by P. D. James
The hen house was a large ramshackle cage bounded by sagging wire and creosoted posts. It had obviously been designed for the disabled. There was a double entry so that Miss Willison could let herself in and fasten the door behind her before opening the second door into the main cage, and the smooth asphalt path, just wide enough for a wheelchair, ran along each side and in front of the nesting boxes. Inside the first door a rough wooden shelf had been nailed waist high to one of the supports. This held a bowl of prepared meal, a plastic can of water and a wooden spoon riveted to a long handle, obviously for the collection of eggs. Miss Willison took them in her lap with some difficulty and reached forward to open the inner door. The hens, who had unaccountably bunched themselves in the far corner of the cage like the nervous virgins, lifted their beady spiteful faces and instantly came squawking and swooping towards her as if determined on a feathered hecatomb. Miss Willison recoiled slightly and began casting handfuls of meal before them with the air of a neophyte propitiating the furies. The hens began an agitated pecking and gulping. Scraping her hand against the rim of the bowl Miss Willison said:
“I wish I could get more fond of them, or they of me. Both sides might get more out of this activity. I thought that animals developed a fondness for the hand that feeds them but it doesn’t seem to apply to hens. I don’t see why it should really. We exploit them so thoroughly, first take their eggs and when they’re past laying wring their necks and consign them to the pot.”
“I hope you don’t have to do the wringing.”
“Oh, no, Albert Philby has that unpleasant job; not that I think he finds it altogether unpleasant. But I eat my share of the boiled fowl.”
Dalgliesh said:
“I feel rather the same. I was brought up in a Norfolk vicarage and my mother always had hens. She was fond of them and they seemed fond of her but my father and I thought they were a nuisance. But we liked the fresh eggs.”
“Do you know, I’m ashamed to tell you that I can’t really tell the difference between these eggs and the ones from the supermarket. Wilfred prefers us not to eat any food which hasn’t been naturally produced. He abhors factory farming and, of course, he’s right. He would really prefer Toynton Grange to be vegetarian, but that would make the catering even more difficult than it is now. Julius did some sums and proved to him that these eggs cost us two and a half times more than the shop ones, not counting of course for my labour. It was rather discouraging.”
Dalgliesh asked:
“Does Julius Court do the book-keeping here then?”
“Oh, no! Not the real accounts, the ones included in the annual report. Wilfred has a professional accountant for those. But Julius is clever with finance and I know Wilfred looks to him for advice. It’s usually rather disheartening advice, I’m afraid; we run on a shoestring really. Father Baddeley’s legacy was a real blessing. And Julius has been very kind. Last year the van which we hired to drive us back from the port after our return from Lourdes had an accident. We were all very shaken. The wheelchairs were in the back and two of them got broken. The telephone message that reached here was rather alarmist; it wasn’t as bad as Wilfred thought. But Julius drove straight to the hospital where we had been taken for a checkup, hired another van, and took care of everything. And then he bought the specially adapted bus which we have now so that we’re completely independent. Dennis and Wilfred between them can drive us all the way to Lourdes. Julius never comes with us, of course, but he’s always here to arrange a welcome home party for us when we return after the pilgrimage.”
This disinterested kindness was unlike the impression that, even after a short acquaintanceship, Dalgliesh had formed of Court. Intrigued he asked carefully:
“Forgive me if I sound crude but what does Julius Court get out of it, this interest in Toynton?”
“Do you know, I’ve sometimes asked myself that. But it seems an ungracious question when it’s so apparent what Toynton Grange gets out of him. He comes back from London like a breath of the outside world. He cheers us all. But I know that you want to talk about your friend. Shall we just collect the eggs and then find somewhere quiet?”
Your friend. The quiet phrase quietly spoken, rebuked him. They filled up the water containers and collected the eggs together, Miss Willison scooping them up in her wooden spoon with the expertise born of long practice. They found only eight. The whole procedure, which an able-bodied person could have completed in ten minutes, had been tedious, time-consuming and not particularly productive. Dalgliesh, who saw no merit in work for the sake of work, wondered what his companion really thought about a job which had obviously been designed in defiance of economics to give her the illusion of being useful.
They made their way back to the little courtyard behind the house. Only Henry Carwardine was sitting there, a book on his lap but his eyes staring towards the invisible sea. Miss Willison gave him a quick worried glance and seemed about to speak. But she said nothing until they had settled themselves some thirty yards from the silent figure; Dalgliesh at the end of one of the wooden benches and she at his side. Then she said:
“I can never get used to being so close to the sea and yet not being able to look at it. One can hear it so plainly sometimes as we can now. We’re almost surrounded by it, we can sometimes smell it and listen to it, but we might be a hundred miles away.”
