by P. D. James
Jonah walked up and down the bedroom, looking down at his feet with complacency. He said: “I seem to have the best of the bargain. The Bumbles came at an opportune time but they were hardly suitable for serious walking, and I intended to replace them as opportunity offered. The rules of the road are few and simple, but they are imperative. I commend them to you. Keep your bowels open; bathe once a week; wear wool or cotton next to the skin and leather on the feet.”
Fifteen minutes later his guest was ensconced in an armchair, a mug of coffee in hand, still regarding his feet with satisfaction. Oliphant was prompt in arriving. Apart from his driver, he was alone. He came into the sitting room bringing with him an aura of masculine menace and authority. Even before Dalgliesh had made the introduction he said to Jonah: “You must have known you’d no right to those trainers. They’re new. Ever heard of stealing by finding?”
Dalgliesh said: “A moment, Sergeant.” Drawing Oliphant aside, he said in a low voice: “You’ll treat Mr. Jonah with courtesy.” And before Oliphant could protest, he added, “All right, I’ll save you the trouble of saying it. This isn’t my case. But he is a guest in my house. If your men had searched the headland more thoroughly on Monday, all three of us might have been saved some embarrassment.”
“He has to be a serious suspect, sir. He’s got the shoes.”
Dalgliesh said: “He also has a knife, and he admits to having been on the headland on Sunday night. Treat him as a serious suspect, by all means, if you can find a motive or proof that he knew how the Whistler killed or even knew that he existed. But why not listen to his story before you jump to conclusions about his guilt?”
Oliphant said: “Guilty or not, Mr. Dalgliesh, he’s an important witness. I don’t see how we can allow him to go wandering off.”
“And I don’t see how, legally, you can prevent him. But that’s your problem, Sergeant.”
A few minutes later Oliphant was leading Jonah towards the car. Dalgliesh went out to see him off. Before climbing in at the back, Jonah turned to him.
“It was an ill day for me when I met you, Adam Dalgliesh.”
“But a good day, perhaps, for justice.”
“Oh, justice. Is that the business you’re in? I think you may have left it rather late. This planet earth is hurtling now to its destruction. That concrete bastion on the edge of a polluted sea may bring about the final darkness. If not it will be by some other folly of man. There comes a time when every scientist, even God, has to write off an experiment. Ah, I see a certain relief on your face. You are thinking, So he is mad after all, this peculiar tramp. I need no longer take him seriously.”
Dalgliesh said: “My mind agrees with you. My genes are more optimistic.”
“You know it. We all know it. How else can one explain the modern sickness of man? And when the final darkness falls I shall die as I have lived, in the nearest dry ditch.” And then he gave a singularly sweet smile and added: “Wearing your shoes, Adam Dalgliesh.”
9
The encounter with Jonah had left Dalgliesh curiously restless. There were plenty of jobs still to be done in the mill, but he felt disinclined to tackle any of them. His instinct was to get into the Jaguar and drive very fast and very far. But he had tried that expedient too often to have any faith in its efficacy. The mill would still be standing when he returned, the problems still unsolved. He had no difficulty in recognizing the basis of his discontent: the frustrating involvement with a case which would never be his yet from which it was impossible to distance himself. He remembered some words of Rickards’s spoken before they had finally parted on the night of the murder.
“You may not want to be involved, Mr. Dalgliesh, but you are involved. You may wish that you had never been near the body, but you were there.”
He seemed to remember using much the same words to a suspect in one of his own cases. He was beginning to understand why they had been so ill received. On an impulse, he unlocked the mill and climbed up the ladders to the top storey. Here, he suspected, his aunt had found her peace. Perhaps some of that lost contentment might seep into him. But any hope of being left undisturbed was due to be frustrated.
As he looked over the headland from the southern window, a bicycle came into sight. At first it was too distant to see who was riding, but then he recognized Neil Pascoe. They had never spoken but, like all the headlanders, they knew each other by sight. Pascoe seemed to be cycling with a ponderous determination, his head low over the handlebars, his shoulders working. But as he came close to the mill, he suddenly stopped, put both feet on the ground, stared towards the mill as if seeing it for the first time, then dismounted and began wheeling the bicycle over the sandy scrubland.
