by P. D. James
“I could have used that arsenic for Maurice just as easily and seen him die in agony any day I chose. It would have been easy. Too easy. Easy and unintelligent. Death by poison wouldn’t have satisfied any of the necessary conditions of Maurice’s murder. It was those conditions which made the crime so interesting to plan and so satisfying to execute. Firstly, he had to die from natural causes. Digby, as his heir, would be the natural suspect and it was important to me that nothing should jeopardise Digby’s inheritance. Then he had to die away from Monksmere; there must be no danger of anyone suspecting me. On the other hand I wanted the crime to be connected with the Monksmere community; the more they were harassed, suspected and frightened the better, I had plenty of old scores to be settled. Besides, I wanted to watch the investigation. It wouldn’t have suited me to have it treated as a London crime. Apart from the fun of watching the reactions of the suspects I thought it important that the police work should be under my eye. I must be there to watch and, if necessary, to control. It didn’t work out altogether as I had planned, but on the whole very little has happened which I haven’t known about. Ironically, I have been less skilful at times than I hoped at controlling my own emotions, but everyone else has behaved strictly according to my plan.
“And then there was Digby’s requirement to be met. He wanted the murder to be associated with L. J. Luker and the Cortez Club. His motive was different, of course. He didn’t particularly want Luker to be suspected. He just wanted to show him that there were more ways than one of committing murder and getting away with it. What Digby wanted was a death which the police would have to accept as natural—because it would be natural—but which Luker would know had been murder. That’s why he insisted on sending Luker the severed hands. I took most of the flesh off them first with acid—it was an advantage to have a dark room in the cottage and the acid available—but I still didn’t like the idea. It was a stupid, an unnecessary risk. But I gave in to Digby’s whim. A condemned man, by tradition, is pampered. One tries to gratify his more harmless requests.
“But before I describe how Maurice died there are two extraneous matters to get out of the way. Neither of them is important but I mention them because both had an indirect part in Maurice’s murder and both were useful in throwing suspicion on Latham and Bryce. I can’t take much credit for Dorothy Seton’s death. I was responsible, of course, but I didn’t intend to kill her. It would have seemed a waste of effort to plan to kill a woman so obviously bent on self-destruction. It couldn’t, after all, have been long. Whether she took an overdose of her drugs, fell over the cliff on one of her half-doped nocturnal wanderings, got killed with her lover on one of their wild drives around the country, or merely drank herself to death, it could only be a matter of time. I wasn’t even particularly interested. And then, soon after she and Alice Kerrison had left for that last holiday at Le Touquet I found the manuscript. It was a remarkable piece of prose. It’s a pity that people who say that Maurice Seton couldn’t write will never have the chance to read it. When he cared, he could write phrases that scorched the paper. And he cared. It was all there: the pain, the sexual frustration, the jealousy, the spite, the urge to punish. Who better than I could know how he felt? It must have given him the greatest satisfaction to write it all down. There could be no typewriter, no mechanical keys between this pain and its expression. He needed to see the words forming themselves under his hand. He didn’t mean to use it, of course. I did that; merely steaming open one of his weekly letters to her and including it with that. Looking back, I’m not even sure what I expected to happen. I suppose it was just that the sport was too good to miss. Even if she didn’t destroy the letter and confronted him with it he could never be absolutely sure that he himself hadn’t inadvertently posted it. I knew him so well, you see. He was always afraid of his own subconscious, persuaded that it would betray him in the end. Next day I enjoyed myself watching his panic, his desperate searching, his anxious glances at me to see whether I knew. When he asked whether I had thrown away any papers I answered calmly that I had only burnt a small quantity of scrap. I saw his face lighten. He chose to believe that I had thrown away the letter without reading it. Any other thought would have been intolerable to him so that was what he chose to believe until the day he died. The letter was never found. I have my own idea what happened to it. But the whole of Monksmere believes that Maurice Seton was largely responsible for his wife’s suicide. And who could have a better motive for revenge in the eyes of the police than her lover, Oliver Latham?
