Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  Meg thought, I shall never be able to unlearn, never forget what’s happening here this evening. But I have to know the whole of it. Even the most painful knowledge is better than half-knowledge. She said: “That afternoon I came here to tell you the Copleys were going to their daughter …”

  Alice said: “On the Friday after the dinner party. Thirteen days ago.”

  “Is that all? It seems in a different dimension of time. You asked me to come and have supper with you when I got back from Norwich. Was that planned as part of your alibi? Did you use even me?”

  Alice looked at her. She said: “Yes. I’m sorry. You would have been here about half past nine, just time for me to get back and be ready with a hot meal in the oven.”

  “Which you would have cooked earlier in the evening. Safe enough with Alex at the power station, out of the way.”

  “That’s what I planned. When you declined I didn’t press it. That would have looked suspicious later, too like trying to establish an alibi. Besides, you wouldn’t have been persuaded to change your mind, would you? You never do. But the very fact of the invitation would have helped. A woman wouldn’t normally invite a friend even to an informal supper party if she were simultaneously planning a murder.”

  “And if I had accepted, if I had turned up here at half past nine, that would have been awkward, wouldn’t it, given your later change of plan? You wouldn’t have been able to drive over to Scudder’s Cottage to give Ryan Blaney his alibi. And you would have been left in possession of the shoes and the belt.”

  “The shoes would have been the greatest problem. I didn’t think they’d ever be connected with the crime, but I needed to get rid of them before next morning. I couldn’t possibly explain my possession of them. I would probably have washed them and hidden them away, hoping for a chance to get them back to the jumble box the next day. Though I would have to have found a way of giving Ryan his alibi. Probably I would have told you that I couldn’t get through by telephone and that we ought to drive over at once to tell him that the Whistler was dead. But it’s all academic. I didn’t worry. You said you wouldn’t come and I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “But I did. Not to supper. But I came.”

  “Yes. Why did you, Meg?”

  “A feeling of depression after a heavy day, hating seeing the Copleys go, the need to see you. I wasn’t looking for a meal. I had an early supper and then walked over the headland.”

  But there was something else she needed to ask. She said: “You knew that Hilary swam after watching the beginning of the main news. I suppose most people knew that who knew that she liked swimming at night. And you were taking trouble to see that Ryan had his alibi for nine-twenty or shortly after. But suppose the body hadn’t been discovered until the next day? Surely she wouldn’t normally be missed until she didn’t turn up at the power station on Monday morning, and then they would telephone to see if she were ill. It might even have been Monday evening before anybody made any enquiries. She could have swum in the morning and not at night.”

  “The pathologist can usually estimate the time of death with reasonable accuracy. And I knew she’d be found that night. I knew that Alex had promised to visit her when he got back from the power station. He was on his way to the cottage when he met Adam Dalgliesh. And now, I think, you know it all except for the Bumble trainers. I came through the back garden at the Old Rectory late on Sunday afternoon. I knew that the back door would be open, and it was the time when you would be having high tea. I had a bag with me with a few items of jumble in case I was seen. But I wasn’t seen. I took soft shoes, easy to wear, a pair that looked roughly my size. And I took one of the belts.”

  But there was one more question to ask, the most important of all. Meg said: “But why? Alice, I have to know. Why?”

  “That’s a dangerous question, Meg. Are you sure you really want the answer?”

  “I need the answer, need to try to understand.”

  “Isn’t it enough that she was determined to marry Alex and I was determined that she shouldn’t?”

  “That isn’t why you killed her. It can’t be. There was something more than that, there had to be.”

  “Yes, there was. I suppose you have a right to know. She was blackmailing Alex. She could have stopped him getting that job, or, if he had got it, could have made it impossible for him to function successfully. She had the power to destroy his whole career. Toby Gledhill had told her that Alex had deliberately held up publishing the result of their research because it might have prejudiced the success of the enquiry into Larksoken’s second reactor. They discovered that some of the assumptions made in generating the mathematical models were more critical than had been thought. People opposing the building of the new PWR at Larksoken could have exploited it to cause delay, whip up fresh hysteria.”

