by P. D. James
“It’s irritating that he’s on your patch, but he’s one of the Met’s senior detectives, the Commissioner’s blue-eyed boy. And he knows these people. He was at the Mair dinner party. He found the body. He’s got useful information. All right, he’s a professional, he’s not going to withhold it, but you’ll get it more easily and make life more agreeable for both of you if you stop treating him like a rival or, worse, a suspect.”
Handing Rickards his whisky, Dalgliesh enquired after his wife.
“She’s fine, fine.” But there was something forced in his tone.
Dalgliesh said: “I suppose, now the Whistler’s dead, she’ll be coming home.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I’d like it, she’d like it, but there’s the little problem of Sue’s ma. She doesn’t want her ewe-lamb mixed up with any unpleasantness, particularly murder, and particularly just now.”
Dalgliesh said: “It’s difficult to isolate yourself from unpleasantness, even murder, if you marry a police officer.”
“She never intended Sue to marry a police officer.”
Dalgliesh was surprised at the bitterness in his voice. Again, he was uncomfortably aware that he was being asked for some kind of assurance which he, of all men, was least competent to give. While he was searching for the anodyne phrase he glanced again at Rickards’s face, at the look of weariness, almost of defeat, at the lines which the fitful light of the wood fire made even more cavernous, and took refuge in practicality.
He asked: “Have you eaten?”
“Oh, I’ll get myself something from the fridge when I get back.”
“There’s the remains of a cassoulet, if you’d like it. It won’t take a moment to heat up.”
“Wouldn’t say no, Mr. Dalgliesh.”
He ate the cassoulet from a tray on his lap voraciously, as if it were his first meal for days, and afterwards mopped up the sauce with a crust of bread. Only once did he look up from his plate to ask: “Did you cook this, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“If you live alone you have to learn at least simple cooking if you’re not prepared to be always dependent on someone else for one of the essentials of life.”
“And that wouldn’t suit you, would it? Dependent on someone else for an essential of life?”
But he spoke without bitterness and carried the tray and the empty plate back into the kitchen with a smile. A second later Dalgliesh heard the splash of running water. Rickards was washing up his plate.
He must have been hungrier than he had realized. Dalgliesh knew how mistakenly easy it was, when working a sixteen-hour day, to suppose that one could function effectively on a diet of coffee and snatched sandwiches. Returning from the kitchen, Rickards leaned back in his chair with a small grunt of contentment. The colour had returned to his face, and when he spoke his voice was strong again.
“Her dad was Peter Robarts. Remember him?”
“No, should I?”
“No reason. Nor did I, but I’ve had time to look him up. He made a packet after the war, in which, incidentally, he served with some distinction. One of those chaps with an eye for the main chance, which in his case was plastics. It must have been quite a time for the wide boys, the 1950s and ’60s. She was his only child. He made his fortune quickly and he lost it as fast. The usual reasons: extravagance, ostentatious generosity, women, throwing his money around as if he were printing it, thinking his luck would hold, whatever the odds. He was lucky not to end up inside. The fraud squad had put together a nice little case against him and were within days of making an arrest when he had his coronary. Slumped forward into his lunch plate at Simpson’s as dead as the duck he was eating. It must have been difficult for her, daddy’s little girl one day, nothing too good, and then near-disgrace, death, poverty.”
Dalgliesh said: “Relative poverty, but that, of course, is what poverty is. You’ve been busy.”
“Some but not much we got from Mair, some we had to grub around for. The City of London police have been helpful. I’ve been speaking to Wood Street. I used to tell myself that nothing about the victim was irrelevant, but I’m beginning to wonder if much of this grubbing about isn’t a waste of time.”
Dalgliesh said: “It’s the only safe way to work. The victim dies because she is uniquely herself.”
