Original Sin

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Tell me about the snake.’

  ‘Hissing Sid? Goodness knows when that first appeared here. About five years ago, I think. Someone left it after a staff Christmas party. It used to be used by Miss Blackett to prop open the door between her room and Henry Peverell’s. It’s become something of an office mascot. Blackie’s attached to it for some reason.’

  ‘And yesterday your brother told her to get rid of it.’

  ‘Mrs Demery told you that, I suppose. Yes, he did. He wasn’t in a particularly good mood after the partners’ meeting and for some reason the sight of the thing irritated him. She put it in the desk drawer.’

  ‘You saw her do that?’

  ‘Yes. Myself, Gabriel Dauntsey and our temporary shorthand-typist, Mandy Price. I imagine that the news got round the office pretty fast.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Your brother came out of the meeting in a bad temper?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said he wasn’t in a particularly good mood. None of us were. It’s no secret that the Peverell Press is in trouble. We have to face up to selling Innocent House if we’re to have any hope of staying in business.’

  ‘That must be a distressing prospect for Miss Peverell.’

  ‘I don’t think any of us welcomes it. The suggestion that any of us tried to prevent it by harming Gerard is ludicrous.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘It is not a suggestion that I have made.’

  Then he let her go.

  She had just reached the door when Daniel put his head round. He opened it for her and waited to speak until she had left the room.

  ‘The gas engineer is ready to go, sir. It’s what we expected. The flue is badly blocked. It looks like rubble from the chimney lining, but there’s been a lot of falling grit over the years. He’ll provide an official report but he hasn’t any doubt about what happened. With the flue in the state it is, that fire was lethal.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Only in a room without adequate ventilation. We’ve been told that often enough. The lethal combination was the burning fire and the unopen-able window.’

  Daniel said: ‘There was one particularly large piece of rubble wedged against the flue. It could have fallen naturally from the lining of the chimney or been deliberately dislodged. There’s really no way of telling. You’d only have to prod parts of that lining and chunks would fall away. Do you want to have a look, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll come now.’

  ‘And you want the fire as well as the rubble to go to forensics?’

  ‘Yes, Daniel, all of it.’ He had no need to add ‘And I want prints, photographs, the lot.’ He was, as always, working with experts in violent death.

  As they made their way upstairs, he asked: ‘Any news of the missing tape recorder or Etienne’s diary?’

  ‘Not so far, sir. Miss Etienne made a fuss about checking the desk drawers of the staff who’d been sent home or who are on leave today. I didn’t think you’d want to apply for a search warrant.’

  ‘Not necessary at present. I doubt whether it will be. The search can take place on Monday when all the staff are here. If that tape recorder was taken by the murderer for a specific reason it’s probably at the bottom of the river. If the office joker took it, it could turn up anywhere. The same goes for the diary.’

  Daniel said: ‘The recorder was the only one of its kind in the office, apparently. It belonged personally to Mr Dauntsey. All the others are larger and are AC/battery cassette recorders which take the usual two-and-a-half by four inch cassettes. Mr de Witt wonders if you’ll see him fairly soon, sir. He has a seriously sick friend living with him and promised that he’d be home early.’

  ‘All right, I’ll take him next.’

  The gas engineer, already in his coat and ready to go, was vocal in his disapproval, obviously torn between an almost proprietorial interest in the appliance and professional outrage at its misuse.

  ‘Haven’t seen a fire of this type for nearly twenty years. It should be in a museum. But there’s nothing wrong with the functioning of the fire itself. It’s well-made, sturdy. It’s the type they used to install in nurseries. The tap’s removable, you see, so that the children couldn’t accidentally turn it on. You can see plainly enough what happened here, Commander. The flue’s totally blocked. This grit must have been coming down for years. God knows when this appliance was last serviced. This was a death waiting to happen. I’ve seen it before, you too no doubt, and we’ll see it again. People can’t say they haven’t been warned often enough. Gas appliances need air. Without ventilation what you get is malfunctioning and a build-up of carbon monoxide. Gas is a perfectly safe fuel if it’s used properly.’

