Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  “Did you give him a reason?”

  “No. I’m not sure that there was a reason. Does there have to be? There wasn’t another man if that’s what you have in mind. What a beautifully simple view you must have of life. I suppose the police work produces a card-index mentality. Victim—Edwin Lorrimer. Crime—Murder. Accused—Domenica Schofield. Motive—Sex. Verdict—Guilty. What a pity that you can’t any longer finish it off neatly with Sentence—Death. Let’s say I was tired of him.”

  “When you’d exhausted his possibilities, sexual and emotional?”

  “Say intellectual, rather, if you’ll forgive the arrogance. I find that one exhausts the physical possibilities fairly soon, don’t you? But if a man has wit, intelligence and his own peculiar enthusiasms, then there’s some kind of purpose in the relationship. I knew a man once who was an authority on seventeenth-century church architecture. We used to drive for miles looking at churches. It was fascinating while it lasted, and I now know quite a lot about the late seventeenth century. That’s something on the credit side.”

  “Whereas Lorrimer’s only intellectual enthusiasms were popular philosophy and forensic science.”

  “Forensic biology. He was curiously inhibited about discussing it. The Official Secrets Act was probably engraved on what he would have described as his soul. Besides, he could be boring even about his job. Scientists invariably are, I’ve discovered. My brother is the only scientist I’ve ever met who doesn’t bore me after the first ten minutes of his company.”

  “Where did you make love?”

  “That’s impertinent. And is it relevant?”

  “It could be—to the number of people who knew that you were lovers.”

  “No one knew. I don’t relish my private affairs being giggled over in the women’s loo at Hoggatt’s.”

  “So no one knew except your brother and yourself?” They must have decided in advance that it would be stupid and dangerous to deny that Howarth had known.

  She said: “I hope you’re not going to ask whether he approved.”

  “No. I took it for granted that he disapproved.”

  “Why the hell should you?” The tone was intended to be light, almost bantering, but Dalgliesh could detect the sharp edge of defensive anger.

  He said mildly: “I am merely putting myself in his place. If I had just started a new job, and one of some difficulty, my half-sister’s affair with a member of my own staff, and one who probably thought he’d been supplanted, would be a complication I’d prefer to do without.”

  “Perhaps you lack my brother’s confidence. He didn’t need Edwin Lorrimer’s support to run his Lab effectively.”

  “You brought him here?”

  “Seducing one of my brother’s staff here in his own house? Had I disliked my brother, it might have given the affair extra piquancy. Towards the end I admit it could have done with it. But as I don’t, it would merely have been in poor taste. We both have cars, and his is particularly roomy.”

  “I thought that was the expedient of randy adolescents. It must have been uncomfortable and cold.”

  “Very cold. Which was another reason for deciding to stop it.” She turned to him with sudden vehemence. “Look, I’m not trying to shock you. I’m trying to be truthful. I hate death and waste and violence. Who doesn’t? But I’m not grieving, in case you thought of offering condolences. There’s only one man whose death has grieved me, and it isn’t Edwin Lorrimer. And I don’t feel responsible. Why should I? I’m not responsible. Even if he killed himself I shouldn’t feel that it was my fault. As it is, I don’t believe his death had anything to do with me. He might, I suppose, have felt like murdering me. I never had the slightest motive for murdering him.”

  “Have you any idea who did?”

  “A stranger, I imagine. Someone who broke into the Lab either to plant or to destroy some forensic evidence. Perhaps a drunken driver hoping to get his hands on his blood sample. Edwin surprised him and the intruder killed him.”

  “The blood-alcohol analysis isn’t done in the Biology Department.”

  “Then it could have been an enemy, someone with a grudge. Someone he’d given evidence against in the past. After all, he’s probably well known in the witness box. Death of an expert witness.”

  Dalgliesh said: “There’s the difficulty of how his killer got in and out of the Lab.”

  “He probably gained entrance during the day and hid after the place was locked up for the night. I leave it to you to discover how he got away. Perhaps he slipped out after the Lab had been opened for the morning during the kerfuffle after that girl—Pridmore, isn’t it?—discovered the body. I don’t suppose that anyone was keeping an eye on the front door.”

  “And the false telephone call to Mrs. Bidwell?”

  “Probably no connection, I’d say. Just someone trying to be funny. She’s probably too scared to admit what happened. I should question the junior female staff of the Lab if I were you. It’s the kind of joke a rather unintelligent adolescent might find amusing.”

  Dalgliesh went on to ask her about her movements on the previous evening. She said that she hadn’t accompanied her brother to the concert, having a dislike of rustic junketing, no wish to hear the Mozart indifferently played, and a couple of drawings to complete. They’d had an early supper at about six forty-five, and Howarth had left home at seven-twenty. She had continued working uninterrupted either by a telephone call or a visitor until her brother returned shortly after ten, when he had told her about his evening over a shared nightcap of hot whisky. Both of them had then gone early to bed.

