Let nothing you dismay, Wexford told himself. Someone had made that handprint, someone had left those coarse dark hairs on Angela's bedroom floor.
And even if his chances of ever laying hands on her were now remote, growing more remote with each day that
167
passed, he would still want to know how it had been done, fill in those gaps that still remained. He'd want to know where Hathall had met her. In the street, in a pub, as Howard had once suggested ? Or had she originally been a friend of Angela's from those early London days before Hathall had been introduced to his second wife at that Finchley party? Surely she must have lived in the vicinity of Toxborough or Myringham if hers had been the job of making withdrawals from those accounts. Or had that task been shared between her and Angela ? Hathall had worked only part-time at Kidd's. On his days off, Angela might have used the car to collect.
Then there was the book on Celtic languages, another strange 'exhibit' in the case he hadn't even begun to account for. Celtic languages had some, not remote, connection with archaeology, but Angela had shown no interest in them while working at the library of the National Archaeologists' League. If the book wasn't relevant, why had Hathall been so upset by the sight of it in his, Wexford's, hands ?
But whatever he might deduce from the repeated examination of these facts, from carefully listing apparently unconnected pieces of information and trying to establish a link, the really important thing, the securing of Hathall before he left the country, depended now on finding evidence of that fraud. Putting those puzzle pieces together and making a picture of his chimera could wait until it was too late and Hathall was gone. That, he thought bitterly, would make an occupation for the long evenings of the New Year. And when he had still heard nothing from Lovat by Wednesday morning, he drove to Myringham to catch him in his own office, getting there by ten o'clock. Mr Lovat, he was told, was in court and wasn't expected back before lunch.
Wexford pushed his way through the crowds in Myring
I68
ham's shopping precinct, climbing concrete steps, ascending and descending escalators - the whole lot strung with twinkling fairy lights in the shape of yellow and red daisies -and made his way into the magistrates' court. The public gallery was almost empty. He slid into a seat, looked round for Lovat, and spotted him sitting at the front almost under the Bench.
A pale-faced gangling man of about thirty was in the dock - according to the solicitor appearing for him, one Richard George Grey, of no fixed abode. Ah, the husband of Morag. No wonder Lovat looked so anxious. But it didn't take long for Wexford to gather that the shop-breaking charge against Grey was based on very fragile evidence. The police, ob- viously, wanted a committal which it didn't look as if they would get. Grey's solicitor, youthful, suave and polished, was doing his best for his client, an effort that made Lovat's mouth turn down. With rare schadenfreude, Wexford found himself hoping Grey would get off. Why should he be the lucky one, able to hold a man until he had got enough evidence against him to charge him with the murder of his wife ?
'And so you will appreciate, Your Worships, that my client has suffered from a series of grave misfortunes. Although he is not obliged to divulge to you any previous convictions, he wishes to do so, aware, no doubt, of how trivial you will find his one sole conviction to be. And of what does this single conviction consist ? That, Your Worships, of being placed on probation for being found on enclosed premises at the tender age of seventeen.'
Wexford shifted along to allow for the entry of two elderly women with shopping bags. Their expressions were avid and they seemed to make themselves at home. This entertain- ment, he thought, was free, matutinal, and the real nittygritty stuff of life, three advantages it had over the cinema.
In
SavouringLovat's discomfiture, he listened as the solicitor went on.
'Apart from this, what do his aiminalproclivities amount to ? Oh, it is true that when he found himself destitute and without a roof over his head, he was driven to take refuge in a derelict house for which its rightful owner had no use and which was classified as unfitfor human habitation. But this, as Your Worships are aware, is no crime. It is not even, as the law has stood for six hundred years, trespass. It is true too that he was dismissed by his previous employer for - he frankly admits, though no charge was brought - appropriating from this employer the negligible sum of two pounds fifty. As a result, he was obliged to leave his flat or tied cottage in Maynnot Hall, Toxborough, and as an even more serious result was deserted by his wife on the ground that she refused to live with a man whose honesty was not beyond reproach. This lady, whose whereabouts are not known and whose desertion has caused my client intense distress, seems to have something in common with the Myringham police, in particular that of hitting a man when he is down . . .'
