Murder Being Once Done (6 page)

Howard nodded, and he and Clements, thanking her briefly, made for the stairs. Wexford lingered. He watched the girl – she was round-shouldered and rather thin – lift one of the smelly bins and then he said, ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

She seemed astonished. The world she lived in had unfitted her for accepting help graciously, and she shrugged, making her mouth into an ugly shape.

‘They should employ a man to do this.’

‘Maybe, but they don’t. What man would practically run this dump and do all the dirty work for eight quid a week and that room? Would
you
?’

‘Not if I could help it. Can’t you get a better job?’

‘Look, chum, there’s the kid. I’ve got to have a job where I can look after her. Don’t you worry yourself about me. Some day my prince will come and then I’ll be off out of here, leaving the bins to Johnny.’ She smiled for the first time, a transcending, glorious smile, evoking for him old dark cinemas and shining screens. ‘Thanks very much. That’s the lot.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Wexford.

The unaccustomed effort had brought the blood beating to his head. It had been a silly thing to do and the pounding inside his temples unnerved him. Howard and the sergeant were nowhere to be seen, so, to clear his head while he waited for them, he walked down to the open end of Garmisch Terrace. A thin drizzle had begun to fall. He found himself in something which at home would have passed for a high street. It was a shabby shopping centre with, sandwiched between a pub and a hairdresser’s, a little cheap boutique called
Loveday
. So that was where she had found the name. She had possessed some other, duller perhaps but identifying, distressing even, which she had wished to conceal . . .

‘Been having a breath of fresh air, sir?’ said the sergeant when he rejoined them. ‘Or what passes for it round here. By gum, but those bins stank to high heaven!’

Howard grinned. ‘We’ll take the sergeant back to the station and then I want to show you something different. You mustn’t run away with the idea that the whole of Kenbourne is like these rat holes.’

They dropped Clements at the police station, a blackened pile in Kenbourne Vale High Street whose blue lamp swung from the centre of an arch above an imposing flight of steps. Then Howard, driving the car himself, swung into a hinterland of slums, winding streets with corner shops and pubs and patches of waste ground, once green centres of garden squares, but now wired-in like hard tennis courts and littered with broken bicycles and oil-drums.

‘Clements lives up there.’ Howard pointed upwards, apparently through the roof of the car, and, twisting round to peer out of the window, Wexford saw a tower block of flats, a dizzy thirty storeys. ‘Quite a view, I believe. He can see the river and a good deal of the Thames Estuary on a clear day.’

Now the towers grew thickly around them, a copse of monoliths sprouting out of a shabby and battered jungle. Wexford was wondering if this was the contrast he had expected to admire when a bend in the road brought them suddenly to a clear open space. The change was almost shocking. A second before he had been in one of the drabbest regions he had ever set eyes on, and now, as if a scene had been rapidly shifted on a stage, he saw a green triangle, plane trees, a scattering of Georgian houses. Such, he supposed, was London, ever variable, constantly surprising.

Howard pulled up in front of the largest of these houses, cream-painted, with long gleaming windows and fluted columns supporting the porch canopy. There were flowerbeds and on each side of the house carefully planned layouts of cypresses and pruned kanzans. A notice fixed to the wall read:
Vaie Park. Strictly Private. Parking for Residents only. By order of Notbourne Properties Ltd
.

‘The old Montfort house,’ said Howard, ‘owned by the company to whom Loveday applied for a job.’

‘The paths of glory,’ said his uncle, ‘lead but to the grave. What became of the Montforts, apart from the grave?’

‘I don’t know. The man to tell you would be Stephen Dearborn, the chairman of Notbourne Properties. He’s supposed to be a great authority on Kenbourne Vale and its history. The company have bought up a lot of places in Kenbourne and they’ve done a good job smartening them up.’

It was unfortunate, Wexford thought, that they hadn’t operated on Kenbourne Vale police station. It was in acute need of renovation, of pale paint to modify the gloom of bottle-green walls, mahogany woodwork and dark passages. One of these vaulted corridors led to Howard’s own office, a vast chamber with a plum-red carpet, metal filing cabinets and a view of a brewery. The single bright feature of the room was human and female, a girl with copper beech hair and surely the longest legs in London.

