Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  “And he said nothing else at all except that he’d ring the TV mechanic this morning?”

  “What else would he say? He wasn’t one for chatting over the telephone.”

  “Did you ring him at the Laboratory yesterday about your hospital appointment?”

  “That’s right. I was supposed to go in to Addenbrooke’s yesterday afternoon. Edwin was going to drive me in. It’s my leg, you see. It’s psoriasis. They’re going to try a new treatment.” He made as if to roll up his trouser leg.

  Dalgliesh said quickly: “That’s all right, Mr. Lorrimer. When did you know the bed wasn’t available after all?”

  “About nine o’clock they rang. He’d only just left home. So I phoned the Lab. I know the number of the Biology Department, of course. That’s where he works—the Biology Department. Miss Easterbrook answered the phone and said that Edwin was at the hospital attending a post-mortem but she would give him the message when he got in. Addenbrooke’s said they’d probably send for me next Tuesday. Who’s going to take me now?”

  “I expect Mrs. Swaffield will arrange something, or perhaps your niece could help. Wouldn’t you like her to be here with you?”

  “No. What can she do? She was here this morning with that friend of hers, the writing woman. Edwin doesn’t like either of them. The friend—Miss Mawson, isn’t it?—was rummaging around upstairs. I’ve got very good ears. I could hear her all right. I went out of the door and there she was coming down. She said she’d been to the bathroom. Why was she wearing washing-up gloves if she was going to the bathroom?”

  Why indeed? thought Dalgliesh. He felt a spasm of irritation that Constable Davis hadn’t arrived sooner. It was perfectly natural that Howarth should come with Angela Foley to break the news and should leave her with her uncle. Someone had to stay with him, and who more suitable than his only remaining relative? It was probably natural, too, that Angela Foley should send for the support of her friend. Probably both of them were interested in Lorrimer’s will. Well, that too was natural enough. Massingham shifted on the sofa. Dalgliesh could sense his anxiety to get upstairs into Lorrimer’s room. He shared it. But books and papers, the sad detritus of a dead life, could wait. The living witness might not again be so communicative. He asked: “What did your son do with himself, Mr. Lorrimer?”

  “After work, do you mean? He stays in his room mostly. Reading, I suppose. He’s got quite a library of books up there. He’s a scholar, is Edwin. He doesn’t care much about the television, so I sit down here. Sometimes I can hear the record player. Then there’s the garden most weekends, cleaning the car, cooking and shopping. He has quite a full life. And he doesn’t get much time. He’s at the Lab until seven o’clock most nights, sometimes later.”

  “And friends?”

  “No. He doesn’t go in for friends. We keep ourselves to ourselves.”

  “No weekends away?”

  “Where would he want to go? And what would happen to me? Besides, there’s the shopping. If he isn’t on call for a scene-of-crime visit he drives me into Ely Saturday morning, and we go to the supermarket. Then we have lunch in the city. I enjoy that.”

  “What telephone calls did he have?”

  “From the Lab? Only when the Police Liaison Officer rings up to say that he’s wanted at a murder scene. Sometimes that’s in the middle of the night. But he never wakes me. There’s a telephone extension in his room. He just leaves me a note and he’s usually back in time to bring me a cup of tea at seven o’clock. He didn’t do that this morning of course. That’s why I rang the Lab. I rang his number first but there wasn’t any reply so then I rang the reception desk. He gave me both numbers in case I couldn’t get through to him in an emergency.”

  “And no one else has telephoned him recently, no one has come to see him?”

  “Who would want to come and see him? And no one has telephoned except that woman.”

  Dalgliesh said, very quietly: “What woman, Mr. Lorrimer?”

  “I don’t know what woman. I only know she rang. Monday of last week it was. Edwin was having a bath and the phone kept on ringing so I thought I’d better answer it.”

  “Can you remember exactly what happened and what was said, Mr. Lorrimer, from the time you lifted the receiver? Take your time, there’s no hurry. This may be very important.”

