‘So he says.’
‘What do I do? Leave the passenger door on the latch?’
‘I reckon so. Trickle along and then push me out.’
Crocker rolled himself into a ball, his arms around his knees. Burden didn’t dare drive at more than a snail’s pace. He was doing five miles an hour. He leaned across, swung the door wide and gave the doctor a light push. Crocker rolled easily into the road, staggered and stood up. Burden stopped.
‘You see?’ Crocker dusted himself off with a grimace. ‘I told you he was crazy. See where I landed? Right in the slow lane. And you’d hardly got the car moving. Our mystery man was going at a fair lick. The girl would have rolled right over to the left, almost on to the grass verge.’
‘D’you want to try it in the fast lane, just for the record?’
‘Once is enough,’ said the doctor firmly. ‘You can see what would happen anyway. The girl mightn’t have rolled into the slow lane, but she’d have landed in the middle of the road. You just couldn’t get a body into the fast lane itself from a moving car.’
‘You’re right. Necessarily, having been thrown from the left, it would roll towards the left, in which case Fanshawe in the fast lane would have passed cleanly to the right of it.’
‘Or if mystery man was in fact driving in the fast lane and the body landed plumb in that lane, Fanshawe would have swerved to the left to avoid it and never hit that tree in the central strip. There’s only one possibility and we’ve proved that’s not tenable.’
Burden was sick of being told his job. ‘Exactly,’ he said hastily. ‘If the girl was thrown out to the right and her head was towards the middle lane with her feet towards the central strip, only then might Fanshawe have swerved to the right. He would have swerved instinctively to avoid the head.’
‘But that, as we know, is impossible. If you’re driving a car you can only throw someone out from the passenger seat on the left, not from one of the back seats, and that means the victim is always going to land way over to the left.’
‘I’ll go back and tell him,’ said Burden thoughtfully, and he let the doctor take the wheel to drive them back along the runway between the lines of green leaves.
‘Chief Inspector gone out?’ Coming out of Wexford’s office, Burden encountered Loring in the corridor.
‘I don’t know, sir. Isn’t he in his office?’
‘You imagine he’s hiding under his desk, do you, or maybe he’s filed himself away in the filing cabinet.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Loring raised a yellow venetian blind. ‘His car’s there.’
‘I know that.’ Burden had come up the stairs. He went towards the lift, pressed the button to summon it. When he had waited a minute and it hadn’t come, he shrugged and walked down to the ground floor. Sergeant Camb turned from the woman who had lost a Siamese cat.
‘Mr Wexford? He hasn’t gone out.’
‘Then where the hell is he?’ Burden never swore, even as mildly as that. Camb stared. ‘He was going to London. I’d reckoned he’d go on the two-fifteen.’
It was half-past three. ‘Maybe he went out the back way.’
‘Why should he? He never does unless he’s going into court.’
‘Blue eyes,’ said the woman plaintively, ‘and a coffee coloured mark on his neck.’
The sergeant sighed. ‘All Siamese cats have blue eyes and brown marks on their backs, madam.’ He picked up his pen and said to Burden, ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve been tied up all the afternoon, trying to get hold of the engineers to see to that lift. Inspector Letts said it wouldn’t come when he pressed the button. I reckon it’s stuck between floors.’
‘And I reckon,’ said Burden, ‘Mr Wexford is stuck in it.’
‘My God, you don’t mean it, sir?’
‘Give me that phone. D’you realise he’s been in there nearly two hours? Give me that phone.’
It was afternoon visiting at Stowerton Infirmary. It was also consultants’ day. That meant an exodus of hundreds of cars which the woman on traffic patrol usually controlled efficiently. Today, however, a huge bluish-green car with battered fins, parked half across the drive, blocked the exit. It was locked, keyless, immovable, and behind it a traffic jam stretched nose to tail from the car park.
In vain four ambulance men had tried to lift it and hump it against the gate of the porter’s lodge. Presently Vigo, the orthodentist, got out of his own car to lend a hand. He was bigger and more powerful than any of the ambulance men, but all their combined efforts couldn’t shift it.
‘Probably belongs to someone visiting a private patient,’ said Vigo to the consultant gynaecologist whose car had come to a standstill behind his.
‘Better get a porter to ring the private wing.’
‘And fast,’ said Vigo. ‘These people ought to be shot. I’ve got an appointment at four.’
And it was five to when Nurse Rose knocked on Mrs Fanshawe’s door. ‘Excuse me, Mr Jameson, but your car’s blocking the drive. Could you move it please? It’s not just visitors that want to get out.’ Her voice took on an awed tone. Outrage had been committed. ‘Personal request of Mr Vigo and Mr Delauney. So if you wouldn’t mind…’
Michael Jameson got up languidly. ‘I don’t know these guys.’ He gave Nurse Rose a long appraising look. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to get in bad with them, sweetheart. I’ll shift it.’
Nora Fanshawe touched his sleeve. ‘You’ll come back for me, Michael?’
‘Sure, don’t fuss.’ Nurse Rose opened the door for him and he walked out ahead of her. ‘Dead bore, this hospital visiting,’ the women in the room heard him say.
Mrs Fanshawe had painted her face for the first time since regaining consciousness. Now she touched up her thin lips with scarlet and rubbed at the eyeshadow which had settled in greasy streaks into the folds of her lids. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well what, Mother?’
‘I take it you’re going to marry that waster?’
‘I am and you’ll have to get used to it.’
‘Your father would never have allowed it if he were alive,’ said Mrs Fanshawe, twisting her rings.
‘If my father were alive, Michael wouldn’t want to marry me. I wouldn’t have any money you see. I’m being quite frank with you. I thought that’s what parents wanted, frankness from their children.’ She shrugged and flicked a fair hair from the shoulder of her blue suit. Her voice was ugly, stripped bald of convention and pretence. ‘I wrote to him and told him my father was dead.’ She laughed. ‘He came down here like a shot. I’ve bought him,’ she said. ‘I tried the product and liked it and now I’m going to keep it. The principle is that of the mail order catalogue.’
Mrs Fanshawe wasn’t shocked. She hadn’t taken her eyes from her daughter’s face and she hadn’t flinched. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop you. I won’t quarrel with you, Nora.’ Her voice didn’t waver. ‘You’re all I’ve got, all I’ve ever had.’
‘Then there is no reason why we shouldn’t be a happy little family, is there?’
‘A happy family! Frank you may be, but you’re deceiving yourself. He’s got his eye on that nurse already.’
‘I know.’
‘And you think you’ve bought him!’ All Mrs Fanshawe’s self-control couldn’t stop the bitterness breaking through. ‘Buying people! You know where you get it from, don’t you? Your father. You’re your father all over again, Nora. God knows, I tried to keep you innocent, but he taught you, he taught you people could be bought.’
‘Oh, no, Mother,’ said Nora Fanshawe equably. ‘You taught me. Shall we have some more tea?’ And she rang the bell.
At four-fifteen the lift slid down to the ground floor. The door began to slide and Burden felt sick, his bowels turned to water. He couldn’t look. The two engineers came down the stairs, running.
The foyer was full of people. Grinswold, the Chief Constable, Inspector Lewis and Letts, Martin, Loring, Camb and, nearest the lift, Dr Crocker.