Shake Hands Forever, page 6
'Are you very very busy, Chief Inspector ?'
'Why do you ask, Mrs Lake?'
'Not because I have any fascinating clues to give you.' She put her hand out of the window and beckoned to him. It was a mischievous and seductive gesture. He found it irresistible and he went up to her and bent down. 'The fact is,' she said, 'that I have a table for two booked at the Peacock in Pomfret and my escort has most churlishly stood me up. Would you think it very forward of me if I asked you to lunch with me instead ?'
He was staggered. There was no doubt now that this rich, pretty and entirely charming woman was making advances to him - him! It was forward all right, it was almost unprecedented. She looked at him calmly, the corners of her mouHh tilted, her eyes shining.
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But it wouldn't do. Along whatever paths of fantasy his imagination might lead him, into whatever picture galleries of erotica, it wouldn't do. Once though, when he was young and without ties or prestige or pressures, it could have been a different story. And in those days he had taken such offers or made them without much appreciation and with little awareness of their delight. Ah, to be a little bit younger and know what one knows now . . .1
'But I also have a table booked for lunch,' he said, 'at the Carousel Cafe.'
'You won't cancel that and be my guest ?'
'Mrs Lake, I am, as you said, very very busy. Would you think me forward if I said you would distract me from my business ?'
She laughed, but it wasn't a laugh of merriment, and her eyes had ceased to dance. 'It's something, I suppose, to be a distraction,' she said. 'You make me wonder if I've ever been anything but a - distraction. Good-bye.'
He went quickly away and up in the lift to his office, wondering if he had been a fool, if such a chance would ever come to him again. He attached no special significance to her words, neither to ponder on them nor to try and interpret them, for he couldn't think of her intellectually. In his mind, her face went with him, so seductive, so hopeful, then so downcast because he had refused her invitation. He tried to thrust this image away and concentrate on what was before him, the dry and technical report on the examination of Robert Hathall's car, but it kept returning, and with it her entrancing voice, reduced now to a cajoling whisper.
Not that there was much in the report to get excited about. The car had been found parked in a street near Alexandra Park, and the discovery had been made by a constable on the beat. It was empty but for a couple of maps and a ball-point 63
pen on the dashboard shelf, and inside and out it had been wiped clean. The only prints were those of Robert Hathall, found on the underside of the boot and bonnet lids, and the only hairs two of Angela's on the driving seat.
He sent for Sergeant Martin, but got nothing encouraging from him. No one claiming to be a friend of Angela's had come forward, and nobody, apparently, had seen her go out or return home on Friday afternoon. Burden was out, making enquiries - for the second or third time - among the workers at Wool Farm, so Wexford went alone to the Carousel Cafe for a solitary lunch.
It was early, not much past midday, and the cafe was still half-empty. He had been sitting at his cornertableforperhaps five minutes and had ordered Antonio's speciality of the day, roast lamb, when he felt a light touch that was almost a caress on his shoulder. Wexford had had too many shocks in his life to jump. He turned round slowly and said with a cool note in his voice that he didn't feel, 'This is an unexpected pleasure.'
Nancy Lake sat down opposite him. She made the place look squalid. Her cream silk suit, her chestnut silk hair, her diamonds and her smile threw into sordid relief Antonio's Woolworth cutlery and the tomato-shaped plastic sauce container.
'The mountain,' she said, 'wouldn't come to Mahomet.'
He grinned. It was pointless to pretend he wasn't delighted to see her. 'Ah, you should have seen me a year ago,' he said. 'Then I was a mountain. What will you eat ? The roast lamb will be bad, but better than the pie.'
'I don't want to eat anything. I'll just have coffee. Aren't you flattered that I didn't come for the food ?'
He was. Eyeing the heaped plate which Antonio set before him, he said, 'It's not much of a compliment, though. Coffee
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only for the lady, please.' Were her attractions enhanced, he asked himself, by Antonio's obvious admiration of them ? She was aware of it all, he could see that, and in her awareness, her experienced acceptance of her powers, lay one of the few signs of her age.
