Murder Being Once Done

by Ruth Rendell

  'We'll come to that in a minute. Gregson met her in Queen's Lane at half past five and they went to a secluded spot in the cemetery. She became frightened, screamed perhaps, and he strangled her to silence her.'

  Why hadn't they gone to her room? Wexford asked himself. Why not to her room in that house where no questions were asked? And why had she taken the afternoon off if she didn't

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  intend to meet Gregson until after work? These were questions he might ask Howard when they were alone together but not now. He saw that Baker was a man whose idea of a dis- cussion was that he should be invited to state his views while the other so-called participants admired, agreed and encour. aged him. Having given his own limited reconstruction of the case, he had turned to Howard once more and was attempting to discuss with him in an almost inaudible tone the findings of the medical report.

  But Howard was determined not to exclude his uncle. Aware that Wexford had a small reputation as an investigator into quirks of character, he pressed Wexford to tell them about his morning's work.

  'She was a very innocent girl,' Wexford began. He felt he was on safe ground here, for Baker could hardly claim to be as conversant with the personality of the dead girl as he was with the geography of Kenbourne Vale. 'She was very shy,' he said, 'afraid to go to parties, and very likely she'd only once in her life been into a public house.' He was pleased to see a smile of what might have been approval on Baker's face. It encouraged him to be bolder, to ask a question which might seem to reflect on the inspector's theory. 'Would a girl like that lead a man on, go alone with a comparative stranger into a lonely place? She'd be too frightened.'

  Baker went on smiling tightly.

  'There was another point that struck me . . .'

  'Let's have it, Reg. It may be helpful.'

  'Tuesday was February the 29th. I've been wondering if he put her in the Montfort vault because he knew it was only visited on the last Tuesday of the month and that Tuesday, he thought, had already gone by.'

  Baker looked incredulous, but Howard's eyes narrowed. 'You mean he forgot that this year, Leap Year, there was an extra Tuesday in the month?'

  'It's a possibility, isn't it? I don't think a boy like Gregson would know about the vault and the trust. I was thinking that the man who killed her did know and that he might have put

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  her in there because Loveday knew something he didn't want revealed before a few weeks had passed by.'

  'Interesting,' said Howard. 'How does that strike you, Michael?'

  The man who was not Burden, who shared with Burden only a Christian name and a certain sharp-featured fairness, raised his eyebrows and drawled, 'To your er, uncle's other point, sir?' It was clever the hesitation he managed before saying 'uncle's', just sufficiently emphasising the nepotism. But he had gone a little too far. His remark brought a frown to Howard's usually gentle face and set him tapping his fingers against his wineglass. And Baker understood that he was admonished. He shrugged, smiled and spoke with cool courtesy.

  'You called Morgan innocent and shy, Mr Wexford, but I'm sure you know how deceptive appearances can be. Post- mortem findings, on the other hand, aren't deceptive. Would it surprise you to hear that, according to the medical report, she gave birth to a child during the past year?'

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  8 Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding rho place to rest in.

  AFTER Howard's kindness and the cheerful. matter-of-fact ~ welcome he had received from other members of Howard's force, Wexford felt Baker's antagonism almost painfully. He was curiously disheartened. His first day here his first day anywhere, come to that as a private investigator had begun so promisingly. Baker's intervention had been like a dark cloud putting out the sun.

  He knew that if he had been fit and quite well, if his confidence hadn't been shaken by his tough old body suddenly betraying him, he would have taken this small reverse in his stride. He wasn't, after all, a child to be put off playing his favourite game because another stronger and healthier child had come along and tried to show him how the bricks ought to be stacked. But now within himself he felt almost childlike, his bold adult identity once more disturbed. And when he looked back on his morning's work, it seemed amateurish. The appalling thought that Howard had sent him off on a little hunt of his own simply to occupy him and keep him happy couldn't be resisted.

