22     

It was nearly four o’clock before they reached the airport. All aircraft were grounded, and Christmas holiday travellers filled the lounges while queues formed at enquiry desks. The fog was all-enveloping, fluffy like aerated snow, dense earth-bound clouds of it, a white gas that set people coughing and covering their faces.

Hathall wasn’t there.

The fog had begun to come down at Heathrow at eleven-thirty, but it had affected other parts of London earlier than that. Had he been among the hundreds who had phoned the airport from fog-bound outer suburbs to enquire if their flights would leave? There was no way of knowing. Wexford walked slowly and painstakingly through the lounges, from bar to restaurant, out on to the observation terraces, looking into every face, tired faces, indignant faces, bored faces. Hathall wasn’t there.

‘According to the weather forecast,’ said Burden, ‘the fog’ll lift by evening.’

‘And according to the long-range, it’s going to be a white Christmas, a white fog Christmas. You and Polly stay here, Mike. Get on to the chief constable and fix it so that we have every exit watched, not just Heathrow.’

So Burden and Polly remained while Wexford and Lovat and Hutton began the long drive to Hampstead. It was very slow going. Streams of traffic, bound for the M1, blocked all the north-west roads as the fog, made tawny by the yellow overhead lights, cast a blinding pall over the city. The landmarks on the route, which by now were all too familiar, had lost their sharp outlines and become amorphous. The winding hills of Hampstead lay under a smoky shroud and the great trees of Hampstead loomed like black clouds before being swallowed up in paler vapour. They crawled into Dartmeet Avenue at ten minutes to seven and pulled up outside number 62. The house was in darkness, every window tight shut and dead black. The dustbins were dewed where the fog had condensed on them. Their lids were scattered, and a cat darted out from under one of them, a chicken bone in its mouth. As Wexford got out of the car, the fog caught at his throat. He thought of another foggy day in Myringham Old Town, of men digging in vain for a body that had never been there. He thought of how his whole pursuit of Hathall had been befogged by doubt and confusion and obstruction, and then he went up to the front door and rang the landlord’s bell.

He had rung it twice more before a light showed through the pane of glass above the lintel. At last the door was opened by the same little elderly man Wexford had once before seen come out and fetch his cat. He was smoking a thin cigar and he showed neither surprise nor interest when the chief inspector said who he was and showed him his warrant card.

‘Mr Hathall left last night,’ he said.

‘Last night?’

‘That’s right. To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect him to go till this morning. He’d paid his rent up to tonight. But he got hold of me in a bit of a hurry last night and said he’d decided to go, so it wasn’t for me to argue, was it?’

The hall was icy cold, in spite of the oil heater which stood at the foot of the stairs, and the place reeked of burning oil and cigar smoke. Lovat rubbed his hands together, then held them out over the guttering blue and yellow flames.

‘Mr Hathall came back here about eight last night in a taxi’ said the landlord. ‘I was out in the front garden, calling my cat. He came up to me and said he wanted to vacate his room there and then.’

‘How did he seem?’ Wexford said urgently. ‘Worried? Upset?’

‘Nothing out of the way. He was never what you’d call a pleasant chap. Always grumbling about something. We went up to his room for me to take the inventory. I always insist on that before I give them back their deposits. D’you want to go up now? There’s nothing to see, but you can if you want.’

Wexford nodded and they mounted the stairs. The hall and the landing were lit by the kind of lights that go off automatically after two minutes, and they went off now before Hathall’s door was reached. In the pitch dark the landlord cursed, fumbling for his keys and for the light switch. And Wexford, his nerves tautening again, let out a grunt of shock when something snaked along the banister rail and jumped for the landlord’s shoulder. It was, of course, only the cat. The light went on, the key was found, and the door opened.

The room was stuffy and musty as well as cold. Wexford saw Hutton’s lip curl as he glanced at the First World War wardrobe, the fireside chairs and the ugly paintings, as he thought no doubt of an inventory being taken of this Junk City rubbish. Thin blankets lay untidily folded on the bare mattress beside a bundle of nickel knives and forks secured with a rubber band, a whistling kettle with a string-bound handle and a plaster vase that still bore on its base the price ticket indicating that it had cost thirty-five pence.

The cat ran along the mantelpiece and leapt on to the screen. ‘I knew there was something fishy about him, mind you,’ said the landlord.

‘How? What gave you that idea?’

He favoured Wexford with a rather contemptuous smile. ‘I’ve seen you before, for one thing. I can spot a copper a mile off. And there was always folks watching him. I don’t miss much, though I don’t say much either. I spotted the little fellow with the ginger hair—made me laugh when he came here and said he was from the council—and the tall thin one that was always in a car.’

