A Certain Justice

by P. D. James

  It was the first time Dalgliesh had ever heard Miles Kynaston express a hope about the success of a case.

  As soon as Kynaston had left, the SOCOs set to work. Dalgliesh moved away from the body, leaving clear the vital area between it and the kitchen and bathroom. Kate and Piers were still interviewing the tenants. They had started with Miss Kemp but it was forty minutes since Dalgliesh had heard her door finally close and their footsteps descending the stairs. They were taking longer than he had expected and he hoped this meant that the chore was proving productive. He turned his own attention to the details of the flat.

  The most prominent feature was the bureau set against the right-hand wall. It was obviously one Mrs. Carpenter had brought with her to the flat, a solid working desk in polished oak, disproportionate to the size of the room. It looked to be the only piece of furniture which wasn’t new. The two-seater sofa against the wall, the round, drop-side table with four matching chairs, the single armchair facing the television set installed between the windows, all looked as unused as if they had just been delivered. They were modern, conventional and unexceptional in design, the kind of furniture one would expect in a three-star hotel. There were no pictures, no photographs, no ornaments. It was the room of a woman who had shed her past, a room which provided the essentials necessary for physical comfort and left the spirit free to inhabit its own unencumbered space. The small bookcase to the right of the desk held only modern editions of the major poets and classical novelists: a personal library, carefully selected to provide solid literary sustenance when required.

  Dalgliesh moved into her bedroom. It was little more than nine feet square with a single high window. Here spare comfort had given place to austerity: a single bed covered with a light counterpane, an oak bedside cabinet with a shelf and a lamp, an upright chair, a fitted wardrobe. A plain brown handbag was on the floor beside the bed. Inside, it was as well ordered as Venetia Aldridge’s had been, with nothing superfluous. He was surprised, however, to find that she had as much as £250 in crisp ten- and twenty-pound notes in her wallet. A dressing-gown in fine patterned wool hung from the single hook on the door. There was no dressing-table. She probably brushed her hair and made up in front of a mirror in the bathroom, but the bathroom was out of bounds until Ferris had finished with it. Except for the carpeted floor, the room could have been a nun’s cell; he almost felt the lack of a crucifix above the bed.

  He returned to the desk and, opening the lid, seated himself for a search, although with no clear idea of what he was looking for. This rummaging among the detritus of a dead life was for him a necessary part of the investigation. A victim died because of who she was, where she was, what she had done, what she knew. The clues to a murder lay always in the clues to a life. But it sometimes seemed to him that his search was a presumptuous violation of a privacy which the victim could no longer protect, and that his latex-gloved hands moved among her belongings as if merely by touching them he could hope to reach out to the core of her personality.

  A much smaller desk would have sufficed for her leavings. Four of the six cubbyholes were bare. The last two held an envelope of bills awaiting payment, and a larger, buff one with the words “bills paid” lettered on it in careful script. It was apparent that she settled her bills promptly and kept the records only for six months. There were no personal letters. The similarity to Venetia Aldridge’s desk, Venetia Aldridge’s leavings, was almost uncanny.

  Under the row of cubbyholes were two slim drawers. The right-hand one contained black plastic-covered folders stamped with the name of her bank, one with the statements of her current account, the slimmer one records of an instant-access deposit account showing a balance of £146,000. The latter showed the accumulation of comparatively low interest earned on the account, but there had been no further deposits and no withdrawals until 9 September of this year, when £50,000 had been transferred to her current account. He referred back to the statements for this account and saw that the sum had been credited and that, two days later, £10,000 had been withdrawn in cash.

  He opened next the cupboard on the left of the kneehole, and then three main drawers on the right. The cupboard was empty. In the top drawer were only three telephone directories. The drawer beneath held a box of plain writing-paper and an assortment of envelopes. Only in the third and bottom drawer did he discover anything of interest.

