Murder Being Once Done (17 page)

Lamont nodded. He slid off the bed, sidled up to Peggy and put his arm round her.

‘Oh, you’re hopeless,’ she said, but she didn’t push him away. ‘Here,’ she said to Wexford, ‘you can write the number down on the back of this envelope.’

Wexford wrote down the number of the police station and of Howard’s extension and, glancing at his watch, saw that the hour was up.

The superintendent had spread before him photographs of the carefully restored and made-up face of Loveday Morgan, taken after death. The eyes were blue, the hair light blonde, the mouth and cheeks pink. But to anyone who has seen the dead, this was the modern version of a death mask, a soulless painted shell.

‘“Life and these lips have long been separated”,’ Wexford quoted. ‘You wouldn’t show these to her
mother
?’

‘We haven’t found a mother to show them to.’

‘I have,’ said Wexford and he explained.

Howard listened, nodding in slightly hesitant agreement. ‘She’d better be brought here,’ he said. ‘We’ll need her to identify the body. It’ll be best if you go for her and take Clements and maybe a WPC with you. I think you should go now, Reg.’

‘I?’ Wexford stared at him. ‘You don’t expect me to go there and . . . ?’

He felt like Hassan who can just bear the idea of the lovers being tortured to death out of his sight, but revolts in horror when Haroun Al Raschid tells him they must be tortured in his house with him as an onlooker.

Howard was no oriental sadist. He looked distressed, his thin face rather wan. ‘Of course, I can’t give you orders. You’re just my uncle, but . . .’

‘But me no buts,’ said Wexford, ‘and uncle me no uncles. I’ll go.’

He phoned her first. He had promised to phone her. A thin hope, a thin dread, made him ask, ‘You haven’t heard from Louise?’ He looked at his watch. Just after one, the time she would hear if she was going to.

‘Not a word,’ she said.

Break it gently, prepare the ground. ‘I think I may . . .’ Made cowardly by her anxious gasp, he said, ‘There are some people I’d like you to talk to. May I come over straight away?’

‘Baker said we’d never identify her,’ said Howard. ‘This’ll shake him. Don’t look so miserable, Reg. She has to be someone’s child.’

Clements drove. They went through Hyde Park where the daffodils were coming out.

‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ Wexford asked out of a dry throat.

‘They do things to the bulbs, sir. Treat ’em so that they bloom before their natural time.’ Clements always knew everything, Wexford thought crossly, and made all the facts he imparted sound unpleasant. ‘I don’t know why they can’t leave things alone instead of all this going against nature. The next thing they’ll be treating cuckoos and importing them in December.’

In the King’s Road all the traffic lights turned red as the car approached them. It made the going slow and by the time Clements turned in under the arch to Laysbrook Place, Wexford felt as sick as he had done thirty years before on the day he took his inspector’s exams. The brickwork of Laysbrook House was a pale amber in the sun, its trees still silver-grey and untouched by the greening mist of spring. But the forsythia was a dazzling gold and the little silvery clusters he had noticed among the snowdrops now showed themselves as bushes of daphne, rose pink bouquets dotted all over the lawn. It was all very quiet, very still. The house basked in the thin diffident sunlight and the air had a fresh scent, free from the fumes of diesel to which Wexford had grown accustomed.

A young, rather smart, cleaning woman let him in and said, ‘She told me you were coming. You’re to go in and make yourself at home. She’s upstairs with the baby, but she’ll be down in a tick.’ Was this the new char who stole things, who might have – but had not – made off with a Gucci scarf? The police car caught her eye and she gaped. ‘What about them?’

‘They’ll stay there,’ said Wexford, and he went into the room where Dearborn had shown him the maps and his wife had opened her heart.

I know how difficult and hardly I myself would have believed another man telling the same, if I had not presently seen it with mine own eyes.

He didn’t sit down but paced about the room, hoping that she wouldn’t keep him waiting for long. And then, suddenly in the midst of his anxiety for her, it occurred to him that once the girl was positively identified, the case would be solved. Things didn’t simply look black for Stephen Dearborn. Louise Sampson had been murdered and who could her murderer be but Dearborn, her stepfather?

