13     

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ said Howard.’ ‘Not yet. But I’ll tell you about it, shall I? Funny, isn’t it, the way I said I didn’t suppose I’d ever have to identify him? But I did identify him last night. Listen, and I’ll tell you how it was.’

On the previous evening, Howard had attempted to call his uncle at seven but the line had been engaged. Since he had nothing but negative news for him, he decided to try again in the morning as he was pressed for time. He and Denise were to dine in the West End before going on to the nine o’clock showing of a film at the Curzon Cinema, and Howard had parked his car near the junction of Curzon Street and Half Moon Street. Having a few minutes to spare, he had been drawn by curiosity to have a look at the exterior of the offices he had phoned during the day, and he and Denise were approaching the Marcus Flower building when he saw a man and a woman coming towards it from the opposite direction. The man was Robert Hathall.

At the plate-glass window they paused and looked inside, surveying velvet drapery and wall-to-wall Wilton and marble staircase. Hathall seemed to be pointing out to his companion the glossy splendours of the place where he worked. The woman was of medium height, good-looking but not startlingly so, with very short blonde hair. Howard thought she was in her late twenties or early thirties.

‘Could the hair have been a wig?’ Wexford asked.

‘No, but it could have been dyed. Naturally, I didn’t see her hand. They were talking to each other in what I thought was an affectionate way and after a bit they walked off down towards Piccadilly. And, incidentally, I didn’t enjoy the picture. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t concentrate.’

‘They haven’t shaken hands for ever, Howard. They haven’t cancelled all their vows. It’s as I thought, and now it can only be a matter of time before we find her.’

The following day was his day of rest, his day off. The ten-thirty train from Kingsmarkham got him to Victoria just before half past eleven and by noon he was in Kilburn. What quirk of romantic imagination had prompted the naming of this squalid Victorian public house after Charles the Second’s principal mistress, Wexford couldn’t fathom. It stood in a turning off the Edgware Road and it had the air of a gone-to-seed nineteenth-century gin palace. Ginge Matthews was sitting on a stool at the bar in earnest and apparently aggrieved conversation with the Irish barman. When he saw Wexford his eyes widened—or, rather, one eye widened. The other was half-closed and sunk in purple swelling.

‘Take your drink over to the corner,’ said Wexford. ‘I’ll join you in a minute. May I have a glass of dry white wine, please?’

Ginge didn’t look like his brother or talk like him and he certainly didn’t smoke like him, but nevertheless they had something in common apart from their partiality for petty crime. Perhaps one of their parents had been possessed of a dynamic personality, or there might even have been something exceptionally vital in their genes. Whatever it was, it made Wexford say that the Matthews brothers were just like other people only more so. Both were inclined to do things to excess. Monkey smoked sixty king-sized cigarettes a day. Ginge didn’t smoke at all but drank, when he could afford it, a concoction of pernod and Guinness.

Ginge hadn’t spoken to Monkey for fifteen years and Monkey hadn’t spoken to him. They had fallen out as the result of the bungling mess they had made of an attempt to break into a Kingsmarkham furrier’s. Ginge had gone to prison and Monkey had not—most unfairly, as Ginge had reasonably thought—and when he came out, the younger brother had taken himself off to London where he had married a widow who owned her own house and a bit of money. Ginge had soon spent the money and she, perhaps in revenge, had presented him with five children. He didn’t, therefore, enquire after his brother whom he blamed for many of his misfortunes, but remarked bitterly to Wexford when he joined him at a corner table:

‘See my eye?’

‘Of course I see it. What the hell have you done to yourself? Walked into your wife’s fist?’

‘Very funny. I’ll tell you who done it. That bleeding Hathall. Last night when I was following him down to the 28 stop.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ said Wexford, aghast. ‘You mean he’s on to you?’

‘Thanks for the sympathy.’ Ginge’s small round face flushed nearly as red as his hair. ‘Course he was bound to spot me sooner or later on account of my bleeding hair. He hadn’t got no cause to turn round and poke me in the bleeding eye, though, had he?’

‘Is that what he did?’

‘I’m telling you. Cut me, he did. The wife said I looked like Henry Cooper. It wasn’t so bleeding funny, I can tell you.’

Wearily, Wexford said, ‘Could you stop the bleeding?’

‘It stopped in time, naturally, it did. But it isn’t healed up yet and you can see the bleeding …’

‘Oh, God. I mean stop saying “bleeding” every other word. It’s putting me off my drink. Look, Ginge, I’m sorry about your eye, but there’s no great harm done. Obviously, you’ll have to be a damn sight more careful. For instance, you could try wearing a hat …’

‘I’m not going back there again, Mr Wexford.’

‘Never mind that now. Let me buy you another of those what-d’you-call-’ems. What do you call them?’

