Original Sin

by P. D. James

There were leisurely footsteps approaching through the archives room. Daniel said: ‘It sounds as if Doc Wardle has arrived.’

  He was over six feet three inches tall, his impressive head jutting above wide bony shoulders from which his ill-fitting and thin jacket drooped as if from a wire coat hanger. With the beaked, mottled nose, barking voice and keen darting eyes under bushy brows so luxuriant and vigorous that they seemed to have a life of their own, he looked and sounded like the stereotype of an irascible colonel. His height could have been a disadvantage in a job where corpses often lay inconveniently concealed in ditches, culverts, cupboards and makeshift graves, but the long body could insinuate itself with unexpected ease, even grace, into the most unaccommodating place. Now he gazed round the room, deploring its stark simplicity and the uninviting business which had dragged him from his microscope, then knelt by the body and let out a lugubrious sigh.

  ‘You’ll want the approximate time of death, of course, Commander. That’s always the first question after “Is he dead?” and, yes, he is dead. That’s the one fact we can all agree about. Body cold, rigor mortis fully established. One interesting exception, but we’ll get on to that later. Suggests he’s been dead about thirteen to fifteen hours. The room’s warm, unnaturally so for the time of the year. Taken the temperature, have you? Sixty-eight degrees. That and the fact that metabolism was probably fairly pronounced at the time of death could delay the onset of rigor. You’ve already discussed the interesting anomaly, no doubt. Still, tell me about it Commander. Tell me about it. Or you, Inspector. I can see you’re longing to.’

  Dalgliesh almost expected him to add, ‘It’s too much to hope that you could keep your hands off him.’ He looked at Kate, who said: ‘The jaw is slack. Rigor mortis begins in the face, jaw and neck at five to seven hours after death and is fully established at about twelve hours. It passes off in the same sequence. So either it is already passing off in the jaw, which would put the time of death earlier by some six hours, or the mouth was forcibly opened. I’d say almost certainly the latter. The facial muscles aren’t slack.’

  Wardle said: ‘I sometimes wonder, Commander, why you bother to call out a pathologist.’

  Undeterred, Kate went on: ‘Which means that the snake’s head was put in the mouth not at the time of death but at least five to seven hours later. So the cause of death can’t be suffocation, at least not with the snake. But then we never thought that it was.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘The staining and the position of the body suggests that he died face downward and was subsequently turned over. It would be interesting to know why.’

  Kate suggested: ‘Easier to arrange the snake, stuff the head in his mouth?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Dalgliesh said no more, while Doc Wardle continued his examination. He had already encroached on the pathologist’s territory more than was prudent. He had little doubt about the cause of death and wondered whether it was perversity rather than caution which was keeping Wardle silent. It wasn’t the first case either of them had seen of carbon-monoxide poisoning. The post-mortem lividity, more pronounced than usual because of the blood’s slower liquidation, the cherry red coloration of the skin, so bright that the body looked as if it had been painted, were unmistakable and surely definitive.

  Wardle said: ‘Copy-book, isn’t it? Hardly needs a forensic pathologist and a Commander of the Met to diagnose carbon monoxide. But don’t let’s get too excited. Let’s get him on the table, shall we? Then the lab leeches can take their blood samples and give us an answer we can rely on. Do you want that snake kept in the mouth?’

  ‘I think so. I’d prefer to leave it undisturbed until the autopsy.’

  ‘Which you’ll want done, no doubt, immediately if not sooner.’

  ‘Don’t we always?’

  ‘I can do it this evening. We were due at a dinner party which our hostess has cancelled. Sudden attack of flu, or so she claims. 6.30 at the usual mortuary if you can make it. I’ll give them a ring, tell them to expect us. Is the meat wagon on the way?’

  Kate said: ‘It should arrive any moment.’

  Dalgliesh was aware that the ΡΜ would go ahead whether or not he could make it, but of course he would be there. Wardle was being unexpectedly cooperative, but then he reminded himself that when the chips were down Wardle invariably was.

