Murder Being Once Done (5 page)

‘Skip the coffee,’ said Wexford.

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.

Garmisch Terrace was straight and grey and forbidding, a canyon whose sides were six-storey houses. All the houses were alike, all joined together, flat-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 façade. 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 street. The wind blew paper out of the Sikh’s dustbin, whirling sheets of newsprint up into the grey sky. It teased at the girl’s 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.

‘Wold anyone live here from choice?’ he said to Sergeant Clements, who, while Howard studied are port 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 recognized 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-cheeked, 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 recognized 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 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 liking 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 STD 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 call 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 look. 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.

‘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 there 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 Wexford 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 before, 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 suppose 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 hold . . . God! Come 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 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.

She alone of the room’s contents could have stood up to the searching light of day. Her clothes were awful, as dirty and dilapidated as the chair coverings, and dust clung to her greasy black hair, but she was beautiful. She was easily the most beautiful woman he had seen since he came to London. Hers was the loveliness of those film stars he remembered from his youth in the days before actresses looked like ordinary women. In her exquisite face he saw something of a Carole Lombard, something of a Loretta Young. Sullen and dirty though she was, he could not take his eyes off her.

Howard and Clements seemed totally unaffected. No doubt they were too young to have his memories. Perhaps they were too efficient to be swayed by beauty. And the girl’s manner didn’t match her looks. She sat on the arm of a chair, biting her nails and staring at them with a sulky frown.

‘Just a few questions, please, Mrs Pope,’ said Howard.

‘Miss Pope. I’m not married.’ Her voice was rough and low. ‘What d’you want to know? I can’t spare very long. I’ve got the bins to take up if Johnny doesn’t come back.’

‘Johnny?’

‘My friend that I live with.’ She cocked a thumb in the direction of the baby and said, ‘Her father. He said he’d come back and help me when he’d got his Social Security, but he always makes himself bloody scarce on bin day. God, I don’t know why I don’t meet up with any ordinary people, nothing but layabouts.’

‘Loveday Morgan wasn’t a layabout.’

‘She had a job, if that’s what you mean.’ The baby had begun to grizzle. Peggy Pope picked up a dummy from the floor, wiped it on her cardigan and thrust it into the child’s mouth. ‘God knows how she kept it, she was so
thick
. She couldn’t make her meter work and had to come to me to know where to buy a light bulb. When she first came here I even had to show her how to make a phone call. Oh, they all impose on me, but never the way she did. And then she had the nerve to try and get Johnny away from me.’

‘Really?’ said Howard encouragingly. ‘I think you should tell us that, Mrs Pope.’

‘
Miss
Pope. Look, I’ve got to get the bins up. Anyway, there wasn’t anything in it, not on Johnny’s side. Loveday was so bloody obvious about it, always coming down here to chat him up when I was out, and it got worse the last couple of weeks. I’d come back and find her sitting here, staring at Johnny, or making out she was fond of the baby. I asked him what she was up to. What d’you talk about, for God’s sake? I said. Nothing, he said. She’d hardly opened her mouth. She was such a bloody miserable sort of girl.’ Peggy Pope sighed as if she, the soul of wit and gaiety, had a right to similarly exuberant companions.

‘Do you know why she was miserable?’

‘It’s money with most of them. That’s all they talk about, as though I was rolling in it. She asked me if I could find her a cheaper room, but I said, No, I couldn’t. We don’t have any flats less than seven a week. I thought she was going to cry. Christ, I thought, why don’t you grow up?’

Howard said, ‘May we come to last Friday, Mrs Pope?’

‘
Miss
Pope. When I want to be
Mrs
I’ll find a man who’s got a job and can get me something better than a hole in the ground to live in, I can tell you. I don’t know anything about last Friday. I saw her come in about ten past one and go off again about ten to two. Oh, and she made a phone call. I don’t know any more about it.’

Wexford caught Howard’s eye and leant forward. ‘Miss Pope,’ he said, ‘we want you to tell us about that in much greater detail. Tell us exactly what you were doing, where you saw her, what she said, everything.’

‘OK, I’ll try.’ Peggy Pope pulled her thumbnail out of her mouth and looked at it with distaste. ‘But when I’ve done you’ll have to let me get shifting those bins.’

The room was rather cold. She kicked down the upper switch on an electric fire and a second bar began to heat. It was evidently seldom used, for as it glowed red a smell of burning dust came from it.

‘It was just after one, maybe ten past,’ she began. ‘Johnny was out somewhere as usual, looking for work, he said, but I reckon he was in the Grand Duke. I was in the hall giving it a bit of a sweep up and Loveday came in. She said hallo or something, and I said hallo, and she went straight upstairs. I was getting out the vacuum when she came down again and said had I got change for ten pence because she wanted two pence to make a phone call. She must have known I don’t carry money about when I’m cleaning the place, but, anyway, I said I’d see and I came down here and got my bag. I hadn’t got change, but I’d got one two-pence piece so I gave her that and she went into the phone box.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Under the stairs. You passed it when you came down.’

‘Do you know whom she was phoning?’

She warmed her bitten fingers at the fire and creased her beautiful face into a ferocious scowl. ‘How would I? There’s a door on the box. She didn’t say I’m going to give my mother a tinkle or ring my boy friend, if that’s what you mean. Loveday never said much. I’ll give her that, she wasn’t talkative. Well, she came out and went upstairs again and then I went down to see if the baby was OK, and when I came up with the pram to take the washing to the launderette she was just going out through the front door, all got up in a green trouser suit. I noticed because it was the only decent thing she had. She didn’t say anything. And now can I get on with my work?’