Murder Being Once Done (2 page)

Theresa Street, where his nephew’s house was, lay on the borders of fashionable Chelsea, outside them if you hold that the King’s Road ends at Beaufort Street. Wexford was beginning to pick up these bits of with-it lore. He had to have something to keep his mind going. He crossed the King’s Road by the World’s End and made his way towards the river.

It was lead-coloured this morning, the 29th of February. Fog robbed the Embankment of colour and even the Albert Bridge, whose blue and white slenderness he liked, had lost its Wedgwood look and loomed out of the mist as a sepia skeleton. He walked down the bridge and then back and across the road, blinking his eye and rubbing it. There was nothing in his eye but the small blind spot, no immovable grain of dust. It only felt that way and always would now, he supposed.

The seated statue which confronted him returned his gaze with darkling kindliness. It seemed preoccupied with affairs of state, affairs of grace and matters utopian. What with his eye and the fog, he had to approach more closely to be sure that it was, in fact, a coloured statue, not naked bronze or stone, but tinted black and gold.

He had never seen it before, but he had, of course, seen pictures of the philosopher, statesman and martyr, notably the Holbein drawing of Sir Thomas and his family. Until now, however, the close resemblance of the reproduced face to a known and living face had not struck him. Only replace that saintly gravity with an impish gleam, he thought, those mild resigned lips with the curve of irony, and it was Dr Crocker to the life.

Feeling like Ahab in Naboth’s vineyard, Wexford addressed the statue aloud.

‘Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?’

Sir Thomas continued to reflect on an ideal state or perhaps on the perils of Reformation. His face, possibly by a trick of the drifting mist, seemed to have grown even more grave, not to say comminatory. Now it wore precisely the expression Crocker’s had worn that Sunday in Kingsmarkham when he had diagnosed a thrombosis in his friend’s eye.

‘God knows, Reg, I warned you often enough. I told you to lose weight, I told you to take things easier, and how many times have I told you to stay off the booze?’

‘All right. What now? Will I have another?’

‘If you do, it may be your brain the clot touches, not your eye. You’d better get away somewhere for a complete rest. I suggest a month away.’

‘I can’t go away for a month!’

‘Why not? Nobody’s indispensable.’

‘Oh, yes, they are. What about Winston Churchill? What about Nelson?’

‘The trouble with you, apart from high blood pressure, is delusions of grandeur. Take Dora away to the seaside.’

‘In
February
? Anyway, I hate the sea. And I can’t go away to the country. I live in the country.’

The doctor took his sphygmomanometer out of his bag and, silently rolling up Wexford’s sleeve, bound the instrument to his arm. ‘Perhaps the best thing,’ said Crocker, without revealing his findings, ‘will be to send you to my brother’s health farm in Norfolk.’

‘God! What would I do with myself all day?’

‘By the time,’ said Crocker dreamily, ‘you’ve had nothing but orange juice and sauna baths for three days you won’t have the strength to do anything. The last patient I sent there was too weak to lift the phone and call his wife. He’d only been married a month and he was very much in love.’

Wexford gave the doctor a lowering cowed glance. ‘May God protect me from my friends. I’ll tell you what, I’ll go to London. How would that do? Mynephew’s always asking us. You know the one Imean, my sister’s boy, Howard, the superintendent with the Met. He’s got a house in Chelsea.’

‘All right. But no late nights, Reg. No participation in swinging London. No alcohol. I’m giving you a diet sheet of one thousand calories a day. It sounds a lot, but, believe me, it ain’t.’

‘It’s starvation,’ said Wexford to the statue.

He had started to shiver, standing there and brooding. Time to get back for the pre-lunch rest and glass of tomato juice they made him have. One thing, he wasn’t joining any Peter Pan expedition afterwards. He didn’t believe in fairies and one statue a day was enough. A bus ride, maybe. But not on that one he could see trundling up Cremorne Road and ultimately bound for Kenbourne Vale. Howard had made it quite plain in his negative gracious way that that was one district of London in which his uncle wouldn’t be welcome.

‘And don’t get any ideas about talking shop with that nephew of yours,’ had been Crocker’s parting words. ‘You’ve got to get away from all that for a bit. Where did you say his manor is, Kenbourne Vale?’

Wexford nodded. ‘Tough sort of place, I’m told.’

