by P. D. James
He had seen no footprints on the sand but his and hers. But the tide was ebbing; it must have been high at about 9.00, although the dustiness of the upper levels of the beach suggested that it didn’t reach the hollow where she lay. But the most likely path for the murderer to have taken was the one through the wood which she herself must have used. He would have had the protection of the trees and a place in their shadow where he could watch and wait unseen. The ground, with its mat of pine needles on the sand, was unlikely to yield footprints, but it was important that it shouldn’t be disturbed. Moving carefully, he backed away from the body, then walked about twenty yards to the south along a ridge of fine shingle. By the light of his torch, half-crouching, he tracked his way through the densely planted pine trees, snapping off the brittle lower twigs as he passed. At least he could be certain that no one had recently passed this way. Within minutes he had gained the road; another ten of brisk walking and he would be at the mill. But the nearest telephone would be at Hilary Robarts’s cottage. The probability was that the cottage was locked, and he had no intention of breaking in. It was almost as important to leave the victim’s house undisturbed as it was not to violate the scene of the crime. There had been no handbag beside her body, nothing but the shoes and torch neatly placed at the head of the hollow, the track suit and the brightly striped red-and-blue beach towel on which she partly lay. Perhaps she had left the key at home, the cottage unlocked. On the headland, after dark, few people would worry if they left a cottage unlocked for half an hour. It was worth taking five minutes to look.
Thyme Cottage, seen from the windows of the mill, had always struck him as the least interesting house on the headland. It faced inland, a square, uncompromising building with a cobbled yard instead of a front garden and picture windows in modern glass which destroyed any period charm it once might have had and made it look like a modern aberration more appropriate to a rural housing estate than to this sea-scarred and remote headland. On three sides the pines grew so closely that they almost touched the walls. He had wondered from time to time why Hilary Robarts should have chosen to live here, despite its convenient distance from the power station. After Alice Mair’s dinner party he thought he knew why. Now all the lights were blazing in the ground-floor rooms, the large rectangle of the picture window to the left reaching almost to the ground and the smaller square to the right, which he thought was probably the kitchen. Ordinarily they would have been a reassuring signal of life, normality and welcome, of a refuge from the atavistic fears of the enclosing wood, the empty moonlit headland. But now those bright, uncurtained windows added to his mounting unease, and as he approached the cottage it seemed to him that there floated between him and those bright windows, like a half-developed print, the mental picture of that dead and violated face.
Someone had been here before him. He vaulted over the low stone wall and saw that the pane of the picture window had been almost completely smashed. Small slivers of glass gleamed like jewels on the cobbled yard. He stood and gazed between the jagged edges of the broken glass into the brightness of the sitting room. The carpet was littered with glass fragments like winking beads of silver light. It was obvious that the force of the blow had come from outside the cottage, and he saw at once what had been used. Below him, face upwards on the carpet, was the portrait of Hilary Robarts. It had been slashed almost to the frame with two right-angled cuts forming the letter L.
He didn’t try the door to see if it was unlocked. It was more important not to contaminate the scene than to save ten or fifteen minutes in ringing the police. She was dead. Speed was important, but it was not vital. Regaining the road, he set off towards the mill, half-running, half-walking. And then he heard the noise of a car and, turning, saw the lights coming at him fast from the north. It was Alex Mair’s BMW. Dalgliesh stood in the middle of the road and waved his torch. The car slowed and stopped. Looking up to the open right side window, he saw Mair, his face bleached by moonlight, regarding him for a moment with an unsmiling intensity, as if this encounter were an assignation.
Dalgliesh said: “I’m afraid I have shocking news for you. Hilary Robarts has been murdered. I’ve just found the body. I need to get to a telephone.”
The hand lying casually on the wheel tightened, then relaxed. The eyes fixed on his grew wary. But when Mair spoke his voice was controlled. Only in that involuntary spasm of the hand had he betrayed emotion. He said: “The Whistler?”
“It looks like it.”
“There’s a telephone in the car.”
Without another word he opened the door, got out and stood silently aside while Dalgliesh spent an irritating two minutes getting through to Rickards’s headquarters. Rickards wasn’t there but, the message given, he rang off. Mair had moved about thirty yards from the car and was staring back at the glitter of the power station, as if dissociating himself from the whole procedure.
Now, walking back, he said: “We all warned her not to swim alone, but she wouldn’t listen. But I didn’t really believe there was any danger. I suppose all the victims thought that until it was too late. ‘It can’t happen to me.’ But it can and it does. But it’s still extraordinary, almost unbelievable. The second victim from Larksoken. Where is she?”
“On the fringe of the pines—where she usually swam, I imagine.”
As Mair made a move towards the sea, Dalgliesh said: “There’s nothing you can do. I’ll go back and wait for the police.”
“I know there’s nothing I can do. I want to see her.”
“Better not. The fewer people who disturb the scene, the better.”
Suddenly Mair turned on him. “My God, Dalgliesh, don’t you ever stop thinking like a policeman? I said I wanted to see her.”
