Devices & Desires - Dalgleish 08

by P. D. James

The earlier arrival of the police must have alerted some of the locals but the plainclothes officer unobtrusively on duty inside the porch had dispersed any curious bystanders and now the road was empty except for a little group of four or five people about fifty yards down on the seaward side. They seemed to be muttering together and as Dalgliesh glanced at them they began moving aimlessly as if stirred by the breeze.

  He asked: 'Why here, for God's sake?'

  'We know why. There's a hell of a lot we don't know but at least we know that. They've got a part-time barman here, Albert Upcraft, seventy-five if he's a day. He remembers. He's a bit vague about what happened yesterday but there's nothing wrong with his long-term memory. The Whistler came here as a kid, apparently. His auntie - his dad's sister - was manager here twenty years ago. Used to take him off his mum's hands for a free holiday when the place was quiet. Mainly when mum had a new man and the new uncle didn't want the kid around. Sometimes he was here for weeks at a time. No trouble to anyone. Helped with the guests, picked up the odd tip, actually went to Sunday school.'

  Dalgliesh said: 'Now the Day is Over.'

  'Well, his day's over, all right. He booked in at 2.30 this afternoon. Asked for the same room, apparently. Single at the back. Cheapest in the house. The Carters should be grateful for small mercies. He might have chosen to go out in style, best double bedroom, private bathroom, view of the sea, the lot.'

  The constable at the door saluted and they passed through the lobby into the hall, and into a smell of paint and polish overlaid with the faint tang of lavender disinfectant. The cleanliness was almost oppressive. The lurid flowered carpet was covered with a narrow strip of perspex. The wallpaper was obviously new, a different pattern on each wall and a glimpse through the open door of the dining room showed tables set for four with shining white cloths and small vases of artificial flowers, daffodils, narcissi and bulbous roses. The couple who came from the back to meet them were as spruce as their hotel. Bill Carter was a dapper little man who looked as if he came fresh from the ironing board, the creases down his white shirt sleeves and the front of his trousers knife sharp, his tie neatly knotted. His wife was wearing a summer dress in a flowered crimplene under a knitted white sweater. She had obviously been crying. Her plump, rather childish face under the carefully set blonde hair was bloated and bruised red as if she had been struck. Her disappointment at seeing just the two of them was pathetically obvious.

  She said: 'I thought you'd come to take him away. Why can't you take him away?'

  Rickards didn't introduce Dalgliesh. He said soothingly: 'We will, Mrs Carter, as soon as the pathologist has seen him. He shouldn't be long now. He's on his way.'

  'Pathologist? That's a doctor, isn't it? Why do you want a doctor? He's dead, isn't he? Bill found him. His throat's cut. How much deader can you get?'

  'He won't be with you much longer, Mrs Carter.'

  'The sheet's covered with blood, Bill says. He wouldn't let me in. Not that I want to see. And the carpet, ruined. Blood's terrible to get out, everyone knows that. Who's going to pay for the carpet and the bed? Oh God, I thought things were really coming right for us at last. Why did he come back here to do it? Not very nice, was it, not very considerate?'

  'He wasn't a considerate man, Mrs Carter.'

  Her husband put his arm round her shoulders and led her away. Less than half a minute later he reappeared and said: 'It's the shock, naturally. She's upset. Well, who wouldn't be? You know the way up, Mr Rickards. Your officer is still there. I won't come up with you if you don't mind.'

  'That's all right, Mr Carter, I know the way.'

  Suddenly he turned and said: 'Get him out soon, sir, for God's sake.'

  For a moment Dalgliesh thought that he, too, was crying.

  There was no lift. Dalgliesh followed Rickards up three flights of stairs, down a narrow passage towards the back and a short turn to the right. A young detective constable got up from his chair outside the door and with his left hand opened it then flattened himself against the wall. The smell seemed to gust out of the room at them, a strong effluvium of blood and death.

