Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  “All right, Mum. We’re not supposed to go through the new Lab anyway. Besides, I’m going by bike. Are these my sandwiches or Dad’s?”

  “Yours, of course. You know your dad’s home to dinner on Wednesdays. Cheese and tomato this morning, and I’ve put you in a boiled egg.”

  When Brenda had waved goodbye, Mrs. Pridmore sat down for her second cup of tea and looked across at her husband.

  “I suppose it’s all right, this job she’s found for herself.” Arthur Pridmore, when he did condescend to talk at breakfast, talked with the magisterial authority of head of his family, Mr. Bowlem’s bailiff and people’s warden at the village church. He laid down his fork.

  “It’s a good job, and she was lucky to get it. Plenty of girls from the grammar school after it, weren’t they? An established civil servant, isn’t she? And look what they’re paying her. More than the pigman gets at the farm. Pensionable too. She’s a sensible girl and she’ll be all right. There aren’t many opportunities left locally for girls with good ‘O’ levels. And you didn’t want her to take a job in London.”

  No indeed, Mrs. Pridmore hadn’t wanted Brenda to go to London, a prey to muggers, IRA terrorists and what the Press mysteriously called “the drug scene.” None of her infrequent, but uneventful and pleasant, visits to the capital on Women’s Institute theatre excursions or rare shopping trips had failed to shake her conviction that Liverpool Street was the cavernous entry to an urban jungle, where predators armed with bombs and syringes lurked in every Underground station, and seducers laid their snares for innocent provincials in every office. Brenda, thought her mother, was a very pretty girl. Well, no point in denying it, she took after her mother’s side of the family for looks even if she had her dad’s brains, and Mrs. Pridmore had no intention of exposing her to the temptations of London. Brenda was walking out with Gerald Bowlem, younger son of her father’s boss, and if that came off there’s no denying it would be a very satisfactory marriage. He wouldn’t get the main farm, of course, but there was a very nice little property over at Wisbech which would come to him. Mrs. Pridmore couldn’t see the sense of more examinations and all this talking about a career. This job at the Lab would do Brenda very well until she married. But it was a pity that there was all this emphasis on blood.

  As if reading her thoughts, her husband said: “Of course it’s exciting for her. It’s all new. But I dare say it’s no different from other jobs, pretty dull most of the time. I don’t reckon anything really frightening will happen to our Brenda at Hoggatt’s Lab.”

  This conversation about their only child’s first job was one they’d had before, a comforting reiteration of mutual reassurance. In imagination Mrs. Pridmore followed her daughter as she pedalled vigorously on her way; bumping down the rough farm track between Mr. Bowlem’s flat fields to Tenpenny Road, past old Mrs. Button’s cottage where, as a child, she had been given rice-cake and homemade lemonade, by Tenpenny Dike where she still picked cowslips in summer, then a right turn onto Chevisham Road and the straight two miles skirting Captain Massey’s land and into Chevisham Village. Every yard of it was familiar, reassuring, unmenacing. And even Hoggatt’s Laboratory, blood or no blood, had been part of the village for over seventy years, while Chevisham Manor had stood for nearly three times as long. Arthur was right. Nothing frightening could happen to their Brenda at Hoggatt’s. Mrs. Pridmore, comforted, drew back the curtains and settled down to enjoy her third cup of tea.

  6

  At ten minutes to nine the post van stopped outside Sprogg’s Cottage on the outskirts of Chevisham to deliver a single letter. It was addressed to Miss Stella Mawson, Lavender Cottage, Chevisham, but the postman was a local man and the difference in name caused him no confusion. There had been Sproggs living in the cottage for four generations, and the small triangle of green in front of the gate had been Sprogg’s Green for almost as long. The present owner, having improved the cottage by the addition of a small brick garage and a modern bathroom and kitchen, had decided to celebrate the metamorphosis by planting a lavender hedge and renaming the property. But the villagers regarded the new name as no more than a foreigner’s eccentric fancy which they were under no obligation either to use or recognize. The lavender hedge, as if in sympathy with their views, failed to survive the first fen winter and Sprogg’s Cottage remained Sprogg’s.

