A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Reasonably enough. He was an old friend, one of the people who would know how Berowne shaved. He must have guessed what weapon was used. It’s interesting that he couldn’t bring himself to ask us outright if it was. Incidentally, we’ll have to check that timing fairly quickly. It’s a job for Saunders, I think. He’d better make three runs, the same time, the same make of car, the same night of the week, and, with luck, the same weather conditions. And we’ll need to know everything possible about Pembroke Lodge. Who owns the freehold, who holds shares, how the business operates, what its reputation is.” She couldn’t make a written note of his instructions. But then, she didn’t need to.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dalgliesh went on:

  “He had the means, he had the knowledge, he had the motive. I don’t think he wanted marriage with the lady, but he certainly didn’t want an impoverished mistress who might begin thinking in terms of divorce. But if he wanted Berowne dead, and dead before he threw away his money on some half-baked scheme for housing derelicts, he didn’t need to slit his throat. He’s a doctor. There are more subtle methods. This murderer didn’t kill merely from expediency. There had been hatred in that room. Hate isn’t an easy emotion to hide. I didn’t see it in Stephen Lampart. Arrogance, aggression, sexual jealousy of the man in possession. But not hate.”

  Kate had never lacked courage and she didn’t now. After all, he’d selected her for the team. Presumably he thought her opinion worth having. He wasn’t looking for a female subordinate to massage his ego. She said:

  “But couldn’t it have been expediency rather than hate, sir? Killing without arousing suspicion isn’t easy even for a doctor. He wasn’t Sir Paul’s general practitioner. And this, if he could pull it off, would be the perfect murder, one that isn’t even suspected as murder. It was Harry Mack who did for him. Without that second killing, wouldn’t we have taken it at its face value … suicide?”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Followed by the usual euphemistic verdict ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ Perhaps. If he hadn’t made the mistake of taking away the matches and of half-burning the diary. That was an unnecessary refinement. In some ways, the clue of that half-burnt match is the most interesting in the case.”

  Suddenly she felt at ease with him, almost companionable. She was no longer thinking of the impression she might be making but of the case. She did what she would have done with Massingham. With her eyes fixed on the road ahead, she thought it through aloud:

  “Once the killer decided to burn the diary, he’d know he needed to take the matches with him to the church. Berowne didn’t smoke, so there wouldn’t be a lighter on the body and he couldn’t be sure he’d find matches in the vestry. And when he did, they were chained, and it was easier and quicker to use the box he’d brought with him. Time was vital. So we get back to someone who knew Sir Paul, knew his habits, knew where he was on Tuesday night, but who wasn’t familiar with the church. But he’d hardly be carrying the diary in his hand when he arrived. So he was wearing a jacket or coat with largish pockets. Or he had a bag of some kind, a carrier, a tote bag, a briefcase, a medical bag.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Or he could have carried it folded inside an evening paper.”

  Kate went on:

  “He rings. Sir Paul lets him in. He asks to go to the washroom. He leaves his bag there together with the matches and the diary. He strips. Perhaps he strips naked. Then it’s back to the Little Vestry. But this is getting bizarre, sir. His victim isn’t going to sit there quietly waiting for it. Not confronted by a man stark naked with an open razor in his hand. Paul Berowne wasn’t old or sick or weak. He would have defended himself. It couldn’t have happened that way.”

  “Concentrate on the matches.”

  “But he must have been naked when he killed. Naked to the waist anyway. He must have known that it would be a bloody business. He couldn’t have risked getting his clothes splashed. But of course! He knocks out his victim first. Then he goes for the razor, strips, does the fancy bit. Then back to the washroom. He has a quick but thorough sluice down and gets back into his clothes. Then, last of all, he burns the diary. That way he can be sure there’s no blood on the cover or in the grate. It must have happened in that order. Finally, perhaps a matter of habit, he slips the matchbox in his jacket pocket. That suggests he was used to carrying matches. A smoker, perhaps. It must have given him a shock when he put his hands in his pocket later and found them and realized that he should have left them at the scene. Why didn’t he go back? Too late, perhaps. Or perhaps he couldn’t face the shambles.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Or he knew that a second visit would add to the risk of being seen, or leaving some trace of himself in the vestry. But let’s assume that the killer took his own box away on purpose. What does that suggest?”

