Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  Rickards said: “Neville Potter, aged thirty-six. Scrawny little sod. You wouldn’t believe he’d got the strength in those arms to throttle a chicken. And he came properly dressed in his Sunday best to meet his Maker, but then thought better of it. Probably remembered that his ma wouldn’t like him getting blood on his best suit. You should meet Ma, Mr. Dalgliesh. She’s a real education, that one. She explains a lot. But he’s left the evidence. It’s all there, all laid out for us. Neat little devil, wasn’t he?”

  Dalgliesh edged himself round the end of the bed, being careful not to tread in the blood. On the top of the chest of drawers were the Whistler’s weapons and his trophies: a leather dog lead, neatly curled, a blond wig and blue beret, a clasp-knife, a lamp with a battery ingeniously fixed to the centre of a metal headband. Beside these was a pyramid of tangled bushy hair, blond, dark brown, red. In front of the careful arrangement was a page of paper torn from a notebook with the single written message in biro, printed like a child’s. “It was getting worse. This is the only way I know to stop myself. Please look after Pongo.” The “Please” was underlined.

  Rickards said: “His dog. Pongo, for God’s sake.”

  “What did you expect him to be called, Cerberus?”

  Rickards opened the door and stood with his back to the gap, breathing deeply, as if hungry for fresh air.

  He said: “He and his ma lived on one of the caravan sites outside Cromer. Been there for twelve years. He was a general handyman, did any easy repairs, kept an eye on the place at night, dealt with complaints. The boss has another site outside Yarmouth, and he would go there some nights to relieve the permanent chap. A bit of a loner. Had a small van and the dog. Married a girl he picked up on the site there years ago but it only lasted four months. She walked out on him. Driven out by Ma or by the smell of the caravan. God knows how she stuck it for four months.”

  Dalgliesh said: “He was an obvious suspect. You must have checked him.”

  “His ma gave him an alibi for two of the murders. Either she was drunk and didn’t know whether he was there or not, or she was covering up for him. Or, of course, she couldn’t give a bloody damn one way or the other.” He said with sudden violence, “I thought we’d learned by now not to take that kind of alibi at its face value. I’m having a word with the DC who interviewed them, but you know how it is. Thousands of interviews, checks, the stuff all put on the computer. I’d give a dozen computers for a DC who can sense when a witness is lying. My God, haven’t we learned anything from the Yorkshire Ripper fiasco?”

  “Didn’t your man search the van?”

  “Oh, they searched the van, all right. They showed a modicum of initiative. It was clean. He cached his stuff elsewhere. Probably picked it up every evening, watched, waited, chose his moment.” He gazed down at the head contraption and said: “Ingenious, isn’t it? As his ma says, he was always clever with his hands.”

  The small rectangle of sky outside the single high window was blue-black pricked with a single star. It seemed to Dalgliesh that he had experienced half a lifetime of sensations since he had woken that morning to the cool sea-scented autumnal dawn, to the beginning of a day which had included that calm, meditative walk under the soaring roof of St. Peter Mancroft; the nostalgic, self-indulgent pain induced by those faded photographs of the long-dead; the rush and pull of the tide over his naked feet; the mingled shock and recognition as his torch shone on Hilary Robarts’s body. It was a day which, stretching interminably, seemed to have embraced all seasons. So this was one way of stretching time, time which for the Whistler had stopped with that great gush of blood. And now, at the end of the day, he had come to this neat box of an execution shed, imposing on his mind as if it were a memory the picture of a skinny child lying supine on that same bed and watching through the high window the same single star while arranged on the chest of drawers with careful art were the trophies of his day: the tips in pennies and sixpences, the shells and coloured stones from the beach, the dried swathe of pustulated seaweed.

