Murder Being Once Done

18

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 R.A.D.A., 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 go 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 couldn'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 appear- ing 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. What did 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 D.C. 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 no 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 offenses, 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 girls, even the fourteenyear-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 her 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.

He smelt Pamela's floral perfume and looked round to find her at his elbow.

'Mr Fortune has gone to court, Mr Wexford, and he's left a message to say he's going straight on to St Biddulph's Hospital to get his foot X-rayed.'

But you've brought the snapshot,' Wexford said slowly.

'It was on his desk, sir, and since you wanted it, I'm sure he wouldn't . . .'

'Thank you very much, Pamela,' said Wexford.

His hand was trembling oddly as he took it from her and placed it beside the Sunday Express photograph of Morgan's temple in Artois Road. Yes, it was as he had thought. The newspaper picture showed the whole church, the snapshot only a corner of it, but in both were the same dusty shrubs nudging a brickwall, the same ridge of coping, and what had seemed in the snapshot to be a wooden post was now revealed as a segment of a door.

There was no girl in the newspaper shot, Morgan, Wexford was sure, had posed the girl his daughter? one of his 'brides'? in front of the temple and taken the photograph himself. He returned the snapshot to Pamela and left the library, deep in thought.

What now? Follow Pamela and leave a message for Howard, his reasonable self told him. Or see Baker. The inspector would soon be back from the court. Wexford revolted from the idea of confiding in him and seeing that sharp mouth curl in a will-nothing-teach-the-old-fuddy-duddy expression.

He had been wrong last time. This time he knew he couldn't be. No one would have known of his folly if he hadn't alerted Howard before he had proof. It wouldn't matter if he failed this time, for no one would know except himself. They would think he had gone off on some sightseeing tour of his own, to Smithfield or Billingsgate perhaps, taking Baker's advice.

He could be what retired policemen sometimes become, a private detective. That thought had a bitter taste about it and he put it from him. Not retired, not old, but free to pursue a line of his own, bound to no one. No driver to take him, no sergeant to accompany him, no chief to refer back to. And he wasn't going to withhold vital information for long, for, if he had got nowhere by tonight, he would just tell Howard and leave it at that.

It was just eleven-thirty. The rain fell steadily. Obviously, it was going to be one of those days when the rain never lets up. He had left his umbrella in Theresa Street. With unusual extravagance he bought a new one and then he walked jauntily, like a young man, towards Elm Green tube station.