Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh said: “Did he give you any explanation why he left his cousin, Angela Foley, out of the will?”

  “As a matter of fact he did. I thought it right to point out that in the event of his death his cousin, as his only surviving relative apart from his father, might wish to contest the will. If she did, a legal battle would cost money and might seriously deplete the estate. I didn’t feel any obligation to press him to alter his decision. I merely thought it right to point out the possible consequences. You heard what he replied, didn’t you, Mitching?”

  “Yes, indeed, sir. The late Mr. Lorrimer expressed his disapprobation of the way in which his cousin chose to live, in particular he deplored the relationship which, he alleged, subsisted between his cousin and the lady with whom I understand she makes her home, and said that he did not wish the said companion to benefit from his estate. If his cousin chose to contest the will, he was prepared to leave the matter to the courts. It would no longer be of any concern to himself. He would have made his wishes clear. He also pointed out, if I remember rightly, sir, that the will was intended to be transitional in its nature. He had it in mind to marry and if he did so the will would, of course, become void. In the meantime he wished to guard against what he saw as the remote contingency of his cousin inheriting absolutely should he die unexpectedly before his personal affairs became clearer.”

  “That’s right, Mitching, that in effect is what he said. I must say that it reconciled me somewhat to the new will. If he were proposing to get married obviously it would no longer stand and he could think again. Not that I thought it necessarily an unjust or unfair will. A man has the right to dispose of his property as he sees fit, if the state leaves him anything to dispose of. It struck me as a bit odd that, if he were engaged to be married, he didn’t mention the lady in the interim will. But I suppose the principle’s sound enough. If he’d left her a paltry sum she’d hardly have thanked him, and if he’d left her the lot, she’d probably promptly have married another chap and it would all pass to him.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “He didn’t tell you anything about the proposed marriage?”

  “Not even the lady’s name. And naturally I didn’t ask. I’m not even sure that he had anyone particular in mind. It could have been only a general intention or, perhaps, an excuse for altering the will. I merely congratulated him and pointed out that the new will would be void as soon as the marriage took place. He said that he understood that and would be coming to make a new will in due course. In the meantime this was what he wanted and this was what I drew up. Mitching signed it, with my secretary as a second witness. Ah, here she is with the coffee. You remember signing Mr. Lorrimer’s will, eh?”

  The thin, nervous-looking girl who had brought in the coffee gave a terrified nod in response to the Major’s bark and hastened out of the room.

  Major Hunt said with satisfaction: “She remembers. She was so terrified that she could hardly sign. But she did sign. It’s all there. All correct and in order. I hope we can draw up a valid will, eh, Mitching? But it will be interesting to see if the little woman makes a fight for it.”

  Dalgliesh asked how much Angela Foley would be making a fight for.

  “The best part of fifty thousand pounds, I dare say. Not a fortune these days but useful, useful. The original capital was left to him absolutely by old Annie Lorrimer, his paternal grandmother. An extraordinary old woman. Born and bred in the fens. Kept a village store with her husband over at Low Willow. Tom Lorrimer drank himself into a comparatively early grave—couldn’t stand the fen winters—and she carried on alone. Not all the money came from the shop, of course, although she sold out at a good time. No, she had a nose for the horses. Extraordinary thing. God knows where she got it from. Never mounted a horse in her life to my knowledge. Shut up the shop and went to Newmarket three times a year. Never lost a penny, so I’ve heard, and saved every pound she won.”

  “What family had she? Was Lorrimer’s father her only son?”

  “That’s right. She had one son and one daughter, Angela Foley’s mother. Couldn’t bear the sight of either of them, as far as I can see. The daughter got herself in the family way by the village sexton and the old woman cast her off in approved Victorian style. The marriage turned out badly and I don’t think Maud Foley saw her mother again. She died of cancer about five years after the girl was born. The old woman wouldn’t have her granddaughter back, so she ended up in local authority care. Most of her life’s been spent in foster homes, I believe.”

