'All right, Antonio, but none of your reconstituted potato, eh ? And no monosodium glutamate.'

  Antonio looked puzzled. 'This is not on my menu, Mr Wexford.'

  'No, but it's there all right, the secret agent, the alimentary fifth column. I trust you've had no more speedy goings-on of late i'

  'Thanks to you, sir, we have not.'

  The reference was to an act of mischief performed a couple of weeks before by one of Antonio's youthful part-time employees. Bored by the sobriety of the clientele, this boy had introduced into the glass tank of orange juice with its floating plastic oranges, one hundred amphetamine tablets, and the result had been a merry near-riot, a hitherto decorous businessman actually dancing on a table top. Wexford,

  39

  chancing to call in and, on account of his diet, sampling the orange juice himself, had located the source of this almost Saturnalian jollity and, simultaneously, the joker. Recalling all this now, he laughed heartily.

  'What's so funny?' said Burden sourly. 'Or has that Mrs Lake been cheering you up ?? When Wexford stopped laughing but didn't answer, he said, 'Martin's taken a room in the church hall, a sort of enquiry post and general information pool. The public are being notified in the hope that anyone who may have seen Angela on Friday afternoon will come in and tell us about it. And if she didn't go out, there's a possibility her visitor was seen.'

  'She went out,' said Wexford. 'She told Mrs Lake she was going out in the car. I wonder who the lady with the Lshaped scar is, Mike. Not Mrs Lake, and Mrs Lake says Angela didn't have a cleaner or, come to that, any friends.'

  'And who's the man who fingers the inside of cupboard doors ?'

  The arrival of the liver and bacon and Burden's spaghetti Bolognese silenced them for a few minutes. Wexford drank his orange juice, wistfully thinking how much he would enjoy it if this tankful had been 'speeded' up and Burden were suddenly to become merry and uninhibited. But the inspector, eating fastidiously, wore the resigned look of one who has sacrificed his weekend to duty. Deep lines, stretching from nostrils to the corners of his mouth, intensified as he said:

  'I was going to take my kids to the seaside.'

  Wexford thought of Nancy Lake who would look wed in a swimsuit, but he switched off the picture before it developed into a full-colour three-dimensional image. 'Mike, at this stage of a case we usually ask each other if we've noticed anything odd, any discrepancies or downright untruths. Have you noticed anything7'

  40

  'Can't say I have, except the lack of prints.'

  She'd spring-cleaned the place to impress the old woman, though I agree it was strange she seems to have wiped everything again before going off on her car jaunt. Mrs Lake had coffee with her at about one, but Mrs Lake's prints aren't anywhere. But there's something else that strikes me as even odder than that, the way Hathall behaved when he got into the house last night.'

  Burden pushed away his empty plate, contemplated the menu, and rejecting the idea of a sweet, signalled to Antonio for coffee. 'Was it odd ?' he said.

  'Hathall and his wife had been married for three years. During that time the old woman had only met her daughterin-law once, and there had evidently been considerable anta- gonism between them. This appears to have been something to do with Angela's having broken up Hathall's first marriage. Be that as it may - and I mean to learn more about it - Angela and her mother-in-law seem to have been at loggerheads. Yet there was a kind of rapprochement, the old woman had been persuaded to come for the weekend and Angela was preparing to receive her to the extent of titivating the place far beyond her normal standard. Now Angela was supposed to be meeting them at the station, but she didn't turn up. Hathall says she was shy and nervous, Mrs Lake that she was brusque and ungracious. Bearing this in mind, what conclusions would you expect Hathall to have drawn when his wife wasn't at the station ?'

  'That she'd got cold feet. That she was too frightened to face her mother-in-law.'

  'Exactly. But what happened when he got to Bury Cottage ? He couldn't find Angela. He looked for her downstairs and in the garden. He never went upstairs at all. And yet by then he must have suspected Angela's nervousness and concluded

  41

  surely that a nervous woman takes refuge not in the garden but in her own bedroom. But instead of looking upstairs for her, he sent his mother, the very person he must have believed Angela to be frightened of. This shy and nervous girl to whom he is alleged to be devoted was cowering - he must have thought - in her bedroom, but instead of going up to reassure her and then bring her to confront his mother with him there to support her, he goes off to the garage. That, Mike, is very odd indeed.'