Dalgliesh thought, This isn’t my case and I can’t stop him by force. But at least he could ensure that the direct path to the body lay undisturbed. Without another word he led the way and Mair followed. Why this insistence, he wondered, on seeing the body? To satisfy himself that she was, in fact, dead, the scientist’s need to verify and confirm? Or was he trying to exorcise a horror which he knew could be more terrible in imagination than in reality? Or was there, perhaps, a deeper compulsion, the need to pay her the tribute of standing over her body in the quietness and loneliness of the night before the police arrived with all the official paraphernalia of a murder investigation to violate for ever the intimacies they had shared.
Mair made no comment when Dalgliesh led him to the south of the well-beaten path to the beach and, still without speaking, followed him as he plunged into the darkness and began tracking his way between the shafts of the pines. The pool of light from his torch shone on the brittle spars snapped by his previous breakthrough, on the carpet of pine needles dusted with sand, on dried pine cones and the glint of an old battered tin. In the darkness the strong, resinous smell seemed to intensify and came up to them like a drug, making the air as heavy to breathe as if it were a sultry night in high summer.
Minutes later they stepped out of stultifying darkness into the white coolness of the beach and saw before them, like a curved shield of beaten silver, the moonlit splendour of the sea. They stood for a moment, side-by-side, breathing hard, as if they had come through some ordeal. Dalgliesh’s footprints were still visible in the dry sand above the last ridge of pebbles, and they followed them until they stood at the foot of the body.
Dalgliesh thought, I don’t want to be here, not with him, not like this, both of us staring down unrebuked at her nakedness. It seemed to him that all his perceptions were preter-naturally sharpened in this cold, debilitating light. The blanched limbs, the halo of dark hair, the gaudy red and blue of the beach towel, the clumps of marram grass, all had the one-dimensional clarity of a colour print. This necessary guard on the body until the police could arrive would have been perfectly tolerable; he was used to the curious undemanding companionship of the recently dead. But with Mair at his side he felt like a voyeur. It was this revulsion, rather than delicacy, which made
him move a little apart and stand looking into the darkness of the pines while remaining aware of every slight move and breath of the tall, rigid figure looking down at her with the concentrated attention of a surgeon.
Then Mair said: “That locket round her neck, I gave it to her on twenty-ninth August for her birthday. It’s just the right size to hold her Yale key. One of the metalworkers in the workshop at Larksoken made it for me. It’s remarkable the delicacy of the work they do there.”
Dalgliesh was not inexperienced in the various manifestations of shock. He said nothing. Mair’s voice was suddenly harsh.
“For God’s sake, Dalgliesh, can’t we cover her up?”
With what? thought Dalgliesh. Does he expect me to jerk the towel from under her? He said: “No, I’m sorry. We mustn’t disturb her.”
“But it’s the Whistler’s work. Dear God, man, it’s obvious. You said so yourself.”
“The Whistler is a murderer like any other. He brings something to the scene and leaves something behind him. That something could be evidence. He’s a man, not a force of nature.”
“When will the police arrive?”
“They shouldn’t be long. I wasn’t able to speak to Rickards, but they’ll be in touch with him. I’ll wait, if you want to leave. There’s nothing you can do here.”
“I can stay until they take her away.”
“That might mean a long wait unless they’re able to get the pathologist quickly.”
“Then I’ll have a long wait.”
Without another word he turned and walked down to the edge of the sea, his footprints parallel with Dalgliesh’s own. Dalgliesh moved down to the shingle and sat there, his arms round his knees, and watched while the tall figure paced endlessly, backwards and forwards, along the fringes of the tide. Whatever evidence he had on his shoes, it wouldn’t be there now. But the thought was ridiculous. No murderer had ever left his imprint more clearly on a victim than had the Whistler. Why, then, did he feel this unease, the sense that it was less straightforward than it seemed?
He wriggled his heels and buttocks more comfortably into the shingle and prepared to wait. The cold moonlight, the constant falling of the waves and the sense of that stiffening body behind him induced a gentle melancholy, a contemplation of mortality including his own. Timor mortis conturbat me. He thought: In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life. And the fear of death, however irrational, was surely natural, whether one thought of it as annihilation or as a rite of passage. Every cell in the body was programmed for life; all healthy creatures clung to life until their last breath. How hard to accept, and yet how comforting, was the gradual realization that the universal enemy might come at last as a friend. Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual death, even the death of the least attractive, the most unworthy, mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives man’s perennial fascination with the mystery of his mortality, providing, too, a comforting illusion of a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice vindicated was the uncertain justice of men. The job certainly had a fascination for him which went beyond its intellectual challenge, or the excuse it gave for his rigorously enforced privacy. But now he had inherited enough money to make it redundant. Was this what his aunt had intended by that uncompromising will? Was she in fact saying, Here is enough money to make any job other than poetry unnecessary. Isn’t it time that you made a choice?
It wasn’t his case. It would never be his case. But by force of habit he timed the arrival of the police, and it was thirty-five minutes before his ears caught the first rustle of movement in the pine wood. They were coming the way he had directed, and they were making a great deal of noise about it. It was Rickards who appeared first, with a younger but solidly built man at his shoulder and four heavily laden officers in a straggle behind them. It seemed to Dalgliesh, rising to meet them, that they were immense, huge moon-men, their features square and blanched in this alien light, bearing with them their bulky and polluting paraphernalia. Rickards nodded but didn’t speak other than briefly to introduce his sergeant, Stuart Oliphant.