“‘And once you comprehend the life, you comprehend the death.’ Old Blanco White—remember him?—used to drum that into us when I was a young DC. And what do you get in the end? A jumble of facts like an upturned waste-paper basket. They don’t really add up to a person. And with this victim the pickings are small. She travelled light. There was little worth finding in that cottage, no diary, no letters except one to her solicitor making an appointment for next weekend and telling him she expected to be married. We’ve seen him, of course. He doesn’t know the name of the man, nor, apparently, does anyone else, including Mair. We found no other papers of importance except a copy of her will. And there’s nothing exciting about that. She left everything she had to Alex Mair in two lines of bald lawyer’s prose. But I can’t see Mair killing her for twelve thousand pounds on NatWest’s special reserve account and a practically derelict cottage with a sitting tenant. Apart from the will and that one letter, only the usual bank statements, receipted bills, the place obsessively tidy. You could imagine she knew she was going to die and had tidied away her life. No sign of a recent search, incidentally. If there was something in the cottage the murderer wanted, and he smashed that window to get it, he covered his tracks pretty effectively.”
Dalgliesh said: “If he did have to smash the window to get in, then he probably wasn’t Dr. Mair. Mair knew that the key was in the locket. He could have taken it, used it and put it back. There would be an additional risk of leaving evidence at the scene, and some murderers dislike returning to the body. Others, of course, feel a compulsion to do so. But if Mair did take the key, he’d have had to put it back, whatever the risk. An empty locket would have pointed directly to him.”
Rickards said: “Cyril Alexander Mair, but he’s dropped the ‘Cyril.’ Probably thinks ‘Sir Alexander Mair’ will sound better than ‘Sir Cyril.’ What’s wrong with ‘Cyril’? My grandfather was called Cyril. I’ve got a prejudice against people who don’t use their proper names. She was his mistress, incidentally.”
“Did he tell you?”
“More or less had to, didn’t he? They were very discreet, but one or two of the senior staff at the station must have known, known or suspected it, anyway. He’s too intelligent to keep back information he knows we’re bound to discover sooner or later. His story is that the affair was over, a natural end by common consent. He expects to move to London; she wanted to stay here. Well, she more or less had to, unless she gave up her job, and she was a career woman, the job was important. His story is that what they felt for each other wasn’t robust enough to be sustained by occasional weekend meetings—his words, not mine. You’d think that the whole affair was a matter of convenience. While he was here he needed a woman, she needed a man. The goods have to be handy. No point if you’re a hundred miles apart. Rather like buying meat. He’s moving to London, she decided to stay. Find another butcher.”
Dalgliesh remembered that Rickards had always been slightly censorious about sex. He could hardly have been a detective for twenty years without encountering adultery and fornication in their various guises, apart from the more bizarre and horrifying manifestations of human sexuality beside which adultery and fornication were comfortingly normal. But this didn’t mean that he liked them. He had taken his oath as a police constable and kept it. He had made his marriage vows in church and no doubt intended to keep them. And in a job where irregular hours, drink, macho camaraderie and the propinquity of women police officers made marriages vulnerable, his was known to be solid. He was too experienced and basically too fair to allow himself to be prejudiced, but in one respect at least Mair was unlucky in the detective assigned to the case.
Rickards said: “Her secretary, Katie Flack, ha
s just given notice. Found her too demanding, apparently. There was a recent row over the girl’s taking more than her allotted lunch hour. And one of her staff, Brian Taylor, admits that he found her impossible to work for and had asked for a transfer. Admirably frank about it all. He can afford to be. He was at a friend’s stag party at the Maid’s Head in Norwich with at least ten witnesses from eight o’clock onwards. And the girl hasn’t anything to worry about either. She spent the evening watching TV with her family.”
Dalgliesh asked: “Just the family?”
