Murder Being Once Done

13

HE too had had a baby . . . During the past year Loveday Morgan had had a baby. If Loveday Morgan was Louise Sampson, Louise had had that baby. A good reason, added to the other good reasons, for not letting her mother see her until Christmas when she might have been fully recovered from the child's birth.

Now that birth must have been registered, but not, apparently to a mother called Morgan. Surely Louise wouldn't have dared register the child in a false name? The penalties for making false registrations were stated clearly enough, Wexford knew, in every registrar's office. They were more than sufficient to daunt a young girl. She would have registered it in her own name.

This, then, was what he just had to check on before he went any further. This might mean he need go no further. But his plan was doomed to postponement, for he was no sooner in his own office when Howard phoned through to request his presence at a house in Copland Road.

'Mrs Kirby?' Wexford said. 'Who's she?'

'Gregson was mending her television at lunchtime on February 25th. She's just phoned to say she's remembered something we ought to know.'

'You won't want me.'

But Howard did. He was very pressing. When Wexford joined him at the car and noted the sullen presence of Inspector Baker, he saw it all. Tactful pressure had been brought to bear on Baker to include the chief inspector in this visit. A king-size sledge-hammer, indeed. to swat a fly, unless the fly itself had suddenly developed into a far larger insect. Evidently Baker didn't like it and not on these grounds alone. He gave Wexford a cold penetrating stare.

And Wexford himself was annoyed. He would have been far happier making his own private researches. Howard had arranged it to avoid hurting his uncle and Wexford was there to avoid hurting his nephew, but all they had succeeded in doing was to upset Baker thoroughly. The nape of his neck, prickly with ginger bristles, had crimsoned with anger.

Wexford wondered about his private life. the solitary existence he must lead somewhere, perhaps in a trim suburb in a neat semi-detached which he had furnished for the young wife who had deserted him. He could hardly imagine a greater humiliation for a middle-aged man than that which Baker had suffered. It would dig into the very roots of his manhood and shake what should, at his age, have been a well-adjusted personality.

He was sitting beside the driver, Wexford in the back with his nephew, and since they had left the station no one had uttered a word. Now Howard, trying to ease the tension, asked Baker when he would be moving from Wimbledon into the new flat he was buying in north-west London.

'Next month, I hope, sir,' Balder said shortly. He didn't turn his head and again the dark flush had appeared on his neck.

The mention of Wimbledon reminded Wexford of Verity Bate who had said that her parents and, at one time, the Sampsons had lived in that suburb. So it was there that the inspector's trouble had come upon him. Not discouraged, Howard pressed the point, but Wexford had the impression that Baker only replied because Howard was his superior officer. And when the superintendent spoke next of the week, terminating on February 27th, that Baker had taken off to consult with solicitor's and arrange with decorators, Baker's shrug was almost rude.

'I'm afraid you're one of those people who never take a proper holiday, Michael,' Howard said pleasantly. 'Even when you were supposed to be off you were hanging about Kenbourne Vale nearly every day. Is it such an attractive place?'

'Filthy hole,' Baker said abruptly. 'How anyone could live here beats me.'

From the tensing of the driver's shoulders, Wexford guessed that he was one of those who did. Here was another instance of the inspector putting people's backs up, literally this time. A gloomy silence fell. Howard deliberately avoided catching his uncle's eye and Wexford, embarrassed, looked out of the window.

It was a damp, raw day, and although it was still early afternoon, lights showed here and there behind long sash windows, making pale bright rectangles in the grey facades. The air itself seemed grey, not dense enough for fog but laden with a damp which blackened the pavements. Kenbourne Vale wore the colours of a snail shell, glimmering faintly in a snail's pallid, dull hues, under the ashen sky which seemed to have dropped and to lie low and sombrely over it. Church spires, a stadium, sprawling factories loomed before the car, took solid shape and then dissolved again as they passed. Only the new office blocks, strident columns of light, had a positive reality in the thickening gloom.

