Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  It was a pity, thought Dalgliesh, that Superintendent Mercer had told the photographers they could go. But it wasn’t surprising. Given the present pressure of work on the Force, it was difficult to justify keeping men hanging about indefinitely. And at least the fingerprint officers were still here. He said: “Have you been able to get in touch with Mr. Bidwell yet?”

  “Captain Massey says he’s up on the five-acre raising sugar beet. He’ll tell him you want to see him when he comes in for his dockey.”

  “His what?”

  “His dockey, sir. That’s the meal break which we have in these parts at about half past ten or eleven.”

  “I’m relieved that Captain Massey has a proper sense of priority between agriculture and murder.”

  “They’re a good bit behind with the five-acre, sir, but Captain Massey will see that he calls in at Guy’s Marsh station as soon as they’ve finished work this afternoon.”

  “If he doesn’t, you’d better dig him out, even if you have to borrow Captain Massey’s tractor to do it. That telephone call is important. I’ll have a word with the senior scientists in the library now and explain to them that I want them present in the departments when you do the internal search. The rest of them can go home. I’ll tell them that we hope to have finished searching by the end of the day. It should be possible for the Lab to open again tomorrow morning. Inspector Massingham and I will be seeing Dr. Lorrimer’s father at Postmill Cottage. If anything breaks, you can contact us there or through the car radio control from Guy’s Marsh.”

  Less than ten minutes later, with Massingham at the wheel of the police Rover, they were on their way.

  BOOK THREE

  AN EXPERIMENTAL MAN

  1

  Postmill Cottage lay two miles to the west of the village at the junction of Stoney Piggott’s Road and Tenpenny Lane, where the road curved gently upwards, but so imperceptibly that it was difficult for Dalgliesh to believe that he was on slightly higher ground until the car was parked on the grass verge and, turning to close the door, he saw the village strung out along the road below him. Under the turbulent painter’s sky, with its changing clusters of white, grey and purple cumulus clouds massing against the pale azure blue of the upper air, and the sunlight moving fitfully across the fields and glittering on roofs and windows, it looked like an isolated frontier outpost, but welcoming, prosperous and secure. Violent death might lurk eastwards in the dark fenlands, but surely not under these neat domestic roofs. Hoggatt’s Laboratory was hidden by its belt of trees, but the new building was immediately identifiable, its concrete stumps, ditches and half-built walls looking like the orderly excavation of some long-buried city.

  The cottage, a low building of brick with a white wood-cladded front and with the rounded top and sails of the windmill visible behind, was separated from the road by a wide ditch. A wooden plank bridge and white-painted gate led to the front path and the latched door. The first impression of melancholy neglect, induced perhaps by the cottage’s isolation and the bareness of outer walls and windows, proved on second glance illusory. The front garden had the dishevelled, overgrown look of autumn, but the roses in the two circular beds, one each side of the path, had been properly tended. The gravel path was clear of weeds, the paintwork on door and windows was shining. Twenty feet farther on, two wide and sturdy planks bridged the ditch and led to a flagstoned yard and a brick garage.

  There was an old and grubby red Mini already parked next to a police car. Dalgliesh deduced from the bundle of parish magazines, a smaller one of what looked like concert programmes and the bunch of shaggy chrysanthemums and autumn foliage on the back seat, that the rector, or more probably his wife, was already at the cottage, probably on her way to help with the church decorations, although Thursday was an unusual day, surely, for this ecclesiastical chore. He had scarcely turned from this scrutiny of the rectory car when the door of the cottage opened and a woman bustled down the path towards them. No one who had been born and bred in a rectory could be in any doubt that here was Mrs. Swaffield. She looked indeed like a prototype of a country rector’s wife, large-bosomed, cheerful and energetic, exuding the slightly intimidating assurance of a woman adept at recognizing authority and competence at a glance, and making immediate use of them. She was wearing a tweed skirt covered with a flowered cotton apron, a hand-knitted twinset, thick brogues and open-work woollen stockings. A felt hat, shaped like a pork pie, its crown stabbed with a steel hatpin, was jammed uncompromisingly over a broad forehead.

