The Murder Room

by P. D. James

  She parked as usual behind the laurel bushes, thinking again how convenient a shield it was for anyone wanting to park unseen. A row of cars was already neatly aligned. She recognized Muriel Godby’s Fiesta and Caroline Dupayne’s Mercedes. The other car was a people carrier. It must, she thought, have brought the Canadians. Perhaps they had hired it for their English tour. It was apparent that Benton-Smith had not yet arrived.

  Despite the blaze of light, the door was locked and she had to ring. It was opened by Muriel Godby who greeted her with unsmiling formality which suggested that, although this particular visitor was neither distinguished nor welcome, it was prudent to show her proper respect. She said, “Mr. Ackroyd and his party have arrived and are having coffee in Mr. Calder-Hale’s office. There’s a cup for you, Inspector, if you want it.”

  “Right, I’ll go up. Sergeant Benton-Smith should be arriving soon. Ask him to join us, will you please?”

  The door to Calder-Hale’s office was shut but she could hear subdued voices. Knocking and entering, she saw two couples and Ackroyd seated on an assortment of chairs, most of them obviously brought in from one of the other rooms. Calder-Hale himself was perched on the side of his desk and Caroline Dupayne was seated in his swivel chair. They were all holding coffee cups. The men rose as Kate entered.

  Ackroyd made the introductions. Professor Ballantyne and Mrs. Ballantyne, Professor McIntyre and Dr. McIntyre. All four were from universities in Toronto and were particularly interested in English social history between the wars. Ackroyd added, speaking directly to Kate, “I’ve explained about Dr. Dupayne’s tragic death and that the museum is closed to the public at present while the police carry out an investigation. Well, shall we get started? That is, unless you’d like some coffee, Inspector.”

  This casual reference to the tragedy was received without comment. Kate said she didn’t need coffee; it had hardly been an invitation she was expected to accept. The four visitors seemed to take her presence for granted. If they were wondering why, as strangers to the museum, they needed to be accompanied by a senior police officer on what was after all a private visit, they were too well mannered to comment. Mrs. Ballantyne, pleasant-faced and elderly, seemed not to realize that Kate was a police officer and even asked her as they left the office whether she was a regular visitor to the museum.

  Calder-Hale said, “I suggest that we start on the ground floor with the History Room, and then the Sports and Entertainment Gallery, before coming up to the gallery floor and the Murder Room. We’ll leave the library to the last. I’ll leave Conrad to describe the exhibits in the Murder Room. That’s more in his line than mine.”

  They were interrupted at this point by the sound of running feet on the stairs and Benton-Smith appeared. Kate introduced him somewhat perfunctorily and the little group set out on its tour. She was irritated by his belated arrival but, glancing at her watch, realized that she couldn’t later complain. He had in fact arrived precisely on time.

  They descended to the History Room. Here one wall with a range of display cabinets and shelves dealt with the main events of British history from November 1918 to July 1939. Opposite a similar collage showed what was happening in the wider world. The photographs were of remarkable quality and some, Kate guessed, were valuable and rare. The slowly moving group contemplated the arrival of world statesmen at the Peace Conference, the signing of the Versailles Treaty, the starvation and destitution of Germany compared with the celebrations of the victorious Allies. A procession of dethroned kings passed before them, their ordinary faces dignified—and sometimes made ridiculous—by lavishly decorated uniforms and ludicrous headgear. The new men of power favoured a more proletarian and utilitarian uniform; their jackboots were made to wade through blood. Many of the political pictures meant little to Kate, but she saw that Benton-Smith was engaging in an intense discussion with one of the Canadian professors about the significance for organized labour of the General Strike of May 1926. Then she remembered that Piers had told her that Benton-Smith had a degree in history. Well he would have. Sometimes Kate reflected wryly that she would soon be the only person under thirty-five without a degree. Perhaps that might in time confer its own prestige. The visitors seemed to take it for granted that she and Benton-Smith were as interested in the exhibits as were they and had as much right to express an opinion. Following them round, she told herself ironically that an investigation of murder was turning into something of a social occasion.

