by P. D. James
And then the disaster. Harry appears, stumbling, probably half-drunk, half-asleep, but not so asleep that he couldn’t see, couldn’t remember. And now, there would be no time for finesse and none needed. And afterwards: the quick wash; the razor placed near Berowne’s hand; the rapid glance to left and right; the covering darkness; the door left unlocked since he couldn’t take away the key; the unhurried return to the car. He would have to depend on her silence, of course. He would need to be certain that she would stick to their story and say that they had driven straight to the Black Swan. But it was an easy lie, no complicated fabrication, no difficult details of timing to remember. She would say what in fact she had in effect already said. “We drove straight there. No, I can’t remember the route. I wasn’t noticing. But we didn’t stop.” He would have to fabricate a good reason for asking her to lie. “I needed to see one of my patients, a woman.” But why not tell the police that? There’s nothing wrong about a quick professional visit. The need to stop would have to be faintly disreputable. Either that or something he had suddenly remembered. A telephone call which had been unanswered. Too quick. He would need longer than that. And why not wait and make it from the Black Swan? But, of course, there was the obvious ploy. He would say he had called at the church, spoken to Berowne, left him alive and well. That way, she would back up his alibi in her own interest as well as his. And if, in the end, she didn’t, he would still have his story. “I called to talk to Berowne about his wife. I only stayed for ten minutes at the most. The discussion was perfectly amicable. I saw no one but Berowne and I left him alive and well.”
Lampart replaced the receiver. He said:
“Sorry about that. Where were we, Commander? At the Black Swan?”
But Dalgliesh changed the tack of the questioning. He said:
“You knew Sir Paul Berowne intimately once, even if you weren’t particularly close at the end. No two men share a woman without being interested in each other.” He could have added, “sometimes obsessed with each other.” He went on: “You’re a doctor. I’m wondering what you make of it, this experience he had in the vestry at St. Matthew’s.” The flattery was hardly subtle and Lampart was too clever a man to miss it. But he wouldn’t be able to resist it. He was used to being asked his opinion, to being listened to with deference. It was partly what he lived by. He said:
“I’m an obstetrician, not a psychiatrist. But I shouldn’t have thought the psychology of it was particularly complicated. The usual story. It’s only the manifestations that are a little bizarre. Call it the mid-life crisis. I don’t like the expression ‘male menopause.’ It’s inaccurate anyway. The two things are fundamentally different. I think he looked at his life, what he’d achieved, what he could hope for, and didn’t much care for it. He’d tried law and politics and neither satisfied him. He had a wife he lusted after but didn’t love. A daughter who didn’t love him. A job which constrained any hope he might have of breaking out into spectacular or exuberant protest. All right; he’d got himself a mistress. That’s the easy expedient. I haven’t seen the lady, but from what Barbara told me it’s more a question of comfort and cocoa, a bit of mild office gossip on the side rather than any breaking of the straitjacket he’d got himself strapped into. So he needed an excuse for chucking it all. What better one than proclaiming that God himself has told you you’re on the wrong tack? I don’t think it would be my way out. But you can argue that it’s preferable to a nervous breakdown, alcoholism or cancer.”
When Dalgliesh didn’t speak he went on quickly, with a kind of nervous sincerity which was almost convincing.
“I see it all the time. The husbands. They sit where you’re sitting now. Ostensibly, they come to talk to me about their wives. But they’re the ones with the problem. They can’t win. It’s the tyranny of success. They spend most of their youth working to qualify, most of their young manhood building up success—the right wife, the right house, the right schools for the children, the right clubs. For what? For some money, more comfort, a bigger house, a faster car, more taxation. And they don’t even get much of a kick out of it. And there’s another twenty years to be got through. And it isn’t much better for those who aren’t disillusioned, who find their niche, who actually enjoy what they do. Their fear is the prospect of retirement. Overnight you’re nobody. The walking dead. Haven’t you seen those dreadful old men, trawling for a committee, angling for a royal commission, a job, any kind of a job, as long as it gives them the illusion that they’re still important?”