  “That the box he used could be traced to him. But that’s unlikely, surely. He’d use an ordinary brand, one of a million similar boxes. And he couldn’t have known that we’d find that half-burnt match. Perhaps he took it away because it was a box someone might miss. Perhaps he always planned to return it. And that means he didn’t go to the church from his own home. Logically, he came from Campden Hill Square, where he’d helped himself both to the diary and to the box of matches. But if so, if the matchbox came from Berowne’s own home, why not leave it at the scene? Even if the box were traced, it would only lead us back to Berowne himself. So we get back to a simple mistake. A matter of habit. He slipped the box into his pocket.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “If he did, it might not have worried him too much after the first shock of discovery. He’d tell himself that we’d assume Berowne used the matches from the chained box, or that we’d think that the matches had been burnt with the diary. Or perhaps we’d argue that he could have used a match from one of those packets you can pick up in hotels and restaurants, small enough to burn away without a trace. Admittedly, Berowne wasn’t a man likely to collect restaurant matches, but defence counsel could argue that it happened that way. This isn’t exactly a propitious time to ask for a conviction on forensic evidence alone, certainly not on one inch of a half-burnt match.”

  Kate asked:

  “How do you think it happened, sir?”

  “Possibly much as you’ve described. If Sir Paul had been faced with a naked and armed assailant, I doubt if we’d have found what we did find at the scene. There was no sign of a struggle. That suggests that he must have been knocked out first. That done, the killer got to work swiftly, expertly, knowing just what he was about. And he didn’t need much time. A couple of minutes to strip and lay his hands on the razor. Less than ten seconds to do the killing. So the knockout blow need not have been heavy. In fact, it would have had to be nicely judged if it weren’t to leave a suspiciously large bruise. But there’s another possibility. He could have slipped something over Berowne’s head and dragged him down. Something soft, a scarf, a towel, his own shirt. Or a noose, a cord, a handkerchief.”

  Kate said:

  “But he’d have to be careful not to pull it too tight, not to throttle his victim. The cause of death had to be the slit throat. And wouldn’t a scarf or handkerchief leave a mark?”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Not necessarily. Not when he’d finished his butchery. But we may get something from this afternoon’s pm.”

  And suddenly she was back in the Little Vestry, looking down again at that half-severed head, seeing the whole picture, vivid, clear-edged, bright as a coloured print. And this time there was no blessed moment of preparation, no chance to compose her mind and muscles for what she knew she would have to face. Her hands, white-knuckled, tightened on the wheel. For a moment she imagined the car had stalled, that she had stepped on the brake. But they were still riding smoothly, down the Finchley Road. How strange, she thought, that the horror, briefly recalled, should be more terrible than reality. But her companion was speaking.
She must have lost a few seconds of what he was saying. But now she heard him talking about the time of the post-mortem, saying that she might like to watch. Normally the suggestion, which she translated as an order, would have pleased her. She would have welcomed it as one more affirmation that she was really part of his team. But now for the first time she felt a spasm of distaste, almost a revulsion. She would be there, of course. This wouldn’t be her first autopsy. She had no fear of disgracing herself. She could gaze and not be sick. In detective training school, she had seen her male colleagues topple in the pm room while she had stood firm. It was important to be present at the pm if the pathologist would allow it. You could learn a lot, and she was eager to learn. Her grandmother and the social worker would be waiting for her at three o’clock, but they would have to wait. She had tried, but not too hard, to find a moment in the day to ring and say that she couldn’t be there. But she told herself that it wasn’t necessary; her grandmother knew that already. She would try to drop in at the end of the day if it wasn’t too late. But for her, now at this moment, the dead had to take priority over the living. But for the first time since she had joined the CID, a small treacherous voice, whispering in self-distrust, asked her what exactly it was that her job was doing to her.

