Devices and Desires

by P. D. James

  The thought of Norman’s discomfiture at finding her gone cheered her a little, and she pressed her foot down on the accelerator, anxious to distance herself from the three of them, to reach the safety of home. But suddenly the car gave a stutter and the engine died. She must have been driving more erratically than she thought, for she found herself half-slewed across the road. It was a bad place to be stranded, a lonely stretch of country lane with a thin band of trees on either side, and it was deserted. And then she remembered. Norman had mentioned that they needed to fill up with petrol and must be sure to call at the all-night garage after they left the Clarence. It was ridiculous to have let the tank get so low, but they had had an argument only three days earlier on whose turn it was to call at the garage and pay for the petrol. All her anger and frustration returned. For a moment she sat there, beating her hands impotently on the wheel, desperately turning the key in the ignition, willing the engine to start. But there was no response. And then irritation began to give way to the first tricklings of fear. The road was deserted and, even if a motorist came by and drew up, could she be certain that he wasn’t a kidnapper, a rapist, even the Whistler? There had been that horrible murder on the A3 only this year. Nowadays you could trust no one. And she could hardly leave the car where it was, slewed across the road. She tried to recall when she had last passed a house, an AA box, a public telephone, but it seemed to her that she had been driving through deserted countryside for at least ten minutes. Even if she left the dubious sanctuary of the car, she had no clue to the best direction in which to seek help. Suddenly a wave of total panic swept across her like nausea and she had to resist the urge to dash from the car and hide herself among the trees. But what good would that do? He might be lurking even there.

  And then, miraculously, she heard footsteps and, looking round, saw a woman approaching. She was dressed in trousers and a trench coat and had a mane of fair hair beneath a tight-fitting beret. At her side, on a leash, trotted a small, smooth-haired dog. Immediately all her anxiety vanished. Here was someone who would help her push the car into the side of the road, who would know in which direction lay the nearest house, who would be a companion on her walk. Without even troubling to slam the door of the car, she called out happily and ran smiling towards the horror of her death.

  2

  The dinner had been excellent and the wine, a Château Potensac ’78, an interesting choice with the main course. Although Dalgliesh knew of Alice Mair’s reputation as a cookery writer, he had never read any of her books and had no idea to what culinary school, if any, she belonged. He had hardly feared being presented with the usual artistic creation swimming in a pool of sauce and accompanied by one or two undercooked carrots and mangetouts elegantly arranged on a side plate. But the wild ducks carved by Alex Mair had been recognizably ducks, the piquant sauce, new to him, enhanced rather than dominated the taste of the birds and the small mounds of creamed turnip and parsnip were an agreeable addition to green peas. Afterwards they had eaten orange sorbet followed by cheese and fruit. It was a conventional menu but one intended, he felt, to please the guests rather than to demonstrate the ingenuity of the cook.

  The expected fourth guest, Miles Lessingham, had unaccountably failed to arrive, but Alice Mair hadn’t rearranged her table, and the empty chair and unfilled wineglass were uncomfortably evocative of Banquo’s ghost. Dalgliesh was seated opposite Hilary Robarts. The portrait, he thought, must have been even more powerful than he realized if it could so dominate his physical reaction to the living woman. It was the first time they had met, although he had known of her existence, as he had of all the handful of people who lived, as the Lydsett villagers said, “t’other side of the gate.” And it was a little strange that this was their first meeting; her red Golf was a frequent sight on the headland, her cottage had frequently met his eyes from the top storey of the mill. Now, physically close for the first time, he found it difficult to keep his eyes off her, living flesh and remembered image seeming to fuse into a presence both potent and disturbing. It was a handsome face, a model’s face, he thought, with its high cheekbones, long, slightly concave nose, wide full lips and dark angry eyes deeply set under the strong brows. Her crimped springing hair, held back with two combs, fell over her shoulders. He could imagine her posed, mouth moistly open, hips jutting, and staring at the cameras with that apparently obligatory look of arrogant resentment. As she leaned forward to twitch another grape from the bunch and almost toss it into her mouth, he could see the faint freckles which smudged the dark forehead, the glisten of hairs above a carved upper lip.

