by P. D. James
He thought he knew the root of his discontent: it lay in envy. Almost from early childhood he had known that his elder brother was his mother’s favourite son. She had been thirty-five when David was born and had almost given up hope of a child. The overwhelming love she had felt for her first-born had been a revelation of such intensity that it had absorbed almost all she had to give in maternal affection. Coming three years later, he was welcomed but never obsessively desired. He remembered as a fourteen-year-old seeing a woman gazing into a neighbour’s pram at a new baby, and saying, ‘So he’s number five? Still, they all bring their own love with them, don’t they?’ He had never felt that he had brought his.
And then when David was eleven he had had his accident. Daniel could still remember the effect on his mother. Her wild eyes as she clung to his father, her face bleached with terror and pain, suddenly the face of a wild stranger, her unbearable sobbing, the long hours spent at David’s bedside in the London Hospital while he was left to the care of neighbours. In the end they had had to amputate David’s left leg below the knee. She had brought home her maimed elder son with an exultant tenderness as if he had risen from the dead. But Daniel knew that he had no chance of competing. David had been courageous, uncomplaining, an easy child. He had been moody, jealous, difficult. He had also been intelligent. He suspected that he was cleverer than David but had early given up their academic rivalry. It was David who went to London University, read law, had been called to the Bar and had now found a place in a chambers which specialized in criminal cases. And it was as an act of defiance that at eighteen and straight from school he had joined the police.
He told himself, and half believed, that his parents were ashamed of his job. Certainly they never boasted of his successes as they did of David’s. He remembered a snatch of conversation at his mother’s last birthday dinner. Greeting him at the door she had said: ‘I haven’t told Mrs Forsdyke that you’re a policeman. Of course I shall mention it if she asks what you do.’
His father had said quietly: ‘And in Commander Dalgliesh’s Special Squad, Mother, called in to crimes of particular sensitivity.’
He had said with a bitterness which surprised even himself: ‘I’m not sure that will help disinfect the shame. And what will the old bat do anyway? Faint into her smoked salmon? Why should the job worry her, unless her old man’s on the fiddle?’ Oh God, he had thought, I’ve started it all again. On her birthday, too. ‘Cheer up. You’ve got one respectable son. You can tell Mrs Forsdyke that David spends his time lying to keep criminals out of gaol and I spend my time lying to get them in.’
Well, they could enjoy criticizing him over their hors-d’oeuvre. And Bella would be there, of course. Like David, she was a lawyer but she would have found time for his parents’ anniversary. Bella the perfect daughter-in-law-to-be. Bella who was learning Yiddish, who visited Israel twice a year and raised money to help immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia, who attended the Beit Midrash, the Talmudic learning centre at the synagogue, who kept Sabbath; Bella who turned on him her dark reproachful eyes and worried about the state of his soul.
It was no use saying to them, ‘I don’t believe in it any more.’ How much did they believe, either of his parents? Put them on oath in the witness box and ask them whether they really believed that God handed down the Torah to Moses at Sinai and that their lives depended on the right answer. What would they say? He had asked his brother that question and he still remembered the answer. It had surprised him at the time and did so now, opening the disconcerting possibility that there were subtleties in David which he had never understood.
‘I should probably lie. There are some beliefs it is worth dying for and that doesn’t depend on whether or not they are strictly true.’
His mother, of course, would never bring herself to say, ‘I don’t care whether you believe or disbelieve, I want you to be here with us on the Sabbath. I want you to be seen in the synagogue with your father and brother.’ And it wasn’t intellectual dishonesty, although he tried to tell himself that it was. You could argue that few adherents of any religion believed all the dogma of their faith except the fundamentalists and, God knew, they were a bloody sight more dangerous than any nonbeliever. God knew. How natural it was and how universal to slip into the language of faith. And perhaps his mother was right, although she would never bring herself to speak the truth. The outward forms were important. To practise religion wasn’t only a matter of intellectual assent. To be seen in the synagogue was to proclaim: this is where I stand, these are my people, these are the values by which I try to live, this is what generations of my forebears have made me, this is what I am. He remembered his grandfather’s words, spoken to him after his bar mitzvah: ‘What is a Jew without his belief? What Hitler could not do to us shall we do to ourselves?’ The old resentments welled up. A Jew wasn’t even allowed his atheism. Burdened with guilt from childhood, he couldn’t reject his faith without feeling the need to apologize to the God he no longer believed in. It was always there at the back of his mind, silent witness of his apostasy, that moving army of naked humanity, the young, the middle-aged, the children, flowing like a dark tide into the gas chambers.
And now, halted at yet another red light, thinking of the house that would never be home, seeing with his mind’s clear eye the gleaming windows, the looped lace curtains with their bows, the immaculate front lawn, he thought: why must I define myself by the wrongs others have done to my race? The guilt was bad enough; do I have to carry the burden of innocence also? I’m a Jew, isn’t that enough? Do I have to represent to myself and others the evil of mankind?
