Original Sin

by P. D. James

  They moved into Mrs Carling’s bedroom but did not linger. It was large, overfurnished, untidy and not very clean. The 1930s dressing table with its triple mirror held a plastic tray patterned with violets containing a jumble of half-empty bottles of hand and body lotions, greasy jars, lipsticks and eye make-up. Without thinking, Kate unscrewed the largest jar of foundation cream and saw its single indentation where Mrs Carling had drawn her finger across the surface. The mark, so ephemeral yet, for a moment, seeming permanent and ineradicable, brought the dead woman’s image so vividly to mind that she froze, the jar in her hand, as if she had been caught out in an act of private violation. The eyes in the mirror stared back at her, guilty and a little ashamed. She made herself go over to the wardrobe and open its door. There came out with the rustle of the hanging clothes a smell that brought back other searches, other victims, other rooms, the sweet-sour musty smell of age and failure and death. She closed its door quickly but not before she had seen the three whisky bottles hidden among the row of shoes. She thought: there are moments when I hate my job. But these moments were few and they never lasted long.

  The guest bedroom was a narrow, ill-proportioned cell, the one high window giving a view of a brick wall grimed with decades of London dirt and angled with heavy drainpipes. But some attempt, even if misguided, had been made to make the room inviting. The walls and ceiling were covered with a paper of twining honeysuckle, roses and ivy. The curtains, elaborately pleated, were of a matching material and the single divan, placed under the window, had a pale pink coverlet, obviously chosen to match the pink of the roses. The attempt to prettify, to impose on bleak nothingness a feminine intensity, served only to emphasize the room’s defects. The décor had obviously been designed for a female guest, but Dalgliesh couldn’t imagine a woman sleeping peacefully in this claustrophobic over-patterned cell. Certainly no man could, with the ceiling’s synthetic sweetness pressing down on him, the bed too narrow for comfort, the bedside table a fragile reproduction, too small to hold more than the bedside lamp.

  The time looking round the flat had not been wasted. Kate remembered one of the first lessons she had been taught as a young detective constable: know the victim. Every victim dies because of who he is, what he is, where he is at one moment of time. The more you know about the victim the closer you are to his murderer. But now as they sat down at Esmé Carling’s desk they were in search of more specific evidence.

  They were rewarded as soon as they opened it. The desk was tidier and less cluttered than they had expected and lying on the top of a pile of recent unpaid bills were two sheets of paper. The first was obviously a draft of the note found on the railings at Innocent House. There were few alterations; Mrs Carling’s final version was little different from her first outpouring of pain and anger. But the writing was a scrawl compared with the firm and careful calligraphy of the final note. Here was confirmation, if it had been needed, that they were her words and written in her hand. Underneath was a draft of a letter in the same hand. It was dated Thursday, 14 October.

  Dear Gerard,

  I have just heard the news from my agent. Yes, from my agent! You haven’t even the decency or the courage to tell me direct. You could have asked me to come to talk to you at the office, or it wouldn’t have hurt you to take me out to lunch or dinner to break the news. Or are you as mean as you are disloyal and cowardly? Perhaps you were afraid that I would disgrace you by howling in the soup. I’m a great deal tougher than that, as you will discover. Your rejection of Death on Paradise Island would still have been unfair, unjustified and ungrateful, but at least I could have said these things to your face. And now I can’t even reach you by telephone. I’m not surprised. That bloody woman, Miss Blackett, is good at blocking calls if nothing else. At least it shows that even you are capable of some shame.

  Have you any idea what I have done for Peverell Press, long before you had any power? And what a disastrous day for the firm that has proved. I have produced a book a year for thirty years, all reliable sellers, and if sales of the last were disappointing, whose fault is that? What have you ever done to promote me with the vigour and enthusiasm my reputation demands? I’m off to do a signing at Cambridge this afternoon. Who persuaded the bookshop to put that on? I did. I shall go alone as usual. Most publishers see that their top authors are properly accompanied and looked after. But the fans will be there, and they’ll buy. I have devoted readers who look to me to provide what no other detective writer apparently does, a fair mystery with good writing and an absence of that sex, violence and filthy language which you apparently think people today want. Well they don’t. If you have so little idea of what readers really want you’ll drive Peverell Press to bankruptcy even quicker than the publishing world predicts.

