Means Of Evil And Other Stories (8 page)

   Wexford nodded. By now Dr. Moss had dried up, having run out, presumably, of subject matter and witticisms. His teeth irradiated his face like lamps, and when his mouth was closed he looked rather ill-tempered and sinister. Wexford decided to try the direct and simple approach. He apologised.

   "I'd no intention of suggesting you'd been negligent, Dr. Moss. But put yourself in my position . . ."

   "Impossible!"

   "Very well. Let me put it this way. Try to understand that in my position I had no choice but to make enquiries."

   "Mrs. Betts might try an action for slander. She can count on my support. The Bettses had neither the opportunity nor the motive to do violence to Mrs. Wrangton, but a bunch of tongue-clacking old witches are allowed to take their characters away just the same."

   "Motive," said Wexford gently, "I'm afraid they did have, the straightforward one of getting rid of Mrs. Wrangton who had become an encumbrance to them, and of inheriting her house."

   "Nonsense." Momentarily the teeth showed in a white blaze. "They were going to get rid of her in any case. They would have had the house to themselves in any case. Mrs. Wrangton was going into a nursing home." He paused, enjoying the effect of what he had said. "For the rest of her days," he added with a touch of drama.

   Crocker shifted off the edge of the desk. "I never knew that."

   "No? Well, it was you who told her about a new nursing home opening in Stowerton, or so she said. She told me all about it that day Mrs. Betts called me when you'd gone away. Sometime at the end of May it was. She was having the house decorated for her daughter and son-in-law prior to her leaving."

   "Did she tell you that too?" asked Wexford.

   "No, but it was obvious. I can tell you exactly what happened during that visit if it makes you happy. That interfering harpy, Radcliffe, had just been bathing her, and when she'd dressed her she left. Thank God. I'd never met Mrs. Wrangton before. There was nothing wrong with her, bar extreme old age and her blood pressure up a bit, and I was rather narked that Mrs. Betts had called me out. Mrs. Wrangton said her daughter got nervous when she slept late in the mornings as she'd done that day and the day before. Wasn't to be wondered at, she said, considering she'd been sitting up in bed watching the World Cup on television till all hours. Only Mrs. Betts and her husband didn't know that and I wasn't to tell them. Well, we had a conspiratorial laugh over that, I liked her, she was a game old dear, and then she started talking about the nursing home——what's it called? Springfield? Sunnyside?"

   "Summerland," said Dr. Crocker.

   "Cost you a lot, that will, I said, and she said she'd got a good bit coming in which would die with her anyway. I assumed she meant an annuity. We talked for about five minutes and I got the impression she'd been tossing around this nursing home idea for months. I asked her what her daughter thought and she said . . ."

   "Yes?" prompted Wexford.

   "Oh, my God, people like you make one see sinister nuances in the most innocent remarks. It's just that she said, You'd reckon Doreen'd be only too glad to see the back of me, wouldn't you? I mean, it rather implied she wouldn't be glad. I don't know what she was inferring and I didn't ask. But you can rest assured Mrs. Betts had no motive for killing her mother. Leaving sentiment apart, it was all the same to her whether her mother was alive or dead. The Bettses would still have got the house and after her death Mrs. Wrangton's capital. The next time I saw her she was unconscious, she was dying. She did die, at seven-thirty, on June 2nd."

Both Wexford's parents had died before he was forty. His wife's mother had been dead twenty years, her father fifteen. None of these people had been beyond their seventies, so therefore Wexford had no personal experience of the geriatric problem. It seemed to him that for a woman like Mrs. Wrangton, to end one's days in a nursing home with companionship and good nursing and in pleasant surroundings was not so bad a fate. And an obvious blessing to the daughter and son-in-law whose affection for a parent might be renewed when they only encountered her for an hour or so a week. No, Doreen Betts and her husband had no motive for helping Mrs. Wrangton out of this world, for by retiring to Summerland she wouldn't even make inroads into that three or four thousand pounds of capital. Her pension and her annuity would cover the fees. Wexford wondered what those fees would be, and remembered vaguely from a few years back hearing a figure of twenty pounds a week mentioned in a similar connection. Somebody's old aunt, some friend of his wife's. You'd have to allow for inflation, of course, but surely it would cost no more than thirty pounds a week now. With the Retirement Pension at eighteen pounds and the annuity worth, say, another twenty, Mrs. Wrangton could amply have afforded Summerland.

   But she had died first——of natural causes. It no longer mattered that she and Harry Betts hadn't been on speaking terms, that no one had fetched Elsie Parrish, that Dr. Moss had been called out to visit a healthy woman, that Mrs. Betts had given orders to stop the painting. There was no motive. Eventually the tongues would cease to wag, Mrs. Wrangton's will would be proved, and the Bettses settle down to enjoy the rest of their lives in their newly decorated home.

   Wexford put it out of his head, apart from wondering whether he should visit Castle Road and drop a word of warning to the gossips. Immediately he saw how impossible this would be. The slander would be denied, and besides he hardly saw his function as extending so far. No, let it die a natural death——as Mrs. Wrangton had.

   On Monday morning he was having breakfast, his wife reading a letter just come from her sister in Wales.

   "Frances says Bill's mother has got to go into a nursing home at last." Bill was Wexford's brother-in-law. "It's either that or Fran having her, which really isn't on."

   Wexford, from behind his newspaper, made noises indicative of sympathy with and support for Frances. He was reading a verbatim report of the trial of some bank robbers.

   "Ninety pounds a week," said Dora.

   "What did you say?"

   "I was talking to myself, dear. You read your paper."