  ‘He’d have been all right with the window open?’

  ‘Should have been. The window is high and rather narrow, but if it’d been properly open he’d have been all right. How did you find him? Asleep in a chair, I suppose. That’s usually how it happens. People get a bit dozy, fall asleep and don’t wake up.’

  Daniel said: ‘There are worse ways of going.’

  ‘Not if you’re a gas engineer there aren’t. It’s an insult to the product. You’ll be needing a report I suppose, Commander. Well, you’ll get it soon enough. He was a young chap, wasn’t he? Well, that makes it worse. I don’t know why it should but it always does.’ He opened the door and looked round the room. ‘I wonder why he came up here to work. Odd place to choose. You’d think there’d be plenty of offices in a building this size without wanting to come up here.’

  28

  James de Witt closed the door behind him and paused for a moment nonchalantly against it as if wondering whether he would after all bother to enter, then walked across the room in easy strides and pulled the empty chair to one side of the table.

  ‘Is it all right if I sit here? Confronting you across the board in this adversarial way is rather intimidating. It brings back unpleasant memories of interviews with one’s tutor.’ He was casually dressed in dark blue jeans and a loose-fitting ribbed sweater with leather patches on the elbows and shoulders which looked like army surplus. On him it looked almost elegant.

  He was very tall, certainly over six feet, and loose-limbed with a suggestion of gawkiness in the long bony wrists. His face, with something of the melancholy humour of a clown, was lean and intelligent, his cheeks flat under the jutting bones. A heavy strand of light brown hair fell across the high forehead. His eyes were narrow, sleepy under heavy lids, but they were eyes which missed little and gave nothing away. When he spoke the soft agreeable drawl was oddly inappropriate to his words.

  ‘I’ve just seen Claudia. She looks desperately tired. Did you really need to interrogate her? She has, after all, lost an only brother in appalling circumstances.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘It was hardly an interrogation. If Miss Etienne had asked us to stop, or if I thought she was too distressed, we would obviously have deferred the interview.’

  ‘And Frances Peverell? It’s just as ghastly for her. Can’t her interview wait until tomorrow?’

  ‘Not unless she’s too distressed to see me now. In this kind of investigation we need to get as much information as possible as soon as possible.’

  Kate wondered whether his real concern had been for Frances Peverell rather than Claudia Etienne.

  He said: ‘I suppose I’m taking Frances’s turn. Sorry about that. It’s just that my arrangements have temporarily broken down and my friend, Rupert Farlow, will be alone if I don’t get back by half past four. Actually, Rupert Farlow is my alibi. I’m assuming that the main purpose of this interview is for me to provide one. I went home yesterday by the launch at 5.30 and was at Hillgate Village by half past six. I took the Circle Line from Westminster to Notting Hill Gate. Rupert can confirm that I was at home with him for the whole evening. Nobody called and, unusually, no one telephoned. It would be helpful if you could make an appointment before you check with him. He’s seriously ill now and some days are better for him than others.’

  Dalgliesh a
sked him the usual question, whether he knew anyone who might wish Gerard Etienne dead. He asked: ‘Any political enemies for example, using that word in the widest sense?’

  ‘Good God no! Gerard was impeccably liberal, in talk if not in actions. And after all it’s the talk that matters. All the correct liberal opinions. He knew what can’t be spoken or published in Britain today and he didn’t speak it or publish it. He may have thought it, like the rest of us, but that’s hardly a crime yet. Actually, I doubt whether he was much interested in political or social affairs, not even as they affected publishing. He’d pretend to a concern if it were expedient but I doubt whether he felt it.’

  ‘What did concern him? What did he feel deeply about?’

  ‘Fame. Success. Himself. The Peverell Press. He wanted to head one of the largest – the largest – and most successful private publishing house in Britain. Music: Beethoven and Wagner in particular. He was a pianist and played rather well. It’s a pity his touch with people wasn’t as sensitive. His current woman, I suppose.’

  ‘He was engaged?’

  ‘To Earl Norrington’s sister. Claudia has telephoned the Dowager. I expect she’s broken the news to her daughter by now.’

