by P. D. James
‘The fact that he died of carbon-monoxide poisoning in a room he rarely visited. A broken window cord which could have snapped when it was tugged so that the window couldn’t be opened. A missing tape recorder. A removable tap on the gas fire which could have been removed after the fire was lit. The position of the body.’
Etienne said: ‘Nothing you have told me is new. My daughter was here yesterday. The evidence is surely entirely circumstantial. Were there any prints on the gas tap?’
‘Only a smudge. The surface is too small for anything useful.’
Etienne said: ‘Even taken together these suppositions are less – odd was the word you used? – than the suggestion that Gerard was murdered. Oddities are not evidence. I am ignoring the matter of the snake. I know that there is a malicious prankster at Innocent House. His or her activities scarcely warrant the attention of a Commander of New Scotland Yard.’
‘They do, sir, if they complicate, or obscure, or are connected with a murder.’
There were footsteps in the passage. Etienne went at once to the door and opened it for the housekeeper. She came in with a tray bearing a cafetière, a brown jug, sugar and one large cup. She placed the tray on the table and, after a glance at Etienne, immediately left the room. Etienne poured the coffee and brought it over to Dalgliesh. It was apparent that he himself was not to drink, and Dalgliesh wondered if this was a not-very-subtle ploy to put him at a disadvantage. There was no small table by his chair so he placed the coffee cup on the hearth.
Returning to his chair, Etienne said: ‘If my son was murdered I want his murderer brought to justice, inadequate as that justice may be. It is not perhaps necessary that I say this, but it is important that I do say it and that you believe me. If you find me unhelpful it is because I have no help to give.’
‘Your son had no enemies?’
‘I know of none. No doubt he had professional rivals, discontented authors, colleagues who disliked, resented, or were envious of him. That is common for any successful man. I know of no one who would wish to destroy him.’
‘Is there anything in his past, or yours? Some old or imagined wrong or injustice that could have caused long-standing resentment?’
Etienne paused before replying, and Dalgliesh was aware for the first time of the silence of the room. Suddenly the wood fire crackled with a small explosion of flame and a shower of sparks fell on to the hearth. Etienne looked into the fire. He said: ‘Resentment? The enemies of France were once my enemies and I fought them in the only way I could. Those who suffered may have sons, grandsons. It seems to me ludicrous to imagine they are exacting a vicarious revenge. And then there are my own people, the families of Frenchmen who were shot as hostages because of the activity of the Resistance. Some would say they had a legitimate grievance, but surely not against my son. I suggest you concentrate your attention on the present not the past and on those people who normally had access to Innocent House. That would seem the obvious line of inquiry.’
Dalgliesh picked up his coffee cup. The coffee, black as he wanted, was still too hot to drink. He replaced it in the hearth and said: ‘Miss Etienne has told us that your son visited you regularly. Did you discuss the firm?’
‘We discussed nothing. He apparently felt the need to keep me informed of what was happening, but he asked for no advice and I offered none. I have no longer any interest in the firm and I had little for the last five years I worked there. Gerard wanted to sell Innocent House and move to Docklands. There is, I think, no secret about that. He saw it as necessary, and no doubt it was. No doubt it still is. I have a confused memory of our conversations; there was talk of money, acquisitions, staff changes, leases, a possible purchaser for Innocent House. I’m sorry my memory is not more precise.’
‘But your years with the firm were not unhappy?’
The question, Dalgliesh saw, was regarded as an impertinence. He had ventured on forbidden ground. Etienne said: ‘Neither happy nor unhappy. I made a contribution although, as I say, in the last five years it was an increasingly unimportant one. I doubt whether any other job would have suited me better. Henry Peverell and I went on too long. The last time I visited Innocent House was to help scatter Peverell’s ashes in the Thames. I shall not return again.’
Dalgliesh said: ‘Your son planned a number of changes, some, no doubt, unwelcome.’
‘All change is unwelcome. I am glad to have placed myself beyond its reach. Some of us who dislike aspects of the modern world are fortunate. We need no longer live in it.’