  “There wasn’t much to remember. I was going to say our number and ask her to hang on, but she didn’t give me any time. She started speaking as soon as I lifted the receiver. She said: ‘We’re right, there is something going on.’ Then she said something about the can being burnt and that she’d got the numbers.”

  “That the can had been burnt and she’d got the numbers?”

  “That’s right. It doesn’t sound sense now, but it was something like that. Then she gave me the numbers.”

  “Can you remember them, Mr. Lorrimer?”

  “Only the last one, which was 1840. Or it may have been two numbers, 18 and 40. I remembered those because the first house we had after I was married was number 18 and the second was 40. It was quite a coincidence, really. Anyway, those numbers stuck in my mind. But I can’t remember the others.”

  “How many numbers altogether?”

  “Three or four altogether, I think. There were two, and then the 18 and 40.”

  “What did the numbers sound like, Mr. Lorrimer? Did you think she was giving you a telephone number or a car registration, for example? Can you remember what impression they made on you at the time?”

  “No impression. Why should they? More like a telephone number, I suppose. I don’t think it was a car registration. There weren’t any letters you see. It sounded like a date; eighteen forty.”

  “Have you any idea who was telephoning?”

  “No. I don’t think it was anyone at the Lab. It didn’t sound like one of the Lab staff.”

  “How do you mean, Mr. Lorrimer? How did the voice seem?”

  The old man sat there, staring straight ahead. His hands, with the long fingers like those of his son, but with their skin dry and stained as withered leaves, hung heavily between his knees, grotesquely large for the brittle wrists. After a moment he spoke. He said: “Excited.”

  There was another silence. Both detectives looked at him. Massingham thought that here again was an example of his chief’s skill. He would have gone charging upstairs in search of the will and papers. But this evidence, so carefully elicited, was vital.

  After about a moment the old man spoke again. The word, when it came, was surprising. He said: “Conspiratorial. That’s what she sounded. Conspiratorial.”

  They sat, still patiently waiting, but he said nothing else. Then they saw that he was crying. His face didn’t change, but a single tear, bright as a pearl, dropped on to the parched hands. He looked at it as if wondering what it could be. Then he said: “He was a good son to me. Time was, when he first went to College up in London, that we lost touch. He wrote to his mother and me, but he didn’t come home. But these last years, since I’ve been alone, he’s taken care of me. I’m not complaining. I dare say he’s left me a bit of money, and I’ve got my pension. But it’s hard when the young go first. And who will look after me now?”

  Dalgliesh said quietly: “We need to look at his room, examine his papers. Is the room locked?”

  “Locked? Why should it be locked? No one went into it but Edwin.”

  Dalgliesh nodded to Massingham, who went out to call Mrs. Swaffield. Then they made their way upstairs.

  2

  It was a long, low-ceilinged room with white walls and a casement window which gave a view of a rectangle of unmown grass, a couple of gnarled apple trees heavy with fruit burnished green and gold in the autumn sun, a straggling hedge beaded with berries and beyond it the windmill. Even in the genial light of afternoon the mill looked a melancholy wreck of its former puissance. The paint was peeling from the walls and the great sails, from which the slats had fallen like rotten teeth, hung heavy with inertia in the restless air. Be
hind the windmill, the acres of black fenland, newly sliced by the autumn ploughing, stretched in glistening clumps between the dikes.

  Dalgliesh turned away from this picture of melancholy peace to examine the room. Massingham was already busy at the desk. Finding the lid unlocked, he rolled it back for a few inches, then let it drop again. Then he tried the drawers. Only the top left-hand one was locked. If he were impatient for Dalgliesh to take Lorrimer’s keys from his pocket and open it, he concealed his eagerness. It was known that the older man, who could work faster than any of his colleagues, still liked occasionally to take his time. He was taking it now, regarding the room with his dark sombre eyes, standing very still as if he were picking up invisible waves.

