Murder Being Once Done Read online

  'We thought we were acting for the best, Reg.'

  'Close friend!' Wexford exploded. 'What business has he got interfering with me?' Usually litter-conscious, he forgot his principles and, screwing the letter into a ball, hurled it among the bushes and the crumbling masonry.

  Howard burst out laughing. 'I spoke to my own doctor

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  about it,' he said, 'telling him what had been the matter with you and he said you Ludlow how diplomatic they are he said there were two opinions about it but he couldn't see that you'd come to any harm indulging er, your usual tastes. Still, Denise insisted we abide by what your own doctor said. And we did think it was your wish.'

  'I took you for a snob,' said his uncle. 'Rank and all that.'

  'Did you? That never struck me.' Howard bit his lip. 'You don't know how I've longed for a real talk instead of literary chit-chat, especially now when I'm short of men and up to my eyes in it.' Frowning, still concerned, he said, 'You must be frozen. Here comes my sergeant, so we can get away from ad these storeyed urns and animated busts.'

  A thickset man of about forty was approaching them from the direction of St Peter's. He wore the cheerful and practical air of someone totally insensitive to atmosphere, to that of the cemetery and that which subsisted between the two other men. Howard introduced him as Sergeant Clements and presented the chief inspector without saying that Wexford was his uncle or attempting to account for his sudden and surdy astonishing appearance at the scene of a crime.

  In such august company the sergeant knew better than to ask questions, or perhaps he had read the Montfort injunction.

  'Very pleased to meet you, sir.'

  'My uncle,' said Howard, relenting a little, 'is on holiday. He comes from Sussex.'

  'I daresay it's a change, sir. No green fields and cows and what-not round here.' He gave Wexford a respectful and somewhat indulgent smile before turning to the superintendent 'I've had another talk.with Tripper, sir, but I've got nothing more out of him.'

  'Right. We'll go back to the car. Mr Wexford will be lunching with me, and over lunch I'm going to try to persuade him to give us the benefit of his brains.'

  'We can certainly use them,' said the sergeant, and he fell back to allow the others to precede him out of the cemetery.

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  The Grand Duke was a little old pub Howard took him to on the corner of a mews in KenbourneLane.

  'I didn't know there were places like this left in London,' Wexford said, appreciating the linenfold panelling, the settles and the old mullioned glass in the windows. It was like home, the kind of inn to be found in Pomfret or Stowerton.

  'There aren't around here. Kenbourne's no Utopia. Would you believe, looking out of the window, that in an unpublished poem, Hood wrote:

  ' "O. to ride on the crest of a laden wain

  Between primrose banks in Kenbourne Lane"?'

  'What will you eat, Reg?'

  'I'm not supposed to eat anything much.'

  'Surely a little cold duck and some salad? The food's very good here.'

  Wexford felt almost dizzy, but he mustn't allow himself to break out entirely. It was a triumph of communication over misunderstanding that he was here with Howard at all and about to get his teeth into some real police work again without getting them into duck as well. The spread on the food counter looked mouth-wateringly enticing. He chose the least calorific, thin sliced red beef and ratatouille froide, and settled back with a sigh of contentment. Even the tall glass of apple juice which Howard presented to him with the assurance that it was made out of Cox's Oranges from Suffolk couldn't cloud his pleasure.

  Ever since his arrival in London he had felt that partial loss of identity which is common to everybody on holiday except the most seasoned of travellers. But instead of returning to him as he grew accustomed to the city, this ego of his, this essential Wexfordness, had seemed to continue its seeping away, until at last in the cemetery he had briefly but almost entirely lost his hold on it. That had been a frightening moment. Now, however, he felt more himself than he had done for days. This was like being with Mike at the Olive and Dove where, on so many satisfactory occasions, they had thrashed

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  out some,case over lunch, but now Howard was the instructor and he in Mike's role. He found he didn't mind this at all. He could even look with equanimity at Howard's lunch: a huge plateful of steak-and-kidney pudding, Jersey new potatoes and courgettes au gratin.

  For the first five minutes they ate and drank and talked a little more about this misunderstanding of theirs, and then Howard, opening their discussion in the clearest and most direct way, pushed a snapshot across the table.

