The Black Tower

by P. D. James

  Ten minutes later Dalgliesh strolled slowly round to where Julius was heaving his shoulders over the edge of the cliff. He drew himself up and stood, slightly panting, beside Dalgliesh. Without speaking he banged a peg into a crack of the rock beside one of the larger boulders, clipped a sling through the peg and into his waistline and started hauling in the rope. There was a cheerful shout from the rock face. Julius settled himself back against the boulder, rope around his waist, shouted “Climb when you’re ready,” and began inching the rope through careful hands. Less than fifteen minutes later, Dennis Lerner stood beside him and began coiling the rope. Blinking rapidly Dennis took off his steel-rimmed spectacles, rubbed away what could have been spray or rain drops from his face and twisted the ends behind his ears with shaking fingers. Julius looked at his watch:

  “One hour twelve minutes, our best so far.”

  He turned to Dalgliesh.

  “There aren’t many climbs on this part of the coast because of the shale, so we try to improve our time. Do you climb? I could lend you some gear.”

  “I haven’t done much since I left school and judging from what I’ve just seen, I’m not in your class.”

  He didn’t bother to explain that he was still too convalescent to climb safely. Once he might have found it necessary to justify his reluctance, but it had been some years now since he bothered how other people judged his physical courage. Julius said:

  “Wilfred used to climb with me but about three months ago we discovered that someone had deliberately frayed one of his ropes. We were about to tackle this particular climb, incidentally. He refused to try to discover who was responsible. Someone at the Grange expressing a personal grievance, I suppose. Wilfred must expect these occasional contretemps. It’s an occupational hazard for playing God. He was never in real danger. I always insist on checking equipment before we start. But it unnerved him, perhaps gave him the excuse he was looking for to give up climbing. He was never much good. Now I depend on Dennis when he has a day off, as today.”

  Lerner turned and smiled directly at Dalgliesh. The smile transformed his face, releasing it from strain. He looked suddenly boyish, confiding:

  “I’m just as terrified as Wilfred most of the time but I’m learning. It’s fascinating; I’m getting to love it. There’s a mild climb about half a mile back, guillemot ledge. Julius started me off there. It’s really quite gentle. We could tackle that if you’d like to try.”

  His naïve eagerness to communicate and share his pleasure was endearing.

  Dalgliesh said:

  “I hardly think I shall be long enough at Toynton to make it worthwhile.”

  He intercepted their quick glance at each other, an almost imperceptible meeting of eyes in what? Relief? Warning? Satisfaction?

  The three men stood silently while Dennis finished coiling the rope. Then Julius nodded towards the black tower.

  “Ugly, isn’t it? Wilfred’s great grandfather built it shortly after he rebuilt the Grange. It replaced—the Grange I mean—a small Elizabethan manor house which originally stood on the site and was destroyed by fire in 1843. A pity. It must have been more agreeable than the present house. Great grandfather had no eye for form. Neither the house nor the folly have quite come off have they?”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “How did he die here, by design?”

  “You could say that. He was one of those unamiable and obstinate eccentrics which the Victorian age seemed to breed. He invented his own religion, based I understand on the book of Revelation. In the early autumn of 1887 he walled himself up inside the tower and starved himself to death. According to the somewhat confused testament he left, he was waiting for the second coming. I hope it arrived for him.”

  “And no one stopped him?”

  “They didn’t know he was here. The old man was crazy but cunning. He made his secret preparations here, stones and mortar and so on, and then pretended to set off to winter in Naples. It was over three months before they found him. Long before that, he’d torn his fingers to the bone trying to claw himself out. But he’d done his brick and mortar work too well, poor devil.”

  “How horrible!”

  “Yes. In the old days before Wilfred closed the headland, the locals tended to avoid the place, and so to be honest do I. Father Baddeley used to come here occasionally. According to Grace Willison, he said some prayers for great grandfather’s soul, sprinkled holy water around and that decontaminated the tower as far as he was concerned. Wilfred uses it for meditation, or so he says. Personally I think it’s to get away from the Grange. The sinister family association doesn’t seem to worry him. But then, it doesn’t really touch him personally. He was adopted. But I expect Millicent Hammitt has told you all about that.”