She looked up from the file she was studying as they entered and said, ‘Mrs Fortune’s been on the phone for you, sir. She said please would you call her back as it’s very urgent.’

‘Urgent, Pamela? What’s wrong?’ Howard moved to the phone.

‘Apparently your . . .’ The girl hesitated. ‘Your uncle that’s staying with you is missing. He went out five hours ago and he hasn’t come back. Mrs Fortune sounded very worried.’

‘My God,’ said Wexford. ‘I was going to Victoria station. I shall be in terribly deep water.’

‘You and me both,’ said Howard, and then they began to laugh.

They gladly hear also the young men, yea, and purposely provoke them to talk . . .

‘Aunt Dora,’ said Denise icily, ‘is lying down. When her headache is better we’re going over to my brother’s to play bridge.’

Wexford made a further attempt to placate her. ‘I’m very sorry about all this, my dear. I didn’t mean to upset you, but it went right out of my head.’

‘Please don’t worry about me. It’s Aunt Dora who’s upset.’

‘Men must work and women must weep,’ said Howard rather unkindly. ‘Now, where’s my dinner and his snack?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t prepare anything special for Uncle Reg. You see, we thought that since he seems to be disregarding all his doctor’s warnings . . .’

‘You’d punish him by giving him a proper meal? Poor old Reg. It looks as if we shall have to deal with you as More dealt with the children in Utopia, by letting them stand and be fed from the master’s plate.’

Dora’s manner, when she came down, was injured and distrait, but the chief inspector had been married for thirty years and had seldom permitted petticoat government.

Observing the determined gleam in his eye, she contented herself with a piteous, ‘Oh, darling, how
could
you?’ before sallying forth to her bridge game.

‘Let’s go into my study,’ Howard said when they had finished their pilaf. ‘I want to talk to you about that phone call.’

The study was a lot pleasanter than Howard’s office in Kenbourne Vale and its appointments less vulnerable than those in the feminine-dominated part of the house. Wexford took his seat by a window through which could be seen, by way of a narrow opening between house backs, the flash of lights passing eternally down the King’s Road. He was not yet used to living in a place where it never grew dark and where all night the sky held a plum-red glow.

‘You look much better, Reg,’ Howard said, smiling. ‘May I say that ten years have fallen away from you in the space of one afternoon?’

‘I daresay. One doesn’t like to take a back seat, to live vicariously.’ Wexford sighed. ‘The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.’

‘I’ve always thought
Dorian Gray
a very silly book and that epigram one of its few redeeming features.
And
it comes nearly on the last page.’

‘Literary chit-chat, Howard?’

His nephew laughed. ‘Not another word,’ he said. ‘Now that phone call Loveday made from Garmisch Terrace . . .’

‘It was to Sytansound, wasn’t it? You said she phoned Sytansound to say she was sick.’

‘So she did, but that call was made at two o’clock and the one from Garmisch Terrace at one-fifteen. Whom did she phone?’

‘Her mother? An old aunt? A girl friend? Perhaps she was replying to one of those advertisements.’ When Howard shook his head at that, Wexford said, ‘You’re sure the call to Sytansound wasn’t made earlier?’

‘The manager took it, a man called Gold, and he’s positive Loveday didn’t phone before two. She was due back at two and he was beginning to wonder where she was when the phone rang.’

‘She made one call from home but the other from a call box outside? Why?’

‘Oh, surely because she had no more change. Don’t you remember the Pope woman said Love day asked her for change but all she had was one two-pence piece? Loveday must have got change outside, bought some cigarettes or a bar of chocolate and then gone into a phone box.’

‘Yes, the first call was the decisive one, the important one. On the outcome of that depended whether she returned to work or not. It was made to her killer.’ Wexford rubbed his eye, caught himself doing it and relaxed. It was easy to relax now that he was being admitted to the secret sanctum of Howard’s house and, better than that, the sanctum of his thoughts. ‘Tell me about the Sytansound people,’ he said.