The motive now. He had better get that clear in his mind. And there was plenty of motive. Since he had talked to Verity Bate he had never doubted the sincerity of Louise’s love for Dearborn, but he had supposed that Dearborn had been speaking the truth when he told Mr Bate that he hadn’t returned it. Perhaps, on the other hand, he
had
originally been in love with Louise or had at least some strong sensual feeling towards her, a feeling which had lost some of its force when he met the mother. Of course, it was the reverse of the usual pattern, this preference of a man for an older woman over a young girl, but Wexford didn’t find it hard to imagine. Anyway, a man could love two women at once. Suppose Dearborn had married the mother because she was more completely to his taste, while retaining the daughter as a mistress he couldn’t bring himself to relinquish? Or their affair could have started after Dearborn found her at Adams’ flat, by which time he might have been growing weary of his wife.

In that case Dearborn was almost certainly the father of her child. Wexford sat down heavily when it occurred to him that the child could be Alexandra. Until now he hadn’t thought much about Louise’s announcement, reported by Adams, that her mother couldn’t have children. After all, Louise had said she was only fifteen at the time. She could have got it wrong and have taken some minor surgery for the far more serious and final operation. If she had been speaking the truth, Melanie Dearborn couldn’t be Alexandra’s mother. But Dearborn could have brought home his own child – his and Louise’s – to be adopted by himself and Louise’s mother. And Melanie wouldn’t have to know whose it was, only that it was a child whom Dearborn had adopted through a ‘third party’. You didn’t have to adopt through a society.

Alexandra, an adopted child . . . Or rather, adopted by one of the parents. That would account for the mother’s indifference and the father’s – the real father – passionate obsession.

But where was she all this time? Why didn’t she come down? He heard her footsteps moving briskly overhead but he heard no other sound. Louise could have threatened Dearborn, especially if he had begun to cool off her, with exposure to her mother of their affair and then of the identity of the child. A very real threat, Wexford thought. Louise hadn’t just been young and his mistress, but his stepdaughter as well. Melanie would surely have left him if she had found out. A strong motive for murder.

That was a clever explanation he had come up with for his office number having been found in Louise’s handbag. How much more likely, though, that she had it there because she phoned him at work habitually! Perhaps it was he whom she had phoned on February 25th . . . But no, it couldn’t be, for on that day, at that time she had phoned her mother.

There was, of course, a good deal more to be worked out. Probably Mrs Dearborn could help him if only she would come down. He felt a return of anguish for her, deepened now by his strong suspicion of her husband’s guilt. The footsteps stopped and Alexandra began to cry, but the sounds were those of a baby who is peevish rather than distressed. He looked at his watch and saw that he had been there for nearly a quarter of an hour. Perhaps he should find the cleaning woman and ask her to . . .

The door swung open and Mrs Dearborn walked in. She was more smartly dressed than on the previous occasions when he had seen her, her hair was brushed and lacquered and her face carefully made up. The baby was in her arms.

‘Oh, Mr Wexford, I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting.’ She freed one hand and held it out to him. ‘My poor little girl is having such trouble with her teeth. I was trying to get changed and comfort her at the same time. I see you’ve brought reinforcements,’ she said, and joked, ‘Don’t worry, I’d have come quietly.’

Have come? Did she mean she couldn’t come? He wished she didn’t look so happy and carefree, cradling the baby and stroking her head with a tenderness he had thought she lacked. ‘Mrs Dearborn,’ he began, ‘I want you to . . .’

‘Sit down, Mr Wexford. You can sit down for a moment, can’t you?’

Uneasily he lowered himself on to the edge of one of the mutilated chairs. It is hard enough to break bad news to anyone at any time, but to break it to someone as cheerful and pleased with life as Melanie Dearborn looked now . . . ? ‘We really shouldn’t delay,’ he said. ‘The car’s waiting and . . .’

‘But we don’t have to go anywhere. It’s
all right
. My daughter phoned me. She phoned me as soon as you rang off.’

His stomach seemed to turn over, the way it sometimes did when he was in a lift, and a faint sweat broke out in the palms of his hand. He couldn’t speak. He could only stare stupidly at her. She smiled at him triumphantly, her head a little on one side. Some of her joy at last communicated itself to Alexandra, who stopped crying, rolled over on to her back on the sofa cushion and gave a crow of laughter.

