14
Ginge had done as he was told, and on Friday, 8 November, a report arrived from him stating that he had been at his observation post in the pub each evening and on two of those evenings, the Monday and the Wednesday, Hathall had appeared at West End Green just before seven and had caught the 28 bus. That, at any rate, was something. There should have been another report on the Monday. Instead, the unheard-of happened and Ginge phoned. He was phoning from a call-box and he had, he told Wexford, plenty of two and ten pence pieces, and he knew a gentleman like the chief inspector would reimburse him.
‘Give me the number and I’ll call you myself.’ For God’s sake, how much of this was he supposed to stand out of his own pocket? Let the ratepayers fork out. Ginge picked up the receiver before the bell had rung twice. ‘It has to be good, Ginge, to get you to the phone.’
‘I reckon it’s bleeding good,’ said Ginge cockily. ‘I seen him with a bird, that’s what.’
The same climactic exultation is never reached twice. Wexford had heard those words—or words having the same meaning—before, and this time he didn’t go off into flights about the Lord delivering Hathall into his hands. Instead he asked when and where.
‘You know all that about me stationing myself in that pub and watching the bleeding bus stop? Well, I thought to myself there was no harm doing it again Sunday.’ Make sure he got seven days’ worth of cash and Demon Kings, thought Wexford. ‘So I was in there Sunday dinnertime—that is, yesterday like-when I seen him. About one it was and pissing down with rain. He’d got a mac on and his umbrella up. He didn’t stop to catch no bus but went right on walking down West End Lane. Well, I never give a bleeding thought to following him. I seen him go by and that was all. But I’d got to thinking I’d better be off to my own dinner—on account of the wife likes it on the table one-thirty sharp—so down I goes to the station.’
‘Which station?’
‘Wes’ Haamsted Stesh’n,’ said Ginge with a very lifelike imitation of a West Indian bus conductor. He chortled at his own wit. ‘When I get there I’m putting a five-pee bit in the machine, on account of its being only one stop to Kilburn, when I see the party standing by the bleeding barrier. He’d got his back to me, thank Gawd, so I nips over to the bookstall and has a look at the girlie mags of what they’ve got a very choice selection. Well, bearing in mind my duty to you, Mr Wexford, I see my train come in but I don’t run down the bleeding steps to catch it. I wait. And up the steps comes about twenty people. I never dared turn round, not wanting my other eye poked, but when I think the coast’s clear, I has a bit of a shufty and he’d gone.
‘I nips back into West End Lane like a shot and the rain’s coming down like stair rods. But up ahead, on his way home, is bleeding Hathall with this bird. Walking very close, they was, under his bleeding umbrella, and the bird’s wearing one of them see-through plastic macs with the hood up. I couldn’t see no more of her, barring she was wearing a long skirt all trailing in the bleeding wet. So I went off home then and got a bleeding mouthful from the wife for being late for my dinner.’
‘Virtue is its own reward, Ginge.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Ginge, ‘but you’ll be wanting to know what my wages and the Demon Kings came to, and the bill’s fifteen pound sixty-three. Terrible, the cost of bleeding living, isn’t it?’
It wouldn’t be necessary, Wexford decided as he put the phone down, to think any longer of ways and means of following a man on a bus. For this man had taken this bus only as far as West Hampstead station, had walked instead this Sunday because he had an umbrella and umbrellas are always a problem on buses. It must be possible now to catch Hathall and his woman together and follow them to Dartmeet Avenue.
‘I’ve got a fortnight’s holiday owing to me,’ he said to his wife.
‘You’ve got about three months’ holiday owing to you with what’s mounted up over the years.’
‘I’m going to take a bit of it now. Next week, say.’
‘What, in November? Then we’ll have to go somewhere warm. They say Malta’s very nice in November.’
‘Chelsea’s very nice in November too, and that’s where we’re going.’