Believing that the passing lights troubled his uncle, Howard drew the curtains and began. ‘Gold is a man of sixty,’ he said. ‘He has a flat over the shop and he was in the shop all Friday afternoon. At five-thirty he switched the phone over to the answering service and went upstairs where here mained all the evening. That’s well corroborated. Also at Sytansound are two reps and two engineers. The two reps and one of the engineers are married and live out of Kenbourne. The other is a boy of twenty-one. Their movements are being checked, but, if we’re assuming that whoever received that phone call is Loveday’s killer, it wasn’t any of the older ones. They were all in the Lammas Arms from one till ten to two and none left the table to take a phone call. The twenty-one-year-old was putting a new valve in a television set at a house in Copeland Road. It may be worth checking as to whether anyone phoned that house while he was there, although it seems unlikely. As far as we know, Loveday had hardly ever spoken to the reps and the engineers. Listen, this is from Gold’s statement.’

Howard had brought his briefcase into the study with him. He opened it and sorted out one sheet of paper from a small stack. ‘ “She was very quiet and polite. She was popular with the customers because she was always polite and patient. You would not call her the kind of girl who would ever stick up for herself. She was old-fashioned. When she first came she wore no make-up and I had to ask her to.” Apparently, he also asked her to turn her skirts up a bit and not to wear the same clothes every day.’

‘What wages did he pay her?’

‘Twelve pounds a week. Not much, was it, when you remember she was paying seven for her room? But the job was quite unskilled. All she had to do was show people two or three types of television set and ask for their names and addresses. The reps deal with the rental forms and take the money.’

Wexford bit his lip. It troubled him to think of this quiet polite girl, a child to him, living among the Peggy Popes of this world and paying more than half her wages for a room in Garmisch Terrace. He wondered how she had filled her evenings when, after walking from work through the gloomy defiles of the cemetery, she let herself into a cell perhaps twelve feet by twelve, a private vault for the living. No friends, no money to spend, no kind lover, no nice clothes . . .

‘What was in her room?’ he asked.

‘Very little. A couple of sweaters, a pair of jeans, one dress, a topcoat. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room occupied by a girl and found so little evidence that a girl had ever occupied it. What little sticks of make-up she had were in her handbag. There was a cake of soap in the room, a bottle of shampoo, two or three women’s magazines and a Bible.’

‘A
Bible
?’

Howard shrugged. ‘It may not have been hers, Reg. There was no name in it and the room was furnished – so-called, as Clements would say. It’s possible the Bible was left behind by a previous tenant or that it just drifted there from some hoard of old books. There was a bookcase in the basement, if you noticed. Peggy Pope didn’t know if it was hers or whose it was.’

‘Will you try to find her parents?’

‘We
are
trying. Of course, we haven’t a proper photograph but all the newspapers have carried detailed descriptions. They must show themselves in the next couple of days if they’re still alive, and why shouldn’t they be? They wouldn’t have to be more than in their forties.’

Wexford said carefully, ‘Would you mind if tomorrow I sort of poke about a bit at Garmisch Terrace, talk to people and so on?’

‘Poke about all you like,’ Howard said affectionately. ‘I need your help, Reg.’

Wexford was up by seven-thirty, bent on leaving by car with Howard, and this defiance sent both women into a flurry. Dora had only just come downstairs and there had been no time to prepare a special breakfast for him.

‘Just boil me an egg, my dear,’ he said airily to Denise, ‘and I’ll have a cup of coffee.’

‘If you hadn’t worried us nearly to death yesterday, we’d have gone out and bought you some of that Austrian cereal with the dried fruit and the extra vitamins.’

Wexford shuddered and helped himself surreptitiously to a slice of white bread.

‘Your pills,’ said his wife, trying to sound cold. ‘Oh, Reg,’ she wailed suddenly, ‘carry them with you and please, please, don’t forget to take them!’

‘I won’t,’ said Wexford, pocketing the bottle.

The rush-hour traffic was heavy and nearly forty minutes elapsed before Howard dropped him outside 22 Garmisch Terrace. The pavements were wet and darkly glittering. As he slammed the car door, he saw a black-caped figure come out of the church and scurry off towards the shops.

The only living creature visible, apart from a cat peering through a grating into sewer depths, was a young man who sat on the top step of number 22, reading a copy of
The Stage
.