  ‘And there was no problem about the engagement?’

  ‘Not that I am aware of. Claudia might know but I doubt it. Gerard was reticent about Lady Lucinda. We’ve all met her, of course. Gerard gave a joint engagement and birthday party for her here on the 10th of July instead of our usual summer bash. I believe he met her in Bayreuth last year but I gained the impression – I could be wrong – that it wasn’t Wagner who had taken her there. I think she and her mother were visiting some continental cousins. I really know little else about her. The engagement was surprising, of course. One didn’t think of Gerard as socially ambitious, if that’s what it was all about. It’s not as if Lady Lucinda was bringing money into the firm. Lineage but not lolly. Of course, when these people complain that they are poor they only mean that there is a slight temporary difficulty about paying the heir’s fees at Eton. Still, Lady Lucinda certainly counts as one of Gerard’s interests. And then there’s mountaineering. If you had asked Gerard about his interests he would probably have added mountaineering. To my knowledge he only climbed one mountain in his life.’

  Kate asked unexpectedly: ‘Which mountain?’

  De Witt turned to her and smiled. The smile was unexpected and transformed his face. ‘The Matterhorn. That probably tells you as much about Gerard Etienne as you need to know.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Presumably he intended to make changes here. They can’t all have been popular.’

  ‘That didn’t mean they weren’t necessary, still are necessary I suppose. Maintaining this house has been eating up the annual profit for decades. I suppose we could stay on if we halved the list, sacked two-thirds of the staff, took a 30 per cent cut in our own pay and contented ourselves with the back-list and being a very small cult publisher. That wouldn’t have suited Gerard Etienne.’

  ‘Or the rest of you?’

  ‘Oh, we grumbled and kicked against the pricks at times but I think we recognized that Gerard was right; it was expand or go under. A publishing house today can’t survive on trade publishing. Gerard wanted to take over a firm with a strong legal list – there’s one ripe for plucking – and to go into educational publishing. It was all going to take money, not to say energy and a certain amount of commercial aggression. I’m not sure that some of us had the stomach for it. God knows what will happen now. I imagine that we’ll have a partners’ meeting, confirm Claudia as chairman and MD and defer all disagreeable decisions for at least six months. That would have amused Gerard. He would have seen it as typical.’

  Dalgliesh, anxious not to detain him too long, ended by asking him briefly about the practical joker.

  ‘I’ve no idea who’s responsible. We’ve wasted a lot of time in the monthly partners’ meetings talking about it but we’ve got nowhere. It’s odd really. With a total staff of only thirty, you’d imagine that we’d have got some clue by now if only by a process of elimination. Of course, the great majority of the staff have been with the Press for years and I’d have said that all of them, old and new, were beyond suspicion. And the incidents have happened when practically everyone has been there. Perhaps that was the joker’s idea, to make elimination difficult. Most serious, of course, was the disappearance of the artwork for the non-fiction book on Guy Fawkes and the alteration of Lord Stilgoe’s proofs.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘But neither, in fact, proved catastrophic.’

  ‘As it happens, no. This last business with Hissing Sid seems to be in a different category. The others were directed against the firm, but stuffing the head of that snake into Gerard’s mouth was surely an act of malice against him personally. To save you asking, I may as well say that I knew where to find Hissing Sid. I imagine most of the office did by the time Mrs Demery had finished her rounds.’

  Dalgliesh thought that it was time to let him go. He said: ‘How will you get to Hillgate Village?’

  ‘I’ve ordered a taxi, it’ll be too slow by launch to Charing Cross. I’ll be in at half past nine tomorrow if there’s anything else you want to know. Not that I think I can help. Oh, I may as well say now that I didn’t kill Gerard, nor did I put that snake round his neck. I could hardly hope to persuade him of the virtues of the literary novel by gassing him to death.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘So that’s how you think he died?’

  ‘Didn’t he? Actually it was Dauntsey’s idea, I can take no credit for it. But the more I think about it the more credible it appears.’

  He left with the same unhurried grace as that with which he had entered.

