Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh laid the letter down. He said: “ ‘Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live.’ Given the choice, Lorrimer would probably have preferred his murder to go unavenged than for any eyes but his to have seen these letters. What do you think of them?”

  Massingham was uncertain whether he was expected to comment on their subject matter or their style. He said cautiously: “The passage about the cave is effective. It looks as if he worked over that one.”

  “But not entirely original. An echo of Plato’s Republic. And like Plato’s caveman, the brightness dazzled and the light hurt his eyes. George Orwell wrote somewhere that murder, the unique crime, should result only from strong emotions. Well, here is the strong emotion. But we seem to have the wrong body.”

  “Do you think Dr. Howarth knew, sir?”

  “Almost certainly. The wonder is that no one else at the Lab apparently did. It’s not the kind of information that Mrs. Bidwell, for one, would keep to herself. First, I think, we check with the solicitors that this will still stands, and then we see the lady.”

  But this programme was to be changed. The wall telephone rang, shattering the peace of the room. Massingham answered. It was Sergeant Underhill trying, but with small success, to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  “There’s a Major Hunt of Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt of Ely wants to see Mr. Dalgliesh. He’d prefer not to talk over the telephone. He says could you ring and say when it would be convenient for Mr. Dalgliesh to call. And sir, we’ve got a witness! He’s over at Guy’s Marsh Police Station now. The name’s Alfred Goddard. He was a passenger last night passing the Lab on the nine-ten bus.”

  3

  “Running down drive he were like the devil out of hell.”

  “Can you describe him, Mr. Goddard?”

  “Naw. He weren’t old.”

  “How young?”

  “I never said ’e were young. I never seed ’im near enough to tell. But he didn’t run like an old ’un.”

  “Running for the bus, perhaps.”

  “If ’e were ’e never catched it.”

  “He wasn’t waving?”

  “ ’Course he weren’t. Driver couldn’t see ’im. No point in waving at back of bloody bus.”

  Guy’s Marsh Police Station was a red-brick Victorian building with a white wooden pediment, which looked so like an early railway station that Dalgliesh suspected that the nineteenth-century police authority had economized by making use of the same architect and the same set of plans.

  Mr. Alfred Goddard, waiting comfortably in the interview room with a huge mug of steaming tea before him, looked perfectly at home, neither gratified nor impressed to find himself a key witness in a murder investigation. He was a nut-brown, wrinkled, undersized countryman who smelt of strong tobacco, alcohol and cow dung. Dalgliesh recalled that the early fen settlers had been called “yellow bellies” by their highland neighbours because they crawled frog-like over their marshy fields, or “slodgers,” splashing web-footed through the mud. Either would have suited Mr. Goddard. Dalgliesh noticed with interest that he was wearing what looked like a leather thong bound round his left wrist, and guessed that this was dried eel skin, the ancient charm to ward off rheumatism. The misshapen fingers stiffly cradling the mug of tea suggested that the talisman had been less than efficacious.

  Dalgliesh doubted whether he would have troubled to come forward if Bill Carney, the conductor of the bus, hadn’t known him as a regular on the Wednesday-evening service travelling from Ely to Stoney Piggott via Chevisham, and had directed the inquiring police to his remote cottage. Having been summarily dug out of his lair, however, he displayed no particular resentment against Bill Carney or the police, and announced that he was prepared to answer questions if, as he explained, they were put to him “civil-like.” His main grievance in life was the Stoney Piggott bus: its lateness, infrequency, rising fares and, in particular, the stupidity of the recent experiment of using double-deckers on the Stoney Piggott route and his own subsequent banishment each Wednesday to the upper deck because of his pipe.

  “But how fortunate for us that you were there,” Massingham had pointed out. Mr. Goddard had merely snorted into his tea.

  Dalgliesh continued with the questioning: “Is there anything at all you can remember about him, Mr. Goddard? His height, his hair, how he was dressed?”

  “Naw. Middling tall and wearing a shortish coat, or mac maybe. Flapping open, maybe.”

  “Can you remember the colour?”

  “Darkish, maybe. I never seed ’im for more’n a second, see. Then trees got in the way. Bus were moving off when I first set eyes on him.”

