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

her beauty was not an enlargement or an enhancement of their near-handsomeness. She looked like her father. The first time Wexford noticed this - she was then about six - he almost hooted aloud, so grotesque was the likeness between this exquisite piece of doll’s flesh and her gross progenitor. And yet that high broad forehead was his, the little tilted nose was his, his the pointed - although in her case, flat - ears, and in her huge grey eyes he saw his own little ones. When he was young his hair had been that flaxen gold too, as soft and as fine. Only hope she doesn’t end up looking like her dad, he thought sometimes with a rich inner guffaw.
       But on the following morning his feelings towards his younger daughter were neither tender nor amused. The dog had awakened him at ten to seven with long-drawn howls and now, a quarter of an hour later; he stood on the threshold of Sheila’s bedroom, glowering.
       ‘This isn’t a boarding kennels, you know,’ he said. ‘Can’t you hear her?’
       ‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound, Pop? Poor darling, she only wants to be taken out.’
       ‘What did you call her?’
       ‘The Acrylic Swoofle Hound. She’s a mongrel really, but that’s what Sebastian calls her. She looks as if she’s made of man-made fibres you see. Don’t you think it’s funny?’
       ‘Not particularly. Why can’t this Sebastian look after his own dog?’
       ‘He’s gone to Switzerland,’ said Sheila. ‘His plane must have gone by now.’ She surfaced from under the sheets and her father saw that her hair was wound on huge electrically heated rollers. ‘I felt awful letting him walk all that way to the station last night.’ She added accusingly, ‘But you had the car.’
       ‘It’s my car,’ Wexford almost shouted. This argument he knew of old was hopeless and he listened to his own voice with a kind of horror as a note of pleading crept into it. ‘If the dog wants to go out, hadn’t you better get up and take her?’
       ‘I can’t. I’ve just set my hair.’ Downstairs Clytemnestra let out a howl that ended in a series of urgent yelps. Sheila threw back the bedclothes and sat up, a vision in pink baby doll pyjamas.
       ‘God almighty!’ Wexford exploded. ‘You can’t take your friend’s dog out but you can get up at the crack of dawn to set your hair.’
       ‘Daddy. . .’ The wheedling tone as well as the now seldom-used paternal appellation told Wexford that a monstrous request was to be made of him. He glared, drawing his brows together in the manner that made Kingsmarkham’s petty offenders tremble. ‘Daddy, duck, it’s a gorgeous morning and you know what Dr Crocket said about your weight and I have just set my hair. . .’
       ‘I am going to take a shower,’ Wexford said coldly.
       He took it. When he emerged from the bathroom the dog was still howling and pop music was issuing from behind Sheila’s door. A degenerate male voice exhorted its hearers to give it love or let it die in peace.
       ‘There seems to be an awful lot of noise going on, darling,’ said Mrs Wexford sleepily.
       ‘You’re joking.’
       He opened Sheila’s door. She was applying a face pack. ‘Just this once, then,’ said the chief inspector. ‘I’m only doing it because I want your mother to have a quiet lie-in, so you can turn that thing off for a start.’
       ‘You are an angel, Daddy,’ said Sheila, and she added dreamily, ‘I expect Clytemnestra has spent a penny by now.’

    Clytemnestra. Of all the stupid pretentious names for a dog . . . But what else could you expect of someone called Sebastian? She had not, however, yet “spent a penny”. She flung herself on Wexford, yelping frantically, and when he pushed her away, ran round him in circles, wildly gyrating her tail and flapping her knitted ears.
       Wexford found the lead, obligingly left by Sheila in a prominent position on top of the refrigerator. Undoubtedly it was going