9
A very small fraud … Wexford hadn’t expected to encounter fraud at all, and it was probably irrelevant. But the shadowy figure of Angela Hathall had now, like a shape looming out of fog, begun to take more definite outlines. A paranoid personality with a tendency to hypochondria; intelligent but unable to persevere at a steady job; her mental state easily overthrown by adversity; financially unstable and not above making extra money by fraudulent means. How, then, had she managed on the fifteen pounds a week which was all she and her husband had had to live on for a period of nearly three years?
He left the library and took the Tube to Chancery Lane. Craig and Butler, Accountants, had their offices on the third floor of an old building near the Royal Free Hospital. He noted the place, had a salad and orange juice lunch in a café, and at one minute to three was shown up into the office of the senior partner, William Butler. The room was as old-fashioned and nearly as quiet as the library, and Mr Butler as wizened as Miss Marcovitch. But he wore a jolly smile, the atmosphere was of business rather than scholarship, and the only portrait a highly coloured oil of an elderly man in evening dress.
‘My former partner, Mr Craig,’ said William Butler.
‘It would be his son, I imagine, who introduced Robert and Angela Hathall?’
‘His nephew. Paul Craig, the son, has been my partner since his father’s retirement. It’s Jonathan Craig who used to work at the archaeologists’ place.’
‘I believe the introduction took place at an office party here?’
The old man gave a sharp scratchy little chuckle. ‘A party here? Where would we put the food and drink, not to mention the guests? They’d be reminded of their income tax and get gloomy and depressed. No, that party was at Mr Craig’s own home in Hampstead on his retirement from the firm after forty-five years.’
‘You met Angela Hathall there?’
‘It was the only time I did meet her. Nice-looking creature, though with a bit of that Shetland pony look so many of them have nowadays. Wearing trousers too. Personally, I think a woman should put on a skirt to go to a party. Bob Hathall was very smitten with her from the first, you could see that.’
‘That can’t have pleased Mr Jonathan Craig.’
Again Mr Butler gave his fiddle-string squawk. ‘He wasn’t serious about her. Got married since, as a matter of fact. His wife’s nothing to look at but loaded, my dear fellow, pots of it. This Angela wouldn’t have gone down at all well with the family, they’re not easy-going like me. Mind you, even I took a bit of a dim view when she went up to Paul and said what a lovely job he’d got, just the thing for knowing how to fiddle one’s tax. Saying that to an accountant’s like telling a doctor he’s lucky to be able to get hold of heroin.’ And Mr Butler chortled merrily. ‘I met the first Mrs Hathall too, you know,’ he said. ‘She was a lively one. We had quite a scene, what with her banging about trying to get to Bob, and Bob locking himself up in his office. What a voice she’s got when she’s roused! Another time she sat on the stairs all day waiting for Bob to come out. He locked himself up again and never went out all night. God knows when she went home. The next day she turned up again and screamed at me to make him go back to her and their daughter. Fine set-out that was. I’ll never forget it.’
‘As a result,’ said Wexford, ‘you gave him the sack.’
‘I never did! Is that what he says?’
Wexford nodded.
‘God damn it! Bob Hathall always was a liar. I’ll tell you what happened, and you can believe it or not, as you like. I had him in here after all that set-out and told him he’d better manage his private affairs a bit better. We had a bit of an argument and the upshot was he flew into a rage and said he was leaving. I tried to dissuade him. He’d come to us as an office boy and done all his training here. I told him that if he was getting a divorce he’d need all the money he could lay his hands on and there’d be a rise for him in the New Year. But he wouldn’t listen, kept saying everyone was against him and this Angela. So he left and got himself some tin-pot part-time job, and serve him right.’
Recalling Angela’s fraud and her remark to Paul Craig, and telling himself that birds of a feather flock together, Wexford asked Mr Butler if Robert Hathall had ever done anything which could be construed even mildly as on the shady side of the law. Mr Butler looked shocked.
‘Certainly not. I’ve said he wasn’t always strictly truthful, but otherwise he was honest.’
‘Susceptible to women, would you say?’
William Butler gave another squawk and shook his head vehemently. ‘He was fifteen when he first came here, and even in those days he was walking out with that first wife of his. They were engaged for God knows how many years. I tell you, Bob was so narrow and downright repressed, he didn’t know there were other women on the face of the earth. We’d got a pretty typist in here, and for all the notice he took, she might have been a typewriter. No, that was why he went overboard for that Angela, went daft about her like some silly romantic schoolboy. He woke up, the scales fell from his eyes. It’s often the way. Those late developers are always the worst.’
‘So perhaps, having awakened, he began looking around some more?’
‘Perhaps he did, but I can’t help you there. You thinking he might have done away with that Angela?’
‘I shouldn’t care to commit myself on that, Mr Butler,’ said Wexford as he took his leave.
‘No. Silly question, eh? I thought he was going to murder that other one, I can tell you. That’s just where she had her sit-in, the step you’re on now. I’ll never forget it, never as long as I live.’
Howard Fortune was a tall thin man, skeletally thin in spite of his enormous appetite. He had the Wexford family’s pale hair, the colour of faded brown paper, and the light grey-blue eyes, small and sharp. In spite of the difference in their figures, he had always resembled his uncle, and now that Wexford had lost so much weight, that resemblance was heightened. Sitting opposite each other in Howard’s study, they might have been father and son, for likeness apart, Wexford was now able to talk to his nephew as familiarly as he talked to Burden, and Howard to respond without the delicacy and self-conscious tact of former days.
Their wives were out. Having spent the day shopping, they had adjourned to a theatre, and uncle and nephew had eaten their dinner alone. Now, while Howard drank brandy and he contented himself with a glass of white wine, Wexford enlarged on the theory he had put forward the night before.
