by P. D. James
Kate said: ‘He must have taken off his own shirt. It was clutched in his right hand. It looked as if he had taken it off with some idea of using it to put out the fire. I mean, look at the photograph. The right hand is still holding part of the shirt, the rest of it trails across the body. It looks to me as if he died on his face and his killer turned over the body, perhaps using his foot, and then prised open the mouth. Look at the position of the knees, slightly bent. He didn’t die in that position. It’s consistent with the post-mortem findings that he died on his face. He was crawling across the room towards the fire.’
‘OΚ, I agree. But he couldn’t have hoped to put it out, not that way. The shirt would have caught fire.’
‘I know he couldn’t, but that’s what it looks like. Snuffing out the fire may have seemed possible to his confused mind.’
Dalgliesh didn’t intervene but listened while they argued it out.
Daniel said: ‘That suggests he knew what was happening to him. But if he did, the obvious thing was to open the door and let in air, then turn off the gas.’
‘But suppose the door had been locked on the outside and the tap removed from the gas fire. When he tried to open the high window the cord snapped because someone had frayed it to make damned sure it would as soon as it was tugged with any force. The murderer must have first moved out the chairs and table so that Etienne couldn’t climb on them to reach the window and break the glass. The window was stuck fast. He couldn’t have opened it if he had, not unless he had something to bash it with.’
Daniel said: ‘The tape recorder perhaps?’
‘Too small, too fragile. All the same, I agree he would have tried. He could have battered the glass with his hands, but there was no evidence of bruising of the knuckles. I think that the furniture must have been moved before he entered the room. We know from the marks on the wall that the table was normally a few inches to the left.’
‘That isn’t proof. The cleaner could have moved it.’
‘I didn’t say that it was proof, but it is significant. Both Gabriel Dauntsey and Mrs Demery said that the table wasn’t in the usual position.’
‘That doesn’t let them out as suspects.’
‘I didn’t say that it did. Dauntsey is an obvious suspect. No one had better opportunity than he. But if Dauntsey moved out the chairs and table, surely he would have taken trouble to place the table back precisely where it was. Unless, of course, he was in a hurry.’ She broke off, then turned to Dalgliesh excitedly. ‘And of course, sir, he was in a hurry. He had to be back in the time it would take to bath.’
Daniel said: ‘We’re going too fast. It’s all conjecture.’
‘I’d call it logical deduction.’
Dalgliesh spoke for the first time. ‘Kate’s theory is reasonable; it conforms with all the facts as we know them. But what we haven’t got is a scintilla of hard evidence. And don’t let’s forget the snake. How far have you got with finding out who knew that it was in Miss Blackett’s desk drawer, apart of course from Miss Blackett, Mandy Price, Dauntsey and the two Etiennes?’
It was Kate who replied. ‘The news was round the office by the afternoon, sir. Mandy told Mrs Demery that Etienne had told Miss Blackett to get rid of it when they were making coffee together in the kitchen, shortly after 11.30. Mrs Demery admits that she may have told one or two people when she took round the afternoon tea trolley. “One or two people” probably means every room in the building. Mrs Demery was a bit vague about what she actually said, but Maggie FitzGerald in publicity is quite certain that they were told that Mr Gerard had instructed Miss Blackett to get rid of the snake and that she’d put it in her desk drawer. Mr Sydney Bartrum in accounts claims that he didn’t know. He said that he and his staff had no time to gossip with the office domestics and that they wouldn’t have the opportunity anyway. Their department is in number 10 and they make their own afternoon tea. De Witt and Miss Peverell have admitted that they knew. Miss Blackett’s drawer was the natural place for anyone to look anyway. She had a sentimental affection for Hissing Sid and wouldn’t have thrown it away.’
Daniel said: ‘Why did Demery bother to pass on the news? It was hardly a major office scandal.’
‘No, but it obviously caused a stir. Most of the staff knew or suspected that Gerard Etienne wouldn’t be sorry to see the back of Miss Blackett. They were probably wondering how long she’d hold out, whether she’d chuck the job before she was sacked. Any fresh spat between those two was news.’