  Massingham interposed: “The driver didn’t see him, nor did the conductor.”

  “More than likely. They was on lower deck. Isn’t likely they’d notice. And driver were driving bloody bus.”

  Dalgliesh said: “Mr. Goddard, this is very important. Can you remember whether there were any lights on in the Lab?”

  “What do you mean, Lab?”

  “The house the figure was running from.”

  “Lights in the house? If you mean house why not say house?” Mr. Goddard pantomimed the ardours of intensive thought, pursing his lips into a grimace and half closing his eyes. They waited. After a nicely judged interval he announced: “Faint lights, maybe. Not blazing out, mind you. I reckon I seed some lights from bottom windows.”

  Massingham asked: “You’re quite sure it was a man?”

  Mr. Goddard bestowed on him the glance of mingled reproof and chagrin of a viva-voce candidate faced with what he obviously regards as an unfair question. “Wearing trousers, wasn’t he? If he weren’t a man then he ought to have been.”

  “But you can’t be absolutely sure?”

  “Can’t be sure of nothing these days. Time was when folk dressed in a decent, God-fearing manner. Man or woman, it were human and it were running. That’s all I seed.”

  “So it could have been a woman in slacks?”

  “Never run like a woman. Daft runners women be, keeping their knees tight together and kicking out ankles like bloody ducks. Pity they don’t keep their knees together when they ain’t running, I say.”

  The deduction was fair enough, thought Dalgliesh. No woman ran precisely like a man. Goddard’s first impression had been that of a youngish man running, and that was probably exactly what he had seen. Too much questioning now might only confuse him.

  The driver and conductor, summoned from the bus depot and still in uniform, were unable to confirm Goddard’s story, but what they were able to add was useful. It is not surprising that neither of them had seen the runner, since the six-foot wall and its overhanging trees cut off a view of the Laboratory from the bottom deck and they could only have glimpsed the house when the bus was passing the open drive and slowing down at the stop. But if Mr. Goddard were right and the figure had only appeared when the bus was moving off, they still wouldn’t have seen him.

  It was helpful that they were both able to confirm that the bus, on that Wednesday evening at least, was running on time. Bill Carney had actually looked at his watch as they moved away. It had shown 9.12. The bus had halted at the stop for a couple of seconds. None of the three passengers had made any preliminary moves to get off, but both the driver and the conductor had noticed a woman waiting in the shadows of the bus shelter and had assumed that she would board. However, she hadn’t done so, but had turned away and moved back farther into the shadow of the shelter as the bus drew up. The conductor had thought it strange that she was waiting there, since there wasn’t another bus that night. But it had been raining slightly and he had assumed, without thinking about it very deeply, that she had been sheltering. It wasn’t his job, as he reasonably pointed out, to drag passengers on the bus if they didn’t want a ride.

  Dalgliesh questioned them both closely about the woman, but there was little firm information they could give. Both agreed that she had bee
n wearing a headscarf and that the collar of her coat had been turned up at her ears. The driver thought that she had been wearing slacks and a belted mackintosh. Bill Carney agreed about the slacks but thought that she had been wearing a duffel coat. Their only reason for assuming that the figure was a woman was the headscarf. Neither of them could describe it. They thought it unlikely that any of the three passengers on the lower deck would be able to help. Two of them were elderly regulars, both apparently asleep. The third was unknown to them.

  Dalgliesh knew that all three would have to be traced. This was one of those time-consuming jobs which were necessary but which seldom produced any worthwhile information. But it was astonishing how much the most unlikely people did notice. The sleepers might have been jogged awake by the slowing-down of the bus and have had a clearer look at the woman than either the conductor or driver. Mr. Goddard, not surprisingly, hadn’t noticed her. He inquired caustically how a chap was expected to see through the roof of a bloody bus shelter and, in any case, he’d been looking the other way hadn’t he, and a good job for them that he had. Dalgliesh hastened to propitiate him and, when his statement was at last completed to the old man’s satisfaction, watched him driven back to his cottage, sitting in some style, like a tiny upright manikin, in the back of the police car.

