by P. D. James
Above the sofa was a line of watercolours: gentle English landscapes, their quality unmistakable. He thought he recognized a Lear and a Cotman. He wondered if these had been Berowne’s gifts, a way perhaps of transferring to her something of value which both could enjoy and which her pride could accept. The wall opposite the fireplace was covered with wooden adjustable units reaching from floor to ceiling. These held a simple stereo system, racks for records, a television set and her books. Walking over to inspect them and flicking them open, he saw she had read history at Reading University. Take away the books and substitute popular prints for the watercolours, and the room could have been a showroom in a newly built block of flats, seducing the prospective buyer with an inoffensive and conventional good taste. He thought: There are rooms designed to be got away from, bleak anterooms where the armour is buckled on to confront the real world outside. There are rooms to come back to, claustrophobic refuges from the arduous business of work and striving. This room was a world in itself, a still centre provisioned with economy and care but containing everything necessary to its owner’s life, the flat itself an investment in more than property. All her capital had been tied up here, monetary and emotional. He looked at the row of plants, varied, well tended, glossily healthy, which were ranged on the windowsill. But then, why shouldn’t they be healthy? She was always there to tend them.
The two women came back into the room, Miss Washburn carrying a tray with a percolator, three large white cups, a jug of hot milk and sugar crystals. She set it down on the coffee table. Dalgliesh and Kate seated themselves on the sofa. Miss Washburn poured the coffee, including a cup for herself, then carried it over to her seat by the fire. As Dalgliesh had expected, the coffee was excellent, but she didn’t drink. She gazed across at them and said:
“The television newsreader said knife wounds. What wounds?”
“Is that how you heard, on the television news?”
She said with great bitterness:
“Of course. How else would I hear?”
Dalgliesh was shaken by a pity so unexpected and so acute that for a moment he dared not speak. And with the pity came a resentment against Berowne which frightened him with its intensity. Surely the man had faced the possibility of sudden death. He was a public figure; he must have known there was always a risk. Hadn’t there been someone that he could trust with his secret? Someone who could have broken the news to her, visited her, brought her at least the comfort that he had thought about saving her pain. Couldn’t he have found time in his over-busy life to write a letter which could have been privately taken to her if he died unexpectedly? Or had he been arrogant enough to think himself immune from the risks of lesser mortals—a coronary, a car accident, an IRA bomb? The tide of anger ebbed, leaving a slough of self-disgust. It had been directed against himself. He thought: Isn’t that how I might have behaved? We’re alike even in this. If he had a splinter of ice in the heart, then so have I.
She repeated stubbornly:
“What knife wounds?”
There was no way of telling it gently.
“His throat was cut. His and the tramp’s who was with him, Harry Mack.” He didn’t know why telling her Harry’s name should be important as it had been important to speak it to Lady Ursula. It was as if he were determined that none of them should forget Harry.
She asked:
“With Paul’s razor?”
“It’s probable.”
“And the razor was still there, by the body?”
She had said body, not bodies. There was only one which concerned her. He said:
“Yes, by his outstretched hand.”
“And the outside door, was it unlocked?”
“Yes.”
She said:
“So he let in his murderer just as he let in the tramp. Or did the tramp kill him?”
“No, the tramp didn’t kill him. Harry was a victim, not a killer.”
“Then it was an outsider. Paul couldn’t have killed anyone, and I don’t believe he killed himself.”
Dalgliesh said:
“We don’t believe it either. We’re treating it as murder. That’s why we need your help. We need you to talk about him. You probably knew him better than any other person.”
She said, so low that he could only just catch the whisper:
“I thought I did. I thought I did.”
She took up her cup and tried to lift it to her lips, but couldn’t control it. Dalgliesh felt Kate stiffen at his side and wondered whether she was controlling an impulse to put her arm round the girl’s shoulder and raise the cup to her lips. But she didn’t move and, at the second attempt, Miss Washburn managed to get her mouth to the brim. She gulped in the coffee, noisily, like a thirsty child.
Watching her, Dalgliesh knew what he was doing and the more fastidious part of his mind was repelled by it. She was alone, unacknowledged, denied the simple human need to share her grief, to talk about her lover. And it was that need which he was about to exploit. He sometimes thought bitterly that exploitation was at the heart of successful detection, particularly with murder. You exploited the suspect’s fear, his vanity, his need to confide, the insecurity that tempted him to say that one vital sentence too many. Exploiting grief and loneliness was only another version of the same technique.
She looked at him and said:
“Can I see where it happened? I mean, without making a fuss about it or being noticed. I should like to sit there alone when they have the funeral. It would be better than sitting at the back of the congregation trying not to make a fool of myself.”
He said:
“At the moment the back of the church is being kept locked. But I’m sure it could be arranged once we’ve finally finished with the place. Father Barnes, he’s the parish priest, would let you in. It’s a very ordinary room. Just a vestry, dusty, rather cluttered, smelling of hymn books and incense, but a very peaceful place.” He added, “I think it happened very quickly. I don’t think he felt any pain.”