Dalgliesh said: ‘You see the importance of the snake. Either it was wound round Etienne’s neck and stuffed into his mouth by the murderer, probably to explain the breaking of the rigor of the jaw, or the joker stumbled on the body and saw the chance of a particularly revolting piece of malice. If the murderer did it, is he or she also the joker? Were these pranks part of a carefully laid plan which goes back as far as the first incident? That would tie up with the frayed window cord. If that was deliberate it was done over a period of time. Or did the murderer realize the significance of the loose jaw and use the snake on impulse to conceal the fact that he’d actually removed some object from Etienne’s mouth?’
Daniel said: ‘There’s another possibility, sir. Suppose the joker finds the body, thinks it’s a natural or accidental death, then decides to stir things up by making it look like murder. It could have been he or she who moved the table out of place as well as putting the snake round Etienne’s neck.’
Kate objected. ‘He couldn’t have weakened the window cord, that must have been done earlier. And why bother to shift the table? That could only confuse the issue and make the death look like murder if the joker already knew that Etienne had died from carbon-monoxide poisoning.’
‘He must have known. He turned off the gas fire.’
Kate said: ‘He’d have done that anyway. That small room must have been like a furnace.’ She turned to Dalgliesh. ‘Sir, I think there’s only one theory that fits all the facts. This was intended to look like an accidental death from carbon-monoxide poisoning. The murderer planned to be the one to find the body and to find it onhis own. All he had to do then was to replace the tap and turn off the gas – a natural reaction anyway – then put back the table and chair, take away the tape and raise the alarm. But he couldn’t find the tape, and when he did he couldn’t get his hands on it without breaking the rigor in the jaw. He knew that this wouldn’t be missed by a competent detective or the forensic pathologists, so he used the snake to suggest that this was an accidental death complicated by the malice of the office joker.’
Daniel objected. ‘Why take the tape recorder? I’m talking about the murderer now.’
‘Why leave it? He had to remove the tape, he might as well take the recorder. Look, the natural thing would be to chuck it in the Thames.’ She turned to Dalgliesh. ‘Do you think there’s any chance an underwater search could find it, sir?’
Dalgliesh said: ‘Extremely unlikely. And if it did the tape wouldn’t be intact. The murderer would certainly have erased any messages. I doubt whether the expense of a search would be justified, but you’d better have a word with the people here. Find out what the bottom of the river is like at Innocent House.’
Daniel said: ‘There’s something else, sir. If the killer wanted to leave a message for his victim, why use the tape? Why not write it? He had to recover it anyway. It would have been as easy to recover a piece of paper, perhaps easier.’
Dalgliesh said: ‘But not as safe. If Etienne had time enough before unconsciousness supervened, he could tear up the paper and hide the separate pieces. But if he didn’t tear it, paper is easier to conceal than a tape. The murderer knew that he might not have much time. He needed to retrieve that message and find it quickly. And there’s another point: a speaking voice can’t be ignored, a written message can. The interesting thing about this whole case is why he needed to leave a message at all.’
Daniel said: ‘To gloat. To have the last word. To show how clever he was.’
&
nbsp; Dalgliesh said: ‘Or to explain to someone why he had to die. If that was the reason then the motive for this murder may not be obvious. It may lie in the past, even in the distant past.’
‘But if so, why wait until now? If the murderer is here at Innocent House, Etienne could have been killed any time during the last twenty years or so. He’s been part of the firm since he left Cambridge. What has happened recently to make this death necessary?’
Dalgliesh said: ‘Etienne took over as chairman and MD, he proposed to force the sale of Innocent House, and he became engaged.’
‘Do you think the engagement could be relevant, sir?’
‘Anything could be, Kate. I’m going to see Etienne’s father tomorrow morning. Claudia Etienne drove down to Bradwell-on-Sea early this evening to break the news to him and to ask him to agree to a meeting. She won’t be staying the night. I’ve asked her to meet you at Etienne’s flat in the Barbican tomorrow. But the priority is to check all the alibis, starting with the partners and staff at Innocent House. Daniel, you and Robbins had better see Esmé Carling. Find out where she went when she left Better Books at Cambridge. There was Gerard Etienne’s engagement party on the 10th of July. We need to check the guest list and interview people who were there. You’re going to need tact. The line to take is whether they did wander through the house and whether they saw anything odd or suspicious. But we concentrate on the partners. Did anyone see Claudia Etienne and her companion on the river, and at what time? Check with St Thomas’s Hospital what time Gabriel Dauntsey was brought in and when he left, and of course on his alibi. I’ll be leaving early for Bradwell-on-Sea but I should be back by early afternoon. For the present I think we’d better call it a day.’