He had at last reached The Highway and mysteriously as is its habit the traffic had eased and he was making good progress. With luck he would be at Innocent House within five minutes. This death wouldn’t be commonplace, this mystery not easily solved. The team wouldn’t have been called in to a routine case. For those intimately concerned, perhaps, no death was commonplace and no investigation purely routine. But this was his chance to prove to Adam Dalgliesh that he had been right to choose him as Massingham’s replacement and he intended to seize it. There was no priority, personal or professional, which was higher than this.
20
The police launch butted upstream round the northerly bend of the river between Rotherhithe and Narrow Street against a strong current. The breeze was strengthening to a light wind and the morning was colder than it had seemed to Kate on her first wakening. A few clouds, thin trails of white vapour, drifted and dissolved against the pale blue of the sky. She had seen Innocent House before from the river, but when it appeared with dramatic suddenness as they rounded the bend of Lime-house Reach she gave a small gasp of wonder and, glancing up at Dalgliesh’s face, caught his brief smile. In the morning sunlight it gleamed with such an unreal intensity that for a moment she thought it was floodlit. As the engine of the police launch died and it was skilfully manoeuvred to the row of hanging tyres to the right of the landing steps she could almost believe that the house was part of a film set, an insubstantial palace of hardboard and paste behind whose ephemeral walls the director, the actors, the lighting men were already busying themselves around the body of the corpse while the make-up girl darted forward to mop a glistening brow and apply a final dollop of artificial blood. The fantasy disconcerted her; she was not prone to play-acting or to flights of imagination, but the sense of a contrived occasion, of being at once an observer and a participant, was difficult to shake off and was strengthened by the posed immobility of the reception party.
There were two men and two women. The women stood a little to the front with a man on each side. They were grouped on the wide marble forecourt as motionless as statues, watching the tying-up of the launch with serious and, it seemed, critical faces. There had been time on the short journey for Dalgliesh to give her some briefing and Kate could guess who they were. The tall dark woman must be Claudia Etienne, the dead man’s sister, with the last of the Peverells, Frances Peverell, on her
left. The older of the two men, who looked well over seventy, would be Gabriel Dauntsey, the poetry editor, and the younger James de Witt. They looked as posed as if a director had carefully arranged them to suit the camera angles, but as Dalgliesh advanced the little group broke up and Claudia Etienne, hand outstretched, came forward to make the introductions. She turned and they followed her down a short cobbled lane and into the side door of the house.
An elderly man was seated at the switchboard behind the reception desk. With his pale, smooth face an almost perfect oval, the cheeks splotched with small red circles under gentle eyes, he had the look of an elderly clown. He looked up at them as they entered and Kate saw in the luminous eyes a look of mingled apprehension and appeal. It was a look she had seen before. The police might be needed, even impatiently awaited, but they were seldom greeted without anxiety, even by the innocent. For the first couple of seconds she wondered irrelevantly which professions were invited into people’s homes without reservation. Doctors and plumbers came high on the list, mid wives probably at the top. She wondered what it would feel like to be greeted with the heartfelt words, ‘Thank God you’re here.’ The telephone rang and the old man turned to answer it. His voice was low and very attractive but held an unmistakable note of distress and his hands were shaking.
‘Peverell Press. Can I help you? No, I’m afraid Mr Gerard isn’t available. Can I get someone else to ring you back later?’ He looked up again, this time at Claudia Etienne, and said helplessly: ‘It’s Matthew Evans’s secretary from Fabers, Miss Etienne. He wants to talk to Mr Gerard. It’s about next Wednesday’s meeting on literary piracy.’
Claudia took the receiver. ‘This is Claudia Etienne. Please tell Mr Evans I’ll ring him back as soon as I can. We’re going to close the office now for the rest of the day. I’m afraid there’s been an accident. Tell him Gerard Etienne is dead. I know he’ll understand that I can’t speak now.’
Without waiting for a response she replaced the receiver, then turned to Dalgliesh. ‘There’s no point in trying to cover it up, is there? Death is death. It isn’t a temporary embarrassment, a little local difficulty. You can’t pretend it hasn’t happened. Anyway the press will get hold of it soon enough.’
Her voice was harsh, the dark eyes hard. She looked like a woman possessed more by anger than grief. Turning to the receptionist, she said more gently, ‘Put a message on the answerphone, George, that the office is closed for the day. Then go and get yourself some strong coffee. Mrs Demery is about somewhere. If any other staff arrive, tell them to go home.’
George said: ‘But will they go, Miss Claudia? I mean, they won’t want to take it from me, surely?’
Claudia Etienne frowned: ‘Perhaps not. I suppose I ought to see them. Better still, we’ll get Mr Bartrum. He’s here somewhere isn’t he, George?’
‘Mr Bartrum is in his own office in number 10, Miss Claudia. He said he had plenty of work to get on with and wanted to stay. He thought it would be all right as he’s not in the main house.’
‘Ring him will you, George, and ask him to have a word with me. He can cope with the latecomers. Some of them may have work they can take home. Tell them I shall be speaking to all of them on Monday.’
She turned to Dalgliesh. ‘We’ve been doing that, sending staff home. I hope that’s all right. It seemed better not to have too many people on the premises.’
Dalgliesh said. ‘We shall need to see them all in time, but that can wait. Who found your brother?’