The first thing to do on the first day of his ‘holiday’ was to familiarize himself with a so far unknown bit of London’s geography. Friday, 22 November, was a fine sunny day, June in appearance if January in temperature. How better to get to West Hampstead than on the 28 bus? Howard had told him that its route passed across the King’s Road on its way to Wandsworth Bridge, so it wasn’t a long walk from Teresa Street to the nearest stop. The bus went up through Fulham into West Kensington, an area he remembered from the time he had helped Howard on that former case, and he noticed to his satisfaction certain familiar landmarks. But soon he was in unknown territory and very varied and vast territory it was. The immense size of London always surprised him. He had had no inkling when he had interrupted Ginge’s recitation of the stops on this route of how long the list would have been. Naively, he had supposed that Ginge would have named no more than two or three further places before the terminus, whereas in fact there would have been a dozen. As the conductor sang out, ‘Church Street’, ‘Notting Hill Gate’, ‘Pembridge Road’, he felt a growing relief that Hathall had merely caught the bus to West Hampstead station.
This station was reached at last after about three-quarters of an hour. The bus went on over a bridge above railway lines and past two more stations on the opposite side, West End Lane and another West Hampstead on some suburban line. It had been climbing ever since it left Kilbum and it went on climbing up narrow winding West End Lane till it reached West End Green. Wexford got off. The air was fresh here, not only fresh in comparison to that of Chelsea, but nearly as diesel-free as in Kingsmarkham. Surreptitiously, he consulted his guide. Dartmeet Avenue lay about a quarter of a mile to the east, and he was a little puzzled by this. Surely Hathall could have walked to West Hampstead station in five minutes and walked by the back doubles. Why catch a bus? Still, Ginge had seen him do it. Maybe he merely disliked walking.
Wexford found Dartmeet Avenue with ease. It was a hilly street like most of the streets round here and lined with fine tall houses built mostly of red brick, but some had been modernized and faced with stucco, their sash windows replaced by sheets of plain plate glass. Tall trees, now almost leafless, towered above roofs and pointed gables, and there were mature unpollarded trees growing in the pavements. Number 62 had a front garden that was all shrubbery and weeds. Three black plastic dustbins with 62 painted on their sides in whitewash stood in the side entrance. Wexford noted the phone-box where Ginge had kept his vigils and decided which of the bay windows must be Hathall’s. Could anything be gained by calling on the landlord? He concluded that nothing could. The man would be bound to tell Hathall someone had been enquiring about him, would describe that someone, and then the fat would be in the fire. He turned away and walked slowly back to West End Green, looking about him as he did so for such nooks, crannies and convenient trees as might afford him shelter if he dared tail Hathall himself. Night closed in early now, the evenings were long and dark, and in a car …
The 28 bus sailed down Fortune Green Road as he reached the stop. It was a good frequent service. Wexford wondered, as he settled himself behind the driver, if Robert Hathall had ever sat on that very seat and looked out through this window upon the three stations and the radiating railway lines. Such ruminations verged on the obsessional, though, and that he must avoid. But it was impossible to refrain from wondering afresh why Hathall had caught the bus at all just to reach this point. The woman, when she came to Hathall’s home, came by train. Perhaps Hathall didn’t like the tube train, got sick of travelling to work by Tube, so that when he went to her home, he preferred the relaxation of a bus ride.
It took about ten minutes to get to Kilburn. Ginge, who was as sure to be found in the Countess of Castlemaine at noon as the sun is to rise at daybreak or the sound of thunder to follow the sight of lightning, was hunched on his bar stool. He was nursing a half of bitter but when he saw his patron he pushed the tankard away from him, the way a man leaves his spoon in his half-consumed soup when his steak arrives. Wexford ordered a Demon King by name and without description of its ingredients. The barman understood.
‘He’s got you on your toes, this bleeder, hasn’t he?’ Ginge moved to an alcove table. ‘Always popping up to the Smoke, you are. You don’t want to let it get on top of you. Once let a thing like that get a hold on you and you could end up in a bleeding bin.’
