Murder Being Once Done

Wexford glanced at the driver. It was the Indian tenant. 'Off with him, are you?'

'I'm off ~one, me and the kid, that is. He's just letting me have a loan of his van. I'm going home to my mother. Nowhere else to go, is there?' She thrust a battered record player into the van, wiped her hands on her jeans and went down the area steps. The three policemen followed her.

The stacks of old books were still there, the cumbersome shabby furniture. On the wall a little more paint had peeled away, enlarging the map of that unearthly, Utopian continent. Lamont was in bed, the baby lying restlessly in\the crook of his arm.

Peggy showed none of the outraged propriety that might have been evinced by a respectable housewife under these circumstances. She wasn't a respectable housewife but a wandering girl about to leave her lover. Remembering perhaps how Wexford had once before assisted her in moving heavy objects, she seemed to take his presence as a sign that it was in this role that he had reappeared, and she thrust into his arms a shopping basket full of kitchen utensils. Wexford shook his head at her. He went over to the bed and stared at Lamont who responded first by burying his head in the pillow, then by pulling himself slowly and despairingly into a sitting position.

Howard and Baker came closer to the bed, Peggy watched them. She knew now that something was wrong, that they were not merely here to ask questions. But she said nothing. She was leaving Garmisch Terrace and everything it contained, and perhaps she didn't care.

'Get up, Lamont,' said Baker. 'Get up and get dressed.'

Lamont didn't speak to him. Under the dirty sheet he was naked. His eyes had a naked empty look in them, expressing a total failure, an utter poverty, a lack of love, of possessions, of imagination. Thou art the thing itself, Wexford thought, un- accommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare animal as thou art . . . 'Come along, you know why we are here.'

'I never had the money,' Lamont whispered. He let the sheet drop, took the child in his arms and handed her to Peggy. It was the final renunciation. 'You'll have to look after her now,' he said. 'Just you. I did it for you and her. Would you have stayed if I'd got the money?'

'I don't know,' Peggy said, crying. 'I don't know.'

'I wish,' said Howard tiredly, 'I felt as well as you look. They say a change is as good as a rest, and you haven't had either, but you look fine.'

'I feel fine.' Wexford thought but he didn't say aloud, I'll be glad to get home just the same. 'It's good to be able to read again without feeling you're going to go blind.'

'Which reminds me,' said Howard, 'I've got something for you to read in the train. A parting gift. Pamela went out to the West-End and got it.'

A very handsome copy of Utopia, bound in amber calf, tooled in gold. 'So I've got it at last. Thanks very much. If we're going back to Chelsea now, d'you think we could make a detour for me to say good-bye to him?'

'Why not? And in the car, Reg. maybe you'll just clear up a few points for me.'

It was going to be a lovely day, the first really fine day of Wexford's holiday now that his holiday was over. He asked Howard to wind down the window so that he could feel the soft air on his face. 'After I made that first blunder,' he said, 'I realised Dearborn wouldn't have desecrated his cemetery, and then I remembered he'd told me February 29th was his birth- day. A man doesn't forget when his own birthday is going to occur, especially when it only really occurs once in every four years. Lamont put her in the Montfort vault because it was outside it that he encountered- her and killed her.'

'What put you on to him in the first place?'

'The way Loveday I think of her as Loveday, perhaps because she was trying to get out of her darkness into a kind of light the way she went down to talk to him and wanted to entrust something to him. She had nothing to entrust but Alexandra. She approached him and not Peggy partly because she was afraid of Peggy and partly because it was Lamont who mostly cared for his own child.' They entered Hyde Park, a sea of precocious daffodils. Ten thousand saw I at a glance . . . 'She told him she was going to get five thousand pounds, and she must have convinced him in spite of the unlikelihood of it, for he consulted estate agents. I saw a specification he had there for a house costing just under five thousand.'

'She was only going to give him one thousand.'

'I know. I don't suppose he thought of resorting to violence then, but he meant to con the rest out of her.'

'So she phoned Dearborn,' said Howard as they drove past the museums, thronged with tourists this Saturday morning. 'She phoned him at one-fifteen on February 25th to make the appointment.'

'They'd already made it in his office. It was Lamont she phoned. He was in the Grand Duke and he always took his phone calls there. She told him the money was going to be handed over to her in the cemetery that afternoon. He must have waited for her and seen her part from Dearborn, con- cluding, of course, that she had got the money.'

'Then he waylaid her,' said Howard. 'He asked for his thousand to start with, but she wouldn't give him even that She had nothing to give.'

Wexford nodded. 'He desperately wanted to keep Peggy and his child. Nothing was to get in his way now. He strangled her with her own scarf.'

'No, Reg. I can't have that. It was Mrs. Dearborn's scarf.'

'It was once,' said Wexford. 'Dearborn gave it to Loveday's aunt.'

The river was rippling brown and gold, a big brother, dirtier and wider and stronger, of the Kingsbrook. Tonight, Wexford thought, when we've unpacked our bags and the grandchildren have been to get their presents, tonight I'll go down and look at my own river. He got out of the car and walked up to Sir Thomas. This morning the gold cap and the gold chain were almost too dazzling to look at.

Wexford turned to Howard who had limped after him. He tapped his pocket where the new book was. 'More than four hundred years since he wrote that,' he said, 'but I don't know that things have changed all that much for the better, not the way he must have hoped they would. It's a good job he doesn't know. He'd get up off that seat of his and gQ back to the Tower.'

'Aren't you going to read your new book?' asked Dora when they were in the train, and the outer suburbs, grey streets, red housing estates, white tower blocks, trees like numberless puffs of smoke in the gold mist, flowed past the window.

'In a minute,' said Wexford. 'What have you got there, more presents?'

'I nearly forgot. These two came for you this morning'

Two parcels, a thick one and a thin one. Who could be sending him parcels? The handwriting on the brown paper wrappings meant nothing. He undid the string in the thin one and a copy of Utopia fell out, a paperback version, with a card enclosed, depicting a rabbit in rustic surroundings, and signed with love from Denise's sister-in-law. Wexford- snorted.

'Are you all right, darling?' said anxious Dora.

'Of course I'm all right,' Wexford growled. 'Don't start that again.'

The other parcel also contained a book. He wasn't at all surprised to come upon another Utopia, second-hand this time but well preserved. The card had a violet border. the name on it printed in gold. 'You forgot this', Wexford read. 'Something to read in the train. You can keep it. One doesn't meet human policemen every day. I.M.T.'

Something to read in the train . . . Tiredness hit him like a physical blow, but he struggled to keep awake, clasping his three new books, staring out of the window. The green country was beginning now, fingers of it groping and inserting themselves into wedges of brick. Soon they would be travailing into the haunch of England, into the swelling downs. Now for Utopia, now at last.