Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  How could he have? Yours died of cancer and mine of pneumonia. He couldn’t have fixed that.”

  “I know. It’s just that he seemed such a natural widower. I thought at the time that he’d done it to stop them having any more babies.”

  “Well it would do that all right. Were you wondering whether a tendency to murder is inherited?”

  “Not really. But so much is. Father’s total inability to make relationships, for example. That incredible self-absorption. Do you know, he’d actually put me down for Stonyhurst before he remembered that it was your mother, not mine, who’d been RC.”

  “A pity he did find out. I should like to have seen what the Jesuits made of you. The trouble with a religious education, if you’re a pagan like me, is that you’re left all your life feeling that you’ve lost something, not that it isn’t there.”

  She walked over to the table and stirred a bowl of mushrooms with her finger. “I can make relationships. The trouble is that I get bored and they don’t last. And I only seem to know one way to be kind. It’s as well that we last, isn’t it? You’ll last for me until the day I die. Shall I change now or do you want me to see to the wine?”

  “You’ll last for me until the day I die.” Contra mundum. It was too late now to sever that cord even if he wanted to. He remembered Charles Schofield’s gauze-cocooned head, the dying eyes still malicious behind two slits in the bandages, the swollen lips painfully moving.

  “Congratulations, Giovanni. Remember me in your garden in Parma.”

  What had been so astounding was not the lie itself, or that Schofield had believed it, or pretended to believe it, but that he had hated his brother-in-law enough to die with that taunt on his lips. Or had he taken it for granted that a physicist, poor philistine, wouldn’t know his Jacobean dramatists? Even his wife, that indefatigable sexual sophisticate, had known better.

  “I suppose you’d sleep together if Domenica happened to want it. A spot of incest wouldn’t worry her. But you don’t need to, do you? You don’t need anything as normal as sex to be more to each other than you are. Neither of you wants anyone else. That’s why I’m leaving. I’m getting out now while there’s still something left of me to get out.”

  “Max, what is it?” Domenica’s voice, sharpened with anxiety, recalled him to the present. His mind spun back through a kaleidoscope of spinning years, through superimposed swirling images of childhood and youth, to that last unforgettable image, still perfectly in focus, patterned forever in his memory, Lorrimer’s dead fingers clawing at the floor of his laboratory, Lorrimer’s dull, half-open eye, Lorrimer’s blood.

  He said: “You get changed. I’ll see to the wine.”

  7

  “What will people say?”

  “That’s all you ever think of, Mum, what will people say. What does it matter what they say? I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”

  “Of course not. If anyone says different your dad’ll soon put them right. But you know what tongues they have in this village. A thousand pounds. I couldn’t hardly believe it when that solicitor rang. It’s a tidy sum. And by the time Lillie Pearce has passed the news around in the Stars and Plough it’ll be ten thousand, more than likely.”

  “Who cares about Lillie Pearce, silly old cow.”

  “Brenda! I won’t have that language. And we have to live in this village.”

  “You may have to. I don’t. And if that’s the kind of minds they’ve got the sooner I move away the better. Oh, Mum, don’t look like that! He only wanted to help me, he wanted to be kind. And he probably did it on impulse.”

  “Not very considerate of him, though, was it? He might have talked it over with your dad or me.”

  “But he didn’t know that he was going to die.”

  Brenda and her mother were alone in the farmhouse, Arthur Pridmore having left after supper for the monthly meeting of the Parochial Church Council. The washing-up was finished and the long evening stretched before them. Too restless to settle to the television and too preoccupied with the extraordinary events of the day to take up a book, they sat in the firelight, edgy, half excited and half afraid, missing Arthur Pridmore’s reassuring bulk in his high-backed chair. Then Mrs. Pridmore shook herself into normality and reached for her sewing basket.

  “Well, at least it will help towards a nice wedding. If you have to take it, better put it in the Post Office. Then it’ll add interest and be there when you want it.”

  “I want it now. For books and a microscope like Dr. Lorrimer intended. That’s why he left it to me and that’s what I’m going to do with it. Besides, if people leave money for a special purpose you can’t use it for something else. And I don’t want to. I’m going to ask Dad to put up a shelf and a workbench in my bedroom and I’ll start working for my science ‘A’ levels straightaway.”

