by P. D. James
Dalgliesh said: “It was painted by Ryan Blaney, who lives at Scudder’s Cottage, farther south on the headland. I saw it first on the afternoon I arrived.”
Rickards said: “A funny way of delivering it. Sat for him, did she?”
“I don’t think so. It was painted to please himself, not her.”
He was going to add that Ryan Blaney would, in his view, be the last person to destroy his work. But then he reflected that it hadn’t, in fact, been destroyed. Two single cuts in the form of an L wouldn’t be too difficult to repair. And the damage had been as precise and deliberate as those cuts on Hilary Robarts’s forehead. The picture hadn’t been slashed in fury.
Rickards seemed for a moment to lose interest in it. He said: “So this is where she lived. She must have been fond of solitude. That is, if she lived alone.”
Dalgliesh said: “As far as I know she lived alone.”
It was, he thought, a depressing room. It was not that the place was uncomfortable; it held the necessary furniture, but the pieces looked as though they were rejects from someone else’s house, not the conscious choice of the occupant. Beside the fireplace with its fitted gas fire were two armchairs in synthetic brown leather. In the centre of the room was an oval dining table with four discordant chairs. On either side of the front window were fitted bookshelves, holding what looked like a collection of textbooks and assorted novels. Two of the lower and taller shelves were packed with box files. Only on the longest wall, facing the door, was there any sign that someone had made this room a home. She had obviously been fond of water-colours, and the wall was as covered with them as if it had been part of a gallery. There were one or two which he thought he could recognize, and he wished he could walk over to examine them more closely. But it was possible that someone other than Hilary Robarts herself had been in this room before them, and it was important to leave the scene undisturbed.
Rickards closed the door and opened the opposite one, on the right of the passage. This led to the kitchen, a purely functional, rather uninteresting room, well enough equipped but in stark contrast to the kitchen at Martyr’s Cottage.
Set in the middle of the room was a small wooden table, vinyl-covered, with four matching chairs all pushed well in. On the table was an uncorked bottle of wine with the cork and the metal opener beside it. Two plain wineglasses, clean and upturned, were on the draining board.
Rickards said: “Two glasses, both washed, by her or her killer. We’ll get no prints there. And an open bottle. Someone was drinking with her here tonight.”
Dalgliesh said: “If so he was abstemious. Or she was.”
Rickards with his gloved hand lifted the bottle by its neck and slowly turned it.
“About one glass poured. Maybe they planned to finish it after her swim.” He looked at Dalgliesh and said: “You didn’t come earlier into the cottage, Mr. Dalgliesh? I have to ask everyone she knew.”
“Of course. No, I didn’t come earlier into the cottage. I was drinking claret tonight, but not with her.”
“Pity you hadn’t been. She’d be alive now.”
“Not necessarily. I might have left when she went to change for her swim. And if she did have someone with her here tonight, that’s probably what he did.” He paused, wondered whether to speak, then said: “The left-hand glass is slightly cracked at the rim.”
Rickards lifted it to the central light and turned it slowly.
“I wish I had your eyesight. It’s hardly significant, surely.”
“Some people strongly dislike drinking from a cracked glass. I do myself.”
“In which case why didn’t she break it and chuck it away? There’s no point in keeping a glass you aren’t prepared to drink from. When I’m faced with two alternatives, I start by taking the more likely. Two glasses, two drinkers. That’s the common-sense explanation.”
It was, thought Dalgliesh, the basis of most police work. Only when the obvious proved untenable was it necessary to explore less likely explanations. But it could also be the first fatally easy step into a labyrinth of misconceptions. He wondered why his instinct insisted that she had been drinking alone. Perhaps because the bottle was in the kitchen, not in the sitting room. The wine was a 1979 Chateau Talbot, hardly an all-purpose tipple. Why not carry it into the sitting room and do it justice in comfort? On the other hand, if she was alone and had needed only a quick swig before her swim, she might hardly have bothered. And if two people had been drinking in the kitchen, she had been meticulous in pushing back the chairs. But it was the level of the wine that seemed to him almost conclusive. Why uncork a fresh bottle to pour only two half-glasses? Which didn’t, of course, mean that she wasn’t later expecting a visitor to help finish it.
