by P. D. James
Dalgliesh said: “But would he have killed in that way? Logically, the knowledge that the Whistler was dead negatives the method.”
“Not necessarily, Mr. Dalgliesh. Suppose it’s a doublebluff. Suppose he’s saying in effect, ‘Look, I can prove I knew the Whistler was dead. Whoever killed Hilary Robarts didn’t know. So why aren’t you looking for someone who hadn’t been told that the Whistler’s body had been found?’ And, by God, Mr. Dalgliesh, there’s another possibility. Suppose he knew that the Whistler was dead but thought that it was very recent. I asked Theresa precisely what George Jago had said to her. She remembered accurately; anyway, Jago confirmed it. Apparently he said: ‘Tell your dad the Whistler is dead. Killed himself. Just now, over at Easthaven.’ But no mention of the hotel, or of when the Whistler booked in. Jago didn’t know any of that. The message he’d got from his mate at the Crown and Anchor was pretty garbled. So Blaney could have assumed that the body was found in open country just five miles down the coast. He can kill with impunity. Everyone, including the police, will assume that the Whistler has claimed his last victim, then done away with himself. My God, Mr. Dalgliesh, that’s neat.”
Dalgliesh privately thought that it was more neat than convincing. He said: “So you’re assuming that the smashed portrait isn’t directly connected with the murder. I can’t see Blaney destroying his own work.”
“Why not? From what I saw of it, it wasn’t anything special.”
“I think it was to him.”
“The portrait is a puzzle, I’ll grant you that. And that’s not the only difficulty. Someone had a drink with Robarts before she took that last swim, someone she let into the cottage, someone she knew. There were those two glasses on the draining board and, in my book, that means two people were drinking. She wouldn’t have invited Blaney to Thyme Cottage, and if he turned up I doubt if she would have let him in, drunk or sober.”
Dalgliesh said: “But if you believe Miss Mair, your case against Blaney collapses anyway. She claims to have seen him at Scudder’s Cottage at nine-forty-five, or shortly afterwards, and he was then half-drunk. All right, he could have feigned his drunkenness; that wouldn’t present much difficulty. What he couldn’t do was to kill Hilary Robarts at about nine-twenty and get home by nine-forty-five, not without the use of a car or van, which he didn’t have.”
Rickards said: “Or a bicycle.”
“It would need fast pedalling. We know that she died after her swim, not before. Her hair was still damp at the roots when I found her. So you’re probably safe enough in putting the time of death at between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty. And he couldn’t have taken the bicycle with him and ridden back along the shore. The tide was high; he’d have been riding over the shingle, which would be more difficult than the road. There’s only one part of the shore where you get a stretch of sand at high tide, and that’s the small cove where Hilary Robarts swam. And if he had been on the road, Miss Mair must have seen him. She’s given him an alibi which I don’t think you’ll be able to break.”
Rickards said: “But he hasn’t given her one, has he? Her story is that she was alone in Martyr’s Cottage until she left just after nine-thirty to collect the portrait. She and that housekeeper at the Old Rectory, Mrs. Dennison, are the only ones who were at the Mairs’ dinner party who made no attempt to produce an alibi. And she has a motive. Hilary Robarts was her brother’s mistress. I know he tells us it was over, but we’ve only his word for that. Suppose they’d planned to marry when he goes to London. She’s devoted her life to her brother. Unmarried. No other outlet for her emotions. Why give way to another woman just when Mair is about to achieve his ambition?”
Dalgliesh thought that this was an altogether too facile explanation of a relationship which, even on his brief acquaintance, had seemed more complicated. He said: “She’s a successful professional writer. I imagine that success provides its own form of emotional fulfilment, assuming she needs it. She seemed to me very much her own woman.”
“I thought she wrote cookery books. Is that what you call being a successful professional writer?”
“Alice Mair’s books are highly regarded and extremely lucrative. We share the same publisher. If he had to make a choice between us, he’d probably prefer to lose me.”
“So you think the marriage might almost be a relief, release her from responsibilities? Let another woman cook and care for him for a change?”
