by P. D. James
“My wife did, from the moment our daughter died.” Then he added, “We planned it together.”
He seemed to need to explain.
“I came late tonight, but you hadn’t left. The light in the front room was still on. I sat in the shop and listened and waited. But you didn’t leave. There were no footsteps overhead, no sounds. At midnight I crept upstairs. The door was smashed and open. I thought she was asleep. She looked as if she was asleep. I didn’t notice until I drove in the knife that her eyes were open. Her eyes were wide open and she was looking at me.”
She said: “You’d better go. You did what you came for. It wasn’t your fault that she escaped you in the end.” Death of one person can be paid but once and that she hath discharged. What thou wouldst do is done unto thy hand.
She said more loudly, shaking him gently by the shoulder: “I shall have to call the police. If you don’t want to be here when they come you’d better go now. There’s no need for you to get involved.”
He didn’t move. He was staring at the bar of the fire. He muttered something. She had to bend her head to hear him: “I didn’t know it would be like this. I want to be sick.”
She supported him into the kitchen and held his head while he retched over the sink, surprised that she could touch him without revulsion, could be so aware of the curiously silken texture of his hair, sliding over the hard skull. It seemed to her that her hand experienced simultaneously every single hair and the soft moving mass. She wanted to say: “She didn’t mean to kill. It was a burst of anger which she couldn’t control. She never wanted your child dead in the way that you and I wanted her dead, willed her death.” But what was the use? What did it matter? His child was dead. Her mother was dead. Words, explanations, excuses, were an irrelevance. About that final negation there was nothing new to be thought, nothing new to be said, nothing that could be put right.
Everything in the kitchen was the same. As his head shuddered between her hands and the stink of vomit rose to her nostrils, she gazed round at the familiar objects, marvelling that they were unchanged. The teapot and two cups on the round papier mâché tray; the glistening pellets of coffee beans in their glass jar, how erotically beautiful they were, freshly ground coffee had been one of their extravagances; the row of herbs in their pots on the window ledge. The north-facing window wasn’t the best light for them, but still they had thrived. Tomorrow they had planned to snip the first chives for a herb omelette. The dressing her mother had made was still there in a jug on the table, the tang of vinegar still in the air. She wondered if she would be able to smell it in the future without thinking of this moment. She looked at the carefully folded tea towels, the two mugs on their hooks, the saucepans with their handles carefully aligned. How excessively neat they had been, imposing order and permanence on their insubstantial and precarious lives.
He was still retching but now it was only bile. The worst of the sickness was over. She handed him a towel and said: “The bathroom’s on the half landing if you want it.”
“Yes, I know.” He wiped his face and his mild eyes met hers. “Won’t you get into trouble? With the police, I mean.”
“No. She killed herself. The knife wound was made after death. Doctors can prove that. You saw yourself that she didn’t bleed. I don’t think there is a criminal offence of mutilating the dead. Even if there is, I don’t suppose they’ll charge me. All anyone will want is to get the whole unsavoury affair neatly tidied up. You see, no one cares about her. No one will mind that she’s dead. She doesn’t count as a human being. They think that she should have been killed nine years ago. She should have been hanged, that’s what they’ll all say.”
“But the police might think you killed her.”
“There’s a suicide note to prove I didn’t.”
“But suppose they think that you forged it.”
How extraordinary that he should get that idea. What a sophistical mind he must have. She looked into the meek, anxious eyes. Behind them a clever little brain must be scheming away. He ought to be writing thrillers. He had the mind of a thriller writer, obsessive, guilt-ridden, preoccupied with trivia. He had lived too long with thoughts of death. She said: “I can prove that she wrote it. I’ve got a long specimen of her handwriting, a story she wrote in prison, a story about a rapist and his wife. Look, you’d better go. There’s no point in letting the police find you unless you like the idea of seeing your face in all the newspapers. Some people do; is that what you want?”
He shook his head. He said: “I want to go home.”
“Home?” she asked. She hadn’t thought of him as having a home, this nocturnal predator with his finicky hands that could do so much damage, his stink of vomit. She thought he whispered something about Casablanca being home, but that was surely absurd.
He asked: “Shall we see each other again?”
“I don’t suppose so. Why should we? All we have in common is that we both wanted her dead. I don’t see that as a basis for social acquaintance.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I’ll be all right. There’ll be plenty of people to make sure that I’m all right.”
There was a rucksack on the floor beside the door. She hadn’t noticed it before. He took off his mackintosh, rolled it, and stuffed it inside. It was, she thought, something he had done many times before. But when he reached for the knife, she said: “Leave it. Leave it where it is. I’ll see that it has my fingerprints on it.”
They went down the stairs together as if he were a dilatory visitor whom she was managing to see off at last. He walked quickly up Delaney Street without a backward glance, and she watched him out of sight. She returned to the bedroom. She couldn’t look at her mother, but she made herself take up the knife and hold it for a moment in her hand. Then she ran out of the flat to Marylebone Station to telephone Maurice.
