by P. D. James
He said:
“I’ve never been quite sure what the attraction is except that the job isn’t boring and it gives me a private life.”
Berowne spoke with sudden bitterness:
“It’s a job with less hypocrisy than most. A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don’t actually believe it.” The voice rather than the words disconcerted Mapleton. Then he decided to treat it as a joke and giggled. He turned to Dalgliesh.
“So what now for you personally, Commander? Apart from the working party, of course?”
“A week of lectures to Senior Command Course at Bramshill. Then back here to set up the new squad.”
“Well, that should keep you busy. What happens if I murder the Member for Chesterfield West when the working party is actually sitting?” He giggled again at his own audacity.
“I hope you’ll resist the temptation, sir.”
“Yes, I must try. The committee is too important to have the senior police detective interest represented on a part-time basis. And by the way, talking of murder, there’s a very odd paragraph about you, Berowne, in today’s Paternoster Review. Not altogether friendly, I thought.”
“Yes,” said Berowne shortly. “I’ve seen it.” He increased his pace so that Mapleton, already out of breath, had to choose between talking or using his energy to keep up. When they reached the Treasury, he obviously decided that the reward was no longer worth the effort and with a valedictory wave disappeared up Parliament Street. But if Berowne had been seeking a moment for further confidences it had disappeared. The pedestrian signal had turned to green. No pedestrian, seeing the lights in his favour at Parliament Square, hesitates. Berowne gave him a rueful glance as if to say: “See how even the lights conspire against me,” and walked briskly across. Dalgliesh watched as he crossed Bridge Street, acknowledged the salute of the policeman on duty and disappeared into New Palace Yard. It had been a brief and unsatisfactory encounter. He had the feeling that Berowne was in some trouble deeper and more subtly disturbing than poison pen messages. He turned back to the Yard telling himself that if Berowne wanted to confide he would do it in his own good time.
But that time had never come. And it had been on his drive back from Bramshill a week later that he had turned on his radio and heard the news of Berowne’s resignation of his ministerial post. The details had been sparse. Berowne’s only explanation had been that he felt it was time for his life to take a new direction. The Prime Minister’s letter, printed in the next day’s Times, had been conventionally appreciative but brief. The great British public, most of whom would have been hard pressed to name three members of the Cabinet of this or any administration, were preoccupied with chasing the sun in one of the rainiest summers in recent years and took the loss of a junior Minister with equanimity. Those parliamentary gossips still in London enduring the boredom of the silly season waited in happy expectation for the scandal to break. Dalgliesh waited with them. But there was, apparently, to be no scandal. Berowne’s resignation remained mysterious.
Dalgliesh had already sent while at Bramshill for the reports of the inquests on Theresa Nolan and Diana Travers. On the face of it there was no cause for concern. Theresa Nolan, after having a medical termination on psychiatric grounds, had left a suicide note for her grandparents which they had confirmed was in her handwriting and which made her intention to kill herself plain beyond any doubt. And Diana Travers, after drinking and eating unwisely, had apparently herself dived into the Thames to swim out to her companions who were messing about in a punt. Dalgliesh had been left with an uneasy feeling that neither case was as straightforward as the reports made it appear, but certainly there was no prima facie evidence of foul play in connection with either of the two deaths. He was uncertain how much further he was expected to probe or whether, in the light of Berowne’s resignation, there was any point in his probing. He had decided to do nothing further for the present and to leave it to Berowne to make the first move.
And now Berowne, the harbinger of death, was himself dead, by his hand or another’s. Whatever secret he had been hoping to confide on that short walk to the House would remain forever unspoken. But if he had, indeed, been murdered, then the secrets would be told; through his dead body, through the intimate detritus of his life, through the mouths, truthful, treacherous, faltering, reluctant, of his family, his enemies, his friends. Murder was the first destroyer of privacy as it was of so much else. And it seemed to Dalgliesh an ironic twist of fate that it should be he, whom Berowne had shown a disposition to trust, who should now be travelling to begin that inexorable process of violation.