  She had chosen to be a police officer deliberately, knowing that the job was right for her. But she had never, even from the first, had any illusions about it. It was a job where people, when they needed you, demanded that you should be there at once, unquestionably, effectively, and when they didn’t, preferred to forget you existed. It was a job where you were sometimes required to work with people you’d rather not work with and show respect for senior officers for whom you felt little or none; where you could find yourself allied to men you despised and against some for whom, more often than you’d bargained for, more often than was comfortable, you felt sympathy, even pity. She knew the comfortable orthodoxies, that law and order were the norms, crime the aberration, that policing in a free society could be done only with the consent of the policed, even presumably in those areas where the police had always been seen as the enemy and had now been elevated into convenient stereotypes of oppression. But she had her own credo. You kept sane by knowing that hypocrisy might be politically necessary, but that you didn’t have to believe it. You kept honest; there was no point in the job otherwise. You did the job so that your male colleagues had to respect you even if it was too much to expect that they would like you. You kept your private life private, unmessy. There were men enough in the world without being trapped by propinquity into sexual entanglement with your colleagues. You didn’t fall into the easy habit of obscenity; you had heard enough of that in Ellison Fairweather buildings. You knew how far you could reasonably hope to rise and how you proposed to get there. You made no unnecessary enemies; it was hard enough for a woman to climb without getting kicked in the ankles on the way up. Every job, after all, had its disadvantages. Nurses got used to the smell of dressings and bedpans, unwashed bodies, other people’s pain, the smell of death. She had made her choice. And now, more than ever, she had no regrets.

  three

  The hospital where Miles Kynaston held his appointment as consultant pathologist had needed a new pm room for years, but facilities for the living patients had taken priority over accommodation for the dead. Kynaston grumbled, but Dalgliesh suspected that he didn’t really care. He had the equipment he needed, and the pm room in which he worked was sparse, familiar territory in which he felt as comfortably at home as he might in an old dressing-gown. He had no real wish to be banished to some larger, more remote and more impersonal quarters, and his occasional complaints were no more than ritual noises made to remind the medical committee that the Forensic Pathology Department existed.

  But there was, inevitably, always something of a squash. Dalgliesh and his officers were there primarily from interest rather than necessity, but the exhibits sergeant, the fingerprint officer, the scene-of-crime and exhibit officers with their envelopes, bottles and tubes took up necessary room. Kynaston’s secretary, a plump, middle-aged woman, as cheerfully efficient as a president of the Women’s Institute, sat in her twin-set and tweeds, squashed in the corner with a bulging bag at her feet. Dalgliesh always expected her to take out her knitting. Kynaston had always disliked using a tape recorder, and from time to time he turned towards her and dictated his findings in low, staccato sentences which she seemed to understand. He always worked to music, often Baroque and sometimes a string quartet, Mozart, Vivaldi, Haydn. This afternoon’s recording was one Dalgliesh immediately recognized since he, too, owned it: Neville Marriner conducting Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G. Dalgliesh wondered if its enigmatic, richly melancholy tone provided Kynaston with a necessary catharsis; whether it was his way of attempting to dramatize the routine indignities of death; or whether, like house painters or others less singularly employed, he simply liked music while he worked.

  Dalgliesh noted with a mixture of interest and irritation that Massingham and Kate kept their eyes fixed on Kynaston’s hands with an attention which suggested that they were afraid to shift their gaze in case inadvertently they should happen to meet his eyes. He wondered how they could possibly suppose that he saw this ritual disembowelment as having anything to do with Berowne. The detachment, which had become second nature to him, was helped by the matter-of-fact efficiency with which the organs were drawn out, examined, bottled and labelled. He felt exactly as he had when, as a young probationer, he had watched his first autopsy: a surprise at the bright colours of the coils and pouches dangling in the pathologist’s gloved and bloody hands, and an almost childish wonder that so small a cavity should be capable of accommodating such a large and diverse collection of organs.

