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 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 card, 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 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 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 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.'
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.