There was a good deal more in the same vein. Wexford would have found it less boring, he thought, if he had heard more of the concrete evidence and less of this airy-fairypleading. But the evidence must have been thin and the identification of Grey shaky, for the magistrates returned after three minutes to dismiss the case. Lovat got up in disgust and Wexford rose to follow him. His elderly neighbours moved their shopping bags under protest, there was a press of people outside the court - a cloud of witnesses appearing for a grievous bodily harm case - and by the time he got through, Lovat was off in his car and not in the direction of the police station.
Well, he was fifteen miles north of Kingsmarkham, fifteen
I70
miles nearer London. Why waste those miles? Why not go on northwards for a last word with Eileen Hathall ? Things could hardly be worse than they were. There was room only for improvement. And how would he feel if she were to tell him Hathall's emigration had been postponed, that he was staying a week, a fortnight, longer in London?
As he passed through Toxborough, the road taking him along Maynnot Way, a memory twitched at the back of his mind. Richard and Morag Grey had lived here once, had been servants presumably at Maynnot Hall - but it wasn't that. Yet it had something to do with what the young solicitor had said. Concentratedly, he reviewed the case, what he had come to think of as Hathall country, a landscape with figures. So many places and so many figures . . . Of all the personalities he had encountered or heard spoken of, one had been hinted at by that solicitor in his dramatic address to the Bench. But no name had been mentioned except Grey's . . . Yes, his wife. The lost woman, that was it. 'Deserted by his wife on the ground that she refused to live with a man whose honesty was not beyond reproach.' But what did it remind him of ? Way back in Hathall country, a year ago perhaps, or months or weeks, someone somewhere had spoken to him of a woman with a peculiar regard for honesty. The trouble was that he hadn't the slightest recollection of who that someone had been.
No effort of memory was required to identify Eileen Hathall's lunch guest. Wexford hadn't seen old Mrs Hathall for fifteen months and he was somewhat aghast to find her there. The ex-wife wouldn't tell the ax-husband of his call, but the mother would very likely tell the son. Never mind. It no longer mattered. Hathall was leaving the country in five days' time. A man who is fleeing his native land for ever has no time for petty revenges and needless precautions.
'7
And it seemed that Mrs Hathall, who was sitting at the table drinking an after-lunch cup of tea, was under a lucky misapprehension as to the cause of his visit. This tiresome policeman had called at a house where she was before; he was calling at a house where she was again. On each previous occasion he had wanted her son, therefore -'You won't find him here,' she said in that gruff voice with its North Country undercurrent. 'He's busy getting himself ready for going abroad.'
Eileen met his questioning glance. 'He came here last night and said good-bye,' she said. Her voice sounded calm, almost complacent. And looking from one woman to the other, Wexford realized what had happened to them. Hathall, while living in England, had been to each of them a source of chronic bitterness, breeding in the mother a perpetual need to nag and harass, in the ex-wife resentment and humiliation. Hathall gone, Hathall so far away that he might as well be dead, would leave them at peace. Eileen would take on the status almost of a widow, and the old woman would have a ready-made respectable reason - her grand-daughter's English education - as to why her son and daughter-in-law were parted.
'He's going on Monday ?' he said.
Old Mrs Hathall nodded with a certain smugness. 'Don't suppose we shall ever set eyes on him again.' She finished her tea, got up and began to clear the table. The minute you finished a meal you cleared the remains of it away. That was the rule. Wexford saw her lift the lid from the teapot and contemplate its contents with an air of irritation as if she regretted the wicked waste of throwing away half a pint of tea. And she indicated to Eileen with a little dumb show that there was more if she wanted it. Eileen shook her head and Mrs Hathall bore the pot away. That Wexford might have
I72
drunk it, might at least have been given the chance to refuse it, didn't seem to cross their minds. Eileen waited till her mother-in-law had left the room.
'I'm well rid of him,' she said. 'He'd no call to come here, I'm sure. I'd done without him for five years and I can do without him for the rest of my life. As far as I'm concerned, it's good riddance.'
