Sebastian’s hair resembled Clytemnestra’s, only it wasn’t grey. It hung on to his shoulders in shaggy curls.
‘I hope the Swoofle Hound hasn’t been too much of a bore for you, Mr Wexford.’
Wexford opened his mouth to make some polite denial but Clytemnestra’s transports at the sight of her owner made speech impossible for a while. She hurled herself at his long legs and plummeted her body against his jacket, a garment which Wexford incredulously identified as part of the full dress uniform of a commander in the Royal Norwegian Navy.
‘You’ll stay and have a meal?’ said Mrs Wexford.
‘If it isn’t too much trouble.’
‘How was Switzerland?’
‘All right. Expensive.’ Wexford was beginning to nourish the unkind thought that the holiday would have been even more costly had he had to pay boarding kennel fees, when Sebastian disarmed him by producing from his haversack a large box of chocolates for Mrs Wexford.
‘Suchard!’ said Mrs Wexford. ‘How kind.’
Encouraged, Sebastian made short work of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, occasionally reaching under the table to fondle Clytemnestra’s ears.
‘I’ll drive you to the station,’ said Sheila and she gave her father a confident smile.
‘That’d be great. We might take Clytemnestra into that Olive place. She likes beer and it’d be a treat for her.’
‘Not in my car, you don’t,’ said Wexford firmly.
‘Oh, Pop!’
‘Sorry, sweetheart, but you don’t drink and drive.’
Sebastian’s expression combined admiration for the daughter and a desire to ingratiate himself with the father. ‘We’ll walk down.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s such a hell of a way to your station, though.’ He eyed the banana custard. ‘Yes, thanks, I will have some more. The trouble is I’ll have to walk Sheila back, unless she goes home by the road,’ he added unchivalrously. ‘We heard about your murder even in Switzerland. Down in those fields at the back, wasn’t it?’
Wexford seldom talked shop at home. Probably this young man wasn’t pumping him and yet… He gave a non-committal nod.
‘Odd,’ Sebastian said. ‘I went to the station that way a fortnight ago, across the fields.’
Wexford intercepted his wife’s glance, deflected it, said nothing. Sheila said it for him.
'What time was it, Seb? About ten?’
‘A bit after that. I didn’t meet a soul and I can’t say I’m sorry.’ He ruffled the dog’s curly coat. ‘If I hadn’t jumped smartly Out of the way, Clytemnestra, you mightn’t ever have seen your papa again. Big American car nearly ran me down.’
‘They do nip into that station approach,’ said Sheila. ‘Station approach, nothing. This was in the fields. In that lane that leads up to the stile thing. Great green car swept in at about forty and I practically had to dive into the hedge. I took the number actually but what with all the kerfuffle about my holiday I lost the bit of paper I wrote it on.’
‘A courting couple?’ said Wexford lightly.
‘Could have been. I was too busy taking the number to look and I was scared of losing my train.’
‘Well we won’t go by the fields this time, and I’ll trail all the way back by the road if it makes you happy, Pop.’
‘You can take my car,’ said Wexford. ‘Stick to bitter lemon in the Olive, eh?’
Chapter 17
‘Here’s my theory,’ said Burden, ‘for what it’s worth. I’ve been thinking about it, though, and it’s the only possible solution. We’ve talked a lot about hired assassins but the only hired assassin in this case was Charlie Hatton, hired by Bridget Culross’s boy friend.’
‘Fertile,’ said Wexford, ‘but I’d like it amplified.’
Burden shifted his chair a little nearer those of Wexford and the doctor. The wind and the sunlight filled the office with a pattern of dancing leaves. ‘Jay is a rich man. He must be if he can afford to pay for three months in that clinic of yours just because his wife’s having a difficult pregnancy.’
‘Money down the drain,’ commented Crocker. ‘Do just as well on the N.H.S.’
‘He’s rich enough to pay someone to do his killing for him. You can bet your life he’s a one-time friend of McCloy’s. He arranges for Hatton to be waiting on that by-pass at the point where he’s going to drop the girl on their way back from this conference.’
‘Just what conference, Mike? Have we checked on Brighton conferences that weekend?’
‘The National Union of Journalists, the Blake Society and the Gibbonites all met there,’ said Burden promptly.
‘What are the last lot?’ put in the doctor, ‘a bunch of monkeys?’
‘Not gibbons,’ said Burden, unsmiling. ‘Gibbon. The Decline and Fall man, the historian. I reckon they’re just another collection of cranks.’
‘And Jay took a girl to Brighton, but left her alone all day while he gossiped about Gibbon?’ said Wexford thought fully. ‘Well, stranger things have happened. Go on.’
‘He faked a quarrel with her in the car on the way back to London and turfed her out of the car in a rage. Hatton was waiting for her, hit her over the head, emptied her handbag and made off back to his lorry. The next day Jay paid him his blood money. You can be sure that call Hatton made from a phone box was to Jay, telling him that the deed was done. And no one would have been any the wiser if Hatton hadn’t been greedy and started soaking Jay.’
The doctor made a derisive face. ‘Pardon me as a mere layman, but that’s a load of old rubbish. I’m not saying the girl couldn’t have been dead before the car hit her. She could have. But why should Hatton put her in the road? He couldn’t be sure a car would come along and hit her. Besides, he could so easily have been seen. And he was a small man. He wouldn’t have had the strength to carry her across the southbound highway. Why bother, anyway? If her death was supposed to look like the work of some vagrant maniac, why not kill her behind the hedge and leave her there?’
‘What’s your idea then?’ said Burden sourly.
Crocker looked uppish. ‘I don’t have to have theories. I’m not paid for this kind of diagnosis.’
‘Come down from your perch, Paracelsus,’ said Wexford ‘and put yourselves in our shoes for a moment. Have a shot at it.’
‘The trouble with you lot is you believe everything you’re told. I don’t. I know from experience people distort the truth because they’re afraid or they have a psychological block or they want to be over-helpful. They leave things out because they’re ignorant and when you tell them you want to know everything, they sort out what everything is to them. It’s not necessarily everything to the expert who’s asking the questions.’
‘I know all that,’ said Wexford impatiently.
‘Then, Mrs Fanshawe says the girl wasn’t in the car, not because she’s ashamed to admit it but because she’s literally forgotten. Of course she was in the car. She hitched a lift a couple of miles before the crash and all that period is a blank to Mrs Fanshawe. Naturally she’s not trying to clear the blanks. The very word “girl” is a red rag to a bull to her.’
‘You’re bothered because there were no keys and no other identification in that expensive handbag. She left them in her suitcase and she left that suitcase in Jay’s car.’
‘Why?’
‘So that Jay would have to come back for her. It was on the seat and after a few miles he’d realise and come back. Or so she thought. When he didn’t she knew she could get it back all right at a later date. Presumably she knew where Jay lived. In extremis it would be an excuse for having it out with him and confronting the wife.’
‘But Jay didn’t come back and she got fed-up with waiting, so she hitched a lift from Fanshawe.’
‘That’s the simple natural solution, isn’t it?’
‘What you’re saying amounts to that Jay is just a more or less harmless philanderer. Why didn’t he come forward when we found the girl?’