by P. D. James
As he and the team moved forward, the door of the great porch opened and a man came out to them. He seemed for a moment uncertain whether to salute, then held out his hand and said, ‘Chief Inspector Keith Whetstone. You’ve made good time, sir. The Chief said you’d be wanting SOCOs. We’ve only got a couple available at present, but they should be here within forty minutes. The photographer’s on his way.’
There could, thought Dalgliesh, be no doubt that Whetstone was a policeman, either that or a soldier. He was heavily built but held himself upright. He had a plain but agreeable face, ruddy cheeked, his eyes steady and watchful under hair the colour of old straw, cut en brosse and neatly shaped round over-large ears. He was dressed in country tweeds and wearing a greatcoat.
The introductions made, he said, ‘Have you any knowledge why the Met are taking the case, sir?’
‘None, I’m afraid. I take it you were surprised when the AC phoned.’
‘I know the Chief Constable thought it a bit odd, but we’re not looking for work. You’ll have heard about those arrests on the coast. We’ve got the Customs and Excise boys crawling all over us. The Yard said you could do with a DC. I’m leaving Malcolm Warren. He’s a bit on the quiet side but bright enough and he knows when to keep his mouth shut.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘Quiet, reliable and discreet. I’ve no quarrel with that. Where is he now?’
‘Outside the bedroom, guarding the body. The household – well, the six most important members, I suppose – are waiting in the great hall. That’s Mr George Chandler-Powell who owns the place, his assistant Mr Marcus Westhall – he’s a surgeon so they call him Mr – his sister Miss Candace Westhall, Flavia Holland, the sister in charge, Miss Helena Cressett, who’s a kind of housekeeper, secretary and general administrator as far as I can make out, and Mrs Letitia Frensham who does the accounts.’
‘An impressive feat of memory, Chief Inspector.’
‘Not really, sir. Mr Chandler-Powell’s a newcomer but most people hereabouts know who’s at the Manor.’
‘Has Dr Glenister arrived?’
‘An hour ago, sir. She’s had tea and done a tour of the garden, had a word with Mog – he’s by way of being the gardener – to tell him he’s over-pruned the viburnum. And now she’s in the hall, unless she’s gone for another walk. A lady very fond of outdoor exercise, I’d say. Well, it makes a change from the smell of corpses.’
Dalgliesh asked, ‘When did you get here?’
‘Twenty minutes after receiving the phone call from Mr Chandler-Powell. I was getting set to act as chief investigating officer when the Chief Constable rang to tell me that the Yard were taking over.’
‘Any thoughts, Inspector?’
Dalgliesh’s question was partly prompted by courtesy. This wasn’t his patch. Time might or might not disclose why the Home Office had taken a hand, but Whetstone’s apparent acceptance of the department’s involvement didn’t mean that he liked it.
‘I’d say it’s an inside job, sir. If it is, you’ve got a limited number of suspects, which in my experience doesn’t make the case any easier to crack. Not if they’ve all got their wits about them, which I reckon most of these will have.’
They were approaching the porch. The door opened as if someone had been watching to time exactly the moment of arrival. There could be no doubt about the identity of the man who moved to one side as they entered. He was grave faced and with the strained pallor of a man in shock, but had lost none of his authority. This was his house and he was in control both of it and of himself. Without holding out a hand or gazing at Dalgliesh’s subordinates, he said, ‘George Chandler-Powell. The rest of the party are in the great hall.’
They followed him through the porch and to a door to the left of the square entrance hall. Surprisingly the heavy oak door was shut and Chandler-Powell opened it. Dalgliesh wondered whether he had intended this first sight of the hall to be so dramatic. He experienced an extraordinary moment in which architecture, colours, shape and sounds, the soaring roof, the great tapestry on the right-hand wall, the vase of winter foliage on an oak table to the left of the door, the row of portraits in their gilt frames, some objects clearly seen even in a first glance, others perhaps dredged from some childish memory or fantasy, seemed to fuse into a living picture which immediately impregnated his mind.