  Burden nodded. 'Drink your coffee,' he said. 'You said Hathall was coming in at three. Maybe he'll give you an answer.'

  5

  Although Wexford pretended to study the list of missing articles - a bracelet, a couple of rings and a gilt neck chain -Hathall had brought him, he was really observing the man himself. He had come into the office with head bowed, and now he sat silent, his hands folded in his lap. But the combination of ruddy skin and black hair gives a man an angry look. Hathall, in spite of his grief, looked angry and resentful. His hard craggy features had the appearance of being carved out of roseate granite, his hands were large and red, and even his eyes, though not bloodshot, held a red gleam. Wexford wouldn't have judged him attractive to women, yet he had had two wives. Was it perhaps that certain women, very feminine or nervous or maladjusted women, saw him as a rock to which they might cling, a stronghold where they might find shelter ? Possibly that colouring of his indicated passion and tenacity and strength as well as ill-temper.

  Wexford placed the list on his desk and, looking up, said, 'What do you think happened yesterday afternoon, Mr Hathall ?'

  'Are you asking me that?'

  'Presumably you knew your wife better than anyone else knew her. You'd know who would be likely to call on her or be fetched home by her.'

  Hathall frowned, and the frown darkened his whole face. 'I've already said, some man got into the house for the purpose of robbery. He took those things on that list and when

  43

  my wife interrupted him, he - he killed her. What else could it have been? It's obvious.'

  'I don't think so. I believe that whoever came to your house wiped the place clean of a considerable number of fingerprints. A thief wouldn't have needed to do that. He'd have worn gloves. And although he might have struck your wife, he wouldn't have strangled her. Besides, I see here that you value the missing property at less than fifty pounds all told. True, people have been killed for less, but I doubt if any woman has ever been strangled for such a reason.'

  When Wexford repeated the word 'strangled', Hathall again bowed his head. 'What alternative is there ?' he muttered.

  'Tell me who came to your house. What friends or acquaintances called on your wife?'

  'We had no friends,' said Hathall. 'When we came here we were more or less on the breadline. You need money to make friends in a place like this. We hadn't got the money to join clubs or give dinner parties or even have people in for drinks. Angela often didn't see a soul from Sunday night till Friday night. And the friends I'd had before I married her - well, my first wife saw to it I'd lost them.' He coughed impatiently and tossed his head in the way his mother had. 'Look, I think I'd better tell you a bit about what Angela and I had been through, and then perhaps you'll see that all this talk of friends calling is arrant nonsense.'

  'Perhaps you had, Mr Hathall.'

  'It'll be my life history.' Hathall gave a humourless bark of laughter. It was the bitter laugh of the paranoiac. 'I started off as an office boy with a firm of accountants, Craig and Butler, of Gray's Inn Road. Later on, when I was a clerk there, the senior partner wanted me to be articled and persuaded me to study for the Institute's exams. In the mean

  44

  time I'd got married and I was buying a house in Croydon on a mortgage, so the extra money was handy.' He looked up with another aggrieved frown. 'I don't think there's ever been a time till now when I've had a reasonable amount of money to live on, and now I've got it it's no good to me.

  'My first marriage wasn't happy. My mother may think it was but outsiders don't know. I got married seventeen years ago and two years later I knew I'd made a mistake. But we'd got a daughter by that time, so there wasn't anything I could do about it. I expect I'd have jogged along and made the best of it if I hadn't met Angela at an office party. When I fell in love with her and knew that - well, what I felt for her was returned, I asked my wife for a divorce. Eileen - that's my first wife's name - made hideous scenes. She brought my mother into it and she even brought Rosemary in - a kid of eleven. I can't describe what my life was like and I won't try to.'

  'This was five years ago ?'