four
They were almost at the church before he wrenched his mind back to the present. Massingham had driven in, for him, an unusual silence as if sensing that his chief was grateful for this small hiatus between knowledge and discovery. And he had no need to enquire the way. As always, he had mapped his route before setting out. They were driving up the Harrow Road and had just passed the complex of St. Mary’s Hospital when the campanile of St. Matthew’s came suddenly into view on their left. With its crossed bands of stone, its high arched windows and copper cupola, it reminded Dalgliesh of the brick towers he had laboriously erected as a child, brick on precarious brick, until they toppled in noisy disorder on the nursery floor. It held for him some of the same hubristic impermanence and, even as he gazed, he half expected it to bend and sway. Without speaking, Massingham took the next turning to the left and drove towards it down a narrow road bordered on each side by a terrace of small houses. They were identical, with their small upper windows, narrow porches and square bays, but it was obvious that the road was coming up in the world. Some few still showed the tell-tale signs of multiple occupation: dishevelled lawns, peeling paint and drawn secretive curtains. But these were succeeded by bright little bandboxes of social aspiration: newly painted doors, carriage lamps, an occasional hanging basket, the front garden paved to provide standing for the car. At the end of the road the huge bulk of the church with its soaring walls of smoke-blackened brick looked as much out of keeping as it was out of scale with this small domestic self-sufficiency.
The huge north door, large enough for a cathedral, was closed. Beside it a grime-encrusted board gave the name and address of the parish priest and the time of services, but there was nothing else to suggest that the door was ever opened. They drove slowly down a narrow asphalt drive between the southern wall of the church and the railing bordering the canal, but still there was no sign of life. It was obvious that the news of a murder hadn’t yet spread. There were only two cars parked outside the south porch. One, he guessed, belonged to Detective Sergeant Robins and the red Metro to Kate Miskin. He wasn’t surprised that she was there before them. She opened the door before Massingham had time to ring, her handsome, shield-shaped face composed under the light brown fringe, and looking in her shirt, slacks and leather jerkin as elegantly informal as if she had just come in from a country walk. She said:
“The DI’s compliments, sir, but he had to get back to the station. They’ve got a homicide at Royal Oak. He left as soon as Sergeant Robins and I arrived. He’ll be available from midday if you need him. The bodies are here, sir. They call it the Little Vestry.”
It was typical of Glyn Morgan not to have disturbed the scene. Dalgliesh had a respect for Morgan as a man and a detective but was grateful that either duty, tact or a mixture of both had taken him away. It was a relief not to have to soothe and propitiate an experienced detective who could hardly be expected to welcome a commander from the new C1 squad intruding on his patch.
Kate Miskin pushed open the first door on the left and stood aside for Dalgliesh and Massingham to enter. The Little Vestry was as garishly lit as a film set. Under the glare of the fluorescent light the whole bizarre scene, Berowne’s sprawled body and severed throat, the clotted blood, the tramp propped like a stringless marionette against the wall, looked for a moment unr
eal, A Grand Guignol tableau too overdone and too contrived to be convincing. Hardly glancing at Berowne’s body, Dalgliesh picked his way across the carpet to Harry Mack and squatted beside him. Without turning his head, he asked:
“Were the lights on when Miss Wharton found the bodies?”
“Not in the passage, sir. But she says this light was on. The boy confirms it.”
“Where are they now?”
“In the church, sir. Father Barnes is with them.”
“Have a word with them, will you, John? Tell them I’ll speak to them as soon as I’m free. And try to contact the boy’s mother. We ought to get him away from here as soon as possible. Then I want you here.”
Harry looked as derelict in death as he must have done in life. If it hadn’t been for the breastplate of blood, he could have been asleep, legs stuck out, head slumped forward, his woollen cap slipped over his right eye. Dalgliesh put his hand under the chin and gently lifted the head. He had the sensation that it would come apart from the body and roll over into his hands. He saw what he had expected to find, the single slash across the throat, apparently from left to right, cutting through the trachea to the vertebrae. Rigor mortis was already well established and the skin was ice cold and goosefleshed as the arrector muscles of the hairs contracted with the onset of rigor. Whatever concatenation of chance or desire had brought Harry Mack to this place, there was no mystery about the cause of death.