She spoke wistfully but without resentment. They sat for a moment in silence. Dalgliesh could indeed hear the sea clearly now, the long withdrawing rasp of the shingled tide borne to him on the onshore breeze. To the inmates of Toynton Grange that ceaseless murmur must evoke the tantalizingly close but unobtainable freedom of wide blue horizons, scudding clouds, white wings falling and swooping through the moving air. He could understand how the need to see it might grow into an obsession. He said deliberately:
“Mr. Holroyd managed to get himself wheeled to where he could watch the sea.”
It had been important to see her reaction and he realized at once that to her the remark had been worse than tactless. She was deeply shaken and distressed. The frail left hand, curved in her lap, began an agitated shaking. Her right hand tightened on the arm of the chair. Her face crimsoned in an unlovely wave, and then became very pale. For a moment he almost wished that he hadn’t spoken. But the regret was transitory. It was returning despite himself, he thought with sardonic humour, this professional itch to seek out the facts. They were seldom discovered without some cost, however irrelevant or important they finally proved to be, and it wasn’t usually he who paid. He heard her speaking so quietly that he had to bend his head to catch the words.
“Victor had a special need to get away by himself. We understood that.”
“But it must have been very difficult to push a light wheelchair like this over the rough turf and up to the edge of the cliff.”
“He had a chair which belonged to him, like this type but larger and stronger. And it wasn’t necessary to push him up the steep part of the headland. There’s an inland path which leads, I understand, to a narrow sunken lane. You can get to the cliff edge that way. Even so it was hard on Dennis Lerner. It took him half an hour hard pushing each way. But you wanted to talk about Father Baddeley.”
“If it won’t distress you too much. It seems that you were the last person to see him alive. He must have died very soon after you left the cottage since he was still wearing his stole when Mrs. Hewson found his body next morning. Normally he would surely have taken it off very soon after hearing a confession.”
There was a silence as if she were making up her mind to something. Then she said:
“He did take it off, as usual, immediately after he’d given me absolution. He folded it up and placed it over the arm of his chair.”
This, too, was a sensation which in the long dog days in hospital he had thought never to experience again, the frisson of excitement along the blood at the first realization that something important had been said, that although the quarry wasn’t yet in sight nor his spore
detectable, yet he was there. He tried to reject this unwelcome surge of tension but it was as elemental and involuntary as the touch of fear. He said:
“But that means that Father Baddeley put on his stole again after you had left. Why should he do that?”
Or someone else had put it on for him. But that thought was best unspoken and its implications must wait.
She said quietly:
“I assume that he had another penitent; that is the obvious explanation.”
“He wouldn’t wear it to say his evening Office?”
Dalgliesh tried to remember his father’s practice in these matters on the very rare occasions when the rector did not say his Office in church; but memory provided only the unhelpful boyhood picture of them both holed up in a hut in the Cairngorms during a blizzard, himself watching, half bored, half fascinated, the patterns of the swirling snow against the windows, his father in leggings, anorak and woollen cap quietly reading from his small black prayer book. He certainly hadn’t worn a stole then.
Miss Willison said:
“Oh no! He would wear it only when administering a sacrament. Besides, he had said evensong. He was just finishing when I arrived and I joined him in a last collect.”
“But if someone followed you, then you weren’t the last person to see him alive. Did you point that out to anyone when you were told of his death?”
“Should I have done? I don’t think so. If the person himself—or herself—didn’t choose to speak it wasn’t for me to invite conjecture. Of course, if anyone but you had realized the significance of the stole it wouldn’t have been possible to avoid speculation. But no one did, or if they did, they said nothing. We gossip too much at Toynton, Mr. Dalgliesh. It’s inevitable perhaps, but it isn’t—well—healthy morally. If someone other than I went to confession that night, it’s nobody’s business but theirs and Father Baddeley’s.”
Dalgliesh said:
“But Father Baddeley was still wearing his stole next morning. That suggests that he might have died while his visitor was actually with him. If that happened surely the first reaction, however private the occasion, would be to summon medical help?”
“The visitor might have had no doubts that Father Baddeley had died and was beyond that kind of help. If so there might be a temptation to leave him there sitting peaceably in his chair and slip away. I don’t think Father Baddeley would call that a sin, and I don’t think you could call it a crime. It might seem callous but would it necessarily be so? It could argue an indifference to form and decorum perhaps, but that isn’t quite the same thing, is it?”
It would argue, too, thought Dalgliesh, that the visitor had been a doctor or a nurse. Was that what Miss Willison was hinting? The first reaction of a lay person would surely be to seek help, or at least confirmation that death had actually occurred. Unless, of course, he knew for the best or worst of reasons that Baddeley was dead. But that sinister possibility seemed not to have occurred to Miss Willison. Why, indeed, should it? Father Baddeley was old, he was sick, he was expected to die and he had died. Why should anyone suspect the natural and the inevitable? He said something about determining the time of death and heard her gentle, inexorable reply.
“I expect that in your job the actual time of death is always important and so you get used to concentrating on that fact. But in real life does it matter? What matters is whether one dies in a state of grace.”