“But he must have felt fear.”
“Perhaps not even that.” She said:
“It’s such an unlikely thing to have happened, that conversion, divine revelation, whatever it was. That sounds foolish. Of course it’s unlikely. I meant that it’s an unlikely thing to have happened to Paul. He was, well, worldly. Oh, I don’t mean in the sense that he only cared about success, money, prestige. But he was so in the world, of the world. He wasn’t a mystic. He wasn’t even particularly religious. He usually went to church on Sundays and on the major feast days because he enjoyed the liturgy—he wouldn’t attend if they used the new Bible or Prayer Book. And he said he liked an hour when he could think without interruptions, without the telephone ringing. He once said that formal religious observance confirmed identity, reminded one of the limits of behaviour, something like that. Belief wasn’t meant to be a burden. Nor was disbelief. Does any of this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“He liked food, wine, architecture, women. I don’t mean that he was promiscuous. But he loved the beauty of women. I couldn’t give him that. But I could give him something no one else could, peace, honesty, total trust.”
It was odd, he thought. It was the religious experience not the murder that she needed most to talk about. Her lover was dead and even the enormity of that final, irrevocable loss couldn’t blot out the pain of that earlier betrayal. But they would get round to the murder in time. There was no hurry. He wouldn’t get what he wanted by rushing her now. He asked:
“Did he explain it to you, that experience in the vestry?”
“He came round the following night. He’d had a meeting in the House and it was late. He couldn’t stay long. He told me that he had had an experience of God. That’s all. An experience of God. He made it sound perfectly matter-of-fact. But it wasn’t, of course. Then he left. I knew then I’d lost him. Not as a friend, perhaps, but then I didn’t want him as a friend. I’d lost him as a lover. I’d lost him forever. He didn’t nee
d to tell me that.”
There were, he knew, women to whom secrecy, risk, treachery, conspiracy, gave a love affair that extra erotic charge. They were women as uncommitted as their men, as fond of personal privacy, who wanted an intense relationship but not at the price of their careers, women to whom sexual passion and domesticity were irreconcilable. But she, he thought, had not been one of them. He recalled word for word his conversation with Higginson of Special Branch. Higginson, in his carefully tailored tweeds, straight-backed, clear-eyed, firm-jawed under the cropped moustache, so like the conventional image of an Army officer that, for Dalgliesh, he walked in an aura of bogus respectability; a conman deferential on suburban doorways, a second-hand-car salesman loitering at Warren Street Station. Even his cynicism seemed as carefully calculated as his accent. Yet the accent was perfectly genuine and so was the cynicism. The worst you could say of Higginson was that he liked his job too well.
“It’s the usual thing, my dear Adam. A decorative wife for show, the devoted little woman on the side for use. Only in this case I’m not sure what use precisely. The choice is a little surprising. You’ll see. But there’s no security problem, never has been. They’ve both been remarkably discreet. Berowne has always made it plain that he accepted any necessary security precautions, but that he was entitled to take some risks where his private life was concerned. She has never made trouble. I’d be surprised if she makes it now. There’ll be no embarrassing little bundle in eight months’ time.”
Could she, he wondered, really have shut her eyes to the reality, that the affair was documented, every step of its progress noted with almost clinical detachment by those cynical watchers who had decided, no doubt after the normal bureaucratic processes, that she could be classified as a harmless diversion, that Berowne could enjoy his weekly entertainment without official harassment? Surely she couldn’t have deceived herself, and neither could he. She was, after all, herself a bureaucrat, a Principal. She must know how the system worked. She was still comparatively junior, but it was her world. One sign that she was a security risk and he would have been warned off. And he would have taken the warning. You didn’t become a Minister of State if you hadn’t enough ambition, egotism and ruthlessness to know where your priorities had to lie.
He asked:
“How did you meet?”
“How do you expect? At work. I was a Principal in his Private Office.”
So it had been as he had expected.
“And then when you became lovers, you asked for a transfer?”
“No, I was due for a transfer. You don’t stay long in Private Office.”
“Did you ever meet his family?”
“He didn’t take me home, if that’s what you mean. He didn’t introduce me to his wife or Lady Ursula and say, ‘Meet Carole Washburn. Meet my mistress.’”
“How often did you see him?”
“As often as he could get away. Sometimes we had a half day. Sometimes a couple of hours. He tried to drop in on his way to his constituency if he was alone. Sometimes we couldn’t meet for weeks.”
“And he never suggested marriage? Forgive me, this question could be important.”
“If you mean that someone could have slit his throat to prevent his asking for a divorce to marry me, you’re wasting your time. The answer to your question, Commander, is no, he never suggested marriage. And neither did I.”
“Would you describe him as happy?”