“It is probably unnecessary to explain that it was I who killed Bryce’s cat. That would have been obvious to Bryce at the time if he hadn’t been so desperate to cut down the body that he failed to notice the slip knot. If he had been in any condition to examine the rope and the method he would have realized that I could have strung up Arabella without lifting myself more than an inch or two in my chair. But, as I had anticipated, he neither acted rationally nor thought coolly. It never occurred to him for a second that Maurice Seton might not be the culprit. It may seem strange that I waste time discussing the killing of a cat but Arabella’s death had its place in my scheme. It ensured that the vague dislike between Maurice and Bryce hardened into active enmity so that Bryce, like Latham, had a motive for revenge. The death of a cat may be a poor motive for the death of a man and I thought it unlikely that the police would waste much time with Bryce. But the mutilation of the body was a different matter. Once the postmortem showed that Maurice had died from natural causes the police would concentrate on the reasons for hacking off the hands. It was, of course, vital that they should never suspect why this mutilation was necessary and it was convenient that there should be at least two people at Monksmere, both spiteful, both aggrieved, both with an obvious motive. But there were two other reasons why I killed Arabella. Firstly I wanted to. She was a useless creature. Like Dorothy Seton she was kept and petted by a man who believed that beauty has a right to exist, however stupid, however worthless, because it is beauty. It took only two twitching seconds on the end of a clothes line to dispose of that nonsense. And then, her death was to some extent a dress rehearsal. I wanted to try out my acting ability, to test myself under strain. I won’t waste time now describing what I discovered about myself. I shall never forget it; the sense of power, the outrage, the heady mixture of fear and excitement. I have felt that again many times since. I am feeling it now. Bryce gives a graphic account of my distress, my tiresomely uncontrolled behaviour after the body was cut down, and not all of it was acting.
“But to return to Maurice. It was by a lucky chance that I discovered the one fact about him that was crucial for my purpose—that he suffered badly from claustrophobia. Dorothy must have known of course. After all there were nights when she condescended to let him share her bedroom. He must have woken her sometimes with his recurring nightmare just as he woke me. I often wonder how much she knew and whether she told Oliver Latham before she died. That was a risk I had to take. But what if she did? No one can prove that I knew. Nothing can change the fact that Maurice Seton died from natural causes.
“I remember that night, over two years ago, very clearly. It was a wet, blustery day in mid-September and the evening grew wilder as darkness fell. We had been working together since ten o’clock that morning and it wasn’t going well. Maurice was trying to finish a series of short stories for an evening paper. It wasn’t his métier and he knew it; he was working against time and he hated that. I had broken off only twice, to cook us a light lunch at one-thirty and again at eight o’clock when I prepared sandwiches and soup. By nine o’clock when we had finished our meal, the wind was howling around the house and I could hear a high tide pounding on the beach. Even Maurice could hardly expect me to get home in my wheelchair once darkness had fallen and he never offered to drive me home. That, after all, would put him to the trouble of fetching me again next day. So he suggested that I should stay the night. He didn’t ask me if I were willing. It didn’t occur to him th
at I might object or that I might perhaps prefer my own toothbrush or toilet things or even my own bed. The ordinary courtesies of life didn’t apply to me. But he told me to put sheets on the bed in his wife’s old room and he came himself to look for a nightdress for me. I don’t know why. I think it may have been the first time since her death that he had brought himself to open her drawers and cupboards and that my presence was both an opportunity for breaking a taboo and a kind of support. Now that I can wear any of her underclothes or can rip them to shreds just as the fancy takes me, I can bring myself to smile at the memory of that night. Poor Maurice! He hadn’t remembered that those wisps of chiffon, those bright transparencies in nylon and silk would be so pretty, so delicate, so very unsuitable for my twisted body. I saw the look on his face as his hands hovered over them. He couldn’t bear to think of her clothes against my flesh. And then he found what he wanted. It was there at the bottom of the drawer, an old woollen nightdress which had belonged to Alice Kerrison. Dorothy had worn it once at Alice’s insistence when she had been ill with influenza and was sweating with rigor. And it was this nightdress which Maurice handed to me. Would his fate have been any different, I wonder, if he had acted otherwise that night? Probably not. But it pleases me to think that his hands, hesitating over the layers of gaudy nonsense, were choosing between life and death.