  Dalgliesh drew out a box-file and discovered, neatly arranged in chronological order, the explanation of the £146,000 in the deposit account. In December 1993 Janet Carpenter had sold the house in Hereford and bought the London flat; the history of the transactions was set out in letters from the estate agents and her solicitor, in surveyor’s reports and estimates from a removal firm. A cash offer for the Hereford house, nearly £5,000 below the original asking price, had been quickly accepted. Her furniture, pictures and ornaments had been sold, not stored. Less valuable items had been given to the Salvation Army and the house finally cleared. There was a copy of a letter from her to her solicitor instructing him to ask the new owner to forward any post to him for onward transmission. No one was to be given her London address. She had cut herself free from her old life with ruthless efficiency and the minimum of fuss, as if the death of her granddaughter and of her daughter-in-law had severed more than their own lives.

  But something other than the oak bureau had been brought with her. In the bottom drawer was a bulky manila envelope, unmarked and with the flap stuck down. Lacking a paper-knife, Dalgliesh insinuated his thumb under the flap and felt an irrational second of mixed guilt and irritation as the paper split into a jagged edge. Inside there was a letter on a single sheet of folded paper, a bundle of photographs and another bundle of birthday and Christmas cards held together with a rubber band. All the photographs were of the dead granddaughter, some formally posed, others amateur family snaps covering her life from babyhood in the arms of her mother until her twelfth birthday party. The young face, bright-eyed, confident, smiled obediently into the lens in a bright panorama of childish rites of passage: the first day at school, crisply uniformed, her smile a mixture of eagerness and apprehension; as bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding, her dark hair crowned with a coronet of roses; a First Communion photograph, serious-eyed under the white veil. The birthday and Christmas cards were a complete set of those she had sent to her grandmother from the age of four until her death, the messages carefully written and obviously in her own words, a mixture of childish concerns, small triumphs at school, messages of love.

  Lastly Dalgliesh took up the letter. It was handwritten. There was no address and no date.

  Dearest Janet,

  Please forgive me. I know what I’m doing is selfish. I know that I ought not to leave you. Ralph is dead and now Emily, and you only have me. But I wouldn’t be any use to you. I know you’re suffering too, but I can’t help. I haven’t even any love left to give, nothing to feel but pain. I long for the night when I can take my pills and sometimes I sleep. Sleep is like a little death, but there are the dreams too, and I hear her calling for me and I know I can’t reach her, I’ll never be able to reach her. And I always wake up, although I pray not to, and the pain comes down like a great black weight. I know it will never grow less, and I can’t live with it any more. I could remember Ralph with love, even when remembering hurt most, because I was there with him when he died and I held his hand and he knew that I loved him, and we had known what it was to be happy. But I can’t think of Emily’s death without guilt and agony. I can’t live with that imagined horror, with that pain, for the rest of my life. Forgive me. Forgive me and try to understand. I couldn’t have had a better mother-in-law. Emily loved you very much.

  Dalgliesh didn’t know how long he sat as if in a trance, staring at the photographs laid out before him. Then he was aware of Piers at his shoulder and heard his voice.

  “Kate is having a last word with Miss Kemp in case she may be more forthcoming to another female without me. Not that she’s got anything more
to tell. And the mortuary van’s arrived. Is it all right for them to take her away?”

  Dalgliesh didn’t answer for the moment, but handed Piers the letter. Then he said: “The body? Oh yes, they can take her away.”

  The room was suddenly full of large masculine forms, subdued masculine voices. Piers nodded to them and then watched as the corpse, head and hands bagged with plastic, was zipped into a body bag. Piers and Dalgliesh could hear receding steps as the men manoeuvred their burden round the bend in the stairs, and a sudden laugh, like a bark, quickly suppressed. And now there was nothing left as witness to the horror but the bloodstained carpet under the spread of protective sheeting, the splattered ceiling and walls. Ferris and his colleague were still in the bathroom, their presence there sensed rather than heard. Dalgliesh and Piers were alone.

  Piers read the letter, then handed it back. He said: “Will you show this to Kate, sir?”

  “Probably not.”

  There was a pause, then Piers said, his voice carefully neutral: “Did you show it to me because I’m the less sensitive or because you think I’m the one who needs a lesson?”

