Murder Being Once Done by Ruth Rendell Page A

don’t want them, they’d have abortions only they leave it too late, while a decent, clean-living woman, a religious woman, like my wife has miscarriage after miscarriage and eats her heart out for years. I’d jail the lot of them, I’d . . .’
    ‘Come now, Sergeant . . .’ Wexford hardly knew what to say to calm him. He sought about in his mind for consoling platitudes, but before he could utter a single one the car door had opened and Howard was introducing him to Inspector Baker.
    It was apparent from the moment that they sat down in the Grand Duke that Inspector Baker was one of those men who, like certain eager philosophers and scientists, form a theory and then force the facts to fit it. Anything which disturbs the pattern, however relevant, must be rejected, while insignificant data are grossly magnified. Wexford reflected on this in silence, saying nothing, for the inspector’s conclusions had not been addressed to him. After the obligatory handshake and the mutterings of a few insincere words, Baker had done his best to exclude him from the discussion, adroitly managing to seat him at the foot of their table while he and Howard faced each other at the opposite end.
    Clearly Gregson was Baker’s candidate for the Morgan murder, an assumption he based on the man’s record – a single conviction for robbery – the man’s friends, and what he called the man’s friendship with Loveday.
    ‘He hung around her in the shop, sir. He gave her lifts in that van of his.’
    ‘We know he gave her a lift,’ said Howard.
    Baker had a harsh unpleasant voice, the bad grammar of his childhood’s cockney all vanished now, but the intonation remaining. He made everything he said sound bitter. ‘We can’t expect to find witnesses to every time they were together. They were the only young people in that shop. You can’t tell me a girl like Morgan wouldn’t have encouraged his attentions.’
    Wexford looked down at his plate. He never liked to hear women referred to by their surnames without Christian name or style, not even when they were prostitutes, not even when they were criminals. Loveday had been neither. He glanced up as Howard said, ‘What about the motive?’
    Baker shrugged. ‘Morgan encouraged him and then gave him the cold shoulder.’
    Wexford hadn’t meant to interrupt, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘In a cemetery ?’
    The inspector acted exactly like a Victorian parent whose discourse at the luncheon table had been interrupted by a child, one of those beings who were to be seen but not heard. But he looked as if he would have preferred not to see Wexford as well. He turned on him a reproving and penetrating stare, and asked him to repeat what he had said.
    Wexford did so. ‘Do people want to make love in cemeteries?’
    For a moment it seemed as if Baker was going to do a Clements and say that ‘they’ would do anything anywhere. He appeared displeased by Wexford’s mention of lovemaking, but he didn’t refer to it directly. ‘No doubt you have a better suggestion,’ he said.
    ‘Well, I have some questions,’ Wexford said tentatively. ‘I understand that the cemetery closes at six. What was Gregson doing all the afternoon?’
    Howard, who seemed distressed by Baker’s attitude, making up for it by a particularly delicate courtesy to his uncle, attending to his wants at the table and refilling his glass from the bottle of apple juice, said quickly, ‘He was with Mrs Kirby in Copeland Road until about one-thirty, then back at Sytansound. After that he went to a house in Monmouth Street – that’s near Vale Park, Reg – and then he had a long repair job in Queen’s Lane that took him until five-thirty, after which he went home to his parents’ house in Shepherd’s Bush.’
    ‘Then I don’t quite see . . .’
    Baker had been crumbling a roll of bread into pellets with the air of a man preoccupied by his own thoughts. He raised his head and said in a way that is usually