‘You say he dropped the girl. Why did he take up with her again?’
‘A man has a child,’ said Wexford. ‘If he worships the child it may, for a while, bring him closer to his wife. But these things wear off. Can the leopard change his spots? The girl thought she’d a chance of getting him to marry her. No doubt, he’d even considered that when he thought his wife wasn’t ever going to give him a child. Now he wanted his bit of fun on the side but he wasn’t going to lose his son for it. Not on your life. And that’s the crux.’
The doctor crossed his legs and shifted his chair a little. ‘Where does Charlie Hatton come into all this?’
Wexford didn’t answer him directly. Instead he said, ‘Vigo and Culross were carrying on their affair intermittently. If it wasn’t all that of a regular thing, that’s probably because the girl nagged him about marriage and he stalled.’
‘You can’t possibly know that,’ Burden objected.
Wexford said loftily, ‘I understand human nature. On the 18th of May Bridget Culross had a long weekend off and, by chance, the Blake Society were also having their weekend conference in Brighton over the next three days. Vigo picked Culross up at Marble Arch and drove her to Brighton in his car, a big Plymouth sedan.’
‘How do you know it was the Blake Society? Why not the Gibbonites?’
‘Vigo’s got Blake drawings all over his hall walls. Did you check their room bookings?’
‘They booked in at the Majestic in their own names. Two adjoining rooms. They vacated them on Monday afternoon, Monday May 20th.’
Wexford nodded. ‘Perhaps it was their first weekend together. Bridget Culross spent it pressurising Vigo into agreeing to divorce his wife. Or trying to. I don’t know what happened. How could I? I’ll make a guess that she knew they’d have to pass through Kingsmarkham, or near it, on their way back to London, and she tried to persuade Vigo to take her back with him to the house in Ploughman’s Lane and confront his wife together.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Men don’t like that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘They had a fight. Want to know where? I guess she put the pressure on really hard when they reached the point where the road passes nearest to Kingsmarkham. That’s about three miles south of the spot where the body was found. No doubt they got out of the car and my guess is the girl said she’d make her way to Ploughman’s Lane on her own if he wouldn’t come with her. Vigo’s a big powerful man. They struggled, she fell and hit her head. He had an unconscious, perhaps dead, girl on his hands. You see his dilemma?’
‘Whatever he did next, his wife would find out, divorce him and get custody of the child,’ said Burden.
‘Exactly. He began some quick thinking. First remove all identification from the expensive handbag he had given her himself. No doubt, a good many people knew where she had gone, but she had assured him no one knew his name. Vigo’s an intelligent man, a medical man who knows something about police methods. They wouldn’t search for a girl with a reputation like Bridget Culross’s and no near relatives to give a damn. Suppose she was found dead in the road, knocked down by a passing vehicle? It would be assumed she’d quarrelled with her boy-friend, hitched a lift to Stowerton and been knocked down crossing the road or trying to hitch a second lift. He put her on the passenger seat, laying her flat with her head on his lap so as not to mark the seat with blood. Probably he had a newspaper or an old rug to cover his knees, something he could burn when he got home.’
‘He entered the by-pass where at that time of night and during the week, the road was comparatively clear. Now he wouldn’t dare drive too fast – no one could open a car door and throw a body out at any speed – so he kept to the slow lane.’
‘What then?’
‘Things went according to plan. He drove along at twenty or thirty miles an hour and when there were no other vehicles in sight, he shot the girl out and she landed as he had expected with her head well over into the fast lane…’
‘Wait a minute,’ said the doctor sharply. ‘That’s not possible. It can’t be done. We tried it and…’
‘Wait a minute by all means,’ said Wexford, and in execrable French, ‘Pas devant les infirmieres.’
‘Tea, coffee, Ovaltine or Horlicks,’ said a bright voice whose owner had tapped on the glass panel in the door.
‘Ovaltine would be very wholesome,’ said Wexford blandly. ‘Thank you kindly.’
‘A chiel’s among ye, taking notes,’ said Wexford. ‘In other words, Charlie Hatton.’ He sipped his Ovaltine with an inscrutable expression. ‘He had parked his lorry in the lay-by just over the brow of the hill and was taking the air in the field on the other side of the hedge.’
‘You mean he saw Vigo push a girl out of his car and did nothing about it?’
‘Depends by what you mean by nothing. In my experience the Charlie Hattons of this world aren’t over-anxious to get involved with the police even as indignant observers. Hatton did something. He blackmailed Vigo.’
‘Can I have a couple of your grapes?’ said the doctor. ‘Thanks. The only grapes I ever taste are the ones I nick from my patients.’ He put one in his mouth and chewed it, seeds and all. ‘Did he know Vigo?’
‘By sight, I daresay, or else he knew the car. You’ll get appendicitis.’
‘Rubbish, old wives’ tale. Anyhow, I’ve had it. What happened next?’
Wexford took another Kleenex and wiped his mouth.
‘Hatton went home to his wife. Five minutes later Jerome Fanshawe came along, driving like the clappers, spotted the girl in the road too late and shouted out, “My God!” She was lying, remember, with her body and legs in the middle lane and her head over the fast lane. Fanshawe swerved. Wouldn’t it be instinctive in those circumstances to avoid the head at all costs? So he swerved to the right, mounted the turfed centre section and crashed into a tree. That, I think, sums up the entire intervention of the Fanshawes into this case. For once in his life, Fanshawe was the innocent victim.’
Burden nodded agreement and took up the tale. ‘On the following morning,’ he said, ‘Hatton mulled over the whole business. He made his telephone call about the flat for Pertwee and then went down to see it with the girl Marilyn.
Immediately there was a call on his purse. The tenant of the flat wanted two hundred pounds key money.’
‘And that clinched it,’ said Wexford. ‘He left Marilyn at the Olive and Dove and she saw him go into a phone box. We may be sure he was phoning Vigo, making an appointment for the afternoon.’
‘I thought you said he made the appointment later from his own home?’ said the doctor.
‘He phoned again from his own home. That was just a blind for his wife. You may be sure he’d already made it clear to Vigo what he wanted and that he would phone again as if legitimately asking for an appointment. Of course it happened that way. If it hadn’t, do you suppose Vigo would have agreed to an appointment that same day, only an hour afterwards? He’s a busy man, booked up weeks in advance. Charlie Hatton wasn’t even a patient of his. I’ve no doubt that in the morning Charlie told him he wanted hush money out of him and he’d have the best set of false teeth Vigo could provide. Free of charge, of course.’
‘It must have been a hell of a shock to Vigo,’ said Crocker thoughtfully. ‘The night before he’d taken a risk and acted on the spur of the moment. The chances then of its coming out were fairly high, I’d have thought. But Fanshawe’s crash was an unforeseen stroke of luck for him. Seeing it in the morning paper and seeing that the girl had been identified as Nora Fanshawe made him safe. By the time the real Nora turned up things would be so confused, the truth would very likely never come out. Who would have imagined his actions had been seen?’