  “He ought not to have thought of you. What about Angela Foley? She’s had a terrible life, that girl. She never got a penny from her grandmother’s will, and now this.”

  “That’s not our concern, Mum. It was up to him. Maybe he might have left it to her if they hadn’t rowed.”

  “How do you mean, rowed? When?”

  “Last week sometime. Tuesday it was, I think. It was just before I came home and most of the staff had left. Inspector Blakelock sent me up to Biology with a query on one of the court reports. They were together in Dr. Lorrimer’s room and I heard them quarrelling. She was asking him for money and he said he wouldn’t give her any and then he said something about changing his will.”

  “You mean you stood there listening?”

  “Well I couldn’t help it, could I? They were talking quite loudly. He was saying terrible things about Stella Mawson, you know, that writer Angela Foley lives with. I wasn’t eavesdropping on purpose. I didn’t want to hear.”

  “You could have gone away.”

  “And come up again all the way from the front hall? Anyway, I had to ask him about the report for the Munnings case. I couldn’t go back and tell Inspector Blakelock that I hadn’t got the answer because Dr. Lorrimer was having a row with his cousin. Besides, we always listened to secrets at school.”

  “You’re not at school now. Really, Brenda, you worry me sometimes. One moment you behave like a sensible adult, and the next anyone would think you were back in the fourth form. You’re eighteen now, an adult. What has school to do with it?”

  “I don’t know why you’re getting so het up. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Well, you’ll have to tell that detective from Scotland Yard.”

  “Mum! I can’t! It hasn’t got anything to do with the murder.”

  “Who’s to say? You’re supposed to tell the police anything that’s important. Didn’t he tell you that?”

  He told her exactly that. Brenda remembered his look, her own guilty blush. He had known that she was keeping something back. She said, with stubborn defiance: “Well, I can’t accuse Angela Foley of murder, or as good as accuse her anyway. Besides,” she proclaimed triumphantly, remembering something Inspector Blakelock had told her, “it would be hearsay, not proper evidence. He couldn’t take any notice of it. And, Mum, there’s another thing. Suppose she didn’t really expect him to alter the will so soon? That solicitor told you that Dr. Lorrimer made the new will last Friday, didn’t he? Well that was probably because he had to go to a scene of crime in Ely on Friday morning. The police call only came through at ten o’clock. He must have gone into his solicitors then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Only if people think that I had a motive, then so did she.”

  “Of course you didn’t have a motive! That’s ridiculous. It’s wicked! Oh, Brenda, if only you’d come to the concert with Dad and me.”

  “No thank you. Miss Spencer singing ‘Pale Hands I Loved,’ and the Sunday School kids doing their boring old Maypole dance, and the WI with their handbells, and old Mr. Matthews bashing away with the acoustic spoons. I’ve seen it all before.”

  �
�But you’d have had an alibi.”

  “So I would if you and Dad had stayed here at home with me.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered where you’d been if it weren’t for that thousand pounds. Well, let’s hope Gerald Bowlem understands.”

  “If he doesn’t, he knows what he can do! I don’t see what it’s got to do with Gerald. I’m not married to him, nor engaged for that matter. He’d better not interfere.”

  She looked across at her mother and was suddenly appalled. She had only seen her look like this once before, the night when she had her second miscarriage and had been told by old Dr. Greene that there could never now be another baby. Brenda had only been twelve at the time. But her mother’s face, suddenly remembered, had looked exactly as it did now, as if an obliterating hand had passed over it, wiping off brightness, blunting the contours of cheek and brow, dulling the eyes, leaving an amorphous mask of desolation.

