Murder Being Once Done

'He's a designer, isn't he? I thought you knew. Well, people write about him in the papers and when they do he cuts the bit out and pastes it in his book.'

Aware that Peggy had fallen silent and that by now everyone was listening avidly, Wexford said in a lower tone, 'Could we go up and have a look at this book?'

'No, we could not. Really, whatever next? Ivan would kin me. He was perfectly horrid to me before he went out just because I'd left last night's washing up. I can't help it if I have these frighful migraines, can I?'

The party girl giggled.

'I feel very depressed,' said Chell. 'I'm going to draw out my whole month's allowance and buy some clothes to cheer myself up.' He stuck up his chin and marched out, banging the front door resoundingly behind him.

'All right for some,' said Peggy, passing a dirty hand across her face and leaving black streaks on her beautiful brow. 'Nice to be a kept man, isn't it, Johnny?'

'I look after her, don't I?' Lamont muttered, giving the baby a squeeze to indicate to whom he was referring. 'I've done everything for her practically since she was born.'

'Except when you're down the pub.'

'Three bloody hours at lunchtime! And you go out leaving me stuck with her every evening. I'm going back to bed.' He hoisted the baby on to his shoulder and made for the basement stairs, giving Peggy a backward glance which, it seemed to Wexford, contained more of hurt love than resentment.

'Look, Mr What's-your-name,' said Peggy, 'when are you lot going to open up Loveday's room so as we can re-let it? The landlords have lost fourteen quid already and it's keeping them awake at nights.'

'Is there someone wanting to rent it?'

'Yeah, her.' Peggy pointed to the party girl who nodded. 'Funny, isn't it? Big laugh. A guy like you would pay seven quid a week not to live in it.'

'It's two pounds a week less than what I'm paying,' said the other girl.

'Well, I'm not discussing the landlords' business in public,' said Peggy huffily. She jumped down from the table and tucked a milk bottle under each arm. 'You'd better come with me down to the hole in the ground.'

Wexford followed her, murmuring vainly that the matter wasn't in his hands. In the basement room Lamont was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Peggy took no notice of him. She began to rummage among letters on the mantelpiece.

'I'm looking for a bit of paper,' she said, 'so you can write down who they have to contact about getting the room back.'

'Will this do?' 'This' was a sheet of paper he had picked up from the top of an untidy pile on the foot of the bed. As he held it out to her he saw that it was an estate agent's specification of a house in Brixton, offered for sale at four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds.

'No, it won't do!' said Lamont, rousing himself and seizing the paper which he screwed up and hurled into a sooty cavern behind the electric fire.

Peggy laughed unpleasantly at him. 'You said you were going to chuck that out God, it must be the weekend before last. Why don't you clear up the place instead of slopping about on the bed all day? It's time you got up, anyway, if that guy's going to phone you about that TV work. Did you give him the number of the Grand Duke?'

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 W.P.C. 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 blown before their natural time.' Clements always knew everything, Wexford thought crossly, and made all the facts he im- parted 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, it's trees still silver-gray 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.

16

I know hew 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, sud- denly in the midst of his anxiety for her, it occured 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.