by P. D. James
And it was so easy, so simple, so foolproof. And so incredibly profitable. What was illegal heroin fetching now? Something like £4,000 an ounce. Julius had no need to deal in bulk or complicate his distribution arrangements beyond the one or two trusted agents to make himself secure for life. Ten ounces brought in each time would buy all the leisure and beauty that any man could desire. And with the Ridgewell Trust takeover the future was secure. Dennis Lerner would keep his job. The pilgrimages would continue. There would be other homes open to his exploitation, other pilgrimages. And Lerner was completely in his power. Even if the newsletter was discontinued and the home no longer needed to pack and sell its handcream and powder, the heroin would still come in. The arrangements for notification and distribution were a minor matter of logistics compared with the fundamental problem of getting the drug safely, reliably and regularly through the port.
There was as yet no proof. But with luck, and if he were right, there would be in three days’ time. He could telephone the local police now and safely leave it to them to contact the central drug control branch. Better still, he could telephone Inspector Daniel and arrange to call in to see him on his way back to London. Secrecy was essential. There must be no risk of suspicion. It would take only one telephone call to Lourdes to cancel this consignment and leave him again with nothing but a hotchpotch of half-formulated suspicions, coincidences, unsubstantiated allegations.
The nearest telephone, he remembered, was in the dining room. It had an external line, and he saw that this had been switched through to the exchange. But when he lifted the receiver, the line was dead. He felt the usual momentary irritation that an instrument, taken for granted, should be reduced to a ridiculous and useless lump of plastic and metal, and reflected that a house with a dead telephone seemed always so much more isolated than one with no telephone at all. It was interesting, perhaps even significant, that the line was silent. But it didn’t matter. He would get on his way and hope to find Inspector Daniel at police headquarters. At this stage when his theory was still little more than conjecture he was reluctant to talk to anyone else. He replaced the receiver. A voice from the doorway said:
“Having difficulty, Commander?”
Julius Court must have stepped through the house as delicately as a cat. He stood now, one shoulder resting lightly against the door post, both hands deep in his jacket pockets. The assumption of ease was deceptive. His body, poised on the balls of his feet as if to spring, was rigid with tension. The face above the high rolled collar of his sweater was as skeletal and defined as a carving, the muscles taut under the flush skin. His eyes unblinking, unnaturally bright, were fixed on Dalgliesh with the speculative intentness of a gambler watching the spinning balls.
Dalgliesh said calmly:
“It’s out of order apparently. It doesn’t matter. My housekeeper will expect me when she sees me.”
“Do you usually roam about other people’s houses to make your private calls? The main telephone is in the business room. Didn’t you know?”
“I doubt whether I should have been any luckier.”
They looked at each other, silent in the greater silence. Across the length of the room Dalgliesh could recognize and follow the process of his adversary’s thought as plainly as if it were registering visibly on a graph, the black needle tracing the pattern of decision. There was no struggle. It was the simple weighing of probabilities.
When Julius at last drew his hand slowly out of his pocket it was almost with relief that Dalgliesh saw the muzzle of the Luger. The die was cast. Now there was no going back, no more pretence, no more uncertainty.
Julius said quietly:
“Don’t move, I’m an excellent shot. Sit down at the table. Hands on the top. Now, tell me how you found me out. I’m assuming that you have found me out. If not, then I’ve miscalculated. You will die and I shall be put to a great deal of trouble and inconvenience and we’ll both be aggrieved to know that it wasn’t after all necessary.”
With his left hand Dalgliesh took Father Baddeley’s letter from his jacket pocket and slid it across the table.
“This will interest you. It came this morning addressed to Father Baddeley.”
The grey eyes did not move from his.
“Sorry. I’m sure it’s fascinating but I have my mind on other matters. You read it to me.”
“It explains why he wanted to see me. You needn’t have worried to concoct the poison pen letter or destroy his diary. His problem had nothing to do with you. Why kill him anyway? He was in the tower when Holroyd died; he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t slept, that you hadn’t come over the headland. But was that knowledge dangerous enough to snuff him out?”