Together they approached the body and stood looking down at what had been Hilary Robarts. Rickards was breathing heavily, as if he had been running, and it seemed to Dalgliesh that there emanated from him a powerful surge of energy and excitement. Oliphant and the four other officers dumped their equipment and stood silently, a little apart. Dalgliesh had a sense that they were all actors in a film waiting for the director to give the command to shoot, or that a voice would suddenly shout “Cut” and the little group would break up, the victim stretch herself and sit up and begin rubbing her arms and legs and complaining of stiffness and the cold.
Then, still gazing down at the body, Rickards asked: “Do you know her, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“Hilary Robarts, Acting Administrative Officer at Larksoken Power Station. I met her first, last Thursday, at a dinner party given by Miss Mair.”
Rickards turned and gazed towards the figure of Mair. He was standing motionless with his back to the sea but so close to the surf that it seemed to Dalgliesh that the waves must be washing over his shoes. He made no move towards them, almost as if he were waiting for an invitation or for Rickards to join him.
Dalgliesh said: “Dr. Alex Mair. He’s the Director of Larksoken. I used the telephone in his car to call you. He says he’ll stay here until the body is removed.”
“Then he’s in for a long wait. So that’s Dr. Alex Mair. I’ve read about him. Who found her?”
“I did. I thought I made that plain when I telephoned.”
Either Rickards was deliberately extracting information he already knew, or his men were singularly inefficient at passing on a simple message.
Rickards turned to Oliphant. “Go and explain to him that we’ll be taking our time. There’s nothing he can do here except to get in the way. Persuade him to go home to bed. If you can’t persuade, try ordering. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”
He waited until Oliphant had started scrunching over the ridge of shingle, then called: “Oliphant. If he won’t move, tell him to keep his distance. I don’t want him any closer. Then get the screens round her. That’ll spoil his fun.”
It was the kind of casual cruelty which Dalgliesh didn’t expect from him. Something was wrong with the man, something that went deeper than professional stress at having to view yet another of the Whistler’s victims. It was as if some half-acknowledged and imperfectly suppressed personal anxiety had been violently released by the sight of the body, triumphing over caution and discipline.
But Dalgliesh too felt a sense of outrage. He said: “The man isn’t a voyeur. He’s probably not altogether rational at present. After all, he knew the woman. Hilary Robarts was one of his senior officers.”
“He can’t do her any good now, even if she was his mistress.” Then, as if acknowledging the implied rebuke, he said: “All right, I’ll have a word with him.”
He began running clumsily over the shingle. Hearing him Oliphant turned and together they went up to that silent, waiting figure on the fringe of the sea. Dalgliesh watched as they conferred; then they turned and began walking up the beach, Alex Mair between the two police officers as if he were a prisoner under escort. Rickards returned to the body, but it was obvious that Oliphant was going to accompany Alex Mair back to his car. He switched on his torch and plunged into the wood. Mair hesitated. He had ignored the body as if it were no longer there, but now he looked over at Dalgliesh as if there were unfinished business between them. Then he said a quick good night and followed Oliphant.
Rickards didn’t comment on Mair’s change of mind or on his methods of persuasion. He said: “No handbag.”
“Her house key is i
n that locket round her neck.”
“Did you touch the body, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“Only her thigh and the hair to test its wetness. The locket was a gift from Mair. He told me.”
“Lives close, does she?”
“You’ll have seen her cottage when you drove up. It’s just the other side of the pine wood. I went there after I found the body, thinking it might be open and I could telephone. There’s been an act of vandalism, her portrait thrown through the window. The Whistler and criminal damage on the same night—an odd coincidence.”
Rickards turned and looked full at him. “Maybe. But this wasn’t the Whistler. The Whistler’s dead. Killed himself in a hotel at Easthaven, sometime around six o’clock. I’ve been trying to reach you to let you know.”
He squatted by the body and touched the woman’s face, then lifted the head and let it drop. “No rigor. Not even the beginning of it. Within the last few hours, by the look of her. The Whistler died with enough sins on his conscience, but this … this”—he stabbed his finger violently at the dead body—“this, Mr. Dalgliesh, is something different.”
4
Rickards rolled on his search gloves. The latex, sliding over his huge fingers, made them look almost obscene, like the udders of a great animal. Kneeling, he fiddled with the locket. It sprang open and Dalgliesh could see the Yale key nestling inside it, a perfect fit. Rickards extracted it, then said: “Right, Mr. Dalgliesh. Let’s go and take a look at that criminal damage.”
Two minutes later he followed Rickards up the path to the front door of the cottage. Rickards unlocked it and they passed into a passage running to the stairs and with doors on either side. Rickards opened the door to the left and stepped into the sitting room with Dalgliesh behind him. It was a large room running the whole length of the cottage, with windows at each end and a fireplace facing the door. The portrait lay about three feet from the window, surrounded by slivers of glass. Both men stood just inside the door and surveyed the scene.