The solicitor went to catch his train and presently Wexford heard the aunt say:
‘I’ve had a long day, Nora. I think I’ll just give the hospital a ring and then I’ll go up to bed.’
Wexford sat by the window, watching the Morris dancers. The music was amateurish and the performers self-conscious, but the evening was so beautiful that if you shut your eyes to the cars and the new shop blocks you might imagine yourself briefly in Shakespeare’s England. Someone carried out to the nine men a tray of bottled beer and the spell broke.
‘Come into the lounge,’ said a voice behind him.
Nora Fanshawe had removed the jacket of her suit and in the thin coffee-coloured blouse she looked more feminine. But she was still a creature of strong straight lines and planes and angles and she was still not smiling.
‘May I get you a drink, Miss Fanshawe?’ Wexford said, rising.
‘Better not.’ Her voice was abrupt and she didn’t thank him for the offer. ‘I’ve had too much already.’ And she added with a dead laugh, ‘We’ve been what my aunt calls celebrating. The resurrection of the dead, you see.’
They went into the lounge, sat down in deep cretonne covered armchairs and Nora Fanshawe said:
‘Mr Updike wouldn’t tell me the details of the accident. He wanted to spare me.’ She beckoned to the waiter and said without asking Wexford first, ‘Bring two coffees.’ Then she lit a king-size cigarette and slipped it into an amber holder. ‘You tell me about it,’ she said.
‘You don’t want to be spared?’
‘Of course not. I’m not a child and I didn’t like my father.’ Wexford gave a slight cough. ‘At about ten o’clock on May 20th,’ he began, ‘a man driving a petrol tanker on the north to south highway of Stowerton by-pass saw a car overturned and in flames on the fast lane of the south to north track. He reported it at once and when the police and ambulance got there they found the bodies of a man and a girl lying on the road and partially burned. A woman – your mother – had been flung clear on to the soft shoulder. She had multiple injuries and a fractured skull.’
‘Go on.’
‘What remained of the car was examined but, as far as could be told, there was nothing wrong with the brakes or the steering and the tires were nearly new.’
Nora Fanshawe nodded.
‘The inquest was adjourned until your mother regained consciousness. The road was wet and your mother has suggested that your father may have been driving exceptionally fast.’
‘He always drove too fast.’ She took the coffee that the waiter had brought and handed a cup to Wexford. He sensed that she would take it black and sugarless and he was right. ‘Since the dead girl wasn’t I,’ she said with repellently fault less grammar, ‘who was she?’
‘I’m hoping you’ll be able to tell us that.’
She shrugged, ‘How should I know?’
Wexford glanced at the curled lip, the hard direct eyes. ‘Miss Fanshawe,’ he said sharply, ‘I’ve answered your questions, but you haven’t even met me half-way. This afternoon you came to my office as if you were doing me a favour. Don’t you think it’s time you unbent a little?’
She flushed at that and muttered. ‘I don’t unbend much.’
‘No, I can see that. You’re twenty-three, aren’t you? Don’t you think all this upstage reserve is rather ridiculous?’
Her hand was small, but, ringless and with short nails as it was, it was like a man’s. He watched it move towards the cup and saucer and for a moment he thought she was going to take her coffee, get up and leave him. She frowned a little and her mouth hardened.
‘I’ll tell you about my father,’ she said at last. ‘It might just help. I first knew about his infidelities when I was twelve,’ she began. ‘Or, let me say, I knew he was behaving as other people’s fathers didn’t behave. He brought a girl home and told my mother she was going to stay with us. They had a row in my presence and when it was over my father gave my mother five hundred pounds.’ She took the cigarette stub from her holder and replaced it with a fresh one. This sudden chain smoking was the only sign she gave of emotion. ‘He bribed her, you understand. It was quite direct and open. “Let her stay and you can have this money”. That was how it was. The girl stayed six months. Two years later he bought my mother a new car and at just the same time I caught him in his office with his secretary.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘On the floor,’ she said coldly. ‘After that it was an understood thing that when my father wanted a new mistress he paid my mother accordingly. By that I mean what he thought the girl was worth to him. He wanted my mother to stay because she was a good hostess and kept house well. When I was eighteen I went up to Oxford.'
‘After I got my degree I told my mother I could keep her now and she should leave my father. Her response was to deny everything and to tell my father to stop my allowance. He refused to stop it – mainly because my mother had asked him to, I suppose. I haven’t drawn it for two years now, but…’ She glanced swiftly at her bag, her watch. ‘You can’t always refuse to take presents,’ she said tightly, ‘not when it’s your own mother, not when you’re an only child.’
‘So you took a job in Germany?’ Wexford asked.
‘I thought it would be as well to get away.’ The flush returned, an unbecoming mottled red. ‘In January,’ she said hesitantly, ‘I met a man, a salesman who made business trips to Cologne from this country.’ Wexford waited for her to talk of love and instead heard her say with a strange sense of shock, ‘I gave up my job, as I told you, and came back to London to live with him. When I told him that if we were to be married I wouldn’t ask my father for a penny he… well, he threw me out.’
‘You returned to your parents?’
Nora Fanshawe raised her head and for the first time he saw her smile, an ugly harsh smile of self-mockery. ‘You’re a cold fish, aren’t you?’ she said surprisingly.
‘I was under the impression you despised sympathy, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘Perhaps I do. Want some more coffee? No, nor do I. Yes, I went back to my parents. I was still sorry for my mother, you see. I thought my father was older now and I was older. I knew I could never live with them again, but I thought… Family quarrels are uncivilized, don’t you think? My mother was rather pathetic. She said she’d always wanted a grown-up daughter to be real friends with.’ Nora Fanshawe wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘Even upstage reserved characters like myself have their weak spots, Chief Inspector. I went to Eastover with them.’
‘And the quarrel, Miss Fanshawe?’
‘I’m coming to that. We’d been on surprisingly good terms up till then. My father called my mother darling once or twice and there was a kind of Darby and Joan air about them. They wanted to know what I was doing about getting another job and all was serene. So serene, in fact, that after we’d had a meal at the bungalow and a few drinks my mother did something she’d never done before. My father had gone off up to bed and she suddenly began to tell me what her life with him had been, the bribery and the humiliation and so on. She really talked as if I were a woman friend of her own age, her confidante. Well, we had about an hour of this and then she asked me if I had any romantic plans of my own. Those were her words. Like a fool I told her about the man I’d been living with. I say like a fool. Perhaps if I hadn’t been a fool I would have been the dead girl in the road.’
‘Your mother reacted unsympathetically?’
‘She goggled at me,’ said Nora Fanshawe, emphasizing the verb pedantically. ‘Then, before I could stop her she got my father out of bed and told him the whole thing. They both raved at me. My mother was hysterical and my father called me a lot of unpleasant names. I stood it for a bit and then I’m afraid I said to him that what was sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose and at least I wasn’t married.’ She sighed, moving her angular shoulders. ‘What do you think he said?’