Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  And then she remembered. There was something she had to do. Slipping her hand into her dressing-gown pocket she felt the cold, slippery plasticine of her model of Dr. Lorrimer. Carefully she drew it out through the folds of the eiderdown and held it close to the flame of the night light. The model was a little misshapen, the face furred with fluff from her pocket, but it was still intact. She straightened the long limbs and pressed the strands of black cotton she had used for hair more firmly into the scalp. The white coat, cut from an old handkerchief, was particularly successful, she thought. It was a pity that she hadn’t been able to use one of his handkerchiefs, a strand of his hair. The model represented more than Dr. Lorrimer, who had been unkind to her and William, who had practically thrown them out of the Laboratory. It stood for the whole of Hoggatt’s Lab.

  And now to kill it. Gently she knocked the head against the baluster. But the plasticine merely flattened, the head lost its identity. She remodelled it with careful fingers, then held it close to the flame. But the smell was disagreeable and she was afraid that the white linen would burst into flame. She dug the nail of her little finger deeply in behind the left ear. The cut was clean and sharp, right through to the brain. That was better. She sighed, satisfied. Holding the dead creature in her right palm she squeezed the pink plasticine, the white coat, the cotton hair into one amorphous lump. Then, huddling deep into the eiderdown, she sat and waited for the dawn.

  3

  The car, a green Morris Minor, had been toppled over the edge of a shallow depression in the wasteland, and had lurched to rest on a grassy plateau about ten feet from the ridge like a clumsy animal going to earth. It must have been there for years, abandoned to the plunderers, an illicit plaything for the local children, a welcome shelter for the occasional vagrant like the seventy-year-old alcoholic who had stumbled on the body. The two front wheels had been removed, and the rusted back wheels with their rotting tyres were firmly embedded in the chalky earth, the paintwork was battered and scratched, the interior stripped of instruments and steering wheel. Two mounted arc-lights, one directed downwards from the top of the bank and the other precariously planted on the edge of the plateau, illuminated its stark decrepitude. Thus brightly lit it looked, thought Kerrison, like some grotesque and pretentious modern sculpture, symbolically poised on the brink of chaos. The back seat, its padding springing from the slashed plastic, had been ripped out and hurled to one side.

  In the front seat rested the body of a girl. Her legs were decorously planted together, the glazed eyes were slyly half open, the mouth, devoid of lipstick, was fixed in a drool elongated by two small trickles of blood. They gave a face which must have been pretty, or at least childishly vulnerable, the vacuous look of an adult clown. The thin coat, too thin surely for a night in early November, was pulled waist-high. She was wearing stockings, and the suspender clips bit into plump white thighs.

  Drawing close to the body, under the watchful eyes of Lorrimer and Doyle, he thought, as he often did at such a scene, that it looked unreal, an anomaly, so singularly and ridiculously out of place that he had to stifle a nervous impulse to laugh. He didn’t feel this so strongly when a corpse was far advanced in decay. It was then as if the rotting maggot infested flesh, or the tags of matted clothing, had already become part of the earth which clung to and enclosed them, no more unnatural or frightening than a clump of compost or a drift of decaying leaves. But here, colours and outlines intensified in the glare, the body, still outwardly so human, looked an absurd burlesque, the skin of the pallid cheek as artificial as the stained plastic of the car against which it rested. It seemed ridiculous that she should be beyond help. As always he had to fight the impulse to fasten his mouth over hers and begin resuscitation, to plunge a needle into the still-warm heart.

  He had been surprised to find Maxim Howarth, newly appointed Director of the Forensic Science Laboratory, at the scene, until he remembered that Howarth had said something about following through the next murder case. He supposed that he was expected to instruct. Withdrawing his head from the open door he said: “It’s almost certainly a case of manual throttling. The slight bleeding from the mouth is caused by the tongue being caught between the teeth. Manual strangulation is invariably homicidal. She couldn’t have done this herself.”

  Howarth’s voice was carefully controlled. “I should have expected more bruising of the neck.”