‘They don’t come any tougher. I trained there at St Biddulph’s.’ As always when speaking to the green rustic of his years in the metropolis, Crocker wore his Mr Worldly Wiseman expression and his voice became gently patronizing. ‘There’s an enormous cemetery, bigger than Kensal Green and more bizarre than Brompton, with vast tombs and a few minor royals buried there, and the geriatric wards of the hospital overlook the cemetery just to show the poor old things what their next stop’ll be. Apart from that, the place is miles of mouldering terraces containing two classes of persons:
Threepenny Opera
crooks and the undeserving poor.’

‘I daresay,’ said Wexford, getting his own back, ‘it’s changed in the intervening thirty years.’

‘Nothing to interest you, anyway,’ the doctor snapped. ‘I don’t want you poking your nose into Kenbourne Vale’s crime, so you can turn a deaf ear to your nephew’s invitations.’

Invitations! Wexford laughed bitterly to himself. Much chance he had of turning a deaf ear when Howard, in the ten days since his uncle’s arrival, hadn’t spoken a single word even to indicate that he was a policeman, let alone suggested a visit to the Yard or an introduction to his inspector. Not that he was neglectful. Howard was courtesy itself, the most considerate of hosts, and, when it came to conversation, quite deferential in matters, for instance, of literature, in spite of his Cambridge First. Only on the subject nearest to his uncle’s heart (and, presumably, to his own) was he discouragingly silent.

It was obvious why. Detective superintendents, holding high office in a London crime squad, are above talking shop with detective chief inspectors from Sussex. Men who have inherited houses in Chelsea will not condescend very far with men who occupy three-bedroom villas in the provinces. It was the way of the world.

Howard was a snob. A kind, attentive, thoughtful snob, but a snob just the same. And that was why, that above all, Wexford wished he had gone to the seaside or the health farm. As he turned into Theresa Street he wondered if he could stand another evening in Denise’s elegant drawing room, the women chatting clothes and cooking, while he and Howard exchanged small talk on the weather and the sights of London, interspersed with bits of Eliot.

‘You must try and see some City churches while you’re here.’

‘St Magnus Martyr, white and gold?’

‘St Mary Woolnoth, who tolls the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine!’

Nearly another fortnight of it.

They wouldn’t go to Peter Pan without him. Some other day, they said, resigning themselves without too much anguish to attending Harvey Nichols’ fashion show instead. He swallowed his pills, ate his poached fish and fruit salad, and watched them leave the house, each suitably attired as befitted thirty years and fifty-five, Denise in purple velvet, feathers and a picture hat, Dora in the ranch mink he had bought her for their silver wedding. They got on fine, those two. As well as their joint determination to treat him like a retarded six-year-old with a congenital disease, they seemed to have every female taste in common.

Everybody got on fine but him: Crocker with his twenty-eight-inch waistline; Mike Burden in Kingsmarkham police station getting the feel of his, Wexford’s, mantle on his shoulders and liking it; Howard departing every day for his secret hush-hush job which might have been in Whitehall rather than Kenbourne Vale nick, for all he told his uncle to the contrary.

Self-pity never got anyone anywhere. He mustn’t look on it as a holiday but as a rest cure. It was time to forget all those pleasant visions he had had in the train to Victoria, the pictures of himself helping Howard with his enquiries, even giving – he blushed to recall it – a few little words of advice. Crocker had been right. He did have delusions of grandeur.

They had been knocked on the head here all right. The house itself was enough to cut any provincial down to size. It wasn’t a big house, but then, nor is the Taj Mahal very big. What worried him and made him tread like a cat burglar were the exquisite appointments of the place: the fragile furniture, the pieces of Chinese porcelain balanced on tiny tables, the screens he was always nearly knocking over, Denise’s flower arrangements. Weird, exotic, heterogeneous, they troubled him as almost daily a fresh confection appeared. He could never be sure whether a rosebud was intended to lie in that negligent fashion on the marble surface of a table or whether it had been inadvertently dislodged from its fellows in the majolica bowl by his own clumsy hand.

The temperature of the house, as he put it to himself, exaggerating slightly, was that of a Greek beach at noon in August. If you had the figure for it you could have gone about quite happily in a bikini. He wondered why Denise, who had, didn’t. And how did the flowers survive, the daffodils ill-at-ease among avocado-pear plants?