“It was shortly after three o’clock when I was awoken by his scream. At first I thought it was a seabird screeching. Then it came again and again. I fumbled for my crutches and went in to him. He was leaning, half-dazed, against the bedroom window and had the lost, disorientated look of a man who has been sleepwalking. I managed to coax him back into bed. It wasn’t difficult. He took my hand like a child. As I drew the sheets up under his chin he suddenly seized my arm and said, ‘Don’t leave me! Don’t go yet! It’s my nightmare. It’s always the same. I dream I’m being buried alive. Stay with me till I’m asleep.’ So I stayed. I sat there with his hand in mine until my fingers were stiff with cold and my whole body ached. There were a great many things which he told me in the darkness about himself, about his great consuming fear, before his fingers relaxed, the muttering ceased and he dropped into peaceful sleep. His jaw had fallen open so that he looked stupid and ugly and vulnerable. I had never seen him asleep before. I was pleased to see his ugliness, his helplessness and I felt a sense of power which was so pleasurable that it almost frightened me. And, sitting there beside him, listening to that quiet breathing, I pondered how I might use this new knowledge to my advantage. I began to plan how I might kill him.
“He said nothing to me next morning about the events of the night. I was never sure whether he had completely forgotten his nightmare and my visit to his room. But I don’t think so. I believe he remembered well enough but put it out of his thoughts. After all, he didn’t have to apologise or explain to me. One doesn’t need to justify one’s weakness either to a servant or an animal. That’s why it is so satisfying, so convenient to have a tame one in the house.
“There was no hurry over the planning, no time limit in which he had to die, and this in itself added to the interest and allowed me to develop a more complicated and sophisticated murder than would have been possible were I working against the clock. I share Maurice’s view here. No one can do his best work in a hurry. Towards the end, of course, there was some urgency when I found, and destroyed, the carbon of the letter to Max Gurney announcing that Maurice was thinking of changing his will. But, by then, my final plans had been ready for over a month.
“I knew from the beginning that I should need an accomplice and who that accomplice should be. The decision to use Digby Seton to destroy firstly his half-brother and then himself was so magnificent in its boldness that at times I was frightened at my own daring. But it wasn’t as foolhardy as it appears. I knew Digby, I knew precisely his weaknesses and his strengths. He is less stupid and far greedier than people realise, more practical but less imaginative, not particularly brave but obstinate and persistent. Above all, he is fundamentally weak and vain. My plan made use of his abilities as well as his defects. I have made very few mistakes in my handling of him and if I underestimated him in some important respects this has proved less catastrophic than I might have feared. He is becoming a liability as well as a nuisance now, of course, but he won’t be worrying me for long. If he had proved less irritating to me and more reliable I might have considered letting him live for a year or so. I should prefer to have avoided death duties on Maurice’s estate. But I have no intention of letting greed trap me into folly.
“In the beginning I did nothing so crude as to present Digby with a plan for killing Maurice. What I suggested to him was no more than a complicated practical joke. He didn’t, of course, believe this for long but then he wasn’t required to. During all the preliminary planning, neither of us mentioned the word murder. He knew and I knew, but neither of us spoke. We conscientiously kept up the fiction that we were engaged in an experiment, not perhaps without some danger but completely without malice, to prove to Maurice that it was possible to transport a man from London to Monksmere secretly and without his knowledge or co-operation. That was to be our alibi. If the plot failed and we were discovered with the body on our hands our story was ready and no one would be able to disprove it. Mr. Seton had wagered us that we couldn’t kidnap him and take him back to Monksmere without being discovered. He wanted to introduce such a scheme into his new book. There would be plenty of witnesses to testify that Maurice loved to experiment, that he was meticulous about detail. And if he should unexpectedly die of a heart attack during the journey, how could we be blamed? Manslaughter? Possibly. But murder, never.
“I think that Digby almost believed the fiction for a time. I did my best to keep it going. There are few men with the courage or the strength of mind to plan murder in cold blood and Digby certainly isn’t one of them. He likes his unpleasant facts gift-wrapped. He prefers to shut his eyes to reality. He has always shut his eyes to the truth about me.