35
The partners spent Friday night apart. Standing at her kitchen table, trying to summon the energy to decide what to eat, Frances reflected that this wasn’t surprising. They led separate lives away from Innocent House and it sometimes seemed to her that they made a deliberate attempt to distance themselves outside the office, almost as if they wanted to demonstrate that all they had in common was work. They seldom discussed their social engagements and she would occasionally be a guest at the party of another publisher and be surprised to see Claudia’s sleek head momentarily appearing in a gap of yelling faces, or be at the theatre with a friend from her convent schooldays and see Dauntsey painfully edging his way along the row ahead. Then they would greet each other as politely as acquaintances. Tonight she sensed that something stronger than habit was holding them apart, that they had grown increasingly reluctant to discuss Gerard’s death as the day progressed, and that the frankness of that hour closeted together in the boardroom had been displaced by a wary distrust of intimacy.
James, she knew, had no choice. He needed to go home to Rupert, and she envied him the necessity of obligation. She had never met his friend, never been invited to his house since Rupert’s arrival there and she wondered now about their life together. But at least he would have someone with whom he could share the distresses of the day, a day which now seemed inordinate in length. They had, by common unspoken consent, left Innocent House early and she had waited while Claudia locked the door and set the alarm. She had asked, ‘Will you be all right, Claudia?’ and, even as she spoke, had been struck by the futility, the banality of the question. She had wondered if she ought to offer to go home with Claudia, but was afraid that this might only be seen as a confession of weakness, her own need for company. And Claudia, after all, had her fiancé – if he was her fiancé. She was more likely to turn to him than to Frances.
Claudia had replied: ‘All I want at the moment is to get home and be alone.’ Then she had added, ‘What about you, Frances? Will you be all right?’
The same meaningless, unanswerable question. She wondered how Claudia would have replied if she’d said, ‘No, I’m not all right. I don’t want to be alone. Stay with me tonight, Claudia. Sleep in my spare room.’
She could, of course, telephone Gabriel. She wondered what he was doing, what he was thinking, in that plain underfurnished apartment beneath her. He too had said, ‘Will you be all right, Frances? Ring me if you need company.’ She wished that he had said, ‘Do you mind if I come up, Frances? I don’t want to be alone.’ Instead he had placed the onus on her. To ring for him was to confess a weakness, a need, which he might not welcome. What was it about Innocent House, she wondered, that made it so difficult for people to express a human need or to give each other a simple reciprocal kindness?
In the end she opened a carton of mushroom soup and boiled herself an egg. She felt extraordinarily tired. Curled last night in Gabriel’s chair, her broken hours of fitful sleep hadn’t been the best preparation for a day of almost continuous trauma. But she knew that she wasn’t ready for sleep. Instead, after washing up her supper things, she went into the room which had been her father’s bedroom and which she had now made into a small sitting-room and sat herself in front of the television. The bright images passed in front of her eyes; the news, a documentary, a comedy, an old film, a modern play. As she pressed the buttons, flicking from channel to channel, the changing faces, grinning, laughing, serious, magisterial, the mouths continually opening and closing were a visual drug, meaning nothing, evoking no emotion, but at least providing a spurious companionship, a fleeting and irrational solace.
At one o’clock she went to bed, taking with her a glass of hot milk laced with a little whisky. It was effective and she slipped away into unconsciousness with the last thought that she was, after all, to enjoy the benison of sleep.
