by P. D. James
Kate said, “No suggestions are being made, Miss Holcombe. We’re asking, as we have to, where you were between those hours, and at present this is a suspicious death. No one has mentioned murder.”
“I’m sure you’re being very careful not to, but no one on this island is a fool. A commander, a detective inspector and a detective sergeant of the Metropolitan Police are unlikely to be arriving by helicopter to investigate either a suicide or an accidental death. All right, you needn’t provide explanations; I know I’m not going to get them. If any more information is required, I prefer to give it to Commander Dalgliesh. There’s only a limited number of suspects on the island, so he can hardly claim he’s overworked.”
Kate said, “He asked me to explain that he would be seeing you later.”
“Please give him my compliments. If he feels I can help him further, perhaps he would care to telephone and fix a time convenient to us both. Monday morning will not be possible for me, as I have a dentist appointment in Newquay. In the meantime, Roughtwood will no doubt be happy to show you his bicycle. And now, Inspector, I would be grateful to have my sitting room to myself.”
The machine was in a small stone annexe to Roughtwood’s cottage. It must previously have been a wash-house, and the copper, encased in its stone surround, was still in place. One wall was hung with tools and garden implements—more, Kate thought, than a small strip of cultivated soil in front of both cottages would warrant. Everything was very clean and meticulously arranged. The bike, an old and heavy Raleigh with a large wicker basket fitted on the front, was leaning against another wall. The front tyre was flat.
Benton-Smith knelt to examine the tyre. He said, “There’s a sharp tear, ma’am, about half an inch long.”
Kate crouched beside him. It was hard to believe that this single precise slash could have been made by a stone, a nail or anything other than a knife, but she didn’t comment. She said to Roughtwood, “When did this happen?”
“Two days ago, Inspector, when I was cycling to the house to collect some cleaning materials.”
“Did you see what caused it?”
“There was nothing stuck in the tyre. I reckoned I had struck a sharp piece of flint.”
Kate wondered for a moment whether it would be advisable to take the bike away now as a possible exhibit, but decided against it. It was hardly likely to disappear, and at this stage of the investigation Roughtwood—or indeed anyone else—was not a prime suspect. She could imagine the reaction on the island if Benton-Smith wheeled the machine away. They’ve taken poor Roughtwood’s old bike now. God knows what they’ll be up to next. Briefly she thanked Roughtwood for his cooperation, and they left.
They walked for some minutes in silence, then Kate said, “I didn’t know you were an expert at Scrabble. You should have put it on your CV. Are there any other talents you haven’t told us about?”
His voice was expressionless. “I can’t immediately think of any, ma’am. I used to play Scrabble as a boy with my grandmother. The English one.”
“Oh well, it’s as well you couldn’t resist showing off. At least it put an end to the game. She didn’t take us seriously and neither did he, and they didn’t mind showing it. It was play-acting. Still, we got the information we were asked to get, where they were from seven-thirty this morning. Mr. Dalgliesh will get anything else that he needs. They won’t play-act with him. What did you think of her?”
“As a suspect?”
“Why else were we there? It wasn’t a social visit.”
So they were to discuss the case as colleagues. There was a pause, then Benton said, “I think if she decided to murder someone she would be pretty ruthless about it. And I don’t think she would be much troubled afterwards by guilt. But where’s the motive?”
“According to Miranda Oliver, her father was dead set on getting Miss Holcombe out of her cottage.”
“There’s no reason to suppose he’d succeed. She’s a Holcombe, the Trustees would be on her side. And isn’t she eighty? She could probably manage the lighthouse stairs all right and she seemed pretty tough for her age, but I can’t see her having the strength to heave Oliver’s body over that railing or carrying it up from the floor beneath. I’m assuming that’s where he died. Whoever lured him to the lighthouse wouldn’t plan to kill him on the lantern level. There would always be a risk of being seen.”
Kate said, “Unlikely on the seaward side. And it would be easier than lugging a dead weight up those last stairs and onto the platform. She could have suggested that they talk in the open air. And he wasn’t a big man. I think she could have pushed him over the railings. But it would have meant lifting him. It wouldn’t have been easy.”
