Original Sin

by P. D. James

  The boy, seated at the card table, made no move. Kate said: ‘We won’t drink, thank you. And this shouldn’t take long. It’s about Thursday evening.’

  ‘I thought it might be.’

  ‘Mr de Witt says that he came straight home from the office and was here with you all the evening. Could you confirm that?’

  ‘If that’s what James told you then it’s true. James never lies. That’s one of the things about him that his friends find so trying.’

  ‘And is it true?’

  ‘Naturally. Hasn’t he said so?’

  ‘What time did he arrive home?’

  ‘The usual time. About 6.30, isn’t it? He’ll tell you. He has told you, surely.’

  Kate, who had pushed a heap of magazines to one side, had seated herself on a Victorian sofa opposite the bed. She said: ‘How long have you lived here with Mr de Witt?’

  Rupert Farlow turned on her his immense, pain-filled eyes, moving his head slowly as if the weight of this denuded skull had become too great for his neck to bear. He said: ‘Are you asking how long I’ve shared this house as opposed, shall we say, to sharing his life, sharing his bed?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘Four months, two weeks, three days. He took me in from the hospice. I’m not sure why. Perhaps being with the dying turns him on. It does some people. There was no shortage of visitors at the hospice, I assure you. We’re the one charity they can always get volunteers for. Sex and death, a great turn-on. We weren’t lovers, incidentally. He’s in love with that boringly conventional woman, Frances Peverell. James is depressingly heterosexual. You needn’t be frightened to shake his hand or even indulge in more intimate physical contact if you like to try your luck.’

  Daniel said: ‘He arrived here from work at 6.30. Did he go out later?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. He went up to bed at about eleven and he was here when I woke at 3.30 and 4.15 and 5.45. I made a careful note of the hours. Oh, and he did various messy things for me at about seven o’clock in the morning. He certainly wouldn’t have had time between these hours to get back to Innocent House and dispose of Gerard Etienne. But I may as well warn you that I’m not particularly reliable. I would say that anyway. It isn’t exactly in my interest to have James carted off to prison, is it?’

  Daniel said: ‘Nor in your interest to be an accessory to murder.’

  ‘That isn’t the worry. If you take James you may as well take me. I should be more of an inconvenience to the criminal justice system than you would be to me. That’s the advantage of dying. It hasn’t a lot to be said for it but it does put you beyond the power of the police. Still, I must try to be helpful, mustn’t I? There is one piece of corroborative evidence. You rang and spoke to James, didn’t you, Ray, at about 7.30?’

  Ray had taken up a second pack of cards and was expertly shuffling them. ‘Yeah, that’s right, 7.30. Rang to inquire. He was here then.’

  ‘There you are then. Wasn’t it clever of me to remember?’

  Kate said impulsively: ‘Are you – surely you must be – the Rupert Farlow who wrote The Fruit Cage?’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘A friend gave it to me last Christmas. He managed to find a hardback. Apparently they’re rather sought after. He told me that the first edition was sold out and that they didn’t reprint.’

  ‘Α literate cop. I thought you only got them in fiction. Did you like it?’

  ‘Yes, I liked it.’ She paused, then added: ‘I thought it was wonderful.’

  He raised his head and looked at her. His voice changed and he spoke so softly she could hardly hear the words. ‘I was quite pleased with it myself

  Looking into his eyes she saw, appalled, that they were glistening with tears. The frail body in its crimson shroud trembled and she had an impulse, so strong that she had almost physically to fight it, to move forward and take him in her arms. She looked away and said, trying to make her voice sound normal: ‘We won’t tire you any more but we may have to come back and ask you to sign a statement.’

  ‘You’ll find me at home. Or if I’m not, you’ll be unlikely to get a statement. Ray will see you out.’

  The three of them walked down the stairs in silence. At the door Daniel turned and said: ‘Mr de Witt has told us that no one telephoned this house on Thursday evening, so one of you is either lying or mistaken. Is it you?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘OΚ, maybe I was mistaken. That’s no great deal. It could have been another night.’