The nightmare returned to her in the early hours, the old familiar nightmare but in a new guise, more terrible, more intensely real. She was walking along the Greenwich tunnel between her father and Mrs Rawlings. They were holding her hands but their grasp was an imprisonment not a comfort. She couldn’t run away and there was nowhere to run. Behind her she could hear the cracking of the tunnel roof but she dared not turn her head because she knew that even to look back would be disaster. In front of her the tunnel stretched longer than in life with a circle of bright sunlight at the end. As they walked the tunnel lengthened and the circle became gradually smaller, until it was only a small gleaming saucer and she knew that soon it would recede into a pinpoint of light, then disappear. Her father was walking very upright, not looking at her, not speaking. He was wearing the tweed coat with the short cape which he always wore in winter and which she had given to the Salvation Army. He was angry that she had given it away without consulting him, but he had found it and got it back. She wasn’t surprised to see the snake wound round his neck. It was a real snake, immense as a cobra, expanding and contracting, draped round his shoulders, hissing with its evil life, ready to crush the breath out of him. And overhead the tiles of the roof were wet and the first large drops were already falling. But she saw that they weren’t drops of water, but of blood. And now suddenly she broke free and began to run, screaming, towards that unobtainable pinpoint of light while the roof ahead cracked and fell and there rolled towards her, shutting out the last light, the black obliterating wave of death.
She woke to find herself slumped against the window, her hands beating the glass. With consciousness came relief, but the horror of the nightmare remained like a stain on the mind. But at least she knew it for what it was. She went over to her bed and turned on the lamp. It was nearly five o’clock. There was no point now in trying to sleep again. Instead she put on her dressing-gown, drew the curtains and opened the windows. With the darkened room behind her she could see the luminous glimmer of the river and a few high stars. The terror of her dream was passing but it gave way to that other terror from which she had no hope of waking.
Suddenly she thought of Adam Dalgliesh. His flat, too, was on the river, at Queenhithe. She wondered how she knew where he lived, and then remembered some of the press coverage of his last and successful book of poetry. He was a very private man but that fact at least had emerged. It was odd that their lives were
linked by this dark tide of history. She wondered if he, too, was wakeful, whether a mile or two upstream his tall dark figure was standing looking out over the same dangerous river.
BOOK THREE
Work in Progress
36
On Saturday, 16 October Jean-Philippe Etienne took his morning walk as usual at nine o’clock. Neither the time nor the route varied whatever the season or the weather. He would walk along the narrow ridge of rock between the marshes and the ploughed fields on which the Roman fort of Othona was said to have stood, past the Anglo-Celtic chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall round the headland to the Blackwater estuary. It was rare for him to meet anyone on his morning perambulation, even in summer when a visitor to the chapel or a bird-watcher might be abroad early, but if he did he would say a courteous good morning, but no more. The locals knew that he had come to Othona House for solitude and had no wish to violate it. He accepted no incoming telephone calls, received no visitors. But this morning at half past ten a visitor would come who could not be refused.
Now in the strengthening light he looked across the calm straits of the estuary to the lights on Mersea Island and thought about this unknown Commander Dalgliesh. The message he had sent to the police by Claudia had been unambiguous: he had no information to offer about his son’s death, no theories to propose, no possible explanations of the mystery to put forward, no suspect he could name. His own view was that Gerard had died by accident, however odd or suspicious some of the circumstances. Accidental death seemed likelier than any other explanation, certainly far likelier than murder. Murder. The heavy consonants of horror thudded in his mind, evoking nothing but repugnance and disbelief.
And now, standing as still as if petrified on the narrow Strip of gritty beach where the minuscule waves spent themselves in a thin smudge of dirty foam, and watching the lamps across the water die one by one as the day brightened, he paid his son the reluctant tribute of memory. Most of the memories were troubling, but since they besieged his mind and could not be repelled it was perhaps better that they should be accepted, made sense of and disciplined. Gerard had grown to adolescence with one central assurance: he was the son of a hero. That was important to a boy, to any boy, but particularly one as proud as he. He might resent his father, feel himself inadequately loved, undervalued, neglected, but he could do without the love if he had the pride, pride in the name and in what that name stood for. It had always been important to him to know that the man whose genes he carried had been tested as had few of his generation and had not been found wanting. The decades were passing and memories fading, but a man could still be judged by what he had done in those turbulent years of war. Jean-Philippe’s reputation was secure, inviolable. The reputation of other heroes of the Resistance had been sullied by the revelations of later years, but never his. The medals that he never now wore had been honestly earned.