  The place held a curious peace. The proportions were right and the furniture fitted where it had been placed. A man might have space to think in this uncluttered sanctum. A single bed, neatly covered with a red and brown blanket, stood against the opposite wall. A long wall shelf above the bed held an adjustable reading lamp, a radio, a record player, a clock, a carafe of water and the Book of Common Prayer. In front of the window stood an oak working-table with a wheel-back chair. On the table was a blotter and a brown and blue pottery mug stacked with pencils and Biro pens. The only other items of furniture were a shabby, winged armchair with a low table beside it, a double wardrobe in oak to the left of the door, and to the right an old-fashioned desk with a roll-top. The telephone was fitted to the wall. There were no pictures and no mirror, no masculine impedimenta, no trivia on desktop or table ledge. Everything was functional, well used, unadorned. It was a room a man could be at home in.

  Dalgliesh walked over to look at the books. He estimated that there must be about four hundred of them, completely covering the wall. There was little fiction, although the nineteenth-century English and Russian novelists were represented. Most of the books were histories or biographies, but there was a shelf of philosophy: Teilhard de Chardin’s Science and Christ, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Humanist Outlook, Simone Weil’s First and Last, Plato’s Republic, the Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. It looked as if Lorrimer had at one time been trying to teach himself Greek. The shelf held a Greek primer and a dictionary.

  Massingham had taken down a book on comparative religion. He said: “It looks as if he was one of those men who torment themselves trying to discover the meaning of existence.”

  Dalgliesh replaced the Sartre he had been studying. “You find that reprehensible?”

  “I find it futile. Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one’s lungs. They’re for breathing.”

  “And life is for living. You find that an adequate personal credo?”

  “To maximize one’s pleasures and minimize one’s pain, yes, sir, I do. And I suppose, to bear with stoicism those miseries I can’t avoid. To be human is to ensure enough of those without inventing them. Anyway, I don’t believe you can hope to understand what you can’t see or touch or measure.”

  “A logical positivist. You’re in respectable company. But he spent his life examining what he could see or touch or measure. It doesn’t seem to have satisfied him. Well, let’s see what his personal papers have to tell.”

  He turned his attention to the desk, leaving the locked drawer to the last. He rolled back the top to reveal two small drawers and a number of pigeon-holes. And here, neatly docketed and compartmentalized, were the minutiae of Lorrimer’s solitary life. A drawer with three bills waiting to be paid, and one for receipts. A labelled envelope containing his parents’ marriage lines, his own birth and baptismal certificates. His passport, an anonymous face but with the eyes staring as if hypnotized, the neck muscles taut. The lens of the camera might have been the barrel of a gun. A life-assurance certificate. Receipted bills for fuel, electricity and gas. The maintenance agreement for the central heating. The hire-purchase agreement for the television. A wallet with his bank statement. His portfolio of investments, sound, unexciting, orthodox.

  There was nothing about his work. Obviously he kept his life as carefully compartmentalized as his filing system. Everything to do with his profession, the journals, the drafts of his scientific papers, were kept in his office at the Lab. They were probably written there. That might account for some of the late hours. It would certainly have been impossible to guess from the contents of his desk what his job had been.

  His will was in a separate labelled envelope together with a brief letter from a firm of Ely solicitors, Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt. The will was very short and had been made five years earlier. Lorrimer had left Postmill Cottage and £10,000 to his father, and the rest of his estate absolutely to his cousin, Angela Maud Foley. To judge from the portfolio of investments, Miss Foley would inherit a useful capital sum.

  Lastly, Dalgliesh took Lorrimer’s bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the top left-hand drawer. The lock worked very easily. The drawer was crammed with papers covered with Lorrimer’s handwriting. Dalgliesh took them over to the table in front of the window and motioned Massingham to draw up the armchair. They sat there together. There were twenty-eight letters in all and they read them through without speaking. Massingham was aware of Dalgliesh’s long fingers picking up each sheet, dropping it from his hand then shifting it across the desk towards him, then picking up the next. The clock seemed to him to be ticking unnaturally loudly and his own breathing to have become embarrassingly obtrusive. The letters were a liturgy of the bitter exfoliation of love. It was all here: the inability to accept that desire was no longer returned, the demand for explanations which, if attempted, could only increase the hurt, the excoriating self-pity, the spasms of irrational renewed hope, the petulant outbursts at the obtuseness of the lover unable to see where her happiness lay, the humiliating self-abasement.