‘As far as I see it,’ he said, ‘the only way to account for Hathall’s horror—and it was horror, Howard—when I told him about the handprint, is that he arranged the killing of Angela with the help of a woman accomplice.’
‘With whom he was having a love affair?’
‘Presumably. That would be the motive.’
‘A thin motive these days, isn’t it? Divorce is fairly easy and there were no children to consider.’
‘You’ve missed the point.’ Wexford spoke with a sharpness that would once have been impossible. ‘Even with this new job of his, he couldn’t have afforded two discarded wives. He’s just the sort of man who’d think himself almost justified in killing if killing was going to rid him of further persecution.’
‘So this girl-friend of his came to the cottage in the afternoon …’
‘Or was fetched by Angela.’
‘I can’t see that part, Reg.’
‘A neighbour, a woman called Lake, says Angela told her she was going out.’ Wexford sipped his drink to cover the slight confusion even the mention of Nancy Lake’s name caused in him. ‘I have to bear that in mind.’
‘Well, maybe. The girl killed Angela by strangling her with a gilt necklace which hasn’t been found, then wiped the place clean of her own prints but left one on the side of the bath. Is that the idea?’
‘That’s the idea. Then she drove Robert Hathall’s car to London, where she abandoned it in Wood Green. I may go there tomorrow, but I haven’t much hope. The chances are she lives as far from Wood Green as possible.’
‘And then you’ll go to this toy factory place in—what’s it called?—Toxborough? I can’t understand why you’re leaving it till last. He worked there, after all, from the time of his marriage till last July.’
‘And that’s the very reason why,’ said Wexford. ‘It’s just possible he knew this woman before he met Angela, or met her when his marriage was three years old. But there’s no doubt he was deeply in love with Angela—everyone admits that—so is it likely he’d have begun a new relationship during the earliest part of his marriage?’
‘No, I see that. Does it have to be someone he’d met at work? Why not a friend he’d met socially or the wife of a friend?’
‘Because he doesn’t seem to have had any friends, and that’s not so difficult to understand. In his first marriage, the way I picture it, he and his wife would have been friendly with other married couples. But you know how it goes, Howard. In these cases, a married couple’s friends are their neighbours or her woman friends and their husbands. Isn’t it probable that at the time of the divorce all these people would have rallied round Eileen Hathall? In other words, they’d remain her friends and desert him.’
‘This unknown woman could be someone he’d picked up in the street or got talking to by chance in a pub. Have you thought of that?’
‘Of course. If it’s so, my chances of finding her are thin.’
‘Well, Wood Green for you tomorrow. I’m taking the day off myself. I have to speak at a dinner at Brighton in the evening and I thought of taking a leisurely drive down, but maybe I’ll come up to darkest Ally Pally with you first.’
The phone ringing cut short Wexford’s thanks at this offer. Howard picked up the receiver and his first words, spoken cordially but without much familiarity, told his uncle that the caller was someone he knew socially but not very well. Then the phone was passed to him and he heard Burden’s voice.
‘Good news first,’ said the inspector, ‘if you can call it good,’ and he told Wexford that at last someone had come forward to say he had seen Hathall’s car driven into the drive of Bury Cottage at five past three on the previous Friday afternoon. But he had seen only the driver whom he described as a dark-haired young woman wearing some sort of red checked shirt or blouse. That she had had a passenger he was sure, and almost sure it had been a woman, but he was able to fill in no more details. He had been cycling along Wool Lane in the direction of Wool Farm and had therefore been on the left-hand side of the road, the side which would naturally give him a view of the car’s driver but not necessarily of the other occupant. The car had stopped since he had the right of way, and he had assumed, because its right-hand indicator was flashing, that it was about to turn into the cottage drive.
‘Why didn’t this cyclist guy come forward before?’
‘He was on holiday down here, he and his bicycle,’ said Burden, ‘and he says he never saw a paper till today.’
‘Some people,’ Wexford growled, ‘live like bloody chrysalises. If that’s the good news, what’s the bad?’
‘It may not be bad, I wouldn’t know. But the chief constable’s been in here after you, and he wants to see you at three sharp tomorrow afternoon.’
‘That puts paid to our Wood Green visit,’ said Wexford thoughtfully to his nephew, and he told him what Burden had said. ‘I’ll have to go back and try and take in Croydon or Toxborough on my way. I shan’t have time for both.’
‘Look, Reg, why don’t I drive you to Croydon and then to Kingsmarkham via Toxborough? I’d still have three or four hours before I need to be in Brighton.’
‘Be a bit of a drag for you, won’t it?’
‘On the contrary. I don’t mind telling you I’m very keen to take a look at this virago, the first Mrs Hathall. You come back with me and Dora can stay on. I know Denise wants her to be here on Friday for some party or other she’s going to.’
And Dora, who came in ten minutes later, needed no encouragement to remain in London till the Sunday.
‘But will you be all right on your own?’
‘I’ll be all right. I hope you will. Personally, I should think you’ll perish with the cold in this bloody awful air-conditioning.’
‘I have my subcutaneous fat, darling, to keep me warm.’
‘Unlike you, Uncle Reg,’ said Denise who, coming in, had heard the last sentence. ‘All yours has melted away quite beautifully. I suppose it really is all diet? I was reading in a book the other day that men who have a succession of love affairs keep their figures because a man unconsciously draws in his stomach muscles every time he pays court to a new woman.’
‘So now we know what to think,’ said Dora.
But Wexford, who had at that moment drawn his in consciously, wasn’t brought to the blush which would have been his reaction the day before. He was wondering what he was to think of his summons by the chief constable, and making a disagreeable guess at the answer.