2     

He was a tall man, carrying insufficient weight for his wide frame. And he had an unhealthy look, his belly sagging a little, his skin a mottled red. Though still black, his hair was thinning and dry, and his features were bold and harsh. He sat in an armchair, slumped as if he had been injured and then flung there. By contrast, his mother sat upright, her solid legs pressed close together, her hands palm-downwards on her lap, her hard eyes fixed on her son with more of sternness than sympathy.

Chief Inspector Wexford thought of those Spartan mothers who preferred seeing their sons brought home on their shields to knowing they were taken captive. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she had told this man to pull himself together, but she hadn’t yet uttered a word or made any sign to himself and Inspector Burden beyond giving them a curt nod when admitting them to the house. She looked, he thought, like an old-style prison wardress or mistress of a workhouse.

From upstairs the footfalls of other policemen could be heard, passing to and fro. The woman’s body had been photographed where it lay, had been identified by the widower and removed to the mortuary. But the men still had much to do. The house was being examined for fingerprints, for the weapon, for some clue as to how this girl had met her death. And it was a big house for a cottage, with five good-sized rooms apart from the kitchen and the bathroom. They had been there since eight and now it was nearly midnight.

Wexford, who stood by a table on which lay the dead woman’s driving licence, purse and the other contents of her handbag, was examining her passport. It identified her as a British subject, born in Melbourne, Australia, thirty-two years old, occupation housewife, hair dark brown, eyes grey, height five feet five inches, no distinguishing marks. Angela Margaret Hathall. The passport was three years old and had never been used to pass any port. The photograph in it bore about as much resemblance to the dead woman as such photographs usually bear to their subjects.

‘Your wife lived alone here during the week, Mr Hathall?’ he said, moving away from the table and sitting down.

Hathall nodded. He answered in a low voice not much above a whisper. ‘I used to work in Toxborough. When I got a new job in London I couldn’t travel up and down. That was in July. I’ve been living with my mother during the week, coming home for weekends.’

‘You and your mother arrived here at seven-thirty, I think?’

‘Twenty past,’ said Mrs Hathall, speaking for the first time. She had a harsh metallic voice. Under the South London accent lay a hint of North Country origins.

‘So you hadn’t seen your wife since—when? Last Sunday? Monday?’

‘Sunday night,’ said Hathall. ‘I went to my mother’s by train on Sunday night. My—Angela drove me to the station. I—I phoned her every day. I phoned her today. At lunchtime. She was all right.’ He made a breath-catching sound like a sob, and his body swayed forward. ‘Who—who would have done this? Who would have wanted to kill—Angela?’

The words had a stagy ring, a false sound, as if they had been learned from some television play or cliché-ridden thriller. But Wexford knew that grief can sometimes only be expressed in platitudes. We are original in our happy moments. Sorrow has only one voice, one cry.

He answered the question in similarly hackneyed words. ‘That’s what we have to find out, Mr Hathall. You were at work all day?’

‘Marcus Flower, Public Relations Consultants. Half Moon Street. I’m an accountant.’ Hathall cleared his throat. ‘You can check with them that I was there all day.’

Wexford didn’t quite raise his eyebrows. He stroked his chin and looked at the man in silence. Burden’s face gave nothing away, but he could tell the inspector was thinking the same thought as his own. And during this silence Hathall, who had uttered this last sentence almost with eagerness, gave a louder sob and buried his face in his hands.

Rigid as stone, Mrs Hathall said, ‘Don’t give way, son. Bear it like a man.’

But I must feel it like a man … As the bit from Macbeth came into Wexford’s mind, he wondered fleetingly why he felt so little sympathy for Hathall, why he wasn’t moved. Was he getting the way he’d always sworn he wouldn’t get? Was he getting hard and indifferent at last? Or was there really something false in the man’s behaviour that gave the lie to these sobs and this abandonment to grief? Probably he was just tired, reading meanings where there were none; probably the woman had picked up a stranger and that stranger had killed her. He waited till Hathall had taken his hands away and raised his face.

‘Your car is missing?’

‘It was gone from the garage when I got home.’ There were no tears on the hard thin cheeks. Would a son of that flint-faced woman be capable of squeezing out tears?

‘I’ll want a description of your car and its number. Sergeant Martin will get the details from you in a minute.’ Wexford got up. ‘The doctor has given you a sedative, I believe. I suggest you take it and try and get some sleep. In the morning I should like to talk to you again, but there’s very little more we can do tonight.’

Mrs Hathall shut the door on them in the manner of one snapping ‘Not today, thanks’ at a couple of hawkers. For a moment or two Wexford stood on the path, surveying the place. Light from the bedroom windows showed him a couple of lawns that hadn’t been mown for months and a bare plum tree. The path was paved but the drive which ran between the house wall and the right-hand fence was a strip of concrete.

‘Where’s this garage he was talking about?’

