by P. D. James
Dalgliesh opened his briefcase and placed on the table Robin Boyton’s copy of Peregrine Westhall’s will. He said, ‘It’s good of you to see me. Please say if I tire you.’
‘I think it unlikely, Commander, that you will either tire or bore me beyond endurance.’
It was the first time he had used Dalgliesh’s rank. Dalgliesh said, ‘My understanding is that you acted for the Westhall family in the matter of both the grandfather’s and father’s wills.’
‘Not I, the family firm. Since my admission here eleven months ago the routine work has been done by my younger brother in the office in Poole. He did, however, keep me informed.’
‘So you weren’t present when this will was drawn up or signed.’
‘No member of the firm was. A copy wasn’t sent to us at the time it was made, and neither we nor the family were aware of its existence until three days after Peregrine Westhall died, when Candace found it in a locked drawer in a cabinet in the bedroom where the old man kept confidential papers. As you may have been told, Peregrine Westhall was given to drawing up wills when he was in the same nursing home as his late father. Most were codicils in his own hand and witnessed by the nurses. He seemed to have taken as much pleasure in destroying them as he did in writing them. I imagine the activity was designed to impress upon his family that he had power at any time to change his mind.’
‘So the will wasn’t hidden?’
‘Apparently not. Candace said there was a sealed envelope in a drawer in the bedroom cabinet to which he kept the key under his pillow.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘At the time it was signed, was her father still able to get out of bed unaided to put it there?’
‘He must have been, unless one of the servants or a visitor placed it there at his request. No one in the family or household admits to knowledge of it. Of course, we have no idea when it was actually placed in the drawer. It could have been shortly after it was drawn up, when Peregrine Westhall was certainly capable of walking unaided.’
‘To whom was the envelope addressed?’
‘No envelope was produced. Candace said she’d thrown it away.’
‘But you were sent a copy of the will?’
‘Yes, by my brother. He knew that I would be interested in anything concerning my old clients. Perhaps he wanted to make me feel I was still involved. This is getting close to a cross-examination, Commander. Please don’t think I’m objecting. It’s some time since I was required to use my wits.’
‘And when you saw the will you had no doubt about its validity?’
‘None. And I have none now. Why should I? As I expect you know, a holograph will is as valid as any other, provided it’s signed, dated and witnessed, and no one familiar with Peregrine Westhall’s hand could possibly doubt that he wrote this will. The provisions are precisely those made in a previous will, not the one immediately preceding this, but one which was typed in my office in 1995, taken by me to the house in which he was then living and witnessed by two of my staff who came with me for that purpose. The provisions were eminently reasonable. With the exception of his library, which was left to his school if they wanted it, but otherwise was to be sold, all that he possessed was left in equal shares to Marcus, his son, and his daughter, Candace. So in this he was just to the despised sex. I had some influence on him while I was in practice. I exercised it.’
‘Was there any other will which preceded this for which probate has now been granted?’
‘Yes, one made in the month before Peregrine Westhall left the nursing home and moved to Stone Cottage with Candace and Marcus. You may as well have a sight of it. This, too, was handwritten. It will give you the opportunity to compare the writing. If you’ll kindly unlock the bureau and lift the lid you’ll find a black deed box. It’s the only one I have brought with me. Perhaps I needed it as a kind of talisman, an assurance that one day I might be working again.’
He insinuated his long deformed fingers in an inner pocket and produced a key. Dalgliesh brought over the deed box and placed it before him. The smaller key on the same ring unlocked it.
The solicitor said, ‘Here, as you will see, he revokes the previous will and leaves half the estate to his nephew Robin Boyton, the remaining half to be divided equally between Marcus and Candace. If you compare the handwriting on both these wills, I think you will find it’s by the same hand.’
As with the later will, the writing was strong, black and distinctive, surprisingly so from an old man, the letters tall, the downward strokes heavy, the upward lines thin. He said, ‘And of course neither you nor any member of your firm would have notified Robin Boyton of his prospective good fortune?’
‘It would have been seriously unprofessional. As far as I know he neither knew nor enquired.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘And even if he had known, he could hardly challenge the later will once probate had been granted.’
‘And nor, I suggest, can you, Commander.’ After a pause he went on, ‘I have submitted to your questions, now there is one I need to ask. Are you completely satisfied that Candace Westhall murdered both Robin Boyton and Rhoda Gradwyn and attempted to murder Sharon Bateman?’
Dalgliesh said, ‘Yes to the first part of your question. I don’t believe the confession in its entirety, but in one respect it’s true. She both murdered Miss Gradwyn and was responsible for the death of Mr Boyton. She has confessed to planning the murder of Sharon Bateman. By then she must have made up her mind to kill herself. Once she suspected that I knew the truth about the last will, she couldn’t risk a cross-examination in court.’
Philip Kershaw said, ‘The truth about the last will. I thought we would come to that. But do you know the truth? And even if you do, would it stand up in court? If she were alive and were convicted of forging the signatures, both of her father and the two witnesses, the legal complications over the will, with Boyton dead, would be considerable. It’s a pity I can’t discuss some of them with my colleagues.’
