by P. D. James
All he knew had been learned from Jo Staveley in a moment, never repeated, of impulsive confidence. “The poor devil fell flat on his face dead drunk while celebrating Holy Communion. Devout old lady, chalice at her lips, knocked off her knees. Wine spilled. Screams, general consternation. The more innocent of the congregation thought he was dead. I gather the parish and the Bish had been tolerant of his little weakness, but this was a drink too far.”
And yet it had been Jo who in the end had saved him. Boyde had been on the island for over a year and had stayed sober until the appalling night of his relapse. Three days later, he had left Combe. Jo had been living in her London flat at the time on one of her periodic escapes from the boredom of the island and had taken him in, moved with him to a remote country cottage, dried him out and, just before Maycroft himself arrived, brought him back to Combe. It was never spoken of, but Boyde probably owed his life to Jo Staveley.
The phone on his desk rang, startling him. It was nine-twenty-five. He hadn’t realised that he had been sitting as if in a fugue. Jo sounded irritable. “Have you seen Oliver? He isn’t with you by any chance? He was supposed to come to the surgery at nine o’clock to have another blood sample taken. I thought he might decide to give it a miss, but he could have rung to let me know.”
“Could he have overslept or forgotten?”
“I’ve rung Peregrine Cottage. Miranda said she’d heard him going out at about seven-twenty. She was in her bedroom and they didn’t speak. She’s no idea where he was going. He didn’t say anything to her yesterday night about coming to give blood.”
“Is he with Tremlett?”
“Tremlett’s already at Peregrine Cottage. He arrived to catch up with some work soon after eight. He says he hasn’t set eyes on Oliver since yesterday. Of course, Oliver may have left early with the idea of taking a walk before coming to the surgery, but, if so, why hasn’t he arrived? And he’s had no proper breakfast. Miranda says he made himself tea—the pot was still warm when she went into the kitchen—but all he’d eaten was a banana. He may just be playing up for the hell of it, but Miranda’s worried.”
So the foreboding had been justified. Here was more trouble. It was unlikely that Oliver had come to harm. If he had merely decided to cause inconvenience by missing the appointment and had gone for a walk instead, to organise a search party would be an added irritation. And with reason; it was part of the ethos of the island that visitors were left in peace. But he was no longer a young man. He had been gone now without explanation for two hours. Suppose he was lying somewhere struck down by a stroke or a heart attack, how would he, as the man in charge, be able to justify inaction?
He said, “We’d better start looking. Tell Guy, will you. I’ll phone people and get them to meet here. You’d better stay in the surgery and let me know if he turns up.”
He put down the receiver and turned to Boyde. “Oliver’s gone missing. He should’ve been at the surgery at nine o’clock to give blood but didn’t turn up.”
Boyde said, “Miranda will be worried. I can call there and then go on to search the north-east of the island.”
“Do that, will you, Adrian? And if you see him, play down the fuss. If he’s panicked about giving blood, the last thing he’ll want is a search party.”
Five minutes later, a little group, summoned by telephone, had formed in front of the house. Roughtwood, uncooperative as usual, had told Adrian that he was too busy to help, but Dr. Staveley, Dan Padgett and Emily Holcombe were there, Emily Holcombe because she had arrived at the surgery at nine-fifteen for her annual anti-flu injection. Jago had been summoned from his cottage but had not yet appeared. The little party looked to Maycroft for instructions. He pulled himself together and began giving thought to their next step.
And then, as suddenly and capriciously as always on Combe, the mist came up, in parts no more than a delicate translucent veil, in others thickening into a damp, occlusive fog, shrouding the blue of the sea, transforming the massive tower of the house into a looming presence, felt but not seen, and isolating the delicate red cupola at the top of the lighthouse so that it looked like some bizarre object floating in space.
As it thickened, Maycroft said, “There’s no point in going far until this lifts. We’ll try the lighthouse, but that’s all.”
