A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  As always he had prepared himself for the visit. He knew more about both of them than he suspected either would have thought necessary. Together in amicable harness they had for the last twenty years run the local party. Frank Musgrave was an estate agent who ran a family business, still independent of the large conglomerates, which he had originally inherited from his father. From the number of house boards Dalgliesh had noticed on his drive through the town and the neighbouring villages, the business was flourishing. The single word MUSGRAVE, bold black lettering on white, had met him at every turn. Its reiteration had become an irritating, almost premonitory, reminder of his destination.

  Musgrave and the general were an incongruous pair. It was Musgrave who at first sight looked like a soldier; indeed his resemblance to the late Field Marshal Montgomery was so marked that Dalgliesh wasn’t surprised to hear him speak in a parody of that formidable warrior’s staccato bark. The general barely came up to Musgrave’s shoulder. He held his slight body so rigidly that it seemed as if his vertebrae were fused, and his tonsured head, the crown ringed with fine white hair, was speckled as a thrush’s egg. As Musgrave made the introductions, the general looked up at Dalgliesh with eyes as innocently candid as a child’s, but strained and puzzled as if he had looked too long on unattainable horizons. In contrast to Musgrave’s formal business suit and black tie, the general was wearing an ancient tweed jacket cut according to some personal whim, with two oblong patches of suede on each elbow. His shirt and regimental tie were immaculate. With his shining face, he had the polished vulnerability of a well-tended child. Even in the first minutes of casual conversation the mutual respect of the two men was immediately apparent. Whenever the general spoke, Musgrave would gaze from him to Dalgliesh with the slightly anxious frown of a parent, worried lest his offspring’s brilliance should be underrated.

  Musgrave led the way through the wide hall, down a short passage to the room at the back of the house which Berowne had used as his office. He said:

  “Kept it locked since Berowne’s death. Your people rang, but we’d have locked it anyway. The general and I thought it the right thing to do. Not that there’s anything here to shed light. Shouldn’t think so, anyway. Welcome to look, of course.”

  The air smelt stale and dusty, almost sour, as if the room had been locked for months rather than days. Musgrave switched on the light, then strode over to the window and vigorously tugged back the curtains with a rattle of rings. A thin northern light filtered through the plain nylon curtains beyond which Dalgliesh could see a small walled car park. He had seldom, he thought, been in a more depressing room, and yet it was difficult to explain why he should feel this sudden weight of dejection. The room was no worse than any of its kind, functional, uncluttered, impersonal, and yet he felt that the very air he breathed was infected by melancholy.

  He said:

  “Did he stay in this house when he was in the constituency?”

  “No. Just used this room here as an office. He always stayed at the Courtney Arms. Mrs. Powell kept a bed for him. It was cheaper and less trouble than having a flat in the constituency. Talked occasionally about asking me to find one, but it never came to anything. I don’t think his wife was keen.”

  Dalgliesh asked casually:

  “Did you see very much of Lady Berowne?”

  “Not a lot. Did her bit, of course. Annual fête, appearances at the local elections, that sort of thing. Decorative and gracious all round. Not much interested in politics, would you say, General?”

  “Lady Berowne? No, not greatly. The first Lady Berowne was different, of course. But then, the Manstons have been a political family for four generations. I used to wonder sometimes whether Berowne entered politics to please his wife. I don’t think he felt the same commitment after she was killed.”

  Musgrave gave him a sharp glance as if this were a heresy, previously unacknowledged, which even now was better left unspoken. He said quickly:

  “Yes, well, water under the bridge. A sad business. He was driving at the time. I expect you’ve heard.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Yes. I had heard.”

  There was a short, uncomfortable pause during which it seemed to him that the golden image of Barbara Berowne glimmered, unacknowledged and disturbing, in the still air.