“Once he had convinced himself that it was all a cosy little game with easy rules, no personal risk and a prize of £200,000, he quite enjoyed planning the details. I gave him nothing to do which wasn’t well within his peculiar capabilities and he wasn’t pressed for time. Firstly, he had to find a second-hand motorcycle and long torpedo-shaped sidecar. He had to buy them separately and for cash in a part of London where he wasn’t known. He had to rent or buy a flat with reasonable privacy and access to a garage, and keep his new address secret from Maurice. All this was relatively simple and I was pleased on the whole with the efficient way in which my creature coped. This was almost the most trying time for me. There was so little I personally could do to control events. Once the body had been brought to Monksmere I should be here to organise and direct. Now I had to rely on Digby to carry out instructions. It was Digby alone who must manage the business at the Cortez Club, and I had never been particularly happy about his plan to lure Maurice to Carrington Mews. It seemed to me unnecessarily complicated and dangerous. I could think of safer and easier ways. But Digby insisted on bringing the Cortez Club into the plot. He had this need to involve and impress Luker. So I let him have his way—after all the plot couldn’t incriminate me—and I admit that it worked admirably. Digby confided to Lily Coombs the fiction about the experiment to kidnap his half-brother and told her that Maurice had wagered a couple of thousand that it couldn’t be done. Lily was paid a hundred in cash for her help. All she had to do was to watch out for Maurice, spin him a yarn about the dope traffic and direct him to Carrington Mews for any further information he wanted. If he didn’t take the bait nothing would be lost. I had other plans for luring him to Carrington Mews and one of those could be used. But, of course, he took the bait. It was in the service of his art and he had to go. Digby had been carefully hinting about Lily Coombs and the Cortez Club on each of his visits and Maurice had typed out the inevitable little white reference card for future use. Once Maurice had arrived in London for his regul
ar autumn visit it was as certain that he would show himself one night at the Cortez as it was that he would stay in his usual room at the Cadaver Club, the room which he could reach without having to use that small claustrophobic lift. Digby would even predict to Lily Coombs the night on which he would appear. Oh yes, Maurice took the bait all right! He would have walked into hell in the service of his writing. And that, of course, was what he did.
“Once Maurice appeared at the door of the Carrington Mews cottage Digby’s part was relatively simple. The swift knockout blow, too slight to leave a mark but heavy enough to be effective, wasn’t difficult for a man who had once been a boxing champion. The adaptations to the sidecar to convert it into a travelling coffin had been an easy matter for one who had built Sheldrake single-handed. The sidecar was ready and waiting and there was access to the garage from the house. The slight body, unconscious and breathing stertorously—for Lily had done her part well and Maurice had drunk far more wine than was good for him—was slid into the sidecar and the top nailed in place. There were, of course, air holes in the sides. It was no part of my plan that he should suffocate. Then Digby drank his half-bottle of whisky and set out to provide himself with his alibi. We couldn’t know precisely when it would be required, of course, and this was a slight worry. It would be a pity if Maurice died too soon. That he would die, and die in torment, was certain. It was merely a question of how long that torment would last and when it would begin. But I instructed Digby to get himself arrested as soon as he was a safe distance from home.
“Later next morning, as soon as he was released, Digby set out with the motorcycle and sidecar for Monksmere. He didn’t look at the body. I had instructed him not to open the sidecar but I doubt whether he was tempted. He was still living in the comfortable, imaginary world of the plot which I had created for him. I couldn’t foresee how remarkably he would react when he could no longer pretend to believe in it. But when he set out secretly from Carrington Mews that morning I have no doubt that he felt as innocently excited as a schoolboy whose practical joke is going well. There was no trouble on the journey. The black plastic driving suit, the helmet and goggles were a perfect disguise as I had known they would be. He had a single ticket to Saxmundham from Liverpool Street in his pocket and before leaving the West End he posted to Seton House my description of the Cortez Club. It seems almost unnecessary to say that a typing style can easily be disguised but not the typewriter used. I had typed the passage some weeks earlier on Maurice’s machine wearing a glove on my right hand and with bandaged left fingers. The passage about the mutilated body floating out to sea had been typed by Maurice and was taken by me from his papers. Using it was one of the small but agreeable refinements which I had incorporated into my plan when I learned about Miss Calthrop’s idea for an effective opening for one of Maurice’s books. It was in every sense a gift to me as well as to Maurice. To a large extent it determined the whole shape of the murder plot, and I made use of it brilliantly.