Innocent Blood

by P. D. James

  And he knew now where he must look. When he had drunk his tea, he opened his map of London and the chart of the Underground and placed them side by side on the table. They had travelled westward on the Circle line. He counted up the stations. St. James’s Park was about halfway, so that for any station beyond that it would have been more sensible to travel in the opposite direction. Victoria was out. They would have taken the Victoria line direct. Similarly, he could eliminate South Kensington and Gloucester Road since both were on the Piccadilly line and could be reached direct from King’s Cross. That meant that they had almost certainly got out at one of the eight stations between King’s Cross and High Street Kensington. It was possible, of course, that they had alighted at Baker Street or Paddington and changed lines or taken a British Rail train out of London. But the thought didn’t worry him. He didn’t believe for one moment they were in the country. It was in the vast anonymity of the capital that the hunted felt most secure. London, which asked no questions, kept its secrets, provided in its hundred urban villages the varied needs of ten million people. And the girl was no provincial. Only a Londoner would have strode with such confidence through the complexities of King’s Cross Underground Station. And she had bought the tickets in advance. That meant, surely, that she had travelled up to York early that morning. No, they were in London all right.

  On his larger map he traced the route of the Circle line. Bloomsbury, Marylebone, Bayswater, Kensington. The districts were unfamiliar to him, but he would get to know them. And the day hadn’t been unsuccessful after all. He knew now that she had a daughter, and he knew the name of the daughter. She had changed it to Palfrey from Ducton by deed poll, adoption or marriage. But she hadn’t, he remembered, been wearing a wedding ring. He had been thwarted by one small piece of ill-luck, the fact that she had troubled to buy the Underground tickets in advance. Unless they were in a hurry, and they hadn’t walked as if they were in a hurry, that could only mean that she wanted to spare her mother the possible trauma of being crushed among crowds while she waited at the ticket office. If so, it suggested a concern that he hadn’t expected. And if the girl were concerned for the murderess, then they might stay together, at least for a time. That surely increased his chances of finding them. If all else failed, the daughter might yet lead him to the mother. He wrote the names of the eight stations in his diary in his careful copperplate, then stared at them as if they were a conundrum and he could will the letters to move and shuffle and, at last, click into place and spell out the address he sought.

  Tomorrow he would move into the next phase of the enterprise. He would make a direct effort to trace the murderess through her daughter. Even if they weren’t still together, to know where the daughter lived would be a definite gain. He went into the hall and dragged out the L-R London telephone directory. There was no Palfrey, P. R., listed, but that wasn’t particularly significant. If she had been adopted the number would be shown under her father’s initials. The first step would be to telephone all the seven Palfreys listed in the London directory. It was an obvious ploy, more sensible than perpetually riding the Circle line or walking the squares of Bloomsbury or Kensington; but he would have to think of a plausible excuse, a reason for ringing those seven strangers which wouldn’t sound suspicious. Suppose the girl herself came to the telephone, what was he to say? It was vital that the murderess shouldn’t suspect that she was hunted. If he frightened her into flight, into changing her name, he might spend a lifetime in tracing her only to fail at last. He was twenty years older than she was. Death had robbed Mavis of revenge, it might even rob him.

  And then, as he sat in the quietness of the kitchen, his hands cradling the cup of tea, the idea came to him. It fell into his mind like a minor act of creativity, as if it had always existed in its simplicity, its rightness, awaiting the moment until it could slip into his mind. The more he examined it, the more faultless it seemed. He was surprised that he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He went to bed impatient for the morning.

  3

  Her mother walked into the room and stood still. She seemed afraid to speak, only her eyes moved. The room seemed to have shrunk since Philippa left it. The newly stained wooden boards, the faded rugs, the unmatched chairs, did they look too makeshift, too cheap a compromise? Had she glorified them in her own eyes?

  “You like it?” She was irritated to hear the note of anxiety in her voice. She had done her best with the place. Presumably it was better than a shared room in a hostel. And it was only for two months.

  “Very much.” Her mother smiled, a different smile from the one with which she had greeted Philippa that morning. This time it reached her eyes.

  “It’s lovely. I didn’t expect that it would be as attractive as this. You were clever to find it. And you must have worked hard.”

  Her voice shook, and Philippa saw that her eyes were too bright. And she looked very tired. The journey, the pressure of people must have been a strain. Terrified that the unshed tears would fall, she said quickly: “I enjoyed myself. It was fun rummaging around the market. The greengrocer, George, helped me up with some of my finds. The picture is the only thing I’ve got from Caldecote Terrace, a Henry Walton. He was an eighteenth-century painter. Some of his work is too sentimental for my taste—almost Victorian—but I like that picture. I thought that it would look good in that light and against the wallpaper. But you don’t have to keep it there.”

  “I should like it to stay, unless you want it in your room. Where are you?”