  The light was on and the main bulb in its cheap pink shade hung low and shone full on the horror on the bed. It was a very small room, little more than a box room, with a single window too high to give a view of more than the sky and enough space only for the single bed, a chair, a bedside cabinet and a low chest of drawers with a mirror hung above it which served as a dressing table. But this room, too, was obsessively clean, making that unclean thing on the bed even more horrible. Both the gaping throat with its white corrugated vessels and the sagging mouth above it seemed to be stretched in protest or outrage at this violence to decency and order. There were no preliminary cuts visible and that single act of annihilating violence must surely, Dalgliesh thought, have taken more strength than was possible from the childish hand lying, fingers curved, on the sheet and fixed now in its blackening carapace of dried blood. The knife, six inches of bloodied steel, lay close beside it. For some reason he had undressed himself for death and lay now wearing only a vest and pants and a pair of short blue nylon socks which looked like the onset of putrefaction. On the chair beside the bed a dark grey striped suit was neatly folded. A blue-striped drip-dry shirt was hung from the back of the chair with the tie folded over it. Under the chair his shoes, well worn but polished to mirror brightness, were precisely placed side by side. They looked small enough for a girl.

  Rickards said: 'Neville Potter, aged thirty-six. Scrawny little sod. You wouldn't believe he'd got the strength in those arms to throttle a chicken. And he came properly dressed in his Sunday best to meet his Maker, but then thought better of it. Probably remembered that his ma wouldn't like him getting blood on his best suit. You should meet Ma, Mr Dalgliesh. She's a real education, that one. She explains a lot. But he's left the evidence. It's all there, all laid out for us. Neat little devil, wasn't he?'

  Dalgliesh edged himself round the end of the bed, being careful not to tread in the blood. On the top of the chest of drawers were the Whistler's weapons and his trophies; a leather dog lead, neatly curled, a blond wig and blue beret, a clasp knife, a lamp with a battery ingeniously fixed to the centre of a metal headband. Beside these was a pyramid of tangled bushy hair: blond, dark brown, red. In front of the careful arrangement was a page of paper torn from a notebook with the single written message in biro, printed like a child's. 'It was getting worse. This is the only way I know to stop myself. Please look after Pongo.' The 'Please' was underlined.

  Rickards said: 'His dog. Pongo, for God's sake.'

  'What did you expect him to be called, Cerberus?'

  Rickards opened the door and stood with his back to the gap breathing deeply as if hungry for fresh air. He said: 'He and his ma lived on one of the caravan sites outside Cromer. Been there for twelve years. He was a general handyman, did any easy repairs, kept an eye on the place at night, dealt with complaints. The boss has another site outside Yarmouth and he would go there some nights to relieve the permanent chap. A bit of a loner. Had a small van and the dog. Married a girl he picked up on the site there years ago but it only lasted four months. She walked out on him. Driven out by Ma or by the smell of the caravan. God knows how she stuck it for four months.'

  Dalgliesh said: 'He was an obvious suspect. You must have checked him.'

  'His ma gave him an alibi for two of the murders. Either she was drunk and didn't know whether he was there or not, or she was covering up for him. Or, of course, she couldn't give a bloody damn one way or the other.' He said with sudden violence, 'I thought we'd learned by now not to take that kind of alibi at its face value. I'm having a word with the DC who interviewed them, but you know how it is. Thousands of interviews, checks, the stuff all put on the computer. I'd give a dozen computers for a DC who can sense when a witness is lying. My God, haven't we learned anything from the Yorkshire Ripper fiasco?'

  'Didn't your man search the van?'

  'Oh, they searched the van, all
right. They showed a modicum of initiative. It was clean. He cached his stuff elsewhere. Probably picked it up every evening, watched, waited, chose his moment.' He gazed down at the head contraption and said: 'Ingenious, isn't it? As his ma says, he was always clever with his hands.'