When he had had his hour’s rest with his feet up he took the two library tickets Denise had left him and walked down to Manresa road. Anything to get out of that house. The beautiful, warm, dull silence of it depressed him.

Why shouldn’t he go home?

Dora could stay on if she liked. He thought of home with an ache in his belly that was only partly due to hunger. Home. The green Sussex meadows, the pine forest, the High Street full of people he knew and who knew him, the police station and Mike glad to see him back; his own house, cold as an English house should be except in front of the one great roaring fire; proper food and proper bread and in the fridge the secret beer cans.

Might as well get out a couple of books, though. Something to read in the train, and he could send them back to Denise by post. He chose a novel, and then, because he now felt he knew the old boy and had actually had a sort of conversation with him, More’s
Utopia
. After that he had nothing at all to do so he sat down for a long while in the library, not even opening the books but thinking about home.

It was nearly five when he left. He bought an evening paper more from habit than from any desire to read it. Suddenly he found he was tired with the staggering weariness of someone who had nothing to do but must somehow fill the hours between getting up and bedtime.

A long way back to Theresa Street on foot, too long. He hailed a taxi, sank into its seat and unfolded his paper.

From the middle of the front page the bony, almost cadaverous, face of his nephew stared back at him.

They set up a pillar of stone with the dead man’s titles therein engraved.

The women were still out. Fighting the soporific heat which had met him with a tropical blast as he entered the house, Wexford sat down, found his new glasses, and read the caption under the photograph. ‘Detective Superintendent Howard Fortune, Kenbourne Vale CID chief, who is in charge of the case, arriving at Kenbourne Vale Cemetery where the girl’s body was found.’

The cameraman had caught Howard leaving his car, and it was a full-face shot. Beneath it was another picture, macabre, compelling the eye. Wexford, refusing to be drawn, turned his attention to the newspaper’s account of the case, its lead story. He read it slowly.

‘The body of a girl was this morning discovered in a vault at Kenbourne Vale Cemetery, West London. It was later identified as that of Miss Loveday Morgan, aged about 20, of Garmisch Terrace, W15.

‘The discovery was made by Mr Edwin Tripper, of Kenbourne Lane, a cemetery attendant, west London. It was later identified as that of Miss Loveday Morgan, aged about 20, of Garmisch Terrace, W15.

‘The discovery was made by Mr Edwin Tripper, of Kenbourne Lane, a cemetery attendant, when he went to give the vault its monthly inspection. Detective Superintendent Fortune said “This is definitely a case of foul play. I can say no more at present.”

‘Mr Tripper told me, “The vault is the property of the Montfort family who were once important people in Kenbourne. A sum of money has been set aside under a trust to keep the vault cared for but the lock on the vault door was broken many years ago.

‘“This morning I went as I always do on the last Tuesday in the month to sweep out the vault and put flowers on the coffin of Mrs Viola Montfort. The door was tightly closed and jammed. I had to use tools to force it. When I got it open I went down the steps and saw the body of this girl lying between the coffins of Mrs Viola Montfort and Captain James Montfort.

‘“It gave me a terrible shock. It was the last place you would expect to find a corpse”.’

Wexford chuckled a little at that, but the photograph of the vault chilled him again. It was a monstrous mausoleum, erected apparently at the height of the Gothic revival. On its roof lay two vast slaughtered lions with, rampant and triumphant above them, the statue of a warrior, the whole executed in black iron. Perhaps one of the Montforts had been a big-game hunter. Beneath this set-piece, the door, worked all over with heroic frescoes, stood half open, disclosing impenetrable blackness. Ilexes, those tress beloved of cemetery architects, lowered their dusty evergreen over the vault and shrouded the warrior’s head.

It was a good photograph. Both photographs were good, the one of Howard showing in his eyes that perspicacity and passionate determination every good police officer should have but which Wexford had never seen in his nephew. And never would either, he thought, laying down the paper with a sigh. He hadn’t the heart to read the rest of the story. What was the betting Howard would come in for his dinner, kiss his wife, enquire what his aunt had bought and ask solicitously after his uncle’s health as if nothing had happened? If anyone could ignore that evening paper, he would. It would be surreptitiously whisked away and the
status quo
would just go on and on.