‘Must be round the back,’ said Burden. ‘There wasn’t room to build a garage on the side.’

They followed the drive round the back of the cottage. It led them to an asbestos hut with a felt roof, a building which couldn’t be seen from the lane.

‘If she went for a drive,’ said Wexford, ‘and brought someone back with her, the chances are they got the car into this garage without a soul seeing them. They’d have gone into the house by the kitchen door. We’ll be lucky if we find anyone who saw them.’

In silence they regarded the moonlit empty fields that mounted towards wooded hills. Here and there, in the distance, an occasional light twinkled. And as they walked back towards the road, they were aware of how isolated the house was, how secluded the lane. Its high banks, crowned by massive overhanging trees, made it a black tunnel by night, a sylvan unfrequented corridor by day.

‘The nearest house,’ said Wexford, ‘is that place up by the Stowerton Road, and the only other one is Wool Farm. That’s a good half-mile down there.’ He pointed through the tree tunnel and then he went off to his car. ‘We can say good-bye to our weekend,’ he said. ‘See you first thing in the morning.’

The chief inspector’s own home was to the north of Kingsmarkham on the other side of the Kingsbrook. His bedroom light was on and his wife still awake when he let himself in. Dora Wexford was too placid and too sensible to wait up for her husband, but she had been baby-sitting for her elder daughter and had only just got back. He found her sitting up in bed reading, a glass of hot milk beside her, and although he had only parted from her four hours before, he went up to her and kissed her warmly. The kiss was warmer than usual because, happy as his marriage was, contented with his lot as he was, it sometimes took external disaster to bring home to him his good fortune and how much he valued his wife. Another man’s wife was dead, had died foully. … He pushed aside squeamishness, his small-hours sensitivity and, starting to undress, asked Dora what she knew of the occupants of Bury Cottage.

‘Where’s Bury Cottage?’

‘In Wool Lane. A man called Hathall lives there. His wife was strangled this afternoon.’

Thirty years of marriage to a policeman hadn’t blunted Dora Wexford’s sensibilities or coarsened her speech or made her untender, but it was only natural that she could no longer react to such a statement with the average woman’s horror.

‘Oh, dear,’ she said, and conventionally, ‘How dreadful! Is it going to be straightforward?’

‘Don’t know yet.’ Her soft calm voice steadied him as it always did. ‘Have you ever come across these people?’

‘The only person I’ve ever come across in Wool Lane is that Mrs Lake. She came to the Women’s Institute a couple of times, but I think she was too busy in other directions to bother much with that. Very much a one for the men, you know.’

‘You don’t mean the Women’s Institute blackballed her?’ said Wexford in mock-horror.

‘Don’t be so silly, darling. We’re not narrow-minded. She’s a widow, after all. I can’t think why she hasn’t married again.’

‘Maybe she’s like George the Second.’

‘Not a bit. She’s very pretty. What do you mean?’

‘He promised his wife on her death-bed that he wouldn’t marry again but only take mistresses.’ While Dora giggled, Wexford studied his figure in the glass, drawing in the muscles of his belly. In the past year he had lost three stone in weight, thanks to diet, exercise and the terror inspired in him by his doctor, and for the first time in a decade he could regard his own reflection with contentment if not with actual delight. Now he could feel that it had been worth it. The agony of going without everything he liked to eat and drink had been worth while. Il faut souffrir pour être beau. If only there was something one could go without, some strenuous game one could play, that would result in remedying hair loss …

‘Come to bed,’ said Dora. ‘If you don’t stop preening yourself, I’ll think you’re going to take mistresses, and I’m not dead yet.’

Wexford grinned and got into bed. Quite early in his career he had taught himself not to dwell on work during the night, and work had seldom kept him awake or troubled his dreams. But as he switched off the bed lamp and cuddled up to Dora—so much easier and pleasanter now he was thin—he allowed himself a few minutes’ reflection on the events of the evening. It could be a straightforward case, it very well could be. Angela Hathall had been young and probably nice to look at. She was childless, and though house-proud, must have found time hanging heavily on her hands during those lonely weekdays and lonely nights. What more likely than that she had picked up some man and brought him back to Bury Cottage? Wexford knew that a woman need not be desperate or a nymphomaniac or on the road to prostitution to do this. She need not even intend infidelity. For women’s attitudes to sex, whatever the new thought may hold, are not the same as men’s. And though it is broadly true that a man who will pick up an unknown woman is only ‘after one thing’ and broadly speaking she knows it, she will cling to the generous belief that he wants nothing but conversation and perhaps a kiss. Had this been Angela Hathall’s belief? Had she picked up a man in her car, a man who wanted more than that and had strangled her because he couldn’t get it? Had he killed her and left her on the bed and then made a getaway in her car?

It could be. Wexford decided he would work along these lines. Turning his thoughts to more pleasant topics, his grandchildren, his recent holiday, he was soon asleep.