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housekeeper at 22 Garmisch Terrace and she says Loveday had no friends. She came to Kenbourne Vale in January, but where she came from nobody seems to know. When she applied for the room she gave Mrs Pope an address in Fulham. We’ve checked on that. The street she named and the house she named are there all right but she never lived there. The owners of the house are a young married couple who have never let rooms. So we don’t yet know where she came from and in a way we don’t really know who she was.’
    Having built up the suspense in a way Wexford recognized, for it was the way he had himself used on countless occasions, Howard went away to fetch cheese and biscuits. He returned with more apple juice for his uncle, who was feeling so contented that he drank it obediently.
    ‘She lived in Garmisch Terrace by herself, very quietly,’ Howard went on, ‘and last Friday, February 25th, she went to work as usual, returning, as she occasionally did, during her lunchtime break. Mrs Pope supposed that she had gone back to work in the afternoon, but in fact, she didn’t. She telephoned the manager of Sytansound to say she was sick and that was the last anyone heard of her.’ He paused. ‘She may have gone straight into the cemetery; she may not. The cemetery gates are closed each day at six, and on Fridays they were closed at that time as usual. Clements sometimes cuts through on his way home. He did that on Friday, spoke to Tripper, and Tripper closed the gates behind him at six sharp. Needless to say, Clements saw nothing out of the way. His route took him nowhere near the Montfort vault.’
    Wexford recognized this short pause as the cue for him to ask an intelligent question, and he asked one. ‘How did you know who she was?’
    ‘Her handbag was beside her in the vault, brimming with information. Her address was on a bill from a dry cleaner’s and this snapshot was there too. Besides that, there was a sheet of notepaper with two telephone numbers on it.’
    Wexford raised an enquiring eyebrow.
    ‘You rang those numbers, of course?’
    ‘Of course. That was among the first things we did. One was that of an hotel in Bayswater, aperfectly respectable, rather large, hotel. They told us they had advertised in a newspaper a vacancy for a receptionist and Loveday Morgan had replied to the advertisement. By phone. She didn’t sound the sort of girl they wanted – too shy and awkward, they said – and she hadn’t the necessary experience for the job.
    ‘The other number was that of a West End company called Notbourne Properties who are particularly well known in Notting Hill and Kenbourne Vale. Hence their name. They also had advertised a job, this time for a telephone girl. Loveday applied and actually got as far as an interview. That interview was at the end of the week before last, but they didn’t intend to take her on. Apparently, she was badly dressed and, anyway, she wasn’t familiar with the particular phone system they use.’
    ‘She wanted to change her job? Does anyone know why?’
    ‘More money, I imagine. We may be able to get some more information about that and her general circumstances from this Mrs Pope.’
    ‘That’s the woman who identified her? The housekeeper?’
    ‘Yes. Shall we wait and have coffee or would you like to go straight round to Garmisch Terrace?’
    ‘Skip the coffee,’ said Wexford.

4
    A little farther beyond that all things begin by little and little to wax pleasant; the air soft, temperate and gentle covered with green grass.
    Garmisch Terrace was straight and grey and forbidding, a canyon whose sides were six-storey houses. All the houses were alike, all joined together, flat-fronted but for their protruding pillared porches, and, like the cemetery building, their proportions were somehow wrong. It had been an unhappy period for architecture, the time when they were built, a period in which those designers who had not adopted the new Gothic, were attempting to improve