  He began his examination of the room, aware of the general’s anxious, hopeful gaze, of Musgrave’s sharp eyes on him as if watching a trainee clerk taking his first inventory. Set in the middle of the floor and facing the window was a solid Victorian desk and a button-backed swivel chair. In front of it were two smaller leather armchairs. There was a modern desk with a heavy old-fashioned typewriter to one side and two more chairs and a low coffee table in front of the fireplace. The only memorable piece of furniture was a bureau-bookcase with brass-bound panes which occupied the recess to the right of the fireplace. Dalgliesh wondered if his companions knew its value. Then he guessed that respect for tradition would forbid its sale. Like the desk, it was part of the room, inviolate, not to be disposed of for a quick profit. Strolling over to it, he saw that it held an oddly assorted collection of reference books, local guides, biographies of notable Tory politicians, Who’s Who, parliamentary reports, Stationery Office publications, even a few classical novels, apparently gummed together by immutable time.

  On the wall behind the desk was a copy of a well-known oil portrait of Winston Churchill with a large colour photograph of Mrs. Thatcher hung to its right. But it was the picture above the fireplace which immediately caught the eye. Moving to it from the bookcase, Dalgliesh saw that it was an eighteenth-century oil painting of the Harrison family by Arthur Devis. The young Harrison, legs elegantly crossed in their satin breeches, stood with proprietorial arrogance beside a garden seat on which sat his thin-faced wife, her arm round a young child. A small girl sat demurely beside her holding a basket of flowers, while to the left her brother’s arm was raised to the string of a kite, luminous in the summer sky. Behind the group stretched a gentle English landscape in high summer, smooth lawns, a lake, a distant manor house. Dalgliesh recalled from his interview with Anthony Farrell that Musgrave had been left a Devis. This, presumably, was it. The general said:

  “Berowne brought it here from Campden Hill Square. He moved the Churchill portrait and hung it here instead. There was some feeling about it at the time. The Churchill had always hung over the mantelpiece.”

  Musgrave had moved up beside Dalgliesh. He said:

  “I’ll miss that picture. Never tired of looking at it. It was painted in Hertfordshire, only six miles from here. You can still see that landscape. The same oak tree, same lake. And the house. It’s a school now. My grandfather was agent when it was sold. It couldn’t be anywhere else but England. I never knew that painter’s work till Berowne brought it here. Rather like a Gainsborough, isn’t it? But I’m not sure I don’t like it better than that one in the National Gallery—Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews. The women are a bit alike, though, aren’t they? Thin-faced, arrogant, wouldn’t care to be married to either of them. But it’s lovely, lovely.”

  The general said quietly:

  “I’ll be relieved when the family send for it. It’s a responsibility.”

  So neither of them knew about the legacy, unless they were better actors than he thought likely. Dalgliesh kept a prudent silence, but he would have given much to have seen Musgrave’s face when he learned of his good luck. He wondered what spurt of quixotic generosity had prompted the gift. It was surely an exceptionally generous way of rewarding political loyalty. And it was an irritating complication. Common sense and imagination protested at the thought of Musgrave slitting a friend’s throat to possess a picture, however obsessively desired, which there was no evidence he even knew had been willed to him. But in the normal course of human life he would have been lucky to have outlived Berowne. He had been at the Campden Hill Square house on the afternoon of Berowne’s death. He could have taken the diary. He almost certainly knew that Berown
e used a cut-throat razor. Like everyone else who benefited from the death, he would have to be tactfully investigated. It was almost certainly a waste of effort; it would take time; it complicated the main thrust of the enquiry; but it still had to be done.

  They were, he knew, waiting for him to talk about the murder. Instead he walked over to the desk and seated himself in Berowne’s chair. That, at least, was comfortable, fitting his long limbs as if made for him. There was a thin film of dust on the desk surface. He pulled open the right-hand drawer and found nothing but a box of writing paper and envelopes, and a diary similar to the one found by the body. Opening it, he saw that it contained only engagements and an aide-mémoire for the days he spent in his constituency. Here, too, his life had been ordered, compartmentalized.