  And he himself was here because Rickards had willed it, had wanted him here in this room and at this time. He could have viewed the Whistler’s body tomorrow in the mortuary, or, since he could hardly claim that he hadn’t the stomach for it, on the autopsy table, to confirm what hardly needed confirmation, that this scrawny killer wasn’t the once-glimpsed, six-foot Battersea Strangler. But Rickards had needed an audience, had needed him, Dalgliesh, against whose dreadfully experienced and unshockable calm he could hurl the bitterness and frustrations of failure. Five women dead, and the murderer a suspect they had interviewed and cleared early in the enquiry. The smell of that failure would linger, at least in his own nostrils, long after the media interest and the official enquiries had run their course. And now there was this sixth death, Hilary Robarts, who might not have died and certainly wouldn’t have died as she had if the Whistler had been stopped in his tracks earlier. But Dalgliesh sensed that something more keenly personal even than professional failure was fuelling Rickards’s anger, with its uncharacteristic spurts of verbal brutality, and he wondered whether it had something to do with his wife and the coming child.

  He asked: “What will happen to the dog?”

  Rickards seemed not to notice the irrelevance of the question.

  “What do you think? Who’s going to take on an animal that has been where he’s been, seen what he’s seen?” He looked down at the stiffening corpse and, turning to Dalgliesh, said harshly: “You pity him, I suppose.”

  Dalgliesh didn’t reply. He could have said: “Yes, I pity him. And his victims. And you. And myself occasionally, come to that.” He thought: Yesterday I was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Odd. Robert Burton, that seventeenth-century Leicestershire rector, had said all that could be said at such a moment, and the words came to him as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud.

  “Of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls God alone can tell; His mercy may come inter pontem et fontem, inter gladium et jugulum, betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat.”

  Rickards shook himself violently, as if suddenly seized with cold. It was an odd gesture. Then he said: “At least he’s saved the country his keep for the next twenty years. One argument for keeping his kind alive instead of putting them down is that we can learn from them, stop it happening again. But can we? We’ve got Stafford banged up, Brady, Nielson. How much have we learned from them?”

  Dalgliesh said: “You wouldn’t hang a madman, presumably?”

  “I wouldn’t hang anyone, I’d find a less barbaric method. But they aren’t mad, are they? Not until they’re caught. Until then they cope with life like most other people. Then we discover that they’re monsters and decide, surprise, surprise, to classify them as mad. Makes it seem more comprehensible. We don’t have to think of them as human any more. We don’t have to use the word ‘evil.’ Everyone feels better. Do you want to see the mother, Mr. Dalgliesh?”

  “There’s no point in it. He obviously isn’t our man. I didn’t for a moment suppose that he would be.”

  “You should see the mother. She’s a right bitch, that one. And do you know what her name is? Lillian. L for ‘Lillian.’ That’s something for the trick cyclist to chew over. She made him what he was. But we can’t check on people and decide who’s fit to have kids, let alone fit to bring them up. And I sup pose that when he was born she must have felt something for him, had some hopes for him. She could hardly know what she’d brought forth. You never had a child, did you, Mr. Dalgliesh.”

  “I had a son. Briefly.”

  Rickards kicked the door gently, looking away. He said: “Bloody hell, I’d forgotten. Sorry. Wrong time to ask, for both of us.”

  There were confident footsteps mounting the stairs, and now they had reached the passage. Dalgliesh said: “It sounds as if the pathologist has arrived.”

  Rickards made no reply. He had moved over to the chest of drawers and, with his forefinger, ge
ntly urged the tangle of hairs across the polished wood.

  He said: “There’s one sample which we won’t find here. Hilary Robarts’s. Forensic will look to make doubly sure, but it won’t be here. And now I start looking for a very different murderer. And, by God, Mr. Dalgliesh, this time I’m going to get him.”

  6

  Forty-five minutes later Rickards was back at the scene of the murder. He seemed to have passed beyond conscious tiredness and to be operating in a different dimension of time and space, in which his mind worked with unnatural clarity while his body had become almost weightless, a creature of light and air, as unsubstantial as the bizarre scene in which he moved and spoke and gave his orders. The pale, transparent disc of the moon was eclipsed by the glare of the mounted lights which illumined and solidified the hard outlines of trees and men and equipment, yet paradoxically robbed them of their form and essence so that they were, at one and the same time, revealed and clarified and transformed into something alien and strange. And always, beyond the masculine voices, the scrunch of feet on pebbles, the sudden flap of canvas in a tentative breeze, was the continual fall and suck of the tide.