She was silent for a few moments while he ate, and he noticed that her expression was one of rueful repose. But suddenly, as he was preparing to ask her why Robert Hathall had repulsed her so violently that morning, she looked up and said:
'I'm sad, Mr Wexford. Things aren't going well for me.'
He was very surprised. 'Do you want to tell me about it ?' How strange that their intimacy had advanced so far that he could ask her that . . .
'I don't know,' she said. 'No, I don't think so. One gets conditioned into habits of secrecy and discretion, even if one doesn't personally see much point in them.'
'That's true. Or can be true in certain circumstances.' The circumstances Dora had referred to ?
Yet she was on the brink of telling him. Perhaps it was only the arrival of her coffee and Antonio's admiring flutterings that deterred her. She gave a little shrug, but instead of the small-talk that he expected, she said something that astonished him. It was so surprising and so intensely spoken that he pushed away his plate and stared at her.
'Is it very wrong, d'you think, to want someone to die?'
'Not,' he said, puzzled, 'if that wish remains just a wish. Most of us wish that sometimes, and most of us, fortunately, let I dare not wait upon I would.'
'Like the poor cat in the adage ?'
He was delighted that she had capped his quotation. 'Is this - er, enemy of yours connected with these habits of secrecy and discretion ?'
She nodded. 'But I shouldn't have brought it up. It was 65
silly of me. I'm very lucky really, only it gets hard sometimes, alternating between being a queen and a - distraction. I shad get my crown back, this year, next year, sometime. I shad never abdicate. Goodness, an this mystery! And you're much too clever not to have guessed what I'm on about, aren't you ?' He didn't reply to that one. 'Let's change the subject,' she said.
So they changed the subject. Afterwards, when she had left him and he found himself standing, bemused, in the High Street, he could hardly have said what they had talked about, only that it had been pleasant, too pleasant, and had left him with most unpleasant feelings of guilt. But he would see her no more. If necessary, he would eat his lunch in the police canteen, he would avoid her, he would never again be alone with her, even in a restaurant. It was as if he had com- mitted adultery, had confessed it, and been told to 'avoid the occasion'. But he had committed nothing, not even himself. He had onb talked and listened.
Had what he had listened to helped him ? Perhaps. All that circumlocution, those hints at an enemy, at secrecy and discretion, that had been a pointer. Hathall, he knew, would admit nothing, would have had his ego boosted by the coroner's sympathy. Yet, knowing all this, he nevertheless set off along the High Street towards Wool Lane. He had no idea that it was to be his last visit to Bury Cottage, and that, although he would see Hathall again, it was to be more than a year before they exchanged another word.
Wexford had forgotten all about the book of Celtic languages, hadn't, in fact, bothered to glance at it again, but it was with a request for its immediate return that Hathall greeted him.
'I'll have it sent over to you tomorrow,' he said.
Hathall looked relieved. 'There's also the matter of my car. I need my car.'
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'You can have that tomorrow as well.'
The sour old woman was evidently in the kitchen, closeted behind a shut door. She had maintained the house in the immaculate condition in which her dead daughter-in-law had left it, but the touch of an alien and tasteless hand was already apparent. On old Mr Somerset's oval table stood a vase of plastic flowers. What impulse, festive or funereal, had prompted Mrs Hathall to buy them and place them there ? Plastic flowers, thought Wexford, in the season of mellow fruitfulness when real flowers filled the gardens and the hedgerows and the florist's shops.
Hathall didn't ask him to sit down and he didn't sit down himself. He stood with one elbow resting on the mantelpiece, his fist pressed into his hard red cheek.
'So you didn't find anything incriminating in my car?'
'I didn't say that, Mr Hathall.'
'Well, did you ?'
