Murder Being Once Done (10 page)

‘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 over 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 abut 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 months 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 doctors’ 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
child
, 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 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 course, 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 enquiring.

‘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 she 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 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 realize, of course, that when you give a false address, unless you simply make up a name, the address you give is that of a 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 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 three-piece 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 jaded 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, debouching 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 rose-pink. 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.’

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 see 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 – 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 Dorathat 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 hair down the back of his neck as he emerged from the last house. Well, Crocker didn’t know everything, 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 massy 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 . . .

So that was how it was done. That was the way Howard had inferred that it was done, and he had been right again. Obviously, then, it was hopeless to try to trace Loveday by these means. He must approach the matter from other angles.

In them they have . . . all manner of fruit, herbs and flowers, so pleasant, so well furnished, and so finely kept, that I never saw thing more fruitful nor better trimmed in any place.

Going out in the evening was one of the excesses on which Crocker had placed a strict ban. If Wexford’s faith in the doctor had been shaken, his wife’s had not. She could only be consoled by his promise to take a taxi to Laysbrook Place, to abstain from strong drink and not to stay out too long.

He was looking forward to this visit. A little judicious questioning might elicit from Dearborn more information about the cemetery. Was it, for instance, as easy to get in and out after the gates were closed as Baker had insisted? Before Tripper and his fellows went home at night did they make any sort of search of the place? Or must Loveday have been killed before six? If this was so, Gregson, occupied at work, would be exonerated. And might Dearborn not also know something of Loveday herself? He had interviewed her. It was possible that, at that interview, she had told him something of her past history.

Laysbrook Place was one of those country corners of London in which the air smells sweeter, birds sometimes sing and other trees grow apart from planes. An arch, hung with a brown creeper Wexford thought was wisteria, concealed most of the little street from Laysbrook Square. He walked under it, light falling about him from two lamps on brackets, and saw ahead of him a single house such as might have stood in Kingsmarkham High Street. It wasn’t an old house but old bricks and timber had been used in its construction, and it was like no London house Wexford had seen. For one thing, it was rather low and sprawling with gables and lattice windows; for another, it had a real garden with apple trees in it and shrubs that were probably lilac. Now, in early March, forsythia blazed yellow and luminous through the lamplit dark and, as he opened the gate, he saw snowdrops in drifts as thick and white as real snow.

The front door opened before he reached it and Stephen Dearborn came down the steps.

‘What a lovely place,’ Wexford said.