Dalgliesh had a momentary and impious picture of his detective sergeant punctiliously attempting to determine and record this essential information about a victim in an official crime report and reflected that Miss Willison’s nice distinction between police work and real life was a salutory reminder of how other people saw his job. He looked forward to telling the Commissioner about it. And then he remembered that this wasn’t the kind of casual professional gossip which they would exchange in that final slightly formal and inevitably disappointing interview which would mark the end of his police career.
Ruefully, he recognized in Miss Willison the type of unusually honest witness whom he had always found difficult. Paradoxically, this old-fashioned rectitude, this sensitivity of conscience, were more difficult to cope with than the prevarications, evasions, or flamboyant lying which were part of a normal interrogation. He would have liked to have asked her who at Toynton Grange was likely to have visited Father Baddeley for the purpose of confession, but recognized that the question would only prejudice confidence between them and that, in any case, he wouldn’t get a reply. But it must have been one of the able bodied. No one else could have come and gone in secret, unless, of course, he or she had an accomplice. He was inclined to dismiss the accomplice. A wheelchair and its occupant, whether pushed from Toynton Grange or brought by car, must surely have been seen at some stage of the journey.
Hoping that he wasn’t sounding too much like a detective in the middle of an interrogation he asked:
“So when you left him he was—what?”
“Just sitting there quietly in the fireside chair. I wouldn’t let him get up. Wilfred had driven me down to the cottage in the small van. He said that he would visit his sister at Faith Cottage while I was with Father Baddeley and be outside again in half an hour unless I knocked on the wall first.”
“So you can hear sounds between the two cottages? I ask because it struck me that if Father Baddeley had felt ill after you’d left, he might have knocked on the wall for Mrs. Hammitt.”
“She says that he didn’t knock, but she might not have heard if she had the television on very loudly. The cottages are very well built, but you can hear sounds through that interior wall, particularly if voices are raised.”
“You mean that you could hear Mr. Anstey talking to his sister?”
Miss Willison seemed to regret that she had gone so far, and she said quickly:
“Well, just now and then. I remember that I had to make an effort of will to prevent it disturbing me. I wished that they would keep their voices lower, and then felt ashamed of myself for being so easily distracted. It was good of Wilfred to drive me to the cottage. Normally, of course, Father Baddeley would come up to the house to see me and we would use what is called the quiet room next to the business room just inside the front door. But Father Baddeley had only been discharged from hospital that morning and it wasn’t right that he should leave the cottage. I could have postponed my visit until he was stronger but he wrote to me from hospital to say that he hoped I would come and precisely at what time. He knew how much it meant to me.”
“Was he fit to be alone? It seems not.”
“Eric and Dot—that’s Sister Moxon—wanted him to come here and be looked after at least for the first night, but he insisted on going straight back home. Then Wilfred suggested that someone should sleep in his spare room in case he wanted help in the night. He wouldn’t agree to that either. He really was adamant that he should be left alone that night; he had great authority in his quiet way. Afterwards I think Wilfred blamed himself for not having been more firm. But what could he do? He couldn’t bring Father Baddeley here by force.”
But it would have been simpler for all concerned if Father Baddeley had agreed to spend at least his first night out of hospital at Toynton Grange. It was surely untypically inconsiderate of him to resist the suggestion so strenuously. Was he expecting another visitor? Was there someone he wanted to see, urgently and in private, someone to whom, like Miss Willison, he had written to give a precisely timed appointment? If so, whatever the reason for the visit, that person must have come on his own feet. He asked Miss Willison if Wilfred and Father Baddeley had spoken together before she had left the cottage.
“No. After I’d been with Father Baddeley about thirty minutes he knocked on the wall with the poker and, soon afterwards, Wilfred honked on the horn. I manoeuvred my chair to the front door just as Wilfred arrived to open it. Father Baddeley was still in his chair. Wilfred called out goodnight to him, but I don’t think he answered. Wilfred seemed in rather a hurry to get
home. Millicent came out to help push my chair into the back of the van.”
So neither Wilfred nor his sister had spoken to Michael before driving away that evening, neither had seen him closely. Glancing down at Miss Willison’s strong right hand Dalgliesh toyed momentarily with the possibility that Michael was already dead. But that notion, apart from its psychological unlikelihood, was of course, nonsense. She couldn’t have relied on Wilfred not coming into the cottage. Come to think of it, it was odd that he hadn’t done so. Michael had only returned from hospital that morning. Surely it would have been natural to come in and enquire how he was feeling, to spend at least a few minutes in his company. It was interesting that Wilfred Anstey had made so quick a getaway, that no one had admitted visiting Father Baddeley after seven forty-five.
He asked:
“What lighting was there in the cottage when you were with Father Baddeley?” If the question surprised her, she didn’t show it.
“Only the small table lamp on the bureau top behind his chair. I was surprised that he could see to say Evensong, but the prayers, of course, would be familiar to him.”
“And the lamp was off next morning?”
“Oh yes, Maggie said that she found the cottage in darkness.”