He was wearing old plaid trousers, over-large and loose as pantaloons, and tied at the ankles with string. Above them, as far as it was possible to see for the blood, he wore a striped knitted pullover over a navy jumper. A malodorous checked jacket, stiff with grime, was unbuttoned, the left flap lying open. Dalgliesh raised it with careful fingers, touching only the extreme edge of the cloth, and saw underneath a smudge of blood on the carpet about two centimetres long and thicker at the right end than at the left. Peering closer, he thought he could see a smear roughly the same length on the jacket pocket, but the cloth was too dirty for him to be sure. But the implication of the smear on the carpet was plain enough. One or more drops of blood must have fallen or been spilt from the weapon before Harry fell and had then been smeared along the carpet as the body was dragged against the wall. But whose blood? If it proved to be Harry’s, the discovery was of small significance. But suppose it was Berowne’s? Dalgliesh felt impatient for the arrival of the forensic biologist, although he knew he couldn’t hope for the answer, not yet. Samples of both victims’ blood would be taken from the bodies at the post-mortem, but it would be three days at least before he could expect to get the result of the analysis.
He wasn’t sure what impulse had made him go first to Harry Mack’s body. But now he trod carefully across the carpet to the bed and stood silently looking down at the body of Berowne. Even as a fifteen-year-old boy, standing at the side of the bed of his dead mother, he hadn’t felt the need to think, far less to utter, the word good-bye. You couldn’t speak to someone who was no longer there. He thought: We can vulgarize everything, but not this. The body in its stiff ungainliness, beginning already, or so it seemed to his over-sensitive nose, to emit the first sour-sweet stink of decay, yet had an inalienable dignity because it once had been a man. But he knew, none better, how quickly this spurious humanity would drain away. Even before the pathologist had finished at the scene and the head was wrapped, the hands mittened in their plastic bags, even before Doc Kynaston got to work with his scalpels, the corpse would be an exhibit, more important, more cumbersome and more difficult to preserve than other exhibits in the case, but still an exhibit, tagged, documented, dehumanized, invoking only interest, curiosity or disgust. But not yet. He thought: I knew this man, not well, but I knew him. I liked him. Surely he deserves better of me than to gaze at him with my policeman’s eyes.
He lay head towards the door and at an angle of forty-five degrees from the bed, his shoes touching the end. The left hand was flung out, the right lay closer to the body. The bed had been covered with a blanket of hand-knitted squares of bright wool. It looked as if Berowne had clutched it as he fell, half-pulling it from the bed, so that it lay partly bunched at his right side. An open razor, the blade thick with clotted blood, lay on top of it, a few inches from his right hand. It was extraordinary how many details simultaneously impressed themselves on Dalgliesh’s mind. A thin wedge of what looked like mud caked between the heel and the sole of the left shoe; the pattern of blood stiffening the fine fawn cashmere of the sweater; the half-open mouth fixed in a rictus between a smile and a sneer; the dead eyes seeming as he watched to shrink into their sockets; the left hand with its long pale fingers, curved and delicate as a girl’s; the palm of the right hand thick with blood. But the whole picture struck him as wrong, and he knew why. Berowne couldn’t both have held the razor in his right hand and clutched at the blanket as he fell. But if he had first dropped the razor, why should it be lying on top of the blanket and so conveniently close to his hand, as if it had slipped from the opening fingers? And why should the palm be so thickly clotted, almost as if another’s hand had lifted it and smeared it into the blood at the throat? If Berowne himself had wielded the razor, surely the palm which had clutched it would have been less bloodied.
He was aware of a small noise at his side and looked round to see Detective Inspector Kate Miskin looking, not at the corpse, but at him. She quickly turned her eyes away but not before he had detected, to his discomfort, a look of grave, almost maternal solicitude. He said roughly:
“Well, Inspector?”
“It looks obvious, sir, murder followed by suicide. The classical pattern of self-inflicted wounds—three cuts, two tentative, the third cutting through the trachea.”
She added:
“It could be used as an illustration in a textbook of forensic medicine.”