  The small rectangle of sky outside the single high window was blue-black pricked with a single star. It seemed to Dalgliesh that he had experienced half a lifetime of sensations since he had woken that morning to the cool sea-scented autumnal dawn, to the beginning of a day which had included that calm meditative walk under the soaring roof of St Peter Mancroft, the nostalgic self-indulgent pain induced by those faded photographs of the long dead; the rush and pull of the tide over his naked feet, the mingled shock and recognition as his torch shone on Hilary Robarts's body. It was a day which, stretching interminably, seemed to have embraced all seasons. So this was one way of stretching time, time which for the Whistler had stopped with that great gush of blood. And now at the end of the day he had come to this neat box of an execution shed, imposing on his mind as if it were a memory the picture of a skinny child lying supine on that same bed and watching through the high window the same single star while arranged on the chest of drawers with careful art were the trophies of his day: the tips in pennies and sixpences, the shells and coloured stones from the beach, the dried swathe of pustulated seaweed.

  And he himself was here because Rickards had willed it, had wanted him here in this room and at this time. He could have viewed the Whistler's body tomorrow in the mortuary, or, since he could hardly claim that he hadn't the stomach for it, on the autopsy table, to confirm what hardly needed confirmation, that this scrawny killer wasn't the once-glimpsed, six-foot, Battersea strangler. But Rickards had needed an audience, had needed him, Dalgliesh, against whose dreadfully experienced and unshockable calm he could hurl the bitterness and frustrations of failure. Five women dead, and the murderer a suspect they had interviewed and cleared early in the inquiry. The smell of that failure would linger at least in his own nostrils long after the media interest, the official inquiries had run their course. And now there was this sixth death, Hilary Robarts who might not have died and certainly wouldn't have died as she had if the Whistler had been stopped in his tracks earlier. But Dalgliesh sensed that something more keenly personal even than professional failure was fuelling Rickards's anger with its uncharacteristic spurts of verbal brutality and he wondered whether it had something to do with his wife and the coming child. He asked: 'What will happen to the dog?'

  Rickards seemed not to notice the irrelevance of the question.

  'What do you think? Who's going to take on an animal that has been where he's been, seen what he's seen?' He looked down at the stiffening corpse and, turning to Dalgliesh, said harshly: 'You pity him, I suppose.'

  Dalgliesh didn't reply. He could have said: 'Yes, I pity him. And his victims. And you. And myself occasionally, come to that.' He thought: Yesterday I was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy. Odd. Robert Burton, that seventeenth-century Leicestershire rector, had said all that could be said at such a moment and the words came to him as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud. 'Of their goods and bodies we can dispose; but what shall become of their souls God alone can tell; His mercy may come inter pontem et fontem, inter gladium et jugulum, betwixt the bridge and the brook, the knife and the throat.'

  Rickards shook himself violently as if suddenly seized with cold. It was an odd gesture. Then he said: 'At least he's saved the country his keep for the next twenty years. One argument for keeping his kind alive instead of putting them down is that we can learn from them, stop it happening again. But can we? We've got Straffen banged up, Brady, Nielson. How much have we learned from them?'

  Dalgliesh said: 'You wouldn't hang a madman, presumably?'

  'I wouldn't hang anyone, I'd find a less barbaric method. But they aren't mad, are they? Not until they're caught. Until then they cope with life like most other people. Then we discover that they're monsters and decide, surprise, surprise, to classify them as mad. Makes it seem more comprehensible. We don't have to think of them as human any more. We don't have to use the word evil. Everyone feels better. Do you want to see the mother, Mr Dalgliesh?'

  'There's no point in it. He obviously isn't our man. I didn't for a moment suppose that he would be.'

  'You should see the mother. She's a right bitch, that one. And do you know what her name is? Lillian. L for Lillian. That's something for the trick-cyclist to chew over. She made him what he was. But we can't check on people and decide who's fit to have kids, let alone fit to bring them up. And I suppose that when he was born she must have felt something for him, had some hopes for him. She could hardly know what she'd brought forth. You never had a child, did you, Mr Dalgliesh.'

  'I had a son. Briefly.'

  Rickards kicked the door gently, looking away. He said: 'Bloody hell, I'd forgotten. Sorry. Wrong time to ask, for both of us.'

  There were confident footsteps mounting the stairs and now they had reached the passage. Dalgliesh said: 'It sounds as if the pathologist has arrived.'

  Rickards made no reply. He had moved over to the chest of drawers and, with his forefinger, gently urged the tangle of hairs across the polished wood.