Looking across at him while he at last sipped his coffee, Dalgliesh saw that the man was as tense in his chair as if about to spring from it. He realized that Etienne was a true recluse. Human company, except that of the few people with whom he lived, was intolerable to him for more than a brief span and he was nearing the end of his endurance. It was time to go; nothing else would be learned.
Moments later, as Etienne was accompanying him to the front door, a courtesy which Dalgliesh hadn’t expected, he commented on the age and architecture of the house. It was the only thing he had said which stimulated his host to an interested response.
‘The facade is Queen Anne, as I expect you know, but the interior is largely Tudor. The original house on this site was much earlier. Like the chapel, it is built on the walls of the old Roman settlement of Othona, hence the name of the house.’
‘I thought I might visit the chapel, if I could leave my car here.’
‘Of course.’
But the permission was not gracious. It was as if even the presence of the Jaguar on his forecourt was a disturbing intrusion. He was no sooner out of the door when it was firmly closed behind him and he heard the rasp of the lock.
39
Dalgliesh wondered if he would find the chapel door locked but it opened to his hand, and he entered into its silence and simplicity. The air was very cold and smelled of earth and mortar grit, an unecclesiastical smell, domestic and contemporary. The chapel was sparsely furnished. There was a stone altar with a Greek crucifix above it, a few benches, two large jars of dried flowers, one on each side of the altar, and a rack of pamphlets and guides. He folded a note and put it in the box, then took one of the guide books and sat on a bench to study it, wondering why he should feel this sense of emptiness and mild depression. The chapel was, after all, among the earliest church buildings in England, perhaps the oldest, the sole surviving monument of the Anglo-Celtic Church in this part of England, the foundation of St Cedd who had landed here at the old Roman fort at Othona as early as 653. It had stood here confronting the cold and inhospitable North Sea for thirteen centuries. Here, if anywhere, he should surely have heard the dying echoes of plainsong and the vibration of 1,300 years of muttered prayer.
Whether one found the building holy or empty of holiness was a matter of personal perception, and his failure in this moment to experience more than the outflowing of tension he could always feel when totally alone was a failure of imagination, not of the place itself. He wished that, sitting there quietly, he could hear the sea, with a need that was almost a longing – that ceaseless rise and fall which, more than any other natural sound, touched mind and heart with a sense of time’s inexorable passing, of the centuries of unknown and unknowable human lives with their brief miseries and even briefer joys. But he had come here not to meditate but to think about murder and of murder’s more immediate degradations. He put down the guide book and mentally reviewed the recent interview.
It had been an unsatisfactory visit. His journey had been necessary but it had proved even more unproductive than he had feared. Yet he couldn’t shake off the conviction that there was something of importance to be learned at Othona House which Jean-Philippe Etienne hadn’t chosen to tell him. It was possible, of course, that Etienne hadn’t told him because it was something he had forgotten, something he thought insignificant, even something which he didn’t realize that he knew. Dalgliesh thought again about the central fact of the mystery, the missing tape recor
der, the scratches in Gerard Etienne’s mouth. This murderer had needed to talk to his victim before he died, to talk to him even while he was dying. He or she had wanted Etienne dead, but had also wanted Etienne to know why he was dying. Was it no more than a murderer’s overwhelming vanity, or had there been another reason buried in Etienne’s past life? And if so, part of that life was here present in Othona House and he had failed to find it.
He wondered what had brought Etienne at the last to this soggy bulge of an alien country, to this drear, wind-scoured coast where the marsh lay like a sour, disintegrating sponge sopping up the fringes of the cold North Sea. Did he ever long for the mountains of his native province, for the jabber of French voices in street and café, for the sound, the scents and colours of rural France? Had he come to this desolate place to forget the past or to relive it? What had these old unhappy far-off things to do with the death nearly fifty years later of his son, a son by an English mother, born in Canada, murdered in London? What tentacles, if any, had stretched out from those momentous years to wind themselves round Gerard Etienne’s neck?