The entrance to the concourse was deserted, the row of telephone booths empty, except for one figure. A young man was huddled in the furthest booth. She couldn’t tell whether he was drunk or asleep. Perhaps he might even be dead. But she recognized him. She had seen him before, patiently trying to hand out texts in Mell Street market.
She found a tenpenny piece in her purse, dialled the seven familiar digits, then pushed the coin home as Maurice’s voice repeated the number. He had answered at once. But then, the telephone was by his bed. She said: “It’s Philippa. Please come. My mother’s dead. I wanted her to kill herself and she has.”
He said: “Are you sure she’s dead?”
“I’m sure.”
“Where are you ringing from?”
“Marylebone Station.”
“I’ll come straight away. Wait where you are. Don’t talk to anyone. Do nothing until I come.”
The streets were almost empty in the calm of the early hours, but, even so, he must have driven very fast. It seemed only a matter of minutes before she heard the Rover.
She walked towards him and into his arms. Suddenly they were round her, fierce and stiff, a clasp of possession not a gesture of comfort. Then, as suddenly, he let her go and she tottered and nearly fell. She felt his fingers gripping her shoulder, propelling her towards the car. He said: “Show me.”
The Rover slid to a stop outside the door of number 12. He took his time over locking it, looking up and down the street, calm and unhurried as if this were a late social visit and he would prefer on the whole not to be observed. She turned the key in the Yale lock and he followed her upstairs. Their climbing feet echoed in the hall. If he noticed the smashed lock on the flat door, he said nothing. She led the way to her mother’s room and stood aside, waiting and watching while he walked over to the bed and looked down. He read the suicide note, his face expressionless. He picked up the empty bottle and studied the label, then tipped out onto his palm the one white bullet-shaped pellet. He said: “Distalgesic. Considerate of her to have left this. It’ll save the analyst time and trouble. I wonder how she got hold o
f it. Distalgesic is on prescription; you can’t just buy it across the counter. Someone must have smuggled it into prison for her if she didn’t steal it from the hospital wing or have it prescribed for her. That’s probably something we’ll never know. She’s not the first person to have mistaken the strength of this stuff. It’s got paracetamol in it; but that isn’t the danger. It contains an opium-type compound. An overdose kills very quickly. She was planning the usual histrionic gesture and misjudged the strength.”
Philippa wanted to reply: “She didn’t misjudge anything or anyone. She killed herself because she meant to kill herself, because she knew that’s what I wanted her to do. You might at least give her the credit of knowing what she did.” But she said nothing.
He bent his head slightly and looked at the savaged throat intently, like a doctor. Then he frowned. It was a frown of worried distaste, as if he were faced with a technical problem and had encountered an unexpected snag. He said: “Who did this?”
“I did. At least I suppose I did.”
“You suppose you did?”
“I can remember wanting to kill her. I can remember going into the kitchen and getting the knife. That’s all.”
“When you talk to the police, forget the first sentence. You didn’t kill her, so what you intended or wanted isn’t relevant. Did you break down the door, too?”
So he had noticed. But of course he had. She said: “After I got back from Caldecote Terrace we quarrelled. I ran out of the flat. I didn’t intend to come back. But then I did come back. We’ve only one pair of keys and I’d forgotten to take them. I banged on the door but she wouldn’t let me in, so I broke it down. I had a chisel with me from the tool chest. I’m not sure why. I think I might have been threatening her with it before I ran out, but I can’t remember now.”
He said: “If you didn’t take the keys with you, how did you get in at the street door? Aren’t they on the same ring?”
She had forgotten that. She said quickly: “There’s only a Yale there. I slipped the latch up. I got used to doing that if I went out briefly at night.”
“Where is the chisel, the one you used on the door?”
“I put it back in the toolbox.”
The inquisition had ended. He moved from the bed and said: “Come away from here. Is there another room or somewhere comfortable?”
“No, not very comfortable. There’s only my room and the kitchen.”
He placed his arm round her shoulders and pushed her gently into the passage. They went into the kitchen. He said: “I’m going to ring the police now from Marylebone Station. Do you want to come with me, or are you all right here?”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Yes, that would be best. Get your coat. It’s cold.”
He made her wait in the car while he telephoned. It didn’t take long. When he came back to the car he said: “They’ll be here very quickly. When they come just tell them what you told me. You can’t remember anything between going to the kitchen drawer for the knife and running out to telephone me.”
The police came quickly too. There seemed a lot of them for so unimportant a death. She was put to wait in her own room. They lit the gas fire. They brought her tea. She wanted to explain that it was the wrong cup, her mother’s cup. There was a policewoman with her, blonde, pretty, almost as young as herself. She looked attractive in her dark blue, well-cut uniform. Her face, disciplined of pity, watchful, was carefully neutral. Philippa thought: “She isn’t sure whether she’s guarding a victim or a villain. Normally she would have put a consoling hand round my shoulders. But then, there is that slit in my mother’s throat.” When the detective came in to question her Maurice was with him, and another man whom she recognized as Maurice’s solicitor. He introduced him formally.
