Murder Being Once Done

20

DARKNESS came early after that day of torrents. Sitting in a lorry driver's retreat, his raincoat steaming in the red glow of an electric fire, Wexford watched the fluorescent lamps come on in Artois Road. The wet pavements threw back scarlet and blue and orange reflections of neon overhead. The sky was red and vaporous, any stars which might have been up there quenched by the glare. He wondered when the prayer meeting would begin. Surely not before seven? Hungry in spite of tea and a doughnut, he ordered a labourer's meal, a forbidden sinful meal of sausages and chips and fried eggs.

According to Crocker and Dora and their gloomy disciples, he ought to have been dead by now, for he had broken all their rules. He had worked when he should have rested, eaten saturated fats when he should have fasted, gone out at night, worried and today forgotten all about his pills. Why not break one more and he hanged for a sheep?

The ultimate forbidden fruit would be to go back into that pub he had visited at lunchtime and drink spirits. He found it and had a double Scotch. Far from laying him out, it filled him with well-being, and he made up his mind then and there to defy them all. No one but a fool follows a regimen that debilitates him while moderate indulgence makes him feel good.

While he had been drinking the rain had stopped. He sniffed the smell of London after rain, smoky, gaseous, with here and there other scents infiltrating. the odour of frying food and stranger oriental platters, the whiff of a French cigarette. They faded as he walked into the residential depths of Artois Road where the blue-white lamps looked too smart for this hinterland. Another light glowed ahead of him, a round red light like a Cyclops eye, and he saw that he was too late. The prayer meeting had begun. He stood outside the temple and heard the voices of the Children, intoning together sometimes, then one single voice raised in spontaneous praise or perhaps commination. How many hours before they came out? And would they talk to him when they did?

The house where the Shepherd lodged, where Morgan had lodged, looked entirely deserted now, no slits of lights showing at the edges of the blinds. The concrete garden lay under a sheet of water which was black because it had no light to mirror. There were perhaps fifty houses like this one in Wilman Park, vaults for the living. Rachel and Mary and Sarah had gone away . . . He hoped that now they wore scent and false eyelashes and feathers and flowers and sat on steps with their boy friends earing crisps out of paper bags.

Morgan must have met his brides somewhere and not under this severe roof. Did he walk with them, sneak off for clandestine love in the temple? Wexford wrinkled his nose in distaste. If he had some neighbour would surely have seen him, perhaps even seen him promenading with the chosen one of the moment.

The house next door showed plenty of light and the curtains weren't even drawn. He rang a bell that chimed, but when she came to admit him his heart sank. She smiled Inquiringly. Her eyes were blue and vacant and she supported herself on a white stick.

She was a very old woman, not far off eighty, and she had just enough sight left, he guessed, to make out the shape of him on her doorstep. He didn't want to alarm her, so he explained who he was and why he was there before beginning to retreat. She was no use to him, although he couldn't put it so bluntly. Her blindness disqualified her.

'I was just going to make a cup of tea,' she said. 'Would you like one? My husband was in the force. You'll have heard of him. Wally Lyle.'

Wexford shook his head, then remembered she couldn't see. 'I'm a stranger in these parts,' he said. 'I won't keep you, Mrs Lyle. Perhaps you could just tell me the name of the people next door?'

'dickers,' she said, and she chuckled. 'You won't get inside there. The only person she ever lets in is the electric meter man. They haven't got no gas.' Her cheerfulness moved hirn. Here she was, alone, blind, very old, but she could still joke, still find some zest in living. When she said, 'You may as well have that tea. I know how it is on the beat all day,' he agreed on an impulse. She couldn't see that he wasn't in uniform. She wanted a chat about her husband and old times. Why not? He had to pass the time somehow until the temple disgorged its throng.

All the lights were on in the hall and the little rooms. Light must help her, he decided, watching her edge her way to the brighter lamp of the kitchen like a moth. But it was he who finally made the tea and carried their two cups into the frontroom. All the while she kept close beside him, and when he went to sit by the window, waiting for the temple door to open and send a shaft of light out on to the pavement, she came and sat next to him, hooking her stick over the arm of her chair.

The little pokey living room was crammed with furniture, loaded down with ornaments. He wondered that she could move among all this bric-a-brac without hurting herself or knocking things over, and he recalled his own clumsiness in Howard's house. While she told him anecdotes of her husband's career, he observed the dexterity with which she handled her teacup, and he marvelled.