They entered Copeland Hill, that district which, nearly a week before, had been Wexford's gateway to his nephew's manor. Much had happened since then. He asked himself how he would have felt on that bus last week if he had known that today he would be riding in a police car with Howard, honorary yet treated by Howard with honour, to interrogate an important witness. The thought cheered him and, viewing Copeland Road with quickening interest, he resolved not to let Baker deter him or damp his ardour.

This was one of the streets which Dearborn had his eye on, and Wexford saw that a whole section of the left-hand terrace was undergoing renovation. Scaffolding covered it and men were painting the broad lofty expanse a rich cream colour so that the moulding above the windows was revealed as swags, bunches of grapes and lovers' knots. New railings of curled wrought iron rested against the scaffolding, ready to be fixed to the balconies.

The effect of this half-completed conversion was to make the neighbouring houses look even shabbier than they would otherwise have done. But neither the scars of decay nor the unmistakable signs that each was inhabited by a score of illassorted tenants rather than one prosperous family could quite ruin their stateliness. Garmisch Terrace was mean now and had been mean in the spirit of its conception; this place had a strange indestructible beauty because, like an old woman who had once been a pretty girl, its bones were good.

Mrs Kirby who occupied part of the ground floor of a house whose plaster front was scored all over with long river-like cracks, had also once been pretty in the Yorkshire of her girl- hood. Her accent marked her as a native of the East Riding, and Wexford wondered what combination of circumstances had brought her to Kenbourne Vale. She was about sixty now. Apparently she owned a lease of the whole house, but lived in only three rooms of it which she kept as neat and sparkling as a pin.

He marvelled at her ordinariness. This place seemed curious to him, the broad street, the mansions like ornamented and windowed cliffs fascinating and wonderful, and he thought they must seem so to her too with her background. What did she think of the people in their exotic clothes, the black faces, the defiant boys and girls who lived in the warren above her head? She conducted her life as if she still lived in some Yorkshire cottage, it seemed, from the description she gave them in minute detail of the way she had spent February 25th. An early riser, she had got up at seven, cleaned the flat, chatted over the fence to a neighbour. Loquaciously, she took the three policemen round the shops with her, listed the dishes prepared for her lunch and came finally, while Baker tapped an impatient foot, to the arrival of Gregson sharp at twelve-thirty.

'Aye, it were half past twelve he come. I know that on account of that's when I have my bit of dinner and I thought to myself, some folks have no consideration. I said to him, How long will you be? and he said half-an-hour so I put my plate in t'oven, not liking to have folks watch me eating.'

'When did the phone call come?' Howard asked. .

'Must have been after one.' She pronounced the last word to rhyme with 'on'. 'Aye, because I recall thinking, you're taking a long half hour, lad. I heard t'phone ring and I answered it and this girl says, Can I speak to Mr Gregson. It's "'shop.'

'You're sure that's what was said, "the shop"?'

'Nay, I can't be sure. Might have been Sytansound or whatever they call theirselves. I called t'young lad and he talked to her, just said yes and no and good-bye. Then he finished t'job and off he went.'

'Be more precise about the time of the call, Mrs Kirby.'

She enjoyed being precise. Wexford could see, and see Howard also saw, that to her precision and accuracy were not the same thing. Her eyes flickered doubtfully. She wanted to impress, to earn praise, even if she did so through a precise inaccuracy.'

Baker said, 'If you thought it had been a long half hour Mrs Kirby, it must have been a while after one. Five or ten minutes.'

Wexford longed for the power to say like a judge to counsel, 'Don't lead, Mr Baker.'

The leading had done its work. 'Aye, about ten past,' said Mrs Kirby, and hopefully, 'Near a quarter past.'

Baker smiled in silent triumph. Smile on, thought Wexford. Loveday didn't phone Gregson, she phoned her mother. He spoke at last. Howard's encouraging glance permitted him a question. 'Did you recognise the girl's voice?'

'Nay, why would I?'