‘I did. Blackie – Miss Blackett, my brother’s secretary – was with me and so was Mrs Demery, our cleaner. We went up together.’
‘Which of you entered the room first?’
‘I did.’
‘Then if you could show me the way. Did your brother usually take the lift or the stairs?’
‘The stairs. But he didn’t normally go up to the top of the house. That’s what’s so extraordinary, his being in the archives office at all.’
Dalgliesh said: ‘Then we’ll take the stairs.’
Claudia Etienne said: ‘I locked the room after we found my brother’s body. Lord Stilgoe has the key. He asked for it so I gave it to him. Why not if it made him happy? I suppose he thought one of us might go back and interfere with the evidence.’
But Lord Stilgoe was already pressing forward. ‘I thought it right to take charge of the key, Commander. I have to speak to you in private. I warned you. I knew that we should have a tragedy here sooner or later.’
He held out the key but it was Claudia who took it. Dalgliesh said: ‘Lord Stilgoe, do you know how Gerard Etienne died?’
‘Of course not, how could I?’
‘Then we’ll talk later.’
‘But I’ve seen the body, of course. I thought that was only my duty. Abominable. Well, I warned you. It’s obvious that this outrage is part of the campaign against me and my book.’
Dalgliesh said: ‘Later, Lord Stilgoe.’
He was, as always, taking his time in viewing the body. Kate knew that, however speedily he responded to a murder call, he always arrived with the same unhurried calm. She had seen him put out a restraining hand to an over-enthusiastic detective sergeant with the quiet words, ‘Cool it, Sergeant. You’re not a doctor. The dead can’t be resuscitated.’
Now he turned to Claudia Etienne. ‘Shall we go up?’
She turned to the three partners who, with Lord Stilgoe, were standing together in a silent group as if waiting for instructions, and said: ‘Perhaps you’d better wait in the boardroom. I’ll join you as soon as I can.’
Lord Stilgoe said in a voice more reasonable than Kate expected: ‘I’m afraid I can’t stay any longer, Commander. That’s why I made such an early appointment with Mr Etienne. I wanted to discuss progress on my memoirs before I went into hospital for a minor operation. I’m due there at eleven. I don’t want to risk losing the bed. I’ll telephone either you or the Commissioner at the Yard from the hospital.’
Kate sensed that this suggestion was greeted with relief by de Witt and Dauntsey.
The little group passed through the open doorway into the hall. Kate gave a silent gasp of admiration. For a second her step halted, but she resisted the temptation to let her eyes too obviously range. The police were always invaders of privacy; it was offensive to act as if she were a paying tourist. But it seemed to her that in that one moment of revelation she was aware simultaneously of every detail of the hall’s magnificence, the intricate segments of the marble floor, the six mottled marble pillars with their elegantly carved capitals, the richness of the painted ceiling, a gleaming panorama of eighteenth-century London, bridges, spires, towers, houses, masted ships, the whole unified by the blue reaches of the river, the elegant double staircase, the balustrade curving down to end in bronzes of laughing boys riding dolphins and holding aloft the great globed lamps. As they mounted the magnificence was less intrusive, the decorative detail more restrained, but it was through dignity, proportion and elegance that they moved purposefully upwards to the stark desecration of murder.
On the third floor there was a green baize door which stood open. They mounted a narrow stairway, Claudia Etienne leading with Dalgliesh at her shoulder and Kate at the rear. The stairs turned to the right before the final half-dozen treads led them to a narrow hall about ten feet wide, with the grille doors of a lift to the left. The right-hand wall was without doors but there was a closed door on the left and one immediately in front of them which stood open.
Claudia Etienne said: ‘This is the archives room where we keep our old records. The small archives office is through here.’
The archives room had obviously once been two rooms, but the central wall had been removed to produce one very long chamber running almost the whole length of the house. The rows of wooden filing racks at right angles to the door and reaching almost to the ceiling were ranged so closely that there could hardly be room to move comfortably between them. Between the rows hung a number of light bulbs without shades. Natural light
came from six long windows through which Kate could glimpse the intricate stone carving of a balustrade. They turned to the right, down the clear space about four feet wide between the ends of the shelves and the wall, and came to another door.
Claudia Etienne silently handed Dalgliesh the key. Taking it he said: ‘If you can bear to come in I would like you to confirm that the room and your brother’s body look exactly as they did when you first entered. If you find that too distressing, don’t worry. It will help, but it isn’t essential.’
She said: ‘It’s all right. It’s easier for me now than it would be tomorrow. I still can’t believe it’s real. Nothing about it looks real, nothing about it feels real. I suppose that by tomorrow I’ll know that it is real and that the reality is final.’
It was her words which to Kate sounded unreal. There was a strain of falsity, of histrionics in the balanced cadences, as if they had been thought out in advance. But she told herself not to be over-hasty. It was too easy to misinterpret the disorientation of grief. She more than most surely knew how oddly inappropriate the first spoken reaction to shock or bereavement could be. She remembered the wife of a bus driver stabbed to death in an Islington pub, whose first reaction had been to lament that he hadn’t changed his shirt that morning or posted the pools coupon. And yet the wife had loved her husband, and genuinely grieved for him.