'How long have you lived here, Mrs Lyle?' he asked gently.

'Forty years. Them Vickerses were here before we come.'

'They're quite an elderly couple, then?'

'Not this lot. His mum and dad. I cad this one young Vickers.' She peered into Wexford's face. 'I daresay he'd be old to you about fifty he is, but a chip off the old block.'

'And you've never been into their house?'

She liked to talk about the dead Wally Lyle and she returned to him. 'My husband tried to get in there once, years and years ago. Young Vickers and his sister were schoolkids then, and the school sent round this doctor on account of Rebecca that was the sister having scarlet fever. They wouldn't have no doctor, you see. Revelationers don't believe in doctors, let their kids die rather than have the doctor.'

'So your husband was called in on account of being a policeman?' Wexford was interested in spite of the irrelevance of an this. 'Did he make them admit the doctor?'

Mrs Lyle laughed shrilly. 'Not likely. He banged and banged in the door till old Vickers come out, and old Vickers cursed him. It made your blood run cold to hear it. My husband said he'd never have nothing to do with them again and he never did.'

'And that was the only contact you ever had with them?'

She looked a little sheepish. 'The only contact he did. I never let on to him how I helped Rebecca run away and get married. He'd have given it to me hot and strong, being as he was in the force.'

Rebecca, a girl who had run away . . .

He spoke rather sharply. 'When was that, Mrs Lyle?'

She dashed his faint hope. 'Must be thirty years. It's her brother as lives there now. He got married and had kids and they've all gone now too. God knows where.'

She sighed and fell silent. Wexford watched the dark pavement, growing impatient. Mrs Lyle finished her tea and set the cup down correctly in its saucer. Her blue, filmed eyes were turned on his face now and he sensed that she wanted to make some sort of confession to him.

'What I did,' she said, and her expression was sly, almost naughty, 'I often thought maybe it was against the law, but I never dared ask my husband, never breathed a word about it.'

'What did you do?' Wexford put laughter and encouragement into his voice, for it was no use showing them on his face.

'Won't do no harm telling you after all these years.' She grinned, enjoying herself. 'Rebecca wanted to get married to a fellow she'd met, fellow called Foster who wasn't one of them, and her dad he put his foot down and they shut her up in there. Just a prisoner she was, shut up in her bedroom. She used to write notes and throw them to me out of the window. I could see to read in them days. I was all for putting a spoke in the wheel of them Revelationers and I had young Foster in here, jollying him along, and one day when they was all in church we got a ladder and stuck it up at the window and down she come. Like a play it was.'

The orchard walls are high and hard to climb and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here . . . 'It must have been,' he said.

'I often have a good laugh about it to this day. Mind you, it'd have been better if I'd ever found out what they thought about it but I never did. I'd like to have seen old Vickers' face when he knew the bird had flown. Rebecca got married and she wrote to me, telling me bits of news, but that's stopped now. No good getting letters when you can't read them and you've no one to read them to you, is it?' Mrs Lyle laughed merrily at the doleful situation she had described. 'dickers the son, that is he got married and they had kids but they've all gone off one by one. Couldn't stand it at home. And now there's just the two of them alone in there. Young Vickers I call him that but he must be all of fifty he never speaks to me. I reckon he knows what I did for Rebecca. I often have a good laugh when I think of her and that ladder and young Foster like a blessed Romeo. A bit of luck for her that was, catching him. She was nothing to look at and she had a great big mole on the side of her nose . . .'

The temple door must have opened, for a pale stream of light seeped out across the wet stones and people began to appear on the pavement. Wexford, who had been waiting for this to happen, ignored it and turned to face Mrs Lyle, although he knew she couldn't see him.

'A mole in the side of her nose?'

'Stuck there between her nose and her cheek like.' Mrs Lyle jabbed a finger at her own apple complexion. 'My husband used to say she could have had that seen to, only seeing they didn't believe in doctors . . .'

'Where did she go?'

'South-west Ten her address was. I've got letters about somewhere. You'll have to look for them yourself. But I'll tell you one thing. Rebecca won't get you in that house next door. It'd take one of them bulldozers to do that.'

