Free Murder Being Once Done by Ruth Rendell

standing on the step, looking at the bells. She said she’d rung at Flat Eight but the young lady seemed to be out. Funny thing for one girl to say about another, wasn’t it? The young lady? Then Loveday came along the street and said hallo to her and took her upstairs with her.’
    Teal looked piqued. He seemed put out because Chell had told Wexford so much and he had told him so little. ‘Well, describe this girl, child,’ he said pettishly. ‘Describe her. You see, Mr Wexford, that here we have a close observer who looks quite through the deeds of men.’
    Wexford ignored him. ‘What was she like?’
    ‘Not exactly “with it”, if you know what I mean.’ The boy giggled. ‘She’d got short hair and she was wearing a sort of dark blue coat. Oh, and gloves ,’ he added as if these last were part of some almost unheard-of tribal paraphernalia.
    ‘A full and detailed portrait,’ sneered Teal. ‘Never mind what colour her eyes were or if she were five feet or six feet tall. She wore gloves . Now all you ave to do is find a conventional young lady who wears gloves and there’s your murderer. Hey presto! Run along, now, back to your mirror. Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever!’
    It wasn’t until Wexford was out in the street that he realized he had left Utopia lying on Teal’s table. Let it stay there. He didn’t relish the thought of climbing all those stairs again to fetch it and perhaps intruding into the monumental row he guessed had broken out between the two men. Instead, he walked to the limit of the cul-de-sac where two stumpy stone posts sprouted out of the pavement and eyed the strange ugly church.
    Like Peggy Pope’s clothes, every item which went to make up this unprepossessing whole seemed chosen with a deliberate eye to the hideous. What manner of man, or group of men, he asked himself, had designed this building and seen it as fit for the worship of their God? It was hard to say when it had been built. There was no trace of the Classical or the Gothic in its architecture, no analogy with any familiar style of construction. It was squat, shabby and mean. Perhaps in some seamy depths at its rear there were windows, but here at the front there was only a single circle of red glass not much bigger than a bicycle wheel, set under a rounded gable of port-coloured brick. Scattered over the whole façade was a noughts and crosses pattern of black and ochre bricks among the red.
    The door was small and such as might have been attached to a garden shed. Wexford tried it but it was locked. He stooped down to read the granite tablet by this door: Temple of the Revelations. The Elect shall be Saved.
    The hand which descended with a sharp blow on his shoulder made him wheel round.
    ‘Go away,’ said the bearded man in black. ‘No trespassers here.’
    ‘Kindly take your hand off my coat,’ Wexford snapped.
    Perhaps unused to any kind of challenge, the man did as he was told. He glared at Wexford, his eyes pale and fanatical. ‘I don’t know you.’
    ‘That doesn’t give you the right to assault me. I know you. You’re the minister of this lot.’
    ‘The Shepherd. What do you want?’
    ‘I’m a police officer investigating the murder of Miss Loveday Morgan.’
    The Shepherd thrust his hands inside his black cloak. ‘Murder? I know nothing of murder. We don’t read newspapers. We keep ourselves apart.’
    ‘Very Christian, I’m sure,’ said Wexford. ‘This girl came to your church. You knew her.’
    ‘No.’ The Shepherd shook his head vehemently. He looked angry and affronted. ‘I have been away ill and someone else was in charge of my flock. Maybe she slipped in past him. Maybe, in his ignorance, he took her for one of the five hundred.’
    ‘The five hundred?’
    ‘Such is our number, the number of the elect on the face of the Earth. We make no converts. To be one of the Children you must be born to parents who are both Children, and thus the number swells and with death