“Why should he need any woman to care for him? It’s dangerous to theorize about people and their emotions, but I doubt whether she feels that kind of domestic, quasi-maternal responsibility or whether he either needs or wants it.”
“How do you see it, then, the relationship? They live together, after all, most of the time anyway. She’s fond of him, that seems to be generally accepted.”
“They’d hardly live together if they weren’t, if you can call it living together. She’s away a great deal, I understand, researching her books, and he has a London flat. How can someone who’s only met them together across the table at a dinner party get to the heart of their relationship? I should have thought that there was loyalty, trust, mutual respect. Ask them.”
“But not jealousy, of him or his mistress?”
“If there is, she’s clever at concealing it.”
“All right, Mr. Dalgliesh, take another scenario. Suppose he was tired of Robarts, suppose she’s pressing him to marry her, wants to quit the job, move to London with him. Suppose she’s making herself a nuisance. Wouldn’t Alice Mair feel like doing something about that?”
“Like devising and carrying out a singularly ingenious murder to relieve her brother of a temporary embarrassment? Isn’t that carrying sisterly devotion to unreasonable lengths?”
“Ah, but they aren’t temporary embarrassments, are they, these determined women? Think. How many men do you know who’ve been forced into marriage they didn’t really want because the woman’s will was stronger than theirs? Or because they couldn’t stand all the fuss, the tears, recriminations, the emotional blackmail?”
Dalgliesh said: “She could hardly blackmail him with the relationship itself. Neither was married; they weren’t deceiving anyone; they weren’t causing public scandal. And I can’t see anyone, man or woman, coercing Alex Mair into something he didn’t want to do. I know it’s dangerous to make facile judgements, although that’s what we’ve been doing for the last five minutes, but he seems to me a man who lives his life on his own terms and probably always has.”
“Which might make him vicious if someone tried to stop him.”
“So now you’re casting him as murderer?”
“I’m casting him as a strong suspect.”
Dalgliesh asked: “What about that couple at the caravan? Is there any evidence that they knew about the Whistler’s methods?”
“None that we could discover, but how certain can you be? The man, Neil Pascoe, gets about in that van of his, drinks in local pubs. He could have heard some talk. Not every policeman on the case has necessarily been discreet. We’ve kept the details out of the papers, but that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been talk. He’s got an alibi of sorts. He took the van just south of Norwich to talk to a chap there who’d written to him expressing interest in PANUP, that anti-nuclear organization of his. Had some hopes, apparently, of getting a group started there. I sent a couple of DCs to see the chap. He says they were together until just after eight-twenty, when Pascoe started for home—said he was starting for home, anyway. The girl he lives with, Amy Camm, says he got back to the caravan by nine o’clock and that they were together for the rest of the evening. My guess is that he got back a bit later. In that van he must have been pushing it a bit to get from beyond Norwich to Larksoken in forty minutes. And he’s got a motive, one of the strongest. If Hilary Robarts had gone ahead with her libel action, it could have ruined him. And it’s in Camm’s interest to support his alibi. She’s got herself very cosily fixed up with the kid in that caravan. I’ll tell you something else,
Mr. Dalgliesh: They had a dog once. The lead is still hanging inside the caravan.”
“But if one or both of them used it to strangle Robarts, would it be?”
“People might have seen it. They might have thought it would have been more suspicious to destroy or hide it than to leave it there. We took it away, of course, but it was little more than a formality. Robarts’s skin was unbroken. There’ll be no physical traces. And if we do manage to get prints, they’ll be hers and his. We shall go on checking the alibis, obviously. Every blasted employee at that station, and there are over five hundred of them. You’d never believe that, would you? You go in the place and hardly set sight on a soul. They seem to move through the countryside as invisibly as the energy they’re generating. Most of them live at Cromer or Norwich. They want to be near schools and shops, presumably. Only a handful choose to live near the station. Most of the Sunday day shift were home well before ten and virtuously watching the telly or out with their friends. We shall check on them, whether or not they had anything to do with Robarts at work. But it’s only a formality. I know where to look for my suspects, the guests at that dinner party. Due to Lessingham’s inability to keep his mouth shut, they were told two crucial facts: that the hair stuffed into her mouth was pubic hair, and the mark on the forehead was an L. So that narrows the field very conveniently. Alex Mair, Alice Mair, Margaret Dennison, Lessingham himself and, assuming that Theresa Blaney reported the conversation to her father, you can add Blaney. All right, I may not be able to break his alibi, his or Mair’s, but I shall have a damn good try.”