  “I realize that you won’t want to live in the fens. But that needn’t be a difficulty, darling. I could get a transfer to the Metropolitan Lab if you prefer London. Or we could find a house in Cambridge or Norwich, a choice of two civilized cities. You once said that you liked to live among the spires. Or if you wished, I could stay on here and we could have a flat in London for you, and I’d join you whenever I could. I ought to be able to make it most Sundays. The week without you would be an eternity, but anything would be bearable if I knew that you belonged to me. You do belong to me. All the books, all the seeking and the reading, what does it come to in the end? Until you taught me that the answer was so simple.”

  Some of the letters were highly erotic. They were probably the most difficult of all love letters to write successfully, thought Massingham. Didn’t the poor devil know that, once desire was dead, they could only disgust? Perhaps those lovers who used a private nursery talk for their most secret acts were the wisest. At least the eroticism was personal. Here the sexual descriptions were either embarrassingly Lawrentian in their intensity, or coldly clinical. He recognized with surprise an emotion that could only be shame. It wasn’t just that some of the outpourings were brutally explicit. He was accustomed to perusing the private pornography of murdered lives; but these letters, with their mixture of crude desire and elevated sentiment, were outside his experience. The naked suffering they expressed seemed to him neurotic, irrational. Sex no longer had any power to shock him; love, he decided, obviously could.

  He was struck by the contrast between the tranquillity of the man’s room and the turbulence of his mind. He thought:

  at least this job teaches one not to hoard personal debris. Police work was as effective as religion in teaching a man to live each day as if it were his last. And it wasn’t only murder that violated privacy. Any sudden death could do as much. If the helicopter had crashed on landing, what sort of a picture would his leavings present to the world? A conformist, right-wing philistine, obsessed with his physical fitness? Homme moyen sensuel, and moyen everything else for that matter? He thought of Emma, with whom he slept whenever they got the opportunity, and
who, he supposed, would eventually become Lady Dungannon unless, as seemed increasingly likely, she found an elder son with better prospects and more time to devote to her. He wondered what Emma, cheerful hedonist with her frank enjoyment of bed, would have made of these self-indulgent, masturbatory fantasies, this humiliating chronicle of the miseries of defeated love.

  One half-sheet was covered with a single name. Domenica, Domenica, Domenica. And then Domenica Lorrimer, a clumsy, uneuphonic linking. Perhaps its infelicity had struck him, for he had written it only once. The letters looked laboured, tentative, like those of a young girl practising in secret the hoped-for married name. All the letters were undated, all without superscription and signature. A number were obviously first drafts, a painful seeking after the elusive world, the holograph scored with deletions.

  But now Dalgliesh was pushing towards him the final letter. Here there were no alterations, no uncertainties, and if there had been a previous draft, Lorrimer had destroyed it. This was as clear as an affirmation. The words, strongly written in Lorrimer’s black upright script, were set out in even lines, neatly as an exercise in calligraphy. Perhaps this was one he had intended to post after all.

  I have been seeking for the words to explain what has happened to me, what you have made happen. You know how difficult this is for me. There have been so many years of writing official reports, the same phrases, the same bleak conclusions. My mind was a computer programmed to death. I was like a man born in darkness, living in a deep cave, crouching for comfort by my small inadequate fire, watching the shadows flickering over the cave drawings and trying to find in their crude outlines some significance, a meaning to existence to help me endure the dark. And then you came and took me by the hand and led me out into the sunlight. And there was the real world, dazzling my eyes with its colour and its beauty. And it needed only your hand and the courage to take a few small steps out of the shadows and imaginings into the light. Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.