“It was, in Baddeley’s hands. The old man had a deep-rooted instinct for what he would describe as evil. That meant he had a deep-rooted suspicion of me, particularly of what he saw as my influence over Dennis. We were playing out our private comedy on a level which I don’t think the procedures of the Metropolitan Police would recognize. It could only have one end. He telephoned me at my London flat from the hospital three days before he was discharged and asked me to come to see him on 26th September after nine o’clock. I went prepared. I drove down from London and left the Mercedes in that hollow behind the stone wall off the coast road. I took one of the habits from the business room while they were all at dinner. Then I walked to Hope Cottage. If anyone had seen me, then I should have had to change my plan. But no one did. He was sitting alone by the dying fire waiting for me. I think he knew about two minutes after I entered that I would kill him. There wasn’t even a flicker of surprise when I pressed the plastic against his face. Plastic, you note. It wouldn’t leave any telltale threads in the nostrils or windpipe. Not that Hewson would have noticed, poor fool. Baddeley’s diary was on the table and I took it away with me just in case he’d made any incriminating entries. Just as well. He had, I discovered, a tedious habit of recording precisely where he’d been and when. But I didn’t break into the bureau. I didn’t need to. You can put that little peccadillo down to Wilfred. He must have been frantic to get his eyes on the old man’s will. Incidentally, I never found your postcard and I suspect Wilfred looked no further once he’d found the will. Probably the old man tore it up. He disliked keeping trifles. Afterwards I went back and slept in some discomfort in the car. Next morning I rejoined the London road and arrived here when all the excitement was over. I saw in the diary that he had invited an A.D. to stay and that the visitor was expected on the first of October. It struck me as a bit odd. The old man didn’t have visitors. So I planted the poison pen letter the evening before, just in case Baddeley had confided that something was on his mind. I must say, it was a bit disconcerting to discover that the mysterious A.D. was you, my dear Commander. Had I known, I might have tried for a little more subtlety.”
“And the stole? He was wearing his stole.”
“I should have removed it, but one can’t remember everything. You see, he didn’t believe I was protecting Dennis to save Wilfred grief or out of kindness to Dennis. He knew me too well. When he accused me of corrupting Dennis, of using Toynton for some purpose of my own, I said that I would tell him the truth, that I wanted to make my confession. He must have known in his heart that this was death, that I was only amusing myself. But he couldn’t take the risk. If he refused to take me seriously, then all his life would have been a lie. He hesitated for just two seconds, then he put the stole round his neck.”
“Didn’t he even give you the gratification of a flicker of fear?”
“Oh, no! Why should he? We were alike in one thing. Neither of us feared death. I don’t know where Baddeley thought he was going as he just had time to make that last archaic sign of his allegiance, but wherever it was he apparently saw nothing to fear. Neither do I. I know just as certainly as he did what will follow my death. Annihilation. It would be unreasonable to fear that. I’m not so unreasonable. Once you have lost the fear of death—absolutely lost it—then all other fea
rs are meaningless. Nothing can touch you. All that is necessary is to keep the means of death to hand. Then one is invulnerable. I apologize for the fact that, in my case, it has to be a gun. I do realize that at the moment I look melodramatic, ridiculous. But I can’t fancy killing myself any other way. Drowning? That onrush of suffocating water? Drugs? Some interfering fool might drag me back. Besides, I do fear that shadow land between life and death. A knife? Messy and uncertain. There are three bullets here, Dalgliesh. One for you, and two, in case they should be needed, for me.”
“If you trade in death as you do, it’s as well no doubt to come to terms with it.”
“Everyone who takes hard drugs wants to die. You know that as well as I do. There is no other way they can do it with so little inconvenience and so much profit to others, and with such pleasure to themselves, at least initially.”