  'This is the only photograph we have of her. Other may come to light, of course. It was in her handbag. Not very usual that, to carry photographs of oneself about on one. Perhaps she had some sentimental reason for it. Where and when it was taken we don't know.'

  The snapshot was too pale and murry for reproduction in a newspaper. It showed a thin fair girl in a cotton frock and heavy unsuitable shoes. Her face was a pale blob and even her own mother, as Wexford put it to himself, wouldn't have recognised her. In the background were some dusty-looking shrubs, a section of wall with coping along the top of it and something that looked like a clothes post.

  He handed it back and asked, 'Is Garmisch Terrace near here?'

  'The backs of the houses overlook the cemetery but on the opposite side to where we were. It's a beastly place. Monstrous houses put up around 1870 for city merchants who couldn't run to fifteen hundred a year for a palace in Queen's Gate. They're mostly let off into rooms now, or flatlets as they're euphemistically called. She had a room. She'd lived there for about two months.'

  'What did she do for a living?'

  'She worked as a receptionist in a television rental place. The shop is called Sytansound and it's in Lammas Grove. That's the street which runs off to the left at Kenbourne Circus and also skirts the cemetery. Apparently she went to work by taking a short-cut through the cemetery. Why do you look like that?'

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  'I was thinking of passing through that place every day.'

  'The local people are used to it. They don't notice it any more. You'd be surprised in the summer how many young housewives you see in there taking their babies for an afternoon's airing.'

  Wexford said, 'When and how did she die?'

  'Probably last Friday. I haven't had a full medical report yet, but she was strangled with her own silk scarf.'

  'Last Friday and no one reported her missing?'

  Howard shrugged. 'In Garmisch Terrace, Reg? Loveday Morgan wasn't living at home with her parents in some select suburb. They come and they go in Garmisch Terrace, they mind their own business, they don't ask questions. Wait till you hear Sergeant Clements on that subject.'

  'How about boy friends?'

  'She didn't have any, as far as we know. The body was identified by a girl called Peggy Pope who's the housekeeper at 22 Garmisch Terrace and she says Loveday had no friends. She came to Kenbourne Vale in January, but where she came from nobody seems to know. When she applied for the room she gave Mrs Pope an address in Fulham. We've checked on that. The street she named and the house she named are there all right but she never lived there. The owners of the house are a young married couple who have never let rooms. So we don't yet know where she came from and in a way we don't really know who she was.'

  Having built up the suspense in a way Wexford recogmsed, for it was the way he had himself used on countless occasions, Howard went away to fetch cheese and biscuits. He returned with more apple juice for his uncle, who was feeling so contented that he drank it obediently.

  'She lived in Garmisch Terrace by herself, very quietly,' Howard went on, 'and last Friday, February 25th, she went to work as usual, returning, as she occasionally did, during her lunchtime break. Mrs Pope supposed that she had gone back to work in the afternoon, but in fact, she didn't. She telephoned the manager of Sytansound to sa
y she was sick and that was

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  the last anyone heard of her.' He paused. 'She may have gone straight into the cemetery; she may not. The cemetery gates are closed each day at six, and on Fridays they were closed at that time as usual. Clements sometimes cuts through on his way home. He did that on Friday, spoke to Tripper, and Tripper closed the gates behind him at six sharp. Needless to say, Clements saw nothing out of the way. His route took him nowhere near the Montfort vault.'

  Wexford recognised this short pause as the cue for him to ask an intelligent question, and he asked one. 'How did you know who she was?'

  'Her handbag was beside her in the vault, brimming with information. Her address was on a bill from a dry cleaner's and this snapshot was there too. Besides that, there was a sheet of notepaper with two telephone numbers on it.'

  Wexford raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  'You rang those numbers, of course?'

  'Of course. That was among the first things we did. One was that of an hotel in Bayswater, a perfectly respectable, rather large, hotel. They told us they had advertised in a news- paper a vacancy for a receptionist and Loveday Morgan had replied to the advertisement. By phone. She didn't sound the sort of girl they wanted too shy and awkward, they said and she hadn't the necessary experience for the job.