  Nor was he much comforted by the private office which Howard had set aside for his use and to which Detective Constable Dinehart had just conducted him. Like all the rooms Wexford had seen in this police station, it was dark, gloomy and with an enormously high ceiling. This one had a bit of

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  greyish carpet, chairs covered in slippery brown leather, and the view from the window was a full frontal one of Kenbourne gasworks. He couldn't help thinking nostalgically of his own office in Kingsmarkham which was bright and modern, and, looking at the pitch pine, pitted monstrosity in front of him, of his beloved rosewood desk, damson-red and always laden with his own particular clutter.

  Sitting down, he asked himself sharply what was the matter with him. Howard's house was too grand for him, this place too shabby. What did he expect? That London would be a Utopian Kingsmarkham and that all these London coppers were going to roll out the red carpet for him?

  He stared at the gasometer, wondering how he was going to pass the afternoon. 'Poke about all you like,' Howard had said, but where was he to poke about and how much authority had he got? He was considering whether it would be pushing or against protocol for him to seek Howard out when his nephew tapped on the door and came in.

  Howard looked tired. His was a face which easily showed wear and tear. The grey eyes had lost their brightness and the skin under them was puffy.

  'How d'you like your office?'

  'It's fine, thanks.'

  'Horrible outlook, I'm afraid, but it's either that or the brewery or the bus station. I want to apologise for Baker.'

  'Come off it, Howard,' said Wexford.

  'No. His treatment of you was rude but not indefensible. One has to make allowances for Baker. He's been under a good deal of strain lately. He married a girl half his age. She became pregnant, which made him very happy until she told him the child was another man's and she was leaving him for that other man. Since then he's lost his confidence, distrusts people and is chronically afraid of not being up to the job.'

  'I see. It's a nasty story.'

  They were both silent for a moment. Wexford found himself hoping desperately that Howard wouldn't go away again, leaving him alone with the gasworlcs and his depressing

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  thoughts. To keep him there a little longer, he said, 'About this child of Loveday Morgan's. . .'

  'That's really why I came to talk to you,' Howard said. 'I don't know what to think. I don't even know if it's significant in this case, and I need to talk it aver with someone. With you.'

  Wexford felt himself relax with relief. His nephew sounded sincere. Perhaps. after all . . . 'The child may be with his or her grandparents,' he said, and as he spoke he felt the case beginning to drive self-pitying thoughts from his mind. 'You've still heard nothing of them?'

  'We're doing everything possible to trace them. For one thing, they'll have to be found before she can be buried, but I'm beginning to think they must be dead. Oh, I know that these days girls are always having differences with their parents and leaving home, but often that only makes the parents more anxious about them. What sort of people who have a missing, or at least absent, blonde twenty-year-old daughter, could read all the newspaper stories there have been these past few days and not get in touch with us?'

  'Very simple unimaginative people, perhaps, Howard. Or people who just don't connect their daughter with Loveday Morgan because that isn't her real name and they don't know that their daughter was living in Kenbourne Vale.'

  Howard shrugged. 'It's as if she dropped out of the blue, Reg. arrived in Kenbourne Vale two m
onths ago without a history. Let me put you a bit more fully into the picture. Now, as you know, although we don't have absolute cards of identity as certain European nationals do, everyone has a medical card and a National Insurance number. There was no medical card in Loveday Morgan's room and she was on none of the local doctor's lists. It's inconceivable that she should have been the private patient of any doctor, but maybe she was so healthy that she didn't need medical attention. But she had a c/'il~l, Reg. Where? Who attended her at the birth?

  'When she first went to Sytansound, Gold asked her for her National Insurance card. She told him she hadn't got one and 73

  he sent her along to the Social Security people to get a card which she did in the name of Loveday Morgan.'

  'Stop a minute, Howard,' said his uncle. 'That means that she had never worked before. A working-class girl of twenty who had never worked . . .'