“No. Luckily for her the neighbours called in just before nine to discuss the dresses for their daughter’s wedding. She’s to be a bridesmaid. Lemon dresses with bouquets of small white and yellow chrysanthemums. Very tasteful. We got a full description. I suppose she thought it added to the verisimilitude of the alibi. Anyway, they were neither of them serious suspects. These days if you don’t like your boss you pack in the job. Both of them were shocked, of course, and slightly defensive. They probably felt she’d got herself killed on purpose to put them in the wrong. Neither of them pretended that they had liked her. But there was something stronger than dislike about this killing. And this may surprise you, Mr. Dalgliesh. Robarts wasn’t particularly unpopular with the senior staff. They respect efficiency and she was efficient. Besides, her responsibilities didn’t directly impinge on theirs. It was her job to see that the station was efficiently administered so that the scientific and technical staff could do their job most effectively. Apparently that’s what she did. They answered my questions without fuss, but they weren’t particularly forthcoming. There’s a kind of camaraderie about the place. I suppose if you feel yourself constantly under criticism or attack it makes for a certain wariness in dealing with outsiders. Only one of them said he actually disliked her, Miles Lessingham. But he has produced an alibi of a kind. He claims to have been on his boat at the time of death. And he made no secret of his feelings. He didn’t want to eat with her or drink with her or spend his spare time with her or go to bed with her. But, as he pointed out, he feels that about a number of people and hasn’t found any impulse to murder them.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Dr. Mair showed you round the power station on Friday morning, didn’t he?”
Dalgliesh asked: “Did he tell you that?”
“Dr. Mair didn’t tell me anything he didn’t actually have to tell me. No, it came out when we were talking to one of the junior staff, a local girl who works in the Establishment Division. Chatty little thing. I got a lot of useful stuff out of her, one way or another. I was wondering if anything happened on your visit which could be relevant.”
Dalgliesh resisted the temptation to reply that if there had been he would have said so before now. He replied: “It was an interesting visit and the place rather impressive. Dr. Mair attempted to explain to me the difference between the thermal reactor and the new pressurized water reactor. Most of the talk was technical, except when he spoke briefly about poetry. Miles Lessingham showed me the high fuelling machine from which Toby Gledhill plunged to his death. It did strike me that Gledhill’s suicide could be relevant, but I don’t see how. It was obviously distressing to Lessingham, and not only because he witnessed it. There was a rather cryptic exchange at the Mairs’ dinner party between him and Hilary Robarts.”
Rickards crouched forward, his huge hand cradling the whisky glass. Without looking up, he said: “The Mair dinner party. I reckon that cosy little gathering—if it was cosy—is at the nub of this case. And there’s something I wanted to ask you. That’s really why I’m here. That child Theresa Blaney, exactly how much of the conversation about the latest Whistler victim did she overhear?”
It was the question Dalgliesh had been expecting. What surprised him was how long it had taken Rickards to ask it.
He said carefully: “Some of it, undoubtedly. You know that, I’ve told you already. I couldn’t say how long she’d been standing behind the dining-room door before I noticed her, or how much of the conversation she actually heard.”
“Can you remember what stage in his account Lessingham had reached at the time you saw Theresa?”
“I can’t be certain. I think he was describing the body, exactly what he saw when he returned with his torch.”
“So she could have heard about the cut on the forehead and the pubic hair.”
“But would she have told her father about the hair? She had a devoutly religious mother, an RC. I don’t really know the child, but I imagine that she’s unusually modest. Would a gently nurtured, modest girl tell that to any man, even to her father?”
“Gently nurtured? Modest? You’re sixty years out of date. Spend half an hour in any secondary-school playground and you’ll hear things that’ll curl your hair. Today’s kids will say anything to anyone.”
“Not that child.”
“All right, but she could have told her dad about the L-shaped cut, and he could have guessed about the hair. Damn it, everyone knew that the Whistler’s murders must have had a sexual connotation. He didn’t rape them, but that wasn’t how he got his kicks. You don’t need to be Krafft—what’s his name?”
“Krafft-Ebing.”
