by P. D. James
Dalgliesh said:
“I find it rather strange that no one looked in later that night to enquire how Father Baddeley was or help him get to bed.”
She said quickly:
“Eric Hewson thought that Millicent was going to look in last thing and she had somehow got the impression that Eric and Helen—Nurse Rainer, you know—had agreed to do so. They all blamed themselves very much the next day. But, as Eric told us, medically it could have made no difference. Father Baddeley died quite peaceably soon after I left.”
They sat in silence for a minute. Dalgliesh wondered whether this was the right time to ask her about the poison pen letter. Remembering her distress over Victor Holroyd, he was reluctant to embarrass her further. But it was important to know. Looking sideways at the thin face with its look of resolute tranquillity, he said:
“I looked in Father Baddeley’s writing bureau very soon after I arrived, just in case there was a note or unposted letter for me. I found a rather unpleasant poison pen letter under some old receipts. I wondered whether he had spoken to anyone about it, whether anyone else at Toynton Grange had received one.”
She was even more distressed by the question than he had feared. For a moment she could not speak. He stared straight ahead until he heard her voice. But, when at last she answered, she had herself well in hand.
“I had one, about four days before Victor died. It was … it was obscene. I tore it into small fragments and flushed it down the lavatory.”
Dalgliesh said with robust cheerfulness:
“Much the best thing to do with it. But, as a policeman, I’m always sorry when the evidence is destroyed.”
“Evidence?”
“Well, sending poison pen letters can be an offence; more important, it can cause a great deal of unhappiness. It’s probably best always to tell the police and let them find out who’s responsible.”
“The police! Oh, no! We couldn’t do that. It isn’t the kind of problem the police can help with.”
“We aren’t as insensitive as people sometimes imagine. It isn’t inevitable that the culprit would be prosecuted. But it is important to put a stop to this kind of nuisance, and the police have the best facilities. They can send the letter to the forensic science laboratory for examination by a skilled document examiner.”
“But they would need to have the document. I couldn’t have shown the letter to anyone.”
So it had been as bad as that. Dalgliesh asked:
“Would you mind telling me what kind of letter it was? Was it handwritten, typed, on what kind of paper?”
“The letter was typed on Toynton Grange paper, in double spacing, on our old Imperial. Most of us here have learned typewriting. It’s one of the ways in which we try to be self-supporting. There was nothing wrong with the punctuation or spelling. There were no other clues that I could see. I don’t know who typed it, but I think the writer must have been sexually experienced.”
So, even in the middle of her distress, she had applied her mind to the problem. He said:
“There are only a limited number of people with access to that machine. The problem wouldn’t have been too difficult for the police.”
Her gentle voice was stubborn.
“We had the police here over Victor’s death. They were very kind, very considerate. But it was terribly upsetting. It was horrible for Wilfred—for all of us. I don’t think we could have stood it again. I’m sure that Wilfred couldn’t. However tactful the police are, they have to keep on asking questions until they’ve solved the case, surely? It’s no use calling them in and expecting them to put people’s sensitivities before their job.”
This was undeniably true and Dalgliesh had little to argue against it. He asked her what, if anything, she had done apart from flushing away the offending letter.
“I told Dorothy Moxon about it. That seemed the most sensible thing to do. I couldn’t have spoken about it to a man. Dorothy told me that I shouldn’t have destroyed it, that no one could do anything without the evidence. But she agreed that we ought to say nothing at present. Wilfred was particularly worried about money at the time and she didn’t want him to have anything else on his mind. She knew how much it would distress him. Besides, I think she had an idea who might have been responsible. If she were right, then we shan’t be getting any more letters.”
So Dorothy Moxon had believed, or had pretended to believe, that Victor Holroyd was responsible. And if the writer now had the sense and self-control to stop, it was a comfortable theory which, in the absence of the evidence, no one could disprove.