‘You ask for a half of draught Guinness with a double pernod in.’ Ginge added proudly and more cheerfully, ‘I don’t know what they call ’em but I call ’em Demon Kings.’

The stuff smelt dreadful. Wexford fetched himself another glass of white wine and Ginge said, ‘You won’t get very fat on that.’

‘That’s the idea. Now tell me where this 28 bus goes.’

Ginge took a swig of his Demon King and said with extreme rapidity, ‘Golders Green. Child’s Hill, Fortune Green, West End Lane, West Hampstead Station, Quex Road, Kilburn High Road …’

‘For God’s sake! I don’t know any of these places, they don’t mean a thing to me. Where does it end up?’

‘Wandsworth Bridge.’

Disappointed at this disclosure yet pleased for once to be at an advantage in the face of so much sophisticated knowledge, Wexford said, ‘He’s only going to see his mother in Balham. That’s near Balham.’

‘Not where that bus goes isn’t. Look, Mr Wexford,’ said Ginge with patient indulgence, ‘you don’t know London, you’ve said so yourself. I’ve lived here fifteen years and I can tell you nobody as wasn’t out of his bleeding twist would go to Balham that way. He’d go to West Hampstead Tube and change on to the Northern at Waterloo or the Elephant. Stands to reason he would.’

‘Then he’s dropping off somewhere along the route. Ginge, will you do one more thing for me? Is there a pub near this bus stop where you’ve seen him catch the 28?’

‘Oppo-sight,’ said Ginge warily.

‘We’ll give him a week. If he doesn’t complain about you during the next week—Oh, all right, I know you think you’re the one with grounds for complaint—but if he doesn’t we’ll know he either thinks you’re a potential mugger …’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘… and doesn’t connect you with me,’ Wexford went on, ignoring the interruption, ‘or else he’s too scared at this stage to draw attention to himself. But, beginning next Monday, I want you to station yourself in that pub by six-thirty every night for a week. Just note how often he catches that bus. Will you do that? I don’t want you to follow him and you won’t be running any risk.’

‘That’s what you lot always say,’ said Ginge. ‘You want to remember he’s already done some poor bleeder in. Who’s going to see after my bleeding wife and kids if he gets throttling me with his bleeding gold chains?’

‘The same as look after them now,’ said Wexford silkily. ‘The Social Security.’

‘What a nasty tongue you’ve got.’ For once Ginge sounded exactly like his brother, and briefly he looked like him as a greedy gleam appeared in his good eye. ‘What’s in it for me if I do?’

‘A pound a day,’ said Wexford, ‘and as many of those—er, bleeding Demon Kings as you can get down you.’

Wexford waited anxiously for another summons from the chief constable, but none came, and by the end of the week he knew that Hathall wasn’t going to complain. That, as he had told Ginge, didn’t necessarily mean any more than that Hathall thought the man who was following him intended to attack him and had taken the law into his own hands. What was certain, though, was that whatever came out of Ginge’s pub observations, he couldn’t use the little red-headed man again. And it wasn’t going to be much use finding out how often Hathall caught that bus if he could set no one to catch it with him.

Things were very quiet in Kingsmarkham. Nobody would object if he were to take the fortnight’s holiday that was owing to him. People who take their summer holidays in November are always popular with colleagues. It all depended on Ginge. If it turned out that Hathall caught that bus regularly, why shouldn’t he take his holiday and try to follow that bus by car? It would be difficult in the London traffic, which always intimidated him, but not all that difficult out of the rush hours. And ten to one, a hundred to one, Hathall wouldn’t spot him. Nobody on a bus looks at people in cars. Nobody on a bus can see the driver of a pursuing car. If only he knew when Hathall was leaving Marcus Flower and when he meant to leave the country …

But all this was driven out of his head by an event he couldn’t have anticipated. He had been certain the weapon would never be found, that it was at the bottom of the Thames or tossed on to some local authority rubbish dump. When the young teacher of political science phoned him to say that a necklace had been found by the men excavating the garden of Bury Cottage and that her landlord, Mr Somerset, had advised her to inform the police, his first thought was that now he could overcome Griswold’s scruples, now he could confront Hathall. He had himself driven down Wool Lane—observing on the way the For Sale board outside Nancy Lake’s house—and then he walked into the waste land, the area of open-cast mining, which had been Hathall’s back garden. A load of Westmorland stone made a mountain range in one corner and a mechanical digger stood by the garage. Would Griswold say he should have had this garden dug over? When you’re searching for a weapon, you don’t dig up a garden that looks just like a bit of field without an exposed, freshly dug bit of earth in the whole of it. There hadn’t been even a miniscule break in the long rank grass last September twelvemonth. They had raked over every inch of it. How then had Hathall or his accomplice managed to bury the necklace and restore earth and grass without its being detected?