   "Did you say ninety pounds a week?"

   "That's right. For the nursing home. I shouldn't think Bill and Fran could stand that for long. It's getting on for five thousand a year."

   "But . . ." Wexford almost stammered, ". . . I thought a couple of years ago you said it was twenty a week for what's-her-name, Rosemary's aunt, wherever they put her?"

   "Darling," said Dora gently, "first of all, that wasn't a couple of years ago, it was at least
twelve
years ago. And secondly, haven't you heard of the rising cost of living?"

   An hour later he was in the matron's office at Summerland, having made no attempt to disguise who he was, but presenting himself as there to enquire about a prospective home for an aged relative of his wife's. Aunt Lilian. Such a woman had actually existed, perhaps still did exist in the remote Westmorland village from which the Wexfords had last heard of her in a letter dated 1959.

   The matron was an Irishwoman, Mrs. Corrigan. She seemed about the same age as Nurse Radcliffe. At her knee stood a boy of perhaps six, at her feet, playing with a toy tractor, was another of three. Outside the window three little girls were trying to coax a black cat from its refuge under a car. You might have thought this was a children's home but for the presence of half a dozen old women sitting on the lawn in a half circle, dozing, muttering to themselves or just staring. The grounds were full of flowers, mauve and white lilac everywhere, roses coming out. From behind a hedge came the sound of a lawn mower, plied perhaps by the philoprogenitive Mr. Corrigan.

   "Our fees are ninety-
five
pounds a week, Mr. Wexford," said the matron. "And with the extra for laundry and dry-cleaning, sure and you might say five thousand a year for a good round figure."

   "I see."

   "The ladies only have to share a room with one other lady. We bath them once a week and change their clothes once a week. And if you could please see to it your aunt only has synthetic fabrics, if you know what I mean, for the lot's popped in the washing machine all together. We like the fees a month in advance and paid on a banker's order, if you please."

   "I'm afraid I don't please," said Wexford. "Your charges are more than I expected. I shall have to make other arrangements."

   "Then there's no more to be said," said Mrs. Corrigan with a smile nearly equalling the candlepower of Dr. Moss's.

   "Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Corrigan, how do your——er, guests meet your fees? Five thousand a year is more than most incomes would be equal to."

   "Sure and aren't they widows, Mr. Wexford, and didn't their husbands leave them their houses? Mostly the ladies sell their houses, and with prices the way they are today that's enough to keep them in Summerland for four years or five."

Mrs. Wrangton had intended to sell her house, and she was having it redecorated inside and out in order to get a better price. She had intended to sell the roof over the Bettses' heads——no wonder she had implied to Dr. Moss that Doreen Betts would be sorry to see the back of her. What a woman! What malevolence at ninety-two! And who could have said she wouldn't have been within her moral as well as her legal rights to sell? It was her house. Doreen Wrangton might long ago have found a home of her own, ought perhaps to have done so, and as Doreen Betts might have expected her husband to provide one for her. It is universally admitted to be wrong to anticipate stepping into dead men's shoes. And yet what a monstrous revenge to have on an uncongenial son-in-law, a not always co-operative daughter. There was a subtlety about it that evoked Wexford's admiration nearly as much as its cruelty aroused his disgust. It was a motive all right, and a strong one.

   So at last he had found himself in Castle Road, in the Bertses' living room, confronting an elderly orphan and her husband. The room was papered in a silvery oyster colour, the woodwork ivory. He was sure that that door had never previously sported a shade lighter than chocolate brown, just as the hall walls had, until their recent coat of magnolia, been gloomily clothed in dark Lincrusta.

   When the two of them had protested bitterly about the gossip and the apparent inability of the police to get their priorities right, Doreen Betts agreed without too much mutiny to answer Wexford's questions. To the first one she reacted passionately.

   "Mother would never have done it. I know she wouldn't, it was all bluff with her. Even Mother wouldn't have been that cruel."

   Her husband pulled his moustache, slowly shuffling his slippered feet back and forth. His angry excitement had resulted in a drop of water appearing on the end of his nose. It hung there, trembling.

   Doreen Betts said, "I knew she didn't mean to go ahead with it when I said, Can I tell the builders to leave the upstairs? And she said, I daresay. That's what she said, I daresay, she said, I'm not bothered either way. Of course she wouldn't have gone ahead with it. You don't even get a room to yourself in that place. Ninety-five pounds a week! They'll put you to bed at eight o'clock, Mother, I said, so don't think they'll let you sit up till all hours watching TV."

   "Quite right," said Harry Betts ambiguously.

   "Why, if we'd known Mother meant to do a thing like that, we could have lived in Harry's flat when we got married. He had a nice little flat over the freezer centre in the High Street. It wasn't just one room like Mother went about saying, it was a proper flat, wasn't it, Harry? What'd we have done if Mother'd done a thing like that? We'd have had nowhere." Her husband's head-shaking, the trembling droplet, the fidgety feet, seemed suddenly to unnerve her. She said to him, distress in her voice, "I'm going to have a little talk to the officer on my own, dear."

   Wexford followed her into the room where Mrs. Wrangton had slept for the last years of her life. It was on the ground floor at the back, presumably originally designated as a dining room, with a pair of windows looking out onto a long narrow concrete terrace and a very long, very narrow garden. No redecorations had been carried out here. The walls were papered in a pattern of faded nasturtiums, the woodwork grained to look like walnut. Mrs. Wrangton's double bed was still there, the mattress uncovered, a pile of folded blankets on top of it. There was a television set in this room as well as in the front room, and it had been placed so that the occupant of the bed could watch it.