15
It was a long time since Wexford had experienced such an anticlimax. Coping with awkward situations wasn’t usually a problem with him, but the shock of what Hathall had just said—combined with his realization that his own disobedience was now known—stunned him into silence. The girl didn’t speak either after she had said a curt hello, but retreated behind the screen where she could be heard filling a kettle.
Hathall, who had been so withdrawn and aloof when Wexford first arrived, seemed to be getting the maximum possible enjoyment from his adversary’s dismay. ‘What’s this visit in aid of?’ he asked. ‘Just looking up old acquaintances?’
In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Wexford, echoing Miss Marcovitch. ‘I understand you’re going to Brazil,’ he said. ‘Alone?’
‘Can one go alone? There’ll be about three hundred other people in the aircraft.’ Wexford smarted under that one and Hathall saw him smart. ‘I hoped Rosemary might go with me, but her school is here. Perhaps she’ll join me in a few years’ time.’
That fetched the girl out. She picked up her raincoat, hung it on a hanger and said, ‘I haven’t even been to Europe yet. I’m not burying myself in Brazil.’
Hathall shrugged at this typical sample of his family’s ungraciousness, and said as brusquely, ‘Satisfied?’
‘I have to be, don’t I, Mr Hathall?’
Was it his daughter’s presence that kept his anger in check. He was almost mild, only a trace of his usual resentful querulousness sounding in his voice when he said, ‘Well, if you’ll excuse us, Rosemary and I have to get ourselves some lunch which isn’t the easiest thing in the world in this little hole. I’ll see you out.’
He closed the door instead of leaving it on the latch. It was dark and quiet on the landing. Wexford waited for the explosion of rage but it didn’t come, and he was conscious only of the man’s eyes. They were the same height and their eyes met on a level. Briefly, Hathall’s showed white and staring around hard black irises in which that curious red spark glittered. They were at the head of the steep flight of stairs, and as Wexford turned to descend them, he was aware of a movement behind him, of Hathall’s splayed hand rising. He grasped the banister and swung down a couple of steps. Then he made himself walk down slowly and steadily. Hathall didn’t move, but when Wexford reached the bottom and looked back, he saw the raised hand lifted higher and the fingers closed in a solemn and somehow portentous gesture of farewell.
‘He was going to push me down those stairs,’ Wexford said to Howard. ‘And I wouldn’t have had much redress. He could have said I’d forced my way into his room. God, what a mess I’ve made of things! He’s bound to put in another of his complaints and I could lose my job.’
‘Not without a pretty full enquiry, and I don’t think Hathall would want to appear at any enquiry.’ Howard threw the Sunday paper he had been reading on to the floor and turned his thin bony face, his ice-blue penetrating eyes towards his uncle. ‘It wasn’t his daughter all the time, Reg.’
‘Wasn’t it? I know you saw this woman with short fair hair, but can you be sure it was Hathall you saw her with?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘You saw him once,’ Wexford persisted. ‘You saw him twenty yards off for about ten seconds from a car you were driving. If you had to go into court and swear that the man you saw outside Marcus Flower was the same man you saw in the garden of Bury Cottage, would you swear? If a man’s life depended on it, would you?’
‘Capital punishment is no longer with us, Reg.’
‘No, and neither you nor I—unlike many of our calling—would wish to see it back. But if it were with us, then would you?’
Howard hesitated. Wexford saw that hesitation and he felt tiredness creep through his body like a depressant drug. Even a shred of doubt could dispel what little hope he now had left.
At last, ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Howard said flatly.
‘I see.’
‘Wait a minute, Reg. I’m not sure nowadays if I could ever swear to a man’s identity if my swearing to it might lead to his death. You’re pressing me too hard. But I’m sure beyond a reasonable doubt, and I’ll still say to you, yes, I saw Robert Hathall. I saw him outside the offices of Marcus Flower in Half Moon Street with a fair-haired woman.’
Wexford sighed. What difference did it make, after all? By his own blundering of that day he had put an end to all hope of following Hathall. Howard mistook his silence for doubt and said, ‘If he isn’t with her, where does he go all those evenings he’s out? Where did he go on that bus?’
