Murder Being Once Done Read Online Free PDF Page A

profound silence. Since entering the cemetery he had heard nothing but the crepitation of dead leaves beneath his feet and the rustle of the wind.
    Inside the vault it was not quite dark. Utter darkness would have been less unpleasant. A little greyish light fell on to the flight of steps from a narrow vitrine in the rear wall. He went down the steps and found himself in a chamber about twelve feet square. ‘The dead Montforts lay not in the coffins mentioned by Mr Tripper but in stone sarcophagi which rested on shelves. In the centre of the chamber was a marble basin absurdly like a birdbath and containing a dribble of water. He couldn’t imagine what purpose it served. He approached the sarcophagi and saw that there were two rows of them with a narrow space between. It must have been there in that trough, on the damp stone floor, that Loveday Morgan’s body had been found.
    He shivered a little. The vault smelt of decay. Not surely of the dead Montforts, passed long ago to dust, but of rotted grave flowers and stagnant water and unventilated age. A nasty place. She had been twenty, he thought, and he hoped she had died quickly and not in here. What are right and wrong? Today one thing, another tomorrow. Death only is real.
    He turned back towards the steps and, as he did so, he heard a sound above him, a footfall on the overgrown gravel path. Some attendant, no doubt. He set his foot on the bottom stair, looking up at the rectangle of dingy light between door and frame. And then, as he was about to speak and declare his presence, there appeared in the aperture, gaunt and severe, the face of his nephew.

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    You conceive in your mind either none at all or else a very false image and similitude of this thing.
    Everyone is familiar with the sensation of wanting the earth to swallow him when he is caught in embarrassing circumstances. And what more appropriate plot of earth than this, thought Wexford, aghast. These acres, choked with the dead, might surely receive one more. There was, however, nothing for it but to mount the stairs and face the music.
    Howard, peering down into semi-darkness, had not at first recognized the intruder. When he did, when Wexford, awkwardly brushing cobwebs from his coat, emerged on to the path, his face registered simple blank astonishment.
    ‘Good God. Reg,’ he said.
    He looked his uncle up and down, then stared into the vault, as it he though himself the victim of some monstrous delusion. Either this was not Wexford, but some Kenbournite disguised to resemble him, or else this was not Kenbourne Vale cemetery. It took him a few moments to recover and then he said:
    ‘I thought you wanted a holiday from all this sort of thing.’
    It was stupid to stand there like a schoolboy. In general, embarrassment was foreign to Wexford and he brimmed over with self-confidence. Now he told himself that he was catching criminals when this man was chewing on a teething ring and he said rather coldly, ‘Did you? I can’t imagine why,’ Never apologize, never explain. ‘Don’t let me keep you from your work. I’ve a bus to catch.’
    Howard’s eyes narrowed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not going like that.’ He always spoke quietly, in measured tones. ‘I won’t have that. If you wanted to see the vault, why didn’t you say last night? I’d have brought you with me this morning. If you wanted the inside stuff on the case, you only had to ask.’
    Absurd as it was, undignified, to stand arguing in the bitter cold among toppled gravestones, Wexford couldn’t leave it like that. All his resentment had boiled to the surface.
    ‘Ask?’ he shouted. ‘Ask you when you’ve made a point of excluding me from everything to do with your work? When you and Denise have conspired to keep quiet about it like a couple of parents turning off the television in front of the child when the sexy play starts? I know when I’m not wanted. Ask! ’
    Howard’s face had fallen glumly at the beginning of this