  Angela Foley, the twenty-seven-year-old personal secretary to the Director of Hoggatt’s Laboratory, picked up the envelope and guessed at once by the quality of the paper, the expertly typed address and the London postmark what it must be. It was a letter they had been expecting. She took it through to the kitchen where she and her friend were breakfasting and handed it over without speaking, then watched Stella’s face as she read. After a minute she asked: “Well?”

  “It’s what we feared. He can’t wait any longer. He wants a quick sale, and there’s a friend of his who thinks he might like it for a weekend cottage. As sitting tenants we get first refusal, but he must know by next Monday whether we’re interested.” She tossed the letter across the table.

  Angela said bitterly: “Interested! Of course we’re interested! He knows we are. We told him weeks ago that we were writing round trying to get a mortgage.”

  “That’s just lawyer’s jargon. What his solicitor is asking is whether we’re able to go ahead. And the answer is that we can’t.”

  The arithmetic was plain. Neither of them needed to discuss it. The owner wanted sixteen thousand pounds. None of the mortgage societies they had approached would advance them more than ten. Together they had a little over two thousand saved. Four thousand short. And, with no time left, it might just as well be forty.

  Angela said: “I suppose he wouldn’t take less?”

  “No. We’ve tried that. And why should he? It’s a fully converted, reed-thatched seventeenth-century cottage. And we’ve improved it. We’ve made the garden. He’d be a fool to let it go for under sixteen even to a sitting tenant.”

  “But, Star, we are sitting tenants! He’s got to get us out first.”

  “That’s the only reason why he’s given us as long as he has. He knows we could make it difficult for him. But I’m not prepared to stay on here under sufferance, knowing that we’d have to go in the end. I couldn’t write under those conditions.”

  “But we can’t find four thousand in a week! And, with things as they are, we couldn’t hope for a bank loan even if …”

  “Even if I had a book coming out this year, which I haven’t. And what I make from writing barely pays my part of the housekeeping. It was tactful of you not to say so.”

  She hadn’t been going to say it. Stella wasn’t a conveyor-belt writer. You couldn’t expect her novels to make money. What was it that last reviewer had said? “Fastidious observation wedded to elegantly sensitive and oblique prose.” Not surprisingly, Angela could quote all the reviews even if she sometimes wondered what exactly they were trying to say. Wasn’t it she who pasted them with meticulous care into the cuttings book which Stella so affected to despise? She watched while her friend began what they both called her tiger prowl, that compulsive pacing up and down, head lowered, hands sunk in her dressing-gown pockets. Then Stella said: “It’s a pity that cousin of yours is so disagreeable. Otherwise one might not have minded asking him for a loan. He wouldn’t miss it.”

  “But I’ve already asked him. Not about the cottage, of course. But I’ve asked him to lend me some money.”

  It was ridiculous that this should be so difficult to say. After all, Edwin was her cousin. She had a right to ask him. And it was her grandmother’s money after all. There was really no reason why Star should be cross. There were times when she didn’t mind Star’s anger, times even when she deliberately provoked it, waiting with half-shameful excitement for the extraordinary outburst of bitterness and despair of which she herself was less a victim than a privileged spectator, relishing even more the inevitable remorse and self-incrimination, the sweetness of reconciliation. But now for th
e first time she recognized the chill of fear.

  “When?” There was nothing for it now but to go on.

  “Last Tuesday evening. It was after you decided that we’d have to cancel our bookings for Venice next March because of the exchange rate. I wanted it to be a birthday present, Venice I mean.”

  She had pictured the scene. Herself handing over the tickets and the hotel reservations tucked into one of those extra-large birthday cards. Star trying to hide her surprise and pleasure. Both of them poring over maps and guide books, planning the itinerary of every marvellous day. To see for the first time and together that incomparable view of San Marco from the western end of the Piazza. Star had read to her Ruskin’s description. “A multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long, low pyramid of coloured light.” To stand together on the Piazzetta in the early morning and look across the shimmering water to San Giorgio Maggiore. It was a dream, as insubstantial as the crumbling city. But the hope of it had been worth steeling herself to ask Edwin for that loan.