He glanced at his watch. It was still a minute short of 11.30. He would make time to visit the monuments in St George’s Church in Bradwell, but after that brief visit there would be no possible excuse for not driving back to London to lunch at New Scotland Yard.
He was still sitting, guide book held loosely in his hand, when the door opened and two elderly women entered. They were shod and dressed for walking, and each carried a small knapsack. They looked disconcerted and a little apprehensive to see him and, thinking that they might not welcome the presence of a solitary male, he said a quick ‘Good morning’ and left. Turning briefly at the door, he saw that they were already on their knees and wondered what it was they found in this quiet place and whether, if he had come with more humility, he might have found it also.
40
Gerard Etienne’s flat was on the eighth floor of the Barbican. Claudia Etienne had said that she would be there to meet them at four o’clock and when Kate rang the door was opened promptly and, without speaking, she stood aside to let them in.
The day was beginning to darken but the large rectangular room was still full of light, as a room will hold warmth when the sun has set. The long curtains in what looked like fine cream linen were drawn back to reveal, beyond the balcony, an attractive view of the lake and the elegant spire of a city church. Daniel’s first response was to wish the flat was his, his second that in all his visits to the homes of murder victims he had never seen one so impersonal, so ordered, so uncluttered with the detritus of the dead life. This place looked like a show flat, carefully furnished to attract a purchaser. But it would be a rich purchaser; nothing in this apartment had been inexpensive. And he was wrong to see it as impersonal, it spoke as clearly of its owner as the most overfurnished suburban sitting-room, or any tart’s bedroom. He could have played that television game: ‘Describe the owner of this apartment.’ Male, young, rich, discriminating, organized; unmarried: there was nothing feminine about this room. Obviously musical: the expensive stereo equipment might be expected in any flat of a well-to-do bachelor, but not the grand piano. All the furniture was modern, pale, unpolished wood elegantly fashioned into cupboards, bookcases, a desk. At the end of the room, close to a door obviously leading to the kitchen, was a round dining table with six matching chairs. There was no fireplace. The focus of the room was the window, and a long sofa and two armchairs in soft black leather were grouped to face it round a coffee table.
There was only one photograph. On the top of a low bookcase, in a silver frame, was the studio portrait of a girl, presumably Etienne’s fiancée. Fine fair hair fell from a central parting to frame a long, delicately boned face, large-eyed, the mouth a little too small but with a full, beautifully curved upper lip. Was this too, Daniel wondered, an acquired expensive object? Feeling that it might be offensive to study it too closely, he turned to the only painting, a large oil of Etienne and his sister hanging on the wall facing the window. In winter, with the curtains drawn, this vivid picture would be the focus of the room, colours, form, brushwork almost aggressively proclaiming the artist’s mastery. Perhaps this week or next the sofa and the chairs would have been swung round to face it and for Etienne winter would have officially begun. This identification with the routine of the dead man’s life seemed to Daniel irrational and a little disturbing. There was, after all, no evidence here of Etienne’s presence, none of the small but pathetic leavings of a life unexpectedly ended; the half-finished meal, the open book placed face-downwards, the unemptied ashtray, the little messes and muddles of ordinary life.
He saw that Kate was studying the oil painting. That was natural enough, she was known to like modern art. She turned to Claudia Etienne. ‘This is a Freud, isn’t it? It’s wonderful.’
‘Yes. My father had it painted as a present for Gerard on his twenty-first birthday.’
It was all there, thought Daniel, moving up beside her: the arrogant good looks, the intelligence, the confidence, the assurance that life was his for the taking. Beside the central figure his sister, younger, more vulnerable, looked at the painter with wary eyes as if defying him to do his worst.
