by P. D. James
“Don’t you talk about a wife’s place to me, please, Terry. You’ll be talking about Susie’s duty next. And what about your duty to her? You’ve told her that you can’t get away to fetch her, and I’m certainly not having my grandchild born on a British Rail train. Susie is staying here until this latest murder is solved and you can find time to fetch her.”
And then he was cut off. Slowly he replaced the receiver and stood waiting. Perhaps Susie would ring back. He could, of course, ring again, but he knew with a sick hopelessness that there would be no use. She wasn’t going to come. And then the telephone rang. He snatched up the receiver and said eagerly: “Hello? Hello?”
But it was only Sergeant Oliphant ringing from the incident room at Hoveton, an early call letting him know that Oliphant either had been up all night or had snatched even less sleep than him. His own four hours now seemed an indulgence.
“The Chief Constable’s trying to get you, sir. I told his PA there’d be no point in ringing home. You’d be on your way here by now.”
“I shall be on my way in five minutes. Not to Hoveton, but to the Old Rectory at Larksoken. Mr. Dalgliesh has given us a strong lead on the Bumble trainers. Meet me outside the rectory in three-quarters of an hour. And you’d better ring Mrs. Dennison now. Tell her to keep the back door locked and not to admit anyone to the house until we come. Don’t alarm her; just say that there are one or two questions we have to put to her and we’d rather she spoke to us this morning before she talked to anyone else.”
If Oliphant was excited at the news he managed to conceal it. He said: “You haven’t forgotten that PR have fixed a press conference for ten, sir? Bill Starling from the local radio has been on to me, but I told him he’ll have to wait until then. And I think the CC wants to know if we’re going to release the approximate time of death.”
And the Chief Constable wasn’t the only one. It had been useful to fudge the approximate time of the murder, to avoid stating categorically that this couldn’t have been the work of the Whistler. But sooner or later they would have to come clean, and once the post-mortem report was to hand it would be difficult to parry the media’s insistent questions. He said: “We shan’t release any forensic information until we get the written report of the autopsy.”
“We’ve got that now, sir. Doc Maitland-Brown dropped it in about twenty minutes ago on his way to the hospital. He was sorry he couldn’t wait to see you.”
I’ll bet he was, thought Rickards. Nothing, of course, would have been said; Dr. Maitland-Brown didn’t gossip with junior police officers. But there must have been a cosy atmosphere of mutual self-congratulation in the incident room on their joint early start to the day. He said: “There’s no reason why he should have waited. All the stuff we need from him will be in the report. Better open it now, give me the gist.”
He heard the receiver being placed down on the desk. There was a silence of less than a minute; then Oliphant spoke: “No sign of recent sexual activity. She wasn’t raped. Seems she was an exceptionally healthy woman until someone slung a ligature round her neck and strangled her. He can be a bit more precise about the time of death now he’s seen the stomach contents, but he hasn’t changed his first estimate. Between eight-thirty and nine-forty-five, but if we want to make it nine-twenty he won’t object. And she wasn’t pregnant, sir.”
“All right, Sergeant. I’ll be with you outside the Old Rectory in about forty-five minutes.”
But he was damned if he was going to face a heavy day without breakfast. Quickly he peeled a couple of rashers from the packet in the refrigerator and placed them under the grill, turning it to full power, then switched on the kettle and reached for a mug. Time for one mug of strong coffee; then he’d put the rashers between two hunks of bread and eat them in the car.
