Murder Being Once Done

'You don't like Mrs Dearborn?'

The girl was very young, very strict and very intolerant. 'I don't like deceit. If my mother did to me what she did to Lou I'd never speak to her again'

'I'd like to hear about that,'said Wexford.

'I'm going to tell you. It's no secret, anyway.'~Verity Bate was silent for a moment and then she said very seriously, 'You do understand, don't you, that even if I knew where Lou was, I wouldn't tell you? I don't know, but if I did I wouldn't tell you! '

Equally seriously, Wexford said, 'I appreciate that, Miss Bate. Your principles do you credit. Let me get this quite straight. You don't know where Louise is, you've 40 idea, and you won't tell me because it's against your principles.'

She looked at him uncertainly. 'That's right. I wouldn't help Mrs Samp Dearborn or him.'

'Mr Dearborn?'

Her white skin took a flush easily and now it burned fiery red, earnest and indignant. 'He was my dad's best friend. They were in partnership. Nobody ought ever to speak to him again. Don't you think the world would be a lot better place if we just refused to speak to people who behave badly? Then they'd learn bloody awful behaviour doesn't pay because society won't tolerate it. Don't you agree with me?'

She was more like fifteen than twenty-one. 'We all behave badly, Miss Bate.'

'Oh, you're just like my father! You're resigned. It's because you old people compromise that we're in the mess we're well, in. Now I say that we ought to stop sending people to prison for stealing things and start sending people to prison who destroy other people's lives. Like Stephen Bloody Dearborn.'

Wexford sighed. What a little talker she was! 'He seems quite a pleasant man to me,' he said. 'I gather Louise didn't like him much, though.'

'Like him?' Verity Bate pushed back her hair and thrust her face forward until little sharp nose and large blue eyes were perhaps six inches from him. 'Like him? You don't know anything, do you? Lou worshipped that man. She was just so crazy about Stephen Dearborn it wasn't true!'

This statement had the effect on him she had evidently hoped for. He was profoundly surprised, and yet, when he considered it, he wondered why he hadn't arrived at the truth himself. That it was the truth, he had no doubt. No normal clever girl leaves school at a crucial stage in her school career, throws up a university place and cuts herself off almost entirely from her mother just because her mother has made a proper and entirely suitable marriage with a man to whom the girl herself has introduced her.

'She was in love with him?' he asked.

Of course she was!' Verity Bate shook her head until her face was entirely canopied in red hair, but whether this was in continuing wonder at her own revelation or at Wexford's obtuseness, he couldn't tell. The hair flew back, driven by a sharp toss. 'I'd better tell you the whole story and mine will be an unbiassed account, at any rate. It's no use you talking to Stephen Dearborn, he's such a liar. He'd only say he never thought of Lou in that way because that's what he said to my dad. Ooh, he's disgusting!'

'This er, unbiassed account of yours, Miss Bate?'

'Yes, well, we were at school together, Lou and I, in Wimbledon. That's where my parents live, and Lou and Mrs Sampson lived in the next street. Stephen Dearborn was living up in ghastly Kenbourne Vale and Dad used to bring him home sometimes on account of him being what dad called a poor lonely widower.'

'He was married before, then?'

'His wife died and their baby died. That was all centuries ago. Stephen was supposed to be fond of kids and he used to take me out. Tower of London, Changing of the Guard, that sort of crap. Oh, and he dragged me around Kenbourne Vale too, showing me a lot of boring old architecture. It's a wonder I didn't catch something awful in that slum. When I got friendly with Lou, he took us both.'

'How old were you?'

'Sixteen, seventeen. I had to call him Uncle Steve. It makes me feel sick when I think of it, physically sick.' Her mouth turned down at the corners. 'Lou's not like me, you know. She keeps everything below surface, but it's all there, emotion welling and churning like a . . .' The childish voice dropped thrillingly. '. . . a cauldron! Anyway, we all went out together but I was the odd one. Stephen and Lou well, it was like in the days when people had chaperones. I was their chaperone. And then one night when she was staying at my place she told me she was in love with him and did I think he loved her? It gave me quite a shock, Lou telling me anything about her personal life. I didn't know what to say, I didn't understand it. I mean, she was seventeen maybe eighteen by then and he was middle-aged. You can't imagine a girl of eighteen falling for a man of forty, can you?'

'It happens.'

'I think it's urky,' said Miss Bate with what looked like a genuine shudder. 'The next thing was she asked him back to her place. To meet,' she added darkly, 'her mother.'

Wexford had almost forgotten that the purpose of this talk had been to discover Louise Sampson's whereabouts. He was seeing the little cameo again, the stranger entering the house alone because an unmannerly girl had left him to introduce himself then, searching for the girl's mother, had come upon a half-open door and seen in a kitchen a woman in a white apron engaged in an age-old feminine task. The girl's strident voice jerked him out of his daydream.

'Lou and I were due to sit for our A's, but the week before they started Lou didn't come to school. I phoned her place and her mother said she wasn't well. Then one night my dad came in and said to Mummy, "What d'you think, Steve's going to marry the Sampson girl." Of course, I thought he meant Lou, but he didn't. Fancy calling a woman of thirtyseven a girl! Lou never took her A's. She was really ill, she had a sort of nervous breakdown'

'A case of fiiu pulckra, mater pulchrior,' said Wexford.

'I wouldn't know. I never did Latin. They sent Lou down to her grandmother and then- they got married. I left school and started at Marjohn's and Daddy said he'd pay half the rent of a flat for me if I could find another girl to share and I was sort of looking for someone when Lou rang up from this grandmother's and said she'd never go to those two in Chelsea, and could she share with me?'

'How long did that last?'

'About a year. Lou was more shut in than ever. She was heartbroken. Her bloody mother used to phone and pretend to me it was all rubbish about Lou fancying Stephen. Anyway, Lou got fed up being hunted and she went off to share with someone in Battersea. I'm not telling you the address, mind you.'

'I wouldn't dream of asking you, Miss Bate.'

'After that we sort of lost touch.'

'You couldn't bear to see so much suffering, was that it?'

'Exactly.' She seemed relieved at so pat a solution which perhaps avoided for her the necessity of explaining that she hadn't bothered to phone and never wrote letters. 'Louise Sampson,' she said dramatically, 'went out of my life. Perhaps she's found happiness, perhaps not. I shall never know.' She lifted her chin and stared intensely in the direction of the coffee machine, showing to Wexford a delicate and faintly quivering profile. He wondered if she had attended all or some of the films shown at the Garbo season, a recent offering, according to Denise, of the Classic Cinema up the road. 'That's all I can tell you,' she said, 'but if I knew any more I wouldn't reveal a single word.'

Surely the sergeant's wife didn't go to all this trouble, a full dinner service, linen napkins, side plates and all, when her husband popped home alone for a bite to eat? Wexford was sure she didn't but he behaved as if all this ceremony was normal and even forgot his diet.

He was aware that further pomp was to attach to the entry of the child, delayed until after their coffee, not only for the sake of suspense but to prove Mrs Clements' ability to be a gracious hostess though a mother. It was touching, he thought, the way she kept stoically to the theme of their conversation inevitably, with her husband taking part, the general decadence of modern life while listening surreptitiously for a squeak from the next room. At last, when Clements and Wexford had left the table and were standing at the picture window, contemplating Kenbourne Vale from twelve floors up, she ret entered the room with the baby in her arms.