'Well, presumably you phoned the shop yourself to tell them your set wanted attention.'

'Aye, I did, and I phoned them last back end too, but I never talked to any girls. It was always that manager, that Gold.'

'Let him die his way out of this one,' said Baker as they trooped into Sytansound where, on a dozen lambent screens, goblin puppets cavorted for the entertainment of the underfives. Behind the desk which had been Loveday's was a fiftyyear-old lady in boots and knee-breeches who swam out to them, followed by fat lumbering Gold.

'There wasn't any girl in the shop after ten to one on that Friday,' said Gold, unhappy at these frequent visits from the law.

'Where is he?' said Baker.

'Out the back with the van.'

A high brick wall made the van park gloomy. Behind it, Wexford knew, was the cemetery. He could see the trees over the top of it. You couldn't get away from that cemetery in Kenbourne Vale; it was the heart and soul of the place.

Gregson had heard them coming. He was leaning against the wall, his arms folded, waiting for them. The pose was defiant, but his face was frightened.

'He doesn't talk, you know,' Howard said conversationally to his uncle as Baker approached the boy. 'I mean, he literally doesn't open his mouth. He told Baker he didn't go out with the girl and where he was on Friday night, and since then he just won't talk.'

'The best defence. I wonder who taught him that?'

'I wish I knew. I only hope his mentor isn't giving lessons to all the villains in Kenbourne.'

Gregson had let his arms fall to his sides because Baker told him to and moved a few inches from the wall. He answered the inspector's questions only with shrugs. In his thin denim jacket he looked cold and pinched and very young.

'We're going to have a talk, my lad,' said Baker. 'Down at the station.'

Gregson shrugged.

At the police station they took him into an interview room Wexford went upstairs and contemplated his gasworks. The gasometer had deflated quite a lot to reveal behind it a can- ning factory, a church and a building that was probably Kenbourne town hall. He thought about girls who were fond of romantic names, about babies who didn't look like their parents and then about Peggy Pope and her lover. He came to no conclusions.

His phone rang. Howard's voice said, 'Gregson's scared stiff of us. How about you having a go at him?'

'Why should he talk to me?'

'I don't know, but it can't do any harm.'

It didn't do any good either. Gregson chain-smoked. He made no answers to any of Wexford's questions. Wexford asked him if he knew what sort of a man Harry Slade was, that his word couldn't be relied on (not quite true, this), if he was aware of the implication of the phone call he had received at Mrs Kirby's. Gregson said nothing. It was, in its way, an admirable performance. Real hardened criminals, twice Gregson's age, couldn't have kept it up.

Wexford tried bullying, although it went against the grain with him. He stood over the boy and bawled questions into his ear. Gregson smelt of the sweat of fear but still he didn't speak. His cigarettes were all gone and he held his hands clenched on the table in front of him.

The stuff of martyrs, Wexford thought. In Sir Thomas's day they would have put him to the rack and the thumbscrew. He cooled his voice and went back once more to the telephone call. Who was the girl? He knew there was no girl in the shop at that time, didn't he? At that precise time Loveday Morgan had made a call. The call was to him, wasn't it?

Wexford leant across the table. He fixed his eyes on Gregson, forcing the boy to look at him, and then, shockingly, Gregson spoke. It was the first time Wexford had heard his voice, a thin cockney whine. 'I want a solicitor,' he said.

Wexford went outside, called in D.C. Dinehart, and told Howard what had happened.

'That's bloody marvellous,' said Baker. 'That's all we need.'

'If he wants a solicitor he'll have to have one,' said Howard. 'Someone's been showing him.the ropes all right.'

'Mr. Wexford perhaps.' Baker could hardly conceal his rage. 'Telling him his rights, no doubt.'

Taking a leaf out of Gregson's book, Wexford said nothing. They went back into the interview room and Howard asked the boy which solicitor he wanted.

'I haven't got one,' said Gregson. 'You can bring me the phone book.'