The first whispering breeze came like a hot breath and Wexford closed his windows. Almost imperceptibly at first the trees in the High Street pavement began to sway. Most of the merchandise outside greengrocers’ and florists’ had already been taken in and now it was the turn of the sun-blinds to be furled and waterproof awnings to take their place. The air seemed to press against Wexford’s windows. He stood against them, watching the dark western sky and the ash-blue cumulus now edged with brilliant white.
The lightning was the forked kind and it branched suddenly like a firework and yet like the limb of a blazing tree. As its fiery twigs flashed out and cut into the inky cloud, the thunder rolled out of the west.
Wexford dearly loved a storm. He liked the forked lightning better than the zig-zag kind and now he was gratified by a second many-branched display that seemed to spring and grow from the river itself, blossoming in the sky above the Kingsbrook meadows. This time the thunder burst with a pistol-shot snap and with an equal suddenness, as if at last those swollen vessels had been punctured, the rain began to fall.
The first heavy drops splashed in coin shapes on the pavement below and in their tubs the pink flowers on the fore court dipped and swayed. For a brief moment it seemed that the rain still hesitated, that it would only patter dispiritedly on the dust-filled gutters where its drops rolled like quicksilver. But then, urged on as it were by a series of multiple lightning flashes, it hesitated no more and, instead of increasing gradually from the first tentative shower, the water gushed forth in a vast fountain. It dashed against the windows, washing off dust in a great cleansing stream, and Wexford moved away from the glass. The sudden flood was more like a wave than rain and it blinded the window as surely as darkness.
He heard the car splash in and the doors slam. Burden, perhaps. The internal phone rang and Wexford lifted the receiver.
‘I’ve got Cullam here, sir.’ It was Martin’s voice. ‘Shall I bring him up? I thought you might like to talk to him.’
Maurice Cullam was afraid of the storm. That didn’t displease Wexford. With some scorn he eyed the man’s pale face and the bony, none-too-steady hands.
‘Scared, Cullam? Not to worry, we’ll all die together.’
‘Big laugh,’ said Cullam, and he winced as the thunder broke above their heads. ‘I don’t reckon it’s safe being so high up. When I was a kid I was in a house that got struck.’
‘But you got out unscathed, eh? Well they say the devil looks after his own. Why have you brought him here, Sergeant?’
‘He’s bought that refrigerator,’ said Sergeant Martin. ‘And a room heater and a load of other electrical bits and pieces. Paid cash for them, a couple of quid short of a hundred and twenty pounds.’
Wexford put the lights on and behind the streaming glass the sky looked black as on a winter’s night. ‘All right, Cullam, where did you get it?’
‘I saved it up.’
‘I see. When did you buy that washing machine of yours, the one you washed your gear in after Hatton died?’
‘April.’ As the storm receded and the thunder became a distant grumbling, Cullam’s shoulders dropped and he lifted sullen eyes. ‘April, it was.’
‘So, you’ve saved another hundred and twenty pounds in just two months. What do you get a week? Twenty? Twenty- two? You with five kids and council house rent to pay? You’ve saved it in two months? Come off it, Cullam. I couldn’t save it in six and my kids are grown up.’
‘You can’t prove I didn’t save it.’ Cullam gave a slight shiver as the overhead light flickered off, then on again. A rolling like the banging of many drums, distant at first, then breaking into a staccato crackling, announced the return of the storm to Kingsmarkham. He shifted in his chair, biting his lip.
Wexford smiled as a zig-zag flash changed the gentle illumination of the office into a sudden white blaze. ‘A hundred pounds,’ he said. ‘That’s pathetic payment for a man’s life. What’s yours worth, Sergeant?’
‘I’m insured for five thousand, sir.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant, but we’ll let it pass. You see, an assassin is paid according to his own self-valuation. Never mind what the victim’s life’s worth. If a road sweeper kills the king he can’t expect to get the same gratuity as a general. He wouldn’t expect it. His standards are low. So if you’re going to employ an assassin and you’re a mean skinflint you pick on the lowest of the low to do your dirty work. Mind you, it won’t be so well done.’
Wexford’s last words were drowned in thunder. ‘What d’you mean, lowest of the low?’ Cullam lifted abject yet truculent eyes.
‘The cap fits, does it? They don’t come much lower than you, Cullam. What, drink with a man – drink the whisky he paid for – and then lie in wait to kill him?’
‘I never killed Charlie Hatton!’ Cullam leapt trembling to his feet. The lightning flared into his face and, covering his eyes with one hand, he said desperately, ‘For God’s sake can’t we go downstairs?’
‘I reckon Hatton was right when he called you an old woman, Cullam,’ Wexford said in disgust. ‘We’ll go down stairs when I’m good and ready. You talk and when you’ve told me where McCloy is and what he paid you, then you can go downstairs and hide your head.’
Still on his feet, Cullam leant on the desk, his head hanging. ‘It’s a lie,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know McCloy and I never touched Hatton.’
‘Where did the money come from then? Oh, sit down, Cullam. What sort of man are you, anyway, scared of a bit of thunder? It’s laughable, afraid of a storm but brave enough to wait in the dark down by the river and bash your friend over the head. Come on now, you may as well tell us. You’ll have to sooner or later and I reckon this storm’s set in for hours. Hatton had fallen foul of McCloy, hadn’t he? So McCloy greased your palm a bit to walk home with Hatton and catch him unawares. The weapon and the method were left to you. Curious, you were so mean, you even grudged him a proper cosh.’
Cullam said again, ‘It’s all a lie.’ He twisted down into the chair, holding his head and keeping it averted from the window. ‘Me bash Charlie on the head with one of them stones? I wouldn’t have thought of it… I wouldn’t…’
‘Then how did you know it was a river stone that killed him?’ Wexford pounced triumphantly. Slowly Cullam raised his head and the sweat glistened on his skin. ‘I didn’t tell you.’
‘Nor me, sir,’ said the sergeant.
‘Jesus,’ Cullam said, his voice uneven and low.
The black clouds had parted to show between them shreds of summer sky turned sickly green. Against the glass the unremitting rain pounded.
Stamford police knew nothing of Alexander James McCloy. His name was on the voters’ list as occupying Moat Hall, the small mansion Burden had found deserted, but plainly he had left it months before. Burden plodded through the rain from estate agent to estate agent and he at last found Moat Hall, listed in the books of a small firm on the outskirts of the town. It had been sold in December by McCloy to an American widow who, having changed her mind without ever living in the place, had returned it to the agent’s hands and departed to spend the summer in Sweden.
Mr McCloy had left them no address. Why should he? His business with them had been satisfactorily completed; he had taken his money from the American lady and disappeared.
No, there had never really been anything in Mr McCloy’s behaviour to make them believe he wasn’t a man of integrity.
‘What do you mean, “really”?’ Burden asked.
‘Only that the place was never kept decently as far as I could see, not the way a gentleman’s house should be. It was a crying shame to see those grounds neglected. Still, he was a bachelor and he’d no staff as far as I know.’