He asked whether anyone else had received a letter. As far as she knew, no one had. Dorothy Moxon hadn’t been consulted by anyone else. The suggestion seemed to distress her. Dalgliesh realized that she had seen the note as a single piece of gratuitous spite directed against herself. The thought that Father Baddeley had also received one, was distressing her almost as much as the original letter. Knowing only too well from his experience the kind of letter it must have been, he said gently:
“I shouldn’t worry too much about Father Baddeley’s letter. I don’t think it would have distressed him. It was very mild really, just a spiteful little note suggesting that he wasn’t of much help to Toynton Grange and that the cottage could be more usefully occupied by someone else. He had too much humility and sense to be bothered by that kind of nonsense. I imagine that he only kept the letter because he wanted to consult me in case he wasn’t the only victim. Sensible people put these things down the WC. But we can’t always be sensible. Anyway, if you do receive another letter, will you promise to show it to me?”
She shook her head gently but didn’t speak. But Dalgliesh saw that she was happier. She put out her withered left hand and placed it momentarily over his, giving it a slight press. The sensation was unpleasant, her hand was dry and cold, the bones felt loose in the skin. But the gesture was both humbling and dignified.
It was getting cold and dark in the courtyard; Henry Carwardine had already gone in. It was time for her to move inside. He thought quickly and then said:
“It isn’t important, and please don’t think that I take my job with me wherever I go. But if during the next few days you can recall how Father Baddeley spent the last week or so before he went into hospital, it would be helpful to me. Don’t ask anyone else about this. Just let me know what he did from your own memory of him, the times he came to Toynton Grange, where else he may have spent his hours. I should like to have a picture in my mind of his last ten days.”
She said:
“I know that he went into Wareham on the Wednesday before he was taken ill, he said to do some shopping and to see someone on business. I remember that because he explained on the Tuesday that he wouldn’t be visiting the Grange as usual next morning.”
So that, thought Dalgliesh, was when he had bought his store of provisions, confident that his letter wouldn’t go unanswered. But then he had been right to be confident.
They sat for a minute not speaking. He wondered what she had thought of so odd a request. She hadn’t seemed surprised. Perhaps she saw it as perfectly natural, this wish to build up a picture of a friend’s last days on earth. But suddenly he had a spasm of apprehension and caution. Ought he perhaps to stress that his request was absolutely private? Surely not. He had told her not to ask anyone else. To make more of it would only arouse suspicion. And what danger could there be? What had he to go on? A broken bureau lock, a missing diary, a stole replaced as if for confession. There was no real evidence here. With an effort of will he reasoned away this inexplicable spasm of apprehension, strong as a premonition. It was too disagreeable a reminder of those long nights in hospital when he had struggled in restless half-consciousness against irrational terrors and half-understood fears. And this was equally irrational, equally to be resisted by sense and reason, the ridiculous conviction that a simple, almost casual and not very hopeful request had sounded so clearly a sentence of death.
CHAPTER THREE
A Stranger for the Night
I
BEFORE DINNER Anstey suggested that Dennis Lerner should show Dalgliesh round the house. He apologized for not escorting the guest himself, but he had an urgent letter to write. The post was delivered and collected shortly before nine o’clock each morning from the box on the boundary gate. If Adam had letters to send he had only to leave them on the hall table, and Albert Philby would take them to the box with the Toynton Grange letters. Dalgliesh thanked him. There was one urgent letter he needed to write, to Bill Moriarty at the Yard, but he proposed to post that himself later in the day at Wareham. He had certainly no intention of leaving it exposed to the curiosity or speculation of Anstey and his staff.
The suggestion for a tour of the Grange had the force of a command. Helen Rainer was helping the patients wash before dinner and Dot Moxon had disappeared with Anstey, so that he was taken round only by Lerner accompanied by Julius Court. Dalgliesh wished the tour were over, or better still, that it could have been avoided without giving hurt. He recalled with discomfort a visit he had paid as a boy with his father to a geriatric hospital on Christmas Day; the courtesy with which the patients accepted yet one more invasion of their privacy, the public display of pain and deformity, the pathetic eagerness with which the staff demonstrated their small triumphs. Now, as then, he found himself morbidly sensitive to the least trace of revulsion in his voice and thought that he detected what was more offensive, a note of patronizing heartiness. Dennis Lerner didn’t appear to notice it and Julius walked jauntily with them looking round with lively curiosity as if the place were new to him. Dalgliesh wondered whether he had come to keep an eye on Lerner or on Dalgliesh himself.
