by P. D. James
Suddenly all his fear seemed to have left him. The large brown eyes were expressionless again, muddy pools in which only the black iris burned with life. Martin, still clasping Nagle’s arms, could feel the muscles bracing, could sense the physical return of confidence. But before anyone had time to speak, their ears caught simultaneously the sound of footsteps. Someone had come in by the basement door and was moving quietly down the passage.
Dalgliesh moved to the door in one silent stride and braced himself against it. The footsteps, timid, hesitant, stopped outside. Three pairs of eyes watched as the doorknob turned, first right, then left. A voice called softly: “Nagle! Are you there, Nagle! Open the door.”
With a single movement Dalgliesh stepped to one side and crashed open the door. The slight figure moved forward involuntarily under the blaze of the fluorescent lights. The immense grey eyes widened and slewed from face to face, the eyes of an uncomprehending child. Whimpering, she clutched a handbag to her breast in a sudden protective gesture as if she were shielding a baby. Wrenching himself from Martin’s grip Nagle snatched it from her and tossed it to Dalgliesh. It fell plumply into the detective’s hands, the cheap plastic sticking warmly to his fingers. Nagle tried to keep his voice level but it cracked with excitement and triumph.
“Take a look inside, Superintendent. It’s all there. I’ll tell you what you’ll find. A signed confession of Enid Bolam’s murder and one hundred pounds in notes, a first payment on account to keep my mouth shut.”
He turned to his visitor. “Sorry, kid. I didn’t plan it this way. I was willing enough to keep quiet about what I’d seen but things have changed since Friday night. I’ve got troubles of my own to worry about now and no one’s going to pin a murder charge on me. Our little arrangement’s off.”
But Marion Bolam had fainted.
Two months later a magistrate’s court committed Marion Grace Bolam for trial on a charge of her cousin’s murder. A capricious autumn had hardened into winter and Dalgliesh walked back alone to headquarters under a grey blanket of sky which sagged with its weight of snow. The first moist flakes were already falling, melting gently against his face. In his chief’s office the lights were lit and the curtains drawn, shutting out the glittering river, the necklace of light along the Embankment and all the cold inertia of a winter afternoon.
Dalgliesh made his report briefly. The AC listened in silence, then said: “They’ll try for diminished responsibility, I suppose. How did the girl seem?”
“Perfectly calm, like a child who knows she’s been naughty and is on her best behaviour in the hope that the grown-ups will overlook it. She feels no particular guilt, I suspect, except the usual female guilt at being found out.”
“It was a perfectly straightforward case,” said the AC. “The obvious suspect, the obvious motive.”
“Too obvious for me, apparently,” said Dalgliesh bitterly. “If this case doesn’t cure me of conceit, nothing will. If I’d paid more attention to the obvious, I might have questioned why she didn’t get back to Rettinger Street until after eleven when the television service was closing down. She’d been with Nagle, of course, arranging the blackmail payments. They met in St James’s Park, apparently. He saw his chance, all right, when he went into that record room and found her bending over her cousin’s body. He must have been on her before she heard a sound. He took over from there with his usual efficiency. It was he who put the fetish so carefully on the body, of course. Even that detail misled me. Somehow I couldn’t see Marion Bolam making that final, contemptuous gesture. But it was an obvious crime, all right. She hardly made an attempt at concealment. The rubber gloves she wore were stuffed back in her uniform pocket. The weapons she chose were the ones nearest to hand. She wasn’t trying to incriminate anyone else. She wasn’t even trying to be clever. At about six-twelve she telephoned the general office and asked Nagle not to come down yet for the laundry; he couldn’t resist lying about that call, incidentally, which gave me another opportunity for being over-subtle. Then she rang for her cousin. She couldn’t be absolutely sure that Enid would come alone and the excuse had to be valid so she threw the medical records on the floor. Then she waited in the record room for her victim, fetish in hand and chisel in her uniform pocket. It was unfortunate for her that Nagle returned secretly to the clinic when he was out with the post. He’d overheard Miss Bolam’s call to the group secretary and wanted to get his hands on the Fenton record. It seemed safer to chuck it in the basement furnace. Coming upon the murder forced him to change his plan and he didn’t get another chance once the body was discovered and the record room sealed. Nurse Bolam, of course, had no choice of time. She discovered on Wednesday night that Enid intended to alter her will. Friday was the earliest evening when there was a lysergic-acid session and she would have the basement to herself. She couldn’t act earlier; she daren’t act later.”
“The murder was highly convenient for Nagle,” said his chief. “You can’t blame yourself for concentrating on him. But if you insist on indulging in self-pity, don’t let me spoil your fun.”
“Convenient, perhaps, but not necessary,” Dalgliesh replied. “And why should he have killed Bolam? His one aim, apart from making easy money, was to take up the Bollinger and get away to Europe without fuss. He must have known that it would be difficult to pin the Fenton blackmail on him even if the group secretary decided to call in the police. And, in fact, we still haven’t enough evidence to charge him. But murder is different. Anyone connected with murder is likely to have his private plans disorganized. Even the innocent can’t so easily shake off that contaminating dust. To kill Bolam only increased his danger. But to kill Priddy was a different matter. At one stroke he could safeguard his alibi, get rid of an encumbrance and give himself the hope of marrying the heiress of nearly thirty thousand. He knew he’d have little chance with Marion Bolam if she learned that Priddy had been his mistress. She wasn’t Enid Bolam’s cousin for nothing.”