  “And what did he say?” There was no chance now of softening that brutal negative, of erasing the whole humiliating episode from her memory.

  “He said no.”

  “I suppose you told him why you wanted it. It didn’t occur to you that we go away from here to be private, that our holidays are our own affair, that it might humiliate me to have Edwin Lorrimer know that I can’t afford to take you to Venice, even on a ten-day package tour.”

  “I didn’t.” She cried out in vehement protest, horrified to hear the crack in her voice, and feel the first hot, gritty tears. It was odd, she thought, that it was she who could cry. Star was the emotional, the vehement one. And yet Star never cried.

  “I didn’t tell him anything, except that I needed the money.”

  “How much?”

  She hesitated, wondering whether to lie. But she never lied to Star.

  “Five hundred pounds. I thought we might as well do it properly. I just told him that I badly needed five hundred pounds.”

  “So, not surprisingly, faced with that irrefutable argument, he declined to hand out. What exactly did he say?”

  “Only that grandmother had made her intentions perfectly plain in her will and that he had no intention of upsetting them. Then I said that most of the money would come to me after his death, anyway—I mean, that’s what he told me when the will was read—and it would be too late then. I’d be an old lady. I might die first. It was now that was important. But I didn’t tell him why I wanted it. I swear that.”

  “Swear? Don’t be dramatic. You’re not in a court of law. And then what did he say?”

  If only Star would stop that agitated pacing, would only turn and look at her instead of questioning her in that cold, inquisitorial voice. And the new bit was even harder to tell. She couldn’t explain to herself why it should be, but it was something which she had tried to put out of her mind, for the present anyway. One day she would tell Star, the moment when it was right to tell. She had never imagined being forced into confidence with such brutal suddenness.

  “He said that I shouldn’t rely on getting anything in his will. He said that he might acquire new obligations. Obligations was the word he used. And if he did, the will would no longer stand.”

  And now Star swung round and faced her.

  “New obligations. Marriage! No, that’s too ridiculous. Marriage, that desiccated, pedantic, self-satisfied prude. I doubt whether he ever deliberately touches a human body except his own. Solitary, masochistic, surreptitious vice, that’s all he understands. No, not vice, the word’s too strong. But marriage! Wouldn’t you have thought …”

  She broke off. Angela said: “He didn’t mention marriage.”

  “Why should he? But what else would automatically set aside an existing will unless he made a new one? Marriage cancels a will. Didn’t you know that?”

  “You mean that as soon as he married I should be disinherited?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that isn’t fair!”

  “Since when has life been noted for its fairness? It wasn’t fair that your grandmother left her fortune to him instead of sharing it with you just because he’s a man and she had an old-fashioned prejudice that women shouldn’t own money. It isn’t fair that you’re only a secretary at Hoggatt’s because no one bothered to educate you for anything else. It isn’t fair, come to that, that you should have to support me.”

  “I don’t support you. In every way except the unimportant one, you support me.”

  “It’s humiliating to be worth more dead than alive. If my heart gave out tonight, then you’d be all right. You could use the life-assurance money to buy the place and stay on. The bank would advance the money once they knew you were my legatee.”

  “Without you I shouldn’t want to stay on.”

  “Well, if you do have to leave here, at least it will give you an excuse to live on your own, if that’s what you want.”

  Angela cried out in vehement protest: “I shall never live with anyone else but you. I don’t want to live anywhere but here, in this cottage. You know that. It’s our home.”

  It was their home. It was the only real home she’d ever known. She didn’t need to look around her to fix with startling clarity each familiar loved possession. She could lie in bed at night and in imagination move confidently around the cottage touching them in a happy exploration of shared memories and reassurance. The two Victorian lustre plant pots on their matching pedestals, found in The Lanes at Brighton one summer weekend. The eighteenth-century oil of Wicken Fen by an artist whose indecipherable signature, peered at through a microscope, had provided so many shared moments of happy conjecture. The French sword in its decorated scabbard, found in a country sale room and now hanging above their fireplace. It wasn’t just that their possessions, wood and porcelain, paint and linen, symbolized their joint life. The cottage, their belongings, were their joint life, adorned and gave reality to it just as the bushes and flowers they had planted in the garden staked out their territory of trust.