  ‘Or no night? It’s dangerous to lie in a murder investigation. Dangerous for you and the innocent. If you have any influence over Mr Farlow you should tell him that the best way he can help his friend is by telling the truth.’

  Ray had his hand on the door. He said: ‘Don’t give me that crap. Why should I? That’s what the police always say, that you help yourself and the innocent by telling the truth. Telling the truth to the fuzz is in the fuzz’s interest. Don’t try telling us it’s in ours. And if you want to come back, you’d better ring first. He’s too weak to be badgered.’

  Daniel opened his mouth, restrained himself and said nothing. The door closed firmly behind them. They walked into Hillgate Street without speaking. Then Kate said: ‘I shouldn’t have said that about his novel.’

  ‘Why not? What’s the harm – that is, if you were being honest.’

  ‘It’s because I was being honest that I did the harm. It upset him.’ She paused then said: ‘What do you think that particular alibi is worth?’

  ‘Not much. But if he sticks to it, and my guess is he will, we’re in trouble, no matter what else we manage to grub up about de Witt.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’ll depend on the strength of any further evidence. And if we find the alibi unconvincing so will a jury.’

  ‘If you ever get that chap in front of a jury.’

  Kate said: ‘There’s one thing, though. It might just have been chance but I wonder. Obviously that friend of his, Ray, was lying, but how did Farlow know that the alibi was needed for around 7.30? Or was it just a lucky guess?’

  38

  Dalgliesh’s appointment with Jean-Philippe Etienne, conveyed by Claudia Etienne, had been made for 10.30, a time which necessitated a comfortably early start from London. The time of the appointment had been surprisingly specific for a man whose day was presumably his own. Dalgliesh wondered if it had been chosen to ensure that, even if the interview were more protracted than expected, Etienne would feel under no obligation to invite him to lunch. This, too, suited him. To lunch alone in a strange place where he was unknown and unrecognized, even if the food proved disappointing, a place where he could eat in the assurance that no one in the world knew who he was and that no telephone could reach him, was a rare pleasure, and he intended after the interview to make the most of it. He had a meeting at the Yard at four o’clock and then would go straight to Wapping to hear Kate’s report. There would be no time for a solitary walk or for exploring an interesting-looking church. But after all, a man had to eat.

  It was dark when he set out and the day lightened into a dry but sunless morning. But as he shook off the last eastern suburbs and drove between the muted colours of the Essex countryside, the grey canopy lightened into a white transparent haze with the promise that the sun might eventually break through. Beyond the cropped hedges spiked with the occasional wind-distracted tree, the ploughed fields of autumn, stippled with the first green shoots of winter wheat, stretched to the far horizon. He felt a sense of liberation under the wide East Anglian sky, as if the weight of an old and familiar burden had been temporarily lifted.

  He thought about the man he was to meet. He was coming to Othona House with few expectations but he was not coming totally unprepared. There had been no time for detailed research into the man’s history. He had spent some forty minutes in the London Library and had talked on the telephone to an ex-member of the Resistance living in Paris, whose name had been supplied by a contact at the French Embas
sy. He now knew something of Jean-Philippe Etienne, hero of the Resistance in Vichy France.

  Etienne’s father had owned a flourishing newspaper and printing press in Clermont-Ferrand and had been one of the earliest and most active members of the Organisation de Resistance de l’ Armée. He had died of cancer in 1941 and his only son, recently married, had both inherited the business and taken over his father’s role in the struggle against the Vichy authorities and the German occupiers. Like his father, he was a fervent Gaullist and strongly anti-Communist, distrustful of the Front National because it was founded by Communists, even though many of his own friends, Christians, socialists, intellectuals, were members of the Front. But he was by nature a loner and worked best with his own small, secretly recruited band. Without quarrelling openly with the major organizations, he had concentrated on propaganda rather than on armed struggle, circulating his own underground paper, distributing Allied leaflets dropped by air, providing London with irregular but invaluable information and attempting even to suborn and demoralize German soldiers by infiltrating propaganda into their camps. His family newspaper continued, but now less a paper of record than a literary journal, its careful, non-political stance enabling Etienne to retain more than his share of printer’s ink and paper, all rationed and closely supervised. By careful husbandry and subterfuge he was able to divert resources to his underground press.

