by P. D. James
He called out: “Aren’t you polluting the beach?”
Pascoe turned to him and spoke for the first time, shouting above the roar of the fire.
“What does it matter? We’re polluting the whole bloody planet.”
Dalgliesh shouted back: “Shove some shingle on it and leave it until tomorrow. It’s too windy for a bonfire this evening.”
He had expected Pascoe to ignore him, but to his surprise the words seemed to recall his companion to reality. The exultation and vigour seemed to drain out of him. He looked at the fire and said dully: “I suppose you’re right.”
There were a spade and a rusty shovel thrown down by the pile of rubbish. Together the two men scooped up a mixture of shingle and sand and flung it onto the flames. When the last red tongue had died with an angry hiss, Pascoe turned and began scrunching his way up the beach towards the cliff. Dalgliesh followed. The question he had half-feared—“Are you here on purpose? Why do you want to see me?”—was unspoken and apparently unthought.
In the caravan Pascoe kicked the door shut and slumped down at the table. He said: “Want a beer? Or there’s tea. I’m out of coffee.”
“Nothing, thanks.”
Dalgliesh sat and watched as Pascoe groped his way over to the refrigerator. Returning to the table, he wrenched open the seal, threw back his head and poured the beer down his throat in an almost continuous stream. Then he slumped forward, silent, still clutching the tin. Neither spoke and it seemed to Dalgliesh that his companion hardly knew that he was still there. It was dark in the caravan, and Pascoe’s face across the two feet of wood was an indistinguishable oval in which the whites of the eyes gleamed unnaturally bright. Then he stumbled to his feet murmuring something about matches, and a few seconds later there was a scrape and hiss and his hands stretched towards the oil lamp on the table. In its strengthening glow his face, beneath the dirt and smudges of smoke, looked drained and haggard, the eyes dulled with pain. The wind was shaking the caravan, not roughly but with a regular gentle sway, as if it were being rocked by an unseen hand. The sliding door of the end compartment was open and Dalgliesh could see, on the narrow bed, a pile of female clothes topped with a jumble of tubes, jars and bottles. Apart from this, the caravan looked tidy but denuded, less a home than a temporary, ill-equipped refuge but holding still the unmistakable milky and faecal smell of a child. The absence of Timmy and his dead mother filled the caravan as it did both their minds.
After minutes of silence, Pascoe looked up at him. “I was burning all my PANUP records out there with the rest of the rubbish. You probably guessed. It was never any use. I was only using PANUP to pander to my own need to feel important. You more or less said so that time I called at the mill.”
“Did I? I hadn’t any right to. What will you do now?”
“Go to London and look for a job. The university won’t extend my grant for a further year. I don’t blame them. I’d prefer to go back to the north-east, but I suppose London offers me more hope.”
“What sort of job?”
“Any job. I don’t give a damn what I do as long as it makes money for me and is no possible use to anyone else.”
Dalgliesh asked: “What happened to Timmy?”
“The local authority took him. They got a Place of Safety Order or something of the sort. A couple of social workers came for him yesterday. Decent enough women, but he didn’t want to go with them. They had to tear him screaming from my arms. What sort of a society does that to its children?”
Dalgliesh said: “I don’t suppose they had any choice. They have to make long-term plans for his future. After all, he couldn’t have stayed here indefinitely with you.”
“Why not? I cared for him for over a year. And at least I would have had something out of all this mess.”
Dalgliesh asked: “Have they traced Amy’s family?”
“They haven’t had much time, have they? And when they do I don’t expect they’ll tell me. Timmy lived here for over a year, but I’m of less account than the grandparents he never saw and who probably don’t give a damn about him.”
He was still holding the empty beer can. Twisting it slowly in his hands, he said: “What really gets to me is the deception. I thought she cared. Oh, not about me, but about what I was trying to do. It was all pretence. She was using me, using this place to be near Caroline.”
Dalgliesh said: “But they can’t have seen very much of each other.”