“Philippa, I don’t think you’ve ever met Charles Cullingford. This is my daughter.”
She stood up and shook hands. It was as punctilious and ordinary as if they were meeting in the drawing room at Caldecote Terrace. He kept his eyes rather too carefully from looking round the bleak little bedroom. The police brought in two chairs from her mother’s room. They introduced the inspector to her but she didn’t take in his name. He was dark and fitted rather too well into his clothes and his eyes had no kindness in them. But he questioned her gently and Maurice was at her side.
“Has anyone else been here this evening?”
“No. Only us.”
“Who broke in the door?”
“I did it. I did it with the chisel in the kitchen drawer.”
“Why did you take the chisel with you when you left the flat?”
“In case she tried to lock me out.”
“Had your mother ever done that before?”
“No.”
“Why did you think she might lock you out tonight?”
“We had a quarrel after my father had told me that she’d given me away.”
“Your father says that you ran out of the flat and walked for about three hours. What happened when you came back?”
“I found that the door was locked and she didn’t answer, so I broke in with the chisel.”
“Did you know when you found her that she was dead?”
“I think so. I can’t remember what I felt. I can’t remember what happened after I broke down the door. I think I wanted to kill her.”
“Where did you get the knife?”
“From the kitchen drawer.”
“But before that? It’s new isn’t it?”
“My mother bought it. We wanted a sharp knife. I don’t know where she got it.”
They went away again. There was a knock at the door, loud voices, confident feet. Her door was ajar. The policewoman got up and closed it. The feet were moving more slowly now, half-shuffling down the passage. They were taking her mother away. When she realized this she sprang up with a cry, but the policewoman was quicker. She felt her shoulder seized in a surprisingly strong grip and, gently but firmly, she was forced back into her chair.
The blur of voices came through the door, disconnected words—“… clearly dead when she stuck the knife in. You didn’t need to pull me out of bed to tell you that. I suppose you’ve got a charge somewhere which fits the case if you want to find one, but it can’t be homicide.”
Maurice’s voice: “This place is pathetic. God knows what these six weeks have been like for her. I couldn’t stop her … she’s of age … my fault. I should never have told her that her mother battered and then abandoned her.”
She thought she heard someone say: “It’s all for the best.” But perhaps that was imagination. Perhaps that was only what they were all thinking. Then Maurice was standing over her.
“We’re going home now, Philippa. It’s going to be all right.”
But of course it would be all right. Maurice would arrange it all. He would dispose of the flat, selling the last few weeks of the lease, get rid of all that was left of their life together. She would never see any of their belongings again. The Henry Walton would be replaced on her wall at Caldecote Terrace. That was too expensive to be discarded. But it was spoilt for her. She would look at it now with different eyes, seeing behind the elegance and order the prison hulks lying off Gravesend, the flogging-block, the public hangman. But there had to be some limit to the indulgence of sensitivity. She would be expected to go on living with the Walton. But everything else would go. The rest would be treated as the rubbish it was. His lawyers would silence the publicity, would gentle her through the further questioning, the inquest, the publicity. Only there wasn’t likely to be much publicity. Maurice would see to that too. Everyone, police, coroner, Press, would be sympathetic. When they remembered that ravaged throat they would fight down repulsion or dislike, remembering whose daughter she was. They would be sorry for her; but they would be a little frightened too. Had she only imagined the inspector’s final words, bluff, almost humorous: “You can take her home now, sir. And for God’s sake keep her away from knives.”
Afterwar
ds, he would take her away, perhaps to Italy since an Italian visit had always been his personal therapy. They would see together the cities she had planned one day to see with her mother. How long would it be before he could look into her eyes without wondering whether she was, after all, her mother’s daughter, without asking himself whether she would have plunged that knife into a living throat. Perhaps the thought would excite him; people were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
And now they were alone. Before they left together, she went to her room and came back with her mother’s manuscript. She held it out to him.
“I want you to read this, please. It’s her account of the murder. She wrote it in prison long before she met me.”
“Is that what she told you? Look at the colour and newness of the paper. Feel it. This hasn’t lain about in a cell for years. This was written recently. Didn’t that strike you?”
He took it over to the fireplace, then paused. He didn’t smoke and carried no matches. While she watched he went into the kitchen and came back with a box. He held up the manuscript and the flame bit, crept in a widening circle across the writing, then burst into flame. He held the paper almost until his fingers were burnt, then dropped it into the grate.
Suddenly she was aware of her tiredness, the stains and filth on her shirt, her trousers grimed with coal dust where she had crouched behind the bins in that distant area. She felt a gout of blood discharge and roll down her leg. He looked at her and said gently: “Go to the bathroom. I’m waiting for you.”
When she came back five minutes later he had taken down the oil painting and had in his arms one of the blankets from her bed. He put it round her shoulders. Without speaking they went together down the stairs and out of the flat.