She didn’t seem surprised by the apparent irrelevance of the question, nor did she need to give it much thought. She had known the answer for a long time. “No, not really. What happened to him—I don’t mean the murder—what happened to him in that church, whatever it was, I don’t think it would have happened if he’d been satisfied with his life, if our love had been enough for him. It was enough for me; all I wanted, all I needed. It wasn’t enough for him. I’ve always known that. Nothing was enough for Paul, nothing.”
“Did he tell you that he’d had a poison pen letter about Theresa Nolan and Diana Travers?”
“Yes, he told me. He didn’t take it seriously.”
“He took it seriously enough to show it to me.”
She said:
“Theresa Nolan’s child, the one she aborted, it wasn’t his, if that’s what you’re thinking. It couldn’t have been. He would have told me. Look, it was just a poison pen letter. Politicians get them all the time. They’re used to them. Why worry about it now?”
“Because anything that happened during the last weeks of his life could be important. You must see that.”
“What does it matter, the scandal or the lies. They can’t touch him now. They can’t hurt him. Nothing can. Not any more.”
He asked gently:
“Were there things that hurt him?”
“He was human, wasn’t he? Of course there were things that hurt him.”
“What things? His wife’s infidelity?”
She didn’t reply.
He said:
“Miss Washburn, my priority is catching his murderer, not preserving his reputation. They needn’t be incompatible. I’ll try to see that they aren’t. But I’m clear which has to come first. Shouldn’t you be?”
She spoke with sudden fierceness:
“No. I’ve preserved his privacy—not reputation, privacy—for three years. It’s cost me a lot. I haven’t complained to him. I’m not complaining now. I knew the rules. But I’m going to go on preserving his privacy. It was important to him. If I don’t, all those years of discretion, never being seen together, never being able to say, ‘This is my man, we’re lovers,’ always taking second place to his job, his wife, his constituents, his mother, what has been the point of it? You can’t bring him back.”
That was always the cry when the going got rough: “You can’t bring them back.” He remembered his second child murderer—the hidden cache of pornographic photographs the police had uncovered in the killer’s flat, indecent poses of his victims, pathetic childish bodies violated and exposed. It had been his job as a newly promoted detective inspector to ask a mother to identify her daughter. The woman’s eyes had glanced at the photograph once only and then stared ahead, denying knowledge, denying truth. There were some realities which the mind refused to accept even in the cause of retribution, of justice. You can’t bring them back. It was the cry of the whole defeated, anguished, grieving world.
But she was speaking.
“There were a lot of things I couldn’t give him. But I could give him secrecy, discretion. I’ve heard about you. There was that business down in the Fens, the forensic scientist who was murdered. Paul told me about it. It was quite a triumph for you, wasn’t it? You say, ‘What about the victim?’ But what about your victims? I expect you’ll catch Paul’s murderer. You usually do, don’t you? Does it ever occur to you to count the cost?”
Dalgliesh felt Kate stiffen at the clear note of dislike and contempt. The girl went on:
“But you’ll have to do it without me. You don’t really need my help. I’m not going to break Paul’s confidences just so that you can notch up another success.”
He said:
“There’s the matter of the dead tramp, Harry Mack.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve nothing left over to spare for Harry Mack, not even sympathy. I’m leaving Harry Mack out of my calculations.”
“I can’t leave him out of mine.”
“Of course not, that’s your job. Look, I know nothing that can help solve this murder for you. If Paul had enemies, I don’t know about them. I’ve told you about him and me. You knew anyway. But I’m not getting involved any deeper. I’m not ending up in the witness box, photographed on my way into court, pictured on the front page, ‘Paul Berowne’s Little Bit on the Side.’”
She got to her feet. It was the sign for them to go. When they reached the door, she said:
“I want to get away, just for a couple of weeks. I’ve plenty of leave in hand. If the papers find out about me, then I don’t wan
t to be here when it happens. I couldn’t bear that. I want to get out of London, out of England. You can’t stop me.”
Dalgliesh said:
“No. But we’ll still be here when you come back.”
“And if I don’t come back?” She spoke with the weary acceptance of defeat. How could she live abroad, dependent as she was on her job, her salary? This flat might have lost its meaning for her, but London was still her home and the job would be important to her for more reasons than money. A young woman didn’t become a Principal without intelligence, hard work, ambition. But he answered her question as if it had reality.
“Then I should have to come to you.”
Outside in the car, buckling on his seat belt, he said:
“I wonder if we would have got more out of her if you’d seen her alone. She might have spoken more freely if I hadn’t been there.”
Kate said:
“Possibly, sir, but only if I’d promised to keep it confidential, and I don’t see how I could have done that.”
Massingham, he suspected, would have promised secrecy and then had no compunction in telling. That was one of the differences between them.
“No,” he said, “you couldn’t have done that.”
five
Back in New Scotland Yard, Kate burst into Massingham’s office. She found him alone, surrounded by paper, and had pleasure in interrupting his conscientious but unenthusiastic perusal of the door-to-door enquiry reports with a vehement account of the interview. She had controlled her sense of outrage with difficulty on the drive back to the Yard and was in the mood for a confrontation, preferably with a male.