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

reflection. At his age boozing didn’t have much visible effect and he always had a red face anyway. He looked smashing, he decided, shyly proud, as good as the Duke of Edinburgh any day. Probably the Duke used an electric shaver though. Jack put another bit of cotton wool on the nick on his chin and he wondered if Marilyn was ready yet.
       Thanks to Charlie boy, they’d been able to splash a bit on the wedding and Marilyn could have the white satin and the four bridesmaids she’d set her heart on. It would have been a different story if they’d had to find the key money for the flat themselves. Trust Charlie to come up with a long-term interest-free loan. That way they’d be able to blow some of their own savings on having the flat done up nicely. How well it had all worked out! A fortnight away by the sea and when they came back, the flat all ready and waiting for them. And it was all thanks to Charlie.
       Moving away from the mirror, Jack looked into the future, twenty, thirty years hence. Charlie would be a really rich man by then. Jack would be very much surprised if his friend wouldn’t be living in one of those houses in Ploughman’s Lane like the one where he sometimes did electrical jobs with real old French furniture and real oil paintings and the kind of china you looked at but didn’t eat off. He and Charlie had had a good laugh over that particular house, but there had been something serious in Charlie’s laughter and Jack had guessed he aimed high.
       They’d still be mates of course, for there was no side to Charlie Hatton. It wouldn’t be beer and a hand of solo then, but dinner parties and bridge games with their wives in cocktail gowns and real jewellery. Jack grew dizzy as he thought of it, seeing them sitting with tall glasses on a shady patio and, strangely, seeing them too as they were now, untouched by the hand of time.
       Abruptly he came back to the present day, his wedding day. Charlie was taking a hell of a time about coming. Maybe there was some difficulty about Lilian’s dress or he was waiting for her to get back from the hairdresser’s. Charlie was dead keen on Lilian doing him credit and she always did, always looked as if she’d just stepped out of a bandbox. After Marilyn, she’d be the best dressed woman at the wed ding, blonde, shapely, in the green dress Marilyn had got so superstitious about. Jack dabbed at his chin again and went to the window to watch for Charlie.
       It was ten-thirty and the wedding was fixed for an hour’s time.

    She was blonde, shapely, pretty in Sheila Wexford’s style but without Sheila’s transcending beauty. Her face was rather blunt, the features unfinished putty dabs, and now it was swollen with crying. After they had told her Wexford and Burden sat helplessly while she flung herself face-downwards on the sofa and sobbed into the cushions.
       Presently Wexford moved over to her and touched her shoulder. She reached for his hand, clutched it and dug in her long nails. Then she struggled up, burying her face in his hand and her own. The expensive velvet cushions were blotched with her tears.
       Wexford glanced quickly around the smartly, even luxuriously, furnished room. Over the back of one of the chairs hung a blue and green flowered dress, a green coat, long wrist-buttoning gloves. In the middle of the long teak dining table lay Lilian Hatton’s wedding hat, an elaborate confection of satin leaves and tulle as green and fresh as the real leaves he could see through the picture window in the Kingsbrook meadows.
       ‘Mrs Hatton,’ he said gently and she raised her face obediently, ‘Mrs Hatton, weren’t you worried when your husband didn’t come home last night?’
       She didn’t speak. He repeated the question, and then she said in a voice choked with sobs, ‘I didn’t expect him home. I only half-expected him.’ She dropped Wexford’s hand, recoiling as if in taking it she had done something