“How do I know? When I wasn’t here she probably sneaked out to meet her lover. Timmy must have spent hours alone. She didn’t even care for him. The cats were more important than Timmy. Mrs. Jago has taken them now. They’ll be all right. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons she used to go out, blatantly telling me that she was off to meet her lover in the sand dunes. I thought it was a joke, I needed to believe that. And all the time she and Caroline were out there together making love, laughing at me.”
Dalgliesh said: “You’ve only got Reeves’s evidence to suggest they were lovers. Caroline could have been lying to him.”
“No. No, she wasn’t lying. I know that. They used us both, Reeves and me. Amy wasn’t—well, she wasn’t undersexed. We lived here together for over a year. On the second night she—well, she did offer to come to my bed. But it was just her way of paying for board and lodging. It wouldn’t have been right then for either of us. But after a time I suppose I began to hope. I mean, living here together, I suppose I grew fond of her. But she never really wanted me to be near her. And when she came in from those Sunday walks I knew. I pretended to myself that I didn’t, but I knew. She looked exultant. She was shining with happiness.”
Dalgliesh said: “Look, is it really so important to you, the affair with Caroline, even if it is true? What you had here together, the affection, friendship, comradeship, caring for Timmy, does all that go for nothing because she found her sexual life outside the walls of this caravan?”
Pascoe said bitterly: “Forget and forgive? You make it sound so easy.”
“I don’t suppose you can forget, or perhaps even want to. But I can’t see why you have to use the word ‘forgive.’ She never promised more than she gave.”
“You despise me, don’t you?”
Dalgliesh thought how unattractive it was, the self-absorption of the deeply unhappy. But there were questions he still had to ask. He said: “And she left nothing, no papers, no records, no diary, nothing to say what she was doing on the headland?”
“Nothing. And I know what she was doing here, why she came. She came to be near Caroline.”
“Did she have any money? Even if you fed her, she must have had something of her own.”
“She always had some cash, but I don’t know how she got it. She never said and I didn’t like to ask. I know she didn’t draw any Welfare payments. She said she didn’t want the DHSS snooping round here to check whether we were sleeping together. I didn’t blame her. Nor did I.”
“And she got no post.”
“She got postcards from time to time. Pretty regularly, really. So she must have had friends in London. I don’t know what she did with them. Threw them away, I suppose. There’s nothing in the caravan but her clothes and make-up, and I’m going to burn those next. After that there’ll be nothing left to show that she was ever here.”
Dalgliesh asked: “And the murder. Do you think that Caroline Amphlett killed Robarts?”
“Perhaps. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter any more. If she didn’t, Rickards will make her a scapegoat, her and Amy together.”
“But you can’t really believe that Amy committed a murder?”
Pascoe looked at Dalgliesh with the frustration and anger of an uncomprehending child. “I don’t know! Look, I really never knew her. That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know! And now that Timmy’s gone, I don’t really care. And I’m in such a muddle, anger at what she did to me, at what she was, and grief that she’s dead. I didn’t think you could be angry and grieving at the same time. I ought to be mourni
ng her, but all I can feel is this terrible anger.”
“Oh yes,” said Dalgliesh. “You can feel anger and grief together. That’s the commonest reaction to bereavement.”
Suddenly Pascoe began crying. The empty beer can rattled against the table, and he bent his head low over it, his shoulders shaking. Women, thought Dalgliesh, are better at coping with grief than we are. He had seen them so many times, the women police officers moving unconsciously to take the grieving mother, the lost child in their arms. Some men were good at it too, of course. Rickards had been in the old days. He himself was good with the words, but, then, words were his trade. What he found difficult was what came so spontaneously to the truly generous at heart, the willingness to touch and be touched. He thought: I’m here on false pretences. If I were not, perhaps I too could feel adequate.
He said: “I think the wind is less strong than it was. Why don’t we finish the burning and clear up that mess on the beach?”
It was over an hour later before Dalgliesh was ready to set off for the mill. As he said goodbye to Pascoe at the door of the caravan, a blue Fiesta with a young man at its wheel came bumping over the grass.
Pascoe said: “Jonathan Reeves. He was engaged to Caroline Amphlett, or thought he was. She fooled him like Amy fooled me. He’s been round once or twice to chat. We thought we might walk to the Local Hero for a game of bar billiards.”