  Outside, a thin drizzle was beginning to fall, misting the window, so that he saw the brick wall of the car park and the bright curved roofs of the cars as if in a pointillist oil painting. What burden, he wondered, had Berowne brought with him into this sunless and depressing office? Disenchantment with the second job to which he had committed himself? Guilt over his dead wife, his failed marriage? Guilt over the mistress whose bed he had so recently left? Guilt over his neglect of his only child, over the baronetcy which had been rightly his brother’s? Guilt because that better-loved elder son was dead and he was still alive? “Most of the things I expected to value have come to me through death.” And had there been, perhaps, a more recent guilt, Theresa Nolan, who had killed herself because she had aborted a child? His child? And what was there for him here amid these files and papers, mocking in their meticulous order his disordered life, but the Catch-22 of the well-intentioned? The miserable batten on their victims. If you provide them with what they crave, open your heart and mind to them, listen with sympathy, they come in ever increasing numbers, draining you emotionally and physically until you have nothing left to give. If you repel them, they don’t come back and you’re left despising yourself for your inhumanity. He said:

  “I suppose this room is the place of last resort.”

  It was Musgrave who understood him the quicker.

  “Nine times out of ten that’s what it is. They’ve exhausted the patience of their families, DHSS staff, local authorities, friends. Then it’s here. ‘I voted for you. Do something.’ Some Members like it, of course. Find it the most fascinating part of the job. They’re the social workers manqué. I suspect he didn’t. What he tried to do, seemed almost obsessed with at times, was explain to people the limits of government power, any government. Remember the last debate on the inner cities? I was in the public gallery. There was a lot of suppressed anger in his irony. ‘If I understand the Honourable Member’s somewhat confused argument the Government are asked to ensure equality of intelligence, talent, health, energy and wealth while, at the same time, abolishing original sin as from the beginning of the next financial year. What Divine Providence has singularly failed to do, Her Majesty’s Government are to achieve by Statutory Order.’ The House didn’t much like it. Not their kind of humour.”

  He added:

  “It was a lost battle anyway, educating the electorate in the limits of executive power. No one wants to believe it. And anyway, in a democracy there’s always an opposition to tell them that anything is possible.”

  The general said:

  “He was a conscientious constituency MP, but it took a lot out of him, more than we realized. I think he was sometimes torn between compassion and irritation.”

  Musgrave jerked open the drawer of a filing cabinet and pulled out a file at random.

  “Take this one, spinster, aged fifty-two. In the middle of the change and feeling like hell. Dad dead. Mum at home and virtually bedridden, demanding, incontinent, getting senile. No hospital bed, and Mum wouldn’t go voluntarily even if there were. Or this one. Two kids, both of them nineteen. She gets pregnant, they marry. Neither set of parents like it. Now they’re living with the in-laws in a small terraced house. No privacy. Can’t make love. Mum will hear through the walls. Baby squalling. Family saying ‘I told you so.’ No hope of a council house for another three years, maybe longer. And that’s typical of what he got every Saturday. Find me a hospital bed, a house, work. Give me money, give me hope, give me love. It’s partly what the job is all about, but I think he found it frustrating. I’m not saying he wasn’t sympathetic to the genuine cases.”

  The general said quietly:

  “All the cases are genuine. Misery always is.”

  He gazed out the window to where the drizzle had now strengthened to steady rain, and then said:

  “Perhaps we should have found him a more cheerful room.”

  Musgrave expostulated:

  “But the Member has always used this room for his surgery, General, and it’s only once a week.”

  The general said quietly:

  “Nevertheless, when we get the new Member he should have something better.”

  Musgrave capitulated without rancour.

  “We could oust George. Or use that front room on the top floor for the surgery. But then the elderly would have to manage the stairs. I don’t see how we could re-house the bar.”

  Dalgliesh half-expected him to call at once for plans and begin the reallocation, his own concerns half-forgotten. He said:

  “Did his resignation come as a surprise?”

  It was Musgrave who answered:

  “Absolutely. A complete shock. A shock and a betrayal. It’s no good beating about the bush, General. It’s a bad time for a by-election, and he must have known.”