Benton-Smith said, “Do you think Roughtwood would kill for her, or help her?”
“How do I know, Sergeant? There’s little point in speculating about motive or collusion before we’ve checked alibis, if any, and know if anyone is definitely in the clear. What we need are facts. Assuming he used a bike, what was the risk of being seen?”
“Not much, ma’am, not while he was in the lane anyway. It’s sunken enough to keep him hidden if he kept his head well down. And that rip in the tyre could have been made with a knife. Look at this path: rough grass, sandy earth, smooth pebbles except for one or two. Or he could have cycled along the lower cliff. That way he’d probably be guaranteed to get a puncture. A sharp flint would make a gash very like a knife. But I’d guess the slit was deliberate, however it was made.”
“That needn’t point to guilt necessarily. He might have done it with the idea of putting himself in the clear, hoping we’d leave them both alone.”
Benton-Smith said, “Then why not do it more convincingly?”
“No time. The idea might only have occurred to him a short time before our arrival. There were tools and a pair of shears in the shed. Anything sharp would have done.”
“But, ma’am, if the murder and the alibi were premeditated, wouldn’t he have disabled the bike earlier?”
“There is that, Sergeant.”
They walked the rest of the way back to the house without speaking, but Kate felt that the silence was companionable, that one small section of the palisade had been cautiously opened up.
11
* * *
It was interesting, Dalgliesh thought, how different, at least externally, were the cottages he had seen. It was as if the architect, given a simple plan, had been anxious to avoid any impression of institutional conformity. Seal Cottage promised to be one of the pleasantest. It had been built only thirty feet from the edge of the cliff and, although simple in design, had an attractive symmetry in the arrangement of windows and in the proportion between the stone walls and the roof. It had only two main rooms, a large bedroom and modern shower upstairs, and a sitting room and kitchen on the ground floor. There were windows on two aspects, so that the cottage was full of light. Everything had been done for his comfort, he assumed by Mrs. Burbridge. The wide stone fireplace with a wooden trug of logs and smoke-free nuggets in the hearth was already laid with kindling. In the recess to the left he saw the iron door of a bread oven and, opening it, found that it contained additional kindling. The furniture was minimal but well designed. Two easy chairs flanked the fireplace, and a simple table with two upright chairs stood in the middle of the room. There was a functional modern desk beneath one of the windows overlooking the sea. The kitchen was little more than a galley but well equipped with a small electric cooker and a microwave. There was a generous supply of oranges and an electric juicer, and the refrigerator held milk, half a dozen eggs, four rashers of bacon—not cellophane-packed but in a plastic container—crème brûlée and a loaf of obviously home-baked bread. On a shelf in the cupboard were small packets of breakfast cereals and a screw jar of muesli. Another cupboard held crockery and cutlery for three people and glasses, including three wine glasses. There were also six bottles of wine, three of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and three of Château Batailley ’94, a quality too
good for casual tippling. He wondered who would pay for them or whether the ungenerous might regard wine as either an inducement or a deliberate temptation to insobriety. How long, he wondered, were the bottles supposed to last? Did they represent Mrs. Burbridge’s nicely judged calculation of the quantity three police officers might be expected to drink in a couple of days, would they be replaced when empty?
And there were other indications of Mrs. Burbridge’s concern for his comfort that amused him, since they seemed to indicate some thought to his personality and taste. There were fitted bookshelves in the recesses each side of the fireplace, presumably kept empty so that visitors could shelve the volumes they had brought. Mrs. Burbridge had made a choice for him from the library: Middlemarch, that safe stand-by for the desert island, and four volumes of poetry, Browning, Housman, Eliot and Larkin. Although there was no television, the sitting room had been fitted with modern stereo equipment, and on another shelf Mrs. Burbridge had made a selection of CDs, or had she, perhaps, taken them from the shelf at random? There was enough variety to satisfy, at least temporarily, an uncapricious taste: Bach’s Mass in B Minor and his Cello Suites with Paul Tortelier playing, songs by Finzi, James Bowman singing Handel and Vivaldi, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. His pleasure in jazz was apparently not to be accommodated.
