Murder Being Once Done (19 page)

‘Good-bye,’ said Clements. He dropped Wexford’s hand and went out into the rain, not even bothering to turn up his coat collar. A passing car splashed him but he didn’t seem to notice. Small incidents such as this, which would once have inspired a diatribe against modern manners, no longer had the power to prick the surface of his mind.

Wexford stood on the steps and watched him go. It was time for him to go too, to leave Kenbourne Vale and Loveday Morgan and forget them if he could. Strange how absorbed he had been in trying to discover who she was, tramping around Fulham, weaving fantasies. Now as he looked back on the past week, he realized that he was no nearer knowing who she was or who had killed her or why than he had been when Howard had found him in the vault. It seemed to him that he had had a few sensible ideas, firm conclusions, which even that howler of his couldn’t shake, but they had grown vague now and he had almost forgotten what they were.

Water which had gathered on the blue glass panels of the lamp above his head trickled down and dripped on him. He moved slowly down the steps and as he did so water hit him from another angle. A wave of it splashed against his trouser legs and he glanced up, affronted. The taxi, cause of the offence, had drawn up a few yards from him and directly in front of the police station. Its rear door opened and a vision in a purple silk suit with a white orchid in its button hole descended on to the wet pavement.

‘What a day for the Honourable Diana’s wedding,’ said Ivan Teal when he had paid the taxi driver. ‘And she such a sunny-natured girl. Where are the flunkeys rushing to meet me with umbrellas?’

‘This isn’t the Dorchester,’ said Wexford.

‘Don’t I know it! I have some experience of police stations, principally West End Central. Were you on your way to see me?’

‘See
you
?’ In Wexford’s present state of mind. Garmisch Terrace and the case seemed a world away. ‘Was I supposed to be seeing you?’

‘Of course you were. I told Philip to say ten. He knew I had this wedding at St George’s. The bride’s gown is one of mine so I must be in at the kill. When you didn’t turn up I came to you. The wedding’s at half eleven.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Wexford, recalling how Chell had sidetracked him with his talk of newspaper cuttings. ‘It doesn’t matter now. Don’t you waste your time.’

Teal stared at him. His hair was carefully waved and gusts of Aphrodisai came from it and his suit. ‘You mean you’ve found out who she was?’ he said.

Wexford almost asked who. Then he remembered that to some people Loveday Morgan’s death was important and he said, ‘If you’ve got some information you’d better see Superintendent Fortune or Inspector Baker.’

‘I want to see you.’

‘It was never my case. I’m here on holiday and I’m going home on Saturday. You’re getting rather wet, you know.’

‘This tussore isn’t exactly drip-dry,’ said Teal, moving under the arch from which the blue lamphung. ‘I wish I’d gone straight to Hanover Square,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s always hell getting a taxi in Kenbourne. Can you see if that one down there has got his light up?’

Wexford didn’t bother to look. ‘You said you wanted to see the superintendent.’

‘You said that. I’m not over-fond of policemen. Remember? You’re different. If I can’t talk to you I’ll be on my way.’ Teal flung out a purple silk arm. ‘Taxi!’ he shouted.

The cab was going the wrong way. It waited for some lights to go green and, in defiance of regulations, began to make a U-turn. Behind it, looming scarlet through the downpour, appeared the bus that went to Chelsea.

‘It was nice meeting you,’ said Teal, going down the steps. ‘Never thought I’d say that to a . . .’

The taxi drew up, the bus went by. ‘You’d better come in a minute,’ said Wexford with a sigh. ‘I can spare half an hour.’

Teal was never amiable for more than a few minutes.

‘I can’t spare that long myself,’ he said with a return to asperity. ‘Really, you’re very inconsistent. What a ghastly place! No wonder policemen have a grudge against humanity. What’s this? Some sort of annex to the morgue?’

‘An interview room.’ Wexford watched him dust the seat of a chair before sitting on it. He supposed he ought to feel flattered. However highly one values one’s profession, it is always a compliment to be told that one is better, more human, more sympathetic, less conventional, than the common run. But boredom with the whole business made him almost impervious to flattery.