‘Oh, I still believe he’s with her. The daughter just goes there sometimes on Sundays. But what good does that do me? I can’t follow him on a bus. He’ll be looking for me now.’
‘He’ll think, you know, that seeing him with his daughter will put you off.’
‘Maybe. Maybe he’ll get reckless. So what? I can’t conceal myself in a doorway and leap on a bus after him. Either the bus would go before I got on or he’d turn round and see me. Even if I got on without his seeing me …’
‘Then someone else must do it,’ said Howard firmly.
‘Easy to say. My chief constable says no, and you won’t cross swords with my chief constable by letting me have one of your blokes.’
‘That’s true, I won’t.’
‘Then we may as well give over talking about it. I’ll go back to Kingsmarkham and face the music—a bloody great symphony in Griswold sharp major—and Hathall can go to the sunny tropics.’
Howard got up and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I will do it,’ he said.
The awe had gone long ago, giving way to love and comradeship. But that ‘I will do it,’, spoken so lightly and pleasantly, brought back all the old humiliation and envy and awareness of the other’s advantages. Wexford felt a hot dark flush suffuse his face. ‘You?’ he said roughly, ‘you yourself? You must be joking. You take rank over me, remember?’
‘Don’t be such a snob. What if I do? I’d like to do it. It’d be fun. I haven’t done anything like that for years and years.’
‘Would you really do that for me, Howard? What about your own work?’
‘If I’m the god you make me out to be, don’t you think I have some say in the hours I work? Of course I shan’t be able to do it every night. There’ll be the usual crises that come up from time to time and I’ll have to stay late. But Kenbourne Vale won’t degenerate into a sort of twentieth-century Bridewell just because I pop up to West Hampstead every so often.’
So on the following evening Chief Superintendent Howard Fortune left his office at a quarter to six and was at West End Green on the hour. He waited until half past seven. When his quarry didn’t come, he made his way along Dartmeet Avenue and observed that there was no light on in the window his uncle had told him was Hathall’s.
‘I wonder if he’s going to her straight from work?’
‘Let’s hope he’s not going to make a habit of that. It’ll be almost impossible to follow him in the rush hour. When does he give up this job of his?’
‘God knows,’ said Wexford, ‘but he leaves for Brazil in precisely three weeks.’
One of those crises at which he had hinted prevented Howard from tailing Hathall on the following night, but he was free on the Wednesday and, changing his tactics, he got to Half Moon Street by five o’clock. An hour later, in Teresa Street, he told his uncle what had happened.
‘The first person to come out of Marcus Flower was a seedy-looking guy with a toothbrush moustache. He had a girl with him and they went off in a Jaguar.’
‘That’d be Jason Marcus and his betrothed,’ said Wexford.
‘Then two more girls and then—Hathall. I was right, Reg. It’s the same man.’
‘I shouldn’t have doubted you.’
Howard shrugged. ‘He got into the Tube and I lost him. But he wasn’t going home. I know that.’
‘How can you know?’
‘If he’d been going home he’d have walked to Green Park station, gone one stop on the Piccadilly Line to Piccadilly Circus or on the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus and changed on to the Bakerloo. He’d have walked south. But he walked north, and at first I thought he was going to get a bus home. But he went to Bond Street station. You’d never go to Bond Street if you meant to go to North-west London. Bond Street’s only on the Central Line until the Fleet Line opens.’
‘And the Central Line goes where?’
‘Due east and due west. I followed him into the station but—well, you’ve seen our rush hours, Reg. I was a good dozen people behind him in the ticket queue. The thing was I had to be so damn careful he didn’t get a look at me. He went down the escalator to the west-bound platform—and I lost him.’ Howard said apologetically, ‘There were about five hundred people on the platform. I got stuck and I couldn’t move. But it’s proved one thing. D’you see what I mean?’
‘I think so. We have to find where the west-bound Central Line route crosses the 28 bus route, and somewhere in that area lives our unknown woman.’