  “And the son?”

  “Oh, he married the local schoolmistress, and that turned out reasonably well as far as I know. But the family were never close. The old lady wouldn’t leave her money to her son because, she said, it would mean two lots of death duties. She was well over forty when he was born. But I think the real reason was simply that she didn’t much like him. I don’t think she saw much of the grandson, Edwin, either, but she had to leave the money somewhere and hers was a generation which believes that blood is thicker than charitable soup and male blood thicker than female. Apart from the fact she’d cast off her daughter and never taken any interest in her granddaughter, her generation didn’t believe in leaving money outright to women. It only encourages seducers and fortune-hunters. So she left it absolutely to her grandson, Edwin Lorrimer. At the time of her death I think he had qualms of conscience about his cousin. As you know, the first will made her his legatee.”

  Dalgliesh said: “Do you know if Lorrimer told her that he intended to change his will?”

  The solicitor looked at him sharply. “He didn’t say. In the circumstances it would be convenient for her if she could prove that he did.”

  So convenient, thought Dalgliesh, that she would certainly have mentioned the fact when first interviewed. But even if she had believed herself to be her cousin’s heir, that didn’t necessarily make her a murderess. If she wanted a share of her grandmother’s money, why wait until now to kill for it?”

  The telephone rang. Major Hunt muttered an apology and reached for the receiver. Holding his palm over the mouthpiece, he said to Dalgliesh: “It’s Miss Foley, ringing from Postmill Cottage. Old Mr. Lorrimer wants to have a word with me about the will. She says he’s anxious to know whether the cottage now belongs to him. Do you want me to tell him?”

  “That is for you. But he’s the next of kin; he may as well know the terms of the will now as later. And so may she.”

  Major Hunt hesitated. Then he spoke into the receiver. “All right, Betty. Put Miss Foley on the line.” He looked up again at Dalgliesh. “This piece of news is going to put the cat among the pigeons in Chevisham.”

  Dalgliesh had a sudden picture of Brenda Pridmore’s eager young face shining across Howarth’s desk at him.

  “Yes,” he said grimly. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  5

  Howarth’s house, Leamings, was three miles outside Chevisham Village on the Cambridge road, a modern building of concrete, wood and glass cantilevered above the flat fenlands, with two white wings like folded sails. Even in the fading light it was impressive. The house stood in uncompromising and splendid isolation, depending for its effect on nothing but perfection of line and artful simplicity. No other building was in sight except a solitary black wooden cottage on stilts, desolate as an execution shed, and, dramatically, an intricate mirage hung above the eastern skyline, the marvellous single tower and octagon of Ely Cathedral.

  From the rooms at the back one would see an immensity of sky and look out over vast unhedged fields dissected by Leamings Dike, changing with the seasons from black scarred earth, through the spring sowing to the harvest; would hear nothing but the wind and, in summer, the ceaseless susurration of the grain.

  The site had been small and the architect had needed ingenuity. There was no garden, nothing but a short drive leading to a paved courtyard and the double garage. Outside the garage, a red Jaguar XJS stood beside Howarth’s Triumph. Massingham cast envious eyes on the Jaguar and wonde
red how Mrs. Schofield had managed to get such quick delivery. They drove in and parked beside it. Even before Dalgliesh had switched off the engine, Howarth had strolled out and was quietly waiting for them. He was wearing a butcher’s long blue-and-white-striped overall in which he seemed perfectly at ease, evidently seeing no need either to explain or remove it. As they made their way up the open-tread, carved wooden stairs Dalgliesh complimented him on the house.

  Howarth said: “It was designed by a Swedish architect who did some of the modern additions at Cambridge. Actually it belongs to a university friend. He and his wife are spending a couple of years’ sabbatical at Harvard. If they decide to stay on in the States, they may sell. Anyway, we’re settled for the next eighteen months, and can then look around if we have to.”