The five people who were waiting on each side of the fire, their faces turned towards him, looked like a tableau, cunningly arranged to give the room its identity and humanity. There was a minute, oddly embarrassing because it seemed an inappropriate formality, in which Dalgliesh and Chandler-Powell quickly made their introductions. Chandler-Powell’s were hardly necessary. The only other male had to be Marcus Westhall, the pale-faced woman with the distinctive features Helena Cressett, the shorter dark woman and the only one whose face bore signs of possible tears, Sister Flavia Holland. The tall elderly woman standing on the fringe of the group seemed to have been overlooked by Chandler-Powell. Now she came quietly forward, shook Dalgliesh’s hand and said, ‘Letitia Frensham. I do the accounts.’
Chandler-Powell said, ‘I understand you already know Dr Glenister.’
Dalgliesh went over to her chair and they shook hands. She was the only person still seated and it was apparent from the tea service on a table beside her that she had been served tea. She wore the same clothes as he remembered from their last meeting, trousers tucked into leather boots and a tweed jacket which looked too heavy for her diminutive frame. A wide-brimmed hat, which she invariably wore at a rakish angle, now rested on the arm of the chair. Without it, her head, the scalp half-visible through the short white hair, looked as vulnerable as a child’s. Her features were delicate and her skin so pale that occasionally she looked like a woman gravely ill. But she was extraordinarily tough and her eyes, so dark they were almost black, were the eyes of a much younger woman. Dalgliesh would have preferred, as he always did, his long-standing colleague Dr Kynaston, but he was glad enough to see someone he liked and respected and with whom he had worked before. Dr Glenister was one of the most highly regarded forensic pathologists in Europe, an author of distinguished textbooks on the subject and a formidable expert witness in court. But her presence was an unwelcome reminder of Number Ten’s interest. The distinguished Dr Glenister tended to be called in when the government was involved.
Getting to her feet with the ease of a young woman, she said, ‘Commander Dalgliesh and I are old colleagues. Well, shall we get started? Mr Chandler-Powell, I’d like you to come up if Commander Dalgliesh has no objections.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘None.’
He was probably the only police officer whom Dr Glenister would invite to concur in any decision of hers. He recognised the problem. There were medical details which only Chandler-Powell could provide, but there were things she and Dalgliesh might want to say which it would be unwise to discuss over the body with Chandler-Powell present. Chandler-Powell had to be a suspect; Dr Glenister knew it – and so, no doubt, did Chandler-Powell.
They crossed the square entrance hall and climbed the staircase, Chandler-Powell and Dr Glenister leading. Their feet sounded unnaturally loud on the uncarpeted wood. The stairs led to a landing. The door to the right was open and Dalgliesh could glimpse a long low room with an intricate ceiling. Chandler-Powell said, ‘The long gallery. Sir Walter Raleigh danced there when he visited the Manor. Apart from the furnishings it’s still as it was then.’
No one commented. A second and shorter flight of stairs led to a door which opened on to a carpeted passage with rooms facing west and east.
Chandler-Powell said, ‘The patients’ accommodation is on this corridor. Suites with sitting room, bedroom and shower. Immediately underneath the long gallery has been furnished as a joint sitting room. Most patients prefer to stay in their suite or, occasionally, to use the library on the ground floor. Sister Holland’s rooms are the first facing west, opposite the lift.’
There was no need to point out which room Rhoda Gradwyn had occu
pied. A uniformed police officer seated at the door sprang up smartly as they appeared and saluted.
Dalgliesh said, ‘You’re Detective Constable Warren?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How long have you been on guard?’
‘Since Inspector Whetstone and I arrived, sir. That was at five past eight. The tape was already in place.’
Chandler-Powell said, ‘I was instructed to seal the door by Inspector Whetstone.’