‘Are you sure?’ he said, and his voice was a croak. ‘Sure it was your daughter?’

‘Of course I’m sure! You’ll see her if you wait a while. She’s coming this afternoon. Isn’t it marvellous? Isn’t it?’

‘Marvellous,’ he said.

‘The phone rang and I thought it was you, calling back for something or other.’ She spoke quickly, chattily, quite unaware of the shock she had given him. ‘I picked it up and I heard the pips. As soon as I heard them I
knew
. Then she said, “Hallo, Mummy.” Oh, it was wonderful! I tried to get in touch with you but you’d already left. I just sat down and ate an enormous lunch – I haven’t been able to eat properly for days – and then I went upstairs and got all dressed up. I don’t know why.’

Wexford gave her a stiff, sickly smile. Alexandra laughed at him, kicking her legs in the air.

‘Will you stay and see her?’

‘No. I don’t think anyone would doubt your word on this, Mrs Dearborn. I’ll go and tell the sergeant not to wait, and then if you’d just give me a few details . . .’

Clements was treating the policewoman to one of his lectures, waving his hands as he pontificated on change and decay, Utopias and Dystopias, past glory and contemporary decadence. Wexford put his head through the car window.

‘Tell Mr Fortune it’s no dice. The girl’s turned up.’

‘Oh, great!’ said the policewoman sincerely.

Clements wagged his head up and down with a kind of grim gratification. He started the car. ‘She’ll have a tale to tell, you can bet on that, and bring home a load of trouble for mother to sort out.’

‘Give it a rest, can’t you?’ Wexford said savagely, knowing he shouldn’t speak like that to a man who had been kind to him and hospitable and who liked him, but he hadn’t been able to help himself. He saw Clements’ face go red and truculent with hurt and then he went back into the house.

Alexandra was chewing voraciously at her teething ring while her mother fetched smoked salmon and a bottle of asti spumante out of her husband’s fancy dining refrigerator, setting it all on a tray. Killing the fatted calf, he thought. Thou art ever my daughter and all that I have is thine . . .

‘Where had she been? What was all that disappearing act about?’

‘She’s going to get married. It’s this boy, John. I suppose she’s been living with him.’ Mrs Dearborn sighed. ‘They’ve had their ups and downs, but it sounds as if they really love each other. He’s married but separated from his wife – awful, isn’t it, to be married and separated before you’re twenty-five? He’s getting a divorce under the new act. Isa knew that last time she phoned but she wouldn’t tell me until he’d got his decree in case something went wrong. That’s Isa all over, always cautious, always secretive. She sounds so happy now.’

He smiled stiffly. She probably thought he disapproved. Let her. The realization that he had been hopelessly wrong, the shock of it, was only just beginning to hit him where it hurt. An awful desire to run away had seized him, to run to Victoria and get on a train and go home. He couldn’t remember ever having made such a monumental howler before and the memory of how he had talked so eagerly to Howard, had nearly convinced him, made him go hot all over.

And now, as he looked back, he saw that although certain circumstances in the lives of the two girls had seemed alike or coincidental, Loveday had never really matched Louise. He asked himself whether a wealthy girl brought up like Louise would have shown horror when asked to a party or baulked at being taken into a pub; if such a girl would have scuttled off for comfort to a non-denominational church; if Louise, who had been Dearborn’s friend before he was her mother’s, would have needed to carry his office number in her handbag, a number she must long have known by heart. He knew it was all impossible. Why hadn’t he known before? Because he had so desperately wanted to prove his abilities, and in order to do so had sacrificed probability to wild speculation. He had been guilty of the very sin he had laid at Baker’s door, that of formulating a theory and forcing the facts to fit it. Fame had been more important to him than truth.

‘Good-bye, Mrs Dearborn,’ he said, and he added hollowly, ‘I’m very glad for you.’

She shook hands with him on the doorstep but she didn’t look at him. She was looking past him towards the arch. And she hadn’t long to wait. As Wexford crossed Laysbrook Square, he saw the girl coming from the King’s Road direction, saw her disappear under the shadows of the arch, a slim fair girl but otherwise quite unlike Howard’s photograph of the dead.