  'About five years ago, yes. Eventually I left home and went to live with Angela. She had a room in Earls Court and she was working at the library of the National Archaeologists' League.' Hathall, who had said he couldn't describe what his life had been like, immediately proceeded to do so. 'Eileen set about a - a campaign of persecution. She made scenes at my office and at Angela's place of work. She even came to Earls Court. I begged her for a divorce. Angela had a good job and I was doing all right. I thought I could have afforded it, whatever demands Eileen made. In the end she agreed, but by that time Butler had sacked me on account of Eileen's scenes, sacked me out of hand. It was a piece of outrageous injustice. And, to crown it all, Angela had to leave the library. She was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  'I got a part-time job as accountant with a firm of toy

  45

  manufacturers, Kidd and Co., of Toxborough, and Angela and I got a room nearby. We were on our beam ends. Angela couldn't work. The divorce judge awarded Eileen my house and custody of my daughter and a very unfairly large slice out of my very inadequate income. Then we had what looked like a piece of luck at last. Angela has a cousin down here, a man called Mark Somerset, who let us have Bury Cottage. It had been his father's, but of course there wasn't any question of its being rent-free - he didn't take his generosity that far, in spite of being a blood relation. And I can't say he ever did anything else for us. He didn't even befriend Angela, though he must have known how lonely she was.

  'Things went on like this for nearly three years. We were literally living on about fifteen pounds a week. I was still paying off the mortgage on a house I haven't set foot in for four years. My mother and my first wife had poisoned my daughter's mind against me. What's the use of a judge giving you reasonable access to a child if the child refuses to come near you ? I remember you said you'd want to know about my private life. Well, that was it. Nothing but harassment and persecution. Angela was the one bright spot in it and now -and now she's dead.'

  Wexford, who believed that, with certain exceptions, a man only suffers chronic and acute persecution if something masochistic in his psychological make-up seeks persecution, pursed his lips. 'This man Somerset, did he ever come to Bury Cottage ?'

  'Never. He showed us over the place when he first offered it to us, and after that, apart from a chance meeting in the street in Myringham, we never saw him again. It was as if he'd taken an unreasonable dislike to Angela.'

  So many people had disliked or resented her. She sounded, Wexford thought, as inclined to paranoia as her husband.

  46

  Generally speaking, nice people are not much disliked. And a kind of widespread conspiracy of hatred against them, which Hathall seemed to infer, is never feasible.

  'You say this was an unreasonable dislike, Mr Hathall. Was your mother's dislike equally unreasonable ?'

  'My mother is devoted to Eileen. She's old-fashioned and rigid and she was prejudiced against Angela for what she calls her taking me away from Eileen. It's complete nonsense to say that a woman can steal another woman's husband if he doesn't want to be - well, stolen.'

  'They only met once, I believe. Was that meeting not a success 7'

  'I persuaded my mother to come to Earls Court and meet Angela. I should have known better, but I thought that when she actually got to know her she might get over the feeling she was a kind of scarlet woman. My mother took exception to Angela's clothes - she was wearing those jeans and that red shirt - and when she said something uncomplimentary about Eileen my mother walked straight out of the house.'

  Hathall's face had grown even redder at the memory. Wexford said, 'So they weren't on speaking terms for the whole of your second marriage?'

  'My mother refused to visit us or have us come to her. She saw me, of course. I tell you frankly, I'd have liked to cut myself off from her entirely but I felt I had a duty towards her.'

  Wexford always took such assertions of virtue with a grain of salt. He couldn't help wondering if old Mrs Hathall, who must have been nearly seventy, had some savings to leave.

  'What brought about the idea of the reunion you planned for this weekend ?'

  'When I landed this job with Marcus Flower - at, incidentally, double the salary I'd been getting from Kidd's - I

  47

  decided to spend my week nights at my mother's place. She lives in Balham, so it wasn't too far for me to go into Victoria. Angela and I were looking for a flat to buy in London, so it wouldn't have gone on for too long. But, as usual with me, disaster hit me. However, as I was saying, I'd spent every week night at my mother's since July and I'd had a chance to talk to her about Angela and how much I'd like them to be on good terms. It took eight weeks of persuasion, but she did at last agree to come here for a weekend. Angela was very nervous at the whole idea. Of course she was as anxious for my mother to like her as I was, but she was very apprehen- sive. She scrubbed the whole place from top to bottom so that my mother couldn't find any fault there. I shall never know now whether it would have worked out.'