Wexford stood in the bay window and watched the congregation disperse. The women wore dull fashionless, rather than oldfashioned, coats and hats in black or grey or fawn, the mew even the young men, black suits topped by dark raincoats. Among them, like a crow, moved the Shepherd in his black robe, shaking hands, murmuring farewells until all but two were gone. This pair, evidently a married couple, stood arm-in arm, waiting for him. Then the three of them filed slowly into the house next door. Briefly Wexford caught a glimpse of them mirrored darkly in the pool of water, three strange people crossing the Styx into their own underworld. The front door shut with a slam.

'You looking at young Vickers?' said Mrs Lyle who had the hypersensitivity of the blind. 'I wish my grandson was here to blow him a raspberry. All the kids round here do that, and good luck to them.'

'Better look for those letters now, Mrs Lyle.'

They went upstairs, the old woman leading the way. She took him into her bedroom which had the jumble sale look of rooms occupied by old people and in which they have grown old. Apart from the usual furniture there were work- boxes, wooden and wicker, stacked one on top of the other, trunks under the bed and trunks covered with dust sheets which were themselves piled with old magazines and old albums. Two of those miniature chests of drawers, dear to the hearts of the Victorians, stood on the massive tallboy, and above them on the wall was a what-not, crammed full of letters and papers and little boxes and old pens and jars of hairpins.

'It might be in here,' said Mrs Lyle, 'or it might be in the other rooms.'

Wexford looked into the other rooms. None of them was exactly untidy. Nor were they rooms for people to live in. They were the repositories for the results of sixty years of hoarding, and it was apparent to his practiced eye that some crazy filing system had been employed in the days when Mrs Lyle sell had her sight.

She seemed to sense that he was taken aback. A note came into her voice that was not quite malice but faintly revengeful. She said, 'You've got a long job.' She meant, 'You can see and I can't, so you get on with it.'

He got on with it, beginning in her bedroom. Perhaps it was the smell of these souvenirs, merely musty to him but evocative to her of the occasions they commemorated, which made her face go strange and dreamy, though not unhappy, her hand shake a little as she touched the cards and photographs he lifted from the drawers. He fetched the old brass bedlamp and put it on the tallboy to give him light, and in its yellow radiance, mated with dust, he explored the archives of Mrs Lyle's long life.

She had been a great correspondent and she had kept every letter, every birthday and Christmas card she had ever received. Some male relative had been a philatelist so she had kept the envelopes too, but the collector had never come for his stamps which had accumulated in their thousands on envelopes and scraps torn from envelopes. The late policeman's love letters were there, bound in ribbon from a wedding cake, pieces of ancient and petrified icing still adhering to it. Every year he had sent her a Valentine. He found five in the tallboy, and then he began on the workboxes, seven more in there.

'I never throw anything away,' said Mrs Lyle happily.

He didn't say the cruel thing aloud, but he asked it of himself. Why didn't she? Why did she keep these cards, these cake boxes, these locks of babies' hair, these greetings tele- grams and these reams of newspaper cuttings? She was blind; she would never be able to see any of them again. But he knew she kept them for another reason. What matter if she never again read the policeman's writing or looked at his picture and those of her posterity? They were the bricks of her identity, the fabric of the walls which kept it safe and the windows through which, though sightless, it could still look out upon its world. His own identity had been too precariously shaken in recent weeks for him to reproach someone who hoarded and harvested and stored to preserve her own.

And he could see. His eye didn't hurt him at all. Even in this dull and dusty light he could read the spidery writing and distinguish the faces in the cloudy sepia photographs. By now he felt that he could have written Mrs Lyle's biography. It was all here, every day of her life, keeping her alive and a unique personality, waiting to be burned by a grandson when she needed it no longer.

They moved on into the next room. Wexford didn't know what time it was; he was afraid to look at his watch. There must be easier ways of finding Rebecca Foster. If only he could remember where it was that he had seen her for the first time . . .

He wished he had begun in the smallest bedroom, for it was there that he found it. He unstrapped a suitcase, unlocked it, opened it, The case contained only letters, some still in their envelopes, some loose, their sheets scattered and mixed with others. And here it was at last. '36, Biretta St., S.W.10. June 26th, 1954. Dear May, Sorry to hear you are having trouble with your eyes . . .'

'Well, that didn't take too long, did it?' said Mrs Lyle. 'I hope you've put all my things back right, not mixed up. I like to know where they are. If you've done, I'll see you off the premises and then I think I'll get to bed.'