  But it was another ten minutes before Dalgliesh and Massingham could set out for Ely. Albert Bidwell had presented himself conveniently if belatedly at the police station, bringing with him a hefty sample of the mud from the five-acre field and an air of sullen grievance. Massingham wondered how he and his wife had originally met and what had brought together two such dissimilar personalities. She, he felt sure, was born a cockney; he a fenman. He was taciturn where she was avid for gossip and excitement.

  He admitted to taking the telephone call. It was a woman and the message was that Mrs. Bidwell was to go to Leamings to give Mrs. Schofield a hand instead of to the Lab. He couldn’t remember if the caller had given her name but didn’t think so. He had taken calls from Mrs. Schofield once or twice before when she had rung to ask his wife to help with dinner parties or suchlike. Women’s business. He couldn’t say whether the voice sounded the same. Asked whether he had assumed that the caller was Mrs. Schofield, he said that he hadn’t assumed anything.

  Dalgliesh asked: “Can you remember whether the caller said that your wife was to come to Leamings or go to Leamings?”

  The significance of this question obviously escaped him but he received it with surly suspicion and, after a long pause, said he didn’t know. When Massingham asked whether it was possible that the caller hadn’t been a woman but a man disguising his voice, he gave him a look of concentrated disgust as if deploring a mind that could imagine such sophisticated villainy. But the answer provoked his longest response. He said, in a tone of finality, that he didn’t know whether it was a woman, or a man pretending to be a woman, or, maybe, a lass. All he knew was that he’d been asked to give his wife a message, and he’d given it to her. And if he’d known it would cause all this botheration he wouldn’t have answered the phone.

  And with that they had to be content.

  4

  In Dalgliesh’s experience, solicitors who practised in cathedral cities were invariably agreeably housed, and the office of Messrs Pargeter, Coleby and Hunt was no exception. It was a well-preserved and maintained Regency house with a view of the Cathedral Green, an imposing front door whose ebony-black paint gleamed as if it were still wet, and whose brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head had been polished almost to whiteness. The door was opened by an elderly and very thin clerk, Dickensian in his old-fashioned black suit and stiff collar, whose appearance of lugubrious resignation brightened somewhat at seeing them, as if cheered by the prospect of trouble. He bowed slightly when Dalgliesh introduced himself and said: “Major Hunt is, of course, expecting you, sir. He is just concluding his interview with a client. If you will step this way he won’t keep you waiting more than a couple of minutes.”

  The waiting room into which they were shown resembled the sitting room of a men’s club in its comfort and air of controlled disorder. The chairs were leather and so wide and deep that it was difficult to imagine anyone over sixty rising from them without difficulty. Despite the heat from two old-fashioned radiators there was a coke fire burning in the grate. The large circular mahogany table was spread with magazines devoted to the interests of the landed gentry, most of which looked very old. There was a glass-fronted bookcase packed with bound histories of the county and illustrated volumes on architecture and painting. The oil over the mantelpiece of a phaeton with horses and attendant grooms looked very like a Stubbs, and, thought Dalgliesh, probably was.

  He only had time briefly to inspect the room, and had walked over to the window to look out towards the Lady Chapel of the cathedral when the door opened and the clerk reappeared to usher them into Major Hunt’s office. The man who rose from behind his desk to receive them was in appearance the opposite of his clerk. He was a stocky, upright man in late middle age, dressed in a shabby but well-tailored tweed suit, ruddy-faced and balding, his eyes keen under the spiky, restless eyebrows. He gave Dalgliesh a frankly appraising glance as he shook hands, as if deciding where exactly to place him in some private scheme of things, then nodded as if satisfied. He still looked more like a soldier than a solicitor, and Dalgliesh guessed that the voice with which he greeted them had acquired its loud authoritative bark across the parade grounds and in the messes of the Second World War.

  “Good morning, good morning. Please sit down, Commander. You come on tragic business. I don’t think we have ever lost one of our clients by murder before.”

  The clerk coughed. It was just such a cough as Dalgliesh would have expected, inoffensive but discreetly minatory and not to be ignored.