‘Don’t be so daft,’ said Wexford, whose own wife had said much the same thing to him that morning, though in more refined terms. ‘It won’t be for much longer, anyway. This coming week ought to see an end of it. Now what I want you to do …’
‘It won’t be for no longer, Mr Wexford.’ Ginge spoke with a kind of shrinking determination. ‘You put me on this to spot him with a bird and I’ve spotted him with a bird. The rest’s up to you.’
‘Ginge,’ Wexford began cajolingly, ‘just to watch the station next week while I watch the house.’
‘No,’ said Ginge.
‘You’re a coward.’
‘Cowardness,’ said Ginge, exhibiting his usual difficulty in making his command of the spoken language match up to his mastery of the written, ‘don’t come into it.’ He hesitated and said with what might have been modesty or shame, ‘I’ve got a job.’
Wexford almost gasped. ‘A job?’ In former days this monosyllable had exclusively been employed by Ginge and his brother to denote a criminal exercise. ‘You mean you’ve got paid work?’
‘Not me. Not exactly’ Ginge contemplated his Demon King rather sadly and, lifting his glass, he sipped from it delicately and with a kind of nostalgia. Sic transit gloria mundi or it had been good while it lasted. ‘The wife has. Bleeding barmaid. Evenings and Sunday dinnertimes.’ He looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Don’t know what’s got into her.’
‘What I don’t know is why it stops you working for me.’
‘Anyone’d think,’ said Ginge, ‘you’d never had no bleeding family of your own. Someone’s got to stay home and mind the kids, haven’t they?’
Wexford managed to delay his outburst of mirth until he was out on the pavement. Laughter did him good, cleansing him of the feverish baulked feeling Ginge’s refusal to cooperate further had at first brought him. He could manage on his own now, he thought as once more he boarded the 28 bus, and manage for the future in his car. From his car he could watch West Hampstead station on Sunday. With luck, Hathall would meet the woman there as he had done on the previous Sunday, and once the woman was found, what would it matter that Hathall knew he had been followed? Who would reproach him for breaking the rules when his disobedience had resulted in that success?
But Hathall didn’t meet the woman on Sunday, and as the week wore on Wexford wondered at the man’s elusiveness. He stationed himself in Dartmeet Avenue every evening but he never saw Hathall and he only once saw evidence of occupancy of the room with the bay window. On the Monday, the Tuesday and the Wednesday he was there before six and he saw three people enter the house between six and seven. No sign of Hathall. For some reason, the traffic was particularly heavy on the Thursday evening. It was six-fifteen before he got to Dartmeet Avenue. Rain was falling steadily and the long hilly street was black and glittering with here and there on its surface the gilt glare of reflected lamplight. The place was deserted but for a cat which snaked from between the dustbins and vanished through a fissure in the garden wall. A light was on in a downstairs room and a feebler glow showed through the fanlight above the front door. Hathall’s window was dark, but as Wexford put on the handbrake and switched off the ignition, the bay window suddenly became a brilliant yellow cube. Hathall was in, had arrived home perhaps a minute before Wexford’s own arrival. For a few seconds the window blazed, then curtains were drawn across it by an invisible hand until all that could be seen were thin perpendicular lines of light like phosphorescent threads gleaming on the dim wet façade.
The excitement this sight had kindled in him cooled as an hour, two hours, went by and Hathall didn’t appear. At half past nine a little elderly man emerged, routed out the cat from among the sodden weeds and carried it back into the house. As the front door closed on him, the light that rimmed Hathall’s curtains went out. That alerted Wexford and he started to move the car to a less conspicuous position, but the front door remained closed, the window remained dark, and he realized that Hathall had retired early to bed.
Having brought Dora to London for a holiday, he remembered his duty to her and squired her about the West End shopping centres in the daytime. But Denise was so much more adept at doing this than he that on the Friday he deserted his wife and his nephew’s wife for a less attractive woman who was no longer a wife at all.