  She remembered and understood what before she had only felt, the anger and resentment that her mother, indestructible and comforting as a great rock in a weary land, should herself be vulnerable to pain. She was there to soothe Brenda’s miseries, not to suffer herself, to comfort, not to seek comfort. But now Brenda was older and she was able to understand. She saw her mother clearly, like a stranger newly met. The cheap crimplene dress, spotlessly clean as always, with the brooch Brenda had given her for her last birthday pinned to the lapel. The ankles thickening above the sensible low-heel shoes, the pudgy hands speckled with the brown stains of age, the wedding ring of dull gold biting into the flesh, the curly hair that had once been red-gold like her own, still brushed plainly to one side and held in a tortoiseshell slide, the fresh, almost unlined skin. She put her arms round her mother’s shoulders.

  “Oh, Mum, don’t worry. It’ll be all right. Commander Dalgliesh will find out who did it and then everything will be back to normal. Look, I’ll make you some cocoa. Don’t let’s wait till Dad’s back from the PCC. We’ll have it now. Mum, it’s all right. Really it is. It’s all right.”

  Simultaneously their ears caught the hum of the approaching car. They gazed at each other, speechless, guilty as conspirators. This wasn’t their ancient Morris. And how could it be? The Parochial Church Council never finished their business before half past eight.

  Brenda went to the window and peered out. The car stopped. She turned to her mother, white-faced.

  “It’s the police! It’s Commander Dalgliesh!”

  Without a word, Mrs. Pridmore got resolutely to her feet. She placed a hand briefly on her daughter’s shoulder, then went out into the passage and opened the door before Massingham had lifted his hand to knock. She said through stiff lips: “Come in please. I’m glad that you’re here. Brenda has something to tell you, something that I think you ought to know.”

  8

  The day was nearly over. Sitting in his dressing gown at the small table in front of the window in his bedroom at the Moonraker, Dalgliesh heard the church clock strike half past eleven.

  He liked his room. It was the larger of the two which Mrs. Gotobed had been able to offer. The single window looked out over the churchyard towards the village hall and beyond it the clerestory and square flint tower of St. Nicholas’s Church. There were only three rooms for guests at the inn. The smallest and noisiest, since it was over the public bar, had fallen to Massingham. The main guest-room had already been taken by an American couple touring East Anglia, perhaps in search of family records. They had sat at their table in the dining parlour, happily occupied with maps and guide books, and if they had been told that their newly arrived fellow guests were police officers investigating a murder, they were too well bred to betray interest. After a brief smile and a good-evening in their soft transatlantic voices they had turned their attention again to Mrs. Gotobed’s excellent casserole of hare in cider.

  It was very quiet. The muted voices from the bar had long since been silent. It was over an hour since he had heard the last shouted goodbyes. Massingham, he knew, had spent the evening in the public bar hoping, presumably, to pick up scraps of useful information. Dalgliesh hoped that the beer had been good. He had been born close enough to the fens to know that, otherwise, Massingham would have found it a frustrating evening.

  He got up to stretch his legs and shoulders, looking around with approval at the room. The floorboards were of ancient oak, black and stout as ship’s timbers. A fire of wood and turf burnt in the iron Victorian grate, the pungent smoke curtseying under a decorated hood of wheat ears and flower posies tied with ribbons. The large double bed was of brass, high and ornate with four great knobs, large as polished cannon balls, at the corners. Mrs. Gotobed had earlier folded back the crocheted cover to reveal a feather mattress shaken to an inviting plumpness. In any four-star hotel he might have enjoyed greater luxury, but hardly such comfort.

  He returned to his work. It had been a crowded day of interrogation and renewed interrogation, telephone calls to London, a hurriedly arranged and unsatisfactory Press conference, two consultations with the Chief Constable, the gathering of those odd-shaped pieces of information and conjecture which, in the end, would click together to form the completed picture. It might be a trite analogy, this comparison of detection with fitting together a jigsaw. But it was remarkably apt, not least because it was so often that tantalizing, elusive piece with the vital segment of a human face that made the picture complete.

  He turned the page to the last interview of the day, with Henry Kerrison at the Old Rectory. The smell of the house was still in his nostrils, an evocative smell of stale cooking and furniture polish, reminding him of childhood visits with his parents to over-large, ill-heated country vicarages. Kerrison’s housekeeper and children had long been in bed and the house had held a melancholy, brooding silence as if all the tragedies and disappointments of its numerous incumbents still hung in the air.