‘I can tell you where that is straight off. The west-bound Central Line route goes Bond Street, Marble Arch, Lancaster Gate, Queensway, dotting Hill Gate, Holland Park, Shepherd’s Bush, and so on. The south-bound 28 route goes Golders Green, West Hampstead, Kilburn, Kilburn Park, Great Western Road, Pembridge Road, Notting Hill Gate, Church Street, on through Kensington and Fulham to here and ultimately to Wandsworth. So it has to be Notting Hill. She lives, along with half the roving population of London, somewhere in Notting Hill. Small progress, but better than nothing. Have you made any?’
Wexford, on tenterhooks for two days, had phoned Burden, expecting to hear that Griswold was out for his blood. But nothing was further from the truth. The chief constable had been ‘buzzing around’ Kingsmarkham, as Burden put it, tearing between there and Myringham where there was some consternation over a missing woman. But he had been in an excellent frame of mind, had asked where Wexford had gone for his holiday, and on being told London (‘For the theatres and museums, you know, sir,’ Burden had said) had asked facetiously why the chief inspector hadn’t sent him a picture postcard of New Scotland Yard.
‘Then Hathall hasn’t complained,’ said Howard thoughtfully.
‘Doesn’t look like it. If I were to be optimistic, I’d say he thinks it safer not to draw attention to himself.’
But it was 3 December … Twenty days to go. Dora had dragged her husband round the stores, doing the last of her Christmas shopping. He had carried her parcels, agreed that this was just the thing for Sheila and that was exactly what Sylvia’s elder boy wanted, but all the time he was thinking, twenty days, twenty days … This year Christmas for him would be the season of Robert Hathall’s getaway.
Howard seemed to read his thoughts. He was eating one of those enormous meals he consumed without putting on a pound. Taking a second helping of charlotte russe, he said, ‘If only we could get him on something.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I don’t know. Some little thing you could hold him on that would stop him leaving the country. Like shoplifting, say, or travelling on the Tube without a ticket.’
‘He seems to be an honest man,’ said Wexford bitterly, ‘if you can call a murderer honest.’
His nephew scraped the dessert bowl. ‘I suppose he is honest?’
‘As far as I know, he is. Mr Butler would have told me if there’s been a smell of dishonesty about him.’
‘I daresay. Hathall was all right for money in those days. But he wasn’t all right for money when he got married to Angela, was he? Yet, in spite of their having only fifteen pounds a week to live on, they started doing all right. You told me Somerset had seen them on a shopping spree and then dining at some expensive place. Where did that money come from, Reg?’
Pouring himself a glass of Chablis from the bottle by Howard’s elbow, Wexford said, ‘I’ve wondered about that. But I’ve never been able to come to any conclusion. It didn’t seem relevant.’
‘Everything’s relevant in a murder case.’
‘True.’ Wexford was too grateful to his nephew to react huffily at this small admonition. ‘I suppose I reckoned that if a man’s always been honest he doesn’t suddenly become dishonest in middle age.’
‘That depends on the man. This man suddenly became an unfaithful husband in middle age. In fact, although he’d been monogamous since puberty, he seems to have turned into a positive womanizer in middle age. And he became a murderer. I don’t suppose you’re saying he killed anyone before, are you?’ Howard pushed away his plate and started on the gruyere. ‘There’s one factor in all this I don’t think you’ve taken into sufficient account. One personality.’
‘Angela?’
‘Angela. It was when he met her that he changed. Some would say she’d corrupted him. This is an outside chance—a very way-out idea altogether—but Angela had been up to a little fraud on her own, one you know about, possibly others you don’t. Suppose she encouraged him into some sort of dishonesty.’
‘Your saying that reminds me of something Mr Butler said. He said he overheard Angela tell his partner, Paul Craig, that he was in a good position to fiddle his Income Tax.’
‘There you are then. They must have got that money from somewhere. It didn’t grow on trees like the “miracle” plums.’
‘There hasn’t been a hint of anything,’ said Wexford. ‘It would have to be at Kidd’s. Aveney didn’t drop so much as a hint.’
‘But you weren’t asking him about money. You were asking him about women.’ Howard got up from the table and pushed aside his chair. ‘Let’s go and join the ladies. If I were you I’d take a little trip to Toxborough tomorrow.’