They moved together, Maycroft in front. He heard muted voices behind him, but one by one the figures disappeared into the obliterating mist and the voices faded and then died. Now, with disconcerting suddenness, the lighthouse was before him, the concave shaft stretching into nothingness. Looking up, he felt a second of giddiness, but was afraid to press his hands for support against the glistening surface in case the whole edifice, unreal as a dream, shuddered and dissolved into the mist. The door was ajar, and cautiously he pushed at the heavy oak and reached for the light switch. Without pausing, he climbed the first flight of stairs, through the fuel room, and halfway up the second flight, calling Oliver’s name—at first quietly, as if afraid to break the mist-shrouded silence. Resisting the futility of the half-hearted summons, he paused on the stairs and shouted loudly into the darkness. There was no reply and he could see no lights. Coming down, he stood in the doorway and called into the mist. “He doesn’t seem to be here. Stay where you are.”
There was still no answer. Without thinking and with no clear purpose, he moved round the lighthouse to the seaward side and stood against the sea wall looking upwards, grateful for the strength of the hard granite in the small of his back.
And now, as mysteriously as it had risen, the mist began to lift. Frail and wispy veils drifted across the lighthouse, formed and dissolved. Gradually shapes and colours revealed themselves, the mysterious and intangible became familiar and real. And then he saw. His heart leaped and began a hard pounding which shook his body. He must have cried out, but he heard no sound except the wild shriek of a single gull. And gradually the horror was revealed, at first behind a thin drifting veil of mist and then with absolute clarity. Colours were restored, but brighter than he remembered them—the gleaming walls, the tall red lantern surrounded by white railing, the blue expanse of the sea, the sky as clear as on a summer day.
And high against the whiteness of the lighthouse a hanging body: the blue and red thread of the climbing rope taut to the railings, the neck mottled and stretched like the neck of a bald turkey, the head, grotesquely large, dropped to one side, the hands, palms outward, as if in a parody of benediction. The body was wearing shoes, and yet for one disorientated second he seemed to see the feet drooping side by side in a pathetic nakedness.
It seemed to him that minutes passed but he knew that time had been suspended. And then he heard a high continuous scream. Looking to the right, he saw Jago and Millie. The girl was staring up at Oliver, her scream so continuous that she hardly drew breath.
And now round the curve of the lighthouse came the search party. He could distinguish no words, but the air seemed to vibrate with a confused symphysis of moans, low cries, exclamations, groans and whimpers, a muted keening made terrible by Millie’s screaming and the sudden wild screech of gulls.
BOOK TWO
* * *
Ashes in the Grate
1
* * *
It was shortly before one o’clock, and Rupert Maycroft, Guy Staveley and Emily Holcombe were closeted together for the first time since the discovery of the body. It was at Maycroft’s request that Emily had returned to the house from Atlantic Cottage. Earlier, finding that her attempts to comfort and console Millie had only exacerbated her noisy distress, she had announced that, as there was obviously nothing she could usefully do, she would go home and come back if and when they were wanted. Millie, who at every opportunity had been clinging hysterically to Jago, had been gently prised off and handed over to the more acceptable ministrations of Mrs. Burbridge to be solaced with common-sense advice and hot tea. Gradually a spurious normality had been imposed. There had been orders to be given, telephone calls to be made, staff to b
e reassured. Maycroft knew that he had done those things, and with surprising calmness, but had no longer any clear memory of the words he had spoken or the sequence of events. Jago had returned to the harbour, and Mrs. Plunkett, having work to do, had gone off to prepare lunch and make sandwiches. Joanna Staveley was at Peregrine Cottage, but Guy, grey-faced, had kept to Maycroft’s side, speaking and walking as if he were an automaton, giving no real support.