  I shall, of course, have to consider how best to safeguard my interests. If I move to another publisher I shall expect to take my back-list with me. Don’t think you can throw me overboard and still exploit that valuable asset. And there’s something else. These mysterious mishaps which are taking place at Peverell Press only began when you took over as managing director. If I were you, I’d take care. There have already been two deaths at Innocent House.

  Kate said: ‘I wonder if this, too, was just a preliminary draft or whether she actually sent in the final version. She usually typed her letters but there’s no carbon here. If she did post it, perhaps she thought it would be more forceful hand-written. This could be the copy.’

  ‘The letter wasn’t among the correspondence in his office. My guess is that it wasn’t sent. Instead she called at Innocent House demanding to see him. When that failed she went to do her Cambridge signing, discovered that it had been cancelled by someone at Peverell Press, returned to London in a state of high indignation and decided to call on Etienne that evening. Most people seem to have known that he worked late on Thursdays. It’s possible that she telephoned and told him that she was coming. He could hardly, after all, prevent her. And if she did telephone using his private number the call wouldn’t have gone through Miss Blackett.’

  Kate said: ‘It’s odd, if she took the first paper with her, that she didn’t take this letter and leave it with him. I suppose it’s possible she did and that either Etienne tore it up or the murderer found it and destroyed it.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Unlikely, I think. What seems more likely is that she took with her the fulmination addressed to the partnership perhaps with the object of pinning it to the notice board in the reception room. That way the partners would see it and so would all members of the staff and visitors.’

  ‘They’d hardly have left it up, sir.’

  ‘Of course not. But she probably hoped that quite a number of people would see it before it was drawn to the partners’ attention. At least it would cause a stir. The fulmination was probably intended as the first blow in her campaign of revenge. She must have had some very bad hours when she first heard of Gerard’s death. If she did in fact leave the notice, and possibly also the manuscript of her novel, in the reception room, their presence would prove that she had called at Innocent House that night and after most of the staff had left. She must have been waiting for us to appear, knowing that the presence of the note made her one of the chief suspects. So she arranges her alibi with Daisy. And then when the police do arrive, nothing is said about the note. So either we’ve missed its significance which is unlikely or someone has removed it. And then the person who did take it down from the noticeboard telephones to reassure her. He or she is able to reassure her because Carling is confident that she is talking to an ally not to a murderer.’

  ‘It hangs together, sir. It’s logical and it’s credible.’

  ‘It’s conjecture, every part of it, Kate. It can’t be proved. None of it would stand up in court. It’s an ingenious theory which fits all the facts as we know them so far but it’s circumstantial. There’s just one small piece of corroborative evidence. If she pinned the false suicide note to the noticeboard before she left Innocent House t
here would have been the marks of one or more drawing pins in the paper. Was that the reason why it was so neatly trimmed down before it was spiked on the railings?’

  There was little else of interest in the desk. Mrs Carling received few letters or, if she did, she destroyed them. Those she kept included a bundle of airmail forms tied with a ribbon and kept together in one of the cubbyholes. They were from a woman friend in Australia, a Mrs Marjorie Rampton, but the correspondence had gradually grown more perfunctory and seemed to have petered out. Apart from this there were bundles of letters from fans, all with a carbon of the reply attached to the original letter. Mrs Carling had obviously taken considerable trouble to satisfy her admirers. In the top drawer of the desk there was a file labelled investments with letters from her stockbroker. She had capital of just over £32,000 carefully invested between gilts and equities. In another file was a copy of her will. It was a short document in which she left a legacy of £5,000 to the Authors’ Foundation and to a crime writers’ club and the bulk of her estate to the friend in Australia. Another file contained papers relating to her divorce fifteen years earlier. Glancing quickly through them, Dalgliesh saw that it had been acrimonious but, from her point of view, not particularly advantageous. The payments had been small and had stopped with Raymond Carling’s death five years later. And that was all. The contents of the desk confirmed what Dalgliesh had suspected. Here was a woman who lived for her work. Take that away and what had she left?