  Afterwards, as they scrubbed their hands in the washroom, Kynaston from necessity, Dalgliesh from a fastidiousness which he would have found difficult to explain, he asked:

  “What about the time of death?”

  “No reason to alter the estimate I made at the scene. Seven o’clock would be the earliest. Say between seven and nine. I may be able to be a little more precise when the stomach contents have been analysed. There were no signs of a struggle. And if Berowne was attacked, he made no attempt to protect himself. There are no cuts across the gripping aspect of Berowne’s palm. Well, you saw that for yourself. The blood on his right palm came from the razor, not from defensive cuts.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “From the razor or from the blood on his throat?”

  “That’s possible. The palm was certainly more thickly coated than one might expect. Nothing complicated about the cause of death in either case. In both, it’s a classical fine cut, through the thyro-hyoid ligament, severing everything from the skin to the spine. Berowne was healthy, no reason why he shouldn’t have lived to a good old age if someone hadn’t cut his throat for him. And Harry Mack was in better shape, medically speaking, than I expected. Liver not too good, but it could have stood a few more years’ abuse before it actually gave out on him. The lab will get the throat tissue under the microscope, but I don’t think you’ll get any joy. There is no obvious sign of a ligature at the edge of the wound. The bump on the back of Berowne’s head is superficial, probably made when he fell.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Or was pulled down.”

  “Or was pulled down. You’ll have to wait for the lab report on the blood smear before you can go much further, Adam.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “And even if that smear isn’t Harry Mack’s blood, you still aren’t prepared to say that Berowne wasn’t capable of stumbling across to Harry even with those two superficial cuts in his throat.”

  Kynaston said:

  “I could say it was improbable. I couldn’t say that it was impossible. And we’re not just talking about the superficial cuts. Remember that case quoted by Simpson? The suicide practically severed his head, yet remained conscious long enough to kick the ambulance man downstairs.”

&nb
sp; “But if Berowne killed Harry, why move back to the bed to finish himself off?”

  “A natural association, bed, sleep, death. If he had decided to die on his bed, why should he change his mind because it was necessary to kill Harry first?”

  “It wasn’t necessary. I doubt whether Harry could have reached him in time to stop that final cut. It offends against common sense.”

  “Or it offends against your idea of Paul Berowne.”

  “Both. This was double murder, Miles.”

  “I believe you, but it’s going to be the devil to prove, and I don’t think my report will be much help. Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Unless, of course, he leaves his testimony behind. If Berowne did decide to kill himself, I’d have expected to find some kind of note, an attempt at explanation.”

  Kynaston said enigmatically:

  “The fact that you didn’t find it doesn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t write it.”

  He drew on a fresh pair of gloves and pulled his face mask over his mouth and nose. Already a new cadaver was being wheeled in. Dalgliesh looked at his watch. Massingham and Kate could drive back to the Yard and get on with the paperwork. He had another appointment. After the frustrations of the day he needed a little light relief, even a little cosseting. He proposed to extract information by more agreeable ways than a police interrogation. He had earlier that morning telephoned Conrad Ackroyd and had been invited to take a civilized afternoon tea with the owner and editor of the Paternoster Review.

  four

  Conrad and Nellie Ackroyd lived in a gleamingly neat stucco Edwardian villa in St. John’s Wood with a garden running down to the canal, a house reputedly built by Edward VII for one of his mistresses and inherited by Nellie Ackroyd from a bachelor uncle. Ackroyd had moved into it from his city flat above the Paternoster office three years previously, following his marriage, and had happily accommodated his books, his belongings and his life to Nellie’s taste for comfort and domesticity. Now, although they had a servant, he himself welcomed Dalgliesh at the door, his black eyes as brightly expectant as a child’s.