  “You mean that he deliberately falsified the results?”

  “That’s something he’s incapable of doing. All he did was to delay publishing the experiment. He’ll publish it within the next month or two. But that’s the kind of information which, once it got into the press, would have done irreparable harm. Toby was almost prepared to hand it over to Neil Pascoe, but Hilary dissuaded him. It was far too valuable for that. She meant to use it to persuade Alex to marry her. She faced him with the knowledge when he walked home with her after the dinner party, and late that night he told me. I knew then what I had to do. The only way he might have been able to buy her off was by promoting her from Acting Administrator to Administrative Officer of Larksoken, and that was almost as impossible for him as deliberately falsifying a scientific result.”

  “You mean he might actually have married her?”

  “He might have been forced to. But how safe would he have been even then? She could have held that knowledge over his head until the end of his life. And what would that life have been, tied to a woman who had blackmailed him into marriage, a woman he didn’t want, whom he could neither respect nor love?”

  And then she said, in a voice so low that Meg only just heard it: “I owed Alex a death.”

  Meg said: “But how could you be sure, sure enough to kill her? Couldn’t you have talked to her, persuaded her, reasoned with her?”

  “I did talk to her. I went to see her on that Sunday afternoon. It was I who was with her when Mrs. Jago arrived with the church magazine. You could say that I went to give her a chance of life. I couldn’t murder her without making sure that it was necessary. That meant doing what I’d never done before, talking to her about Alex, trying to persuade her that the marriage wouldn’t be in either of their interests, to let him go. I could have saved myself the humiliation. There was no argument, she was beyond that. She was no longer even rational. Part of the time she railed at me like a woman possessed.”

  Meg said: “And your brother, did he know about the visit?”

  “He knows nothing. I didn’t tell him at the time, and I haven’t told him since. But he told me what he planned: to promise her marriage and then, when the job was secure, to renege. It would have been disastrous. He never understood the woman he was dealing with, the passion, the desperation. She was a rich man’s only child, alternately overindulged and neglected, trying all her life to compete with her father, taught that what you want is yours by right if you’ve only got the courage to fight for it and take it. And she had courage. She was obsessed by him, by her need for him, above all by her need for a child. She said that he owed her a child. Did he think she was like one of his reactors, tamable, that he could let down into that turbulence the equivalent of his rods of boron steel and control the force which he’d let loose? When I left her that afternoon I knew I had no choice. Sunday was the deadline. He had arranged to call at Thyme Cottage on his way home from the power station. It was fortunate for him that I got to her first.

  “Perhaps the worst part of all was waiting for him to come home that night. I daren’t ring the power station. I couldn’t be sure that he would be alone in his office or in the compute
r room, and I had never before telephoned him to ask when he would be home. I sat there and waited for nearly three hours. I expected that it would be Alex who would find the body. When he discovered that she wasn’t in the cottage, the natural move would be to check at the beach. He would find the body, telephone the police from the car and ring home to tell me. When he didn’t I began to fantasize that she wasn’t really dead, that somehow I’d bungled it. I pictured him desperately working on her, giving her the kiss of life, saw her eyes slowly open. I turned off the lights and moved to the sitting room to watch the road. But it wasn’t an ambulance that arrived, it was the police cars, the paraphernalia of murder. And still Alex didn’t come.”

  Meg asked: “And when he did?”

  “We hardly spoke. I’d gone to bed; I knew I must do what I would normally have done, not wait up for him. He came to my room to tell me that Hilary was dead and how she had died. I asked, ‘The Whistler?’ and he answered, ‘The police think not. The Whistler was dead before she was killed.’ Then he left me. I don’t think either of us could have borne to be together, the air heavy with our unspoken thoughts. But I did what I had to do, and it was worth it. The job is his. And they won’t take it away from him, not after it’s been confirmed. They can’t sack him because his sister is a murderess.”

