21     

Lovat came in slowly, and with him his inevitable interpreter, his fidus Achates, Sergeant Hutton.

‘Lovely day.’

‘Be damned to the day,’ said Wexford in a throaty voice because his heart and his blood pressure were behaving very strangely. ‘Never mind the day. I wish it would bloody well snow, I wish …’

Hutton said quietly, ‘If we might just sit down a while, sir? Mr Lovat has something to tell you which he thinks will interest you greatly. And since it was you put him on to it, it seemed only a matter of courtesy …’

‘Sit down, do as you like, have a calendar, take one each. I know why you’ve come. But just tell me one thing. Can you get a man extradited for what you’ve found out? Because if you can’t, you’ve had it. Hathall’s going to Brazil today, and ten to one he’s gone already.’

‘Dear me,’ said Lovat placidly.

Wexford nearly put his head in his hands. ‘Well, can you?’ he shouted.

‘I’d better tell you what Mr Lovat has found, sir. We called at the home of Mr and Mrs Kingsbury again last night. They’d just returned. They’d been on a visit to their married daughter who was having a baby. No Mrs Mary Lewis has never lodged with them and they have never had any connection with Kidd and Co. Moreover, on making further enquiries at the boarding house Mr Lovat told you about, he could discover no evidence at all of the existence of the other so-called account holder.’

‘So you’ve had a warrant sworn for Hathall’s arrest?’

‘Mr Lovat would like to talk to Robert Hathall, sir,’ said Hutton cautiously. ‘I’m sure you’ll agree we need a little more to go on. Apart from the—er, courtesy of the matter, we called on you for Hathall’s present address.’

‘His present address,’ Wexford snapped, ‘is probably about five miles up in the air above Madeira or wherever that damned plane flies.’

‘Unfortunate,’ said Lovat, shaking his head.

‘Maybe he hasn’t left, sir. If we could phone him?’

‘I daresay you could if he had a phone and if he hasn’t left.’ Wexford looked in some despair at the clock. It was ten-thirty. ‘Frankly, I don’t know what to do. The only thing I can suggest is that we all get out to Millerton-les-deux—er, Hightrees Farm, and lay all this before the chief constable.’

‘Good idea,’ said Lovat. ‘Many a fine night I’ve spent watching the badger setts there.’

Wexford could have kicked him.

He never knew what prompted him to ask the question. There was no sixth sense about it. Perhaps it was just that he thought he should have the facts of this fraud as straight in his mind as they were in Hutton’s. But he did ask it, and afterwards he thanked God he had asked it then on the country lane drive to Millerton.

‘The addresses of the account holders, sir? One was in the name of Mrs Dorothy Carter of Ascot House, Myringham—that’s the boarding house place—and the other of Mrs Mary Lewis at 19 Maynnot Way, Toxborough.’

‘Did you say Maynnot Way?’ Wexford asked in a voice that sounded far away and unlike his own.

‘That’s right. It runs from the industrial estate to …’

‘I know where it runs to, Sergeant. I also know who lived at Maynnot Hall in the middle of Maynnot Way.’ He felt a constriction in his throat. ‘Brock,’ he said, ‘what were you doing at Kidd’s that day I met you at the gates?’

Lovat looked at Hutton and Hutton said, ‘Mr Lovat was pursuing his enquiries in connection with the disappearance of Morag Grey, sir. Morag Grey worked as a cleaner at Kidd’s for a short while when her husband was gardener at the hall. Naturally, we explored every way open to us.’

‘You haven’t explored Maynnot Way enough.’ Wexford almost gasped at the enormity of his discovery. His chimera, he thought, his thing of fanciful conception. ‘Your Morag Grey isn’t buried in anyone’s garden. She’s Robert Hathall’s woman, she’s going off to Brazil with him. My God, I can see it all …!’ If only he had Howard beside him to explain all this to instead of the phlegmatic Lovat and this open-mouthed sergeant. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘This Grey woman was Hathall’s accomplice in the fraud. He met her when they both worked at Kidd’s, and she and his wife had the job of making withdrawals from those accounts. No doubt, she thought up the name and address of Mrs Mary Lewis because she knew Maynnot Way and knew the Kingsburys let rooms. Hathall fell for her and she murdered Hathall’s wife. She isn’t dead, Brock, she’s been living in London as Hathall’s mistress ever since … When did she disappear?’

‘As far as we know, in August or September of last year, sir,’ said the sergeant, and he brought the car to a halt on the gravel outside Hightrees Farm.

For the sake of the reputation of Mid-Sussex, it would be most unfortunate for Hathall to escape. This, to Wexford’s amazement, was the opinion of Charles Griswold. And he saw a faint flush of unease colour the statesman-like face as the chief constable was forced to admit the theory was tenable.

‘This is a little more than “feeling”, I think, Reg,’ he said, and it was he personally who phoned London Airport.

Wexford and Lovat and Hutton had to wait a long time before he came back. And when he did it was to say that Robert Hathall and a woman travelling as Mrs Hathall were on the passenger list of a flight leaving for Rio de Janeiro at twelve forty-five. The airport police would be instructed to hold them both on a charge of deception under the Theft Act, and a warrant had better be sworn at once.

