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 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 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 meantime 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 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. 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?’

‘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 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 apprehensive. 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? Annoyed? 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, so 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?’

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

‘But not upstairs, Mr Hathall?’ 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, 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 significant 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 burning question or to conceal it under another of less moment. ‘Have you had anything from the—well, the pathologist yet?’

‘Not yet, Mr Hathall.’

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 three conversations he had had with Hathall, but he wasn’t able to recall a single instance of disbelief in awful reality. And he recalled similar situations, bereaved husbands who had interrupted his questions with cries that it couldn’t be true, widows who had exclaimed that it couldn’t be happening to them, that it was a dream from which they must soon awaken. Disbelief temporarily crowds out grief. Sometimes whole days pass before the fact can be realized, let alone accepted. Hathall had realized and accepted at once. It seemed to Wexford, as he sat musing and awaiting the post-mortem results, that he had accepted even before he let himself in at his own front door.

‘So she was strangled with a gilt necklace,’ said Burden. ‘It must have been a pretty tough one.’

Looking up from the report, Wexford said, ‘It could be the one on Hathall’s list. It says here a gilt ligature. Some shreds of gilding were found embedded in her skin. No tissue from her killer found under her fingernails, so there was presumably no struggle. Time of death, between one-thirty and three-thirty. Well, we know it wasn’t one-thirty because that was when Mrs Lake left her. She seems to have been a healthy woman, she wasn’t pregnant, and there was no sexual assault.’ He gave Burden a condensed version of what Robert Hathall had told him. ‘The whole thing’s beginning to look peculiar now, isn’t it?’

‘You mean you’ve got it into your head that Hathall had some sort of guilty knowledge?’

‘I know he didn’t kill her. He couldn’t have done. When she died he was at this Marcus Flower place with Linda Whatsit and God knows how many other people. And I don’t see any motive there. He seems to have been fond of her, if no one else was. But why didn’t he go upstairs last night, why isn’t he stunned with shock, and why does he get so worked-up about fingerprints?’

‘The killer must have hung around after the deed was done to wipe off prints, you know. He must have touched things in the bedroom and the other rooms, and then forgotten what he had touched, so that he had to do a big clean-up job to be on the safe side. Otherwise Angela’s and Mrs Lake’s prints would have been in the living room. Doesn’t that argue a lack of premeditation?’

‘Probably. And I think you’re right. I don’t for a moment believe Angela was so fanatical or so frightened of her mother-in-law that she polished the living room after Mrs Lake had gone as well as before she came.’

‘It’s a funny thing, though, that he went to all that trouble, yet still left prints on the inside of a door to a cupboard in a spare room, a cupboard that was apparently never used.’

‘If he did, Mike,’ said Wexford, ‘if he did. I think we’re going to find that those prints belong to a Mr Mark Somerset, the owner of Bury Cottage. We’ll find out just where in Myringham he lives and then we’d better get over to see him.’