For one second Dalgliesh was tempted to pretend that he wasn’t home. Then he realized that the Jaguar was parked at the side of the mill and that it was possible that Pascoe in that long stare had glimpsed his face at the window. Whatever the purpose of this visit, it looked as if it were one he couldn’t avoid. He moved over to the window above the door, opened it and called down: “Are you looking for me?”
The question was rhetorical. Who else would Pascoe expect to find at Larksoken Mill? Looking down at the upturned face, the thin jutting beard, Dalgliesh saw him curiously diminished and foreshortened, a vulnerable, rather pathetic figure clutching his bicycle as if for protection.
Pascoe shouted up against the wind: “Could I talk to you?”
An honest reply would have been “If you must,” but it was not one that Dalgliesh felt he could shout down against the noise of the wind without sounding ungracious. He mouthed, “I’ll be down.”
Pascoe propped the machine against the wall of the mill and followed him into the sitting room.
He said: “We haven’t actually met, but I expect you’ve heard of me. I’m Neil Pascoe, from the caravan. I’m sorry if I’m butting in when you want some peace.” He sounded as embarrassed as a door-to-door salesman trying to reassure a prospective customer that he wasn’t a con man.
Dalgliesh was tempted to say, “I might want some peace but it doesn’t look as if I’m likely to get it.” He asked: “Coffee?”
Pascoe gave the predictable reply: “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
“No trouble. I was thinking of making it.”
Pascoe followed him into the kitchen and stood leaning against the doorpost in an unconvincing assumption of ease as Dalgliesh ground the coffee beans and put on the kettle. It struck him that he had spent a considerable time since his arrival at the mill providing food and drink for uninvited visitors. When the grinding had ceased, Pascoe said almost truculently: “I need to talk to you.”
“If it’s about the murder, then you ought to be speaking to Chief Inspector Rickards, not me. This isn’t my case.”
“But you found the body.”
“That might in certain circumstances make me a suspect. But it doesn’t give me the right to interfere professionally in another officer’s case outside my own force area. I’m not the investigating officer. But you know that, you’re not stupid.”
Pascoe kept his eyes on the bubbling liquid. He said: “I didn’t expect you to be particularly pleased to see me. I wouldn’t have come if there were anyone else I could talk to. There are things I can’t discuss with Amy.”
“As long as you remember whom you are talking to.”
“A policeman. It’s like the priesthood, is it? Never off-duty. Once a priest, always a priest.”
“It isn’t in the least like the priesthood. No guarantee of confidentiality in the confessional and no absolution. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
They said nothing else until the coffee had been poured into the two mugs and carried by Dalgliesh into the sitting room. They sat, one each side of the fireplace. Pascoe took his mug but seemed uncertain what to do with it. He sat twisting it in his hands, looking down at the coffee, making no attempt to drink. After a moment he said: “It’s about Toby Gledhill, the boy—well, he was a boy, really�
��who killed himself at the power station.”
Dalgliesh said: “I’ve heard about Toby Gledhill.”
“Then I expect you know how he died. He hurled himself down on top of the reactor and broke his neck. That was on Friday, twelfth August. Two days before, on the Wednesday, he came to see me at about eight o’clock in the evening. I was on my own in the caravan; Amy had taken the van into Norwich to shop and said she wanted to see a film and would be back late. I was looking after Timmy. Then there was this knock and there he stood. I knew him, of course. At least, I knew who he was. I’d seen him on one or two of those open days at the power station. I usually make time to go to those. They can’t stop me, and it gives me an opportunity of putting one or two awkward questions, countering their propaganda. And I think he was present at some of the meetings of the new pressurized-water-reactor enquiry. But, of course, I’d never really met him. I couldn’t think what he wanted of me, but I invited him in and offered him a beer. I’d lit the stove, because there were a lot of Timmy’s clothes which needed drying, so the caravan was very hot and rather damp. When I remember that night I seem to see him through a haze of steam. After the beer he asked if we couldn’t go out. He seemed restless, as if he found the caravan claustrophobic, and he asked more than once when Amy was expected back. So I lifted Timmy out of his cot and put him into the backpack and we set off to walk north along the shore. It was when we had got as far as the abbey ruins that he told me what he’d come to say. He came out with it quite baldly, without any preamble. He’d come to the conclusion that nuclear power was too dangerous to use and that, until we’ve solved the problem of radioactive waste, we ought not to build any more nuclear-power stations. There was one rather odd expression he used. He said: ‘It’s not only dangerous, it’s corrupting.’”