  'Now, Mr Hathall, when you got to the station last night and your wife wasn't there to meet you as had been arranged, what was your reaction?'

  'I don't follow you,' said Hathall shortly.

  'What did you feel? Alarmed? Annoyed7 Or just disappointed ?'

  Hathall hesitated. 'I certainly wasn't annoyed,' he said. 'I suppose I thought it was an unfortunate start to the weekend. I assumed Angela had been too nervous to come, after all.'

  'I see. And when you reached the house, what did you do ?'

  'I don't know what all this is leading up to, but I suppose there's some purpose behind it.' Again Hathall gave that impatient toss of the head. 'I called out to Angela. When she didn't answer, I looked for her in the dining room and in the kitchen. She wasn't there, 80 I went out into the garden. Then I told my mother to go upstairs while I looked to see if the car was in the garage.'

  'You thought perhaps that you on foot and your wife in the car might have missed each other ?'

  48

  'I don't know what I thought. I just naturally looked everywhere for her.'

  'But not upstairs, MrHathall?' said Wexford quietly.

  'Not at first. I would have done.'

  'Wasn't it likely that of all places in the house a nervous woman, afraid to meet her mother-in-law, would have been, the first was her own bedroom ? But you didn't go there first, as might have been expected. You went to the garage and sent your mother upstairs.'

  Hathall, who might have blustered, who might have told Wexford to state plainly what he was getting at, said instead in a rather stiff and awkward tone, 'We can't always account for our actions.'

  -'I disagree. I think we can if we look honestly into our motives.'

  'Well, I suppose I thought if she hadn't answered my call, she couldn't be in the house. Yes, I did think that. I thought she must have set off in the car and we'd missed each other because she'd gone some other way round.'

  But some other way round would have meant driving a mile down Wool Lane to its junction with the Pomfret to Myringham road, then following this road to Pomfret or Stowerton before doubling back to Kingsmarkham station, a journey of five miles at least instead of a half-mile trip. But Wexford said no more about it. Another factor in the man's behaviour had suddenly struck him, and he wanted to be alone to think about it, to work out whether it was sig~uficant or merely the result of a quirk in his character.

  As Hathall rose to go, he said, 'May I ask you something now?'

  'By all means.'

  But Hathall seemed to hesitate, as if still to postpone some bunting question or to conceal it under another of less

  49

  moment. 'Have you had anything from the - well, the pathologist yet?'

  'Not yet, MrHathall.'

  The red rock face tightened. 'These fingerprints. Have you got something from them yet? Isn't there some clue there?'

  'Very little, as far as we can tell.'

  'It seems a slow process to me. But I know nothing about it. You'll keep me informed, will you ?'

  He had spoken hectoringly, like a company chairman addressing a junior executive. 'Once an arrest has been made,' said Wexford, 'you may be sure you won't be left in the dark.'

  'That's all very well, but neither will any newspaper reader. I should like to know about this . . .' He bit off the sentence as if he had been tending towards an end it might have been unwise to approach. 'I should like to know about this pathologist's report.'

  'I will call on you tomorrow, Mr Hathall,' said Wexford. 'In the meantime, try to keep calm and rest as much as you can.'

  Hathall left the office, bowing his head as he went. Wexford couldn't escape the notion that he had bowed it to impress the young detective constable who had shown him out. Yet the man's grief seemed real. But grief, as Wexford knew, is much easier to simulate than happiness. It demands little more than a subdued voice, the occasional outburst of righteous anger, the reiteration of one's pain. A man like Hathall, who believed the world owed him a living and who suffered from a persecution complex, would have no difficulty in intensifying his normal attitude.

  But why had he shown no sign of shock ? Why, above all, had he never shown that stunned disbelief which is the first characteristic reaction of one whose wife or husband or child has met with a violent death ? Wexford thought back over the

 

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