  52

  Velma Pitt-Cowley, Mrs Carling’s literary agent, had agreed to be at the flat at 11.30 and arrived six minutes late. She was hardly inside the door before it became apparent that she was in none too good a temper. She burst into the room when Kate opened the door with a speed that suggested that it was she who had been kept waiting, flung herself into the nearer of the two armchairs, then leaned forward to slip the gold chain of her bag from her shoulder and to deposit a bulging briefcase on the carpet beside her. Only then did she deign to bestow any attention on Kate or Dalgliesh. When she did, and her eyes met Dalgliesh’s, her mood subtly changed and her first words showed that she was prepared to be gracious.

  ‘Sorry to be late and in such a rush, but you know how it is. I had to go into the office first and I’ve got a luncheon guest at the Ivy at 12.45. It’s pretty important as a matter of fact. The author I’m meeting flew in especially from New York this morning. And things cropped up as they always do if you show your face in the office. You can’t trust people with the simplest jobs nowadays. I left as soon as I could but the taxi got snarled up in Theobalds Road. My God, this is terrible about poor Esmé. It’s really terrible! What happened? She drowned herself, didn’t she? Drowned or hanged herself or both. I mean, that’s really sick.’

  Having expressed appropriate outrage, Mrs Pitt-Cowley settled herself more elegantly in the chair and drew up the skirt of her formal black suit almost to her crotch to reveal a pair of very long and shapely legs enclosed in nylons so fine that they were no more than a dull sheen on the sharp bones. She had obviously dressed with care for her 12.45 luncheon appointment, and Dalgliesh wondered what privileged client, present or prospective, warranted a smartness which carefully combined professional competence with sexual allure. Beneath the well-fitting jacket with its row of brass buttons she wore a high-necked silk shirt. A hat of black velvet, speared at the front with a golden arrow, was crushed over light brown hair cut in a fringe, just touching the thick, level eyebrows and falling in well-brushed swathes almost to her shoulders. As she spoke she gesticulated; the long fingers, heavily ringed, restlessly patterned the air as if she were communicating to the deaf, and from time to time her shoulders hunched in sudden spasms. The gestures seemed oddly unrelated to her words and it seemed to Dalgliesh that the affectation was less a symptom of nervousness or insecurity than a trick originally designed to draw attention to her remarkable hands but which had now become an unbreakable habit. Her initial testiness had surprised him; in his experience people involved in a spectacular murder, provided they neither grieved for the victim nor felt themselves at risk from the police inquiry, usually relished the vicarious excitement of their brush with violent death and the notoriety of being in the know. He was used to encountering eyes slightly ashamed but avid with curiosity. Bad temper and a preoccupation with one’s own concerns at least made a change.

  She gazed round the room at the open desk, at the pile of papers on the table, and said: ‘God, it’s too awful sitting here in her flat, you having to rummage through her things. I know you have to do it, it’s your job, but it’s sort of uncanny. She seems more present now than when she was actually here. I keep thinking I’ll hear her key in the lock and she’ll come in, find us like this, uninvited, and raise hell.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Violent death destroys privacy, I’m afraid. Did she commonly raise hell?’

  As if she hadn’t heard him, Mrs Pitt-Cowley said: ‘Do you know what I’d really like now? What I really need is a good strong black coffee. There’s no chance of any, I suppose?’

  It was Kate she looked at, and Kate who replied. ‘There’s a jar of coffee grains in the kitchen and a carton of milk in the fridge unopened. Strictly speaking I suppose we should get the bank’s permission, but I doubt whether anyone would object.’

  When Kate made no immediate move towards the kitchen, Velma gave her a long speculative stare as if assessing the possible nuisance-value of a new typist. Then, with a shrug and a flurry of fingers, she decided on prudence.