Claudia Etienne said: ‘Would you like coffee? It won’t take long. One could never rely on finding food here – Gerard mostly ate out – but there was always wine and coffee. You can come into the kitchen if you like, but there’s nothing to see there. All Gerard’s papers are in that bureau. It opens at the side, a concealed catch. You’re welcome to look, but you won’t get any joy out of prying. Any papers of importance were kept by the bank and all his business papers are at Innocent House. You’ve got those. Gerard always lived as if he expected to die overnight. There is one thing, though. I found this unopened on the mat. It’s dated the 13th of October, so probably arrived on Thursday by the second post. I saw no reason not to read it.’
She handed over a plain white envelope. The paper inside was of the same high quality, the address embossed. The handwriting was large, a girlish scrawl. Daniel read it over Kate’s shoulder.
Dear Gerard,
This is to tell you that I want to end our engagement. I suppose I ought to say that I’m sorry to hurt you, but I don’t think you will be hurt except in your pride. I shall mind more than you, but not very much and not for long. Mummy thinks that we ought to put a notice in The Times since we did announce the engagement, but that doesn’t seem very important at present. Look after yourself. It was fun while it lasted, but not as much fun as it could have been.
Lucinda
Underneath there was a postscript: ‘Let me know if you want me to return the ring.’
Daniel thought that it was as well the letter had been found unopened. If Etienne had received it, it could have been used by a defence counsel to show a motive for suicide. As it was, it was of small importance to their inquiry.
Kate said to Claudia: ‘Had your brother any idea that Lady Lucinda was about to break their engagement?’
‘Not as far as I know. She’s probably regretting that she wrote that letter. She can hardly pose now as the broken-hearted fiancée.’
The desk was modern, plain and outwardly unpretentious, but with an interior cleverly designed with numerous drawers and cubbyholes. It was all in immaculate order: bills paid, a few bills still outstanding, cheque books for the previous two years bound together with a rubber band, a drawer with a portfolio of his investments. It was obvious that Etienne kept only what was necessary, clearing his life as it went along, shedding inessentials, conducting his social life, such as it was, by telephone not by letter. They had been at the task for only a few minutes when Claudia Etienne returned carrying a tray with a cafetière and three mugs. She placed the tray on the low table and they came over to take up their mugs. They were still standing, Claudia Etienne with her mug in her hand, when there was the sound of a key in the lock.
Claudia gave an extraordinary sound – something between a gasp and a moa
n – and Daniel saw that her face had become a mask of terror. The coffee mug dropped from her hands and the brown stain spread over the carpet. She bent down to pick it up, her hands scrabbling over the soft surface and shaking so violently that she couldn’t replace the mug on the tray. It seemed to Daniel that her terror infected him and Kate so that they, too, gazed with horrified eyes at the closed door.
It was slowly opened and the original of the photograph came into the room. She said: ‘I’m Lucinda Norrington. Who are you?’ Her voice was high and clear, a child’s voice.
Instinctively Kate had moved to steady Claudia, and it was Daniel who answered. ‘Police. Detective Inspector Miskin, and I’m Detective Inspector Aaron.’
Claudia had quickly managed to control herself. Clumsily, refusing Kate’s help, she got to her feet. Lucinda’s letter lay beside the tray on the coffee table. It seemed to Daniel that every eye was on it.
Claudia’s voice was harshly guttural. ‘Why did you come here?’
Lady Lucinda moved further into the room. ‘I came for that letter. I didn’t want people to think Gerard had killed himself because of me. After all he didn’t, did he? Kill himself I mean.’
Kate said quietly: ‘How can you be sure of that?’
Lady Lucinda turned on her her immense blue eyes. ‘Because he liked himself too much. People who like themselves don’t commit suicide. Anyway, he wouldn’t kill himself because I chucked him. He didn’t love me, he only loved an idea of me.’
Claudia Etienne had found her normal voice. She said: ‘I told him that the engagement was foolish, that you were a selfish, over-bred and rather silly girl, but I think I may have been unfair. You’re not as silly as I thought. Actually, Gerard never received your letter. I found it here unopened.’
‘Then why did you open it? It isn’t addressed to you.’