“Sounds like a cheese. You don’t need to be Krafft-Ebing, you don’t even need to be sexually sophisticated, to guess what kind of hair the Whistler helped himself to.”
Dalgliesh said: “But this is important, isn’t it, if you’re casting Blaney as chief suspect? Would he, or anyone else, kill that way if he wasn’t certain about the Whistler’s method? He could only hope to pin it on the Whistler by getting all the details right. If you can’t prove that Theresa told her father both about the hair and the L-shaped cut, your case is considerably weakened. I would doubt whether you had one. Besides, I thought that Oliphant said that Blaney had an alibi both from Miss Mair, who said he was drunk and at home by nine-forty-five, and from his daughter. Wasn’t her story that she went to bed at eight-fifteen and came down just before nine to get herself a drink of water?”
“That’s what she said, Mr. Dalgliesh. But I’ll tell you this: That child would confirm any story that her dad chose to tell. And the timing is suspiciously accurate. Robarts dies at nine-twenty or as near as, damn it. Theresa Blaney goes to bed at eight-fifteen and conveniently needs a drink of water forty-five minutes later. I wish you could have seen her, and seen that cottage. But of course you have. Two WPCs from the juvenile bureau were with me, and they treated her as tenderly as a babe-in-arms. Not that she needed it. We all sat round the fire in a cosy little circle and she held the kid in her lap. Ever tried questioning a child to discover if her dad’s a murderer while she’s sitting there gazing at you with those huge reproachful eyes and nursing a baby? I suggested that she hand the kid over to one of the WPCs, but as soon as she tried to take him he immediately started up a howling. Wouldn’t let his dad take him either. You’d think that Theresa and he had arranged it between them. And Ryan Blaney was there too, of course, throughout the interview. You can’t question a child without the parent being present if the parent wants to be. My God, when I arrest someone for this murder—and I shall, Mr. Dalgliesh, this time I shall—I hope it doesn’t have to be Ryan Blaney. Those kids have lost enough already. But he’s got the strongest motive of all, and he hated Robarts. I don’t think he could conceal that hatred if he tried, and he didn’t even attempt to try. And it’s not only that she was trying to force him out of Scudder’s Cottage. It goes deeper than that. I don’t know what’s at the root of it. Something to do with his wife, maybe. But I’ll find out. He left the kids in the cottage and walked out with us to the cars. The last thing he said was: ‘She was an evil bitch and I’m glad she’s dead. But I didn’t kill her, and you can’t prove I did.’
“And I know the objections. Jago says he telephoned at about seven-thirty to let him know the Whistler was dead. He spoke to Theresa and the kid says she told her dad. No reason why she shouldn’t tell him. I think we take it that she did. He wouldn’t have left the kids alone in th
at cottage with the Whistler alive and on the prowl. No responsible father would, and it’s generally admitted he’s a responsible father. We’ve got the local authority’s word for that, by the way. A fortnight ago they sent a social worker just to check that everything was all right. And I’ll tell you who instigated that, Mr. Dalgliesh. Now, this is interesting. It was Robarts.”
“Did she make any specific allegations?”
“None. Her story was that she had to visit from time to time to discuss repairs and so on, and that she was concerned at the weight of responsibility he was carrying and thought he could do with some help. Talked about seeing Theresa lugging heavy shopping home with the twins tagging along, sometimes when Theresa should have been at school. Phoned the local authority to send a social worker along. The social worker satisfied herself, apparently, that things were going as well as could be expected. The twins are already attending a playgroup, and she offered additional services including a home help, but she didn’t find Blaney either welcoming or co-operative. Don’t know that I blame him. I wouldn’t want the Welfare on my back.”
“Does Blaney know that Hilary Robarts instigated the visit?”
“The local authority didn’t tell him; it isn’t their policy. And I don’t see how he could have found out. But if he did find out, it considerably strengthens his motive, doesn’t it? That visit could have been the last straw.”