  “Good morning. Good morning. You’re Commander Dalgliesh and Inspector Massingham. Winifred Swaffield. Come in, won’t you. The old gentleman is upstairs changing. He insisted on putting on his suit when he heard you were on the way, although I assured him that it wasn’t necessary. He’ll be down in a minute. In the front parlour would be best I think, don’t you? This is Constable Davis, but of course you know all about him. He tells me that he’s been sent here to see that no one goes in to Dr. Lorrimer’s room and to stop any visitors from bothering the old gentleman. Well, we haven’t had any so far except one reporter and I soon got rid of him, so that’s all right. But the constable has really been very helpful to me in the kitchen. I’ve just been getting some lunch for Mr. Lorrimer. It’ll only be soup and an omelette, I’m afraid, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the larder except tins and he might be glad of those in the future. One doesn’t like to come laden from the rectory like a Victorian do-gooder.

  “Simon and I wanted him to come back to the rectory at once but he doesn’t seem anxious to leave, and really one mustn’t badger people, especially the old. And perhaps it’s just as well. Simon’s down with this two-day flu—that’s why he can’t be here—and we don’t want the old gentleman to catch it. But we can’t let him stay here alone tonight. I thought that he might like to have his niece here, Angela Foley, but he says no. So I’m hoping that Millie Gotobed from the Moonraker will be able to sleep here tonight, and we’ll have to think again tomorrow. But I mustn’t take up your time with my worries.”

  At the end of this speech, Dalgliesh and Massingham found themselves ushered into the front sitting room. At the sound of their footsteps in the narrow hall Constable Davis had emerged from what was presumably the kitchen, had sprung to attention, saluted, blushed and given Dalgliesh a glance of mingled appeal and slight desperation before disappearing again. The smell of homemade soup had wafted appetizingly through the door.

  The sitting room, which was stuffy and smelt strongly of tobacco, was adequately furnished, yet gave an impression of cheerless discomfort, a cluttered repository of the mementos of ageing and its sad solaces. The chimney breast had been boarded up and an old-fashioned gas fire hissed out an uncomfortably fierce heat over a sofa in cut moquette with two greasy circles marking where innumerable heads had once rested. There was a square oak table with bulbous carved legs and four matching chairs with vinyl seats, and a large dresser set against the wall opposite the window, hung with the cracked remnants of long-smashed tea sets. On the dresser were two bottles of Guinness and an unwashed glass. To the right of the fire was a high-winged armchair and beside it a wicker table with a ramshackle lamp, a tobacco pouch, an ashtray bearing a picture of Brighton Pier, and an open draughtboard with the pieces set out, crusted with dried food and accumulated grime. The alcove to the left of the fire was filled with a large television set. Above it were a couple of shelves holding a collection of popular novels in identical sizes and bindings, issued by a book club to which Mr. Lorrimer had once apparently briefly belonged. They looked as if they had been gummed together unopened and unread.

  Dalgliesh and Massingham sat on the sofa. Mrs. Swaffield perched upright on the edge of the armchair and smiled across at them encouragingly, bringing into the room’s cheerlessness a reassuring ambience of homemade jam, well-conducted Sunday schools and massed women’s choirs singing Blake’s “Jerusalem.” Both men felt immediately at home with her. Both in their different lives had met her kind befo
re. It was not, thought Dalgliesh, that she was unaware of the frayed and ragged edges of life. She would merely iron them out with a firm hand and neatly hem them down.

  Dalgliesh asked: “How is he, Mrs. Swaffield?”

  “Surprisingly well. He keeps talking about his son in the present tense, which is a little disconcerting, but I think he realizes all right that Edwin is dead. I don’t mean to imply that the old gentleman is senile. Not in the least. But it’s difficult to know what the very old are feeling sometimes. It must have been a terrible shock, naturally. Appalling, isn’t it? I suppose a criminal from one of those London gangs broke in to get his hands on an exhibit. They’re saying in the village that there were no signs of a break-in, but a really determined burglar can get in anywhere, I’ve always been told. I know Father Gregory has had terrible trouble with break-ins at St. Mary’s at Guy’s Marsh. The poor-box has been rifled twice and two pews of kneelers stolen, the ones the Mothers’ Union had specially embroidered to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. Goodness knows why anyone should want to take those. Luckily we’ve had no trouble of that kind here. Simon would hate to have to lock the church. Chevisham has always been a most law-abiding village, which is why this murder is so shocking.”