  She had a sudden and terrifying memory of a recurrent nightmare. They were standing facing each other in an empty attic room, bare walls squared with the pale imprints of discarded pictures, floorboards harsh to the feet, two naked strangers in a void, herself trying to reach out her hands to touch Stella’s fingers, but unable to lift the heavy monstrous bolsters of flesh that had become her arms. She shivered and then was recalled to the reality of the cold autumn morning by the sound of her friend’s voice.

  “How much did your grandmother leave? You did tell me, but I’ve forgotten.”

  “About thirty thousand, I think.”

  “And he can’t have spent any of it, living with his old father in that poky cottage. He hasn’t even renovated the windmill. His salary alone must be more than enough for the two of them, apart from the old man’s pension. Lorrimer’s a senior scientist, isn’t he? What does he get?”

  “He’s a Principal Scientific Officer. The scale goes up to eight thousand.”

  “God! More in a year than I could earn from four novels. I suppose if he jibbed at five hundred he’d hardly part with four thousand, not at a rate of interest we could afford. But it wouldn’t hurt him. I’ve a good mind to ask him for it after all.”

  Stella was only teasing, of course, but she recognized this too late to control the panic in her voice.

  “No, please, Star! No, you mustn’t!”

  “You really hate him, don’t you?”

  “Not hate. Indifference. I just don’t want to be under an obligation to him.”

  “Nor, come to that, do I. And you shan’t be.”

  Angela went out to the hall and came back pulling on her coat. She said: “I’ll be late at the Lab if I don’t hurry. The casserole is in the oven. Try to remember to switch it on at half past five. And don’t touch the regulator. I’ll turn down the heat when I get back.”

  “I think I can just about manage that.”

 
“I’m taking sandwiches for lunch, so I shan’t be back. There’s the cold ham and salad in the fridge. Will that be enough, Star?”

  “No doubt I’ll survive.”

  “Yesterday evening’s typing is in the folder, but I haven’t read it through.”

  “How remiss of you.”

  Stella followed her friend out to the hall. At the door she said: “I expect they think at the Lab that I exploit you.”

  “They know nothing about you at the Lab. And I don’t care what they think.”

  “Is that what Edwin Lorrimer thinks, too, that I exploit you? Or what does he think?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.” She folded her scarf over her blond hair. In the antique mirror with its frame of carved shells she saw both their faces distorted by a defect in the glass; the brown and green of Stella’s huge luminous eyes smeared like wet paint into the deep clefts between nostrils and mouth; her own wide brow bulging like that of a hydrocephalic child. She said: “I wonder what I’d feel if Edwin died this week; a heart attack, a car accident, a brain haemorrhage.”

  “Life isn’t as convenient as that.”

  “Death isn’t. Star, shall you reply today to that solicitor?”

  “He doesn’t expect an answer until Monday. I can ring him at the London office on Monday morning. That’s another five days. Anything can happen in five days.”

  7

  “But they’re just like mine! The panties I mean. I’ve got a pair like that! I bought them from Marks and Spencer’s in Cambridge with my first salary cheque.”

  It was 10.35 and Brenda Pridmore, at the reception desk at the rear of the main hall of Hoggatt’s Laboratory, watched wide-eyed while Inspector Blakelock drew towards him the first labelled bag of exhibits from the clunch pit murder. She put out a finger and tentatively slid it over the thin plastic through which the knickers, crumpled and stained round the crotch, were clearly visible. The detective constable who had brought in the exhibits had said that the girl had been to a dance. Funny, thought Brenda, that she hadn’t bothered to put on clean underclothes. Perhaps she wasn’t fastidious. Or perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry to change. And now the intimate clothes which she had put on so unthinkingly on the day of her death would be smoothed out by strange hands, scrutinized under ultraviolet light, perhaps be handed up, neatly docketed, to the judge and jury in the Crown Court.