  “Not yet. I’ve hardly spoken to her.”

  “She will, she will.”

  Dennis Lerner said surprisingly:

  “I like the black tower, particularly in summer when the headland is peaceful and golden and the sun glints on the black stone. It’s a symbol really, isn’t it? It looks magical, unreal, a folly built to amuse a child. And underneath there’s horror, pain, madness and death. I said that to Father Baddeley once.”

  “And what did he reply?” asked Julius.

  “He said, ‘Oh, no my son. Underneath there’s the love of God.’”

  Julius said roughly:

  “I don’t need a phallic symbol erected by a Victorian eccentric to remind me of the skull under the skin. Like any reasonable man I prepare my own defences.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “What are they?”

  The quiet question, even in his own ears, sounded stark as a command. Julius smiled:

  “Money and the solace it can buy. Leisure, friends, beauty, travel. And when they fail, as your friend Father Baddeley would have reminded me, they inevitably will, and Dennis’s four horses of the apocalypse take over, three bullets in a Luger.” He looked up once more at the tower.

  “In the meantime, I can do without reminders. My half Irish blood makes me superstitious. Let’s get down to the beach.”

  They slid and clambered cautiously down the cliff path. At the foot of the cliff Dennis Lerner’s brown monk’s habit lay neatly folded, topped by a rock. He corded it round himself, exchanged his climbing boots for sandals taken from the pocket of the cloak and, thus metamorphosed and with his climbing helmet tucked under his arm, joined his companions as they trudged through the shingle.

  All three seemed weary and no one spoke until the cliffs changed and they passed under the shadow of the black shale. The shore was even more remarkable seen close-to, a wide shining platform of boulder-strewn clay, fractured and crevassed as if by an earthquake, a bleak uncompromising shore. The pools were blue-black pits festooned with slimy seaweed; surely no northern sea bred such an exotic green? Even the ubiquitous litter of the shore—tarred splinters of wood, cartons in which the foam bubbled like brown scum, bottles, ends of tarred rope, the fragile bleached bones of a sea bird—looked like the sinister debris of catastrophe, the sad sludge of a dead world.

  As if by common consent they moved closer together and picked their way cautiously over the viscous rocks towards the sea until the tide was washing the flatter stones and Dennis Lerner had to hitch up his cloak. Suddenly Julius paused and turned towards the rock face. Dalgliesh turned with him, but Dennis still looked steadfastly out to sea.

  “The tide was coming in fast. It must have reached to about here. I got down to the beach by the path we used. It took some minutes of hard running but it was the nearer, really the only way. I didn’t see either him or the chair as I plunged and scrambled through the shingle. When I reached the black cliff I had to force myself to look at him. At first I could see nothing unusual, only the sea boiling between the rocks. Then I caught sight of one of the wheels of his chair. It was lying in the centre of a flat rock, the sun gleaming on the chrome and the metal spokes. It looked so decorative, so precisely placed, it couldn’t surely hav
e landed there by chance. I suppose that it bounced off with the shock of impact and finally rolled on to the stone. I remember that I picked it up and hurled it towards the shore, laughing aloud. Shock, I suppose. The sound echoed back from the rock face.”

  Lerner, without turning, said in a stifled voice:

  “I remember. I heard you. I thought it was Victor laughing; it sounded like Victor.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “You saw the accident, then?”

  “From a distance of about fifty yards. I’d got back to the cottage from London after lunch and decided to have a swim. It was an exceptionally warm day for September. I was just coming over the headland when I saw the chair lurch forward. There was nothing I, or anyone, could do. Dennis was lying on the grass about ten yards from Holroyd. He scrambled to his feet and ran after the chair hooting like a banshee. Then he ran backwards and forwards along the cliff edge, flailing his arms like a great brown demented crow.”