Dalgliesh had not suggested that the team should eat dinner together to discuss the case. Going through the ritual of serving up the food, coping with an unfamiliar kitchen and finally washing up would be a time-wasting postponement to serious discussion. He judged too that Kate and Benton would prefer to eat in their own apartments, either separately or together as Kate decided—although “apartments” seemed too spacious a word for the staff accommodation in the stable block. He wondered how they were getting on when they were alone together. Kate would have no difficulty in coping with a male subordinate who was obviously highly intelligent and physically attractive, but he had worked with her long enough to sense that Benton’s Oxford education combined with unconcealed ambition made her uneasy. Benton would be scrupulously correct, but Kate would detect that a readiness to judge his superiors and a careful calculation of chance might lie behind those dark and watchful eyes.
Mrs. Burbridge had obviously envisaged that they would eat separately. No additional china or cutlery had been provided, only the two extra wine glasses and mugs, suggesting that she accepted they might at least drink together. A handwritten notice lying on the cupboard shelf read: Please telephone for anything extra you need. Dalgliesh resolved to keep requests to a minimum. If he and his colleagues wanted to take a meal together, anything needed could be carried up from the stable block.
Dinner had been left in a metal container placed on a shelf in the porch under a wooden box labelled Letters. A note on the larger can read: Please reheat osso buco and baked potatoes for thirty minutes in oven at 160 degrees. Crème brûlée in refrigerator.
Following instructions and laying the table, he reflected wryly on the oddity of his situation. In the years since, as a sergeant, he had first entered the CID, he had looked back on a series of meals on duty, hurried or more leisurely, indoors or out, alone or with colleagues, pleasurable or almost inedible. Most had been long forgotten, but some from his days as a young detective constable could still twitch the cord of memory: the brutal murder of a child forever incongruously associated with cheese sandwiches made with ferocious energy by the mother, the unwanted squares piling higher and higher until, with a scream, she took the knife in both hands and drove it into the board, then collapsed howling into a disintegrating mountain of cheese and bread. Sheltering with his detective sergeant under a railway bridge in sleeting rain while they waited for the forensic pathologist, Nobby Clark had taken two Cornish pasties from his murder case. “Get this inside you, lad. Made by my wife. They’ll put some life into you.” He could still recall the comfort of the still-warm pasty enclosed in his frozen hands; none since had tasted so good. But the meals on Combe Island were likely to be among the strangest. Were he and his colleagues to be fed in the next few days by the charity of a killer? No doubt the police would eventually pay—some official at the Yard would have the job of negotiating how much—and presumably up at the house anxious consultations between Maycroft and Mrs. Burbridge had already taken place about the domestic upheaval of their arrival. They were apparently to be treated as ordinary visitors. Did that mean that they could eat dinner in the main house if they gave notice? At least he could spare Maycroft that embarrassment. But he was grateful that tonight Mrs. Burbridge or Mrs. Plunkett had decided that after a sandwich lunch they were entitled to a hot dinner.
But when the osso buco was ready, his appetite, so far from being stimulated by the evocative smell of onions, tomatoes and garlic which permeated the kitchen, had mysteriously waned. After a few mouthfuls of the veal, so tender that it fell from the bone, he realised that he was becoming too tired to eat. Clearing the table, he told himself that this wasn’t surprising: he had been overworking for weeks before the case broke, and even in his few solitary moments he found Combe Island strangely disturbing. Was its peace evading him because he had lost his own? His mind was a vortex of hope, longing and despair. He thought back to the women whom he had liked, respected and enjoyed as companions and lovers, affairs with no commitment beyond discretion and no expectations except the giving and receiving of pleasure. The women he had liked—fastidious and intelligent—had not been looking for permanency. They had prestigious jobs, incomes larger than his own, their own houses. An hour with the children of their friends had reinforced their view that motherhood was a life sentence for which, thankfully, they were psychologically unsuited. They admitted to selfishness without compunction, and if they later regretted it, they didn’t inflict their pain on him. The affairs usually ended because of the demands of his job, and if there had been hurt on either side, pride dictated that it should be concealed. But now, in love and it seemed to him for the first time since the death in childbirth of his young wife, he wanted unattainable assurances, not least that love could last. How odd that sex should be so simple and love such a complication.
