'That's the woman who identified her? The housekeeper?'
'Yes. Shall we wait and have coffee or would you like to go straight round to Garmisch Terrace?'
'Skip the coffee,' said Wexford.
4
A little farther beyond that all things begin by little and little to wax pleasant; the air soft, temperate and gentle covered with green grass.
ARMISCH TERRACE was straight and grey and forbidding, a canyon whose sides were six-storey houses. All the houses were alike, all joined together, flat-fronted but for their protruding pillared porches, and, like the cemetery building, their proportions were somehow wrong. It had been an unhappy period for architecture, the time when they were built, a period in which those designers who had not adopted the new Gothic, were attempting to improve on the Georgian.
This would have mattered less if some effort had been made to maintain these houses, but Wexford, looking at them with a sinking heart, could not see a single freshly painted facade. Their plaster was cracked and their pillars streaked where water had run through dust. Rubbish clogged the basement areas and these were separated from the pavement by broken railings patched with wire netting. Instead of trees, parking meters stood in a grey row, an avenue of them leading up the cul-de-sac to where it ended in a red-brick church.
There were few people about, a turbaned Sikh lugging his dustbin up area steps, an old woman wheeling a pram filled apparently with jumble-sale spoils, a pregnant black girl whose kingfisher-blue raincoat provided the only colour in the street. The wind blew paper out of the Sikh's dustbin, whirling sheets of newsprint up into the grey sky. It teased at the girls woolly hair which, in a pathetic attempt to be accepted, to be in fashion, she was trying to grow long. Wexford wondered sadly about these coloured people who must have looked to a promised land and had found instead the bitter indecency of Garmisch Terrace.
'Would anyone live here from choice?' he said to Sergeant Clements, who, while Howard studied a report in the car, had attached himself to him as mentor, guide, and possibly protector.
'You may well ask, sir,' said the sergeant approvingly. His manner was not quite that of the schoolmaster addressing a promising pupil. Wexford's rank and age were recognised and respected, but he was made aware of the age-old advantage of the townsman over the greenhorn from the country. Clements' plump face, a face which seemed not to have changed much since he was a fat-checked, rosebud-mouthed schoolboy, wore an expression both smug and discontented. 'They like it, you see,' he explained. 'They like muck and living four to a room and chucking their gash about and prowling all night and sleeping all day.' He scowled at a young man and woman who, arm in arm, crossed the road and sat down on the pavement outside the church where they began to eat crisps out of a bag. 'They like dropping in on their friends at midnight and dossing down on the floor among the fag-ends because the last bus has gone. Ask 'em and most of 'em don't know where they live, here this week, there the next, catch as catch can and then move on. They don't live like you or me sir. They live like those little furry moles you have down in the country, always burrowing about in the dark.'
Wexford recognised in the sergeant a type of policeman which is all too common. Policemen see so much of the seamy side of life and, lacking the social worker's particular kind of training, many of them become crudely cynical instead of learning a merciful outlook. His own Mike Burden came dangerously near sometimes to being such a one, but his intelligence saved him. Wexford didn't think much of the sergeant's intelligence, although he couldn't help rather lilting him.
'Poverty and misery aren't encouragements to an orderly life,' he said, smiling to take the sting out of the admonition.
Clements didn't take this as a rebuke but shook his head at so much innocence.
'I was referring to the young, sir, the young layabouts like that pair over there. But you'll learn. A couple of weeks in Kenbourne Vale and you'll get your eyes opened. Why, when I first came here I thought hash was mutton stew and S.T.D. a dialling system.'
Perfectly aware of the significance of these terms, Wexford said nothing. but glanced towards the car. He was beginning to feel chilly and at a nod from Howard he moved under the porch of number 22. That a lecture, contrasting the manners of modern youth with the zeal, ambition and impeccable morality of Clements' contemporaries in his own young days, was imminent he felt sure, and he hoped to avoid. But the sergeant followed him, stamping his feet on the dirty step, and launched into the very diatribe Wexford most feared. For a couple of minutes he let him have his head and then he interrupted.
'About Loveday Morgan . . .'
'So-called,' said Clements darkly. 'That wasn't her real name. Now, I ask you, is it likely to be? We checked her at Somerset House. Plenty of Morgan girls but no Loveday Morgan. She just called herself that. Why? You may well ask. Girls can themselves all sorts of things these days. Now, let me give you an illustration of what I mean . . .'
But before he could, Howard had joined them and silenced him with an unusually cold Iook. There was a row of bells beside the front door with numbers instead of nameplates.
'The housekeeper lives in the basement,' said Howard, 'so .we may as well try Flat One.' He rang the bell and a voice snapped what sounded like 'Teal' out of the entry phone.
'I beg your pardon?'
'This is Ivan Teal. Flat One. Who are you?'
'Detective Superintendent Fortune. I want Mrs Pope.'
'Ah,' said the voice. 'You want Flat Fifteen. The thing that works the door is broken. I'll come down.'
'Flats!' said the sergeant while they waited. 'That's a laugh. They aren't any of 'em flats. They're rooms with a tap and a gas meter, but our girl was paying seven quid a week for hers and thee are only two loos in the whole dump. What a world!' He patted Wexford's shoulder. 'Brace yourself for what's coming now, sir. Whoever this Teal is he won't look human.'
But he did. The only shock Wexford felt was in confronting a man nearly as old as himself, a shortish, well-muscled man with thick grey hair worn rather long.
'Sorry to keep you waiting,' he said. 'It's a long way down.' He stared at the three men, unsmiling, insolent in a calculating way. It was a look Wexford had often seen on faces be- fore, but they had almost always been young faces. Teal had, moreover, a smooth upper-class accent. He wore a spotlessly clean white sweater and smelt of Faberge's Aphrodisia. 'I sup- pose we're all going to be persecuted now.'
'We don't persecute people, Mr Teal.'
'No? You've changed then. You used to persecute me.'
Assuming that Howard had given him carte blanche to question possible witnesses if he chose, Wexford said, 'Did you know Loveday Morgan?'
'I know everybody here,' Teal said, 'the oldest inhabitants and the ships that pass in the night. I who have sat by Thebes below the wall . . .' He grinned suddenly. 'Flat One if you want me.'
He led them to the basement stairs and went off without saying any more.
'A curious old queen,' said Howard. 'Fifteen years in this hole . . . God! Corne on, it's down here.'
The stairs were narrow and carpeted in a thin much-worn haircord. They led down to a largish lofty hall, long ago painted dark crimson, but this paint was peeling away, leaving white islands shaped like fantastic continents, so that the walls might have been maps of some other unknown world, a charted Utopia. Furniture, that looked too big to go up those stairs although it must have come down them, a sideboard, a huge bookcase crammed with dusty volumes, filled most of the floor space. There were three closed doors, each with an overflowing dustbin on its threshold, and the place smelt of decaying rubbish.