  For four years he had lived a double life so successfully that he was never suspected by the Germans nor denounced as a collaborator by his fellow résistants. His deep distrust of the Maquis had been reinforced when in 1943 his wife had been killed in a train blown up by one of the more active groups. He had ended the war as a hero, not as well known as Alphonse Rosier, Serge Fischer or Henri Martin, but his name could be found in the index of books on the Vichy Resistance. He had earned his medals and his peace.

  Less than two hours after leaving London Dalgliesh had turned off the A12 south-east to Maldon, then east through flat unexciting countryside, and had entered the attractive village of Bradwell-on-Sea with its square-towered church and pink, white and ochre clapboard cottages, the doorways hung with baskets of late chrysanthemums. He marked down the King’s Head as a possible place for lunch. A narrow road was signposted to the chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall and soon it came into view, a distant high rectangular building standing against the sky. It looked now as it had when he had first been brought there by his father as a ten-year-old, as simply and crudely proportioned as a child’s doll’s house. There was a rough footpath leading to the chapel separated from the road by a fixed wooden barrier, but the track to Othona House a few hundred yards to the right was open. A signpost, the wood beginning to split and the words almost indecipherable, bore the painted name of the house, and that and the distant sight of the roof and chimneys confirmed that the lane was the only access. Dalgliesh reflected that Etienne could hardly have devised a more effective deterrent to visitors and for a moment he wondered whether to walk the half-mile rather than risk his suspension. Glancing at his watch he saw that it was 10.25. He would arrive precisely on time.

  The track to Othona House was deeply rutted, the potholes still holding water from the previous night’s rain. It was bounded on one side by ploughed fields stretching as far as the eye could see, hedgeless and with no sign of habitation. On the left was a wide ditch bordered by a tangle of blackberry bushes heavy with berries, and beyond them a broken row of gnarled trunks thickly leached with ivy. On both sides of the path the tall dry grasses, already weighted with seed pods, stirred fitfully in the breeze. Under his careful handling the Jaguar lurched and shuddered and he was beginning to regret not parking in the entrance to the lane when the track became less potholed, the crevasses less deep, and he was able to accelerate for the last hundred yards.

  The house, bounded by a high curved wall in brick which looked comparatively modern, was still invisible except for the roof and chimneys, and it was apparent that the entrance faced the sea. He drove round to the right and saw the place clearly for the first time.

  It was a small, agreeably proportioned house in mellowed red brick, the facade almost certainly Queen Anne. The central bay was capped with a Dutch parapet, its curve echoing that of the elegant portico of the front door. On either side stretched identical wings with their eight-paned windows under a stone cornice, decorated with carved scallop shells. These were the only indication that the house had been built on the coast but it still seemed oddly out of place, its dignified symmetry and mellow calm more appropriate to a cathedral close than to this bleak and isolated headland. There was no immediate access to the sea. Between the breaking waves and Othona House stretched a hundred yards or so of salt marsh, crossed by innumerable small streams, a sodden and treacherous carpet of soft blues, greens and greys with patches of acid green in which the pools of sea water gleamed as if the marshland had been set with jewels. He could hear the sea, but on this calm day, with only a light wind rustling the reeds, it came to him as gently as a soft expiring sigh.

  He rang the bell and heard its muffled peal within the house, but it was over a minute before his ears caught the shuffle of approaching footsteps. There was a rasp of a drawn bolt and he heard the key turn before, slowly, the door was opened.