Forty minutes later, driving through Lydsett, he thought about the previous evening. He hadn’t suggested to Adam Dalgliesh that he should come with the police to the Old Rectory. It wasn’t necessary; his information had been precise and specific, and it hardly needed a Commander of the Metropolitan Police to point out a tea chest of discarded shoes. But there was another reason. He had been happy enough to drink Dalgliesh’s whisky, eat his stew, or whatever it was he had called it, to discuss the salient points of the investigation. What else, after all, had they in common except their jobs? But that certainly didn’t mean that he wanted Dalgliesh present while he was actually doing it. He had been glad the previous evening to call at the mill, grateful that he hadn’t had to return to an empty house, had sat companionably by the wood fire and had felt, by the end of the evening, at least comfortably at ease. But once he was away from Dalgliesh’s physical presence, the old uncertainties returned, as they had with such disconcerting force at the deathbed of the Whistler. He knew he would never be totally at one with the man and he knew why. He had only to think of the incident now and the old resentment would come flooding back. And yet it had happened nearly twelve years ago, and he doubted whether Dalgliesh even remembered it. That, of course, was the greater part of the injury, that words which had remained in his memory for years, which at the time had humiliated him and almost destroyed his confidence as a detective, could be so easily spoken and apparently so quickly forgotten.
The place was a small top room in a narrow warren of a house behind the Edgware Road, the victim a fifty-year-old prostitute. She had been dead for over a week when they found her, and the stink in the cluttered, airless hovel had been so disgusting that he had had to press his handkerchief against his mouth to hold back the vomit. One of the DCs had been less successful. He had rushed to throw open the window and might have made it if the pane hadn’t been grimed fast. He himself had been unable to swallow, as if his own spittle had become contaminated. The handkerchief held against his mouth was soaked with saliva. She had been lying naked among the bottles, the pills, the half-eaten food, an obscene putrefying lump of flesh only a foot from the brimming chamber-pot which she hadn’t in the end been able to reach. But that had been the least of the stench in the room. After the pathologist had left, Rickards had turned to the nearest DC and said: “For God’s sake, can’t we get this thing out of here?”
And then he had heard Dalgliesh’s voice from the doorway like a whiplash.
“Sergeant, the word is ‘body.’ Or, if you prefer, there’s ‘cadaver,’ ‘corpse,’ ‘victim,’ even ‘deceased’ if you must. What you are looking at was a woman. She was not a thing when she was alive and she is not a thing now.”
He could still react physically to the memory of it, feel the tightening of the stomach muscles, the hot surge of anger. He shouldn’t have let it pass, of course, not a public rebuke like that, not in front of the DCs. He should have looked the arrogant bastard in the face and spoken the truth, even if it had cost him his stripes.
“But she isn’t a woman now, is she, sir? She’s not a human being any more, is she? So if she isn’t human, what is she?”
It had been the unfairness that had rankled. There were a dozen of his colleagues who would have merited that cold rebuke, but not him. He had never at any time since his promotion to the CID seen the victim as an unimportant lump of flesh, never taken a prurient, half-shameful pleasure in the sight of a naked body, had rarely seen even the most degraded, most disgusting of victims without some pity, and often with pain. His words had been totally out of character, torn from him out of hopelessness, tiredness after a nineteen-hour day, out of uncontrollable physical disgust. It was bad luck that they should have been overheard by Dalgliesh, a DCI whose cold sarcasm could be more devastating than another officer’s bawled obscenities. They had continued working together for another six months. Nothing further had been said. Apparently Dalgliesh had found his work satisfactory; at least there hadn’t been any further criticism. There hadn’t been any praise either. He had been scrupulously correct to his superior officer; Dalgliesh had acted as if the incident had never taken place. If he later regretted his words, he had never said so. Perhaps
he would have been amazed to know how bitterly, almost obsessively, they had been resented. But now, for the first time, Rickards wondered whether Dalgliesh too might not have been under strain, driven by his own compulsions, finding relief in the bitterness of words. After all, hadn’t he at the time recently lost his wife and newborn child? But what had that to do with a dead prostitute in a London whorehouse? And he should have known better. That was the nub of it. He should have known his man. It seemed to Rickards that to remember the incident for so long and with such anger was almost paranoid. But the thought of Dalgliesh on his patch had brought it all back. Worse things had happened to him, more serious criticisms accepted and forgotten. But this he couldn’t forget. Sitting by the wood fire in Larksoken Mill, drinking Dalgliesh’s whisky, nearly equal in rank, secure on his own patch, it had seemed to him that the past might be put aside. But he knew now that it couldn’t. Without that memory, he and Adam Dalgliesh might have become friends. Now he respected him, admired him, valued his opinion, could even feel at ease with him. But he told himself that he could never like him.