  He said: 'There's one sample which we won't find here. Hilary Robarts. Forensic will look to make doubly sure, but it won't be here. And now I start looking for a very different murderer. And, by God, Mr Dalgliesh, this time I'm going to get him.'

  Forty-five minutes later Rickards was back at the scene of the murder. He seemed to have passed beyond conscious tiredness and to be operating in a different dimension of time and space in which his mind worked with unnatural clarity while his body had become almost weightless, a creature of light and air, as insubstantial as the bizarre scene in which he moved and spoke and gave his orders. The pale transparent disc of the moon was eclipsed by the glare of the mounted lights which illumined and solidified the hard outlines of trees and men and equipment, yet paradoxically robbed them of form and essence so that they were, at one and the same time, revealed and clarified and transformed into something alien and strange. And always, beyond the masculine voices, the scrunch of feet on pebbles, the sudden flap of canvas in a tentative breeze, was the continual fall and suck of the tide.

  Dr Anthony Maitland-Brown had driven from East-haven to the scene in his Mercedes and had arrived first. He was already gowned and gloved and crouching by the body by the time Rickards caught up with him. Wisely he left him to it. M-B strongly disliked being watched while he made his preliminary examination at the scene and was apt to protest with a peevish 'Do we really need all these people standing around?' if anyone came within ten feet of him, as if the police photographer, scene-of-crime officer and forensic biologist were all so many snap-happy sightseers. He was an elegant and extraordinarily handsome man, over six feet tall, who had once in youth - so it was rumoured - been told that he looked like Leslie Howard and had spent subsequent years sedulously promoting the image. He was amicably divorced, comfortably well-off-his mother had bequeathed him a private income - and well able to indulge his twin passions of clothes and the opera. In his free time he escorted a succession of young and extremely pretty actresses to Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, where they were apparently content to endure three hours of boredom for the prestige of his company or, perhaps, the frisson of knowing that the elegant hands which poured their wine or helped them out of the Mercedes were commonly engaged with more bizarre activities. Rickards had never found him an easy colleague but recognized that he was a first-class forensic pathologist, and God knew they were rare enough. Reading M-B's lucid and comprehensive autopsy reports he could forgive him even his aftershave.

  Now, moving away from the body, he stirred himself to greet the recent arrivals, photographer, cameraman, forensic biologist. The stretch of beach fifty yards each side of the murder scene had been efficiently roped off and plastic sheeting laid over the path now lit by a string of overhead lights
. He was aware of his sergeant's disciplined excitement at his side.

  Stuart Oliphant said: 'We've found a print, sir. About forty yards into the copse.'

  'On grass and pine needles?'

  'No, sir, on sand. Someone, a kid perhaps, must have tipped it from a bucket. The print's a good one, sir.'

  Rickards followed him into the wood. The whole of the path had been protected but at one place a marker had been driven into the soft ground at the right-hand side. Sergeant Oliphant drew back the plastic then lifted the box covering the print. In the glow of the overhead lights slung along the path it showed clearly, a dusting of moist sand over the pine needles and flattened grass, covering no more than six inches by four, and printed on it the intricate pattern of the sole of a right shoe.

  Oliphant said: 'We found it soon after you left, sir. Only the one, but it's pretty clear. The photographs have been taken and the measurements will be at the lab this morning. Size ten by the look of it. They'll be able to give us confirmation pretty quickly, but it's hardly necessary. It's a trainer shoe, sir. A Bumble. You know the make, the one that has a picture of a bee on the heel. And it has the outline of a bee on the sole. You can see the curve of the wing here, sir. It's quite unmistakable.'

  A Bumble trainer. If you wanted a print you could hardly hope for anything more distinctive. Oliphant voiced his thoughts: 'Common enough, of course, but not all that common. Bumbles are the most expensive on the market, the Porsche of trainers. Most of the kids with money like to have them. It's a bloody silly name. Part of the firm is actually owned by a man called Bumble and they've only been on the market for a couple of years, but he promotes them fairly vigorously. I suppose he hopes that the name will catch on, that people will start yelling for their Bumbles as they do for their wellie-boots.'