As they passed from room to room, Lerner lost his first diffidence and became confident, almost voluble. There was something endearing about his naïve pride in what Anstey was trying to do. Anstey had certainly laid out his money with some imagination. The Grange itself, with its large, high rooms and cold marble floors, its oppressively panelled dark oak walls and mullioned windows, was a depressingly unsuitable house for disabled patients. Apart from the dining-room and the rear drawing-room, which had become a TV and communal sitting-room, Anstey had used the house mainly to accommodate himself and his staff and had built on to the rear a one-storey stone extension to provide ten individual patients’ bedrooms on the ground floor and a clinical room and additional bedrooms on the floor above. This extension had been joined to the old stables which ran at right angles to it providing a sheltered patio for the patients’ wheelchairs. The stables themselves had been adapted to provide garages, a workshop and a patients’ activity room for woodwork and modelling. Here, too, the handcream and bath powder which the Home sold to help with finances were made and packed at a workbench behind a transparent plastic screen erected, presumably, to indicate respect for the principle of scientific cleanliness. Dalgliesh could see, hanging on the screen, the white shadows of protective overalls.
Lerner said:
“Victor Holroyd was a chemistry teacher and he gave us the prescription for the handcream and powder. The cream is really only lanolin, almond oil and glycerine but it’s very effective and people seem to like it. We do very well with it. And this corner of the workroom is given over to modelling.”
Dalgliesh had almost exhausted his repertoire of appreciative comments. But now he was genuinely impressed. In the middle of the workbench and mounted on a low wooden base was a clay head of Wilfred Anstey. The neck, elongated and sinewy, rose tortoise-like from the folds of the hood. The head was thrust forward and held a little to the right. It was almost a parody, and yet it had an extraordinary power. How, Dalgliesh wondered, had the sculptor managed to convey the sweetness and the obstinacy of that individual smile, to model compassion and yet reduce it to self-delusion, to show humility garbed in a monk’s habit and yet convey an overriding impression of the puissance of evil. The plastic wrapped lumps and rolls of clay which lay, disorderly, on the workbench only emphasized the force and technical achievement of this one finished work.
Lerner said:
“Henry did the head. Something’s gone a little wrong with the mouth, I think. Wilfred doesn’t seem to mind it but no one else thinks that it does him justice.”
Julius put his head on one side and pursed his lips in a parody of critical assessment.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that. What do you think of it, Dalgliesh?”
“I think it’s remarkable. Did Carwardine do much modelling before he came here?”
It was Dennis Lerner who answered:
“I don’t think he did any. He was a senior civil servant before his illness. He modelled this about a couple of months ago without Wilfred giving him a sitting. It’s quite good for a first effort, isn’t it?”
Julius said:
“The question which interests me is did he do it intentionally, in which case he’s a great deal too talented to waste himself here, or were his fingers merely obeying his subconscious? If so, it raises interesting speculations about the origin of creativity and even more interesting ones about Henry’s subconscious.”
“I think it just came out like that,” said Dennis Lerner simply. He looked at it with puzzled respect, clearly seeing nothing in it either for wonder or explanation.
Lastly, they went into one of the small rooms at the end of the extension. It had been arranged as an office and was furnished with two wooden ink-stained desks which looked as if they were rejects from a government office. At one Grace Willison was typing names and addresses on a perforated sheet of sticky labels. Dalgliesh saw with some surprise that Carwardine was typing what looked like a private letter at the other desk. Both the typewriters were very old. Henry was using an Imperial; Grace a Remington. Dalgliesh stood over her and glanced at the list of names and addresses. He saw that the newsletter was widely distributed. Apart from local rectories, and other homes for the chronic sick, it went to addresses in London and even to two in the United States and one near Marseilles. Flustered at his interest, Grace jerked her elbow clumsily and the bound list of names and addresses from which she was working fell to the floor. But Dalgliesh had seen enough; the unaligned small e, the smudged o, the faint almost indecipherable capital w. There was no doubt that this was the machine on which Father Baddeley’s note had been typed. He picked up the book and handed it to Miss Willison. Without looking at him, she shook her head and said:
“Thank you, but I don’t really need to look at it. I can type all the sixty-eight names by heart. I’ve done it for so long you see. I can imagine what the people are like just from their names and the names they give to their houses. But I’ve always been good at remembering names and addresses. It was very useful to me when I worked for a charity to help discharged prisoners and there were so many lists to type. This is quite short, of course. May I add your name so that you get our quarterly magazine? It’s only ten pence. I’m afraid with postage so expensive we have to charge more than we’d like.”