  Dr. Anthony Maitland-Brown had driven from Easthaven to the scene in his Mercedes and had arrived first. He was already gowned and gloved and crouching by the body by the time Rickards caught up with him. Wisely he left him to it. M.B. strongly disliked being watched while he made his preliminary examination at the scene and was apt to protest with a peevish “Do we really need all these people standing around?” if anyone came within ten feet of him, as if police photographer, scene-of-crime officer and forensic biologist were all so many snap-happy sightseers. He was an elegant and extraordinarily handsome man, over six feet tall, who had once, in youth—so it was rumoured—been told that he looked like Leslie Howard and had spent subsequent years sedulously promoting the image. He was amicably divorced, comfortably well off—his mother had bequeathed him a private income—and well able to indulge his twin passions of clothes and the opera. In his free time he escorted a succession of young and extremely pretty actresses to Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, where they were apparently content to endure three hours of boredom for the prestige of his company or, perhaps, the frisson of knowing that the elegant hands which poured their wine or helped them out of the Mercedes were commonly engaged with more bizarre activities. Rickards had never found him an easy colleague but recognized that he was a first-class forensic pathologist, and God knew they were rare enough. Reading M.B.’s lucid and comprehensive autopsy reports, he could forgive him even his aftershave.

  Now, moving away from the body, he stirred himself to greet the recent arrivals, photographer, cameraman, forensic biologist. The stretch of beach fifty yards each side of the murder scene had been efficiently roped off, and plastic sheeting laid over the path, now lit by a string of overhead lights. He was aware of his sergeant’s disciplined excitement at his side.

  Stuart Oliphant said: “We’ve found a print, sir. About forty yards into the copse.”

  “On grass and pine needles?”

  “No, sir, on sand. Someone, a kid perhaps, must have tipped some from a bucket. The print’s a good one, sir.”

  Rickards followed him into the wood. The whole of the path had been protected, but at one place a marker had been driven into the soft ground at the right-hand side. Sergeant Oliphant drew back the plastic, then lifted the box covering the print. In the glow of the overhead lights slung along the path it showed clearly, a dusting of moist sand over the pine needles and flattened grass, covering no more than six inches by four, and printed on it the intricate pattern of the sole of a right shoe.

  Oliphant said: “We found it soon after you left, sir. Only the one, but it’s pretty clear. The photographs have been taken, and the measurements will be at the lab this morning. Size ten by the look of it. They’ll be able to give us confirmation pretty quickly, but it’s hardly necessary. It’s a trainer shoe, sir. A Bumble. You know the make, the one that has a picture of a bee on the heel. And it has the outline of a bee on the sole. You can see the curve of the wing here, sir. It’s quite unmistakable.”

  A Bumble trainer. If you wanted a print you could hardly hope for anything more distinctive. Oliphant voiced his thoughts: “Common enough, of course, but not all that common. Bumbles are the most expensive on the market, the Porsche of trainers. Most of the kids with money like to have them. It’s a bloody silly name. Part of the firm is actually owned by a man called Bumble, and they’ve only been on the market for a couple of years, but he promotes them fairly vigorously. I suppose he hopes that the name will catch on, that people will start yelling for their Bumbles as they do for their wellie-boots.”

  Rickards said: “It looks fresh enough. When did we last get rain? Late on Saturday night, wasn’t it?”

  “About eleven. It was over by midnight, but it was a heavy shower.”

  “And there’s no tree cover on this part of the path. The print’s perfectly smooth. If it was made before midnight on Saturday I’d expect some spotting. Interesting that there’s only the one and that it’s pointing away from the sea. If someone wearing Bumble trainers came along this path any time on Sunday, you’d expect to find at least one similar print on the upper reaches of the beach.”

  “Not necessarily, sir. The shingle comes up almost as high as the path in places. We’d get no prints if he stayed on the pebbles. But if it was made on Sunday before she died, would it still be here? She must have come along this path.”

  “No reason why she would have trodden on it. It’s well to the right of the path. It’s odd, though. Too plain, too distinctive, too opportune. You could almost believe it’s been deliberately made to deceive us.”

