The door was open. Burden had to look. He stepped for ward, pushing people aside.
‘Gangway!’ said the doctor.
Wexford came out, grey in the face, the doctor’s arm about his shoulders. He took two heavy steps.
‘Bricked up,’ he said, ‘like a bloody nun!’
‘God, sir. Are you all right?’
‘It’s all in the book,’ Wexford gasped. ‘I’ve got it all down in the book. Nothing…’ he said, ‘nothing like a rarefied atmosphere for making the brain work. Cheaper than going up Everest, that lift.’
And then he collapsed into the sling Crocker and Letts made with their arms.
‘I’m just going off duty,’ said Nurse Rose, ‘and the night staff are in the kitchen, so you won’t mind finding your own way, will you?’ She peered at him in the dim light of the corridor. ‘Didn’t you come visiting Mrs Fanshawe? I thought so. You’ll know where to go, then. He’s in room five, next door but one to hers.’
Burden thanked her. Turning the corner, he came face to face with Mrs Wexford and Sheila.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s fine. No after-effects. They’re only keeping him in for the night to be on the safe side.’
‘Thank God!’
‘You really care about poor old Pop, don’t you?’ When she smiled, he could have kissed her, she looked so like her father. Crazy, really, that this enchanting perfect face was the copy and the essence of the heavy wrinkled face that had been haunting him all the time he had made out his arrest and read out the charge. He didn’t want to seem sentimental and he managed a cheerful grin. ‘He’s dying to see you,’ she said. ‘We were just a stop-gap.’
Wexford lay in bed in a room that was just like Mrs Fanshawe’s. He had an old red checked dressing gown across his shoulders and a fuzz of grey hair showed between the lapels of his pyjama jacket. A grin curled the corners of his mouth and his eyes snapped.
Tip-toeing, Burden crossed to the bed. Everyone in hospital tip-toes, except the staff, so he did too, glancing nervously about him. The cooking smell and the disinfectant smell with which the corridor was redolent were drowned in here by the carnations Mrs Wexford had brought her husband.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Perfectly all right, of course,’ Wexford said impatiently. ‘All those damned flowers. Makes the place look like a chapel of rest. I’d come out now only that bloody Crocker and his henchmen keep getting at me, sapping my strength.’ He sat up with a jerk and scowled. ‘Open that beer, will you? Sheila brought those cans in for me. She’s a good girl, chip off the old block.’
Burden rinsed the glass from Wexford’s supper tray and from the washbasin took the toothglass for himself. ‘A private room, eh? Very grand.’
Wexford chuckled. ‘Not my idea, Mike. They were heading for the general ward when Crocker remembered Monkey Matthews was in, having his veins done. We came to the conclusion it might be an embarrassment for him after I did him a couple of years ago for stealing by finding. Don’t worry, I’ll take care to tell him what saving his face has cost me.’ He looked round him complacently. ‘Eight quid a day, this room. Good thing I wasn’t in that lift any longer.’ He drank his beer, wiped his mouth with a man-size Kleenex. ‘Well, have you done the deed?’
‘At five-thirty.’
‘Pity I wasn’t there.’ Suddenly he shivered. ‘The skin of my teeth…’ Then he laughed. ‘Teeth!’ he said. ‘That’s funny.’
Footsteps that didn’t tip-toe sounded outside and Crocker marched in. ‘Who gave you leave to have a booze-up?’
‘Sit down, not on the bed. Nurse Rose doesn’t like it. We were just going to have a post-mortem. Interested?’
The doctor fetched himself a chair from the empty room next door. He flopped into it. ‘I’ve heard who it is over the grapevine. By God, you could have knocked me down with a feather.’
‘I leave that to others,’ said Wexford. ‘The intemperate fellows who aren’t content with feathers. They use stones.’ He met the doctor’s eyes and saw there the astonishment and the eagerness for enlightenment he loved to see. ‘Murderers aren’t unknown among the medical profession,’ he said. ‘What about Crippen? Buck Ruxton? This time it happened to be a dentist.’
Chapter 18
‘It’s always a problem,’ said Wexford, ‘to know where to begin. Where’s the beginning? I often think novelists must have my trouble. Well, I know they do. I used to know a chap who wrote books. He said it was easy to end and the middle just happened naturally, but he never knew where to begin. How far do you have to go back in a man’s life to find what makes him do things? To his childhood, to his parents, to Adam?’
‘Let’s not go back that far,’ said Burden. ‘We’ll be here all night.’
Wexford grinned at him. He banged his pillows and pulled their corners round his shoulders. ‘I think I’ll begin ten years ago,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry. You know how time flies.’
‘Vigo wasn’t here ten years ago.’
‘He was getting married. He married a rich girl, probably not entirely for her money. But the money set him up in practice here and bought his house for him. They had a child.’
‘It was mongoloid,’ said the doctor. ‘Been in an institution since it was six months old. Vigo took it very hard.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’ said Wexford. ‘Look at Vigo. What Hitler would have called the perfect Aryan type and clever with it. If you were stud farming humans, wouldn’t you choose Vigo as your ideal stallion?’ The doctor gave a grudging nod.
‘And if you were Vigo, wouldn’t you expect to sire splendid progeny?’
‘Everyone does.’
‘Maybe. Everyone hopes, let’s say, and sometimes the most unexpected people are lucky.’ He smiled to himself and finished the last drop of beer Sheila had brought. ‘I reckon Vigo blamed his wife. Don’t tell me that was unfair. Life’s unfair. They didn’t have any more children for eight years.’
The doctor leant forward. ‘They’ve got a son now,’ he sighed. ‘Poor kid.’
‘If he’s poor it’s his father’s fault,’ Wexford snapped. ‘Don’t give me that sentimental stuff. This is the real beginning, Mrs Vigo’s second pregnancy. She had high blood pressure, she got toxaemia.’
‘A threatened toxaemia, surely,’ the doctor corrected him pedantically.
‘Whatever it was, she was admitted to the Princess Louise Clinic in New Cavendish Street two months before the birth. You can imagine Vigo’s feelings, was it going to go wrong again?’
‘Toxaemia doesn’t lead to mongoloid babies.’
‘Oh, shut up!’ said Wexford irritably. ‘People don’t reason in cases like that. He was scared and depressed and he took up with one of the nurses he met when he was visiting his wife. Maybe he’d always been a bit of a philanderer. I’ve got my own reasons for thinking that.’
‘In your notes,’ said Burden, who had the book open on his lap, ‘you said he dropped Bridget Culross after the child was born healthy and normal.’
‘That’s conjecture. Let’s say he was too taken up with the child – he’s crazy about that child – to bother about outside interests. Did you check with the clinic?’
‘I did. Mrs Vigo was admitted last October and remained in the clinic until two weeks after the child was born at the end of December. Bridget Culross was on duty in the ward where her room was from November 1st until January 1st.’
Wexford leaned back. ‘It had to be someone with a Christian or surname beginning with J, you see. Jerome Fanshawe, we thought at first, but that couldn’t be because Mrs Fanshawe was past the age of childbearing. I seriously considered Michael Jameson. It wouldn’t at all surprise me to know he’s got a wife somewhere.’ He lowered his voice. Mrs Fanshawe was two doors down the corridor. ‘A Michael Jameson might just as well call himself Jay as Mike and he had the right kind of car. But we’ll come to that later. Anyway, it wasn’t either of them. It was Jolyon Vigo. With a name like that you’d be glad of a convenient abbreviation sometimes.’