  'The other number was that of a West End company called Notbourne Properties who are particularly well known in Notting Hill and Kenbourne Vale. Hence their name. They also had advertised a job, this time for a telephone girl. Loveday applied and actually got as far as an interview. That interview was at the end of the week before last, but they didn't intend to take her on. Apparently, she was badly dressed and, anyway, she wasn't familiar with the particular phone system they use.'

  'She wanted to change her job? Does anyone know why?'

  'More money, I imagine. We may be able to get some more information about that and her general circumstances from this Mrs Pope.'

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  'That's the woman who identified her? The housekeeper?'

  'Yes. Shall we wait and have coffee or would you like to go straight round to Garmisch Terrace?'

  'Skip the coffee,' said Wexford.

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  4 A little farther beyond that all things begin by little and little to wax pleasant; the air soft, temperate and gentle covered with green grass.

  ARMISCH TERRACE was straight and grey and forbid~J ding, a canyon whose sides were six-storey houses. All the houses were alike, all joined together, fla~fronted but for their protruding pillared porches, and, like the cemetery building, their proportions were somehow wrong. It had been an unhappy period for architecture, the time when they were built, a period in which those designers who had not adopted the new Gothic, were attempting to improve on the Georgian.

  This would have mattered less if some effort had been made to maintain these houses, but Wexford, looking at them with a sinking heart, could not see a single freshly painted facade. Their plaster was cracked and their pillars streaked where water had run through dust. Rubbish clogged the basement areas and these were separated from the pavement by broken railings patched with wire netting. Instead of trees, parking meters stood in a grey row, an avenue of them leading up the cul-de-sac to where it ended in a red-brick church.

  There were few people about, a turbaned Sikh lugging his dustbin up area steps, an old woman wheeling a pram filled apparently with jumble-sale spoils, a pregnant black girl whose kingfisher-blue raincoat provided the only colour in the

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  street. The wind blew paper out of the Sikh's dustbin, whirling sheets of newsprint up into the grey sky. It teased at the girls woolly hair which, in a pathetic attempt to be accepted, to be in fashion, she was trying to grow long. Wexford wondered sadly about these coloured people who must have looked to a promised land and had found instead the bitter indecency of Garmisch Terrace.

  'Would anyone live here from choice?' he said to Sergeant Clements, who, while Howard studied a report in the car, had attached himself to him as mentor, guide, and possibly protector.

  'You may well ask, sir,' said the sergeant approvingly. His manner was not quite that of the schoolmaster addressing a promising pupil. Wexford's rank and age were recognised and respected, but he was made aware of the age-old advantage of the townsman over the greenhorn from the country. Clements' plump face, a face which seemed not to have changed much since he was a fat-checked, rosebud-mouthed schoolboy, wore an expression both smug and discontented. 'They like it, you see,' he explained. 'They like muck and living four to a room and chucking their gash about and prowling all night and sleeping all day.' He scowled at a young man and woman who, arm in arm, crossed the road and sat down on the pavement outside the church where they began to eat crisps out of a bag. 'They like dropping in on their friends at midnight and dossing down on the floor among the fag-ends because the last bus has gone. Ask 'em and most of 'em don't know where they live, here this week, there the next, catch as catch can and then move on. They don't live like you or me sir. They live like those little furry moles you have down in the country, always burrowing about in the dark.'

  Wexford recognised in the sergeant a type of policeman which is all too common. Policemen see so much of the seamy side of life and, lacking the social worker's particular kind of training, many of them become crudely cynical instead of learning a merciful outlook. His own Mike Burden came

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  dangerously near sometimes to being such a one, but his intelligence saved him. Wexford didn't think much of the sergeant's intelligence, although he couldn't help rather lilting him.

  'Poverty and misery aren't encouragements to an orderly life,' he said, smiling to take the sting out of the admonition.

  Clements didn't take this as a rebuke but shook his head at so much innocence.

  'I was referring to the young, sir, the young layabouts like that pair over there. But you'll learn. A couple of weeks in Kenbourne Vale and you'll get your eyes opened. Why, when I first came here I thought hash was mutton stew and S.T.D. a dialling system.'