Dalgliesh said:
“Yes, I’ve seen them.”
“Christ, they practically go down on their knees and slaver for it.”
“I think that’s true enough, but it didn’t apply to him. He was still only a junior Minister. His success was ahead. He was still at the striving stage.”
“Oh yes, I know. The next Tory Prime Minister but one. Do you think that was a serious possibility? I don’t. He hadn’t the fire in the belly, not for politics anyway. Not even one little smouldering coal.”
He spoke with a kind of triumphant bitterness. He said:
“I’m all right, Jack. I’m one of the lucky ones. No hostages to fortune. The job gives me what I need. And when I’m ready for the scrapheap, I’ve got the Mayflower, a sloop, fifty feet. She’s berthed at Chichester. I don’t get much time for her now. But once retired, I’ll provision her and be off. And you, Commander? No Mayflower?”
“No Mayflower.”
“But you’ve your poetry, of course. I was forgetting.” He spoke the word as if it were an insult. As if he were saying ‘you’ve got your woodwork, your stamp collection, your embroidery.’ Worse, he spoke it as if he knew there hadn’t been a poem for four years, that there might never be one again. Dalgliesh said:
“For someone who wasn’t intimate, you know a lot about him.”
“He interested me. And at Oxford his elder brother and I were friends. I dined at Campden Hill Square fairly often when he was alive, and the three of us used to sail together. To Cherbourg specifically, in 1978. You get to know a man when you’ve survived a ten-force gale together. Actually, Paul saved my life. I went overboard and he got me back.”
“But isn’t yours a rather superficial assessment, the obvious explanation?”
“It’s surprising how often the obvious explanation is the correct one. If you were a diagnostician, you’d know that.”
Dalgliesh turned to Kate:
“Is there anything you wanted to ask, Inspector?” Lampart wasn’t quite quick enough to restrain his momentary frown of surprise and discomfiture that a woman he had taken to be no more than Dalgliesh’s helot, whose role was to take unobtrusive notes and sit as a meek and silent witness, was apparently licensed to question him. He turned on her a half-smiling over-attentive gaze, but his eyes were wary.
Kate said:
“This dinner at the Black Swan … is that a favourite place of yours? Do you and Lady Berowne go there often?”
“Fairly often in summer. Less so in winter. The ambience is agreeable. It’s a convenient distance from London, and now that Higgins has changed his chef the food is good. If you’re asking for a recommendation for a quiet dinner, yes, I can recommend it.” The sarcasm was unsubtle and he had made his resentment too obvious. The question, innocuous enough, if apparently irrelevant, had rattled him. Kate said:
“And you were there, both of you, on the evening of the seventh of August, when Diana Travers was drowned?”
He said drily:
“You obviously already know that we were there, so there seems little point in asking. It was Lady Berowne’s twenty-seventh birthday party. She was born on the seventh of August.”
“And you escorted her, not her husband?”
“Sir Paul Berowne was otherwise engaged. I gave the party for Lady Berowne. He was expected to join us later, but rang to say that he couldn’t make it. Since you know that we were there, you obviously know, too, that we left before the tragedy.”
“And the other tragedy, sir, Theresa Nolan? You were not, of course, present when that happened either?” Careful, Kate, thought Dalgliesh. But he didn’t interfere, and he wasn’t anxious.
“If you mean did I sit by her side in Holland Park when she swallowed a bottle of distalgesic tablets and washed them down with cooking sherry, no I wasn’t. If I had been, obviously I should have stopped her.”
“She left a note making it plain that she’d killed herself because of guilt over her abortion. A perfectly legal abortion. She was one of your nurses here. I wonder why she didn’t have the operation at Pembroke Lodge.”