  23

  As soon as he saw Mrs Demery Dalgliesh knew that he would have no trouble with her; he had dealt with her kind before. The Mrs Demerys, in his experience, had no hang-ups about the police, whom they assumed in general to be beneficent and on their side, while seeing no reason to treat them with inordinate respect or to credit male officers with more sense than was commonly found in the rest of the sex. They were, no doubt, as ready to lie as other witnesses when it came to protecting their own, but being honest and unburdened by imagination preferred to tell the truth as being on the whole less trouble and, having told it, saw no reason to torture their consciences with doubts about their own motives or the intentions of other people. They were obstinately firm, unshakeable and occasionally irreverent under cross-examination. Dalgliesh suspected that they found men slightly ridiculous, particularly when dressed in gowns and wigs and given to pontificating in arrogant voices over other people’s heads, and had no intention of being lectured to, browbeaten or put down by those irritating creatures.

  Now the latest example of this excellent species settled herself opposite him and gave him a frank appraisal from bright intelligent eyes. Her hair, obviously recently dyed, was a bright orange-gold worn in a style seen in Edwardian photographs; swept up firmly at the back and sides and with a fringe of frizzy curls low on the forehead. With her sharp nose and bright, slightly exophthalmic eyes she reminded Dalgliesh of an exotic and intelligent poodle.

  Without waiting for him to begin the conversation she said: ‘I knew yer dad, Mr Dalgliesh.’

  ‘Did you, Mrs Demery? When was that? During the war?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. My twin brother and I was evacuated to your village. Remember the Carter twins? Well, of course, you wouldn’t. You wasn’t even a glint in yer dad’s eye then. Oh, he was a lovely gentleman! We wasn’t billeted at the rectory, they had the unmarried mothers. We was with Miss Pilgrim in her cottage. Oh God, Mr Dalgliesh, that was a terrible place, that village. I don’t know how you put up with it when you was a kid. Put me off the country for life that village did. Mud, rain and that awful stink you get from the farmyard. And talk about boredom!’

  ‘Not much, perhaps, for a city child to do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. There was things to do all right, but start doing them and you were in dead trouble.’

  ‘Like damming the village stream?’

  ‘So you heard about that? How was we to know that it would flow into that Mrs Piggott’s back kitchen and drown her old cat? Fancy you knowing about that, though.’ Mrs Demery’s face expressed the liveliest gratification.

  ‘You and your brother are part of the folklore of the village, Mrs Demery.’

  ‘Are we now? That’s nice. Remember Mr Stuart’s piglets?’

  ‘Mr Stuart does. He’s well over eighty now, but there are some events that are branded on the memory.’

  ‘A proper race that was going to be. We got the little buggers lined up, more or less, but after that they was all over the place. Well, mostly all over the Norwich road. But, oh God! That village was a terrible place. The quiet of it! We’d lie awake listening to it, that silence. It was like being dead. And the dark! I never knew darkness like that. Pitch black it was. It was like a great black woolly blanket being pressed down on you until you felt suffocated. Billy and I couldn’t stand it. We never had a nightmare till we was evacuated. When our mum came to visit we used to bawl all the time. I can remember those visits, Mum dragging us along that boring old lane and Billy and I howling that we wanted to come home. We told her that Miss Pilgrim wasn’t giving us any food and was always after us with the slipper. It was true about the food t
oo, we never had a decent chip the whole time we was there. In the end Mum brought us back home to get a bit of peace. We was all right then. We had a lovely time, especially after the bombing started. We had one of those Anderson shelters in the garden and we were all snug in it with Mum and Gran and Auntie Edie and Mrs Powell from number 42 when she got bombed out.’

  Dalgliesh asked: ‘Wasn’t it dark in the Anderson shelter?’

  ‘We had our torches, didn’t we? And when the raids weren’t actually on you could go outside and watch the searchlights. Lovely crisscross patterns they made in the sky. And talk about noise! Those anti-aircraft guns, well it was like a giant tearing up corrugated iron. Well, as Mum said, if you give your kids a happy childhood there’s not much life can do to them after that.’

  Dalgliesh felt that it would be unproductive to argue this sanguine view of child rearing. He was about tactfully to suggest that it was time they got down to business when Mrs Demery forestalled him.

  ‘Well, that’s enough about the good old days. You’ll be wanting to ask me about this murder.’

  ‘So that’s how it strikes you, Mrs Demery?’

  ‘Stands to reason. He didn’t put that snake around his own neck. Strangled, was he?’

  ‘We shan’t know how he died until we get the result of the PM.’