The first thing he saw when he came to Eileen Hathall’s house was her ex-husband’s car parked on the garage drive, the car which Ginge said had long ago been sold. Had Ginge made a mistake about that? He drove on till he came to a call-box where he phoned Marcus Flower. Yes, Mr Hathall was in, said the voice of a Jane or a Julie or a Linda. If he would just hold the line … Instead of holding the line, he put the receiver back and within five minutes he was in Eileen Hathall’s arid living room, sitting on a cushionless chair under the Spanish gypsy.
‘He gave his car to Rosemary,’ she said in answer to his question. ‘She sees him sometimes at her gran’s, and when she said she’d passed her test he gave her his car. He won’t need it where he’s going, will he?’
‘Where is he going, Mrs Hathall?’
‘Brazil.’ She spat out the together and the sibilant as if the word were not the name of a country but of some loathsome reptile. Wexford felt a chill, a sudden anticipation that something bad was coming. It came. ‘He’s all fixed up,’ she said, ‘to go the day before Christmas Eve.’
In less than a month …
‘Has he got a job there?’ he said steadily.
‘A very good position with a firm of international accountants.’ There was something pathetic about the pride she took in saying it. The man hated her, had humiliated her, would probably never see her again, yet for all that, she was bitterly proud of what he had achieved. ‘You wouldn’t believe the money he’s getting. He told Rosemary and she told me. They’re paying me from London, deducting what I get before it goes to him. He’ll still have thousands and thousands a year to live on. And they’re paying his fare, fixing it all up, got a house there waiting for him. He hasn’t had to do a thing.’
Should he tell her Hathall wouldn’t be going alone, wouldn’t live in that house alone? She had grown stouter in the past year, her thick body—all bulges where there should be none—stuffed into salmon-pink wool. And she was permanently flushed as if she ran an endless race. Perhaps she did. A race to keep up with her daughter, keep pace with rage and leave the quiet dullness of misery behind. While he was hesitating, she said, ‘Why d’you want to know? You think he killed that woman, don’t you?’
‘Do you?’ he said boldly.
If she had been struck across the face her skin couldn’t have crimsoned more deeply. It looked like flogged skin about to split and bleed. ‘I wish he had!’ she said on a harsh gasp, and she put up her hand, not to cover her eyes as he had at first thought, but her trembling mouth.
He drove back to London, to a fruitless Friday night vigil, an empty Saturday, a Sunday that might—just might—bring him what he desired.
1 December, and once more pouring with rain. But this was no bad thing. It would clear the streets and make the chance of Hathall’s peering into a suspicious-looking car less likely. By half past twelve he had parked as nearly opposite the station as he dared, for it wasn’t only the chance of being spotted by Hathall that worried him, but also the risk of obstructing this narrow bottleneck. Rain drummed hard on the car roof, streamed down the gutter between the kerb and the yellow painted line. But this rain was so heavy that, as it washed over the windscreen, it didn’t obscure his view but had only a distorting effect as if there were a fault in the glass. He could see the station entrance quite clearly and about a hundred yards of West End Lane where it humped over the railway lines. Trains rattled unseen beneath him, 159 and 28 buses climbed and descended the hill. There were few people about and yet it seemed as if a whole population were travelling, proceeding from unknown homes to unknown destinations through the wet pallid gloom of this winter Sunday. The hands of the dashboard clock crawled slowly through and past the third quarter after twelve.
By now he was so used to waiting, resigned to sitting on watch like a man who stalked some wary cunning animal, that he felt a jolt of shock which was almost disbelief when at ten to one he saw Hathall’s figure in the distance. The glass played tricks with him. He was like someone in a hall of mirrors, first a skeletal giant, then a fat dwarf, but a single sweep of the windscreen wipers brought him suddenly into clear focus. His umbrella up, he was walking swiftly towards the station—fortunately, on the opposite side of the road. He passed the car without turning his head, and outside the station he stopped, snapped the umbrella shut and open, shut, open and shut, to shake off the water drops. Then he disappeared into the entrance.