Ten minutes later Rickards got to his feet and said it was time to get home. Dalgliesh walked with him to his car. The cloud level was low, the earth and sky subsumed in the same obliterating darkness in which the cold glitter of the power station seemed to have moved closer, and there lay over the sea a pale-blue luminosity, like the faint semblance of a newly discovered Milky Way. Even to feel the ground strike hard beneath their feet was disorientating in this blackness, and for a few seconds both men hesitated, as if the ten yards to the car, gleaming like some floating spacecraft in the light spilling from the open door, was an odyssey over dangerous and insubstantial ground. Above them the sails of the mill gleamed white and silent, potent with latent power. For a moment Dalgliesh had the illusion that they were about to begin slowly turning.
Rickards said: “Everything on this headland is contrast. After I left Pascoe’s caravan this morning I stood on those low sandy cliffs and looked south. There was nothing but an old fishing smack, a coiled rope, an upturned box, that awful sea. It must have looked like that for near on a thousand years. And then I faced north and saw that bloody great power station. There it is, glittering away. And I’m seeing it under the shadow of the mill. Does it work, by the way? The mill, I mean.”
Dalgliesh said: “I’m told so. The sails turn but it doesn’t grind. The original millstones are in the lower chamber. Occasionally I have a wish to see the sails slowly turning, but I resist. I’m not sure, once started, whether I could stop them. It would be irritating to hear them creaking away all night.”
They had reached the car, but Rickards, pausing with his hand on the door, seemed reluctant to get in. He said: “We’ve moved a long way, haven’t we, between this mill and the power station? What is it? Four miles of headland and three hundred years of progress. And then I think of those two bodies in the morgue and wonder if we’ve progressed at all. Dad would have talked about original sin. He was a lay preacher, was Dad. He had it all worked out.”
So had mine, come to that, thought Dalgliesh. He said: “Lucky Dad.” There was a moment’s silence, broken by the sound of the telephone, its insistent peal clearly heard through the open door. Dalgliesh said: “You’d better wait a moment. It could be for you.”
It was. Oliphant’s voice asked if Chief Inspector Rickards was there. He wasn’t at his home and Dalgliesh’s number was one of those which he’d left.
The call was brief. Less than a minute later Rickards joined him at the open door. The slight melancholy of the last few minutes had fallen away and his step was buoyant.
“It could have waited until tomorrow, but Oliphant wanted me to know. This could be the breakthrough we’ve needed. There’s been a call from the lab. They must have been working on it non-stop. Oliphant told you, I imagine, that we found a footprint.”
“He did mention it. On the right-hand side of the path, in soft sand. He didn’t give any details.”
And Dalgliesh, punctilious in not discussing a case with a junior officer in the absence of Rickards, hadn’t asked.
“We’ve just got confirmation. It’s the sole of a Bumble trainer, the right foot. Size ten. The pattern on the sole is unique, apparently, and they have a yellow bee on each heel. You must have seen them.” Then, when Dalgliesh didn’t reply, he said: “For God’s sake, Mr. Dalgliesh, don’t tell me that you own a pair. That’s a complication I can do without.”
“No, I don’t own them. Bumbles are too fashionable for me. But I’ve seen a pair recently, and here on the headland.”
“On whose feet?”
“They weren’t on any feet.” He thought for a moment, then said: “I remember now. Last Wednesday morning, the day after I arrived, I took some of my aunt’s clothes, including two pairs of her shoes, to the Old Rectory for the church jumble. They keep a couple of tea chests in an old scullery there where people can leave things they don’t want. The back door was open, as it usually is in daylight, so I didn’t bother to knock. There was a pair of Bumbles among the other shoes. Or, more accurately, I saw the heel of one shoe. I imagine the other was there, but I didn’t see it.”