Rickards seemed to be taking an unnatural interest in the bottle and its label. Suddenly he said gruffly:
“What time did you leave the mill, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“At nine-fifteen. I looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and checked my watch.”
“And you saw no one during your walk?”
“No one, and no footprints other than hers and mine.”
“What were you actually doing on the headland, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“Walking, thinking.” He was about to add: “And paddling like a boy,” but checked himself.
Rickards said consideringly: “Walking and thinking.”
To Dalgliesh’s oversensitive ears he made the activities sound both eccentric and suspicious. Dalgliesh wondered what his companion would say if he had decided to confide. “I was thinking about my aunt and the men who loved her, the fiancé who was killed in 1918 and the man whose mistress she might or might not have been. I was thinking of the thousands of people who have walked along that shore and who are now dead, my aunt among them, and how, as a boy, I hated the false romanticism of that stupid poem about great men leaving their footprints on the sands of time, since that was essentially all that most of us could hope to leave, transitory marks which the next tide would obliterate. I was thinking how little I had known my aunt and whether it was ever possible to know another human being except on the most superficial level, even the women I have loved. I was thinking about the clash of ignorant armies by night, since no poet walks by the sea at moonlight without silently reciting Matthew Arnold’s marvellous poem. I was considering whether I would have been a better poet, or even a poet at all, if I hadn’t also decided to be a policeman. More prosaically, I was, from time to time, wondering how my life would be changed for better or worse by the unmerited acquisition of three-quarters of a million.”
The fact that he had no intention of revealing even the most mundane of these private musings, the childish secrecy about the paddling, induced an irrational guilt, as if he were deliberately withholding information of importance. After all, he told himself, no man could have been more innocently employed. And it was not as if he were a serious suspect. The idea would probably have struck Rickards as too ridiculous even for consideration, although with logic he would have had to admit that no one who lived on the headland and had known Hilary Robarts could be excluded from the enquiry, least of all because he was a senior police officer. But Dalgliesh was a witness. He had information to give or withhold, and the knowledge that he would have no intention of withholding it didn’t alter the fact that there was a difference now in their relationship. He was involved, whether he liked it or not, and he didn’t need Rickards to point out that uncomfortable reality. Professionally it was none of his business, but it was his business as a man and a human being.
He was surprised and a little disconcerted to discover how much he had resented the interrogation, mild as it had been. A man was surely entitled to walk along the beach at night without having to explain his reasons to a police officer. It was salutary for him personally to experience this sense of privacy violated, of virtuous outrage, which the most innocent of suspects must feel when faced with police interrogation. And he realized anew how much, even from childhood, he had disli
ked being questioned. “What are you doing? Where have you been? What are you reading? Where are you going?” He had been the much-wanted only child of elderly parents, burdened by their almost obsessive parental concern and overconscientiousness, living in a village where little the rector’s son did was safe from scrutiny. And suddenly, standing here in this anonymous, over-tidy kitchen, he recalled vividly and with heartstopping pain the moment when his most precious privacy had been violated. He remembered that secluded place, deep in the laurels and elderberries, at the bottom of the shrubbery, the green tunnel of leaves leading to his own three square yards of moist, mould-rich sanctuary, remembered that August afternoon, the crackle of bushes, the cook’s great face thrust between the leaves. “Your ma thought you’d be in here, Master Adam. Rector wants you. What do you do in there, hiding yourself away in all those mucky bushes? Better be playing out in the sunshine.” So the last refuge, the one he had thought totally secret, had been discovered. They had known about it all the time.
He said: “Oh God from You that I could private be.”
Rickards looked at him. “What was that, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“Just a quotation that came into my mind.”
