Murder Being Once Done (4 page)

He shivered a little. The vault smelt of decay. Not surely of the dead Montforts, passed long ago to dust, but of rotted grave flowers and stagnant water and unventilated age. A nasty place. She had been twenty, he thought, and he hoped she had died quickly and not in here. What are right and wrong? Today one thing, another tomorrow. Death only is real.

He turned back towards the steps and, as he did so, he heard a sound above him, a footfall on the overgrown gravel path. Some attendant, no doubt. He set his foot on the bottom stair, looking up at the rectangle of dingy light between door and frame. And then, as he was about to speak and declare his presence, there appeared in the aperture, gaunt and severe, the face of his nephew.

You conceive in your mind either none at all or else a very false image and similitude of this thing.

Everyone is familiar with the sensation of wanting the earth to swallow him when he is caught in embarrassing circumstances. And what more appropriate plot of earth than this, thought Wexford, aghast. These acres, choked with the dead, might surely receive one more. There was, however, nothing for it but to mount the stairs and face the music.

Howard, peering down into semi-darkness, had not at first recognized the intruder. When he did, when Wexford, awkwardly brushing cobwebs from his coat, emerged on to the path, his face registered simple blank astonishment.

‘Good God. Reg,’ he said.

He looked his uncle up and down, then stared into the vault, as it he though himself the victim of some monstrous delusion. Either this was not Wexford, but some Kenbournite disguised to resemble him, or else this was not Kenbourne Vale cemetery. It took him a few moments to recover and then he said:

‘I thought you wanted a holiday from all this sort of thing.’

It was stupid to stand there like a schoolboy. In general, embarrassment was foreign to Wexford and he brimmed over with self-confidence. Now he told himself that he was catching criminals when this man was chewing on a teething ring and he said rather coldly, ‘Did you? I can’t imagine why,’ Never apologize, never explain. ‘Don’t let me keep you from your work. I’ve a bus to catch.’

Howard’s eyes narrowed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not going like that.’ He always spoke quietly, in measured tones. ‘I won’t have that. If you wanted to see the vault, why didn’t you say last night? I’d have brought you with me this morning. If you wanted the inside stuff on the case, you only had to ask.’

Absurd as it was, undignified, to stand arguing in the bitter cold among toppled gravestones, Wexford couldn’t leave it like that. All his resentment had boiled to the surface.

‘Ask?’ he shouted. ‘Ask you when you’ve made a point of excluding me from everything to do with your work? When you and Denise have conspired to keep quiet about it like a couple of parents turning off the television in front of the child when the sexy play starts? I know when I’m not wanted.
Ask!
’

Howard’s face had fallen glumly at the beginning of this speech, but now a faint smile twitched his lips. He felt in the pocket of his coat while Wexford leaned against the vault, his arms folded defiantly.

‘Here, read that. It came two days before you did.’ Reassured by the evidence he had produced, Howard spoke firmly now. ‘Read it, Reg.’

Suspiciously Wexford took the letter. Without his glasses he could only just read it, but he could make out enough. The signature, ‘Leonard Crocker’, leered blackly at him. ‘. . . I am confident I can rely on your good sense . . . Nothing he wants more than to get completely away from everything connected with police work . . . Better not let him come into any contact with . . .’

‘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 about it,’ he said, ‘telling him what had been the matter with you and he said – you know 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 all 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 this sudden and surely 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.

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

‘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:

‘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 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. Others 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 muzzy 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 recognized 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?’

‘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 recognized, 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 say she was sick and that was 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 recognized 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, aperfectly respectable, rather large, hotel. They told us they had advertised in a newspaper 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.’

‘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?’