  “Here, next to the kitchen. I’ve got the quietest room and the better view. You’ve got the sun but more noise. We can change if you’d rather.”

  They went into the back room. Her mother walked to the window and stared out over the patch of yard and the narrow strips of cluttered gardens. After a few minutes she turned and looked round the room.

  “It doesn’t seem fair for me to have the larger room. We could spin a coin.”

  “But I’ve had the larger room for the last ten years. It’s your turn now.”

  She wanted to ask: “Do you think you can be happy here?” But the question seemed a presumption with its implication that she—Philippa—had happiness within her gift. It was new to her, this carefulness with words, this sensitivity to their power to wound. It should have caused a constraint between them, but it didn’t. She said: “Come and see the kitchen. I’ve put the television there. We can carry our easy chairs in there if we want to watch.”

  Hilda had said, resentfully: “You’ll have to hire a colour telly. She’ll have got used to that in prison. Lifers get these extra privileges. She won’t be satisfied with black and white.”

  They went back together into the front room. Philippa said: “I thought we might take about ten days’ holiday before we start thinking of a job. We could look at London, or have some days in the country if you prefer.”

  “I’d like both. Only there’s one thing, I don’t think I’ll be much good going about on my own for a week or so. At least not in crowds.”

  “You don’t have to be on your own.”

  “And could we buy some clothes first? I’ve only got what I’m wearing and one pair of pyjamas. I thought I could spend about fifty pounds of my two hundred. Then I could get rid of these things in the case. I don’t want anything here which I had in prison.”

  “That’ll be fun. I like buying clothes. The sales are still on in Knightsbridge and we might get something good quite cheaply. We can get rid of what you’ve got in Mell Street market.”

  They could get rid of the case there too, although Philippa doubted whether any of the stallkeepers would give more than a few pence for it. Better still, they could chuck it in the canal. It was a cheap fibre case, already scruffy at the corners. Her mother placed it on the floor, then, kneeling, opened it. She took out a pair of white cotton pyjamas and placed them on the bed. The only other objects in the case were a drawstring toilet bag and a manila envelope. She handed it to Philippa, looking up into her face.


  “This is the account I wrote in prison of what happened to Julie Scase. Don’t read it now, wait a day or two. And I don’t want to know when you’ve read it. While we’re living together I know that you’ve a right to ask questions about the crime, about me, about your past. But I’d rather that you didn’t. Not yet, anyway.”

  Philippa took the envelope. Maurice had said: “Lifers, murderers, have to justify themselves. I’m not talking about political murderers, terrorists, they don’t have to waste mental energy fabricating excuses. They get their justification like their political philosophy, second-hand and ready-made. I’m talking about the ordinary lifer, and most of them are ordinary. Murder is the one crime for which there can’t be any reparation for the victim. We’re all conditioned to regard it with particular abhorrence. So murderers, unless they’re psychopaths, have to come to terms with what they’ve done. Some of them persist in claiming that they’re innocent, wrongly convicted. Some probably believe it.”

  She had said: “Some may be innocent.”

  “Of course. That’s the irrefutable argument against capital punishment. A fair number take refuge in religious confession, officially recognized contrition if you like. There’s a beautiful simplicity in claiming that you’re assured of God’s forgiveness, it puts your fellow humans at a moral disadvantage if they obstinately persist in unforgiveness. And of course there are plenty of eminent people happy to assist you in your emotional wallowings. I’d probably opt myself for conversion in the circumstances. Then there are the excuses based on mental instability, provocation, deprived background, drunkenness, the common stuff of any defending counsel’s plea in mitigation. A few of the more robust spirits probably claim justifiable homicide, the victim got no more than he deserved. Your mother has survived ten years in prison on the one charge that the other women there can’t ever forgive. That means she’s tough. She’s probably intelligent. Whatever story she decides to tell you will be plausible and, once she’s met you, I’ve no doubt it will be tailored to what she decides are your particular psychological requirements.”

  “Nothing she tells me can alter the fact that she’s my mother.”

  And he had said: “So long as you remember that that is probably the least important fact about her.”

  She put Maurice out of her mind. There was no hurry about questions. She could begin to learn who she was without an inquisition. After all, they were to have two months together. She said: “I haven’t any rights. We’re here together because that’s what we both want. It suits us both. You’re not demanding to know what my life has been during the last ten years.”

  She added, with deliberate lightness: “There are no obligations except those which sharing a flat necessarily implies, cleaning the bath after use, doing one’s share of washing-up.”

  Her mother smiled.

  “From that point of view I’ll probably suit. Otherwise I think you could have chosen more wisely.”