“And Lerner? I suppose you paid his mother’s nursing home fees. What are they, about £200 a month? You got him cheap. Even so, he must have known what he was bringing in.”
“Will be bringing in, three days from now. Will go on bringing in. I told him that it was cannabis, a perfectly harmless drug; one which an over-sensitive government have chosen to make illegal but which my London friends happen to fancy and are prepared to pay highly for. He chooses to believe me. He knows the truth, but he won’t admit to himself that he knows. That’s reasonable, sensible, a necessary self-deception. It’s how we all manage to go on living. You must know that your job is a dirty job, crooks catching crooks, and that you waste your intelligence by doing it. But it wouldn’t exactly add to your peace of mind to admit the fact. And if you ever chuck it, you won’t give that as your reason. Are you going to chuck it, by the way? Somehow I’ve gained the impression that you might be.”
“That shows some discernment. I did have it in mind. But not now.”
The decision to go on, arrived at when and why Dalgliesh didn’t know, seemed to him as irrational as the decision to give up. It wasn’t a victory. A kind of defeat even. But there would be time enough, if he lived, to analyse the vicissitudes of that personal conflict. Like Father Baddeley, a man lived and died as he had to. He heard Julius’s amused voice.
“A pity. But as this seems likely to be your last job, why not tell me how you found me out.”
“Is there time? I don’t relish spending my last five minutes in a recital of professional incompetence. It won’t give me any satisfaction and I don’t see why I should gratify your curiosity.”
“No. But it’s more in your interests than mine. Oughtn’t you to be playing for time? Besides, if it’s fascinating enough I might relax my guard, might give you a chance to pounce or fling a chair at me or whatever they train you to do in this kind of situation. Or somebody may come, or I may even change my mind.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
“Then gratify my curiosity. I can guess about Grace Willison. You killed her in the same way you killed Father Baddeley once you decided that I was getting dangerously suspicious, because she could type by heart the list of Friends, the list which included your distributors. But Maggie Hewson, why did she have to die?”
“Because of something she knew. Haven’t you guessed that? I’ve over-estimated you. She knew that Wilfred’s miracle was a delusion. I drove the Hewsons and Victor to London for his appointment at St. Saviour’s hospital. Eric and Maggie went to the medical records department to have a look at Wilfred’s folder. I suppose they wanted to gratify a natural professional curiosity while they were there. They discovered that he’d never had disseminated sclerosis, that his latest tests had shown that it was a wrong diagnosis. All he’d suffered from was hysterical paralysis. But I must be shocking you, my dear Commander. You’re a pseudo-scientist, aren’t you? It must be hard for you to accept that medical technology can err.”
“No. I believe in the possibility of a wrong diagnosis.”
“Wilfred, apparently, doesn’t share your healthy scepticism. He never returned to the hospital for his next checkup, so no one bothered to write to him about their little mistake. Why should they? But it was knowledge that the two Hewsons couldn’t keep to themselves. They told me, and subsequently Maggie must have told Holroyd. He probably guessed on the drive back to Toynton that something was up. I tried to bribe her with whisky to keep the knowledge to herself—she actually believed in my solicitude for dear Wilfred—and it worked until Wilfred excluded her from the decision on the future of the home. She was furious. She told me that she planned to burst into the last session at the end of the meditation and publicly proclaim the truth. I couldn’t risk that. It was the one fact, the only fact, that could have made him sell out. It would have stopped the hand-over to the Ridgewell Trust. Toynton Grange and the pilgrimage had to go on.
“She wasn’t really looking forward to the fracas that would follow breaking the news and it was easy enough to persuade her to leave the party at Toynton Grange to indulge their various reactions to her news and escape up to town with me immediately afterwards. I suggested that she should leave a deliberately ambiguous note, one which could be read as a threat of suicide. Then she could return to Toynton if and when she felt like it and see how Eric was reacting as a presumptive widower. It was the kind of histrionic gesture which appealed to dear Maggie. It got her out of an awkward situation here, provided the maximum of worry and inconvenience to Wilfred and Eric, and provided her with a free holiday in my London flat and the prospect of plenty of excitement if and when she chose to return. She even volunteered to fetch the rope herself. We sat there drinking together until she was too fuddled to suspect me but still sober enough to write the note. The last scrawled lines, the reference to the black tower, were, of course, added by me.”