The AC said: “At least we’ve got him as an accessory after the fact and that should put him away for quite a time. I’m not sorry that the Fentons will be spared the ordeal of giving evidence. But I doubt whether the charge of attempted murder will stick—not unless Priddy changes her mind. If she persists in supporting his story, we’ll get nowhere.”
“She won’t change her mind, sir,” said Dalgliesh bitterly. “Nagle doesn’t want to see her, of course, but nothing makes any difference. All she thinks about is planning their life together when he comes out. And God help her when he does.”
The AC shifted his immense bulk irritably in his chair, closed the file and pushed it across the table to Dalgliesh. He said: “There’s nothing that you or anyone else can do about that. She’s the kind of woman who pursues her own destruction. I’ve had that artist, Sugg, on to me, by the way. Extraordinary ideas about judicial procedure these people have! I told him that it’s out of our hands now and referred him to the proper quarter. He wants to pay for Nagle’s defence, if you please! Said that if we’ve made a mistake, the world will lose a remarkable talent.”
“It will be lost, anyway,” replied Dalgliesh. Thinking aloud, he added: “I wonder just how good an artist would have to be before one let him get away with a crime like Nagle’s. Michelangelo? Velazquez? Rembrandt?”
“Oh, well,” said the AC easily. “If we had to ask ourselves that question, we wouldn’t be policemen.”
Back in Dalgliesh’s office Sergeant Martin was putting away papers. He took one look at his super’s face, pronounced a stolid ‘good night, sir’ and left. There were some situations which his uncomplicated nature found it prudent to avoid. The door had hardly closed behind him when the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Shorthouse.
“Hullo!” she yelled. “Is that you? I had the devil of a job getting through to you. Saw you in court today. Don’t suppose you noticed me, though. How are you?”
“Well, thank you, Mrs. Shorthouse.”
“Don’t suppose we’ll be meeting again, so I t
hought I’d give you a ring to say cheerio and tell you the news. Things have been happening at the clinic, I can tell you. Miss Saxon’s leaving, for one thing. She’s going to work in a home for subnormal kids up north. Run by the RCs it is. Fancy going off to work in a convent! No one at the Steen ever did that before.”
Dalgliesh said he could well believe it.
“Miss Priddy’s been transferred to one of the group’s chest clinics. Mr. Lauder thought the change would do her good. She’s had a terrible row with her people and she’s living alone now in a bed-sitter in Kilburn. But you know all about that, no doubt. Mrs. Bolam’s gone to an expensive nursing home near Worthing. All on her share of Cousin Enid’s money, of course. Poor sod. I’m surprised she could bring herself to touch a penny of it.”
Dalgliesh wasn’t surprised but did not say so. Mrs. Shorthouse went on: “And then there’s Dr. Steiner. He’s getting married to his wife.”
“What did you say, Mrs. Shorthouse?”
“Well, re-married. Fixed it up very sudden they did. They got divorced and now they’re getting married again. What d’you think of that?”
Dalgliesh said that it was a question of what Dr. Steiner thought of it.
“Oh, he’s as pleased as a dog with a new collar. And a collar is just about what he’s getting, if you ask me. There’s a rumour that the Regional Board may close the clinic and move everyone to a hospital outpatient department. Well, you can’t wonder! First a stabbing and then a gassing and now a murder trial. Not nice really. Dr. Etherege says it’s upsetting for the patients, but I haven’t noticed it to speak of. The numbers haven’t half gone up since last October. That would have pleased Miss Bolam. Always worrying about the numbers, she was. Mind you, there are those who say we wouldn’t have had that trouble with Nagle and Priddy if you’d picked on the right one first go. It was a near thing all right. But what I say is, you did your best and there’s no harm done to speak of.”
No harm to speak of! So these, thought Dalgliesh bitterly, as he replaced the receiver, were the concomitants of failure. It was enough to taste his sour, corroding self-pity without enduring the AC’s moralizing, Martin’s tact, Amy Shorthouse’s condolences. If he were to break free from this pervasive gloom, he needed a respite from crime and death, needed to walk for one brief evening out of the shadow of blackmail and murder. It came to him that what he wanted was to dine with Deborah Riscoe. At least, he told himself wryly, it would be a change of trouble. He put his hand on the receiver and then paused, checked by the old caution, the old uncertainties. He was not even sure that she would wish to take a call at the office, what exactly her place was at Hearne and Illingworth. Then he remembered how she had looked when last they met and he lifted the receiver. He could surely dine with an attractive woman without this preparatory morbid self-analysis. The invitation would commit him to nothing more crucial than seeing that she had a pleasant evening and paying the bill. And a man was surely entitled to call his own publishers.
P. D. James is the author of twenty-one books, most of which have been filmed for television. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of Great Britain’s Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 and was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008. She lives in London and Oxford.