‘Comfy?’ he said sarcastically.

‘Oh, don’t come that!’ snapped Teal. ‘Not you. You’re not one of these flatfeet who think that because one’s gay, one’s got the mentality of a finicky schoolgirl. I’m going to a wedding and I don’t want to muck up my clothes any more than you would.’

Wexford looked at him with positive dislike. ‘Well, Mr Teal, what is it you want to tell me?’

‘That minister we were talking about – remember? His name is Morgan.’

The priests whom they find exceeding vicious livers, them they excommunicate from having any interest in divine matters.

It was like giving up smoking, thought Wexford, who had given it up with some difficulty years before. The bloody things made you ill, you resisted them, they even bored you, but only let someone produce one – or, worse, light it under your nose – and you were hooked again, yearning, longing to get back to the old habit. Teal had done that to him, although he hadn’t lighted it yet. Wexford tried to suppress the excitement he felt, the hateful irritating excitement, and said:

‘What minister?’

Maddeningly, Teal began to digress. ‘Of course it’s hindsight,’ he said, ‘but there was something funny about her voice. I noticed it at the time and yet I didn’t, if you know what I mean. She didn’t have any accent.’

‘I don’t have any accent,’ said Wexford rashly.

Teal laughed at that. ‘You mean you think you don’t. You can’t hear that faint Sussex burr any more than I can hear the rag-trade camp in my voice unless I listen for it. Just think about it for a moment. Johnny talks RADA, Peggy South London, Phil suppressed cockney with a gay veneer, your superintendent pure Trinity. One doesn’t have to be a Henry Higgins to sort all that out. Everyone has an accent that he’s got from his parents or his school or his university or the society he moves in. Loveday didn’t have any at all.’

‘What’s that got to do with some minister?’

‘I’m coming to that. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve asked myself who are these rare creatures that speak unaccented English. One example would be servants of the old school. I should think that when there was a whole servant class they all talked like that – flat, plain English without any inflexion or intonation. Their parents brought them up to it, having been servants themselves and knowing that cockney wouldn’t be acceptable in a housemaid. Who else? Children brought up in institutions, maybe. People who spent years of their lives in hospitals and perhaps, people who have spent all their lives in closed communities.’

Wexford was growing very impatient. ‘Brought up in an institution . . . ?’

‘Oh, come
on
. You’re the detective. Don’t you remember my telling you how she went to the temple of the Children of the Revelation?’

‘She can’t have been one of them. She worked in a television shop. They don’t have television or read newspapers.’

‘There you have it, the reason why her parents haven’t got in touch. Didn’t it occur to you? Anyway, her father couldn’t have got in touch. He’s that Morgan who was their minister and got put inside. He’s in prison.’

There was a dramatic pause. Wexford had thought he could never care about this case again, never experience for a second time the thrill and the dread of the hunter with his quarry in sight. Now he felt the tingle of adrenalin in his blood, a shiver travel up his spine.

‘I keep this book of press cuttings,’ Teal went on. ‘That is, I collect newspapers that have bits about me in them, but often I don’t cut the bits out for a year or so and the papers accumulate. Well, a couple of nights ago, having time to kill, I started on my cuttings and on the back of a photograph of one of my gowns there was a story about this Morgan appearing in a magistrates’ court.’

‘You have the cutting with you?’

‘Do me a favour, I’m on my way to a very fashionable wedding. As Wilde says . . .’ Here Teal wriggled affectedly – purposely to annoy, Wexford thought – and said in a camp falsetto, ‘A well-made dress has no pockets.’ He chuckled at the chief inspector’s discomfiture. ‘Anyway, I stuck it in my book, court proceedings side downwards, of course. You can do some work now.’

‘When did these proceedings take place, Mr Teal?’ Wexford asked, keeping his temper.

‘Last March. He was charged with bigamy, indecent assault on
five
women – the courage the man must have had! – and having had carnal knowledge of a fourteen-year-old girl. I don’t know what that means precisely, but I expect you do. He was committed for trial to the Surrey Assizes.’ Teal looked at his watch. ‘My God, I mustn’t be late and find myself in a rear pew. I want to get a good look at the honourable Diana in all my glory.’