He disciplined his mind to throw off images of the past and the personal preoccupations of the present. There was a job to be done, and Kate and Benton would be with him in five minutes. Returning to the kitchen, he brewed strong coffee, uncorked a bottle of the red and opened the cottage door to the mild, sweet-smelling night made luminous under the glittering canopy of stars.
12
* * *
Kate and Benton-Smith had dinner in their own rooms, collecting their metal containers from the kitchen of the main house when Mrs. Plunkett phoned. Kate reflected that if she’d been with Piers Tarrant they would have eaten together, rivalries temporarily forgotten, discussed and argued over the case. But with Benton-Smith it was different, and not because he was junior in rank; that never worried her when she liked a colleague. But AD, as always, would ask for the junior’s views first, and if Benton was set to show off his intelligence she had no wish to provide a dress rehearsal. They had been given two adjacent apartments in the stable block. She had briefly inspected both before making her choice and knew that his was a mirror image of her own. The rooms were sparsely furnished; like her, Benton had a sitting room some twelve feet by eight, a galley kitchen adequate for the heating of meals and the making of hot drinks, and upstairs a single bedroom with an adjacent shower room.
She guessed that both apartments were usually occupied by overnight and weekly staff. Although Mrs. Burbridge, presumably helped by Millie, had prepared the room for this unexpected and hardly welcome guest—the bed freshly made up, the kitchen immaculate and with food and milk in the refrigerator—there was still evidence of the previous occupier. A print of Raphael’s Madonna and Child hung to the right of the bed, and to the left a family photograph framed in oak. There they were, immobilised in sepia, carefully posed against the railings of a seaside pier, the grandparent
s—the man in a wheelchair—smiling broadly, the parents in their summer holiday clothes and three young children, moon-faced with identical fringes, staring stolidly into the camera lens. Presumably one of them was the usual occupant of the room. Her pink chenille dressing gown had hung in the single cupboard, her slippers placed ready beneath it, her paperback copies of Catherine Cookson on the shelf. In taking down the dressing gown and hanging up her own, Kate felt like an intruder.
She showered, changed her shirt and vigorously brushed and re-plaited her hair, then knocked at Benton’s door to signal she was ready. He came out immediately and she saw that he had changed into a Nehru-style suit in a green so dark that it looked black. It gave him a look, hieratic, distinguished and alien, but he wore it un-self-consciously, as if he had changed into something familiar and comfortable merely to please himself. Perhaps he had. She was tempted to say, Why change? We’re not in London and this isn’t a social occasion, but knew that the comment would be revealingly petty. Besides, hadn’t she too taken trouble?
They walked across the headland path to Seal Cottage without speaking. Behind them the lit windows of the great house and the distant pinpoints of light from the cottages only intensified the silence. With the setting of the sun, the illusion of summer was erased. This was the air of late October, still unseasonably mild but with the first chill of autumn, the air faintly scented, as if the dying light had drawn up from the headland the concentrated sweetness of the day. The darkness would have been absolute but for the stars. Never had they seemed to Kate more multitudinous, more glittering or so close. They made of the furry darkness a mysterious luminosity, so that, looking down, she could see the narrow path as a faintly gleaming ribbon in which individual blades of grass glittered like small spears, silvered with light.
The open door of Seal Cottage was at the side facing north, and light spilled out from it over a stone patio. Kate saw Dalgliesh had recently lit the fire. The kindling was still crackling and the few pellets of smokeless fuel were as yet untouched. On the table was an open bottle of wine and three glasses, and there was the smell of coffee. Kate and Benton decided on the wine, and as AD poured it, Benton drew up the desk chair to the table.