He said:
“There’s no difficulty in recognizing the obvious. One should be slower to believe it. I want you to break the news to his family. The address is 62 Campden Hill Square. There is a wife and an elderly mother, Lady Ursula Berowne, and a housekeeper of sorts. Use your discretion about which is best able to take it. And take a DC. When the news breaks they may be pestered and need protection.”
“Yes, sir.”
She showed no resentment at being ordered from the scene. She knew that the job of breaking the news wasn’t a routine chore, that she hadn’t been chosen merely because she was the only woman in his team and he saw this as a woman’s job. She would break the news with tact, discretion, even with compassion. God knew she had had enough practice in ten years of policing. But she would still be a traitor to grief, watching and listening, even as she spoke the formal words of condolence, for the flicker of an eyelid, the tensing of hands and face muscles, for the unwise word, for any sign that for someone in that waiting house in Campden Hill Square this might not be news at all.
five
Before he concentrated on the actual scene of the crime, Dalgliesh always liked to make a cursory survey of the surroundings to orientate himself and, as it were, to set the scene of murder. That exercise had its practical value, but he recognized that, in some obscure way, it fulfilled a psychological need. Just so in boyhood he would explore a country church by first walking slowly round it before, with a frisson of awe and excitement, pushing open the door and beginning his planned progress of discovery to the central mystery. And now, in these few remaining minutes, before the photographer, the fingerprint officers, the forensic biologists arrived at the scene, he had the place almost to himself. Moving into the passage, he wondered whether this quiet air tinctured with the scent of incense, candles and the more solidly Anglican smell of musty prayer books, metal polish and flowers had held for Berowne also the promise of discovery, of a scene already set, a task inevitable and inescapable.
The brightly lit passage with its floor of encaustic tiles and its white-painted walls ran the whole west end of the church. The Little Vestry was the first room on the left. Next to it and w
ith a connecting door was a small kitchen about ten feet by eight. Then came a narrow lavatory with an old-fashioned bowl of decorated porcelain and a mahogany seat with, above it, a hanging chain set under a single high window. Lastly an open door showed him a high square room, almost certainly set under the campanile, which was obviously both the vestry proper and the bell room. Opposite it the passage was separated from the body of the church by a ten-foot-long grille in delicate wrought iron which gave a view up the nave to the cavernous glitter of the apse and the Lady Chapel on the right. A central door in the grille topped with figures of two trumpeting angels gave entry to the church for the processing priest and choir. To the right a padlocked wooden box was fixed to the grille. Behind it, but within reach of stretching hands, stood a branching candlestand, also in wrought iron, with a box of matches in a brass holder attached to it with a chain, and a tray containing a few small candles. Presumably this was to enable people who had business in the vestry to light a candle when the grille door to the church was locked. Judging from the cleanness of the candleholders, it was a facility of which they seldom, if ever, took advantage. There was only one candle in place, stuck upright like a pale wax finger, and this had never been lit. Two of the brass chandeliers suspended above the nave gave a gentle diffused light, but the church looked dimly mysterious compared with the glare of the passage, and the figures of Massingham and the detective sergeant quietly conferring, of Miss Wharton and the boy patiently sitting like hump-backed dwarfs on low chairs in what must be the children’s corner, seemed as distanced and insubstantial as if they moved in a different dimension of time. As he stood watching, Massingham looked up, caught his eye, and moved down the nave towards him.
He returned to the Little Vestry and, standing in the doorway, drew on his latex gloves. It always surprised him a little that it was possible to fix the attention on the room itself, its furniture and objects, even before the bodies had been packaged and taken away, as if in their fixed and silent decrepitude they had for a moment become part of the room’s artefacts, as significant as any other physical clue, no more and no less. As he moved into the room he was aware of Massingham behind him, alert, already drawing on his gloves, but, for him, unnaturally subservient, pacing quietly behind his chief like a recently qualified houseman deferentially attendant on the consultant. Dalgliesh thought: Why is he behaving as if I need tactful handling, as if I’m suffering from a private grief? This is a job like any other. It promises to be difficult enough without John and Kate treating me as if I’m a sensitive convalescent.