The doctor gave a sardonic and superior laugh. ‘Thanks to a spot of inefficiency on someone’s part, you told the Press the dead girl was Nora Fanshawe. Why should Jay stick his neck out? If he’d ditched the girl on the outskirts of Stowerton it was because he never wanted to see her again. He’s not likely to pop up and help you with your enquiries.’
Wexford said quietly, ‘Where does Charlie Hatton come into all this?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll answer that question with a question of my own. What makes you think he didn’t have a source of supply completely separate from McCloy or Fanshawe or Jay?’
Wexford looked at Burden and he saw uneasiness creep into the inspector’s face. He couldn’t allow for this sort of doubt. It was unthinkable. ‘He was behind that hedge,’ he said stoutly. ‘He saw that girl pushed into the road.’
‘Get away!’
‘Oh, not from the central strip of grass.’ Wexford paused for effect. The quivering leaf shadows played, danced and died as the sun went in. ‘From a car,’ he said, ‘she was thrown out of a car.’
The sunlight came and went intermittently. Alone now, Wexford watched the cloud masses drift above the High Street roofs and cast their shadows now on a house front, now on the road itself. The sun blazed briefly, appearing from time to time embedded in a golden nest.
Presently he took his railway timetable from his desk drawer and looked up the afternoon trains to London. There was a fast one at two-fifteen.
The lift was waiting for him, its door invitingly open. By now Wexford had lost all his inhibitions about it. He stepped inside and pressed the ground-floor button. The door closed with a whisper and sank on a sigh.
Someone on the first floor must have summoned it, for it trembled and its floor seemed to rise a fraction. Then it shivered and stopped. Wexford waited for the door to slide but nothing happened.
It was a solid door with neither glass nor grille. Impatiently Wexford tapped his foot. He glanced at the control panel and wondered why the light marked one hadn’t come on. Probably it had been summoned and whoever was waiting had got bored and used the stairs. In that case, why wasn’t the light on? He stuck his thumb on the ground-floor button. Nothing happened.
Or rather, the worst, what he had always feared, had happened. The damned thing had broken. It had got stuck. Very likely it was between floors. A tremor of panic touched one corner of his brain and he dismissed it with a fierce oath. He tapped smartly on the door.
Was the thing sound-proof? Wexford had never had much faith in sound-proofing methods, having lived during the early part of his career in a series of flats highly commended by their agents for the seaweed board allegedly incorporated in their walls and ceilings. They hadn’t stopped him being driven nearly mad by the piano from upstairs and the incessant drumming of children’s feet. They couldn’t sound-proof a dwelling house, he thought furiously. It would be just like ‘them’ to succeed in the utterly pointless achievement of sound-proofing a lift. He knocked on the door again and then he pressed the button market Emergency. If anything, the little black and gilt box settled into an even deeper immobility.
There was a little leather seat, like the extra seats in a taxi, folded into the wall. Wexford pulled it down. It creaked when he sat on it. Glancing about him with simulated ease, he assessed the volume of the lift. Seven by four by four. As far as he could see there was no means of letting air in or carbon dioxide out. He listened. He might have been stone deaf, the silence was so deep.
How long could anybody as big as he remain confined in a space seven by four by four? He had no idea. It was ten minutes to two. He got up and the seat snapped back into the wall. The sound made him jump. He brought both fists down against the panelling and pounded hard. The lift quivered and that disquieted him. For all he knew it was hanging by a thread.
It might be better to shout. But shout what? ‘Help, let me out!’ was too humiliating to consider.
‘Is there anyone there?’ he called, and because that sounded like a medium in a séance, ‘Hey, the lift’s stuck!’
Under the circumstances, it would be wiser to save his breath. It was possible that most of the rooms were empty. Burden and Martin and Loring were all out. Camb might be sitting downstairs (downstairs!) at his desk. Someone would be sitting there. It was equally certain that his cries were unheard.
With an unpleasant sinking feeling, Wexford faced the fact that unless Burden returned two hours earlier than he had said, it was likely that no one would want to use the lift. Camb was at his post, Martin in Sewingbury. It hadn’t escaped Wexford’s notice that most of the uniformed branch preferred the stairs. He might be there till tea-time and if so, would he still be alive at tea-time?
Two o’clock. If he didn’t get out in five minutes he would miss that train. That didn’t matter too much. Without checking at the Princess Louise Clinic, he was almost sure he had the answer. Guesswork perhaps, but inspired guesswork. If he died they would never know…
Sick of shouting, he flapped down the seat again. Probably it was only his fancy that the air in the tiny box was growing thick. Panic would not help at all. It was outside the indulgencies he allowed himself. Outside them too was the thread of terror that told him he was a rat in a hole, a fox in a stopped earth. Briefly he thought of Sheila. No more of that, that way madness lies…
Two-fifteen, Wexford took out his notebook and a pencil. At any rate, he could write it all down.
‘I don’t know where he gets his crazy ideas,’ said the doctor indiscreetly. Burden gave him a neutral smile. ‘If I was in your place I’d want to try it out. Have you got something else on this afternoon?’
‘Nothing Martin and Loring can’t see to without me.’
‘Shall we take my car, then?’
‘Don’t you have a surgery?’ asked Burden, who thought the whole plan unorthodox.
‘My afternoon off. I rather like this dabbling in forensics.’ Burden didn’t. He wondered what Crocker would say if he suggested accompanying him to a patient’s bedside. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But not the by-pass, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Cheriton airfield,’ said the doctor.
The place hadn’t been used for years. It lay on the far side of Cheriton forest beyond Pomfret and it was a favourite haunt of L-drivers. Teenagers below the permitted age of provisional licence holders got their parents to bring them on to the disused runways where they kangaroo-hopped in comparative safety.
Today it was deserted. The greens between the runways had been ploughed up and used for a turnip and sugar beet crop. Beyond the rows of regularly planted beet the pine forest climbed over gently undulating hills.
‘You can drive,’ said the doctor. ‘I fancy the victim’s role.’
‘Rather you than I,’ said Burden, who was wearing his new Gannex.
He shifted into the driving seat. The runway was as broad as the northbound highway of the Stowerton By-pass.
‘Presumably she was a strong healthy girl,’ said Crocker. ‘You couldn’t push anyone like that out of a moving vehicle if she was in full possession of her faculties. He must have hit her on the head first.’
‘You’re suggesting he had an unconscious girl beside him?’
‘They had a row and he’d socked her,’ said the doctor laconically. ‘Now I’m her and I’m unconscious. The road is clear. You wouldn’t do it from the fast lane, though, would you? Something might just come whizzing up behind you and that’d be awkward. So it’s the middle lane. Go on, move over.’
Burden eased into the centre of the runway. ‘That row of beet on the right corresponds to the central strip,’ he said. ‘Fanshawe swerved to the right to avoid the body.’