  “A lesson in what, Piers?”

  “I suppose in what murder can do to the innocent.”

  It was perilously close to questioning a superior’s action, and if he expected a direct answer he didn’t get it.

  Dalgliesh said: “If you haven’t learned that by now, would you ever learn it? This wasn’t meant for either of our eyes.”

  He put the letter back in the envelope and began gathering up the photographs and cards. He said: “She’s right, of course, the only immortality for the dead is in our remembrance of them. If that is tainted with horror and evil, then they’re dead indeed. The bank statements and a file on her property sale and purchase are of more immediate interest.”

  He got up and left Piers studying them, and went to talk to Ferris. His search was over and, from the look on his face, had been disappointing. There were no discernible bloodstains carried from the body to the kitchen sink or the bathroom, no heavy footprints on the close pile of the carpet, no stain of oil, grease or dirt from alien shoes. Had the killer brought with him a cloth with which to wipe his shoes while he waited silently in the shadow of the landing? Had he been that careful?

  As Ferris and his fellow SOCO with their meagre haul made ready to leave, Kate appeared and closed the door behind them. The three of them were alone.

  9

  Before Kate and Piers reported on their inquiries, Dalgliesh said: “See if there’s any coffee in the kitchen, will you, Piers?”

  There were coffee beans, a grinder and a percolator. Piers coped while Dalgliesh put Kate in the picture. The coffee when it came was black and strong, brought in on a tray in green Denby mugs.

  Piers said: “I don’t think she’d begrudge us her coffee. There isn’t any whisky. If there had been I must say I’d have been tempted.”

  Dalgliesh sat in the one easy chair, Piers and Kate on the sofa. They drew up a small table and sat, relaxed and companionable, as if they had taken over the flat. After the constant comings and goings it seemed preternaturally quiet. Uniformed police were keeping a discreet watch on the door. Any tenants arriving would be checked in and questioned by Sergeant Robbins and the detective constable. But little activity could be expected until people began coming home from work, and the news of the murder still hadn’t spread beyond Coulston Court. They had a sense of inhabiting a short hiatus in time between bouts of feverish activity, during which it was possible to take stock.

  Dalgliesh said: “So what have we got so far?”

  Kate was swallowing a mouthful of coffee and it was Piers who got in first. He had obviously decided to give a résumé of the case.

  “Mrs. Janet Carpenter, a widow. Lives with her daughter-in-law and granddaughter just outside Hereford. Three years ago the child is raped and murdered. The murderer, Dermot Beale, is convicted and is now serving a life sentence. He had previously been tried in 1992 for an almost identical rape and murder. The evidence was less compelling and he was acquitted. The defending counsel was Venetia Aldridge. Emily’s mother, distraught with grief, kills herself. After her suicide Janet Carpenter sells her house, moves anonymously to London, cuts herself free from her old life.

  “She sets out to gain access to Venetia Aldridge’s Chambers by working as a cleaner. It isn’t difficult. She’s respectable, obviously competent, can provide references. She has to start with another set of Chambers but she asks for a transfer and gets it. She also offers to do occasional and temporary cleaning in Miss Aldridge’s house and buys a flat within two stations’ travelling distance by tube of where Miss Aldridge lives. She only works three nights a week. That in itself is odd; if you’re going to look to housework for an income, you can hardly earn much in three nights. But three nights are sufficient for her needs. All she wants is access to Chambers.

  “On Wednesday, 9th October, Venetia Aldridge is murdered. Stabbed in the heart with an ornamental dagger which she used as a paper-knife. A full-bottomed wig is stuck on her head and blood stored in a basement refrigerator poured over the wig. Mrs. Carpenter cleaned Miss Aldridge’s room. She knew about the dagger. She knew that the blood was stored in Mr. Ulrick’s room. She knew where the full-bottomed wig was kept. She had the means, motive and opportunity. She has to be chief suspect still for the Aldridge killing.”

