by Ruth Rendell
There was nothing for it but to stop and ask him how he was feeling.'
'I'll survive,' Baker said curtly.
The only polite answer one can make to this churlish response is a muttered, 'I hope so.' Wexford made it, added that he was glad things were no worse and moved on. Baker gave a dry cough.
'Oh, Mr Wexford . . . ? Still got a few days of your holiday left, haven't you?'
This sounded like the first move towards a truce. Wexford's spirits were so low that he was grateful for any show of cordiality. 'Yes, I'm in London till Saturday.'
'You want to try and take in Billingsgate, then. Plenty of red herrings there, and you'll find the wild geese at Smithfield.'
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Like a goose himself, Baker cackled at his joke. His laughter with an accompanying patronisingpat on the shoulder didn't rob the remark of insult. It simply made it impossible for Wexford to take offense.. Immensely pleased with himself, the inspector went into the lift and clanged the doors behind him. Wexford went down the stairs. No point now in avoiding the front entrance.
Suddenly it seemed even more futile to avoid Clements. There, at least, the deference due to rank would forbid any witticisms of the nature Baker had indulged in. Wexford came down the last flight and caught sight of his own reflection in a window which the brick wall behind it had transformed into a huge and gloomy mirror. He saw a big elderly man, a wrinkled man in a wrinkled raincoat, whose face in which some had discerned wisdom and wit, now showed in every line the frustrated petulance of a spoiled child and. at the same time, the bitterness of age. He straightened his shoulders and stopped frowning. What was the matter with him to let a small reverse get him down? And how could he stoop to comfort himself with his rank? Not only must he not avoid Clements, but must seek him out to apologize for his behaviour of the previous day and this was even more imperative say good-bye. Had he really thought of quitting Kenbourne Vale for ever without taking a formal leave of the kind sergeant?
The big outer hall was deserted but for the two uniformed men who presided over a long counter and dealt with en- quiries. One of them courteously offered to see if the sergeant was in the building, and Wexford sat down in an uncomfortable black leather armchair to wait for him. It was still only ten o'clock. Rain had begun to splash lightly against the arched windows which flanked the entrance. Perhaps the meteorological office had been right in its forecast of a deep depression settling over South-East England. If the weather had been more promising, he might have telephoned Stephen Dearborn and reminded him of the tour he had suggested. It would be doing the man a favour rather than asking for one, 142
and Wexford felt he owed Dearborn something. Not, in this case, an apology for you cannot apologise to a man for suspecting him of murder but a friendly gesture to make up for harbouring such absurd and unfounded suspicions. Wexford was well aware of the guilt one can feel for even thinking ill of a man, although those thoughts have never found verbal expression.
He wasn't sure whether it was this reminder of his folly that made him go hot and red in the face or Clements' sudden appearance at his elbow. He rose to his feet, forgetting selfpity and self-recrimination. In a couple of hours Clements would be eating his lunch with his wife and James, his last lunch with James as a probationary father. Or his last lunch with James?
'Sergeant, I want to apologise for the way I spoke to you.'
'That's all right, sir. I'd forgotten all about it.'
Of course he had. He had other things on his mind. Wexford said gently and earnestly, 'Tomorrow's the great day, isn't it?'
As soon as he had spoken he wished he hadn't brought the subject up. Until this moment he had never quite realised the tension under which Clements lived and worked, the strain which daily grew more agonising. It showed now in the mammoth effort he made to keep his face ordinary and civilised and receptive, even stretching his mouth into a rictus smile. Wexford saw that he couldn't speak, that anxiety, invading every corner of his mind and his thoughts, had at last dried up that tide of moralising and censorious criticism. He was empty now of everything but the animal need to hold on to its young.
They stared at each other, Wexford growing embarrassed, the sergeant, all garrulity gone, dumb with panic and the dread of tomorrow. At last he spoke in a thick dry voice.
'I'm taking the morning off. Maybe the whole day.' He paused, swallowed. 'Depends on . . . My wife . . . On what they . . .'
'We shan't meet again, then.' Wexford held out his hand and Clements took it, giving it a hard painful squeeze as if it
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were a lifeline. 'Good-bye, Sergeant, and all the very best for tomorrow.'
'Goodbye,' 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 realised 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 offense, 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 buttonhole 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 sunnynatured 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?'
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'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 Aphrodisia 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 lamp hung. '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 lig
hts 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
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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 annexe 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 wed- ding 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.'
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18 The priests whom they find exceeding vicious If vers, them they excommunicate from having any interest in divine matters.
TT was like giving up smoking, thought Wexford, who had l 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.'
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'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?'
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'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
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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
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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.
