Wexford 4 - The Best Man To Die Read Online Free Page A

The dog stopped and he was just about to congratulate himself on his authoritative and successful method of summoning her, when she made a plunging dart forward and seized the mass of cloth in her mouth.
       It moved with a heavy surge and the dog released it, her hackles rising. The slow and somehow primeval erecting of that mat of grey hairs brought a curious chill to Wexford’s blood. The sun seemed to go in. He forgot the black dog, coming ever nearer, and his joy in the morning went. Clytemnestra let out an unearthly keening howl, her lips snarling back and her tail a stiff prolongation of her backbone.
       The bundle she had disturbed eddied a few inches into the deeper water and as Wexford watched, a thin pale hand, lifeless as the agate-veined stones, rose slowly from the sodden cloth, its fingers hanging yet pointing towards him.

    He took off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers to his knees. The man and the child on the other side watched him with interest. He didn’t think they had yet seen the hand. Holding his shoes, he stepped on to the stones and crossed the river carefully. Clytemnestra came to him quickly and put her face against his bare leg. Wexford pushed aside the willows that hung like a pelmet and came to the rubbish pocket, where he knelt down. One shoe floated empty, the other was still on a foot. The dead man lay face-downwards and someone had smashed in the back of his head with a heavy smooth object. One of these very stones, Wexford guessed.
       The brambles shivered behind him and a footstep crunched.
       ‘Keep back,’ Wexford said. ‘Keep the child back.’
       He turned, shielding what lay in the water with his own big body. Downstream the child was playing with both dogs, throwing stones for them into the water.
       ‘Christ!’ said the man softly.
       'He’s dead,’ said Wexford. ‘I’m a police officer and . . .’
       ‘I know you. Chief Inspector Wexford.’ The man approached and Wexford couldn’t stop him. He looked down and gasped. ‘My God, I . . .’
       ‘Yes, it isn’t a pleasant sight.’ The thought came to Wexford that something very out of the way had happened. Not so much that here on a fine June morning a man lay murdered, but that he, Wexford had found him. Policemen don’t find bodies unless they are sent to look for them or unless someone else has found them first. ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked. The newcomer’s face was green. He looked as if he was about to be sick. ‘Will you go down to the town, to the nearest phone box and-get on to the station? Just tell them what you’ve seen. They’ll do the rest. Come on, man, pull yourself together.’
       ‘O.K., it’s just that . . .’
       ‘Perhaps you’d better let me have your name.’
       ‘Cullam, Maurice Cullam. I’ll go, I’ll go right away. It’s just that - well, last night I was having a drink with him at the Dragon.’
       ‘You know who it is then? You can’t see his face.’
       ‘I don’t need to. I’d know Charlie Hatton anywhere.’

Chapter 3

    He looked a right Charlie in those tails and striped trousers. That would be something funny to say to his best man when he came.
       ‘You and me, we look a pair of right Charlies, Charlie Hatton.’
       Quite witty really. Jack often thought he wasn’t quick enough to match Charlie’s easy repartee, but now he had thought of something that would make his friend smile.
       Dear old Charlie, he thought sentimentally, the best friend a man ever had. Generous to a fault, and if he wasn’t always strictly above-board - well, a man had to live. And Charlie knew how to live all right. The best of everything he had. Jack was ready to bet all the crisp honeymoon pound notes he had in his pocket that Charlie would be one of the few guests not wearing a hired morning coat. He had his own and not off the peg, either.
       Not that he looked half bad himself, he thought, admiring his