It was not, thought Dalgliesh, an agreeable picture, the two men, bound by a common grievance, consoling each other for the perfidy of their women with beer and bar billiards. But Pascoe seemed to want to introduce him to Reeves, and he found himself grasping a surprisingly firm hand and making his formal condolences.
Jonathan Reeves said: “I still can’t believe it, but I suppose people always say that after a sudden death. And I can’t help feeling that it was my fault. I should have stopped them.”
Dalgliesh said: “They were adult women. Presumably they knew what they were doing. Short of physically dragging them off the boat, which would hardly have been practicable, I don’t see how you could have stopped them.”
Reeves reiterated obstinately: “I should have stopped them.” Then he added: “I keep having this dream, well, nightmare really. She’s standing at the side of my bed with the child in her arms and saying to me, ‘It’s all your fault. All your fault.’”
Pascoe said: “Caroline comes with Timmy?”
Reeves looked at him as if surprised that he could be so obtuse. He said: “Not Caroline. It’s Amy who comes. Amy, whom I never met, standing there with water streaming from her hair, holding the child in her arms and telling me that it’s all my fault.”
7
Just over an hour later Dalgliesh had left the headland and was driving west along the A1151. After twenty minutes he turned south along a narrow country road. Darkness had fallen and the low, scudding clouds, torn by wind, moved like a tattered blanket over the moon and the high stars. He drove fast and unhesitatingly, hardly aware of the tug and howl of the wind. He had taken this route only once before, early that same morning, but he had no need to consult the map; he knew where he was going. On either side of the low hedges stretched the black, unbroken fields. The lights of the car silvered an occasional distorted tree flailing in the wind, briefly illuminated as if with a searchlight the blank face of an isolated farm cottage, picked out the pin-bright eyes of a night animal before it scuttled to safety. The drive was not long, less than fifty minutes, but, staring straight ahead and shifting the gear lever as if he were an automaton, he felt for a moment disorientated as if he had driven through the bleak darkness of this flat, secretive landscape for interminable hours.
The brick-built, early-Victorian villa stood on the outskirts of a village. The gate to the gravel drive lay open, and he drove slowly between the tossing laurels and the high, creaking boughs of the beech trees and manoeuvred the Jaguar between the three cars already discreetly parked at the side of the house. The two rows of windows in the front were dark, and the single bulb which illuminated the fanlight seemed to Dalgliesh less a welcoming sign of occupation than a private signal, a sinister indication of secretive life. He did not need to ring. Ears had been alert for the approaching car, and the door was opened just as he reached it by the same stocky, cheerful-faced janitor who had greeted him on his first summons, earlier that morning. Now, as then, he was wearing blue overalls so sprucely well cut that they looked like a uniform. Dalgliesh wondered what was his precise role: driver, guard, general factotum? Or had he, perhaps, a more specialized and sinister function?
He said: “They’re in the library, sir. I’ll bring in the coffee. Will you be wanting sandwiches, sir? There’s some beef left, or I could put up a bit of cheese.”
Dalgliesh said: “Just the coffee, thank you.”
They were waiting for him in the same small room at the back of the house. The walls were panelled in pale wood and there was only one window, a square bay heavily curtained with faded blue velvet. Despite its name, the function of the room was unclear. Admittedly the wall opposite the window was lined with bookshelves, but they held only half a dozen leather-bound volumes and piles of old periodicals which looked as if they were Sunday colour supplements. The room had an oddly disturbing air of being makeshift yet not devoid of comfort, a staging post in which the temporary occupants were attempting to make themselves at home. Ranged round the ornate marble fireplace were six assorted armchairs, most of them leather and each with a small wine table. The opposite end of the room was occupied by a modern dining table in plain wood with six chairs. This morning it had held the remains of breakfast and the air had been oppressively heavy with the smell of bacon and eggs. But the debris had been cleared and replaced by a tray of bottles and glasses. Looking at the variety provided, Dalgliesh thought that they had been doing rather well for themselves. The loaded tray gave the place the air of a temporary hospitality room in which little else was hospitable. The air struck him as rather chill. In the grate an ornamental fan of paper rustled with each moan of the wind in the chimney, and the two-bar electric fire which stood in the fender was barely adequate even for so meanly proportioned and cluttered a room.