  Perfectly aware of the significance of these terms, Wexford said nothing. but glanced towards the car. He was beginning to feel chilly and at a nod from Howard he moved under the porch of number 22. That a lecture, contrasting the manners of modern youth with the zeal, ambition and impeccable morality of Clements' contemporaries in his own young days, was imminent he felt sure, and he hoped to avoid. But the sergeant followed him, stamping his feet on the dirty step, and launched into the very diatribe Wexford most feared. For a couple of minutes he let him have his head and then he interrupted.

  'About Loveday Morgan . . .'

  'So-called,' said Clements darkly. 'That wasn't her real name. Now, I ask you, is it likely to be? We checked her at Somerset House. Plenty of Morgan girls but no Loveday Morgan. She just called herself that. Why? You may well ask. Girls can themselves all sorts of things these days. Now, let me give you an illustration of what I mean . . .'

  But before he could, Howard had joined them and silenced him with an unusually cold Iook. There was a row of bells beside the front door with numbers instead of nameplates.

  'The housekeeper lives in the basement,' said Howard, 'so .we may as well try Flat One.' He rang the bell and a voice snapped what sounded like 'Teal' out of the entry phone.

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  'I beg your pardon?'

  'This is Ivan Teal. Flat One. Who are you?'

  'Detective Superintendent Fortune. I want Mrs Pope.'

  'Ah,' said the voice. 'You want Flat Fifteen. The thing that works the door is broken. I'll come down.'

  'Flats!' said the sergeant while they waited. 'That's a laugh. They aren't any of 'em flats. They're rooms with a tap and a gas meter, but our girl was paying seven quid a week for hers and thee are only two loos in the whole dump. What a world!' He patted Wexford's shoulder. 'Brace yourself for what's coming now, sir. Whoever this Teal is he won't look human.'

  But he did. The only shock Wexfor
d felt was in confronting a man nearly as old as himself, a shortish, well-muscled man with thick grey hair worn rather long.

  'Sorry to keep you waiting,' he said. 'It's a long way down.' He stared at the three men, unsmiling, insolent in a calculating way. It was a look Wexford had often seen on faces be- fore, but they had almost always been young faces. Teal had, moreover, a smooth upper-class accent. He wore a spotlessly clean white sweater and smelt of Faberge's Aphrodisia. 'I sup- pose we're all going to be persecuted now.'

  'We don't persecute people, Mr Teal.'

  'No? You've changed then. You used to persecute me.'

  Assuming that Howard had given him carte blanche to question possible witnesses if he chose, Wexford said, 'Did you know Loveday Morgan?'

  'I know everybody here,' Teal said, 'the oldest inhabitants and the ships that pass in the night. I who have sat by Thebes below the wall . . .' He grinned suddenly. 'Flat One if you want me.'

  He led them to the basement stairs and went off without saying any more.

  'A curious old queen,' said Howard. 'Fifteen years in this hole . . . God! Corne on, it's down here.'

  The stairs were narrow and carpeted in a thin much-worn haircord. They led down to a largish lofty hall, long ago

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  painted dark crimson, but this paint was peeling away, leaving white islands shaped like fantastic continents, so that the walls might have been maps of some other unknown world, a charted Utopia. Furniture, that looked too big to go up those stairs although it must have come down them, a sideboard, a huge bookcase crammed with dusty volumes, filled most of the floor space. There were three closed doors, each with an overflowing dustbin on its threshold, and the place smelt of decaying rubbish.

  Wexford had never seen anything like this before, but the interior of Flat Fifteen was less unfamiliar. It reminded him of certain Kingsmarkham cottages he had been in. Here was the same squalor that is always present when edibles and washables are thrown into juxtaposition, opened cans among dirty socks, and here in one of those battered prams was a baby with a food-stained face such as town and country alike produce. It was deplorable, of course, that this young girl and her child should have to live in a subterranean cavern, perpetually in artificial light; on the other hand, daylight would have revealed even more awfully the broken armchairs and the appalling carpet. In a way, this was a work of art, so carefully had some female relative of the landlord's repaired it. Wexford couldn't tell whether it was a blue carpet mended with crimson or a piece of red weaving incorporating patches of blue Axminster. The whole of it was coated with stains, ground-in food and the housekeeper's hair combings.