‘Then you’ll know,’ Wexford said, swallowing his humiliation, ‘why he was watched.’

‘Not me. He never did nothing but come and go and have his mother to tea and grouse about the rent.’

‘He never had a woman come here? A woman with short fair hair?’

‘Not him. His mother and his daughter, that’s all. That’s who he told me they were, and I reckon it was true seeing they was the spitting image of him. Come on, puss, let’s get back where it’s warm.’

Turning wearily away, standing on the spot where Hathall had been on the point of flinging him down those stairs, Wexford said, ‘You gave him back his deposit and he left. What time was that?’

‘About nine.’ The landing light went off again and again the landlord flicked the switch, muttering under his breath while the cat purred on his shoulder. ‘He was going abroad somewhere, he said. There were a lot of labels on his cases but I didn’t look close. I like to see what they’re doing, you know, keep an eye till they’re off the premises. He went over the road and made a phone call and then a taxi came and took him off.’

They went down into the smelly hall. The light went off and this time the landlord didn’t switch it on. He closed the door on them quickly to keep out the fog.

‘He could have gone last night,’ said Wexford to Lovat. ‘He could have crossed to Paris or Brussels or Amsterdam and flown from there.’

‘But why should he?’ Hutton objected. ‘Why should he think we’re on to him after all this time?’

Wexford didn’t want to tell them, at this stage, about Howard’s involvement or Howard’s encounter with Hathall on the previous evening. But it had come sharply into his mind up in that cold deserted room. Hathall had seen Howard at about seven, had recognized this man who was tailing him, and soon after had given him the slip. The taxi he had got into had dropped the girl off and taken him back to Dartmeet Avenue where he had settled with his landlord, taken his luggage and gone. Gone where? Back to her first and then …? Wexford shrugged unhappily and went across the road to the call-box.

Burden’s voice told him the airport was still fog-bound. The place was swarming with disappointed stranded would-be travellers, and swarming by now with anxious police. Hathall hadn’t appeared. If he had phoned, along with hundreds of other callers, he hadn’t given his name.

‘But he knows we’re on to him,’ said Burden.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘D’you remember a chap called Aveney? Manager of Kidd’s?’

‘Of course I remember. What the hell is this?’

‘He got a phone call from Hathall at his home at nine last night. Hathall wanted to know—asked in a roundabout way, mind you—if we’d been asking questions about him. And Aveney, the fool, said not about his wife, that was all over, but only looking into the books in case there was something fishy about the pay-roll.’

‘How do we know all this?’ Wexford asked dully.

‘Aveney had second thoughts, wondered if he ought to have told him anything, though he knew our enquiries had come to nothing. Apparently, he tried to get hold of you this morning and when he couldn’t he at last contacted Mr Griswold.’

That, then, was the phone call Hathall had made from the call-box in Dartmeet Avenue, this very call-box, after leaving the landlord and before getting into that taxi. That, coupled with his recognition of Howard, would have been enough to frighten the wits out of him. Wexford went back across the road and got into the car where Lovat was smoking one of his nasty little damp cigarettes.

‘I think the fog’s thinning, sir,’ said Hutton.

‘Maybe. What time is it?’

‘Ten to eight. What do we do now? Get back to the airport or try and find Morag Grey’s place?’

With patient sarcasm, Wexford said, ‘I have been trying to do that for nine months, Sergeant, the normal period of gestation, and I’ve brought forth nothing. Maybe you think you can do better in a couple of hours.’

‘We could at least go back through Notting Hill, sir, instead of taking the quicker way by the North Circular.’

‘Oh, do as you like,’ Wexford snapped, and he flung himself into the corner as far as possible from Lovat and his cigarette which smelt as bad as the landlord’s cigar. Badgers! Country coppers, he thought unfairly. Fools who couldn’t make a simple charge like shop-breaking stick. What did Hutton think Notting Hill was? A village like Passingham St John where everyone knew everyone else and would be all agog and raring to gossip because a neighbour had gone off to foreign parts?

They followed the 28 bus route. West End Lane, Quex Road, Kilburn High Road, Kilburn Park … The fog was decreasing, moving now, lying here in dense patches, there shivering and thinning into streaks. And Christmas colours began to glitter through it, garish paper banners in windows, sharp little starry lights that winked on and off. Shirland Road, Great Western Road, Pembridge Villas, Pembridge Road …

One of these, Wexford thought, sitting up, must be the bus stop where Howard had seen Hathall board the 28. Streets debouched everywhere, streets that led into other streets, into squares, into a vast multitudinously peopled hinterland. Let Hutton make what he could of …

‘Stop the car, will you?’ he said quickly.