  Dalgliesh wasn’t surprised that the village already knew that there had been no break-in at the Lab. Presumably one of the staff, on the excuse of needing to telephone home and say that he wouldn’t be back for luncheon and avid to break the exciting news, had been less than discreet. But it would be pointless to try to trace the culprit. In his experience news percolated through a village community by a process of verbal osmosis, and it would be a bold man who tried to control or stem that mysterious diffusion. Mrs. Swaffield, like any proper rector’s wife, had undoubtedly been one of the first to know.

  Dalgliesh said: “It’s a pity that Miss Foley and her uncle don’t seem to get on. If he could go to stay temporarily with her that would at least solve your immediate problem. She and her friend were here when you arrived this morning, I take it?”

  “Yes, both of them. Dr. Howarth came himself with Angela to break the news, which I think was thoughtful of him, then left her here when he went back to the Lab. He wouldn’t want to be away for more than a short time, naturally. I think Angela phoned her friend and she came at once. Then the constable arrived and I was here shortly afterwards. There was no point in Angela and Miss Mawson staying on once I’d come, and Dr. Howarth was anxious for most of the staff to be actually in the Lab when you arrived.”

  “And there are no other relatives and no close friends, as far as you know?”

  “None, I think. They kept themselves very much to themselves. Old Mr. Lorrimer doesn’t come to church or take part in village affairs, so that Simon and I never really got to know him. I know that people expect the clergy to come round knocking at doors and rooting people out, but Simon doesn’t really believe it does much good, and I must say I think he’s right. Dr. Lorrimer, of course, went to St. Mary’s at Guy’s Marsh. Father Gregory might be able to tell you something about him although I don’t think he took a very active part in church life. He used to pick up Miss Willard from the Old Rectory and drive her over. She might be worth having a word with, although it seems unlikely that they were close. I imagine that he drove her to church because Father Gregory suggested it rather than from inclination. She’s an odd woman, not really suitable to look after children, I should have thought. But here comes the one you really want to talk to.”

  Death, thought Dalgliesh, obliterates family resemblance as it does personality; there is no affinity between the living and the dead. The man who came into the room, shuffling a little but still upright, had once been as tall as his son; the sparse hair brushed back from a high forehead still showed streaks of the black it had once been; the watery eyes, sunken under the creased lids, were as dark. But there was no kinship with that rigid body on the laboratory floor. Death, in separating them forever, had robbed them even of their likeness.

  Mrs. Swaffield made the introductions in a voice of determined encouragement as if they had all suddenly gone deaf. Then she melted tactfully away, murmuring something about soup in the kitchen. Massingham sprang to help the old man to a chair, but Mr. Lorrimer, with a stiff chopping motion of the hand, gestured him aside. Eventually, after some hesitation, as if the sitting room were unfamiliar to him, he lowered himself into what was obviously his usual place, the shabby, high-backed armchair to the right of the fire, from which he regarded Dalgliesh steadily.

  Sitting there, bolt upright, in his old-fashioned and badly cut dark-blue suit, which smelt strongly of mothballs and now hung loosely on his diminished bones, he looked pathetic, almost grotesque, but not without dignity. Dalgliesh wondered why he had troubled to change. Was it a gesture of respect for his son, the need to formalize grief, a restless urge to find something to do? Or was it some atavistic belief that authority was on its way and should be propitiated by an outward show of deference? Dalgliesh was reminded of the funeral of a young detective constable killed on duty. What he had found almost unbearably pathetic had not been the sonorous beauty of the burial service, or even the young children walking hand in hand with careful solemnity behind their father’s coffin. It had been the reception afterwards in the small police house, the carefully planned home-cooked food and the drink, ill-afforded, which the widow had prepared for the refreshment of her husband’s colleagues and friends. Perhaps it had comforted her at the time, or solaced her in memory. Perhaps old Mr. Lorrimer, too, felt happier because he had taken trouble.