  The general said:

  “Hardly a betrayal. We’ve never seen ourselves as a marginal seat.”

  “Anything under fifteen thousand is marginal these days. He should have soldiered on until the election.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “Did he explain his reasons? I take it that he did see you both, he didn’t merely write.”

  Again it was Musgrave who answered:

  “Oh, he saw us all right. Actually deferred writing to the Chancellor until he’d told us. I was on holiday—my usual short autumn break—and he had the decency to wait until I was back. Came up here late last Friday, Friday the thirteenth, appropriately enough. He said that it wouldn’t be right for him to continue as our Member. It was time that his life took a different turn. Naturally I asked what he meant by a different turn. ‘You’re a Member of Parliament,’ I said. ‘You’re not driving a bloody bus.’ He said that he didn’t know yet. He hadn’t been shown. ‘Hadn’t been shown by whom?’ I asked. He said ‘God.’ Well, there’s not much a man can say to that. Nothing like an answer like that for putting a stopper on rational discussion.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Oh, perfectly calm, perfectly normal. Too calm. That’s what was so odd about it. A bit eerie really, wouldn’t you say, General?”

  The general said very quietly:

  “He looked to me like a man released from pain, physical pain. Pale, drawn, but very peaceful. You can’t mistake the look.”

  “Oh, he was peaceful enough. Obstinate too. You couldn’t argue. His decision had nothing to do with politics, though. We did at least establish that. I asked him outright. ‘Are you disillusioned with policy, with the party, with the PM, with us?’ He said it was nothing like that. He said: ‘It’s nothing to do with the party. It’s myself I have to change.’ He seemed surprised by the question, almost amused, as if it were irrelevant. Well, it wasn’t irrelevant to me. The general and I have given a lifetime of service to the party. It matters to us. It’s not some kind of game, a trivial pursuit that you can pick up and put down when you’re bored. We deserved a better explanation and a bloody sight more consideration than we got. He seemed almost to resent having to talk about it. We could have been discussing arrangements for the summer fête.”

  He began pacing the narrow room, his outrage a palpable force. The general said mildly:

  “I’m afraid we were no help to him. None at all.�
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  “He wasn’t asking for help, was he? Or for advice. He’d gone to a higher power for that. It’s a pity he ever set foot in that church. Why did he, anyway? D’you know?” He shot the question at Dalgliesh like an accusation. Dalgliesh said mildly:

  “Out of an interest in Victorian church architecture, apparently.”

  “Pity he didn’t take up fishing or stamp collecting. Oh well, he’s dead, poor devil. No point in feeling bitter now.”

  Dalgliesh said: “You saw that article in the Paternoster Review, of course?”

  Musgrave had got himself under control. He said:

  “I don’t read that kind of journal. If I want book reviews I get them from the Sunday papers.” His tone suggested that he was occasionally given to such odd indulgences. “But someone read it and cut it out; it was round the constituency pretty sharply. The general’s view was that it was actionable.”

  General Nollinge said:

  “I thought that it might be. I advised him to consult his lawyer. He said he’d think about it.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “He did more than that. He showed it to me.”

  “Asked you to investigate, did he?” Musgrave’s tone was sharp.

  “Not really. He wasn’t specific.”

  “Exactly. He wasn’t specific about anything in those last few weeks.”

  He added:

  “Of course, when he first told us that he’d written to the PM and was applying for the Chiltern Hundreds, we remembered that Review article and braced ourselves for the scandal. Quite wrong, of course. Nothing as human or understandable. There’s one odd thing, though, which we thought we’d better mention. Now that he’s dead it can’t do any harm. It happened on the night that girl was drowned. Diana Something-or-other.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Diana Travers.”

  “That’s right. He turned up here that night, well, early morning really. He didn’t arrive until well after midnight, but I was still here working on some papers. Something or someone had scratched his face. It was superficial, but deep enough to have bled. The scab had just formed. It could have been a cat, I suppose, or he may have fallen into a rose bush. Equally, the claws could have been a woman’s.”