  She followed the party into the gallery concerned with sports and entertainment. Here were the women tennis players in their bandeaux and encumbering long skirts, the men in their pressed white flannels; posters of hikers with their rucksacks and shorts, striding into an idealized English countryside; the Women’s League of Health and Beauty in black satin knickers and white blouses, performing their mass rhythmic exercises. There were original railway posters of blue hills and yellow sands, bob-haired children flourishing buckets and spades, the parents in their discreet bathing costumes all apparently oblivious to the distant clangour of a Germany arming for war. And here, too, was the ever-present, unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the underprivileged, emphasized by the clever grouping of the photographs, parents and friends at the 1928 Eton–Harrow cricket match compared with the bleak expressionless faces of ill-fed children photographed at their annual Sunday school outing.

  And now they moved upstairs and into the Murder Room. Although the lights were already on, the darkness of the day had intensified and there was a disagreeable mustiness about the air. Caroline Dupayne, who had been an almost silent member of the party, spoke for the first time. “It smells stale in here. Can’t we open a window, James? Let in some cold air on this stuffiness.”

  Calder-Hale went to a window and, after a slight struggle, opened it about six inches at the top.

  Ackroyd now took over. What an extraordinary little man he was, Kate thought, with his plump, carefully tailored body, restless with enthusiasm, his face as innocently excited as a child’s above that ridiculous spotted bow-tie. AD had told the team about his first visit to the Dupayne. Always over-busy, he had given up valuable time to drive Ackroyd to the museum. She wondered, not for the first time, at the singularity of male friendship founded apparently on no bedrock of personality, no shared view of the world, based often on a single common interest or mutual experience, uncritical, undemonstrative, undemanding. What on earth did AD and Conrad Ackroyd have in common? But Ackroyd was clearly enjoying himself. Certainly his knowledge of the murder cases displayed was exceptional and he spoke without notes. He dealt at some length with the Wallace case and the visitors dutifully examined the notice from the Central Chess Club showing that Wallace was due to play on the evening before the murder, and gazed in respectful silence at Wallace’s chess set displayed under glass.

  Ackroyd said, “This iron bar in the display cabinet isn’t the weapon; a weapon was never found. But a similar bar used to scrape ashes from beneath the grate was missing from the house. These two blown-up police photographs of the body taken within minutes of each other are interesting. In the first you can see Wallace’s crumpled mackintosh, heavily bloodstained, tucked against the victim’s right shoulder. In the second photograph it has been pulled away.”

  Mrs. Ballantyne gazed at the photographs with a mixture of distaste and pity. Her husband and Professor McIntyre conferred together on the furniture and pictures in the cluttered sitting-room, that seldom-used sanctum of upper-working-class respectability which, as social historians, they obviously found more fascinating than blood and smashed brains.

  Ackroyd concluded, “It was a unique case in three ways, the Court of Appeal quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was ‘unsafe having regard to the evidence,’ in fact saying that the jury had been wrong. This must have been galling for Lord Chief Justice Hewart who heard the appeal and whose philosophy was that the British jury system was virtually infallible. Secondly, Wallace’s trade union finance
d the appeal, but only after calling the people concerned to the London office and in effect holding a mini trial. Thirdly, it was the only case for which the Church of England authorized a special prayer that the Appeal Court should be guided to a right decision. It’s rather a splendid prayer—the Church knew how to write liturgy in those days—and you can see it printed in the order of service in the display case. I particularly like that last sentence. ‘And you shall pray for the learned counsels of our Sovereign Lord the King, that they may be faithful to the Christian injunction of the apostle Paul. Judge nothing until God brings to light hidden things of darkness and makes manifest the counsels of the heart.’ The Prosecuting Counsel, Edward Hemmerde, was furious about the prayer and probably more furious when it was effective.”

  Professor Ballantyne, the elder of the two male visitors, said, “The counsels of the heart.” He took out a notebook and the group waited patiently while, peering at the printed service, he wrote down the last sentence of the prayer.