Henry Carwardine looked up and spoke:
“I believe this quarter we have a poem by Jennie Pegram which begins:
‘Autumn is my favourite time,
I love its glowing tints.’
It’s worth ten pence to you Dalgliesh, I should have thought, to discover how she tackles that little problem of rhyming.”
Grace Willison smiled happily.
“It’s only an amateur production I know, but it does keep the League of Friends in touch with what is going on here, our personal friends too, of course.”
Henry said:
“Not mine. They know I’ve lost the use of my limbs but I’ve no wish to suggest that I’ve lost the use of my mind. At best the newsletter reaches the literary level of a parish magazine; at worst, which is three issues out of four, it’s embarrassingly puerile.”
Grace Willison flushed and her lip trembled. Dalgliesh said quickly:
“Please add my name. Would it be easier if I paid for a
year now?”
“How kind! Perhaps six months would be safer. If Wilfred does decide to transfer the Grange to the Ridgewell Trust they may have different plans for the newsletter. I’m afraid the future is very uncertain for all of us at present. Would you write your address here? Queenhythe. That’s by the river, isn’t it? How pleasant for you. You won’t be wanting any of the handcream or bath powder, I suppose, although we do send the powder to one or two gentlemen customers. But this is really Dennis’s department. He sees to the distribution and does most of the packing himself. I’m afraid our hands are too shaky to be much use. But I’m sure he could spare you some of the bath powder.”
Dalgliesh was saved from the need to reply to this wistful enquiry by the booming of a gong. Julius said:
“The warning gong. One more boom and dinner will be on the table. I shall return home and see what my indispensable Mrs. Reynolds has left for me. By the way, have you warned the Commander that dinner at Toynton Grange is eaten Trappist fashion in silence? We don’t want him to break the rule with inconvenient questions about Michael’s will or what possible reason a patient in this abode of love could have for hurling himself over the cliff.”
He disappeared at some speed as if afraid that any tendency to linger would expose him to the risk of an invitation to dine.
Grace Willison was obviously relieved to see him go but she smiled bravely at Dalgliesh.
“We do have a rule that no one talks during the evening meal. I hope that it won’t inconvenience you. We take it in turns to read from any work we choose. Tonight it’s Wilfred’s turn so we shall have one of Donne’s sermons. They’re very fine of course—Father Baddeley enjoyed them, I know—but I do find them rather difficult. And I don’t really think that they go well with boiled mutton.”
II
Henry Carwardine wheeled his chair to the lift, drew back the steel grill with difficulty, clanged the gate closed and pressed the button to the floor above. He had insisted on having a room in the main building, firmly rejecting the unsubstantial, meanly proportioned cells in the annex, and Wilfred, despite what Henry thought were obsessive, almost paranoid fears that he might be trapped in a fire, had reluctantly agreed. Henry had confirmed his committal to Toynton Grange by moving one or two chosen pieces of furniture from his Westminster flat and virtually all his books. The room was large, high ceilinged and pleasantly proportioned, its two windows giving a wide view south-west across the headland. Next door was a lavatory and shower which he shared only with any patient being nursed in the sickroom. He knew, without the least qualm of guilt, that he had the most comfortable quarters in the house. Increasingly he was retreating into this tidy and private world, closing the heavy carved door against involvement, bribing Philby to bring up occasional meals on a tray, to buy for him in Dorchester special cheeses, wines, pâté and fruit to augment the institutional meals which the staff of the Grange took it in turns to cook. Wilfred had apparently thought it prudent not to comment on this minor insubordination, this trespass against the law of togetherness.