by P. D. James
‘Can’t help you there, mate. But I did notice that it was slung round her shoulder and it was large.’
‘And you can swear that you drove this woman from Hammersmith to Innocent Walk on Thursday and left her alive at the end of Innocent Passage at 7.30?’
‘Well, I certainly didn’t leave her dead. Yes, I can swear to that all right. Do you want me to make a statement?’
‘You’ve been very, helpful, Mr Johnson. Yes, we’d like a statement. We’ll take it next door.’
Mr Johnson went out accompanied by the detective constable. Almost immediately the door opened and Sergeant Robbins put his head in. He made no attempt to disguise his excitement.
‘Just checking on the river traffic, sir. We’ve just had a telephone call from the Port of London Authority. It’s in reply to that ring I gave them about an hour ago. Their launch, Royal Nore, was passing Innocent House last night. Their chairman had a private dinner party on board. The meal was at eight and three of his guests were anxious to see Innocent House so they were out on deck. They reckon the time was about twenty to eight. They can swear, sir, that the body wasn’t suspended then and that they saw no one on the forecourt. And there’s another thing, sir. They’re adamant that the launch was to the left not to the right of the steps. I mean to the left looking from the river.’
Daniel said slowly: ‘Bloody hell! So AD’s instinct was right. She was killed in the launch. The killer heard the Port of London Authority boat approaching and kept the body out of sight before he strung her up.’
‘But why that side of the railings? Why move the boat?’
‘In the hope that we wouldn’t realize that that’s where she was killed. The last thing he wants is to have scene-of-crime officers crawling over that launch. And there’s another thing. He met her inside the wrought-iron gates at the bottom of Innocent Passage. He had a key and was waiting for her, standing in the side doorway. It would be safer to keep to that end of the forecourt as far as possible from Innocent House and number 12.’
Robbins had thought of an objection. ‘Wasn’t it risky moving the launch? Miss Peverell and Mr de Witt might have heard it from her flat. If they had, surely they’d have come down to investigate.’
‘They claim they couldn’t even hear a taxi unless it was actually driven over the cobbles of Innocent Lane. It’s something we can check, of course. If they did hear an engine they probably thought it was any passing launch on the river. They had the curtains drawn, remember. Of course there’s always another possibility.’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘That it was they who moved the launch.’
57
It was only just 5.30 on Saturday, normally a busy day, but the shop was locked with the closed notice showing through the glass. Claudia rang the bell at the side and within seconds Declan’s figure appeared and the door was unbolted. As soon as she was through he gave a quick look down both sides of the street, then locked the door again behind her.
She said: ‘Where’s Mr Simon?’
‘In hospital. That’s where I’ve been. He’s very ill. He thinks it’s cancer.’
‘What do they say, the people at the hospital?’
‘They’re going to do some tests. I could see that they think it’s serious. I made him call in Dr Cohen – that’s his GP – this morning and he said, “For God’s sake, why didn’t you see me earlier?” Simon knows he isn’t going to come out of hospital, he told me. Look, come into the back room, won’t you, it’ll be more comfortable there.’
He neither kissed her nor touched her.
She thought, he’s speaking to me as if I were a customer. Something had happened to him, something more than old Simon’s illness. She had never seen him like this before. He seemed to be possessed by a mixture of excitement and terror. His eyes looked almost wild and his skin glistened with sweat. She could smell him, an alien, feral smell. She followed him into the conservatory. All three bars of the wall-mounted electric fire were on and the room was very warm. The familiar objects looked strange, diminished, the petty leavings of dead and unregarded lives.
She didn’t sit but stood watching him. He seemed unable to keep still, pacing the few yards of free space like a caged animal. He was more formally dressed than usual and the unfamiliar tie and jacket were at odds with his almost manic restlessness, the dishevelled hair. She wondered how long he had been drinking. There was a bottle of wine, two-thirds empty, and a single stained glass among the clutter on one of the tables. Suddenly he stopped the restless pacing and turned to her, and she saw in his eyes a look of mingled pleading, shame and fear.
He said: ‘The police have been here. Look, Claudia, I had to tell them about Thursday, the night that Gerard died. I had to tell them that you left me at Tower Pier, that we weren’t together all the time.’
She said: ‘Had to? What do you mean, had to?’
‘They forced it out of me.’
‘What with, thumb-screws and hot pincers? Did Dalgliesh twist your arms and slap your face? Did they take you to Notting Hill nick and punch you up, cleverly leaving no bruises? We know how good they are at that, we watch the TV.’
‘Dalgliesh wasn’t here. It was that Jew-boy and a sergeant. Claudia, you don’t know what it was like. They think that that novelist, Esmé Carling, was murdered.’
‘They can’t know that.’
‘I’m telling you, that’s what they think. And they know I had a motive for Gerard’s murder.’
‘If it was murder.’
‘They knew that I needed cash, that you’d promised to get it for me. We could’ve moored the launch at Innocent House and done it together.’
‘Only we didn’t.’
‘They don’t believe that.’
‘Did they say that directly, any of it?’