  Ackroyd had less to say about the Rouse case, concentrating on the technical evidence about the possible cause of the fire and saying nothing about Rouse’s explanation of a bonfire. Kate wondered whether this was prudence or sensitivity. She hadn’t expected Ackroyd to mention the similarity with the Dupayne murder and he managed to avoid it with some skill. Kate knew that no one outside those most concerned had been told of the mysterious motorist or of how his words to Tally Clutton had so uncannily echoed those of Rouse. She glanced at Caroline Dupayne and James Calder-Hale during Ackroyd’s careful recital; neither betrayed a flicker of particular interest.

  They moved on to the Brighton Trunk Murder. It was a case less interesting to Ackroyd and one which it was more difficult to justify as typical of its age. He concentrated on the trunk.

  “This was precisely the kind of tin trunk used by the poor when they travelled. It would have held virtually everything the prostitute Violette Kaye owned, and in the end it was her coffin. Her lover, Tony Mancini, was tried at Lewes Assize Court in December 1934 and acquitted after a brilliant defence by Mr. Norman Birkett. It was one of the few cases where the forensic pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, had his evidence successfully challenged. The case is an example of what is important in a trial for murder: the quality and reputation of the Defence Counsel. Norman Birkett—later Lord Birkett of Ulverston—had a remarkably beautiful and persuasive voice, a most potent weapon. Mancini owed his life to Norman Birkett and we trust that he was appropriately grateful. Before he died, Mancini confessed that he had killed Violette Kaye. Whether he intended murder is another matter.”

  The little group surveyed the trunk, Kate thought, more from politeness than genuine interest. The sourness of the air seemed to have intensified. She wished that the party could move on. The Murder Room, and indeed the whole museum, had oppressed her from the moment of her first entry. There was something alien to her spirit about its careful reconstruction of the past. For years she had tried to throw off her own history and she resented and was half afraid of the clarity and the awful inevitability with which it was now returning month by month. The past was dead, finished with, unalterable. Nothing about it could be compensated for and surely nothing fully understood. These sepia photographs which surrounded her had no more life than the paper on which they were printed. Those long-dead men and women had suffered and caused suffering and were gone. What extraordinary impulse had led the founder of the Dupayne to display them with so much care? Surely they had no more relevance to their age than had those photographs of old cars, the clothes, the kitchens, the artefacts of the past. Some of these people were buried in quicklime and some in churchyards, but they might just as well have been dumped together in a common grave for all that mattered now. She thought, How can I live safely except in this present moment, the moment which, even as I measure it, becomes the past? The uneasy conviction she had felt when leaving Mrs. Faraday’s house returned. She couldn’t safely confront those early years or nullify their power by being a traitor to her past.

  They were about to move on when the door opened and Muriel Godby appeared. Caroline Dupayne was standing close to the trunk and Muriel, a little flushed, moved up beside her. Ackroyd, about to introduce the next case, paused and they waited.

  The deliberate silence and the circle of faces turned towards her disconcerted Muriel. She had obviously hoped to deliver her message discreetly. She said, “Lady Swathling is on the telephone for you, Miss Dupayne. I told her you were engaged.”

  “Then tell her I’m still engaged. I’ll ring her back in half an hour.”

  “She says it’s urgent, Miss Dupayne.”

  “Oh very well, I’ll come.”

  She turned to go, Muriel Godby at her side, and the group again turned their attention to Conrad Ackroyd. And at that moment it happened. A mobile phone began ringing, shattering the silence, as startling and ominous as a fire alarm. There was no doubt from where it came. All their eyes turned to the trunk. For Kate the few seconds before anyone moved or spoke seemed to stretch into minutes, a suspension of time in which she saw the group frozen into a tableau, every limb as fixed as if they were dummies. The tinny ringing continued.

  Then Calder-Hale spoke, his voice deliberately light. “Someone seems to be playing tricks. Juvenile but surprisingly effective.”