“On top of the chest?”
“No, about a third down. I think they were in a transparent plastic bag. As I say, I didn’t see the whole pair, but I did glimpse one heel with the unmistakable yellow bee. It’s possible that they were Toby Gledhill’s. Lessingham mentioned that he was wearing Bumbles when he killed himself.”
“And you left the trainers there. You see the importance of what you’re saying, Mr. Dalgliesh?”
“Yes, I see the importance of what I’m saying, and yes, I left the shoe there. I was donating jumble, not stealing it.”
Rickards said: “If there was a pair, and common sense suggests that there was, anyone could have taken them. And if they’re no longer in the chest, it looks as though somebody did.” He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch and said: “Eleven-forty-five. What time do you suppose Mrs. Dennison goes to bed?”
Dalgliesh said firmly: “Earlier than this, I imagine. And she’d hardly go to bed without bolting the back door. So if someone did take them and they’re still missing, they can’t be returned tonight.”
They had reached the car. Rickards, with his hand on the door, didn’t reply but gazed out over the headland as if in thought. His excitement, carefully controlled and unspoken, was as palpable as if he had banged his fists against the car bonnet. Then he unlocked the door and slipped inside. The headlights cut into the darkness like searchlights.
As he wound down the window to say a final good night, Dalgliesh said: “There’s something I ought perhaps to mention about Meg Dennison. I don’t know whether you remember, but she was the teacher at the centre of that race-row in inner London. I imagine that she’s had about as much interrogation as she can take. That means the interview might not be easy for you.”
He had thought carefully before he spoke, knowing that it might be a mistake. It was a mistake. The question, however carefully phrased, had sparked off that latent antagonism of which he was uneasily aware in all his dealings with Rickards.
Rickards said: “What you mean, Mr. Dalgliesh, is that it might not be easy for her. I’ve already spoken to the lady and I know something about her past. It took a lot of courage to stand up for her principles as she did. Some might say a lot of obstinacy. A woman who is capable of that has guts enough for anything, wouldn’t you say?”
4
Dalgliesh watched the car lights until Rickards reached the coastal road and turned right, then locked the door and began a desultory tidying-up before bed. Looking back over the evening, he recognized that he had been reluctant to talk to Rickards at length about his Friday-morning visit to Larksoken Power Station and less than open about his reactions, perhaps because they had been more complex and the place itself more impressive than he had expected. He had been asked to arrive by 8.45, since Mair wanted to escort him personally and had to leave for a luncheon appointment in London. At the beginning of the visit Mair had asked: “How much do you know about nuclear power?”
“Very little. Perhaps it might be wiser to assume that I know nothing.”
“In that case we’d better begin with the usual preamble about sources of radiation, and what is meant by nuclear power, nuclear energy and atomic energy, before we begin our tour of the plant. I’ve asked Miles Lessingham, as Operations Superintendent, to join us.”
It was the beginning of an extraordinary two hours. Dalgliesh, escorted by his two mentors, was garbed in protective clothing, divested of it, checked for radioactivity, subjected to an almost constant stream of facts and figures. He was aware, even coming as an outsider, that the station was run with exceptional efficiency, that a quietly competent and respected authority was in control. Alex Mair, ostensibly there to escort a man afforded the status of a distinguished visitor, was never uninvolved, always quietly watchful, obviously in charge. And the staff Dalgliesh met impressed him with their dedication as they patiently explained their jobs in terms which an intelligent layman could understand. He sensed beneath their professionalism a commitment to nuclear power amounting in some cases to a controlled enthusiasm combined with a defensiveness which was probably natural given the public’s ambivalence about nuclear energy. When one of the engineers said: “It’s a dangerous technology but we need it and we can manage it,” he heard, not the arrogance of scientific certainty, but a reverence for the element which they controlled, almost the love-hate relationship of a sailor for the sea, which was both a respected enemy and his natural habitat. If the tour had been designed to reassure, then it had to some extent succeeded. If nuclear power was safe in any hands, then it would be safe in these. But how safe, and for how long?