  They were mounting a wide circular wooden staircase rising from the well of the house. Upstairs someone was playing, very loudly, a record of the finale of the third Brandenburg Concerto. The glorious contrapuntal sound beat against the walls and surged through the house; Massingham could almost imagine it taking off on its white wings and rollicking joyously over the fens.

  Dalgliesh said, above the music: “Mrs. Schofield likes it here?”

  Howarth’s voice, carefully casual, came down to them. “Oh, she may have moved on by then. Domenica likes variety. My half-sister suffers from Baudelaire’s horreur du domicile—she usually prefers to be elsewhere. Her natural habitat is London, but she’s with me now because she’s illustrating a new limited edition of Crabbe for the Paradine Press.”

  The record came to an end. Howarth paused and said with a kind of roughness, as if regretting an impulse to confide: “I think I ought to tell you that my sister was widowed just over eighteen months ago. Her husband was killed in a car crash. She was driving at the time but she was lucky. At least, I suppose she was lucky. She was scarcely scratched. Charles Schofield died three days later.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dalgliesh. The cynic in him wondered why he had been told. Howarth had struck him as essentially a private man, one not lightly to confide a personal or family tragedy. Was it an appeal to chivalry, a covert plea for him to treat her with special consideration? Or was Howarth warning him that she was still distraught with grief, unpredictable, unbalanced even? He could hardly be implying that, since the tragedy, she had indulged an irresistible impulse to kill her lovers.

  They had reached the top of the stairs and were standing on a wide wooden balcony seemingly hung in space. Howarth pushed open a door and said: “I’ll leave you to it. I’m making an early start on cooking dinner tonight. She’s in here.” He called: “This is Commander Dalgliesh and Detective Inspector Massingham of the Met. The men about the murder. My sister, Domenica Schofield.”

  The room was immense, with a triangular window from roof to floor jutting out over the fields like a ship’s prow, and a high curved ceiling of pale pine. The furniture was scant and very modern. The room looked, in fact, more like a musician’s studio than a sitting room. Against the wall was a jangle of music stands and violin cases and, mounted above them, a bank of modern and obviously expensive stereo equipment. There was only one picture, a Sidney Nolan oil of Ned Kelly. The faceless metallic mask, with the two anonymous eyes gleaming through the slit, was appropriate to the austerity of the room, the stark blackness of the darkening fens. It was easy to imagine him, a grim latter-day Hereward, striding over the clogging acres.

  Domenica Schofield was standing at a drawing desk placed in the middle of the room. She turned, unsmilingly, to look at them with her brother’s eyes, and Dalgliesh encountered again those disconcerting pools of blue under the thick, curved brows. As always, in those increasingly rare moments when, unexpectedly, he came face to face with a beautiful woman, his heart jerked. It was a pleasure more sensual than sexual and he was glad that he could still feel it, even in the middle of a murder investigation.

  But he wondered how studied was that smooth deliberate turn, that first gaze, remote yet speculative, from the remarkable eyes. In this light, the irises, like those of her brother, were almost purple, the whites stained with a paler blue. She had a pale, honey-coloured skin, with flaxen hair drawn back from the forehead and tied in a clump at the base of her neck. Her blue jeans were pulled tightly over the strong thighs and were topped with an open-necked shirt of checkered blue and green. Dalgliesh judged her to be about ten years younger than her half-brother. When she spoke, her voice was curiously low for a woman, with a hint of gruffness.

  “Sit down.” She waved her right hand vaguely towards one of the chrome and leather chairs. “You don’t mind if I go on working?”

  “Not if you don’t mind being talked to while you do, and if you don’t object to my sitting while you stand.”

  He swung the chair closer to her easel, from where he could see both her face and her work, and settled himself. The chair was remarkably comfortable. He sensed that already she was regretting her lack of civility. In any confrontation the one standing has a psychological advantage, but not if the adversary is sitting very obviously at ease in a spot he has himself selected. Massingham, with an almost ostentatious quietness, had lifted a second chair for himself and placed it against the wall to the left of the door.