  On the other side of their host sat Meg Dennison, delicately but unfussily peeling her grapes with pink-tipped fingers. Hilary Robarts’s sultry handsomeness emphasized her own very different look, an old-fashioned, carefully tended but unself-conscious prettiness which reminded him of photographs of the late 1930s. Their clothes pointed up the contrast. Hilary wore a shirt-waister dress in multicoloured Indian cotton, three buttons at the neck undone. Meg Dennison was in a long black skirt and a blue-patterned silk blouse with a bow at the neck. But it was their hostess who was the most elegant. The long shift in fine dark-brown wool worn with a heavy necklace of silver and amber hid her angularity and emphasized the strength and regularity of the strong features. Beside her Meg Dennison’s prettiness was diminished almost to insipidity and Hilary Robarts’s strong-coloured cotton looked tawdry.

  The room in which they were dining must, he thought, have been part of the original cottage. From these smoke-blackened beams Agnes Poley had hung her sides of bacon, her bundles of dried herbs. In a post slung over that huge hearth she had cooked her family’s meals and, perhaps, at the end had heard in its roaring flames the crackling fagots of her dreadful martyrdom. Outside the long window had passed the helmets of marching men. But only in the name of the cottage was there a memory of the past. The oval dining table and the chairs were modern, as were the Wedgwood dinner service and the elegant glasses. In the drawing room, where they had drunk their pre-dinner sherry, Dalgliesh had a sense of a room which deliberately rejected the past, containing nothing which could violate the owner’s essential privacy: no family history in photograph or portrait, no shabby heirlooms given room out of nostalgia, sentimentality or family piety, no antiques collected over the years. Even the few pictures, three recognizably by John Piper, were modern. The furniture was expensive, comfortable, well designed, too elegantly simple to be offensively out of place. But the heart of the cottage wasn’t there. It was in that large, warm-smelling and welcoming kitchen.

  He had only been half-listening to the conversation, but now he forced himself to be a more accommodating guest. The talk was general, candlelit faces leaned across the table and the hands which peeled the fruit or fidgeted with the glasses were as individual as the faces. Alice Mair’s strong but elegant hands with their short nails, Hilary Robarts’s long, knobbled fingers, the delicacy of Meg Dennison’s pink-tipped fingers, a little reddened with housework. Alex Mair was saying: “All right, let’s take a modern dilemma. We know that we can use human tissue from aborted foetuses to treat Parkinson’s disease and probably Alzheimer’s. Presumably you’d find that ethically acceptable if the abortion were natural or legal but not if it were induced for the purpose of providing the tissue. But you can argue that a woman has a right to the use that she makes of her own body. If she’s particularly fond of someone who has Alzheimer’s and wants to help him by producing a foetus, who has the right to say no? A foetus isn’t a child.”

  Hilary Robarts said: “I notice that you assume the sufferer to be helped is a man. I suppose he’d feel entitled to use a woman’s body for this purpose, as he would any other. But why the hell should he? I can’t imagine that a woman who’s actually had an abortion wants to go through that again for any man’s convenience.”

  The words were spoken with extreme bitterness. There was a pause; then Mair said quietly: “Alzheimer’s is rather more than an inconvenience. But I’m not advo
cating it. In any case, under present law, it would be illegal.”

  “Would that worry you?”

  He looked into her angry eyes. “Naturally it would worry me. Happily it isn’t a decision that I shall ever be required to make. But we’re not talking about legality, we’re talking about morality.”

  His sister asked: “Are they different?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? Are they, Adam?”

  It was the first time he had used Dalgliesh’s Christian name. Dalgliesh said: “You’re assuming there’s an absolute morality independent of time or circumstance.”

  “Wouldn’t you make that assumption?”

  “Yes, I think I would, but I’m not a moral philosopher.”