  “There was Sir James Cummins, sir, in 1923. He was shot by his neighbour, Captain Cartwright, because of the seduction of Mrs. Cartwright by Sir James, a grievance aggravated by some unpleasantness over fishing rights.”

  “Quite right, Mitching. But that was in my father’s time. They hanged poor Cartwright. A pity, my father always thought. He had a good war record—survived the Somme and Arras and ended on the scaffold. Battle-scarred, poor devil. The jury would probably have made a recommendation to mercy if he hadn’t cut up the body. He did cut up the body, didn’t he, Mitching?”

  “Quite right, sir. They found the head buried in the orchard.”

  “That’s what did it for Cartwright. English juries won’t stand for cutting up the body. Crippen would be alive today if he’d buried Belle Elmore in one piece.”

  “Hardly, sir. Crippen was born in 1860.”

  “Well he wouldn’t have been long dead. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d reached his century. Only three years older than your father, Mitching, and much the same build, small, pop-eyed and wiry. They live forever, that type. Ah well, to our muttons. You’ll both take coffee, I hope. I can promise you it will be drinkable. Mitching has installed one of those glass retort affairs and we grind our own fresh beans. Coffee then, please, Mitching.”

  “Miss Makepeace is preparing it now, sir.”

  Major Hunt exuded postprandial well-being, and Massingham guessed, with some envy, that his business with his last client had been chiefly done over a good lunch. He and Dalgliesh had snatched a hurried sandwich and beer at a pub between Chevisham and Guy’s Marsh. Dalgliesh, known to enjoy food and wine, had an inconvenient habit of ignoring mealtimes when in the middle of a case. Massingham wasn’t fussy about the quality; it was the quantity he deplored. But, at least, they were to get coffee.

  Mitching had stationed himself near the door and showed no inclination to leave. This was apparently perfectly acceptable. Dalgliesh thought that they were like a couple of comedians in the process of perfecting their antiphonal patter, and reluctant to lose any opportunity of practising it.

  Major Hunt said: “You want to know about Lorrimer’s will, of course.”

&
nbsp; “And anything else you can tell us about him.”

  “That won’t be much, I’m afraid. I’ve only seen him twice since I dealt with his grandmother’s estate. But of course I’ll do what I can. When murder comes in at the window privacy goes out of the door. That’s so, isn’t it, Mitching?”

  “There are no secrets, sir, in the fierce light that beats upon the scaffold.”

  “I’m not sure that you’ve got that one right, Mitching. And we don’t have scaffolds now. Are you an abolitionist, Commander?”

  Dalgliesh said: “I’m bound to be until the day comes when we can be absolutely sure that we could never under any circumstances make a mistake.”

  “That’s the orthodox answer, but it begs quite a lot of questions, doesn’t it? Still you’re not here to discuss capital punishment. Mustn’t waste time. Now the will. Where did I put Mr. Lorrimer’s box, Mitching?”

  “It’s here, sir.”

  “Then bring it over, man. Bring it over.”

  The clerk carried the black tin box from a side table and placed it in front of Major Hunt. The Major opened it with some ceremony and took out the will.

  Dalgliesh said: “We’ve found one will in his desk. It’s dated 3rd May 1971. It looks like the original.”

  “So he didn’t destroy it? That’s interesting. It suggests that he hadn’t finally made up his mind.”

  “So there’s a later will?”

  “Oh, indeed there is, Commander. Indeed there is. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Signed by him only last Friday and both the original and the only copy left here with me. I have them here. Perhaps you’d like to read it yourself.”

  He handed over the will. It was very short. Lorrimer, in the accepted form, revoked all previous wills, proclaimed himself to be of sound mind and disposed of all his property in less than a dozen lines. Postmill Cottage was left to his father together with a sum of ten thousand pounds. One thousand pounds was left to Brenda Pridmore “to enable her to buy any books required to further her scientific education.” All the rest of his estate was left to the Academy of Forensic Science to provide an annual cash prize of such amount as the Academy should see fit for an original essay on any aspect of the scientific investigation of crime, the essay to be judged by three judges selected by the Academy. There was no mention of Angela Foley.