  She must have been aware of his presence at her back, but she gave no sign. She could hardly object to a situation she had herself contrived, but, as if sensing that the interview had started unpropitiously, she said: “I’m sorry to seem so obsessively busy, but I have a deadline to meet. My brother’s probably told you that I’m illustrating a new edition of Crabbe’s poems for the Paradine Press. This drawing is for ‘Procrastination’—Dinah among her curious trifles.”

  Dalgliesh had known that she must be a competent professional artist to have gained the commission, but he was impressed by the sensitivity and assurance of the line drawing before him. It was remarkably detailed but unfinicky, a highly decorative and beautifully composed balance of the girl’s slender figure and Crabbe’s carefully enumerated objects of desire. They were all there, meticulously drawn: the figured wallpapers, the rose carpet, the mounted stag’s head and the jewelled, enamelled clock. It was, he thought, a very English illustration of the most English of poets. She was taking trouble with the period details. On the right-hand wall was mounted a cork board on which were pinned what were obviously preliminary sketches: a tree, half-finished interiors, articles of furniture, small impressions of landscape.

  She said: “It’s as well one doesn’t have to like a poet’s work to illustrate him competently. Who was it called Crabbe ‘Pope in worsted stockings’? After twenty lines my brain begins to thud in rhymed couplets. But perhaps you’re an Augustan. You write verse, don’t you?”

  She made it sound as if he collected cigarette cards for a hobby.

  Dalgliesh said: “I’ve respected Crabbe ever since I read as a boy that Jane Austen said she could have fancied being Mrs. Crabbe. When he went to London for the first time he was so poor that he had to pawn all his clothes, and then he spent the money on an edition of Dryden’s poems.”

  “And you approve of that?”

  “I find it appealing.” He quoted:

  Miseries there were, and woes the world around,

  But these had not her pleasant dwelling found;

  She knew that mothers grieved and widows wept

  And she was sorry, said her prayers and slept:

  For she indulged, nor was her heart so small

  That one strong passion should engross it all.

  She gave him a swift, elliptical glance. “In this case there is happily no mother to grieve nor widow to weep. And I gave up saying my prayers when I was nine. Or were you only proving that you could quote Crabbe?”

  “That, of course,” replied Dalgliesh. “Actually I came to talk to you about these.”

  He took a bundle of the letters out of his coat pocket, opened one of the pages and held it out towards her. He asked: “This is Lorrimer’s handwriting?”

&
nbsp; She glanced dismissively at the page. “Of course. It’s a pity he didn’t send them. I should have liked to have read them, but not now perhaps.”

  “I don’t suppose they’re so very different from the ones he did post.”

  For a moment he thought that she was about to deny receiving any. He thought: “She’s remembered that we can easily check with the postman.” He watched the blue eyes grow wary.

  She said: “That’s how love ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”

  “Less a whimper than a cry of pain.”

  She wasn’t working, but stood still, scrutinizing the drawing. She said: “It’s extraordinary how unattractive misery is. He’d have done better to have tried honesty. ‘It means a lot to me, it doesn’t mean very much to you. So why not be generous? It won’t cost you anything except an occasional half-hour of your time.’ I’d have respected him more.”

  “But he wasn’t asking for a commercial arrangement,” said Dalgliesh. “He was asking for love.”

  “That’s something I didn’t have to give, and he had no right to expect.”

  None of us, thought Dalgliesh, has a right to expect it. But we do. Irrelevantly a phrase of Plutarch fell into his mind. “Boys throw stones at frogs in sport. But the frogs do not die in sport, they die in earnest.”

  “When did you break it off?” he asked.

  She looked surprised for a moment. “I was going to ask you how you knew that I’d done the breaking. But, of course, you’ve got the letters. I suppose he was whining. I told him that I didn’t want to see him again about two months ago. I haven’t spoken to him since.”