  Mrs. Dennison looked up from her plate a little flushed and said: “I’m always suspicious of the excuse that a sin is justified if it’s done to benefit someone we love. We may think so, but it’s usually to benefit ourselves. I might dread the thought of having to look after an Alzheimer’s patient. When we advocate euthanasia is it to stop pain or to prevent our own distress at having to watch it? To conceive a child deliberately in order to kill it to make use of its tissue, the idea is absolutely repugnant.”

  Alex Mair said: “I could argue that what you are killing isn’t a child and that repugnance at an act isn’t evidence of its immorality.”

  Dalgliesh said: “But isn’t it? Doesn’t Mrs. Dennison’s natural repugnance tell us something about the morality of the act?”

  She gave him a brief, grateful smile and went on: “And isn’t this use of a foetus particularly dangerous? It could lead to the poor of the world conceiving children and selling the foetuses to help the rich. Already, I believe, there’s a black market in human organs. Do you think a multimillionaire who needs a heart-lung transplant ever goes without?”

  Alex Mair smiled. “As long as you aren’t arguing that we should deliberately suppress knowledge or reject scientific progress just because the discoveries can be abused. If there are abuses, legislate against them.”

  Meg protested: “But you make it sound so easy. If all we had to do was to legislate against social evils, Mr. Dalgliesh would be out of work, for one.”

  “It isn’t easy but it has to be attempted. That’s what being human means, surely, using our intelligence to make choices.”

  Alice Mair got up from the table. She said: “Well, it’s time to make a choice now on a somewhat different level. Which of you would like coffee and what kind? There’s a table and chairs in the courtyard. I thought we could switch on the yard lights and have it outside.”

  They moved through to the drawing room, and Alice Mair opened the French windows leading to the patio. Immediately the sonorous booming of the sea flowed into and took possession of the room like a vibrating and irresistible force. But once they had stepped out into the cool air, paradoxically, the noise seemed muted, the sea no more than a distant roar. The patio was bounded on the road side by a high flint wall which, to the south and east, curved to little more than four feet to give an unimpeded view across the headland to the sea. The coffee tray was carried out by Alex Mair within minutes and, cups in hand, the little party wandered aimlessly among the terra-cotta pots like strangers reluctant to be introduced or like actors on a stage set, self-absorbed, pondering their lines, waiting for the rehearsal to begin.

  They were without coats and the warmth of the night had proved illusory. They had turned as if by common consent to go back into the cottage when the lights of a car, driven fast, came over the southern rise of the road. As it approached its speed slackened.

  Mair said: “Lessingham’s Porsche.”

  No one spoke. They watched silently as the car was driven at speed off the road to brake violently on the turf of the headland. As if conforming to some pre-arranged ceremony, they grouped themselves into a semi-circle with Alex Mair a little to the front, like a formal welcoming party but one bracing itself for trouble rather than expecting pleasure from the approaching guest. Dalgliesh was aware of the heightening tension; small individual tremors of anxiety which shivered on the still, sea-scented air, unified and focused on the car door and on the tall figure which unwound from the driver’s seat, leapt easily over the low stone wall and walked deliberately across the courtyard towards them. Lessingham ignored Mair and moved straight to Alice. He took her hand and gently kissed it, a theatrical gesture which Dalgliesh felt had taken her by surprise and which the others had watched with an unnaturally critical attention.

  Lessingham said gently: “My apologies, Alice. Too late for dinner, I know, but not, I hope, for a drink. And, God, do I need one.”

  “Where have you been? We waited dinner for forty minutes.” It was Hilary Robarts who asked the obvious question, sounding as accusatory as a peevish wife. Lessingham kept his eye on Alice. He said: “I’ve been considering how best to answer that question for the last twenty minutes. There are a number of interesting and dramatic possibilities. I could say that I’ve been helping the police with their enquiries. Or that I’ve been involved in a murder. Or that there was a little unpleasantness on the road. Actually it was all three. The Whistler has killed again. I found the body.”