6
Oliphant was waiting outside the Old Rectory, not sitting in the car but lolling cross-legged against the bonnet and reading a tabloid newspaper. The impression given and no doubt intended was that he had been wasting time there for the past ten minutes. As the car approached he straightened up and handed over the paper. He said: “They’ve gone to town a bit, sir. Only to be expected, I suppose.”
The story hadn’t made the front page but was spread over the two centre pages with black headlines and a screamer: “Not again!” The byline was that of the paper’s crime correspondent. Rickards read: “I have today learned that Neville Potter, the man now identified as the Whistler, who killed himself in the Balmoral Hotel at Easthaven on Sunday, had been interviewed by the police early in their enquiry and eliminated. The question is, why? The police knew the type of man they were looking for. A loner. Probably unmarried or divorced. Unsociable. A man with a car and a job that took him out at night. Neville Potter was just such a man. If he had been caught when he was first interviewed, the lives of four innocent women could have been saved. Have we learned nothing from the Yorkshire Ripper fiasco?”
Rickards said: “The usual predictable nonsense. Female murder victims are either prostitutes, who presumably deserve what they get, or innocent women.”
Walking up the drive to the Old Rectory, he quickly scanned the rest of the article. Its argument was that the police relied too much on computers, on mechanical aids, fast cars, technology. It was time to get back to the bobby on the beat. What use was feeding interminable data into a computer when an ordinary DC wasn’t competent to spot an obvious suspect? The article was no more acceptable to Rickards because it expressed some of his own views.
He threw it back at Oliphant and said: “What are they suggesting, that we could have trapped the Whistler by stationing a uniformed bobby on the beat at every country-road intersection? You told Mrs. Dennison that we were coming and asked her to keep out visitors?”
“She sounded none too pleased, sir. Said the only visitors who were likely to call were the headlanders, and what reason could she give for turning away her friends. No one has called so far, at least not at the front door.”
“And you checked on the back door?”
“You said to wait outside for you, sir. I haven’t been round the back.”
It was hardly a promising beginning. But if Oliphant, with his usual tactlessness, had managed to antagonize Mrs. Dennison, she showed no sign of displeasure on opening the door but welcomed them in with grave courtesy. Rickards thought again how attractive she was, with a gentle, old-fashioned prettiness which he supposed people used to call the English-rose type when English-rose prettiness was in fashion. Even her clothes had an air of anachronistic gentility, not the ubiquitous trousers but a grey pleated skirt and a matching cardigan over a blue blouse with a single row of pearls. But despite her apparent composure she was very pale, the carefully applied pink lipstick almost garish against the bloodless skin, and he saw that her shoulders were rigid under the thin wool.
She said: “Won’t you come into the drawing room, Chief Inspector, and explain what this is all about? And I expect you and your sergeant would like some coffee.”
“It’s good of you, Mrs. Dennison, but I’m afraid we haven’t the time. I hope we won’t have to keep you for long. We’re looking for a pair of shoes, Bumble trainers, which we have reason to believe may be in your jumble box. Could we see it, please?”
She gave them one quick glance, then, without speaking, led them through a door at the rear of the hall and down a short passage leading to another door, which was bolted. She reached up to the bolt, which slid easily, and they found themselves in a second and shorter passage, stone-flagged, facing a formidably stout back door, which was also bolted at the top and bottom. There was a room on either side. The door on the right stood open.
Mrs. Dennison led them in. She said: “We keep the jumble here. As I told Sergeant Oliphant when he telephoned, the back door was double-locked at five last evening and has remained bolted. During the daytime I usually open it, so that anyone who has jumble can come in and leave it without bothering to knock.”
Oliphant said: “Which means they could help themselves to the stuff as well as leave it. Aren’t you afraid of theft?”
“This is Larksoken, Sergeant, not London.”