  Kerrison had answered the door himself and had shown him and Massingham into his study where he was occupied in sorting coloured slides of post-mortem injuries to illustrate a lecture he was to give the following week to the detective-training school. On the desk was a framed photograph of himself as a boy with an older man, obviously his father. They were standing on a crag, climbing ropes slung round their shoulders. What interested Dalgliesh as much as the photograph itself was the fact that Kerrison hadn’t bothered to remove it.

  He hadn’t appeared to resent his visitors’ late arrival. It was possible to believe that he welcomed their company. He had worked on in the light of his desk lamp, fitting each slide into his view, then sorting it into the appropriate heap, intent as a schoolboy with a hobby. He had answered their questions quietly and precisely, but as if his mind were elsewhere. Dalgliesh asked him whether his daughter had talked to him about the incident with Lorrimer.

  “Yes, she did tell me. When I got home for lunch from my lecture I found her crying in her room. It seems that Lorrimer was unnecessarily harsh. But Nell is a sensitive child and it’s not always possible to know the precise truth of the matter.”

  “You didn’t talk to him about it”?

  “I didn’t talk to anyone. I did wonder whether I ought to, but it would have meant questioning Inspector Blakelock and Miss Pridmore, and I didn’t wish to involve them. They had to work with Lorrimer. So, for that matter, did I. The effectiveness of an isolated institution like Hoggatt’s largely depends on good relationships between the staff. I thought it was best not to take the matter further. That may have been prudence, or it may have been cowardice. I don’t know.”

  He had smiled sadly, and added: “I only know that it wasn’t a motive for murder.”

  A motive for murder. Dalgliesh had discovered enough motive in this crowded but not very satisfactory day. But motive was the least important factor in a murder investigation. He would gladly have exchanged the psychological subtleties of motive for a single, solid, incontrovertible piece of physical evidence linking a suspect with the crime. And, so far, there was none. He still awai
ted the report from the Metropolitan Laboratory on the mallet and the vomit. The mysterious figure seen by old Goddard fleeing from Hoggatt’s remained mysterious; no other person had yet been traced or had come forward to suggest that he wasn’t a figment of the old man’s imagination. The tyre marks near the gate, now definitely identified from the tyre index at the laboratory, still hadn’t been linked to a car. Not surprisingly, no trace had been found of Middlemass’s white coat and no indication whether or how it had been disposed of. An examination of the village hall and the hobby-horse costumes had produced nothing to disprove Middlemass’s account of his evening and it was apparent that the horse, a heavy, all-enveloping contraption of canvas and serge, ensured that its wearer would be unidentifiable even, in Middlemass’s case, to his elegant handmade shoes.

  The central mysteries of the case remained. Who was it who had telephoned the message to Lorrimer about the can being burned and the number 1840? Was it the same woman who had rung Mrs. Bidwell? What had been written on the missing sheet from Lorrimer’s rough notebook? What had prompted Lorrimer to make that extraordinary will?

  Lifting his head from the files, he listened. There was a noise, faintly discernible, like the creeping of a myriad insects. He remembered it from his childhood nights, lying awake in the nursery of his father’s Norfolk vicarage, a sound he had never heard in the noise of cities, the first gentle sibilant whisper of the night rain. Soon it was followed by a spatter of drops against the window and the rising moan of the wind in the chimney. The fire spluttered and then flared into sudden brightness. There was a violent flurry of rain against the pane and then, as quickly as it had begun, the brief storm was over. He opened the window to savour the smell of the damp night air, and gazed out into a blanket of darkness, black fen earth merging with the paler sky.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the night, he could discern the low rectangle of the village hall and, beyond it, the great medieval tower of the church. Then the moon sailed out from behind the clouds and the churchyard became visible, the obelisks and gravestones gleaming pale as if they exuded their own mysterious light. Below him, faintly luminous, lay the gravel path along which, the previous night, the morris-dancers, bells jangling, had made their way through the rising mist. Staring out over the churchyard he pictured the hobby-horse pawing the ground to meet them, rearing its grotesque head among the gravestones and snapping the air with its great jaws. And he wondered again who had been inside its skin.