  It was Muriel Godby who acted. Scarlet-faced, she burst out with “Stupid, stupid!” and, before anyone could move, dashed to the trunk, knelt and lifted the lid.

  The stench rose into the room, overpowering as a gas. Kate, at the back of the group, had only a glimpse of a hunched torso and a spread of yellow hair before Muriel’s hands fell from the lid and it dropped back with a low clang. Her legs were shaking, her feet scrabbling at the floor as if she were trying to rise, but the strength had gone out of her body. She lay across the trunk making stifled noises, shuddering groans and pitiful squeals like a distressed puppy. The ringing had stopped. Kate heard her muttering, “Oh no! Oh no!” For a few seconds she too was rooted. Then quietly she came forward to take command and do her job.

  She turned to the group, her voice studiously calm, and said, “Stand back please.” Moving to the trunk she put her arms round Muriel’s waist and tried to lift her. She herself was strong-limbed, but the woman was heavily built and a dead weight. Benton-Smith came to help and together they got Muriel to her feet and half carried her to one of the armchairs.

  Kate turned to Caroline Dupayne. “Is Mrs. Clutton in her cottage?”

  “I suppose so. She may be. I really don’t know.”

  “Then take Miss Godby to the ground-floor office here and look after her, will you? Someone will be with you as soon as possible.”

  She turned to Benton-Smith. “Get the key from Miss Dupayne and check that the front door is locked. See that it remains locked. No one is to leave at present. Then ring Commander Dalgliesh and come back here.”

  Calder-Hale had been silent. He was standing a little apart, his eyes watchful. Turning to him, Kate said, “Will you and Mr. Ackroyd take your group back to your study, please? We’ll be needing their names and their addresses in this country, but after that they’ll be free to leave.”

  The little group of visitors stood in stunned bewilderment. Scanning their faces, it seemed to Kate that only one of them, the elderly Professor Ballantyne, who had been standing with his wife nearest the trunk, had actually glimpsed the body. His skin looked like grey parchment and, putting out his arm, he drew his wife to him.

  Mrs. Ballantyne said nervously, “What is it? Was there an animal trapped in there? Is it a dead cat?”

  Her husband said, “Come along, dear,” and they joined the small group moving towards the door.

  Muriel Godby was calm now. She got to her feet and said with some dignity, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It was the shock. And it was so horrible. I know it’s stupid, but for a second I thought it was Violette Kaye.” She looked piteously at Caroline Dupayne. “Forgive me, forgive me. It was the shock.”r />
  Ignoring her, Caroline Dupayne hesitated, then moved towards the trunk, but Kate barred the way. She said again, more firmly, “Please take Miss Godby to the office. I suggest you make a hot drink, tea or coffee. We’re phoning Commander Dalgliesh and he’ll join you as soon as he can. It may be some time.”

  There were a few seconds of silence in which Kate half-expected that Caroline would protest. Instead she merely nodded and turned to Benton-Smith. “The front door keys are in the key cupboard. I’ll let you have them if you come down with us.”

  Kate was alone. The silence was absolute. She had kept on her jacket and now felt in the pocket for her gloves, then remembered that they were in the compartment of the car. But she did have a large clean handkerchief. There was no hurry, AD would be here soon with their murder bags, but she needed at least to open the trunk. But not at this moment. It might be important to have a witness; she would do nothing until Benton-Smith returned. She stood motionless, looking down at the trunk. Benton-Smith could only have been absent for a couple of minutes but they stretched into a limbo of waiting in which nothing in the room seemed real except that battered receptacle of horror.

  And now at last he was at her side. He said, “Miss Dupayne wasn’t too happy about being told where she was to wait. The front door was already locked and I’ve got the keys. What about the visitors, ma’am? Is there any point in holding them?”

  “No. The sooner they’re off the premises the better. Go to Calder-Hale’s office, will you, take their names and addresses and say something reassuring—if you can think of anything. Don’t admit that we’ve found a body, although I don’t imagine they’re in much doubt.”

  Benton-Smith said, “Should I make sure there’s nothing useful they can tell us, nothing they’ve noticed?”