'Work on a paper, do you?'
'Something like that.' said Wexford.
'I only ask,' said the postman, 'because it seems hard on a feller your age, especially in this weather. Wear the old ones out first, eh?'
Wexford swaDowed his humiliation as best he could and managed an unamused grin. The postman gave him the ad- dress. 'I daresay she'll be at work now?' he said.
'Not her. The Revelationers don't let their daughters go to work, but I don't reckon you'll see her. They won't let you in.'
But they might open the door. Hannah herself might do that. What he needed now was a piece of luck, one of those nearmiracles that had sometimes come his way in the past, clearing and illuminating the path he must follow. And he thought it had happened when, turning into Stockholm Street, he saw the frizzy-haired girl of the newspaper photograph come out of the corner house where the Peters family lived.
She held a letter in her hand which she thrust into the pocket of her long dark raincoat to protect it from the rain, and she paused on the step, darting quick glances about her. Timidly, she came out into the street. It was only a shabby back street where she had probably lived all her life and but for him it was deserted, but she peered about and hesitated as if she were a schoolgirl, separated from her party and lost in a foreign city. Then she walked rapidly towards a pillar box, her head down, keeping custody of her eyes like a nun.
Wexford followed her, and suddenly he felt shy himself. He had an idea, although it was without foundation, that the letter was for Morgan. She started violently when he spoke to her, gasped and put her hand up to cover her mouth.
'Miss Peters, I'm a policeman. I'm only talking to you in the street because I was a*raid I wouldn't be admitted to your home.'
Where did they go to school, these girls? Or did the Revelationers run special schools for their children? Did they never meet outsiders? He wondered if he was the first outsider she had spoken to since she had passed through the terror of the court, an experience which must have been tor- ture to her, enough to shake her reason. Spoken? Was she going to speak now?
She had a plain, unformed face, half-covered still by her hand. No make-up, no rings on her hand. Her body was flat under the stiff heavy coat.
'Miss Peters . . .' Rapidly and rather awkwardly, for she gave him no help, he told her what he wanted and why he was there, accosting her in the rain. He didn't think she was *ightened of him, but perhaps she was frightened of God. She scanned the street, her hand now a fist tapping her chin, but before she spoke to him she looked down at her feet. She wouldn't meet his eyes.
'Father would turn me out if he saw me. He was going to turn me out after . . . after . . . Mother made him let me stay.'
The strangest thing in all this strangeness, Wexford thought, was that she should have wanted to stay. But perhaps it wasn't so strange. Hatch out a wild bird, rear it in a cage, and when you set it free it will perish or be destroyed by its fellows. Easing his umbrella over her so that they were both sheltered by it, he began talking to her soothingly, apologising explaining how important it was for him to know. But all the time he was thinking of the word which lay outside her experience, of the girls like Louise Sampson and Verity Bate who snapped their fingers at their parents, who lived where they liked and with whom they liked, to whom a tyrannical father, wielding real power, was a fictional monster they read about in books written in the distant past. It was almost un- believable that such opposites as they and Hannah Peters could co-exist in the same city and the same century.
Without looking up, she said, 'I never heard of a girl called Loveday.' She shivered. 'She didn't have to go to the court. What was her real name?'
Wexford shook his head, feeling paralysed by her dull slow voice, her ox-like acceptance of oppression.
'Perhaps she left your congregation in the past twelve months?'
'Mary went away to be a teacher, and Sarah went and Rachel. Edna married out. They all went away.' She didn't speak wistfully but as of some dire enormity. 'My father will punish me if I don't go home now.'
'Their addresses?' he pleaded.
'Oh, no. No, no. Mary was at the court.' It cost her something to say that, he thought. Mary too, had been one of Morgan's brides. She struggled with an emotion no one had ever taught her existed or could be controlled. There were tears on her face or perhaps just rain. 'You must go to the Shepherd,' she said, and ducked out from under the umbrella.
'They won't let me into the house!'
She called back to him something about a prayer meeting that night. Then she ran home through the rain, the caged creature escaping from predators and the humane that would set it free. Back to the cage, the safety of a living death.
Wexford had been shaken by the interview. Hannah Peters bore no physical resemblance to Loveday Morgan, and yet he felt that it was to the latter he had been talking. Here, alive and in a different skin, was the dead girl, the shy, frightened, badly-dressed girl who didn't know how to make friends and was scarcely fit to be employed. At last she had been revealed to him, the cemetery walker, the BiWe reader. Teal had known her and had seen her rare, wondering smile; Lamont had sat with her, witness her tortured silences; with a shrug, Dearborn had dismissed her ugly gaucheness. And now he too had seen her, or seen perhaps her ghost.
The street was empty again, the ghost gone. But she had left him a message. He must take the only way open to him now of catching her people outside their prisons.
20
In dim and doubtful light they be gathered together, and more earnestly fixed on religion and devotion.
DARKNESS came early after that day of torrents. Sitting in a lorry driver's retreat, his raincoat steaming in the red glow of an electric fire, Wexford watched the fluorescent lamps come on in Artois Road. The wet pavements threw back scarlet and blue and orange reflections of neon overhead. The sky was red and vaporous, any stars which might have been up there quenched by the glare. He wondered when the prayer meeting would begin. Surely not before seven? Hungry in spite of tea and a doughnut, he ordered a labourer's meal, a forbidden sinful meal of sausages and chips and fried eggs.
According to Crocker and Dora and their gloomy disciples, he ought to have been dead by now, for he had broken all their rules. He had worked when he should have rested, eaten saturated fats when he should have fasted, gone out at night, worried and today forgotten all about his pills. Why not break one more and he hanged for a sheep?
The ultimate forbidden fruit would be to go back into that pub he had visited at lunchtime and drink spirits. He found it and had a double Scotch. Far from laying him out, it filled him with well-being, and he made up his mind then and there to defy them all. No one but a fool follows a regimen that debilitates him while moderate indulgence makes him feel good.
While he had been drinking the rain had stopped. He sniffed the smell of London after rain, smoky, gaseous, with here and there other scents infiltrating. the odour of frying food and stranger oriental platters, the whiff of a French cigarette. They faded as he walked into the residential depths of Artois Road where the blue-white lamps looked too smart for this hinterland. Another light glowed ahead of him, a round red light like a Cyclops eye, and he saw that he was too late. The prayer meeting had begun. He stood outside the temple and heard the voices of the Children, intoning together sometimes, then one single voice raised in spontaneous praise or perhaps commination. How many hours before they came out? And would they talk to him when they did?
The house where the Shepherd lodged, where Morgan had lodged, looked entirely deserted now, no slits of lights showing at the edges of the blinds. The concrete garden lay under a sheet of water which was black because it had no light to mirror. There were perhaps fifty houses like this one in Wilman Park, vaults for the living. Rachel and Mary and Sarah had gone away . . . He hoped that now they wore scent and false eyelashes and feathers and flowers and sat on steps with their boy friends earing crisps out of paper bags.