  “That’s usual, certainly. There’s always some damage to the tissues, although the extent of the bruised area depends on the position of the assailant and victim, the way in which the neck is grasped as well as the degree of pressure. I’d expect to find deep-seated internal bruising, but it’s possible to get this without many superficial signs. This happens when the murderer has maintained pressure until death; the vessels have been emptied of blood and the heart stops beating before the hands are removed. The cause of death is asphyxia, and one expects to find the usual signs of this. What is so interesting here is the cadaveric spasm. You’ll see that she’s clutching the bamboo handle of her bag. The muscles are absolutely rigid, proof that the grasp occurred at or about the moment of death. I’ve never before seen cadaveric spasm in a case of homicidal manual throttling, and it’s interesting. She must have died extraordinarily quickly. But you’ll get a clearer idea of what exactly happened when you watch the post-mortem.”

  Of course, thought Howarth, the post-mortem. He wondered how early Kerrison would expect to get down to that job. He wasn’t afraid that his nerve would fail him, only his stomach, but he wished he hadn’t said he would be there. There was no privacy for the dead; the most one could hope for was a certain reverence. It now seemed to him monstrous that tomorrow he, a stranger, would be looking unrebuked at her nakedness. But for the present he had seen enough. He could step aside now without loss of face. Turning up the collar of his Burberry against the chill morning air, he climbed up the slope to the rim of the hollow and stood looking down at the car. This must be what shooting a film was like: the brightly lit scene, the ennui of waiting for the chief actors to appear, the brief moments of activity, the concentrated attention to detail. The body could easily be that of an actress simulating death. He half expected one of the police to dart forward and rearrange her hair.

  The night was nearly over. Behind him the eastern sky was already brightening, and the wasteland, which had been a formless void of darkness above the lumpy earth, was assuming an identity and a shape. To the west he could see the outline of houses, probably a council estate, a trim row of identical roofs and square slabs of darkness broken by patterned squares of yellow as the early risers switched on their lights. The track along which his car had bumped, rock-strewn and silver, alien as a moonscape in the glare of the headlights, took shape and direction, became ordinary. Nothing was left mysterious. The place was an arid scrubland between the two ends of the town, litter-strewn and edged with sparse trees above a ditch. He knew that the ditch would be dank with nettles and sour with rotting rubbish, the trees wounded by vandals, the trunks carved with initials, the low branches hanging torn from the boughs. Here was an urban no-man’s-land, fit territory for murder.

  It was a mistake to have come, of course; he should have realized that the role of voyeur was always ignoble. Few things were more demoralizing than to stand uselessly by while other men demonstrated their professional competence: Kerrison, that connoisseur of death, literally sniffing at the body; the photographers, taciturn, preoccupied with lighting and angles; Inspector Doyle, in charge of a murder case at last, impresario of death, tense with the suppressed excitement of a child at Christmas gloating over a new toy. Once, while waiting for Kerrison to arrive, Doyle had actually laughed, a hearty guffaw, filling the hollow. And Lorrimer? Before touching the body he had briefly crossed himself. It was so small and precise a gesture that Howarth could have missed it, except that nothing Lorrimer did escaped him. The others seemed unsurprised at the eccentricity. Perhaps they were used to it. Domenica hadn’t told him that Lorrimer was
religious. But then his sister hadn’t told him anything about her lover. She hadn’t even told him that the affair was over. But he had needed only to look at Lorrimer’s face during the past month to know that. Lorrimer’s face, Lorrimer’s hands. Odd that he hadn’t noticed how long the fingers were or with what apparent gentleness they had taped the plastic bag over the girl’s hand to preserve, as he had tonelessly explained, conscientious in his role of instructor, any evidence under the fingernails. He had taken a sample of blood from the plump flaccid arm, feeling for the vein as carefully as if she could still flinch at the needle’s prick.