  The woman who stood regarding him with blank incuriosity was old – probably, he thought, nearer eighty than seventy – but there was nothing frail about her full-fleshed solidity. She was wearing a black dress, high-buttoned to the throat and fastened with an onyx brooch surrounded with dull seed pearls. Her legs bulged above black laced boots and her breasts were carried high, shapeless as a bolster over a voluminous white starched apron. Her face was broad, the colour of suet, the cheekbones sharp ridges under the creased, suspicious eyes. Before he could speak, she said: ‘Vous êtes le Commandant Dalgliesh?’

  ‘Oui, Madame, je viens voir Monsieur Etienne, s’il vous plaît.’

  ‘Suivez-moi.’

  Her pronunciation of his name was so bizarre that at first he couldn’t recognize it, but her voice was strong and deep, and with a note of confident authority. She might be a servant at Othona House but she was not servile. She stood aside to let him enter and he waited while she closed and secured the door. The bolt above her head was heavy, the key large and old-fashioned, and she had some difficulty in turning it. The veins on her age-blanched and speckled hands stood out like purple cords and the strong, work-worn fingers were gnarled.

  She led him down a panelled hall to a room at the rear of the house. Pressing her back against the open door as if he were infectious, she announced ‘Le Commandant Dalgliesh’, then closed the door firmly as if anxious to dissociate herself from this unwanted guest.

  The room was surprisingly light after the darkness of the hall. Two tall windows, multi-paned and fitted with shutters, looked out over a treeless garden dissected with stone paths and apparently given over to vegetables and herbs. The only colour was from late geraniums planted in the large terracotta pots which lined the main path. The room was obviously both a library and a sitting-room. Three walls were fitted with bookshelves to a height comfortable to reach, with prints and maps ranged above them. There was a drum table in the middle of the room, its top laden with books. To the left was a stone fireplace with a simple but elegant overmantel. A small fire of wood crackled in the basket-grate.

  Jean-Philippe Etienne was sitting in a high-buttoned green leather chair to the right of the fire, but made no move until Dalgliesh had almost reached it, when he got to his feet and held out his hand. Dalgliesh felt for no more than two seconds the clasp of the cold flesh. Time, he thought, can reduce all individuality to stereotype. It can soften and plump the ageing features into bland childishness, or strip them to the bone and muscle so that mortality already stares out from the shrivelled eyes. It seemed to him that he could see the outline of every bone, the twitch of every muscle in Etienne’s face. His spare figure was still upright, although he walked stiffly, and his dapper elegance held no h
int of decrepitude. The grey hair was sparse, brushed back from a high forehead, the jutting nose was long above a wide, almost lipless mouth, the large ears lay flat against the skull and the veins under the high cheekbones looked as if they were about to bleed. He was wearing a velvet jacket with frogged fastening, reminiscent of a Victorian smoking-jacket, above black tightly fitting trousers. Just so might a nineteenth-century landowner have risen stiffly to greet a guest, but this guest, Dalgliesh at once knew, was as little welcome in this elegant library as he had been on arrival.

  Etienne motioned him to the chair opposite his own and seated himself, then he said: ‘Claudia handed me your letter, but please spare me any renewal of your condolences. They can hardly be sincere. You did not know my son.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘It isn’t necessary to know a man to feel regret that he should die too young and needlessly.’

  ‘You are, of course, right. The death of the young is always embittered by the injustice of mortality, the young go, the old live on. You will take something? Wine? Coffee?’

  ‘Coffee, please, sir.’

  Etienne walked into the passage, closing the door behind him. Dalgliesh could hear him call out, he thought in French. There was an embroidered bell rope to the right of the fireplace, but apparently Etienne did not choose to use it in his relationship with his household. Returning to his chair, he said: ‘It was necessary for you to come, I realize that. But there is nothing I can say to help you. I have no idea why my son died, unless it was, as seems most likely, by accident.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘There are a number of oddities about his death which suggest that it could have been deliberate. I know that this must be painful for you and I’m sorry.’

  ‘What are those oddities?’