Wexford was in a dilemma. Was he meeting someone or travelling himself? In daylight, even in this rain, he dared not leave the car. A red train scuttled under the road and came to a stop. He held his breath. The first people to get off the train began to come out on to the pavement. One man put a newspaper over his head and ran, a little knot of women fluttered, struggling with umbrellas that wouldn’t open. Three opened simultaneously, a red one, a blue one and an orange pagoda, blossoming suddenly in the greyness like flowers. When they had lifted and danced off, what their brilliant circles had hidden was revealed—a couple with their backs to the street, a couple who stood close together but not touching each other while the man opened a black umbrella and enclosed them under its canopy.
She wore blue jeans and over them a white raincoat, the hood of which was up. Wexford hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of her face. They had set off as if they meant to walk it, but a taxi came splashing down with its For Hire light glowing orange like a cigarette end. Hathall hailed it and it bore them off northwards. Please God, thought Wexford, let it take them home and not to some restaurant. He knew he hadn’t a hope of tailing a London taxi-driver, and the cab had vanished before he was out into West End Lane and off.
And the journey up the hill was maddeningly slow. He was bogged down behind a 159 bus—a bus that wasn’t red but painted all over with an advertisement for Dinky Toys which reminded him of Kidd’s at Toxborough—and nearly ten minutes had passed before he drew up in front of the house in Dartmeet Avenue. The taxi had gone, but Hathall’s light was on. Of course he’d have to put the light on at midday on such a day as this. Wondering with interest rather than fear if Hathall would hit him too, he went up the path and examined the bells. There were no names by the bell-pushes, just floor numbers. He pressed the first-floor bell and waited. It was possible Hathall wouldn’t come down, would just refuse to answer it. In that case, he’d find someone else to let him in and he’d hammer on Hathall’s room door.
This turned out to be unnecessary. Above his head the window opened and, stepping back, he looked up into Hathall’s face. For a moment neither of them spoke. The rain dashed between them and they stared at each other through it while a variety of emotions crossed Hathall’s features—astonishment, anger, cautiousness, but not, Wexford thought, fear. And all were succeeded by what looked strangely like satisfaction. But before he could speculate as to what this might mean, Hathall said coldly:
‘I’ll come down and let you in.’
Within fifteen seconds he had done so. He closed the door quietly, saying nothing, and pointed to the stairs. Wexford had never seen him so calm and suave. He seemed entirely relaxed. He looked younger and he looked triumphant.
‘I should like you to introduce me to the lady you brought here in a taxi.’
Hathall didn’t demur. He didn’t speak. As they went up the stairs Wexford thought, has he hidden her? Sent her to some bathroom or up on to the top floor? His room door was on the latch and he pushed it open, allowing the chief inspector to precede him. Wexford walked in. The first thing he saw was her raincoat, spread out to dry over a chair back.
At first he didn’t see her. The room was very small, no more than twelve feet by ten, and furnished as such places always are. There was a wardrobe that looked as if it had been manufactured round about the time of the Battle of Mons, a narrow bed with an Indian cotton cover, some wooden-armed chairs that are euphemistically known as ‘fireside’, and pictures that had doubtless been painted by some relative of the landlord’s. The light came from a dust-coated plastic sphere suspended from the pock-marked ceiling.
A canvas screen, canvas-coloured and hideous, shut off one corner of the room. Behind it, presumably, was a sink, for when Hathall gave a cautionary cough, she pushed it aside and came out, drying her hands on a tea towel. It wasn’t a pretty face, just a very young one, heavy-featured, tough and confident. Thick black hair fell to her shoulders and her eyebrows were heavy and black like a man’s. She wore a tee-shirt with a cardigan over it, Wexford had seen that face somewhere before, and he was wondering where when Hathall said:
‘This is the “lady” you wanted to meet.’ His triumph had changed to frank amusement and he was almost laughing. ‘May I present my daughter, Rosemary?’