  Lorrimer’s hands. Howarth thrust the tormenting, brutally explicit images out of his mind. He had never before resented one of Domenica’s lovers. He hadn’t even been jealous of her dead husband. It had seemed to him perfectly reasonable that she should eventually wish to marry, just as she might choose, in a fit of boredom or acquisitiveness, to buy herself a fur coat or a new item of jewellery. He had even quite liked Charles Schofield. Why was it then that, even from the first moment, the thought of Lorrimer in his sister’s bed had been intolerable? Not that he could ever have been in her bed, at least not at Leamings. He wondered yet again where they had managed to meet, how Domenica had contrived to take a new lover without the whole Laboratory and the whole village knowing. How could they have met and where?

  It had begun, of course, at that disastrous dinner party twelve months ago. At the time it had seemed both natural and civilized to celebrate the taking up of his directorship with a small private party at his house for the senior staff. They had, he remembered, eaten melon, followed by boeuf stroganoff and a salad. He and Domenica liked good food and, occasionally, she enjoyed cooking it. He had opened the 1961 claret for them because that was the wine he and Dom had chosen to drink and it hadn’t occurred to him to offer his guests less. He and Dom had changed because that was their habit. It amused them to dine in some style, formally separating the working day from their evenings together. It hadn’t been his fault that Bill Morgan, the Senior Vehicle Examiner, had chosen to come in open-necked shirt and corduroys; neither he nor Dom had cared a damn what their guests chose to wear. If Bill Morgan felt awkward about these unimportant shibboleths of taste, he should learn either to change his clothes or to develop more social confidence in his sartorial eccentricities.

  It had never occurred to Howarth that the six senior staff sitting awkwardly around his table in the candlelight, unmellowed even by the wine, would see the whole occasion as an elaborate gastronomic charade designed to demonstrate his social and intellectual superiority. At least Paul Middlemass, the Principal Scientific Officer Document Examiner, had appreciated the wine, drawing the bottle across the table towards him and refilling his glass, his lazy ironic eyes watching his host. And Lorrimer? Lorrimer had eaten practically nothing, had drunk less, pushing his glass almost petulantly aside and fixing his great smouldering eyes on Domenica as if he had never before seen a woman. And that, presumably, had been the beginning of it. How it had progressed, when and how they had continued to meet, how it had ended, Domenica hadn’t confided.

  The dinner party had been a private and public fiasco. But what, he wondered, had the senior staff expected? An evening of solid drinking in the private snug in the Moonraker? A free-for-all jollification in the village hall for the whole Laboratory including the cleaner, Mrs. Bidwell, and old Scobie, the Laboratory attendant? “Knees Up Mother Brown” in the public bar? Perhaps they had thought that the first move should have come from their side. But that was to admit that there were two sides. The conventional sophistry was that the Laboratory worked as a team harnessed by a common purpose, reins lightly but firmly in the director’s hands. That had worked well enough at Bruche. But there he had directed a research laboratory with a common discipline. How could you direct a team when your staff practised half a dozen different scientific disciplines, used their own methods, were responsible for their own results, stood finally alone to justify and defend them in the only place where the quality of a forensic scientist’s work could properly be judged, the witness box of a court of law? It was one of the loneliest places on earth, and he had never stood there.

  Old Dr. Mac, his predecessor, had, he knew, taken the occasional case, to keep his hand in as he would say, trotting out to a scene of crime like an old bloodhound happily sniffing after half-forgotten scents, doing the analysis himself, and finally appearing, like a resurrected Old Testament prophet, in the witness box, greeted by the judge with dry judicial compliments, and boisterously welcomed in the bar by counsel like a long-missed old reprobate drinking comrade happily restored to them. But that could never be his way. He had been appointed to manage the Laboratory and he would manage it in his own style. He wondered, morbidly introspective in the cold light of dawn, whether his decision to see the next murder case through from the call to the scene of crime to the trial had really arisen from a desire to learn or merely from a craven wish to impress or, worse, to propitiate his staff, to show them that he valued their skills, that he wanted to be one of the team. If so, it had been one more error of judgement to add to the bleak arithmetic of failure since he had taken up his new job.