He seemed almost animated for the first time since Dalgliesh had entered the room. Dalgliesh asked, ‘And what, under oath, would you have said?’
‘About the will? That I regarded it as valid and had no suspicions about the signatures either of the testator or of the witnesses. Compare the writing on these two wills. Can there be any doubt that they are by the same hand? Commander, there is nothing you can do and nothing you need to do. This will could only have been challenged by Robin Boyton, and Boyton is dead. Neither you nor the Metropolitan Police have any locus standi in this matter. You have your confession. You have your murderess. The case is closed. The money was bequeathed to the two people who had the best right to it.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘I accept that, given the confession, nothing more can reasonably be done. But I don’t like unfinished business. I needed to know if I was right and if possible to understand. You have been very helpful. Now I know the truth insofar as it can be known, and I think I understand why she did it. Or is that too arrogant a claim?’
‘To know the truth and to understand it? Yes, with respect, Commander, I think it is. An arrogance and, perhaps, an impertinence. How we scrap around in the lives of the famous dead, like squawking chickens pecking at every piece of gossip and scandal. And now I have a question for you. Would you be willing to break the law if by doing so you could right a wrong or benefit a person you loved?’
Dalgliesh said, ‘I’m prevaricating, but the question is hypothetical. It must depend on the importance and reasonableness of the law I would be breaking and whether the good to the mythical loved person, or indeed the public good, would in my judgement be greater than the harm of breaking the law. With certain crimes – murder and rape, for example – how could it ever be? The question can’t be considered in the abstract. I’m a police officer, not a moral theologian or an ethicist.’
‘Oh but you are, Commander. With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religion and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messa
ges, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe. So tell me, are there any circumstances in which you would break the law to benefit another?’
‘Benefit in what way?’
‘In any way a benefit can be conferred. To satisfy a need. To protect. To right a wrong.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘Then, put so crudely, I think the answer must be yes. I could, for example, see myself helping someone I loved to a merciful death if she were being stretched out on Shakespeare’s rack of this tough world, and every breath was drawn in agony. I hope I wouldn’t need to. But since you’re posing the question, yes, I can see myself breaking the law to advantage someone I loved. I’m not so sure about righting a wrong. That supposes I would have the wisdom to decide what is in fact right and what is wrong, and the humility to consider whether any action I could take would make things better or worse. Now I could put a question to you. Forgive me if you find it impertinent. Would the loved person, for you, be Candace Westhall?’
Kershaw got painfully to his feet and, grasping his crutch, moved over to the window and stood for some moments looking out as if there were a world outside where such a question would never be put, or, if put, would require no answer. Dalgliesh waited. Then Kershaw turned back to him and Dalgliesh watched while, like someone learning for the first time how to walk, he made his way with uncertain steps back to his chair.
He said, ‘I’m going to tell you something that I have never told another human being and never shall. I do that because I believe that with you it will be safe. And perhaps there comes a time at the end of life when a secret becomes a burden which one longs to place on another’s shoulders, as if the mere fact that someone else knows it and will share in its keeping somehow lessens the weight. I suppose that’s why religious people go to confession. What an extraordinary ritual cleansing that must be. However, that’s not open to me and I don’t propose to change a lifetime’s non-belief for what to me would be a spurious comfort at the end. So I shall tell you. It will impose no burden on you and no distress, and I am speaking to Adam Dalgliesh the poet, not Adam Dalgliesh the detective.’
Dalgliesh said, ‘At the moment there can be no difference between them.’
‘Not in your mind, Commander, but there can be in mine. And there’s another reason for speaking, not admirable, but then which of them is? I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to talk to a civilised man about something other than the state of my health. The first thing the staff or any visitor asks, and the last, is how I am feeling. That’s how I’m defined now, by sickness and mortality. No doubt you find it difficult to be polite when people insist on talking about your poetry.’
‘I try to be gracious since they mean to be kind, but I hate it and it isn’t easy.’
‘So I’ll keep off the poetry if you will keep off the state of my liver.’
He laughed, a high but harsh expelling of breath cut short. It sounded more like a cry of pain. Dalgliesh waited without speaking. Kershaw seemed to be gathering his strength, to be settling his skeletal form back more comfortably in his chair.
He said, ‘Basically it’s a commonplace story. It happens everywhere. There’s nothing unusual or interesting about it except to the people concerned. Twenty-five years ago when I was thirty-eight and Candace was eighteen, she had my child. I had recently become a partner in the firm, and it was I who took over Peregrine Westhall’s concerns. They weren’t particularly arduous or interesting, but I did visit often enough to see what was happening in that large stone house in the Cotswolds where the family then lived. The frail pretty wife who made illness a defence against her husband, the silent frightened daughter, the withdrawn young son. I think at the time I fancied myself as someone interested in people, sensitive of human emotions. Perhaps I was. And when I say that Candace was frightened, I’m not suggesting that her father abused or struck her. He had only one weapon and that the deadliest – his tongue. I doubt whether he ever touched her, certainly not in affection. He was a man who disliked women. Candace was a disappointment to him from the moment of birth. I don’t want to give you the impression that he was a deliberately cruel man. I knew him as a distinguished academic. I wasn’t frightened of him. I could talk to him, Candace never could. He would have respected her if only she’d stood up to him. He hated subservience. And, of course, it would have helped if she’d been pretty. Doesn’t it always with daughters?’