  ‘Better not I suppose, although she won’t be needing it herself now, will she? But I can’t say I fancy drinking it out of one of her cups.’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘Obviously it’s important for us to learn as much about Mrs Carling as we can. That’s why we’re grateful to you for meeting us here this morning. Her death must have been a shock and I realize that it can’t be easy for you coming here. But it is important.’

  Mrs Pitt-Cowley’s voice and look expressed a passionate intensity. ‘Oh, I do see that. I mean, I understand absolutely that you have to ask questions. Obviously I’ll help all I can. What did you want to know?’

  He asked: ‘When did you hear the news?’

  ‘This morning, shortly after seven, before your people rang to ask me to meet you here. Claudia Etienne telephoned. Woke me up, actually. Not exactly pleasant news to start the day. She could have waited, but I suppose she didn’t want me to read it in the evening paper or hear it when I got to the office. You know how fast gossip travels in this town. After all I am – I mean I was – Esmé’s agent and I suppose she thought that I ought to be one of the first to know and that she ought to be the one to tell me. But suicide! It’s bizarre. It’s the last thing I’d have expected Esmé to do. Well, of course it was the last thing she did. Oh God, I’m sorry. Nothing one says seems adequate at a time like this.’

  ‘So you were surprised at the news?’

  ‘Isn’t one always? I mean, even when people who threaten suicide actually do it, it always seems surprising, a bit unreal. But Esmé! And to kill herself like that. I mean it wasn’t the most comfortable way to go. Claudia didn’t seem very sure how exactly she died. She just said that Esmé had hanged herself from the railings at Innocent House and that the body was found under water. Did she drown or strangle herself or what exactly?’

  Dalgliesh said: ‘It is possible Mrs Carling died by drowning but we shan’t know the cause of death until after the autopsy.’

  ‘But it was suicide? I mean, you’re sure about that?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet of anything. Can you think of any reason why Mrs Carling should have wanted to end her life?’

  ‘She was upset about Peverell Press rejecting Death on Paradise Island. You’ve heard about that, I suppose. But she was more angry than distressed. Furiously angry in fact. I can imagine her seeking some kind of vengeance on the firm, but not by killing herself. Besides that takes guts. I don’t mean that Esmé was a coward, but I can’t somehow see her throttling
herself or throwing herself in the river. What a way to die! If she really wanted to do away with herself there are easier ways. Take Sonia Clements. You know about that, of course. Sonia killed herself with drugs and booze. That would be my way. I’d have thought it would be Esmé’s.’

  Kate said: ‘But less effective as a public protest.’

  ‘Not so dramatic, I agree. But what’s the good of a dramatic public protest if you aren’t there to enjoy it? No, if Esmé decided to kill herself it would be in bed, clean sheets, flowers in the room, her best nightdress, a dignified farewell note on the bedside cabinet. She was a great one for appearances.’

  Kate, remembering the rooms of suicides she had been called to, the vomit, the soiled bedclothes, the grotesque body stiffened in death, reflected that suicide was seldom as dignified in practice as in imagination. She said: ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘On the evening of the day after Gerard Etienne’s death. That would be October 15th, the Friday.’

  Dalgliesh asked: ‘Here or in your office?’

  ‘Here in this room. It was fortuitous really. I mean, I hadn’t planned to call. I was dining with Dicky Mulchester of Herne & Illingworth to discuss a client and it occurred to me that his firm might be interested in Death on Paradise Island. It was a long shot but they are taking on a few crime writers. I was driving past here to the restaurant when I noticed that there were some parking spaces free down the side road and I thought I’d call in and borrow Esmé’s copy of the manuscript. The traffic was lighter than I expected and I had ten minutes in hand. We hadn’t spoken since Gerard’s death. It’s odd, isn’t it, how small things decide one’s actions? I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t seen the empty space. I was interested, too, in hearing Esmé’s reaction to Gerard’s death. I couldn’t get much out of Claudia. I thought Esmé might have picked up some of the details. She was a great one for gossip. Not that I had much time to spare then. The main reason for calling was to collect the manuscript.’