Dalgliesh asked: “Did he say why he’d come to this conclusion?”
“I think it had been building up for quite a few months, and Chernobyl had probably brought it to a head. He said that something else had recently happened that had helped to make up his mind. He didn’t say what, but he promised he would tell me when he’d had more time to think. I asked him if he was merely going to give up his job and opt out or whether he was prepared to help us. He said he thought that he had to help. It wouldn’t be enough just to resign his job. It was difficult for him, and I could see just how difficult. He admired and liked his colleagues. He said they were dedicated scientists and very intelligent men who believed in what they were doing. It was just that he couldn’t believe any more. He hadn’t thought about the way ahead, not very clearly anyway. He was like I am now: he just needed to talk it through. I suppose I seemed to be the natural person. He knew about PANUP, of course.” He looked up at Dalgliesh and said rather naïvely: “That stands for ‘People Against Nuclear Power.’ When the proposal was put forward for the new reactor here, I formed a little local group to oppose it. I mean a group of ordinary concerned local residents, not the more powerful national protest bodies. It hasn’t been easy. Most people try to pretend that the power station isn’t really there. And of course quite a number welcome it because it does bring in some employment, new customers for the shops and pubs. Most of the opposition to the new reactor wasn’t local, anyway; it was people from CND, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. Of course we welcomed them. They’re the ones with the heavy guns. But I thought it important to get something going locally, and I suppose I’m not really a joiner. I like to do my own thing.”
Dalgliesh said: “And Gledhill would have been quite a catch for you.” The words were almost brutal in their implication.
Pascoe flushed, then looked him in the eyes. “There was that too. I suppose I realized it at the time. I wasn’t entirely disinterested. I mean, I did know how important it would be if he came over. But I was, well, flattered, I suppose, that he’d come first to me. PANUP hasn’t made much impact, really. Even the initials were a mistake. I wanted something that people would easily remember, but PANUP—a bit of a laugh. I can guess what you’re thinking, that I might have done more good for the cause by joining an existing pressure group instead of ministering to my own ego. You’d be right.”
Dalgliesh asked: “Did Gledhill say whether he’d spoken to anyone at the station?”
“He said that he hadn’t, not yet. I think that was what he most dreaded. He particularly hated the thought of telling Miles Lessingham. While we walked along the beach, with Timmy half-asleep bumping on my back, he felt free to talk, and I think he found it a release. He told me that Lessingham was in love with him. He wasn’t gay himself but he was ambivalent. But he did tremendously admire Lessingham and felt that in some way he was letting him down. He gave the impression that everything was a muddle, his feelings about atomic power, his personal life, his career, everything.”
Suddenly Pascoe seemed to realize that he was holding his coffee mug and, lowering his head, began to drink from it with great slurps, like a man desperate with thirst. When the cup was drained, he put it down on the floor and wiped his mouth with his hand.
He said: “It was a warm night after a rainy day, the night of the new moon. Funny how I remember that. We were walking just above the tide mark on the shingle. And then, suddenly, there she was, Hilary Robarts, splashing out of the foam. She was only wearing the bottom half of her bikini, and she stood there for a moment, with the water running off her hair, glistening in that eerie light which seems to come off the sea on a starry night. Then she came slowly up the beach towards us. I suppose we stood there almost as if mesmerized. She had lit a small fire of brushwood on the shingle, and the three of us moved towards it. She picked up her towel but didn’t wrap it round her. She looked—well, she looked marvellous, the drops of water glistening on her skin, and that locket thing she wears resting between her breasts. I know it sounds ridiculous and, well, corny, but she looked like some goddess risen from the sea. She took absolutely no notice of me, but she looked at Toby. She said: ‘Nice to see you, Toby. Why not come down to the cottage for a drink and a meal?’ Such ordinary words. Harmless-sounding words. But they weren’t.