‘No, but they didn’t need to I could see what they were thinking.’
She said patiently: ‘Look, if they seriously suspected you they would have had to question you under caution at a police station and tape record the interview. Is that what they did?’
‘Of course not.’
‘They didn’t invite you to go with them to the station, tell you that you could call a lawyer?’
‘Nothing like that. They did say at the end that I must call in at Wapping and make a statement.’
‘So what did they really do?’
‘Kept on about was I really sure that we’d been together all the time, that you’d driven me back here from Innocent House. How much better it was to tell the truth. The inspector used the words “accessory to murder”, I’m sure he did.’
‘Are you? I’m not.’
‘Anyway, I told them.’
She said quietly and through lips that no longer seemed her own: ‘You realize what you’ve done? If Esmé Carling was murdered then probably Gerard was too, and if he was, the same person was responsible for both deaths. It would be too much of a coincidence to have two murderers in one firm. All you’ve done is to get yourself suspected of two deaths, not one.’
He was almost crying. ‘But we were together here when Esmé died. You came here straight from work. I let you in. We were together the whole evening. We were making love. I told them that.’
‘But Mr Simon wasn’t here when I arrived, was he? No one saw me but you. So what proof have we?’
‘But we were together! We’ve got an alibi – we both have an alibi!’
‘But are the police going to believe it now? You’ve admitted that you lied about the night of Gerard’s death; why shouldn’t you be lying again about the night when Esmé died? You were so anxious to save your own skin that you hadn’t the sense to see that you were dropping yourself deeper in the shit.’
He turned from her and poured more wine into the glass. He held out the bottle and said: ‘Do you want some? I’ll get a glass.’
‘No, thank you.’
Again he turned away from her. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we ought to see each other again. Not f
or quite a time anyway. I mean, we oughtn’t to be seen together until all this is cleared up.’
She said: ‘Something else has happened, hasn’t it? It’s not only the alibi.’
It was almost laughable how his face changed. The look of shame and fear gave way to a flush of excitement, a sly satisfaction. How like a child he is, she thought, and wondered what new toy had come within his grasp. But she knew that the contempt she felt was more for herself than for him.
He said, willing her to understand: ‘There is something else. It’s rather good really. It’s Simon. He’s sent for his solicitor. He’s going to make a will leaving me the whole of the business and the property. Well, there’s no one else to leave it to, is there? He’s got no relations. He knows he’ll never get to the sun now, so I might as well have it. He’d rather me than the government.’
‘I see,’ she said. And she did see. She was no longer necessary. The money she had inherited from Gerard was no longer required. She said, keeping her voice calm, ‘If the police seriously suspect you, and I very much doubt whether they do, not seeing each other isn’t going to make any difference. If anything it will look more suspicious. That’s exactly how two guilty people would behave. But you’re right. We won’t see each other again, not ever if I can help it. You don’t need me and I certainly don’t need you. You have a certain farouche charm and a mild entertainment value, but you’re hardly the world’s greatest lover, are you?’
She was surprised that she could walk to the door without faltering, but she had a little difficulty with the bolts. She found that he was close behind her. He said, his voice almost pleading: ‘But you can see how it looked. You asked me to go on the river with you. You said it was important.’
‘It was important. I was going to speak to Gerard after the partners’ meeting, remember? I thought I might have something good to tell you.’
‘And then you asked me for an alibi. You asked me to say that we were together until two o’clock. You rang from the archives room as soon as you were alone with the body. You just had time. And it was the first thing you thought about. You told me what to say. You forced me to lie.’
‘And you’ve told the police that, of course.’
‘You could see how it looked to them, how it will look to anyone. You took the launch back on your own. You were alone at Innocent House with Gerard. You’ve inherited his flat, his shares, his life assurance money.’
She felt the strength of the door against her back. She turned to face him and she saw the dawning of fear in his eyes as she spoke.
‘So aren’t you afraid to be with me? Aren’t you terrified to be here alone with me? I’ve already killed two people, why should I worry about a third? Perhaps I’m a homicidal maniac, you can’t be sure, can you? God, Declan! Do you really believe I killed Gerard, a man worth ten of you, just to buy you this place and that pathetic collection of junk which you acquire to try and convince yourself that your life has a meaning, that you’re a man?’
She couldn’t remember opening the door, but she heard it close firmly behind her. The night seemed to her very cold and she found that she was shivering violently. So it has ended, she thought, ended in bitterness, acrimony, cheap sexual insult, humiliation. But then, doesn’t it always? She pushed her hands deep into her coat pockets and hunching her shoulders into her collar walked briskly to where she had parked the car.
BOOK FIVE
Final Proof
58
It was early Monday evening and Daniel was working alone in the archives room. He wasn’t sure what had brought him back to these close-packed, musty-smelling shelves unless it was to perform a self-imposed penance. It seemed that he couldn’t even for a moment put out of his mind his blunder over Esmé Carling’s alibi. It wasn’t only Daisy Reed who had deceived him; Esmé Carling had too, and her, he could have pressed more strongly. Dalgliesh hadn’t referred again to the mistake, but it wasn’t one he was likely to forget. Daniel didn’t know which was worse, AD’s forbearance or Kate’s tact.