The teacher, Mrs Snyder, told him.

‘There was a kind of cavity under here. A septic pit, would you call it? I guess Mr Somerset said something about a pit.’

‘A cesspit or septic tank,’ said Wexford. ‘The main drainage came through to this part of Kingsmarkham about twenty years ago, but before that there’d have been a cesspit.’

For heaven’s sake! Why didn’t they have it taken out?’ said Mrs Snyder with the wonderment of a native of a richer and more hygiene-conscious country. ‘Well, this necklace was in it, whatever it’s called. That thing …’ She pointed to the digger, ‘… smashed it open. Or so the workmen said. I didn’t look personally. I don’t want to seem to criticize your country, Captain, but a thing like that! A cess tank!’

Extremely amused by his new title which made him feel like a naval officer, Wexford said he quite understood that primitive methods of sewage disposal weren’t pleasant to contemplate, and where was the necklace?

‘I washed it and put it in the kitchen closet. I washed it in antiseptic.’

That hardly mattered now. It wouldn’t, after its long immersion, bear prints, if it had ever done so. But the appearance of the necklace surprised him. It wasn’t, as had been believed, composed of links, but was a solid collar of grey metal from which almost all the gilding had disappeared, and it was in the shape of a snake twisted into a circle, the snake’s head passing, when the necklace was fastened, through a slot above its tail. Now he could see the answer to something that had long puzzled him. This was no chain that might snap when strained but a perfect strangle weapon. All Hathall’s accomplice had had to do was stand behind her victim, grasp the snake’s head and pull …

But how could it have got into the disused cesspit? The metal cover, for use when the pit was emptied, had been buried under a layer of earth and so overgrown with grass that Wexford’s men hadn’t even guessed it might be there. He phoned Mark Somerset.

‘I think I can tell you how it got there,’ said Somerset. ‘When the main drainage came through, my father, for the sake of economy, only had what’s called the “black water” linked on to it. The “grey water”—that is, the waste from the bath, the hand basin and the kitchen sink—went on passing into the cesspit. Bury Cottage is on a bit of a slope, so he knew it wouldn’t flood but would just soak away.’

‘D’you mean someone could have simply dropped the thing down the sink plughole?’

‘I don’t see why not. If “someone” ran the taps hard, it’d get washed down.’

‘Thank you, Mr Somerset. That’s very helpful. By the way, I’d like to—er, express my sympathy for you in the loss of your wife.’

Was it his imagination, or did Somerset sound for the first time ill-at-ease? ‘Well, yes, thanks,’ he muttered and he rang off abruptly.

When he had had the necklace examined by laboratory experts, he asked for an appointment with the chief constable. This was granted for the following Friday afternoon and by two o’clock on that day he was in Griswold’s own house, a tarted-up, unfarm-like farmhouse in a village called Millerton between Myringham and Sewingbury. It was known as Hightrees Farm but Wexford privately called it Millerton-Les-Deux-Eglises.

‘What makes you think this is the weapon?’ were Griswold’s opening words.

‘I feel it’s the only type of necklace which could have been used, sir. A chain would have snapped. The lab boys say the gilt which remains on it is similar to the specimens of gilding taken from Angela Hathall’s neck. Of course they can’t be sure.’

‘But I suppose they’ve got a “feeling”? Have you got any reason to believe that necklace hadn’t been there for twenty years?’

Wexford knew better than to mention his feelings again. ‘No, but I might have if I could talk to Hathall.’

‘He wasn’t there when she was killed,’ said Griswold, his mouth turning down and his eyes growing hard.

‘His girl-friend was.’

‘Where? When? I am supposed to be the chief constable of Mid-Sussex where this murder was committed. Why am I not told if the identity of some female accomplice has been discovered?’

‘I haven’t exactly …’

‘Reg,’ said Griswold in a voice that had begun to tremble with anger, ‘have you got any more evidence of Robert Hathall’s complicity in this than you had fourteen months ago? Have you got one concrete piece of evidence? I asked you that before and I’m asking you again. Have you?’

Wexford hesitated. He couldn’t reveal that he had had Hathall followed, still less that Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune, his own nephew, had seen him with a woman. What evidence of homicide lay in Hathall’s economy or the sale of his car? What guilt was evinced by the man’s living in North-west London or his having been seen to catch a London bus? There was the South American thing, of course … Grimly, Wexford faced just what that amounted to. Nothing. As far as he could prove, Hathall had been offered no job in South America, hadn’t even bought a brochure about South America, let alone an air ticket. He had merely been seen to go into a travel agency, and seen by a man with a criminal record.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then the situation is unchanged. Totally unchanged. Remember that.’