“So that was why she was bathed and dressed.”
“Of course. Tarted up to make an effective entrance at Toynton Grange, and also I flatter myself, to impress me. I was gratified that I ranked clean underclothes and painted toe nails. I don’t know what precisely she thought I had in mind for us when we reached London. Dear Maggie was never quite in touch with reality. To pack her contraceptive was perhaps more optimistic than discreet. But she may have had her plans. The dear girl was certainly delirious at the thought of leaving Toynton. She died happy I assure you.”
“And, before leaving the cottage, you gave the signal with the light.”
“I had to have some excuse for turning up and finding the body. It seemed prudent to add verisimilitude. Someone might have looked out of a window and been able to confirm my story. I didn’t bargain for it being you. Finding you here busily doing your boy scout turn gave me a bad moment. And you were remarkably obstinate about not leaving the body.”
It must have been almost as bad a moment, thought Dalgliesh, as finding Wilfred so nearly choked to death. There had been nothing faked about Julius’s terror either then or after Maggie’s death. He asked:
“And was Holroyd pushed over the cliff for the same reason, to stop him talking?”
Julius laughed:
“Now this will amuse you; a delicious irony. I didn’t even know that Maggie had confided in Holroyd until I challenged her with it after his death. And Dennis never knew. Holroyd began taunting Dennis as he usually did. Dennis was more or less inured to it and merely moved with his book a little way apart. Then Holroyd began on a more sinister line of torment. He began shouting at Dennis. He wondered what Wilfred would say when he learned that his precious pilgrimages were a fraud, that Toynton Grange itself was founded on a lie. He told Dennis to make the most of the next pilgrimage; it would certainly be the last. Dennis panicked; he thought that Holroyd had discovered about the drug smuggling. He didn’t pause to ask himself how in the hell Holroyd could have found out. He told me afterwards that he couldn’t even remember scrambling to his feet, releasing the brakes and hurling the chair forward. But he did, of course. There was no one else to do it. It couldn’t have landed where it did if it hadn’t gone over the cliff with c
onsiderable force. I was on the beach beneath them when Holroyd came over. One of the irritating things about that murder was that I’ve never received any sympathy for the traumatic experience of having Holroyd smashed to death only twenty yards from me. I hope you will give it to me now.”
Dalgliesh reflected that the murder must have been doubly convenient for Julius. It removed Holroyd and his dangerous knowledge; it put Dennis Lerner finally in his power. He said:
“And you disposed of the two side pieces of the wheelchair while Lerner was fetching help.”
“About fifty yards away, down a deep cleft between two rocks. It seemed, at the time, a sensible way of complicating the case. Without the brakes no one could be sure that it wasn’t an accident. On reflection I should have left well alone and let it be assumed that Holroyd killed himself. Essentially he did. That’s what I’ve persuaded Dennis.”
Dalgliesh asked:
“What are you going to do now?”
“Put a bullet in your head, conceal your body in your own car and get rid of both together. It’s a trite method of murder I know, but I understand that it works.”
Dalgliesh laughed. He was surprised that the sound could be so spontaneous.
“You propose to drive about sixty miles, I take it, in an easily identifiable car with the murdered body of a Commander of the Metropolitan Police in the boot—his own boot incidentally. A number of men of my acquaintance in the maximum security wings of Parkhurst and Durham would admire your nerve even while not exactly relishing the prospect of welcoming you to their company. They’re a quarrelsome, uncivilized bunch. I don’t think you’re going to have a lot in common.”
“I shall be at risk. But you’ll be dead.”