“I don’t think he could resist her. I don’t suppose I would have been able to either. Not at that moment. And I knew exactly what she was doing, and so did she. She was asking him to make a choice. On my side nothing but trouble, a lost job, personal anguish, possibly even disgrace. And on hers security, professional success, the respect of peers, colleagues. And love. I think she was offering him love. I knew what would happen in the cottage if he went with her, and he knew too. But he went. He didn’t even say good night to me. She slung her towel over her shoulder and turned her back on us as if absolutely confident that he would follow her. And he did follow her. And two days later, on Friday twelfth August, he killed himself. I don’t know what she said to him. No one will know now. But after that meeting I think he just couldn’t take any more. It was not what she threatened him with, or even if she threatened him at all. But if it hadn’t been for that meeting on the beach I think he’d be alive now. She killed him.”
Dalgliesh said: “None of this came out at the inquest?”
“No, none. There was no reason why it should. I wasn’t called as a witness. It was all handled very discreetly. Alex Mair was anxious that there shouldn’t be any publicity. As you’ve probably noticed, there hardly ever is when something goes wrong at an atomic-power station. They all become experts at the cover-up.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
“I want to be sure that this is something Rickards needs to be told. But I suppose I’m really telling you because I need to share it with someone. I’m not sure why I picked on you. Sorry.”
A true, if hardly kind, reply would have been: “You picked on me in the hope that I’d undertake to pass it on to Rickards and save you the responsibility.” Instead Dalgliesh said: “You realize, of course, that this is information Chief Inspector Rickards should have.”
“But is it? That’s what I want to be sure of. I supp
ose it’s the usual fear when dealing with the police. What use are they going to make of it? Are they going to get the wrong idea? Could it point to someone who could be innocent? I suppose you have to have confidence in the integrity of the police, you wouldn’t go on being a detective if you hadn’t. But the rest of us know that things can go wrong, that the innocent can be harried, the guilty get off, that the police aren’t always as scrupulous as they pretend to be. I’m not asking you to tell him for me, I’m not that childish. But I don’t really see how it’s relevant. Both of them are dead. I can’t see how telling Rickards about that meeting can help to catch Miss Robarts’s killer. And it can’t bring either of them back to life.”
Dalgliesh refilled Pascoe’s mug. Then he said: “Of course it’s relevant. You’re suggesting that Hilary Robarts might have blackmailed Gledhill into staying in his job. If she could do it to one person, she could do it to another. Anything about Miss Robarts could be relevant to her death. And don’t worry too much about innocent suspects. I’m not going to pretend that the innocent don’t suffer in a murder investigation. Of course they do. No one even remotely touched by murder goes unscathed. But Chief Inspector Rickards isn’t a fool and he’s an honest man. He’s only going to use what is relevant to his enquiry, and it’s for him to decide what is relevant and what isn’t.”
“I suppose that’s the reassurance I wanted to hear. All right, I’ll tell him.”
He finished his coffee very quickly, as if anxious to be gone, and, with only a final word of goodbye, mounted his bicycle and pedalled furiously down the path, bending himself against the wind. Dalgliesh took the two mugs back into the kitchen thoughtfully. That verbal picture of Hilary Robarts rising like a glistening goddess from the waves had been remarkably vivid. But one detail had been wrong. Pascoe had spoken of the key locket resting between her breasts. He remembered Mair’s words as he stood looking down at the body. “That locket round her neck, I gave it to her on twenty-ninth August for her birthday.” On Wednesday 10 August Hilary Robarts couldn’t have been wearing it. Pascoe had undoubtedly seen Hilary Robarts walking out of the sea with the locket resting between her naked breasts; but it couldn’t have been on 10 August.