Dalgliesh peeled the adhesive tape away and he entered the sitting room with Kate and Benton following. There was a strong smell of vomit, strangely at odds with the formality of the room. The door to the bedroom was to the left. It was closed and Chandler-Powell pushed it gently open against the impediment of a fallen tray, the cups broken and the teapot, its lid detached, lying on its side. The bedroom was in darkness, lit only by the daylight streaming in from the sitting room. The dark stain of tea splattered the carpet.
Chandler-Powell said, ‘I left things exactly as I found them. No one has entered this room since Sister and I left it. I suppose this mess can be cleared up once the body has been moved.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘Not until the scene has been searched.’
The room was not unduly small but, with five people, it suddenly seemed crowded. It was a little smaller than the sitting room but furnished with an elegance which intensified the dark horror of what lay on the bed. With Kate and Benton at the rear they approached the body. Dalgliesh switched on the light at the door and then turned to the bedside lamp. He saw that the bulb was missing and that the cord with its red call button had been looped high above the bed. They stood by the body in silence, Chandler-Powell keeping a little distant, aware that he might be there under sufferance.
The bed faced the window, which was closed and with the curtains drawn. Rhoda Gradwyn was lying on her back, her two arms, the hands clenched, were raised awkwardly above her head as if in a gesture of theatrical surprise, the dark hair splayed over the pillow. The left side of her face was covered by a taped surgical dressing but what flesh could be seen was a bright cherry red. The right eye, filmed in death, was fully open, the left, partly obscured by the thick dressing, was half-closed, giving the body a bizarre and unnerving look of a corpse peering balefully from an eye not yet dead. The sheet covered her body up to the shoulders as if her killer were deliberately exposing his handiwork framed by the two narrow straps of her white linen nightdress. The cause of death was evident. She had been throttled by a human hand.
Dalgliesh knew that speculative gazes fixed on a corpse – his own among them – were different from the gazes fixed on living flesh. Even for a professional inured to the sight of violent death there would always be a vestige of pity, anger or horror. The best pathologists and police officers, standing where they stood now, never lost respect for the dead, a respect born of shared emotions, however temporary, the unspoken recognition of a common humanity, a common end. But all humanity, all personality was extinguished with the last breath. The body, already subject to the inexorable process of decay, had been demoted to an exhibit, to be treated with a serious professional concern, a focus for emotions it could no longer share, no more be troubled by. Now the only physical communication was with gloved exploring hands, probes, thermometers, scalpels, wielded on a body laid open like the carcase of an animal. This was not the most horrific corpse he had seen in his years as a detective, but now it seemed to hold a career’s accumulation of pity, anger and impotence. He thought, Perhaps I’ve had enough of murder.
The room in which she lay, like the sitting room through which they had passed, despite its comfort was too carefully furnished, achieving an organised perfection which for him was unwelcoming and impersonal. The objects he had glimpsed as he passed through the sitting room to her bedside arranged themselves in his memory: the Georgian writing desk, the two modern easy chairs before a stone grate fitted with an electric heater, the mahogany bookcase and bureau arranged to their advantage. And yet they were rooms in which he would never have felt at home. They reminded him of a country-house hotel once – and only once – visited, where the overcharged guests were subtly made to feel socially inferior in their taste to that of the owners. No imperfections were allowed. He wondered who had arranged the rooms. Presumably Miss Cressett. If so, she was trying to convey that this part of the Manor was merely a short-stay hotel. Visitors were here to be impressed but not to take over even temporary possession. Rhoda Gradwyn may have felt differently, may even have been at home here. But the room, for her, had not been tainted by the noxious contamination of murder.
Turning to Chandler-Powell, Dr Glenister said, ‘You had, of course, seen her the evening before.’
‘Naturally.’
‘And is this how you found her this morning?’
‘Yes. When I saw her throat I knew that there was nothing I could do, that there was no possibility that this was a natural death. It hardly needs a consultant forensic pathologist to diagnose how she died. She’s been throttled. What you see now is exactly what I saw when I first approached the bed.’
Dalgliesh asked, ‘Were you alone?’