  At this point Kate broke in: “But now we’ve got her murder. That alters everything. Whoever killed her wrote those letters in her blood. It was a definite attempt to pin the Aldridge murder on her. Why bother to do that if she’s already the prime suspect? And she was a prime suspect, I’ll give you that, but it isn’t as straightforward as you make out. If she took the job in Chambers to give her the opportunity to kill Aldridge, why wait for over two years? There must have been other nights when Mrs. Watson wasn’t with her. Anyway, she had a key to Chambers. She could have got in any time. And why choose a method which she must have known would make her chief suspect? It was hardly certain. If Mrs. Carpenter did it, she acted like a fool, and I don’t think that she was a fool. There’s another thing. I was the first to interview her after the murder. I could swear she was surprised. She was more than surprised, she was deeply shocked.”

  Piers said: “That’s not evidence. I’m constantly amazed at the acting ability of the general public. You’ve seen it often enough, Kate. There they are on television, eyes full of tears, voice broken, pleading for the return of the loved one, when they know bloody well that the loved one’s under the floorboards and they put her there. Anyway, what about the money? How do you explain the withdrawal of that ten thousand pounds?”

  “The obvious explanation would be blackmail, but she drew it out before the murder, not after, so that’s out. Or she could have wanted to pay someone to do the murder, but that seems unlikely. Where would a woman like that look for a contract killer? Anyway, the Aldridge murder wasn’t a contract job. Contract killers use guns and a get-away car. That murder was an inside job. And you can’t get over the fact that this second murder is a deliberate attempt to pin the first onto Janet Carpenter. If she hadn’t been left-handed it might have succeeded.”

  Now that the body had been taken away and the experts had done their jobs and departed, the flat had become less claustrophobic, but the dead, polluted air was still oppressive, as if the living had sucked it dry. Dalgliesh went over to the window and pushed up the bottom pane. The morning breeze came in, cleansing, coldly autumnal. He almost believed that he could smell the grass and the trees. They sat together and felt no sense of intrusion, perhaps because there was so little in that spare, underfurnished space to bring the dead alive.

  He asked: “Any joy from the tenants?”

  Piers left it to Kate. “Not a great deal, sir. Miss Kemp can’t tell us much more than she has already. She didn’t hear anything last evening, but, then, she’s very deaf. She says the last time she saw Mrs. Carpenter was yesterday afternoon, when she
knocked on the door to tell Miss Kemp that she was going away and would leave her the pot plants and her keys. She says she didn’t know Mrs. Carpenter well. She’s never been in this flat, for example, nor Mrs. C. in hers. But they met on the stairs occasionally and chatted briefly. That’s how Mrs. Carpenter knew her neighbour liked pot plants. And they keep each other’s spare keys when they’re away from home. That’s been agreed by the Residents’ Association. Apparently last year a flat was left with a tap running and no one could get in to stop the flood. Miss Kemp only goes out when her nephew occasionally calls to take her to his home or for a drive. She leaves her spare keys with Mrs. Carpenter all the time. She walks about twice a week to the corner shop and she’s afraid that someone will snatch her purse. It’s a comfort to know that Mrs. C. has her spares. She’d like them back, please, if Mrs. C. is in hospital. She seems more concerned about the keys than about the accident. She didn’t even ask what had happened or how it had happened. I think she assumes that Mrs. C. fell over. Falling over and getting mugged are her two main fears. I think she regards one or both of them as more or less inevitable.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “Did she know when Mrs. Carpenter put her spare keys through the door?”

  “They weren’t there when she checked on the bolt last evening but that was early, before she settled down to her evening viewing at six. She found them on the mat this morning, when she went to check whether the post had arrived. Mrs. Carpenter usually collected her post for her and put it through her letter-box. The hall’s carpeted, so she wouldn’t have heard the keys fall.”

  “Did Mrs. C. usually just drop them through the letter-box without a note?”

  “No she didn’t. They were usually in a strong envelope, stuck down and with Mrs. Carpenter’s name, flat number and the date she expected to be back. If the keys were wanted in a hurry it would be safer to have them labelled.”