Three pairs of eyes turned on him as he entered. Clifford Sowerby was standing against the fireplace in exactly the same pose as when Dalgliesh had last seen him. He looked, in his formal suit and immaculate linen, as fresh as he had at nine o’clock that morning. Now, as then, he dominated the room. He was a solid-fleshed, conventionally handsome man with the assurance and controlled benevolence of a headmaster or a successful banker. No customer need fear to enter his office, provided his account was well in credit. Meeting him for only the second time, Dalgliesh felt again an instinctive and seemingly irrational unease. The man was both ruthless and dangerous, and yet, in their hours apart, he had been unable accurately to recall either his face or his voice.
The same could not be said of Bill Harding. He stood over six feet tall and, with his pale freckled face and thatch of red hair, had obviously decided that anonymity was impossible and that he might as well opt for eccentricity. He was wearing a checked suit in heavy tweed with a spotted tie. Raising himself with some difficulty out of the low chair, he ambled over to the drinks and, when Dalgliesh said he’d wait for coffee, stood holding the whisky bottle as if unsure what to do with it. But there was one addition since the morning. Alex Mair, whisky glass in hand, stood against the bookcase, as if interested in the assortment of leather-bound volumes and piled periodicals. He turned as Dalgliesh entered and gave him a long, considering look, then nodded briefly. He was easily the most personable and the most intelligent of the three waiting men, but something, confidence or energy, seemed to have drained out of him, and he had the diminished, precariously contained look of a man in physical pain.
Sowerby said, his heavily lidded eyes amused: “You’ve singed your hair, Adam. You smell as if you’ve been raking a bonfire.”
“I have.”
Mair didn’t move, but Sowe
rby and Harding seated themselves each side of the fire. Dalgliesh took a chair between them. They waited until coffee had arrived and he had a cup in hand. Sowerby was leaning back in his chair and looking up at the ceiling and seemed to be prepared to wait all night.
It was Bill Harding who said: “Well, Adam?”
Putting down his cup, Dalgliesh described what exactly had happened since his arrival at the caravan. He had total verbal recall. He had made no notes, nor was it necessary. At the end of his account he said: “So you can relax. Pascoe believes what will, I imagine, become the official line, that the two girls were lovers, went for an unwise boat trip together and were accidentally run down in the fog. I don’t think he’ll make any trouble for you or for anyone else. His capacity for troublemaking seems to be over.”
Sowerby said: “And Camm left nothing incriminating in the caravan?”
“I doubt very much whether there was anything to leave. Pascoe said that he read one or two of the postcards when they arrived, but they were mostly the usual meaningless phrases, tourist’s chat. Camm apparently destroyed them. And he, with my help, has destroyed the detritus of her life on the headland. I helped him carry the last of her clothes and make-up down to the fire. While he was busy burning it, I had a chance to return and make a fairly thorough search. There was nothing there.”
Sowerby said formally: “It was good of you to do this for us, Adam. Obviously, as Rickards isn’t in the picture as far as our interest is concerned, we could hardly rely on him. And you, of course, had an advantage he lacked. Pascoe would see you more as a friend than a policeman. That’s obvious from his previous visit to Larksoken Mill. For some reason he trusts you.”
Dalgliesh said: “You explained all that this morning. The request you made then seemed to me to be reasonable in the circumstances. I’m neither naïve nor ambivalent about terrorism. You asked me to do something and I’ve done it. I still think you should put Rickards in the picture, but that’s your business. And you’ve got your answer. If Camm was involved in Amphlett’s conspiracy, she didn’t confide in Pascoe and he has no suspicions of either woman. He believes that Camm only stayed with him to be near her lover. Pascoe, for all his liberal ideas, is as ready as the next man to believe that a woman who persists in not wanting to go to bed with him must be either frigid or a lesbian.”