Rickards didn’t reply. He was probably thinking: “Well, you’re supposed to be a poet. You’re entitled.” He gave a last, searching look around the kitchen, as if by the intensity of his gaze he could somehow compel that unremarkable table and four chairs, the opened bottle of wine, the two washed glasses to yield up their secret.
Then he said: “I’ll lock up here and set someone on guard until tomorrow. I’m due to meet the pathologist, Dr. Maitland-Brown, over at Easthaven. He’ll take a look at the Whistler and then come straight on here. The forensic biologist should have arrived from the lab by then. You wanted to see the Whistler yourself, didn’t you, Mr. Dalgliesh? This seems as good a time as any.”
It seemed to Dalgliesh a particularly bad time. One violent death was enough in one night, and he was seized with a sudden longing for the peace and solitude of the mill. But there seemed no prospect of sleep for him until the early hours of the morning, and there was little point in objecting. Rickards said: “I could drive you over and bring you back.”
Dalgliesh felt an immediate revulsion at the thought of a car journey tête-à-tête with Rickards. He said: “If you’ll drop me at the mill, I’ll take my own car. There won’t be any reason for me to linger at Easthaven, and you may have to wait.”
It surprised him a little that Rickards was willing to leave the beach. Admittedly he had Oliphant and his minions; procedures at the scene of a murder were well established, they would be competent to do what was necessary, and until the forensic pathologist arrived the body couldn’t be moved. But he sensed that it was important to Rickards that he and Dalgliesh together should see the Whistler’s body, and he wondered what forgotten incident in their joint pasts had led to that compulsion.
5
Balmoral Private Hotel was the last house of an undistinguished twentieth-century terrace at the unfashionable end of the long promenade. The summer lights were still strung between the Victorian lampposts, but they had been turned off and now swung in uneven loops like a tawdry necklace which might scatter its blackened beads at the first strong wind. The season was officially over. Dalgliesh drew up behind the police Rover on the left-hand side of the promenade. Between the road and the glittering sea was a children’s playground, wire-enclosed, the gate padlocked, the shuttered kiosk pasted with fading and half-torn posters of summer shows, bizarrely shaped ice creams, a clown’s head. The swings had been looped high, and one of the metal seats, caught by the strengthening breeze, rapped out a regular tattoo against the iron frame. The hotel stood out from its drabber neighbours, sprucely painted in a bright blue which even the dull street lighting could hardly soften. The porch light shone down on a large card with the words “Under new management. Bill and Joy Carter welcome you to Balmoral.” A separate card underneath said simply “Vacancies.”
As they waited to cross the road while a couple of cars cruised slowly past, the drivers peering for a parking space, Rickards said: “Their first season. Done quite well up to now, so they say, despite the bloody awful summer. This won’t help. They’ll get the ghouls, of course, but parents will think twice before booking in with the kiddies for happy family hols. Luckily the place is half-empty at present. Two cancellations this morning, so they’ve only got three couples, and they were all out when Mr. Carter found the body, and, so far, we’ve managed to keep them in happy ignorance. They’re in bed now, presumably asleep. Let’s hope they stay that way.”
The earlier arrival of the police must have alerted some of the locals, but the plainclothes officer unobtrusively on duty inside the porch had dispersed any curious bystanders, and now the road was empty except for a little group of four or five people about fifty yards down on the seaward side. They seemed to be muttering together, and as Dalgliesh glanced at them they began moving aimlessly, as if stirred by the breeze.
He asked: “Why here, for God’s sake?”
“We know why. There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know, but at least we know that. They’ve got a part-time barman here, Albert Upcraft, seventy-five if he’s a day. He remembers. He’s a bit vague about what happened yesterday, but there’s nothing wrong with his long-term memory. The Whistler came here as a kid, apparently. His auntie—his dad’s sister—was manager here twenty years ago. Used to take him off his mum’s hands for a free holiday when the place was quiet. Mainly when Mum had a new man and the new uncle didn’t want the kid around. Sometimes he was here for weeks at a time. No trouble to anyone. Helped with the guests, picked up the odd tip, actually went to Sunday school.”
Dalgliesh said: “Now the day is over.”