“She didn’t ask. And if she had, I wouldn’t have done it. I prefer not to operate on my own staff. If there appear to be medical reasons for termination, I refer them to a fellow gynaecologist. Actually, I can’t see how her death or that of Diana Travers has anything to do with the business that brings you here this morning. Ought we to be wasting time with irrelevant questions?”
Dalgliesh said:
“Not irrelevant. Sir Paul received letters suggesting, obliquely but fairly unmistakably, that he was somehow connected with those two deaths. Anything that happened to him during the last weeks of his life has to be relevant. The letters were probably the usual malicious nonsense that politicians expose themselves to, but it’s as well to clear them out of the way.”
Lampart turned his gaze from Kate to Dalgliesh.
“I see. I’m sorry if I sounded uncooperative, but I know absolutely nothing of the Travers girl except that she worked at Campden Hill Square as a part-time domestic and that she was at the Black Swan on the night of the birthday party. Theresa Nolan came here from Campden Hill Square, where she’d been nursing Lady Ursula, who was laid low with sciatica. I understand they got her from a nursing agency. When Lady Ursula no longer needed a night nurse, she suggested to the girl that she apply here. She had a midwifery qualification. She was perfectly satisfactory. She must have got pregnant when she was working at Campden Hill Square. But I didn’t ask by whom and I don’t think she ever said.”
Dalgliesh said:
“Did it occur to you that the child could have been Sir Paul Berowne’s?”
“Yes. It occurred to me. I imagine it occurred to quite a number of people.”
He said no more and Dalgliesh didn’t press him. He asked:
“What happened when she discovered she was pregnant?”
“She came to me and said that she couldn’t face having a baby and wanted a termination. I referred her to a psychiatrist and left him to make the necessary arrangements.”
“Did you think that the girl’s condition at the time, I mean her mental condition, was such that she was likely to qualify legally for an abortion?”
“I didn’t examine her. I didn’t discuss it with her. And it wasn’t a medical decision I was qualified to make. As I said, I referred her to a psychiatric colleague. I told her that she could have leave with pay until a decision was made. She only came back here for a week after the operation. And the rest you know.”
Suddenly he got to his feet and began restlessly pacing. Then he turned to Dalgliesh.
“I’ve given some thought to this business of Paul Berowne. Man is an animal, and he lives most at ease with himself and the world when he remembers that. Admittedly he’s the cleverest and most dangerous of animals, but he’s still an animal. The philosophers, and poets too, for all I know, make it all too complicated. It isn’t. Our basic needs are pretty straightforward—food, shelter, warmth, sex, prestige, in that order. The happiest people go after them and are satisfied with them. Berowne wasn’t. God knows what unattainable intangibles he thought he’d a right to. Eternal life, probably.”
Dalgliesh said:
“So you believe the probability is that he killed himself?”
“I haven’t enough evidence. But let’s say that if you finally decide it was suicide, then I for one won’t be surprised.”
“And the tramp? There were two deaths.”
“That’s more difficult. Did he kill Paul or did Paul kill him? Obviously the family won’t want to believe the latter. Lady Ursula will never accept that explanation, whatever the final verdict.”
“But you …”
“Oh, I feel that if a man has sufficient violence in him to slit his own throat, he’s certainly capable of slitting another’s. And now, perhaps you’ll excuse me.” He glanced at Kate. “Both of you. I have a patient waiting. I’ll call in at the Yard between eight and nine thirty and sign my statement.” He added, rising: “Perhaps by then I shall manage to think of something else to help you. But don’t be too sanguine.” He made it sound like a threat.
two
There was an almost unbroken stream of traffic past the front gate and Kate had to wait for over a minute before it was safe to filter in. She thought: I wonder just how he does it. The interview was all there in her notebook in her neat, unorthodox shorthand, but she had the gift of almost perfect verbal recall and she could have typed most of it out without reference to the hieroglyphics. She let her mind slide over each question and response and she still couldn’t see where AD had been so clever.