It seemed to Maycroft that time had become disjointed and that he had experienced the last two hours less as a continuum than as a series of vivid scenes, unlinked, each as instantaneous and indelible as a photograph. Adrian Boyde standing beside the stretcher and looking down at Oliver’s body, then slowly lifting his right hand as if it were weighted and making the sign of the cross. Himself with a silent Guy Staveley walking to Peregrine Cottage to break the news to Miranda and mentally rehearsing the words he would use. They had all seemed inadequate, banal, sentimental or brutally monosyllabic: “hanged,” “rope,” “dead.” Mrs. Plunkett, grim-faced, pouring tea from a huge teapot he couldn’t remember having seen before. Dan Padgett, who had acted sensibly at the scene, suddenly demanding reassurance that it wasn’t his fault, that Mr. Oliver hadn’t killed himself because of the lost blood, and his own irritated response. “Don’t be ridiculous, Padgett. An intelligent man doesn’t kill himself because he has to give blood a second time. It’s hardly a major operation. Nothing you did or failed to do is that important.” Watching Padgett’s face quiver into childish tears as he turned away. Standing beside the bed in the sickroom while Staveley drew the sheet more tightly over Oliver’s body and noticing for the first time with a desperate intensity of gaze the pattern of the William Morris wallpaper. Most vivid of all, as if floodlit against the wall of the lighthouse, the dangling body, the stretched neck and the pathetically drooped naked feet—which his brain told him hadn’t been naked. And this, he realised, was how Oliver’s death would live in memory.
Now, at last, he had a chance to clear his mind and to discuss the arrival of the police with the people who he felt had a right to be consulted. The choice of the sitting room of his private flat had arisen from an unspoken general agreement rather than from a specific decision. He had said, “We have to talk now, before the police arrive. Let’s go somewhere where we won’t be disturbed. I’ll leave Adrian in the office. He’ll cope. We’re not taking any incoming calls.” He had turned to Staveley. “Your cottage or my flat, Guy?”
Staveley had said, “Wouldn’t it be better if we stayed in the house? That way we’ll be here when the police arrive.”
Maycroft asked Boyde to telephone Mrs. Plunkett and ask her to bring soup, sandwiches and coffee up to his flat, and they moved together to the lift. They were borne upwards to the top of the tower in silence.
Once in the sitting room, Maycroft closed the door and they sat down, Emily Holcombe on the two-seater sofa with Staveley beside her. He turned one of the fireside chairs to face them. The movement, which, in this setting, would normally have been familiar and domestic, had become portentous. Even his sitting room, in which the three of them had so often been together, became for one disconcerting moment as unfamiliar and temporary as a hotel lounge. It was furnished entirely by familiar things he had brought from his wife’s drawing room: the comfortable chintz-covered chairs and sofa, the matching curtains, the oval mahogany table with the silver-framed photographs of their wedding and that of their son, the delicate porcelain figures, the obviously amateur watercolours of the Lake District which her grandmother had painted. In bringing them with him he must have hoped to re-create the quiet evenings he and Helen had shared. But now, with a shock, he realised how much he had always disliked every object of this feminine cluttered chintzy domesticity.
Looking across at his colleagues, he felt as graceless as a socially inept host. Guy Staveley was sitting rigidly upright, like a stranger aware of the inconvenience of his visit. Emily, as always, looked comfortably at ease, one arm stretched along the back of the sofa. She was wearing black trousers, boots and a voluminous fawn jumper in fine wool and long amber earrings. Maycroft was surprised that she had taken the trouble to change, but, after all, so had he and Staveley, he supposed from some vestigial notion that Saturday informality was inappropriate in the presence of death.
He said, detecting in his voice a note of forced bonhomie, “What will you have? There’s sherry, whisky, wine, the usual things.”
Why, he wondered, had he said that? They knew perfectly well what was on offer. Emily Holcombe asked for sherry, Staveley—surprisingly—for whisky. Maycroft had no water at hand and muttered apologies as he went to his small kitchen to fetch it. Returning, he poured the drinks and a glass of Merlot for himself. He said, “There was a hot lunch at twelve-thirty in the staff dining room for anyone who was able to eat it, but I thought it better if we had something here. The sandwiches shouldn’t be long.”