  Lerner said through tight lips:

  “I know that I didn’t behave with much courage.”

  “It wasn’t exactly an occasion for courage, dear boy. No one could expect you to hurl yourself over the cliff after him, although, for a second, I thought you were going to.”

  He turned to Dalgliesh.

  “I left Dennis lying prone on the grass in what I suppose was a state of shock, paused long enough to yell at him to get help from Toynton Grange, and made for the cliff path. It took Dennis about ten minutes to pull himself together and get moving. It might have been more sensible if I’d paid more attention to him and then got him down here with me to help with the corpse. I nearly lost it.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “The chair must have come over the cliff with considerable speed if he landed as far out as here.”

  “Yes, odd isn’t it? I was looking for him further inshore. Then I saw a tangle of metal about twenty feet to the right already being washed by the tide. And lastly I saw Holroyd. He looked like a great stranded fish rolling in the tide. His face was pale and bloated, even when he was alive poor devil; something to do with the steroids Eric was giving him. Now he looked grotesque. He must have parted from the chair before impact; anyway he was some distance from the wreckage. He was wearing only slacks and a cotton shirt when he died, and now the shirt had been torn away by the rocks and the sea so that all I could see was this great white torso turning and rising as the tide washed over him. He had gashed open his head and cut the neck artery. He must have bled copiously, and the sea had done the rest. By the time I reached him the foam was still stained pink, pretty as a bubble bath. He looked bloodless, as if he had been in the sea for months. A bloodless corpse, half naked, wallowing in the tide.”

  A bloodless corpse. A bloodless murder.

  The phrase fell unbidden into Dalgliesh’s mind. He asked, making his voice unemphatic, hardly interested:

  “How did you manage to get hold of him?”

  “It wasn’t easy. As I’ve said, the tide was coming in fast. I managed to get my bathing towel under his belt and tried to haul him on to one of the higher rocks, an undignified, clumsy business for both of us. He was considerably heavier than I and his waterlogged trousers added to the weight. I was afraid they would come off. I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered if they had, but it seemed important at the time to preserve some dignity for him. I took advantage of each onrush of wave to heave him further to shore and managed to get him on to this rock here, as far as I can remember. I was soaking myself and shivering despite the heat. I remember thinking it odd that the sun didn’t seem to have the power to dry my clothes.”

  Dalgliesh had glanced at Lerner’s profile during this recital. A pulse in the thin sun-reddened neck was beating like a pump. He said coolly:

  “We must hope that Holroyd’s death was less distressing for him than it obviously was for you.”

  Julius Court laughed:

  “You must remember that not everyone has your professional predilection for these entertainments. When I’d got him this far I just hung on grimly like a fisherman to his catch until the party from Toynton Grange arrived with a stretcher. They came stumbling along the beach, the quicker way, strung out, falling over the stones, overladen like a disorganized picnic party.”

  “What about the wheelchair?”

  “I only remembered it when we got back to Toynton. It was a write-off, of course. We all knew that. But I thought that the police might want to examine it to see if the brakes were defective. Rather clever of me wasn’t it? The idea didn’t seem to occur to anyone else. But when a party from the Grange came back to look they could only find the two wheels and the main part of the body. The two side pieces with the ratchet hand-brakes were missing. The police searched more thoroughly next morning but with no better luck.”

  Dalgliesh would have liked to have asked who it was from Toynton Grange who had done the searching. But he was determined not to betray real curiosity. He told himself that he had none. Violent death was no longer his concern and, officially, this violent death never would be. But it was odd that the two vital pieces of the wheelchair hadn’t been found. And this rocky shore, with its deep crevices, its pools, its numerous hiding places would have been an ideal place in which to conceal them. But the local police would have thought of that. It was, he supposed, one of the questions he would tactfully have to ask them. Father Baddeley had written to ask for his help the day before Holroyd had died, but that didn’t mean that the two events were totally unconnected. He asked:

  “Was Father Baddeley very distressed about Holroyd’s death? I imagine so.”