  'She may, of course, have worked before and had a card in her real name. They don't ask for your birth certificate, you know, only your name and where you were born and so on. I really don't think there's anything to stop anyone from getting half a dozen cards and fraudulently claiming sickness benefit and unemployment money, only that one day they'd catch up with you. Of cause, there are certain jobs you can do where you needn't have a card at all. Most charwomen don't. Prostitutes don't. Nor do those who make their living by crime or drug pushing. But surely Loveday Morgan wasn't any of those things?'

  Wexford shook his head. 'She seems the last girl in the world who would have had an illegitimate child.'

  'You know what they say, it's the good girls who have the babies. Now, as well as her parents, we're trying to trace her child. It isn't fostered in Kenbourne Vale, we've established that. It could be anywhere. D'you know what I find hardest of all to understand, Reg?'

  Wexford looked Inquiring.

  'I can see that she might have had reasons for wanting to cover her tracks, for wanting to be anonymous. She may, for instance, have had possessive parents who tried to deny her a life of her own. She~ may have been hiding from some man who threatened her a point that, I must remember that. But what I can't fathom at all is why she had apparently been doing this for years. It almost looks as if years ago she avoided going to a doctor or getting a National Insurance card so that one day, now, when sue came to die by violence, she would appear to have had a life of no more than two months duration, to have dropped from another planet.'

  'What about this Fulham address?' Wexford asked.

  'The one she gave Peggy Pope? It's a house in Belgrade

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  Road, as I told you, but she was never there.'

  'The owners of the house . . . ?'

  'I suppose they could be lying, playing some deep game of their own, but all the neighbours aren't. I expect Loveday went along Belgrade Road in a bus one day and the name stuck in her mind. I realise, of course, that when you give a false address, unless you simply make up a name, the address you give is that Olga street you've either seen or heard of in some connection that causes it to remain in your memory. But the mind is so complex, Reg. and she isn't alive to be psychoanalysed. If she were, we wouldn't be doing this, talking this way.'

  'I was thinking that she might have known someone in this Belgrade Road.'

  'You mean we ought to do a house to house on the chance of that?'

  'Well, I could,' said Wexford.

  He weighed himself before he went to bed and found that he had lost five pounds. But instead of being cheered by this in the morning he awoke Depressed. It was raining. Like a humble trainee, he was going to have to plod round Fulham in the rain. And where, anyway, was Fulham?

  Denise had stuck a rather alarming flower arrangement on the landing, a confection which was to floral decoration as Dali is to painting. A branch of holly grabbed him as he started to go downstairs and when he freed himself his hand came into disagreeable contact with a spider plant.

  'Where's Fulham?' he asked as he ate his sugarless grapefruit. 'Not miles away I hope.'

  Denise said, 'It's just down the road.' She added mournfully, 'Some people call this Fulham.'

  She didn't ask why he wanted to know. She and Dora thought he was going for his favourite Embankment walk, not understanding that he hated the river when it was shivering and prickly with rain. By now it was falling steadily, not country rain which washes and freshens and brings with it a green scent, but London rain, dirty and soot-smelling. He went

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  westwards, crossed Stamford Bridge and past the gates to the football ground. By the station, fans were buying Chelsea scarves and badges in the sports souvenir shops. Young couples stared disconsolately at secondhand furniture, battered threepiece suites growing damp on the pavement. In North End Road traffic crawled between the stalls, splashing shoppers. But it was more the sort of thing he was used to, a bit like Stowerton really. Here was none of the laded and somehow sinister sophistication of Kenbourne Vale. The side streets looked suburban. They had gardens and whole families lived in them. Housewives shopped here with proper shopping baskets and almost everyone he passed seemed to belong to an order of society with which he was familiar.

  He laughed at himself for being like a conventional old fuddy-duddy, and then he saw Belgrade Road ahead of him, debauching at a right angle from the main street. The houses were three storeys tall, sixty or seventy years old, terraced. At the end, as in Garmisch Terrace, was a church, but grey and spired and as a church should be. He furled the umbrella he was carrying and began on his house to house.

