Murder Being Once Done

by Ruth Rendell

  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

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  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 irnpose 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 38

  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.'

  'O.K., 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 hello or something, and I said hello, 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

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  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. Lovedaynever 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 O.K., 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?'

  Howard nodded, and he and Clernents, thanking her Wetly, 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

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  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, so 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 Tha
mes 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

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  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 flower-beds and on each side of the house carefully planned layouts of cypresses and pruned kanzans.Anotice fixed to the wall read: Vale 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 a 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

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  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.

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  They gladly hear also the young men, yea, ana purr posely provoke them to talk . . .

  CAUNT DORA,' said Denise icily, 'is lying down. When 1 - 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 ups set.'

  '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.

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  '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 pass- ing 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 Dorzan 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 Sytan- sound 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?'

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  'Oh, surely because she had no more change. Don't you remember the Pope woman said Loveday 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 he remained 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 un- likely. 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 46

  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 fo
r 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 race 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?'