He had said very little, his questions short and sometimes apparently unrelated to the line of enquiry. But Lampart, and that after all was the intention, had been seduced into saying a great deal too much. And all that guff about the male mid-life crisis—popular psychology which you could have sent to you in a plain envelope if you wrote to the agony aunties enquiring what was wrong with your old man. He could be right, of course. But, after all, medically speaking, varieties of the male menopause weren’t Stephen Lampart’s field. He’d been asked for his opinion and he’d given it, but you’d expect a man as fond of his own voice as he was to be even more forthcoming about the psychological problems of pregnancy and abortion. But when it came to Theresa Nolan, what had they got? A brush-off, the keep-off signs clearly posted. He hadn’t even wanted to think about her, let alone talk about her. And it wasn’t just because she, Kate, had been the one to do the questioning and had done it with that undeferential over-politeness which she had known would be more offensive to his vanity than rudeness or open antagonism. She had hoped that, with luck, it might goad him into an indiscretion, but it wouldn’t have worked if there had been nothing to conceal. She heard AD’s voice:
“That touching detail, about Sir Paul saving his life. Did you believe it?”
“No sir. Not as he told it. I think something of the sort probably happened. He went overboard and his friend yanked him back. He wouldn’t have mentioned it if there weren’t some corroboration. But I think he was really saying, ‘Look, I might have pinched his wife, but I wouldn’t have killed him, would I? He saved my life.’” She added: “It wasn’t very subtle, the way he fingered Garrod.” She glanced at him quickly. He smiled with wry distaste as he sometimes did when a colleague used an Americanism. But he let it pass, merely saying:
“Nothing about him was subtle.”
Suddenly she felt a surge of optimism, heady, intoxicating and dangerously close to the euphoria which always came when a case was going well but which she had learned to distrust and subdue. If this goes all right, if we get him, whoever he is, and we will, then I’m on my way. I’m really on my way. But the elation went deeper than mere ambition or the satisfaction of a test passed, a job well done. She had enjoyed herself. Every minute of her brief confrontation with that self-satisfied poseur had been deeply pleasurable. She thought of her first months with the CID, the plugging, conscientious, door-to-door enquiries which had made up her day, the pathetic victims, the even more pathetic villains. How much more satisfying was this sophisticated manhunt: the knowledge that they were up against a killer with the intelligence to think and plan, who wasn’t an ignorant, feckless victim of circumstance or passion. She had learned facial control long before she had joined the police. She drove carefully, her face calmly set on the road ahead. But something of what she was feeling must have communicated
itself to her companion. He said:
“Did you enjoy yourself, Inspector?” The question and the rare use of her rank jolted her, but she decided to answer it honestly, knowing that she had no option. She had done her homework. She knew his reputation, and when colleagues had spoken about him she had made it her business to listen. They had said: “He’s a bastard, but a just bastard.” She knew that there were some inadequacies he could forgive and some foibles he could tolerate. But dishonesty wasn’t among them. She said:
“Yes, sir. I liked the sense of being in control, that we were getting somewhere.” Then she added, knowing as she spoke that this was dangerous territory, but hell, she thought, why should he get away with it:
“Was the question meant as a criticism, sir?”
“No. No one joins the police without getting some enjoyment out of exercising power. No one joins the murder squad who hasn’t a taste for death. The danger begins when the pleasure becomes an end in itself. That’s when it’s time to think about another job.”
She wanted to ask: “Have you ever thought of another Job, sir?” But she knew the temptation was illusory. There were some senior officers of whom one could ask that question after a couple of whiskies in the senior officers’ mess, but he wasn’t among them. She remembered the moment when she had told Alan that Dalgliesh had chosen her for the new squad. He had said, smiling: “So isn’t it about time you tried reading his verse?” and she had replied: “I’d better come to terms with the man before I try coming to terms with his poetry.” She wasn’t sure that she had succeeded. Now she said:
“Lampart spoke about razor slashing. We deliberately didn’t tell him how Sir Paul died. So why should he have mentioned a razor?”