The room, stone-floored, brick-walled and with a single high window, must originally have been either a pantry or perhaps a storeroom. Its present use was immediately apparent. Against the wall were two tea chests, the left one about three-quarters full of shoes and the right containing a jumble of belts, bags and men’s ties knotted together. Next to the door were two long shelves. On one stood an assortment of bric-à-brac: cups and saucers, fairings, small statuettes, saucers and plates, a portable radio, a bedside lamp with a cracked and grubby shade. The second shelf held a row of old and rather tattered books, most of them paperbacks. A row of hooks had been screwed into the lower shelf, on which hung hangers holding a variety of better-quality clothes: men’s suits, jackets, women’s dresses and children’s clothes, some of them already priced on small scraps of paper pinned to the hem. Oliphant stood for no more than a couple of seconds surveying the room, and then turned his attention to the box of shoes. It took less than a minute of rummaging to confirm that the Bumbles weren’t there, but he began a systematic search, watched by Rickards and Mrs. Dennison. Each pair, most tied together by the laces, was taken out and placed on one side until the box was empty and then as methodically replaced. Rickards took a right-foot Bumble trainer from his briefcase and handed it to Mrs. Dennison.
“The shoes we are looking for are like this. Can you remember if a pair were ever in the jumble box and, if so, who brought them in?”
She said at once: “I didn’t realize they were called Bumbles but, yes, there was a pair like this in the box. Mr. Miles Lessingham, from the power station, brought them in. He was asked to dispose of the clothes of the young man who killed himself at Larksoken. Two of the suits hanging up here also belonged to Toby Gledhill.”
“When did Mr. Lessingham bring in the shoes, Mrs. Dennison?”
“I can’t remember exactly. I think it was late afternoon a week or so after Mr. Gledhill died, sometime towards the end of last month. But you’d have to ask him, Chief Inspector. He may remember more precisely.”
“And he brought them to the front door?”
“Oh yes. He said he wouldn’t stay to tea but he did have a word in the drawing room with Mrs. Copley. Then he brought the suitcase of clothes out here with me and we unpacked them together. I put the shoes in a plastic bag.”
“And when did you last see them?”
“I can’t possibly remember that, Chief Inspector. I don’t come out here very often, except occasionally to price up some of the clothes. And when I do I don’t necessarily look in the shoe box.”
“Not even to see what’s been brought in?”
“Yes, I do that from time to time, but I don’t make any kind of regular inspection.”
“They’re very distinctive shoes, Mrs. Dennison.”
“I know that, and if I’d rummaged about in the box recently I must have seen them or even noticed that they were missing. But I didn’t. I’m afraid I can’t possibly say when they were taken.”
“How many people know about the system here?”
“Most of the headlanders know, and any staff at Larksoken Power Station who regularly donate jumble. They usually come by car, of course, on their way home, and sometimes, like Mr. Lessingham, ring at the front door. Occasionally I take the bags from them at the door, or they may say that they’ll drop them in at the back. We don’t actually hold the jumble sale here; that takes place in the village hall in Lydsett in October. But this is a convenient collecting place for the headland and for the power station, and then Mr. Sparks or Mr. Jago from the Local Hero comes in a van and loads it up a day or two before the sale.”
“But I see you price up some of the stuff here.”
“Not all of it, Chief Inspector. It’s just that occasionally we know of people who might like some of the items and who buy them before the sale.”
The admission seemed to embarrass her. Rickards wondered whether the Copleys might not benefit in this way. He knew about jumble sales. His ma had helped with the annual one at the chapel. The helpers expected to get the pick of the goods; that was their perk. And why not? He said: “You mean that anyone local wanting clothes, maybe for his kids, would know that he could buy them here?”
She flushed. He could see that the suggestion and perhaps his choice of pronoun had embarrassed her. She said: “Lydsett people usually wait until the main sale. After all, it wouldn’t be worthwhile, people coming in from the village just to see what we’re collecting. But sometimes I sell to people on the headland. After all, the jumble is given in aid of the church. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be sold in advance if someone local happens to want it. Naturally they pay the proper price.”