Mrs. Plunkett had anticipated their need. Almost immediately there was a knock on the door and Staveley opened it. Mrs. Plunkett came in pushing a trolley containing plates, cups and saucers, jugs and two large thermos flasks and, on the bottom shelf, two plates covered with napkins. Maycroft said quietly, “Thank you,” and they watched as the food and crockery were laid out by Mrs. Plunkett as reverently as if they were part of some religious ceremony. Maycroft almost expected her to drop a curtsey as she reached the door.
Going over to the table, he lifted the damp napkins from the plates. “Mostly ham, apparently, but there’s egg and cress if you don’t feel like meat.”
Emily Holcombe said, “I can’t think of anything less appealing. Why does violent death make one so hungry? Perhaps ‘hungry’ is the wrong word—in need of food but requiring something appetising. Sandwiches don’t meet the need. What’s in the thermoses? Soup, I suppose, or it could be the coffee.” She went over to one of the flasks, twisted the lid and sniffed. “Chicken soup. Unimaginative but nourishing. However, it can wait. What we’ve got to do is to decide how we’re going to play this. We haven’t much time.”
“To play it?” The words It isn’t a game hung on the air unspoken.
As if recognising that her phrase had been ill-judged, Emily said, “To decide our response to Commander Dalgliesh and his team. I’m assuming there will be a team.”
Rupert said, “I’m expecting three. The Metropolitan Police rang to say he’s bringing a detective inspector and a sergeant, that’s all.”
“But it’s a pretty senior invasion, isn’t it? A commander of the Metropolitan Police and a detective inspector. And why not the local force? Presumably they’ve been given some explanation.”
It was a question Rupert had been expecting, and he was prepared. “I think it’s because of the importance of the victim and the insistence of the Trustees on discretion and as much privacy as possible. Whatever Dalgliesh does, it’s unlikely to cause the kind of upheaval or publicity which calling in the local force would inevitably produce.”
Emily said, “But that isn’t quite good enough, Rupert. How did the Metropolitan Police get to know that Oliver was dead? Presumably you telephoned them. Why not phone the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary?”
“Because, Emily, I have instructions to contact a London number if there’s anything worryingly untoward on the island. My understanding is that that’s always been the procedure.”
“Yes, but what number? Whose number?”
“I wasn’t told whose. My instructions were to report and to say nothing further. I’m sorry, Emily, but that’s in line with a long-standing arrangement, and I intend to adhere to it. I have adhered to it.”
“Long-standing? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Probably because no crisis of this magnitude has occurred before. It’s a perfectly reasonable procedure. You know better than most how important some of our guests are. The procedure’s intended to deal with any untoward event effectively, speedily and with the maximum of discretion.”
Emi
ly said, “I suppose Dalgliesh will want to question us together, I mean all of us, visitors and staff.”
Maycroft said, “I’ve really no idea. Both together and then later separately, I imagine. I’ve been in touch with the staff and arranged for them to be available here in the house. That seemed advisable. The library will be the best room to use. The Commander will need to question the guests as well, of course. I felt it wrong to disturb Miranda Oliver, and she and Dennis Tremlett are still in their cottage. She made it clear that she wanted to be alone.”
Emily said, “Except presumably for Tremlett. Incidentally, how did Miranda take the news? I suppose you and Guy broke it to her, you as the person in charge here and Guy to deal with any physical reactions to the shock. Very appropriate.”
Was there, Maycroft thought, a tinge of irony in her voice? He glanced at Staveley but got no response. He said, “Yes, we went together. It was less distressing than I feared. She was shocked, of course, but she didn’t break down. She was perfectly calm—stoical even. Tremlett was the more affected. He pulled himself together but he looked devastated. I thought he was going to faint.”