  Settling himself some distance from Dalgliesh on the extraordinarily lumpy sofa, Massingham opened his notebook. Thank God the old man was calm anyway. You could never tell how the relatives were going to take it. Dalgliesh, as he knew, had the reputation of being good with the bereaved. His condolences might be short, almost formal, but at least they sounded sincere. He took it for granted that the family would wish to co-operate with the police, but as a matter of justice, not of retribution. He didn’t connive at the extraordinary psychological interdependence by which the detective and the bereaved were often supported, and which it was so fatally easy to exploit. He made no specious promises, never bullied the weak or indulged the sentimental. And yet they seem to like him, thought Massingham. God knows why. At times he’s cold enough to be barely human.

  He watched Dalgliesh stand up as old Mr. Lorrimer came in to the room; but he made no move to help the old man to his chair. Massingham had glanced briefly at his chief’s face and seen the familiar look of speculative detached interest. What, if anything, he wondered, would move Dalgliesh to spontaneous pity? He remembered the other case they had worked on together a year previously, when he had been a detective sergeant; the death of a child. Dalgliesh had regarded the parents with just such a look of calm appraisal.

  But he had worked eighteen hours a day for a month until the case was solved. And his next book of poems had contained that extraordinary one about a murdered child which no one at the Yard, even those who professed to understand it, had had the temerity even to mention to its author. He said now: “As Mrs. Swaffield explained, my name is Dalgliesh and this is Inspector Massingham. I expect Dr. Howarth told you that we would be coming. I’m very sorry about your son. Do you feel able to answer some questions?”

  Mr. Lorrimer nodded towards the kitchen. “What’s she doing in there?”

  His voice was surprising; high timbred and with a trace of the querulousness of age, but extraordinarily strong for an old man.

  “Mrs. Swaffield? Making soup, I think.”

  “I suppose she’s used the onions and carrots we had in the vegetable rack. I thought I could smell carrots. Edwin knows I don’t like carrots in soup.”

  “Did he usually cook for you?”

  “He does all the cooking if he isn’t away at a scene of crime. I don’t eat much dinner at midday, but he leaves me something to heat up, a stew from the night before or a bit of fish in sauce, maybe
. He didn’t leave anything this morning because he wasn’t at home last night. I had to get my own breakfast. I fancied bacon, but I thought I’d better leave that in case he wants it for tonight. He usually cooks bacon and eggs if he’s late home.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “Mr. Lorrimer, have you any idea why anyone should want to murder your son? Had he any enemies?”

  “Why should he have enemies? He didn’t know anyone except at the Lab. Everyone had a great respect for him at the Lab. He told me so himself. Why would anyone want to harm him? Edwin lived for his work.”

  He brought out the last sentence as if it were an original expression of which he was rather proud.

  “You telephoned him last night at the Laboratory, didn’t you? What time was that?”

  “It was a quarter to nine. The telly went blank. It didn’t blink and go zigzag like it sometimes does. Edwin showed me how to adjust the knob at the back for that. It went blank with just one little circle of light and then that failed. I couldn’t see the nine o’clock news, so I rang Edwin and asked him to send for the TV man. We rent the set, and they’re supposed to come at any hour, but there’s always some excuse. Last month when I telephoned they didn’t come for two days.”

  “Can you remember what your son said?”

  “He said that it wasn’t any use telephoning late at night. He’d do it first thing this morning before he went to work. But, of course, he hasn’t. He didn’t come home. It’s still broken. I don’t like to telephone myself. Edwin always sees to everything like that. Do you think Mrs. Swaffield would ring?”

  “I’m sure that she would. When you telephoned him did he say anything about expecting a visitor?”

  “No. He seemed in a hurry, as if he didn’t like it because I phoned. But he always said to ring the Lab up if I was in trouble.”