Pink light streamed across the roadway from the glazed doors of a public house. Wexford had seen its sign and remembered. The Rosy Cross. If they had been regular customers, if they had often met there, the licensee or a barman might recall them. Perhaps they had met there again last night before leaving or had gone back just to say good-bye. At least he would know. This way he might know for sure.

The interior was an inferno of light and noise and smoke. The crowd was of a density and a conviviality usually only reached much later in the evening, but this was Christmas, the night before the Eve. Not only was every table occupied and every bar stool and place by the bar, but every square foot of floor space too where people stood packed, pressed against each other, their cigarettes sending spirals of smoke to mingle with the blue pall that hung between gently swaying paper chains and smarting screwed-up eyes. Wexford pushed his way to the bar. Two barmen and a girl were working it, serving drinks feverishly, wiping down the counter, slopping dirty glasses into a steaming sink.

‘And the next?’ called the older of the barmen, the licensee maybe. His face was red, his forehead gleaming with sweat and his grey hair plastered against it in wet curls. ‘What’s for you, sir?’

Wexford said, ‘Police. I’m looking for a tall black-haired man, about forty-five, and a younger blonde woman.’ His elbow was jostled and he felt a trickle of beer run down his wrist. ‘They were in here last night. The name is …’

‘They don’t give their names. There were about five hundred people in here last night.’

‘I’ve reason to think they came in here regularly.’

The barman shrugged. ‘I have to attend to my customers. Can you wait ten minutes?’

But Wexford thought he had waited long enough. Let it pass into other hands, he could do no more. Struggling through the press of people, he made again for the door, bemused by the colours and the lights and the smoke and the heady reek of liquor. There seemed to be coloured shapes everywhere, the circles of red and purple balloons, the shining translucent cones of liqueur bottles, the squares of stained window glass. His head swimming, he realized he hadn’t eaten all day. Red and purple circles, orange and blue paper spheres, here a green glass square, there a bright yellow rectangle …

A bright yellow rectangle. His head cleared. He steadied and stilled himself. Jammed between a man in a leather coat and a girl in a fur coat, he looked through a tiny space that wasn’t cluttered by skirts and legs and chair legs and handbags, looked through the blue acrid smoke at that yellow rectangle which was liquid in a tall glass, and saw it raised by a hand and carried out of his sight.

Pernod. Not a popular drink in England. Ginge had drunk it mixed with Guinness as a Demon King. And one other, she that he sought, his chimera, his thing of fanciful conception, drank it diluted and yellowed by water. He moved slowly, pushing his way towards that corner table where she was, but he could get only within three yards of her. There were too many people. But now there was a space clear enough at eye level for him to see her, and he looked long and long, staring greedily as a man in love stares at the woman whose coming he has awaited for months on end.

She had a pretty face, tired and wan. Her eyes were smarting from the smoke and her cropped blonde hair showed half an inch of dark at the roots. She was alone, but the chair beside her was covered by a folded coat, a man’s coat, and stacked against the wall behind her, piled at her feet and walling her in, were half a dozen suitcases. She lifted her glass again and sipped from it, not looking at him at all, but darting quick nervous glances towards a heavy mahogany door marked Telephone and Toilets. But Wexford lingered, looking his fill at his chimera made flesh, until hats and hair and faces converged and cut off his view.

He opened the mahogany door and slipped into a passage. Two more doors faced him, and at the end of the passage was a glass kiosk. Hathall was bent over the phone inside it, his back to Wexford. Phoning the airport, Wexford thought, phoning to see if his flight’s on now the fog is lifting. He stepped into the men’s lavatory, pulling the door to, waiting till he heard Hathall’s footsteps pass along the passage.

The mahogany door swung and clicked shut. Wexford let a minute go by and then he too went back into the bar. The cases were gone, the yellow glass empty. Thrusting people aside, ignoring expostulation, he gained the street door and flung it open. Hathall and the woman were on the pavement edge, surrounded by their cases, waiting to hail a taxi.

Wexford flashed a glance at the car, caught Hutton’s eye and raised his hand sharply, beckoning. Three of the car’s doors opened simultaneously and the three policemen it had contained were on their feet, bounced on to the wet stone as if on springs. And then Hathall understood. He swung round to face them, his arm enclosing the woman in a protective but useless hold. The colour went out of his face, and in the light of the misted yellow lamps the jutting jaw, the sharp nose and the high forehead were greenish with terror and the final failure of his hopes. Wexford went up to him.

The woman said, ‘We should have left last night, Bob,’ and when he heard her accent, made strong by fear, he knew. He knew for sure. But he couldn’t find his voice and, standing silent, he left it to Lovat to approach her and begin the words of the caution and the charge.

‘Morag Grey …’

She brought her knuckles to her trembling lips, and Wexford saw the small L-shaped scar on her forefinger as he had seen it in his dreams.