Dalgliesh said, ‘It’s difficult to stand up to someone if you’ve been frightened of them since early childhood.’
Without apparently hearing the comment, Kershaw went on. ‘Our relationship – and I am not talking of a love affair – began when I was in Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford and saw Candace. She had come up in the Michaelmas term. She seemed anxious to chat, which was unusual, and I invited her to have coffee with me. Without her father she seemed to come alive. She talked and I listened. We agreed to meet again and it became something of a habit for me to drive to Oxford when she was there and take her for lunch outside the city. We were both energetic walkers and I looked forward to those autumnal meetings and our drives into the Cotswolds. We only had sex once, on an unusually warm afternoon, lying in the wood under a canopy of sunlit trees when I suppose a combination of beauty and the seclusion of the trees, the warmth, our contentment after what had been a good lunch, led to the first kiss and from that to the inevitable seduction. I think afterwards we both knew it was a mistake. And we were perceptive enough about ourselves to know how it had happened. She’d had a bad week at college and was in need of comfort, and the power to confer comfort is seductive – and I don’t mean merely physically. She was feeling sexually inadequate, alienated from her peers and, whether she realised it or not, was looking for an opportunity to lose her virginity. I was older, kind, fond of her, available, the ideal partner for a first sexual experience, which she both wanted and feared. She could feel safe with me.
‘And when, too late for an abortion, she told me about the pregnancy, we both knew that her family must never be told, particularly her father. She said that he despised her and would despise her more, not for the sex itself, which probably wouldn’t worry him, but because it had been with the wrong person and she had been a fool in getting pregnant. She could tell me exactly what he would say, and it disgusted and horrified me. I was approaching middle age and unmarried. I had no wish to take responsibility for a child. I see now, when it is too late to put anything right, that we treated the baby as if she was some kind of malignant growth which had to be cut out, or at any rate got rid of, and then could be forgotten. If we’re thinking in terms of a sin – and you, so I’ve heard, are the son of a priest and no doubt family influence still means something – then that was our sin. She kept the pregnancy secret and, when there was a risk of discovery, she went abroad, then came back and had the baby in a London nursing home. It wasn’t difficult for me to arrange for private fostering followed by adoption. I was a lawyer; I had the knowledge and the money. And things were less controlled in those days.
‘Candace was stoical throughout. If she loved her child, she managed to conceal it. Candace and I didn’t see each other after the adoption. I suppose there was no true relationship on which we could build, and even to meet was to invite embarrassment, shame, the memory of inconvenience, of lies told, careers disrupted. Later she made up her time at Oxford. I suppose she read Classics in an attempt to win her father’s love. All I know is that she didn’t succeed. She didn’t see Annabel again – even her name was chosen by the prospective foster parents – until she was eighteen but I think she must have kept in touch, however indirectly, and without ever acknowledging that the child was hers. She obviously discovered to which university Annabel had gained admission and took a job there, although it wasn’t a natural choice for a classicist and one with a DPhil.’
Dalgliesh asked, ‘Did you see Candace again?’
‘Once only, and for the first time after twenty
-five years. It was also the last. On Friday the 7th of December, she came back from visiting the old nurse, Grace Holmes, in Canada. Mrs Holmes is the only surviving witness to Peregrine’s will. Candace went out to pay her a sum of money – I think she said ten thousand pounds – to thank her for the help she gave in nursing Peregrine Westhall. The other witness, Elizabeth Barnes, was a retired member of the Westhall household and had been receiving a small pension which, of course, ended with her death. Candace felt that Grace Holmes shouldn’t go unrewarded. She was also anxious to have the nurse’s evidence about the date of her father’s death. She told me about Robin Boyton’s ludicrous allegation that the dead body was concealed in a freezer until twenty-eight days after the grandfather’s death had elapsed. Here is the letter Grace Holmes wrote and gave to her. It is, as you see, addressed to Candace. She wanted me to have a copy, perhaps as insurance. If necessary I would pass it on to the head of the firm.’
He lifted the copy of the will and took from beneath it a sheet of writing paper which he passed to Dalgliesh. The letter was dated Wednesday 5 December 2007. The writing was large, the letters round and carefully formed.
Dear Sir,
Miss Candace Westhall has asked me to send you a letter confirming the date of the death of her father, Dr Peregrine Westhall. This occurred on 5 March 2007. He had been getting much worse during the two preceding days and Dr Stenhouse saw him on 3 March but did not prescribe any fresh medicines. Professor Westhall said that he wanted to see the local clergyman, the Reverend Matheson, and he came at once. He was driven by his sister. I was in the house at the time but not in the sickroom. I could hear the Professor shouting but not what Mr Matheson was saying. They did not stay very long and the Reverend looked distressed when they left. Dr Westhall died two days later and I was in the house with his son and Miss Westhall when he passed away. I was the one who laid him out.