‘I was alone at the bedside. Sister Holland was in the sitting room coping with Kimberley Bostock, the assistant cook who had brought up the early morning tea. When she saw the body, Sister pressed the red call button in the sitting room several times so I knew that there was some kind of emergency. As you’ll see, the one by the bed has been looped out of reach. Very wisely, Sister Holland didn’t touch it. She has assured me that it was lying as usual on the bedside table when she settled the patient for the night. I thought that probably the patient had panicked or was ill and I expected to find Sister here also responding to the call. We shut both doors and I carried Kimberley down to her own apartment. I called her husband to stay with her and immediately telephoned the local police. Chief Inspector Whetstone instructed me about sealing the room and was here in charge until you arrived. I had already arranged for this corridor and the lift to be out of bounds.’
Dr Glenister had been bending over the body but without touching it. Now she straightened herself and said, ‘She was strangled by a right-handed grip, the hand probably in a smooth glove. There is bruising by the right-hand fingers and thumb but no nail scratches. I’ll know more when I have her on the table.’ She turned to Chandler-Powell. ‘There’s one question, please. Did you prescribe any sedatives for her yesterday night?’
‘I offered her Temazepam but she said she didn’t need it. She had come out of the anaesthetic well, had had a light supper and was now feeling drowsy. She thought she’d have no difficulty in sleeping. Sister Holland was the last person to see her – apart, of course, from her murderer – and all she asked for was a glass of hot milk laced with brandy. Sister Holland waited while she drank and then removed the glass. It has of course now been washed.’
Dr Glenister said, ‘I think the lab will find it useful if they could have a list of all the sedatives that you keep in the dispensary here, or any drugs to which a patient could have had access or been given. Thank you, Mr Chandler-Powell.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘It would be helpful to have a preliminary talk with you alone, perhaps in ten minutes’ time. I need to get an idea of the layout here and the number and function of the staff, and how Miss Gradwyn came to be your patient.’
Chandler-Powell said, ‘I’ll be in the general office. It’s inside the porch opposite the great hall. I’ll look out a plan of the Manor for you.’
They waited until they heard his footsteps in the next room and the closing of the corridor door. Now Dr Glenister took her surgical gloves from the Gladstone bag and gently touched Gradwyn’s face, then her neck and arms. The forensic pathologist had been a notable teacher and Dalgliesh knew from experience of working with her that she could seldom resist the opportunity to instruct the young.
She said to Benton, ‘No doubt you know all about rigor mortis, Sergeant.’
‘No ma’am. I know it begin
s in the eyelids about three hours after death, then spreads down through the face and neck to the thorax, and finally the trunk and lower extremities. The stiffening is generally complete in about twelve hours and begins to wear off in reverse order after about thirty-six hours.’
‘And do you think that rigor mortis is a reliable assessment of the time of death?’
‘Not entirely reliable, ma’am.’
‘Not reliable at all. It can be complicated by the temperature of the room, the muscular condition of the subject, the cause of death, and by some conditions which may simulate rigor mortis but are different, that includes bodies exposed to great heat and a cadaveric spasm. You know what that is, Sergeant?’
‘Yes ma’am. It can occur at the instant of death. The muscles of the hand tighten so that anything the dead person may have been clutching is difficult to extract.’
‘The assessment of an accurate time of death is one of the most important responsibilities of a medical examiner, and one of the most difficult. One development is the analysis of the amount of potassium in the fluid of the eye. Here I shall know more precisely when I’ve taken the rectal temperature and done the post mortem. In the meantime, I can give a preliminary assessment based on the hypostasis – you know what that is, I’m sure.’
‘Yes ma’am. Post-mortem lividity.’
‘Which we see here probably at its height. Based on that and the present development of rigor mortis, my preliminary estimate would be that she died between eleven p.m. and twelve thirty a.m., probably closer to the first. I’m relieved, Sergeant, that you’re not likely to become one of those investigative officers who expect the forensic pathologist to provide an accurate estimate within minutes of viewing the body.’