‘She must be travelling on his passport.’

‘Or on Angela’s,’ Wexford said. ‘He’s still got it. I remember looking at it, but it was left with him in Bury Cottage.’

‘No need to be bitter, Reg. Better late than never.’

‘It happens, sir,’ said Wexford very politely but with an edge to his voice, ‘to be twenty to twelve now. I just hope we’re in time.’

‘Oh, he won’t get out now,’ Griswold said on a breezy note. ‘They’ll stop him at the airport where you can take yourselves forthwith. Forthwith, Reg. And tomorrow morning you can come over for a Christmas drink and tell me all about it.’

They went back to Kingsmarkham to pick up Burden. The inspector was in the foyer, peering through his glasses at the envelope he brandished, and angrily enquiring of a puzzled station sergeant who had had the effrontery to send him pornography for his exclusive perusal.

‘Hathall?’ he said when Wexford explained. ‘You don’t mean it. You’re joking.’

‘Get in the car, Mike, and I’ll tell you on the way. No, Sergeant Hutton will tell us on the way. What have you got there? Art studies? Now I see why you needed glasses.’

Burden gave a snort of rage and was about to launch into a long explanation of his innocence, but Wexford cut him short. He didn’t need diversions now. He had been waiting for this day, this moment, for fifteen months, and he could have shouted his triumph at the crisp blue air, the spring-like sun. They left in two cars. The first contained Lovat and his driver and Polly Davis, the second Wexford, Burden and Sergeant Hutton with their driver.

‘I want to know everything you can tell me about Morag Grey.’

‘She was—well, is—a Scot, sir. From the north-west of Scotland, Ullapool. But there’s not much work up there and she came south and went into service. She met Grey seven or eight years ago and married him and they got that job at Maynnot Hall.’

‘What, he did the garden and she cleaned the place?’

‘That’s right. I don’t quite know why as she seems to have been a cut above that sort of thing. According to her mother and—more to the point—according to her employer at the hall, she’d had a reasonable sort of education and was quite bright. Her mother says Grey had dragged her down.’

‘How old is she and what does she look like?’

‘She’d be about thirty-two now, sir. Thin, dark-haired, nothing special. She did some of the housework at the hall and did outside cleaning jobs as well. One of those was at Kidd’s, in last March twelvemonth, but she only stayed two or three weeks. Then Grey got the sack for taking a couple of quid from his employer’s wife’s handbag. They had to leave their flat and go and squat in Myringham Old Town. But soon after that Morag turned him out. Grey says she found out the reason for their getting the push and wouldn’t go on living with a thief. A likely story, I’m sure you’ll agree, sir. But he insisted on it, despite the fact that he went straight from her to another woman who had a room about a mile away on the other side of Myringham.’

‘It doesn’t,’ said Wexford thoughtfully, ‘seem a likely story under the circumstances.’

‘He says he spent the money he pinched on a present for her, a gilt snake necklace …’

‘Ah.’

‘Which may be true but doesn’t prove much.’

‘I wouldn’t say that, Sergeant. What happened to her when she was left on her own?’

‘We know very little about that. Squatters don’t really have neighbours, they’re an itinerant population. She had a series of cleaning jobs up until August and then she went on Social Security. All we know is that Morag told a woman in that row of houses that she’d got a good job in the of Eng and would be moving away. What that job was and where she was going we never found out. No one saw her after the middle of September. Grey came back around Christmas and took away what possessions she’d left behind.’

‘Didn’t you say it was her mother who started the hue and cry?’

‘Morag had been a regular correspondent, and when her mother got no answers to her letters she wrote to Grey. He found the letters when he went back at Christmas and at last he wrote back with some cock-and-bull story about thinking his wife had gone to Scotland. Mother had never trusted Richard Grey and she went to the police. She came down here and we had to get an interpreter in on account of—believe it or not—her speaking only Gaelic.’

Wexford, who at that moment felt, like the White Queen, that he could have believed six impossible things before breakfast, said, ‘Does Morag also—er, have the Gaelic?’

‘Yes, sir, she does. She’s bilingual’

With a sigh Wexford sank back against the upholstery. There were a few loose ends to be tied, a few small instances of the unaccountable to be accounted for, but otherwise … He closed his eyes. The car was going very slowly. Vaguely he wondered, but without looking, if they were running into heavy traffic as they approached London. It didn’t matter. Hathall would have been stopped by now, detained in some little side room of the airport. Even if he hadn’t been told why he wasn’t allowed to fly, he would know. He would know it was all over. The car was almost stopping. Wexford opened his eyes and seized Burden’s arm. He wound down the window.

‘See,’ he said, pointing to the ground that now slid past at a snail’s pace. ‘It does move. And that,’ his arm went upwards, skywards, ‘… that doesn’t.’

‘What doesn’t?’ said Burden. ‘There’s nothing to see. Look for yourself. We’re fog-bound.’