  Hilary Robarts said sharply: “How do you mean, found? Where?”

  Again Lessingham ignored her. He said to Alice Mair: “Could I have that drink? Then I’ll give you all the gory details. After unsettling your seating plan and delaying dinner for forty minutes, that’s the least I owe you.”

  As they moved back into the drawing room, Alex Mair introduced Dalgliesh. Lessingham gave him one sharp glance. They shook hands. The palm which momentarily touched his was moist and very cold. Alex Mair said easily: “Why didn’t you ring? We would have kept some food for you.”

  The question, conventionally domestic, sounded irrelevant, but Lessingham answered it. “Do you know, I actually forgot. Not all the time, of course, but it honestly didn’t cross my mind until the police had finished questioning me, and then the moment didn’t seem opportune. They were perfectly civil, but I sensed that my private engagements had a pretty low priority. Incidentally, you get absolutely no credit from the police for finding a body for them. Their attitude is, rather, ‘Thank you very much, sir, very nasty, I’m sure. Sorry you’ve been troubled. But we’ll take over now. Just go home and try to forget all about it.’ I have a feeling that that isn’t going to be so easy.”

  Back in the drawing room Alex Mair threw a couple of thin logs onto the glowing embers and went to get the drinks. Lessingham had refused whisky but had asked for wine. “But don’t waste your best claret on me, Alex. This is purely medicinal.” Almost imperceptibly they edged their chairs closer. Lessingham began his story deliberately, pausing at times to take gulps of the wine. It seemed to Dalgliesh that he was subtly altered since his arrival, had become charged with a power both mysterious and oddly familiar. He thought: He has acquired the mystique of the story-teller, and, glancing at the ring of fire-lit and intent faces, he was suddenly reminded of his first village school, of the children clustered round Miss Douglas at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon for the half-hour of story-time, and felt a pang of pain and regret for those lost days of innocence and love. He was surprised that the memory should have come back so keenly and at such a moment. But this was to be a very different story, and one unsuited to the ears of children.

  Lessingham said: “I had an appointment with my dentist in Norwich at five o’clock and then briefly visited a friend in the Close. So I drove here from Norwich, not from my cottage. I’d just turned right off the B1150 at Fairstead when I nearly crashed into the back of this unlit car skewed across the road. I thought it was a damn silly place to park if someone wanted to take a leak in the bushes. Then it crossed my mind that there could have been an accident. And the right-hand door was open; that seemed a bit odd. So I drew into the side and went to take a look. There was no one about. I’m not sure why I walked into the trees. A kind of instinct, I suppose. It was too dark to
see anything and I wondered whether to call out. Then I felt a fool and decided to leave it and mind my own business. And it was then that I almost tripped over her.”

  He took another gulp of the wine. “I still couldn’t see anything, of course, but I knelt down and groped about with my hands. And it was then that I touched flesh. I think I touched her thigh, I can’t be sure. But flesh, even dead flesh, is unmistakable. So I went back to the car and got my torch. I shone it on her feet and then slowly up her body to her face. And then, of course, I saw. I knew it was the Whistler.”

  Meg Dennison asked gently: “Was it very terrible?”

  He must have heard in her voice what she obviously felt, not prurience but sympathy, an understanding that he needed to talk. He looked at her for a moment as if seeing her for the first time, then paused, giving the question serious thought.

  “More shocking than terrible. Looking back, my emotions were complicated, a mixture of horror, disbelief and, well, shame. I felt like a voyeur. The dead, after all, are at such a disadvantage. She looked grotesque, a little ridiculous, with thin clumps of hair sticking out of her mouth as if she were munching. Horrible, of course, but silly at the same time. I had an almost irresistible impulse to giggle. I know it was only a reaction to shock, but it was hardly admirable. And the whole scene was so, well, banal. If you had asked me to describe one of the Whistler’s victims, that’s exactly how I should have seen her. You expect reality to be different from imaginings.”