“Well, his day’s over, all right. He booked in at two-thirty this afternoon. Asked for the same room, apparently. Single at the back. Cheapest in the house. The Carters should be grateful for small mercies. He might have chosen to go out in style, best double bedroom, private bathroom, view of the sea, the lot.”
The constable at the door saluted, and they passed through the lobby into the hall, and into a smell of paint and polish overlaid with the faint tang of lavender disinfectant. The cleanliness was almost oppressive. The lurid flowered carpet was covered with a narrow strip of perspex. The wallpaper was obviously new, a different pattern on each wall, and a glimpse through the open door of the dining room showed tables set for four with shining white cloths and small vases of artificial flowers, daffodils, narcissi and bulbous roses. The couple who came from the back to meet them were as spruce as their hotel. Bill Carter was a dapper little man who looked as if he came fresh from the ironing board, the creases down his white shirtsleeves and the front of his trousers knife-sharp, his tie neatly knotted. His wife was wearing a summer dress in a flowered crimplene under a knitted white sweater. She had obviously been crying. Her plump, rather childish face under the carefully set blond hair was bloated and bruised red, as if she had been struck. Her disappointment at seeing just the two of them was pathetically evident.
She said: “I thought you’d come to take him away. Why can’t you take him away?”
Rickards didn’t introduce Dalgliesh. He said soothingly: “We will, Mrs. Carter, as soon as the pathologist has seen him. He shouldn’t be long now. He’s on his way.”
“Pathologist? That’s a doctor, isn’t it? Why do you want a doctor? He’s dead, isn’t he? Bill found him. His throat’s cut. How much deader can you get?”
“He won’t be with you much longer, Mrs. Carter.”
“The sheet’s covered with blood, Bill says. He wouldn’t let me in. Not that I want to see. And the carpet, ruined. Blood’s terrible to get out, everyone knows that. Who’s going to pay for the carpet and the bed? Oh God, I thought things were really coming right for us at last. Why did he come back here to do it? Not very nice, was it, not very considerate?”
“He wasn’t a considerate man, Mrs.
Carter.”
Her husband put his arm round her shoulders and led her away. Less than half a minute later he reappeared and said: “It’s the shock, naturally. She’s upset. Well, who wouldn’t be? You know the way up, Mr. Rickards. Your officer is still there. I won’t come up with you, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Carter, I know the way.”
Suddenly Bill Carter turned and said: “Get him out soon, sir, for God’s sake.”
For a moment Dalgliesh thought that he, too, was crying.
There was no lift. Dalgliesh followed Rickards up three flights of stairs, down a narrow passage towards the back and a short turn to the right. A young detective constable got up from his chair outside the door and with his left hand opened it, then flattened himself against the wall. The smell seemed to gust out of the room at them, a strong effluvium of blood and death.
The light was on and the main bulb in its cheap pink shade hung low and shone full on the horror on the bed. It was a very small room, little more than a box room, with a single window too high to give a view of more than the sky, and enough space only for the single bed, a chair, a bedside cabinet and a low chest of drawers with a mirror hung above it which served as a dressing table. But this room, too, was obsessively clean, making that unclean thing on the bed even more horrible. Both the gaping throat with its white corrugated vessels and the sagging mouth above it seemed to be stretched in protest or outrage at this violence to decency and order. There were no preliminary cuts visible, and that single act of annihilating violence must, Dalgliesh thought, surely have taken more strength than was possible from the childish hand lying, fingers curved, on the sheet and fixed now in its blackening carapace of dried blood. The knife, six inches of bloodied steel, lay close beside it. For some reason he had undressed himself for death and lay now wearing only a vest and pants and a pair of short blue nylon socks which looked like the onset of putrefaction. On the chair beside the bed a dark-grey striped suit was neatly folded. A blue-striped drip-dry shirt was hung from the back of the chair with the tie folded over it. Under the chair his shoes, well worn but polished to mirror brightness, were precisely placed side-by-side. They looked small enough for a girl.