‘Mr Teal, you’ve been very helpful. I’m grateful. There’s just one other thing. You said Loveday asked you if Johnny and Peggy were trustworthy. Whatdid she want to entrust to them?’

‘To him, you mean. Herself, I suppose, if she was in love with him.’

Wexford looked doubtful. ‘A woman of fifty might feel that way, but I don’t think a young girl would. I’m asking myself what precious thing she had to entrust to anyone.’

‘Then you must go on asking yourself, Mr Wexford, because I do have to go now.’

‘Yes, of course. Thanks for coming.’

The interview room became a drab little hole again after Teal had gone. Wexford went out into the corridor and began to mount the stairs. It struck him suddenly that he could climb stairs now without getting short of breath.

It was a piece of luck really getting that information from Teal, for passing it on immediately would vindicate him in the eyes of Howard and Baker. Not that he had done anything but listen and that reluctantly. Never mind. He would tell them simply what Teal had told him and leave them to follow it up. Unless . . . Unless he delayed passing it on for half an hour, and used that half-hour to do a little research of his own in the police station library.

If they had one. At the top of the stairs he encountered someone he thought was Sergeant Nolan and asked him. They had. Down one floor, sir, and third door on your right.

In the library he found Pamela and DC Dinehart, each occupied with a newspaper file, and wearing on their young faces the serious and absorbed expressions of students in the British Museum. Both looked up to nod and then took on further notice of him. It took him no more than ten minutes to find what he wanted, the proceedings against Morgan in the Assize court.

The
News of the World
had dealt with the case lubriciously, yet with its customary manner of righteous outrage;
The People
had seen in it occasion for a venomous article on corruption among ministers of religion;
The Observer
, its nose in the air had tucked it away under a story about a blackmailed county councillor. For facts and photographs he selected
The Sunday Times
and the
Sunday Express
.

Alexander William Morgan had been separated from his wife for some years before the commission of the offences, he lodging next door to his church in Artois Road, Camberwell, she remaining in the erstwhile matrimonial home in nearby Ivy Street. Apparently, the rift had taken place when Morgan received a call and became shepherd of the Camberwell Temple. He had tried, very gradually, to infuse into the bitter and life-denying creed of the Children of the Revelation a certain liberalism, although, due to the opposition of diehard elders, had got no further than to make a few of them believe that television and radio enjoyed in the privacy of their own homes was no sin.

In sexual matters he had been more successful. Indeed, his success had been startling. A stream of young women had given evidence, including a Miss Hannah Peters whom he had married (gone through a form of marriage was the charge) in a ceremony of his own devising at which he had been both bridegroom and officiating priest. The other girl, even the fourteen-year-old, regarded themselves as his wives under the curious philosophy he had propounded to them. He had treated them affectionately. They said they had expected, as a result of what he had told them and by reason of his relationship with them, to inherit a more blissful form of eternal life than the less favoured Children. It was only when he made advances to older women that his propensities had come to light. Morgan had been sent to prison for three years, still protesting that he was responsible for conferring on these women a peculiar grace.

Wexford noted down the names of all the women witnesses. Then he studied the photographs, but only one of them caught his eye, a picture of the temple itself in Artois Road. He glanced up and, seeing that Pamela had finished her researches, beckoned her over.

‘Are you going back to Mr Fortune’s office?’

She nodded.

‘He has a snapshot of Loveday Morgan . . .’

‘Yes, sir, I know the one you mean.’

‘I wonder if you mind asking him if he’d have it sent along to me here?’

That was that, then. It was the only way. Howard would, of course, come back with the snapshot himself, note from the newspaper stories that Morgan had two daughters, and the case would pass out of his, Wexford’s, hands. He felt rather flat, for he had found her in such an undramatic way.

While he waited for Howard to appear, he looked at the other photographs, round-faced, bespectacled Morgan, forty-six years old, a suburban satyr; Morgan with his wife and two fat little girls, either of whom might have been Loveday in childhood; Hannah Peters, plain, smiling, a bride among the handmaidens with an Alice band holding back her frizzy hair.