'As a matter of fact, no. Whoever killed your wife was very clever. I don't know that I've ever come across anyone in this sort of situation who covered his tracks so expertly.' Wexford piled it on, letting a note of grudging admiration creep into his voice. Hathall listened impassively. And if gratified was too strong a word to use to describe his expression, satisfied wasn't. The fist uncurled and relaxed, and he leant back against the fireplace with something like arrogance. 'He seems to have worn gloves to drive your car,' Wexford said, 'and to have given it a wash as well, for good measure. Apparently, he wasn't seen to park the car, and no one was seen driving it on Friday. At the moment, we really have very few leads to go on.'
'Will - will you find any more ?' He was eager to know, but as anxious to disguise his eagerness.
'It's early days yet, Mr Hathall. Who knows?' Perhaps it
was cruel to play with the man. Does the end ever justify the means ? And Wexford didn't know what end he was aiming for, or where next to grab in this game of hide-and-seek in a dark room. 'I can tell you that we found the fingerprints of a man, other than your own, in this house.'
'Are they on - what d'you call it? - record?'
'They proved to be those of Mr Mark Somerset.'
'Ah, well . . .' Suddenly Hathall looked more genial than Wexford had ever seen him. Perhaps only an inhibition as to touching prevented him from stepping forward to pat the chief inspector on the back. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm not myself at the moment. I should have asked you to sit down. So the only prints you found were those of Mr Somerset, were they ? Dear Cousin Mark, our tight-fisted landlord.'
'I didn't say that, Mr Hathall.'
'Well, and mine and - and Angela's, of course.'
'Of course. But apart from those, we found a whole handprint of a woman in your bathroom. It's the print of her right hand, and on the tip of the forefinger is an L-shaped scar.'
Wexford had expected a reaction. But he believed Hathall to be so well under control that he had thought that reaction would show itself only as fresh indignation. He would expostulate perhaps, ask why the police hadn't followed this evidence up, or with a shrug of impatience suggest that this was the handprint of some friend of his wife's whose existence, in his grief, he had forgotten to mention. Never had he supposed, feeling his way in the dark as he was, that his words would have had such a cataclysmic effect.
For Hathall froze where he stood. Life seemed driven out of him. It was as if he had suddenly been stricken with a pain so great that it had paralysed him or forced him to hold himself still for the protection of his heart and his whole nervous system. And yet he said nothing, he made no sound. His
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self-control was magnificent. But his body, his physical self, was triumphing over his mental processes. It was as strong an example of matter over mind as Wexford had ever seen. The shock had come to Hathall at last. The stunning, with its attendant disbelief and terror and realization of what the future must now be, which should have bludgeoned him when he first saw his wife's body, was taking effect five days later. He was pole-axed by it.
Wexford was excited but he behaved very casually. 'Perhaps you can throw some light on whose this handprint may be ?'
Hathall drew in his breath. He seemed to have a very real need of oxygen. Slowly he shook his head.
'No idea at all, Mr Hathall ?'
The head-shaking went on. It was robot-like, automatic, as if running on some dreadful cerebral clockwork, and Wexford had the notion that Hathall would have to take his head in both hands and grasp it to stop that slow mechanical movement.
'A clear handprint on the side of your bath. An L-shaped scar on the right forefinger. We shall, of course, take it as a lead for our main line of enquiry.'
Hathall jerked up his chin. A spasm ran through his body. He forced a thin constricted voice through sti* lips. 'On the bath, you said?'
'On the bath. I'm right, aren't I, in thinking you can guess whose it may be ?'
'I haven't,' Hathall said tremulously and weakly, 'the faintest idea.' His skin had taken on a mottled pallor, but now the blood returned to it and pulsed in the veins on his forehead. The worst of the shock was over. It had been replaced by - what? Not anger, not indignation. Sorrow, Wexford thought, surprised. He was overcome at this late stage by real sorrow . . .