  It looked as if they had nearly finished. The girl’s rigid fingers had been prised from her handbag and Doyle’s hands, gloved, were spreading out its few contents on a plastic sheet laid on the bonnet of the car. Howarth could just make out the shape of what looked like a small purse, a lipstick, a folded sheet of paper. A love letter probably, poor little wretch. Had Lorrimer written letters to Domenica? he wondered. He was always first at the door when the post arrived, and usually brought his sister her letters. Perhaps Lorrimer had known that. But he must have written. There must have been assignations. Lorrimer would hardly have risked telephoning from the Laboratory or from home in the evenings when he, Howarth, might have taken the call.

  They were moving the body now. The mortuary van had moved closer to the rim of the hollow and the stretcher was being manoeuvred into place. The police were dragging out the screens from their van, ready to enclose the scene of crime. Soon there would be the little clutch of spectators, the curious children shooed away by the adults, the Press photographers. He could see Lorrimer and Kerrison conferring together a little way apart, their backs turned, their two dark heads close together. Doyle was closing his notebook and supervising the removal of the body as if it were a precious exhibit which he was frightened someone would break. The light was strengthening.

  He waited while Kerrison climbed up beside him and together they walked towards the parked cars. Howarth’s foot struck a beer can. It clattered across the path and bounced against what looked like the battered frame of an old pram, with a bang like a pistol shot. The noise startled him. He said pettishly: “What a place to die! Where in God’s name are we exactly? I just followed the police cars.”

  “It’s called the clunch field. That’s the local name for the soft chalk they mined here from the Middle Ages onwards. There isn’t any hard building stone hereabouts, so they used clunch for most domestic buildings and even for some church interiors. There’s an example in the Lady Chapel at Ely. Most villages had their clunch pits. They’re overgrown now. Some are quite pretty in the spring and summer, little oases of wild flowers.”

  He gave the information almost tonelessly, like a dutiful guide repeating by rote the official spiel. Suddenly he swayed and reached for the support of his car door. Howarth wondered if he were ill or whether this was the extremity of tiredness. Then the pathologist straightened himself and said, with an attempt at briskness: “I’ll do the PM at nine o’clock tomorrow at St. Luke’s. The hall porter will direct you. I’ll leave a message.”

  He nodded a goodbye, forced a smile, then eased himself into his car and slammed the door. The Rover bumped slowly towards the road.

  Howarth was aware that Doyle and Lorrimer were beside him. Doyle’s excitement was almost palpable. He turned to look across the clunch field to the distant row
of houses, their yellow-brick walls and mean square windows now plainly visible.

  “He’s over there somewhere. In bed probably. That is, if he doesn’t live alone. It wouldn’t do to be up and about too early, would it? No, he’ll be lying there wondering how to act ordinary, waiting for the anonymous car, the ring at the door. If he’s on his own, it’ll be different, of course. He’ll be creeping about in the half-dark wondering if he ought to burn his suit, scraping the mud off his shoes. Only he won’t be able to get it all off. Not every trace. And he won’t have a boiler big enough for the suit. And even if he had, what will he say when we ask for it? So maybe he’ll be doing nothing. Just lying there and waiting. He won’t be asleep. He didn’t sleep last night. And he won’t be sleeping again for quite a time.”

  Howarth felt slightly sick. He had eaten a small and early dinner and knew himself to be hungry. The sensation of nausea on an empty stomach was peculiarly unpleasant. He controlled his voice, betraying nothing but a casual interest.

  “You think it’s relatively straightforward then?”

  “Domestic murder usually is. And I reckon that this is a domestic murder. Married kid, torn stump of a ticket for the local Oddfellows’ hop, letter in her bag threatening her if she doesn’t leave another bloke alone. A stranger wouldn’t have known about this place. And she wouldn’t have come here with him even if he had. By the look of her, they were sitting there cosily together before he got his hands on her throat. It’s just a question of whether the two of them set off home together or whether he left early and waited for her.”