  ‘Well, he looked strangled to me, with his face all pink and that snake’s head stuffed in his mouth. Mind you, I’ve never seen a healthier-looking corpse. Looked better dead than he did alive, and he looked pretty good alive. He was a good looker all right. I always thought he looked a bit like the young Gregory Peck.’

  Dalgliesh asked her to describe exactly what had happened since her arrival at Innocent House.

  ‘I come in every weekday except Wednesday from nine until five. On Wednesdays they’re supposed to have the whole place thoroughly cleaned by the Superior Office Cleaning Company. At least that’s what they call themselves. Inferior Cleaning Company would be more like it. I suppose they do the best they can, but it’s not like taking a personal interest in the place. George comes thirty minutes early and lets them in. They’re usually through by ten.’

  ‘Who lets you in, Mrs Demery? Do you have keys?’

  ‘No. Old Mr Etienne suggested I did but I didn’t want the responsibility. Too many keys in my life already. George usually opens up. Or it could be Mr Dauntsey or Miss Frances. Just depends who’s earlier. This morning Miss Peverell and Mr Dauntsey weren’t here, but George was and he let me in. Well, I got on quietly enough with my cleaning back in the kitchen. Nothing happened until just before nine, then this Lord Stilgoe turned up, saying he’d got an appointment with Mr Gerard.’

  ‘Were you there at the time?’

  ‘I was as it happened. I was having a bit of a chat with George. Lord Stilgoe was none too pleased to find no one there but the receptionist and me. George had rung round the office trying to find Mr Gerard, and he was suggesting that Lord Stilgoe should wait in the reception area when Miss Etienne arrived. She asked George if Mr Gerard was in his office and George said he’d rung but there was no reply. So she went across the hall to the office and Lord Stilgoe and I followed her. Mr Gerard’s jacket was over his chair and the chair was pulled back from the desk, which seemed a bit odd. Then she put her hand in the right-hand drawer and found his keys. Mr Gerard always kept his keys there when he was in his office. The bunch was rather heavy and he hated it dragging on his jacket pocket. Miss Claudia said, “He must be here somewhere. Perhaps he’s in number 10 with Mr Bartrum.” So we went back to the reception room and George said he’d rung number 10. Mr Bartrum had arrived but he hadn’t seen Mr Gerard though his Jag was there. Mr Gerard always parked his car in Innocent Passage, because it was safer. So Miss Claudia said, “He must be here somewhere. We’d better start looking for him.” By then the first boat had arrived and then Miss Frances and Mr Dauntsey.’

  ‘Did Miss Etienne sound worried?’

  ‘More puzzled, if you know what I mean. I said, well, I’ve been through most of the back of the house and on the ground floor, so he isn’t in the kitchen. And Miss Claudia said something about, well, he’d hardly likely to be would he, and started up the stairs with me and Miss Blackett just behind her.’

  ‘You didn’t say that Miss Blackett was there.’

  ‘Didn’t I? Well, she’d arrived all right with the launch. Of course you tend to overlook her now that old Mr Peverell’s dead. Anyway she was there, although she was still wearing her coat, and she came up the stairs with us.’

  ‘Three of you to search for one man?’

  ‘Well, that’s how it was. I suppose I went out of curiosity. It was a kind of instinct really. I don’t know why Miss Blackett went. You’ll have to ask her. Miss Claudia said, “We’ll start searching at the top of the house”, so that’s what we did.’

  ‘So she went straight to the archive room?’

  ‘That’s right, and then on to the little room beyond. The door wasn’t locked.’

  ‘How did she open it, Mrs Demery?’

  ‘How do you mean? She opened it same way you always open a door.’

  ‘Did she fling it wide? Open it gently? Did she seem at all apprehensive?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. She just opened it. And, well, there he was. Lying on his back with his face all pink and that snake wound round his neck with the head stuffed in his mouth. His eyes were open and staring. Horrible they was! Mind you, I could see he was dead at once, though, like I said, I’ve never seen him looking better. Miss Claudia went over and knelt beside him. She said, “Go and phone the police. And get out of here, both of you.” Kind of sharp, she was. Still, it was her brother. I know when I’m not wanted so I got out. I wasn’t that anxious to stay.’

  ‘What about Miss Blackett?’