  But there was no question of choice. While her mother went to wash, Philippa took the envelope into her bedroom and shut it in her bedside drawer. She had been asked to wait before reading it. She would wait, but not for long. She felt triumphant, almost exulted. She thought: “You’re here because you’re my mother. Nothing in life or death can alter that. It’s the only thing about myself I can be sure of. In your uterus I grew. It was your muscles that forced me into the world, your blood which first bathed me, and it was on your belly where I first took my rest.” Her mother liked the room, was glad to be with her. It was going to be a success. She wouldn’t have to return to Maurice and confess failure. He would never be able to say, “I told you so.”

  4

  The only post next morning was a letter from the house agent to say that the young couple had obtained their mortgage and that contracts were being drawn up. He read its turgid professional jargon without surprise or particular gratification. The house had to go. Apart from the fact that he needed more money than he had been able to save from a modest salary, he couldn’t imagine himself returning to it after the murder. There was nothing in the house that he wanted, not even a photograph of Julie. Mavis had destroyed them all after her death. He would take with him enough clothes to fill one suitcase. The rest of his belongings and the furniture he would sell through one of those firms which advertised that they cleared houses. He supposed that they were called in after the deaths of the old and lonely to dispose of the detritus of unregarded lives and to save the executors trouble. It pleased him to think of moving thus unencumbered into his unknown future, so much alone that if he fell under a bus there would be no one in the world with any responsibility for him, no one who need assume the obligations of grief. He would lie, shrouded and docketed in the public mortuary while the police searched for a next of kin, someone to authorize the disposal of this embarrassingly redundant corpse. To move into this nothingness seemed to him a promise of an intoxicating and limitless freedom. As he boiled his breakfast egg and stirred powdered coffee into his cup of hot milk, it occurred to him that he had become more interesting to himself since he had started out on his enterprise. Before Mavis’s death he had been like a man treadmilled on a moving staircase, walking but not advancing, while on each side of him bright images of a synthetic world, blown-up photographs, montages of life moved steadily in the opposite direction. As they passed he was programmed to perform certain actions. At daybreak he would get up and dress. At half past seven he ate breakfast. At eight o’clock he set out to work. At 8.12 he caught his train. At midday he ate his sandwiches at his desk. Home again in the evening, he would eat his supper in the kitchen with Mavis, then sit watching television while she knitted. The evenings had been dominated by the television programmes. For some of her favourites through those bleak years, Upstairs Downstairs, Dixon of Dock Green, The Forsyte Saga, she had even taken some trouble with her appearance. She no longer changed to please him or to go out with him, but she put on a different dress and even applied make-up for these bright ephemeral images. On those evenings they would have supper on a tray. It hadn’t been an unhappy life. He hadn’t felt any emotion as positive as unhappiness. But now, on the shoulders of the dead, he had hoisted himself into a different air, and although it stung his nostrils, at least it gave him the illusion of living.

  Sitting in the train as it flashed through the incongruously named stations of the eastern suburbs, his rucksack on his shoulder, he reflected that it was an odd and interesting quirk of his new character that he should need to make this particular journey at all. His plan stood an equal chance of success if he stayed at home and rang the Palfrey numbers from the anonymity of his front hall. The lie he was proposing to tell wouldn’t be more believable because it would be supported by contrived verisimilitude, yet he knew that every detail would have to be right if he were to succeed. No one was going to challenge him, no one would check up on his story, or demand confirmation, yet he was compelled to act, as if by meticulous attention to every small part he could somehow confer the authority of truth on the whole.

  From Liverpool Street he took the Central line to Tottenham Court Road and walked down Charing Cross Road. He had decided that Foyle’s Bookshop would be the best for his purpose because it was the largest. The book he chose had to be valuable enough to be worth taking trouble about, but not so valuable that an honest finder would naturally take it to a police station. Non-fiction, he reasoned, would be more appropriate than fiction, and after some thought he selected from the shelves Pevsner’s first volume on the buildings of London. The girl at the cash desk seemed hardly to look at him as she gave him his change.

  Then he walked to Shaftesbury Avenue and took a number 14 bus to Piccadilly Circus. He gave the conductor a pound note for his fare since he knew he would need plenty of small change. At Piccadilly he shut himself up in one of the telephone booths. In the address pages of his pocket diary he wrote in pencil the initials and telephone numbers of all the subscribers listed under the name Palfrey, grateful that th
e girl had such an uncommon name. None of the Palfreys were shown as “Miss” but that didn’t surprise him. He had read somewhere that to advertise that you were a woman was to invite obscene telephone calls. When the eight numbers had been listed he printed in pencil the words “Miss P. Palfrey” on the bookshop bag. No one would ever see it, yet he took care to form the letters in large uneven strokes, as different as possible from his own hand. Then, before raising the receiver, he rehearsed mentally the words he was to say: “Excuse me for troubling you, but my name is Yelland. I’ve found a book left on a bench in St. James’s Park. It was bought at Foyle’s and it’s got the name ‘Miss P. Palfrey’ written on the bag. I thought it was worth telephoning to try and trace the owner.”