  Dalgliesh reflected that questioning suspects was rather like interviewing candidates as a member of a selection board. There was always the temptation to assess the performance of each and to put forward a tentative opinion before the next applicant was summoned. Today he waited in silence. Kate, as always, sensed that it was wise to keep her counsel, but he suspected that there were one or two pungent comments she would like to have made about Claudia Etienne.

  Frances Peverell was the last. She came into the room with something of the docility of a well-trained schoolchild but her composure broke when she saw Etienne’s jacket still hanging across the back of his chair.

  She said: ‘I didn’t think this was still here,’ and began to move towards it, her hand outstretched. Then she checked herself and turned towards Dalgliesh and he saw that her eyes had brimmed with tears.

  He said: ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps we should have taken it away.’

  She said: ‘Claudia might have removed it, perhaps, but she’s had other things to think about. Poor Claudia. I suppose she’ll have to cope with all his belongings, all his clothes.’

  She sat down and looked at Dalgliesh like a patient, waiting for a consultant’s opinion. Her face was gentle, the light brown hair with strands of gold was cut in a fringe above straight eyebrows and blue-green eyes. Dalgliesh suspected that the look of strained anxiety in them was more long-standing than a response to the present trauma and he wondered what Henry Peverell had been like as a father. The woman before him had none of the petulant self-absorption of a spoiled only daughter. She looked like a woman who all her life had responded to the needs of others, more used to receiving implied criticism than praise. She had none of Claudia Etienne’s self-possession or de Witt’s dégagé elegance. She was wearing a skirt in a soft blue and fawn tweed with a blue jumper and matching cardigan, but without the usual string of pearls. She could, he thought, have worn exactly the same in the 1930s or 1950s, the unexceptional day clothes of the English gentlewoman; unexciting, conventional, expensive good taste, giving offence to no one.

  Dalgliesh said gently: ‘I always think that’s the worst job after someone dies. Watches, jewellery, books, pictures; these can be given to friends and it seems right and appropriate. But clothes are too intimate to be given as gifts. Paradox
ically it seems that we can only bear to think of them being worn not by people we know, but by strangers.’

  She said with eagerness as if grateful that he understood: ‘Yes, I felt that after Daddy died. In the end I gave all his suits and shoes to the Salvation Army. I hope they found someone who needed them, but it was like clearing him out of the flat, clearing him out of my life.’

  ‘Were you fond of Gerard Etienne?’

  She looked down at her folded hands and then straight into his eyes. ‘I was in love with him. I wanted to tell you myself because I’m sure you’ll find out sooner or later and it’s better coming from me. We had an affair but it ended a week before he became engaged.’

  ‘By common consent?’

  ‘No, not by common consent.’

  He didn’t need to ask her what she had felt at this betrayal. What she had felt, and was still feeling, was written plainly on her face.

  He said: ‘I’m sorry. Talking about his death can’t be easy for you.’

  ‘Not as painful as being unable to talk. Please tell me, Mr Dalgliesh, do you think that Gerard was murdered?’

  ‘We can’t be certain yet but it is a probability rather than a possibility. That’s why we have to question you now. I’d like you to explain exactly what happened last night.’

  ‘I expect Gabriel – Mr Dauntsey – has explained about the mugging. I didn’t go with him to his poetry reading because he was adamant he wanted to be alone. I think he felt I wouldn’t enjoy it. But someone from Peverell Press should have gone with him. It was the first time he’d read for about fifteen years and it wasn’t right that he should be alone. If I’d been with him perhaps he wouldn’t have been mugged. I received the telephone call from St Thomas’s at about 11.30 saying he was there and would have to wait for an X-ray, and asking if I would be with him if they sent him home. Apparently he was more or less demanding to come back and they wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be alone. I was watching out for him from my kitchen window but I missed hearing the taxi. His front door is in Innocent Lane but I think the driver must have turned at the bottom and left him there. He must have rung as soon as he got in. He said he was all right, that there was no fracture and he was going to have a bath. After that he’d be glad if I’d come down. I don’t think he really wanted me, but he knew I couldn’t be happy if I hadn’t made sure he was all right.’