Wexford felt no impulse to be merciful. He said relentlessly, 'I've noticed how anxious you've been right through my enquiries to know what we've deduced from finger- prints. In fact, I've never known a bereaved husband to take quite such a keen interest in forensics. Therefore, I can't help feeling you expected a certain print to be found. If that's so and we've found it, I must tell you that you'll be obstructing this enquiry if you keep what may be vital information to yourself.'
'Don't threaten me!' Though the words were sharp, the voice that spoke them was feeble and the huffiness in the tone pathetically assumed. 'Don't think you can persecute me.'
'I should rather advise you to think over what I've said, and then, if you are wise, you'll make a frank disclosure to us of what I'm sure you know.'
But even as he spoke, looking into the man's miserable, shocked eyes, he knew that any such disclosure would be far from wise. For whatever alibi the man might have, whatever love for her and devotion to her he might profess, he had killed his wife. And as he left the room, making his own way out of the house, he imagined Robert Hathall collapsing into a chair, breathing shallowly, feeling his racing heart, gathering his resources for very survival.
The revelation that they had found a woman's handprint had done this to him. Therefore, he knew who that woman was. He had been anxious about fingerprints because all the time he had dreaded she might have left this evidence behind. But his reaction hadn't been that of a man who merely suspects something or fears the confirmation of a fact he has guessed at. It had been the reaction of someone who fears for his own liberty and peace, the liberty and peace too of another, and, above all, that he and that other might not now have that liberty and peace together.
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His discovery had driven from Wexford's mind memories of that lunchtime interlude. But when he walked into his own house soon after four they returned to him, discoloured by guilt. And if he hadn't spent that hour in Nancy Lake's company, or if it had been less enjoyable, he might not now have given Dora such a hearty kiss or asked her what he did ask her.
'How would you like to go up to London for a couple of days ?'
'You mean you have to go ?'
Wexford nodded.
'And you can't bear to be parted from me ?' Wexford felt himself blushing. Why did she have to be so perceptive ? It was almost as if she read his thoughts. But if she had been less perceptive, would he have married her ? 'I'd love to, darling,' she said blandly. 'When?'
'If Howard and Denise will have us, as soon as you can pack a bag.' He grinned, knowing the quantity of clothes she would want to take with her for even two days with his fashionable niece. 'Like - ten minutes?'
'Give me an hour,' said Dora.
'OK. I'll phone Denise.'
Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune, the head of Kenbourne Vale CID, was the son of Wexford's dead sister. For years Wexford had been in awe of him, his awe mixed with envy of this nephew, so aptly named, into whose lap so many
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good things had fallen, apparently without effort on his part, a first-class honours degree, a house in Chelsea, marriage to a beautiful fashion model, rapid promotion until his rank far surpassed his uncle's. And these two had taken on in his eyes the hard gloss of jet-set people, entering, although he hardly knew them, into that category of rich relations who will despise us from a distance and snub us if we make overtures to them. With misgivings he had gone to stay with them to convalesce after an illness, and his misgivings had turned out to be groundless, the silly suspicions that are born only of a grudge. For Howard and Denise had been kind and hospitable and unassuming, and when he had helped Howard solve a Kenbourne Vale murder case - solved it himself, Howard said - he had felt he was vindicated and a friendship established.
Just how firm that friendship was to be had been shown by the Fortunes' enjoyment of family Christmases at Wexford's house, by the new rapport between uncle and nephew, and revealed itself again in the greeting the chief inspector and his wife got as their taxi brought them to the house in Teresa Street. It was just after seven and one of Denise's elaborate dirmers was almost ready.
'But you've got so thin, Uncle Reg.' she said as she kissed him. 'Here was I, counting calories for you, and now it looks as if it was all labour in vain. You look quite handsome.'
'Thank you, my dear. I must confess my weight 1099 has removed one of my principal fears of London.'
'And what would that be?'
'That was that I'd get myself inside one of those automatic ticket things on the Underground - you know, the kind with the snapping jaws - and be unable to get out.'
Denise laughed and took them into the living room. Since that first visit, Wexford had got over his fear of knocking over