  “Very much, when he knew. But that wasn’t until a week later. We’d had the inquest by then and Holroyd had been buried. I thought Grace Willison would have told you. Michael and Victor between them gave us quite a day. When Dennis arrived back at the Grange with his news, the rescue party set out without saying anything to the patients. It was understandable but unfortunate. When we all staggered through the front door about forty minutes later, with what remained of Holroyd half slipping off the stretcher, Grace Willison was wheeling herself through the hall. Just to add to the excitement, she collapsed with shock. Anyway, Wilfred thought that Michael might start earning his money, and sent Eric off to Hope Cottage. Eric found Father Baddeley in the throes of his heart attack. So yet another ambulance was summoned—we thought it might finish Michael off if he had to share his journey to the hospital with what remained of Victor—and the old man went off in happy ignorance. The ward sister broke the news about Victor as soon as the doctors thought he was well enough to take it. According to her, he took it quietly, but was obviously upset. He wrote to Wilfred I believe; a letter of condolence. Father Baddeley had the professional knack of taking other people’s death in his stride, and he and Holroyd weren’t exactly close. It was the idea of suicide which upset his professional susceptibilities, I imagine.”

  Suddenly Lerner said in a low voice:

  “I feel guilty because I feel responsible.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Either you pushed Holroyd over the cliff or you didn’t. If you didn’t, guilt is an indulgence.”

  “And if I did?”

  “Then it’s a dangerous indulgence.”

  Julius laughed:

  “Victor committed suicide. You know it, I know it, so does everyone who knew Victor. If you’re going to start fantasizing about his death, it’s lucky for you that I decided to swim that afternoon and came over the brow of the hill when I did.”

  The three of them, as if by common consent, began squelching their way along the shingled shore. Looking at Lerner’s pale face, the twitch of muscle at the corner of the slack mouth, the perpetually anxious blinking eyes, Dalgliesh felt they’d had enough of Holroyd. He began to ask about the rock. Lerner turned to him eagerly.

  “It’s fascinating isn’t it? I love the variety of this coast. You get the same shale further to the west at Kimmeridge; there it’s known as Kimmeridge coal. It�
�s bituminous you know, you can actually burn it. We did try at Toynton Grange; Wilfred liked the idea that we might be self-supporting even for heating. But the stuff smelt so offensive that we had to give it up. It practically stank us out. I believe people have tried to exploit it from the middle of the eighteenth century but no one’s managed yet to deodorize it. The blackstone looks a bit dull and uninteresting now, but if it’s polished with beeswax it comes up like jet. Well, you saw the effect on the black tower. People used to make ornaments of it as far back as Roman times. I’ve got a book on the geology of this coast if you’re interested and I could show you my collection of fossils. Wilfred thinks that I ought not to take them now that the cliffs are so denuded, so I’ve given up collecting. But I’ve got quite an interesting collection. And I’ve got what I think is part of an Iron Age shale armlet.”

  Julius Court was grating through the shingle a few feet ahead. He turned and shouted back at them:

  “Don’t bore him with your enthusiasm for old rocks, Dennis. Remember what he said. He won’t be long enough at Toynton to make it worthwhile.”

  He smiled at Dalgliesh. He made it sound like a challenge.

  III

  Before setting out for Wareham, Dalgliesh wrote to Bill Moriarty at the Yard. He gave such brief information as he had about the staff and patients at Toynton Grange and asked whether anything was officially known. He thought that he could imagine Bill’s reaction to the letter, just as he could predict the style of his reply. Moriarty was a first-class detective but, except mercifully in official reports, he affected a facetious, spuriously jovial style when talking or writing about his cases as if nervously anxious to decontaminate violence with humour, or to demonstrate his professional sang-froid in the face of death. But if Moriarty’s style was suspect, his information was invariably detailed and accurate. What was more, it would come quickly.