  There were a hundred and two houses in Belgrade Road. He went first to the one where Loveday said she had lived, a cared-for house which had recently been painted. Even the brickwork had been painted, and it was a curious colour to choose for an English house in a grimy street, a bright rosepink. Number seventy. It had a name too, Rosebank, printed in white on pink, the sign swinging in the rain. Had she chosen it for the number? For the name? Had she even seen it?

  A couple lived there, Howard had said, and it was a young woman who answered his ring. It made him feel rather awkward asking about a girl with fair hair, quiet and reserved, a girl who might have had a baby with her, for this woman was also a blonde and she carried a young child supported on her hip.

  'They came and asked me before,' she said. 'I told them we never let rooms or a flat.' She added proudly, 'We live in the whole house.'

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  He tried the immediate neighbours, worked back to the main street from which this one turned, then up towards the church, down the other side. A lot of people in Belgrade Road let rooms and he talked to half a dozen landladies who sent him off to other landladies. At one point he thought he was getting somewhere. A West Indian hospital orderly who worked nights but showed no dismay at being awakened from his sleep, remembered young Mrs Maitland who had lived on the top floor of number 59 and whose husband had abandoned her and her baby in December. She had moved away a couple of weeks later.

  Wexford went back to 59 where he had previously met with ungraciousness on the part of the owner, and met this time with pugnacity. 'I told you my daughter was living here. How many more times, I should like to know? Will you go away and let me get on with my cooking? She left in December and she's living up Shepherd's Bush way. I saw her last night and she wasn't dead then. Does that satisfy you?'

  Disheartened, he went on. There was no point in giving her name. He was sure she hadn't called herself Loveday Morgan until she went to live in Garmisch Terrace. All he could do was repeat the description and enquire about anyone known to have moved away at the end of the previous year. The rain fell more heavily. What a stupid invention an umbrella was, almost useless for a job like this! But he put it up again, tilting it backwards while he stood under the dripping porches.

  Facing the rose-pink house and on the corner of the only side street to run out of Belgrade Road was a little shop, a general store, very like those to be found in the villages near Kingsmarkham. Wexford marvelled to s
ee such a place here, only a hundred yards from a big shopping centre, and marvelled still more to see that it was doing a thriving trade. There was just one assistant serving the queue, a shabby little woman with a mole on the side of her nose, and he made his enquiries of her briefly, anxious not to keep her from her work. She had a curious flat voice, free from cockney, and she was patient with him, but neither she nor the woman shopper behind him

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  a resident of the side street could recall anyone answering his description who had moved away in December.

  About twenty houses remained to be visited. He visited them all, feeling very cold now and wondering how he was going to explain to Dora that he had got soaked to the skin. Between them all they were turning him into a hypochondriac, he thought, and he began to feel nervous, asking himself what all this tramping about and getting wet might be doing to his health. Crocker would have a fit if he could see him now, water running from his hair down the back of his neck as he emerged from the last house. Well, Crocker didn't know everythin& and for the rest of the day and all tomorrow until the evening he would take it easy.

  He paused and, turning back, surveyed the whole length of the street once more. Through the falling silvery rain, under the messy clouds which were streaming across the sky from behind the-grey church spire, Belgrade Road looked utterly commonplace. Nothing but the church and the pink house distinguished it from a sister street which ran from the main highway in the opposite direction, and this latter was, if anything, more interesting and memorable. Buses used it and on a sunny day both sides of it would catch the full sun for hours. Why, then had Loveday Morgan chosen Belgrade Road?

  He tried to imagine himself giving a false address in London. What street would he choose? Not one that he had stayed in or knew well, for that might lead to discovery. Say Lammas Grove, West Fifteen? Number 43, for instance. Immediately he asked himself why, and reasoned that he had picked the street because he had sat outside Sytansound there with Sergeant Clements, the number was just a number that had come to him....