He worked on, taking each pile of about ten files into the little archives room. It was warm enough; he had been provided with a small electric fire. But the room wasn’t comfortable. Without the fire, the cold struck with an immediate chill which was almost unnatural; with it the room soon became unpleasantly warm. He wasn’t superstitious. He had no sense that the ghosts of the unquiet dead were the watchers of his solitary, methodical search. The room was bleak, soulless, commonplace, evoking only a vague unease born paradoxically not of horror’s contagion but of its absence.
He had taken out the next tranche of files on a top shelf when he saw behind them a small parcel of brown paper done up with old string. Taking it to the table, he struggled with the knots and finally got it undone. It was an old leather-covered Prayer Book measuring about six inches by four with the initials F.P. engraved in gold on the cover. The Prayer Book had obviously been well used; the initials were almost indecipherable. He opened it at the first brown stiff page and saw in crude writing the superscription: ‘Printed by John Baskett, Printers to the Kings most Excellent Majesty and the Assigns of Thomas Newcomb, and Henry Hills, Deceas’d. 1716. Cum Privilegio.’ There were thin red lines down each margin and the middle of the page. He knew little of the Anglican Prayer Book but he turned the stiff brown pages with some interest, noting that there was a special ‘Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to be used yearly upon the Fifth of November, for the happy Deliverance of King James I and Parliament from the most Traitorous and Bloody intended Massacre by Gunpowder’. He doubted whether this was still part of the Anglican liturgy.
It was then that the sheet of paper fell out of the back of the book. It was folded once, whiter than the pages of the Prayer Book but as thick. There was no superscription. The message was written in black ink, the hand uncertain, but the words were as plain as the day they were penned:
I, Francis Peverell, write this with my own hand on the Fourth of September 1850 at Innocent House, in my last agony. The disease that has laid its hold on me for the past eighteen months will soon have finished its work, and by the grace of God I shall be free. My hand has written those words, ‘by the grace of God’, and I shall not delete them. I have neither strength nor time for re-writing. But the most that I can expect from God is the grace of extinction. I have no hope of Heaven and no fear of the pains of Hell, having suffered my Hell here on earth for the last fifteen years. I have refused all palliatives for my present agony. I have not touched the laudanum of oblivion. Her death was more merciful than mine. This, my confession, can bring no relief to mind or body since I have not sought absolution nor confessed my sin to a living soul. Nor have I made restitution. What restitution can a man make for the murder of his wife?
I write these words because justice to her memory demands that the truth be told. Yet I still cannot bring myself to make public confession, nor to lift from her memory the stain of suicide. I killed her because I needed her money to finish the work on Innocent House. I had spent what she brought as a marriage-portion but there were funds tied up and denied to me that would come to me on her death. She loved me but she would not pass them over. She saw my love of the house as an obsession and a sin. She thought that I cared more for Innocent House than for her or for our children, and she was right.
The deed could not have been more easy. She was a reserved woman whose shyness and disinclination for company meant that she had no intimate acquaintances. All her family were dead. She was known by the servants to be unhappy and, in preparation for her death, I confided to certain of my colleagues and friends that I was worried about her health and spirits. On the twenty-fourth of September on a calm autumnal night I called her up to the third floor telling her I had something to show her. We were alone in the house, except for the servants. She came out to me where I stood on the balcony. She was a slight woman and it was only a second’s work to lift her bodily and cast her to her death. Then, without hurrying, I went swiftly downstairs to the
library and was there, sitting quietly reading, when they brought me the terrible news. I was never suspected. Why should I be? They would not suspect a respected man of murdering his wife.
I have lived for Innocent House and killed for it but, since her death, the house has given me no joy. I leave this confession to be handed in each generation to the eldest son. I implore all who read it to keep my secret. It will come first to my son, Francis Henry, and then in time to his son, and to all my descendants. I have nothing to hope for in this world or the next, and no message to give. I write because it is necessary before I die that I tell the truth.
At the bottom he had signed his name and the date.
After reading the confession, Daniel sat still for a full two minutes, considering. He wondered why these words, speaking to him over a century and a half, should have affected him so powerfully. He felt that he had no right to read them, that the proper course was to replace the paper in the Prayer Book, re-wrap the book and place it back on the shelf. But he supposed that he ought at least to let Dalgliesh know what he had found. Was this confession the reason why Henry Peverell had been so unwilling to have the archives examined? He must have known of its existence. Was he shown it when he came of age, or had it been mislaid before then and become part of family folklore, whispered about but never actually acknowledged? Had Frances Peverell been shown it when she came of age, or had the words ‘eldest son’ always been taken literally? But it surely had no relevance to Gerard Etienne’s murder. This was a Peverell tragedy, a Peverell shame, as old as the paper on which it was confessed. He could understand that the family would want it kept secret. It would be disagreeable whenever the house was admired to have to confess that it had been built with money obtained by murder. After a little thought he replaced the paper, carefully re-parcelled the Prayer Book and left it on one side.