  ‘She was just behind me. I thought she was going to scream but instead of that she made a kind of high, wailing noise. I put my arms round her shoulders. She was shaking something terrible. I said, “Come on, dearie, come on, there’s nothing you can do here.” So we went down the stairs. I thought it would be quicker than the lift, which is always getting stuck. But maybe the lift would’ve been better. I had some trouble getting her down the stairs, she was shaking so much. And once or twice her legs almost gave way. Once I thought I’d just have to dump her and go for help. When we got to the bottom flight there was Lord Stilgoe and Mr de Witt and the rest of them standing there looking up at us. I suppose they saw from my face and the state Miss Blackett was in that something awful had happened. So then I told them. Seemed like they couldn’t take it in for a moment, and then Mr de Witt started running up the stairs with Lord Stilgoe and Mr Dauntsey behind him.’

  ‘What happened then, Mrs Demery?’

  ‘I helped Miss Blackett to her chair and went off to find her some water.’

  ‘You didn’t ring the police?’

  ‘I thought I’d leave that to the rest of them. The body wasn’t going to go away, was it? What was the hurry? Anyway, if I had rung I’d only have done the wrong thing. Lord Stilgoe came back. He went straight to the reception desk and said to George, “Get me New Scotland Yard. I want the Commissioner. Failing him, Commander Adam Dalgliesh.” Straight to the top for him, of course. Then Miss Claudia asked me to go and make some strong coffee, so that’s what I did. White as a sheet she was. Well, you couldn’t wonder, could you?’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Mr Gerard Etienne took over as chairman and managing director fairly recently, didn’t he? Was he well-liked?’

  ‘Well, he wouldn’t have been carried out of here in a body bag if he was a little ray of sunshine about the place. Someone didn’t like him, that’s for sure. Of course, it wasn’t easy for him taking over from old Mr Peverell. Everyone respected Mr Peverell. He was a lovely man. But I got on all right with Mr Gerard. I didn’t worry him and he didn’t worry me. I don’t reckon, though, that many about the place will be crying for him. Still, murder is murder and it’ll be a shock, no doubt about it. Won’
t do much good for the firm either, I shouldn’t wonder. Now here’s an idea. See how this grabs you. Maybe he did it himself, then this joker we’ve got about the place put the snake round his neck afterwards to show what they thought of him. Might be worth thinking about.’

  Dalgliesh didn’t say that it had been thought about. He asked: ‘Would it surprise you to hear that he had killed himself?’

  ‘Well, it would, to tell you the truth. Too pleased with himself for that, I’d have said. Anyway, why should he? OK, so the firm’s in a bit of trouble, but what firm isn’t? He’d have come through all right. I can’t see Mr Gerard doing a Robert Maxwell. Still, who’d have thought it of Robert Maxwell, so there’s no knowing really, is there? Mysterious, that’s what people are, mysterious. I could tell you a thing or two about the mysteriousness of people.’

  Kate broke in: ‘Miss Etienne must have been terribly distressed finding him like that. Her own brother.’

  Mrs Demery transferred her attention to Kate but seemed none too pleased at this intrusion of a third person into her tête-à-tête. ‘Ask a straight question and you’ll get a straight answer, Inspector. How distressed was Miss Claudia? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? You’ll have to ask her. I don’t know. She was at the side of the body bending over it and she never turned her face all the time Miss Blackett and I were in the room, which wasn’t long. I don’t know what she was feeling. I only know what she said.’

  ‘“Get out of here both of you.” Rather harsh.’

  ‘Shock, maybe. You work it out for yourselves.’

  ‘Leaving her alone with the body.’

  ‘That’s the way she wanted it seemingly. Anyway, I couldn’t have stayed. Someone had to help Miss Blackett down the stairs.’

  Dalgliesh asked: ‘Is it a good place to work, Mrs Demery? Are you happy here?’

  ‘As good as I’m likely to get. Look, Mr Dalgliesh, I’m sixty-three. OK, that’s no great age and I’ve still got my eyes and legs, and I’m a damned sight better worker than some I could name. But you don’t start looking for a new job at sixty-three, and I like work. I’d die of boredom stuck at home. And I’m used to this place, been here nigh on twenty years. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it suits me. And it’s handy – well, more or less. I’m still in Whitechapel. Got a nice little modern flat now.’