  “They sell Bumble trainers at the sports shop in Blakeney, sir. I could send a chap to buy a pair of size ten as soon as they open.”

  “See that he’s in plain clothes and buys them as an ordinary purchaser. I need confirmation of the pattern before we start asking people to turn out their shoe cupboards. We’re going to be dealing with intelligent suspects. I don’t want a balls-up at the beginning of the case.”

  “Pity to waste time, sir. My brother owns a pair of Bumbles. The print’s unmistakable.”

  Rickards said obstinately: “I need confirmation, and I want it fast.”

  Oliphant replaced the box and the plastic cover, then followed him back to the beach. Rickards was uncomfortably aware of the almost physical weight of resentment, antagonism and slight contempt which seemed to flow from the sergeant. But he was lumbered with the man. Oliphant had been part of the team bearing the brunt of the Whistler investigation and, although this admittedly was a different enquiry, it would be difficult to replace him without causing personal or logistical problems which Rickards was anxious to avoid. During the fifteen-month hunt for the Whistler, his mild dislike of the sergeant had grown into an antipathy which he knew to be not wholly reasonable and which he had tried to discipline in the interests both of the investigation and of his own self-regard. A serial murder was difficult enough without personal complications.

  He had no real evidence that Oliphant was a bully; he only looked like one. He was six feet of disciplined flesh and muscle, dark and conventionally handsome with rather pudgy features, full-lipped and hard-eyed, with a fleshy chin like a doughnut, dented in the middle with a deep dimple. Rickards found it difficult to keep his eyes off it. His repugnance to the man had elevated it to a deformity. Oliphant drank too much, but that was an occupational hazard for a policeman. The fact that Rickards had never seen him actually drunk only increased the offence. A man shouldn’t be able to put away that amount of alcohol and still stand firmly on his feet.

  He was meticulous in his attitude to senior officers, respectful without being servile, but subtly managed to give Rickards the impression that he wasn’t quite measuring up to the standards Oliphant had privately set for him. He was popular enough with the less sensitive probationers; the others wisely kept clear of him
. Rickards told himself that, if he were ever in trouble, Oliphant was the last police officer he would wish to see on his doorstep. Oliphant would probably regard that sentiment as a compliment. And there had never been from the public even the whisper of a complaint against him. That too, unreasonably, made Rickards suspicious. It suggested that where his interests were at stake the man was devious enough to act against his essential nature. He was unmarried but managed, without the crudity of actual boasting, to give the impression that women found him irresistible. Probably a number did, but at least he kept clear of his colleagues’ wives. In all, he represented most of the qualities in a young detective which Rickards disliked: aggression only controlled because control was prudent, a frank relish for power, too much sexual assurance and an inflated opinion of his own capabilities. But those capabilities weren’t negligible. Oliphant would make Chief Inspector at least and might go higher. Rickards had never managed to bring himself to use his sergeant’s nickname of Jumbo. Oliphant, so far from resenting a sobriquet both childish and basically unsuitable, seemed to tolerate, even to like it, at least in those colleagues he had privately authorized to use it. Less favoured mortals only used it once.

  Maitland-Brown was ready to make his preliminary report. Drawing himself up to his full six feet three inches, he peeled off his gloves and tossed them to a DC, rather like an actor casually divesting himself of part of his costume. It wasn’t his custom to discuss his findings at the scene. He did, however, condescend to announce them.

  “I’ll do the autopsy tomorrow and let you have a report by Wednesday. I doubt whether there will be any surprises. On a preliminary examination it’s clear enough. Death by strangulation. The implement was smooth and two centimetres in width, perhaps a belt, a strap or a dog lead. She was a tall, well-muscled woman. It would have taken strength but not inordinate strength, given the advantage of surprise. He probably stood in the shelter of the pines, then stepped out and slung the strap over her head as soon as she got back from the swim. She had just time to pick up her towel. She made one or two convulsive movements with the feet; you can see where the grass is marked. I estimate on the present evidence that she died between eight-thirty and ten.”