'Come off it, Peggy. You know you and Johnny have a great time at my parties.'
'Did Loveday accept your invitation?' Wexford asked.
'Of course not. She looked quite shocked like as if I'd asked her to an orgy. Mind you, she was very nice about it. She said not to worry about the noise. She liked to hear people enjoying themselves, but I thought, well, you're more like an old aunt than a kid of twenty.'
'She'd got no life in her at all,' said Peggy with a heavy sigh.
At the top of the last flight Wexford had much the same sensation as he had received when coming from the dingy wastes of Kenbourne into the light and space which surrounded the Montfort house. The arch at the head of the stairs had been filled in with a glass door set in a frame of polished wood and from this frame, hooked to white trellis, hung a display of house plants. These were so well arranged and well tended as to have satisfied even Denise.
The air smelt cleaner, fresher. Wexford stood still for a moment, getting his breath back, and then he put his finger to the bell above a small plaque which read: 'Chez Teal.'
6
There be diverse kinds of religion not only in sundry parts of the island, but also in diverse places of every city.
'I THOUGHT you'd turn up sooner or later,' said Ivan Teal. The look he gave Wexford was not the insolent stare of the previous day, but slightly mocking, containing a kind of intense inner amusement. 'Come in. You seem rather out of breath. Perhaps you've been afraid to breathe in case you might inhale something nasty? The stairs do smell, don't they? There must be some very unusual germs lurking in those cracks. I'm sure they'd be a source of fascination to a bacteriologist.' He closed the door and continued to talk in the same light indulgent tone. 'You may wonder why I live here. In point of fact, it has its advantages. The view, for instance. and I have plenty of space for a low rent. Besides, I'm sure you'll agree I've made the flat rather nice.'
It would have seemed nice in any surroundings. Here it was like a jewel in a pigsty. Apart from being spotlessly clean, the flat was decorated with an artist's taste in intense clear colours, the carpets deep, the walls hung here and there with abstract paintings. Wexford walked ahead of Teal into a long lounge running the length of the back of the house. The small sash windows had been removed and replaced by a fifteenfoot-long sheet of plate glass through which could be seen, starkly and almost indecently, the full windswept panorama of Kenbourne Cemetery. He stepped back, disconcerted, and saw Teal's lips twitch.
'Our guest thinks we have an unhealthy taste for the macabre,' he said. 'Perhaps, child, we should get some pretty little lace curtains.'
Wexford had been so drawn to the window that he had not noticed the boy who knelt on the floor beside a wall-length well-stocked bookcase. As Teal addressed him, he got up and stood awkwardly, fidgeting with the girdle of his towelling dressing gown. He was perhaps twenty-two, slim, fair, with huge rather dull eyes.
'Let me introduce Philip Chell, the other consenting adult in this establishment.' Teal's twitching mouth broke into a grin. 'You've no idea what a pleasure it is to say that openly to a policeman.'
'Oh, Ivan! ' said the boy.
'Oh, even! ' Teal mocked. 'There's nothing to be afraid of. We're doing nothing wrong. At your age you can surely hardly remember when it was wrong.' Still smiling, but rather less pleasantly, he said to Wexford, 'Unlike me who have suffered much from policemen.' He shrugged in the boy's direction. 'We must let bygones be bygones and give him some coffee. Go and get it, child.'
Philip Chell went with a sulky flounce.
Teal stared out at the cemetery, his head slightly on one side. 'I'm badly hung-up about it, aren't I? Shall I tell you a joke? It's quite proper, though you might not think so from the way it starts.' He turned his pale grey insolent eyes full on Wexford's face. 'Three men, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Russian. Each tells the others what gives him the greatest pleasure. The Englishman says cricket on the village green on a fine Saturday afternoon in June. A bowl of bouillabaisse made by line Erie Marseillaise, says the Frenchman. It is night, says the Russian, I am in my flat. There comes a knock at my door the secret police are outside, soft hats, raincoats concealing guns. And my greatest pleasure comes when they ask for Ivan Ivanovitch and I can tell them that Ivan Ivanovitch lives next door.'
Wexford laughed.
'But you see, my friend, I wasn't able to say that, for Ivan lived here. And on two occasions I had to go with them.' His voice changed and he said lightly. 'Now my pleasure is to have policemen in for coffee. You know, one advantage the straight has over the gay is that he has a woman in the house and women are better at chores. That boy's hopeless. Make yourself at home while I go and rescue him.'
The bookshelves contained Proust, Gide and Wilde, as he might have expected, and a lot more he didn't expect. If Teal had read all these books Teal was well read. He reached for a calf-bound volume and, as he did so, its owner's voice said at his dbow:
'John Addington Symonds? Isn't he rather old-hat? Poor fellow. Swinburne called him Mr Soddington Symonds, you know.'
'I didn't know,' said Wexford, laughing, 'and I don't want Symonds. I see you've Robinson's translation of Utopia.'
'Borrow it.' Teal took the book down and handed it to Wexford. 'Do you take cream with your coffee? No? My friend has retired to the bedroom. I think he's afraid I'm going to make all sorts of revelations to you.'
'I hope you are, Mr Teal, though not of a kind that would embarrass Mr Chell. I want you to talk to me about Loveday Morgan.'
Teal placed himself on the window-seat, resting one arm along the sill. Sitting down, Wexford couldn't see the cemetery. Teal's face, one of those polished brown faces, both youthless and ageless, was framed against the milky sky. 'I knew her only very slightly,' he said. 'She was a strange repressed child. She had that look about her of a person who had been brought up by strict old-fashioned parents. Once or twice on Sunday mornings I saw her go off to church, go creeping off as if she were doing something both wrong and irresistible.'
'To church?' Suddenly he remembered the Bible. It had been hers then, after all.
'Why not?' exclaimed Teal, his voice loud and impatient.
'Some people still go to church even in these enlightened times.'
'Which church?'
'That one up at the end of the street, of course. I wouldn't have known she was going to church if she'd been trotting off to St Paul's, would I?'
'You needn't get so heated,' Wexford said mildly. 'Is that place C. of E.? No, I shouldn't think so.'
'They call themselves the Children of the Revelation. They're rather like Exclusives or Plymouth Bretheren. There's this chapel temple, they call it and another one up north somewhere and one in South London. Surely you as a policeman remember the fuss a year or two back when one of their ministers was up in court for some sort of indecency. Poor sod. It was in all the papers.' He added reflectively, 'It always is.'
'Was Loveday a... er, Child of the Revelation?'
'Hardly. She worked in a television shop, and to them television, newspapers and films are synonymous with sin. She probably went there because it was the nearest church and she wanted some comfort. I never discussed it with her.'
'What did you discuss with her, Mr Teal?'
'I'm coming to that. More coffee?' He refilled Wexford's cup and stretched out his legs, yawning. 'She was a quiet, sad sort of a girl as I daresay you've gathered. I don't think I'd ever seen her smile or look cheerful until one day about a fortnight ago. It was February the 14th, if that's any help to you. I remember' he smiled sourly 'because that idiot child Philip had seen fit to send me a Valentine and we had a row about it. Sentimental nonsense! Well, instead of going out with him as we'd arranged, I was going for a quiet drink on my own to the Queen's Arms when I met Loveday coming along Queen's Lane that's the street at the bottom here, in case you didn't know looking as if she'd come into a fortune. It was just before six and she was on her way home from work. I'd never seen her looking the way she looked that evening. She was almost laughing, like a child laughs, you know, from joy.'