  “But if they found out why you did it?”

  “They won’t. Only two people know that, and I wouldn’t have told you if I couldn’t trust you. On a less elevated level, I doubt if they’d believe you in the absence of confirmation from another witness; and Toby Gledhill and Hilary Robarts, the only two who could give it, are dead.”

  After a minute’s silence she said: “You would have done the same for Martin.”

  “Oh no, no.”

  “Not as I did. I can’t see you managing to use physical force. But when he drowned, if you could have stood on that riverbank and had the power to choose which one should die and which live, would you have hesitated?”

  “No, of course not. But that would have been different. I wouldn’t have planned a drowning, wouldn’t have wanted it.”

  “Or if you were told that millions of people would live more safely if Alex got a job which he is uniquely capable of filling but at the cost of one woman’s life, would you hesitate then? That was the choice which faced me. Don’t evade it, Meg. I didn’t.”

  “But murder, how could it solve anything? It never has.”

  Alice said with sudden passion: “Oh, but it can, and it does. You read history, don’t you? Surely you know that.”

  Meg felt exhausted with weariness and pain. She wanted the talking to stop. But it couldn’t. There was still too much to be said. She asked: “What are you going to do?”

  “That depends on you.”

  But out of horror and disbelief Meg had found courage. And she had found more than courage: authority. She said: “Oh no it doesn’t. This isn’t a responsibility I asked for and I don’t want it.”

  “But you can’t evade it. You know what you know. Call Chief Inspector Rickards now. You can use this telephone.” When Meg made no move to use it she said: “Surely you aren’t going to do an E. M. Forster on me. ‘If I had a choice between betraying my country and my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.’”

  Meg said: “That is one of those clever remarks that, when you analyse it, either means nothing or means something rather silly.”

  Alice said: “Remember, whatever you choose to do, you can’t bring her back. You’ve got a number of options, but that isn’t one. It’s very satisfying to the human ego to discover the truth; ask Adam Dalgliesh. It’s even more satisfying to human vanity to imagine you can avenge the innocent, restore the past, vindicate the right. But you can’t. The dead stay dead. All you can do is to hurt the living in the name of justice or retribution or revenge. If that gives you any pleasure, then do it, but don’t imagine that there’s virtue in it. Whatever you decide, I know that you won’t go back on it. I can believe you and I can trust you.”

  Looking at Alice’s face, Meg saw that the look bent on her was serious, ironic, challenging; but it was not pleading. Alice said: “Do you want some time to consider?”

  “No. There’s no point in having time. I know now what I have to do. I have to tell. But I’d rather you did.”

  “Then give me until tomorrow. Once I’ve spoken, there’ll be no more privacy. There are things I need to do here. The proofs, affairs to arrange. And I should like twelve hours of freedom. If you can give me that, I’ll be grateful. I haven’t the right to ask for more, but I am asking for that.”

  Meg said: “But when you confess, you’ll have to give them a motive, a reason, something they can believe in.”

  “Oh, they’ll believe it all right. Jealousy, hatred, the resentment of an aging virgin for a woman who looked as she did, lived as she did. I’ll say that she wanted to marry him, take him from me after all I’ve done for him. They’ll see me as a neurotic, menopausal woman gone temporarily off her head. Unnatural affection. Suppressed sexuality. That’s how men talk about women like me. That’s the kind of motive that makes sense to a man like Rickards. I’ll give it to him.”

  “Even if it means you end up in Broadmoor? Alice, could you bear it?”

  “Well, that’s a possibility, isn’t it? It’s either that or prison. This was a carefully planned murder. Even the cleverest counsel won’t be able to make it look like a sudden, unpremeditated act. And I doubt whether there’s much to choose between Broadmoor and prison when it comes to the food.”

