‘Naturally he paid up,’ said Wexford. ‘Paid and paid. My guess is that when he phoned the first time Hatton asked him to draw a thousand pounds immediately from his bank, a sum which he was to give to Hatton, and did give him, during his visit to Ploughman’s Lane that afternoon, the afternoon of May 21st. Must have been rather bizarre, mustn’t it, that consultation of Hatton’s? The mind boggles, as they say. You have to picture the blackmailer lying back in his chair with his mouth open while his victim, desperate, at bay, if you like, probed about, measuring him for his new teeth.’
‘On the following day, May 22nd, we know Hatton paid five hundred pounds into his own account, keeping two hundred for the Pertwees’ key money and the remaining three hundred for incidental expenses, furniture, clothes and other frivolity. The weekly payments of fifty pounds a time followed at once. I reckon Hatton got Vigo to leave the money in some prearranged hiding place down by the river on Friday nights somewhere along the route Hatton took on his way home from the darts club. And one Friday night…’
‘Yes, why that particular Friday?’
‘Who can say at what point the victim of blackmail reaches the end of his tether?’
‘Mrs Fanshawe,’ put in Burden unexpectedly. ‘You see, that wasn’t quite right, what you said about the Fanshawes’ intervention having come to an end. Mrs Fanshawe regained consciousness the day before Hatton was killed. It was in the morning papers, just a paragraph, but it was there.’
‘You’ve got something there, Mike. Nora was still missing, but once Mrs Fanshawe could talk, Vigo might believe she’d tell us the girl’s body couldn’t be that of her daughter. Hatton was an important witness with someone else now to back up his story. Once he’d had all he wanted out of Vigo…’
The doctor got up, stood for a moment staring at Wexford’s flowers and then said, ‘It’s a good story, but it’s impossible. It couldn’t have happened that way.’ Wexford smiled at him. Crocker said irritably, ‘What are you grinning like that for? I tell you there’s an obvious flaw. If anyone throws a body out of a car, even feet first, it’s going to fall well over to the left. Vigo would have had to be driving right on the grass section itself for the girl’s head to have been in the fast lane. And as to that theory of yours about the head being on his lap to stop bloodstains getting on the passenger seat, it’s nonsense. That way her feet would have been in the fast lane and Fanshawe would have swerved to the left to avoid her head.’
He stopped and gave a defiant snort as the nurse came back with a sleeping pill.
‘I don’t want that,’ said Wexford. He slid down in the bed and pulled up the covers. ‘I’ll sleep, I’m tired.’ Over the top of the sheet he said, ‘Nice of you two to come. Oh, and by the way, it’s a foreign car. Left-hand drive. Good night.’
Chapter 19
‘Electrician,’ said Jack Pertwee on the doorstep. ‘You’ve got a switch that wants fixing.’
‘Not me,’ said the girl. ‘I only work here. Wait a bit… Is this it?’ She fumbled among some loose sheets of paper on a table beneath the mullioned window and her face reddened with indignation. ‘You was supposed to come last week.’
‘I was off last week. This is my first day back. Don’t work yourself up. I’ve been here before. I can find my own way.’
His first day back. His first job on his first day, the first return to normal routine after the earthquake. Jack didn’t know why he had chosen to come here – there were a dozen names who needed him on his list. Perhaps it was because some unformed unrecognised hunger in his subconscious cried for the solace and the refreshment of looking on beautiful things; perhaps because this place was unique in his experience, alien, and remote from anywhere he had ever been with Charlie.
But as always when he found himself at the house in Ploughman’s Lane, a clumsiness dragged at his feet and his deft fingers began to feel all thumbs. He was like a barbarian who, having entered a forsaken Roman villa, stood dazzled and amazed, overcome by the awe of ignorance. He crossed the hall and pretending to himself that he did not know the precise location of the switch – there was no need to, he was alone now – he opened door after door to peer in wonderment at the treasures within. A muttered ‘Pardon me, lady’ would have been his defence if one of them had been occupied but there was no one about and Jack looked his fill undisturbed at velvet and silk, dark tables inlaid with ivory, pictures in gilt frames, flowered china holding real flowers, a bust in bronze, a pomander whose orange spicy scent was brought to him on warm sunlight.
Afterwards he was unable to say what had suddenly brought Charlie so vividly to his mind, except perhaps that the memory of his dead friend was never far from it. Maybe this flash of pain, sharper and more real than any he had yet felt, came when he opened the door of the Chinese room. It was here, just inside the door, that his task awaited him and he stepped for a moment on the threshold stunned into immobility by the strange rich colours. It was too early yet for the sun to have reached the back of the house but the reds and golds, the unearthly sea greens and citrus yellows, blazed fiercely enough in shadow. Jack put down his tool bag and gazed about him numbly. He had been here before and yet it seemed to him that he had never seen the room until this moment. It was as if his nerves had been stripped raw and, unprotected, received the impact of these glorious yet intolerable colours in a series of vibrations like electric shocks.
Half in a trance he approached the chessmen that Charlie had called an army and saw in the face of one of them, a red knight, the perfect facsimile of his dead friend’s face, sharp, cunning, astute and kind. A longing to possess and preserve it seized him but he was afraid even to touch the delicate carved jade and he heard himself give a low sob.
It was his awed and perhaps childlike descriptions of this house which had, he supposed, led Charlie here. Just as he, Jack, might have gone to the grocer’s, so Charlie Hatton had come here to buy the best. Jack’s sorrow dissolved in admiration of that audacity. His friend had penetrated this museum too and that not as a servant or a workman but as a customer. Vigo had brought him into this room and drunk with him. Jack could imagine Charlie’s cocky poise, his hard brown hands even daring to lift a cup or finger a silk picture while he commented on its quality, its desirability, with brash impudence. Had he recognised himself at the head of that scarlet army? And the Philistines slew Jonathan… How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!
Jack turned away from the sharp little faces that seemed to scrutinise him and, opening his bag, squatted down in front of it. He felt worn out, exhausted at ten in the morning, and the girl’s voice behind him made him jump.
‘Thought you might fancy a cup of tea.’
He could guess his own expression and he didn’t want her to see his face. ‘Mr or Mrs about?’ he asked. ‘I’d better see one of them.’
‘Haven’t you heard then? She’s gone away and taken the boy. The police arrested him yesterday for killing that lorry driver.’
There had been tears in Jack’s eyes and now his eyelids burned as they sometimes did after an evening with Charlie in the smoke-filled bar of the Dragon. He was staring into the heap of tools but not seeing them. His brain had become an empty red space. He got to his feet and there was a hammer in his hand, although he couldn’t remember selecting it from the heap.
The red light before his eyes split into a spectrum of insane red and gold and sea green that roared as it twisted and leapt about him, as if a kaleidoscope could make sound as varied and as fantastic as its changing pictures. Behind him another, shriller noise echoed. The girl had begun to scream.