  It seemed to Meg that nothing ever again would be certain. Not only had her inner world been shattered but the familiar objects of the external world no longer had reality. Alice’s roll-top desk, the kitchen table, the high-backed cane chairs, the rows of gleaming pans, the stoves all seemed insubstantial, as if they would disappear at her touch. She was aware that the kitchen round which her eyes ranged was now empty. Alice had left. She leaned back, faint, and closed her eyes, and then, opening them, she was aware of Alice’s face bending low over hers, immense, almost moon-like. She was handing Meg a tumbler. She said: “It’s whisky. Drink this, you need it.”

  “No, Alice, I can’t. I can’t really. You know I hate whisky, it makes me sick.”

  “This won’t make you sick. There are times when whisky is the only possible remedy. This is one of them. Drink it, Meg.”

  She felt her knees tremble, and simultaneously the tears started like burning spurts of pain and began flowing unchecked, a salt stream over her cheeks, her mouth. She thought, This can’t be happening. This can’t be true. But that was how she had felt when Miss Mortimer, calling her from her class, had gently seated her in the chair opposite to her in the Head’s private sitting room and had broken the news of Martin’s death. The unthinkable had to be thought, the unbelievable believed. Words still meant what they had always meant: “murder,” “death,” “grief,” “pain.” She could see Miss Mortimer’s mouth moving, the odd, disconnected phrases floating out, like balloons in a cartoon, noticing again how she must have wiped off her lipstick before the interview. Perhaps she had thought that only naked lips could give such appalling news. She saw again those restless blobs of flesh, noticed again that the top button on Miss Mortimer’s cardigan was hanging loose on a single thread and heard herself say, actually say, “Miss Mortimer, you’re going to lose a button.”

  She clasped her fingers round the glass. It seemed to her to have grown immensely large and heavy as a rock and the smell of the whisky almost turned her stomach. But she had no power to resist. She lifted it slowly to her mouth. She was aware of Alice’s face still very close, of Alice’s eyes watching her. She took the first small sip and was about to throw back her head and gulp it down when, firmly but gently, the glass was taken out of her hands, and she heard Alice’s voice: “You’re quite right, Meg, it was never your drink. I’ll make coffee for both of us, then walk with you back to the Old Rectory.”

  Fifteen mi
nutes later Meg helped wash up the coffee cups as if this were the end of an ordinary evening. Then they set out together to walk over the headland. The wind was at their back, and it seemed to Meg that they almost flew through the air, their feet hardly touching the turf, as if they were witches. At the door of the rectory Alice asked: “What will you do tonight, Meg, pray for me?”

  “I shall pray for both of us.”

  “As long as you don’t expect me to repent. I’m not religious, as you know, and I don’t understand that word unless, as I suppose, it means regret that something we’ve done has turned out less well for us than we hoped. On that definition I have little to repent of except ill luck that you, my dear Meg, are an incompetent car mechanic.”

  And then, as if on impulse, she grasped Meg’s arms. The grip was so fierce that it hurt. Meg thought for a moment that Alice was going to kiss her, but her hold loosened and her hands fell. She said a curt goodbye and turned away.

  Putting her key in the lock and pushing the door open, Meg looked back, but Alice had disappeared into the darkness, and the wild sobbing, which for an incredible moment she thought was a woman weeping, was only the wind.

  12

  Dalgliesh had just finished sorting the last of his aunt’s papers when the telephone rang. It was Rickards. His voice, strong, high with euphoria, came over the line as clearly as if his presence filled the room. His wife had given birth to a daughter an hour earlier. He was ringing from the hospital. His wife was fine. The baby was wonderful. He had only a few minutes. They were carrying out some nursing procedure or other, and then he’d be able to get back to Susie.

  “She’s got home just in time, Mr. Dalgliesh. Lucky, wasn’t it? And the midwife says she’s hardly known such a quick labour for a first pregnancy. Only six hours. Seven and a half pounds, just a nice weight. And we wanted a girl. We’re calling her Stella Louise. Louise is after Susie’s mother. We may as well make the old trout happy.”