  She volunteered without being asked that her brother had seemed perfectly normal on his return, although both of them had been tired. He had attended a murder scene the night before and had lost some hours’ sleep. She did occasionally make use of Mrs. Bidwell, for example before and after a dinner party she and Howarth had given soon after their arrival, but certainly wouldn’t call on her on a day when she was due at the Lab.

  Dalgliesh asked: “Did your brother tell you that he left the concert for a time after the interval?”

  “He told me that he sat on a tombstone for about half an hour contemplating mortality. I imagine that, at that stage of the proceedings, he found the dead more entertaining than the living.”

  Dalgliesh looked up at the immense curved wooden ceiling. He said: “This place must be expensive to keep warm in winter. How is it heated?”

  Again there was that swift elliptical flash of blue. “By gas central heating. There isn’t an open fire. That’s one of the things we miss. So we couldn’t have burnt Paul Middlemass’s white coat. Actually, we’d have been fools to try. The most sensible plan would be to weigh it down with stones in the pockets and sling it into Leamings’ Sluice. You’d probably dredge it up in the end, but I don’t see how that would help you to discover who put it there. That’s what I would have done.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Dalgliesh mildly. “There weren’t any pockets.”

  She didn’t offer to see them out, but Howarth was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. Dalgliesh said: “You didn’t tell me that your sister was Lorrimer’s mistress. Did you really convince yourself that it wasn’t relevant?”

  “To his death? Why should it be? It may have been relevant to his life. I very much doubt whether it was to hers. And I’m not my sister’s keeper. She’s capable of speaking for herself, as you’ve probably discovered.”

  He walked with them out to the car, punctilious as a host speeding a couple of unwelcome guests. Dalgliesh said, his hand on the car door: “Does the number 1840 mean anything to you?”

  “In what context?”

  “Any you choose.”

  Howarth said calmly, “Whewell published Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences; Tchaikovsky was born; Berlioz composed the Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale. I think that’s the limit of my knowledge of an unremarkable year. Or if you want a different context, the ratio of the mass of the proton to the ma
ss of the electron.”

  Massingham called from the other side of the Rover: “I thought that was 1836, unless you’re not fussy about rounding up. Good-night, sir.”

  As they turned out of the drive, Dalgliesh asked: “How do you come to remember that remarkably irrelevant piece of information?”

  “From school. We may have been disadvantaged when it came to social mix, but the teaching wasn’t bad. It’s a figure which sticks in the mind.”

  “Not in mine. What did you think of Mrs. Schofield?”

  “I didn’t expect her to be like that.”

  “As attractive, as talented or as arrogant?”

  “All three. Her face reminds me of someone, an actress. French I think.”

  “Simone Signoret when she was young. I’m surprised that you’re old enough to remember.”

  “I saw a revival last year of Casque d’Or.”

  Dalgliesh said: “She told us at least one small lie.”

  Apart, thought Massingham, from the one major lie which she may or may not have told. He was experienced enough to know that it was the central lie, the affirmation of innocence, which was the most difficult to detect, and the small, ingenious fabrications, so often unnecessary, which in the end confused and betrayed.

  “Sir?”

  “About where she and Lorrimer made love, in the back of his car. I don’t believe that. Do you?”

  It was rare for Dalgliesh to question a subordinate so directly. Massingham disconcertingly felt himself under test. He gave careful thought before replying. “Psychologically it could be wrong. She’s a fastidious, comfort-loving woman with a high opinion of her own dignity. And she must have watched the body of her husband being pulled from the wreckage of their car after that accident when she’d been driving. Somehow I don’t think she’d fancy sex in the back of anyone’s car. Unless, of course, she’s trying to exorcize the memory. It could be that.”

  Dalgliesh smiled. “Actually I was thinking on less esoteric lines. A scarlet Jaguar, and the latest model, is hardly the most inconspicuous vehicle for driving round the country with a lover. And old Mr. Lorrimer said that his son hardly left home in the evenings or at night, unless to a murder scene. These are unpredictable. On the other hand he was frequently late at the Lab. Not all the lateness could have been work. I think that he and Mrs. Schofield had a rendezvous somewhere fairly close.”

  “You think it important, sir?”

  “Important enough to cause her to lie. Why should she care if we know where they chose to disport themselves? I could understand it if she told us to mind our own business. But why bother to lie? There was another moment, too, when very briefly she lost composure. It was when she talked about seventeenth-century church architecture. I got the impression that there was a small, almost undetectable moment of confusion when she realized that she’d stumbled into saying something indiscreet, or at least something she wished unsaid. When the interviews are out of the way tomorrow, I think we’ll take a look at the chapel at Hoggatt’s.”

  “But Sergeant Reynolds had a look at it this morning, sir, after he’d searched the grounds. It’s just a locked, empty chapel. He found nothing.”

  “Probably because there’s nothing to find. It’s just a hunch. Now we’d better get back to Guy’s Marsh for that Press conference and then I must have a word with the Chief Constable if he’s back. After that I’d like to see Brenda Pridmore again; and I want to call later at the Old Rectory for a word with Dr. Kerrison. But that can wait until we’ve seen what Mrs. Gotobed at the Moonraker can do about dinner.”

  6

  Twenty minutes later, in the kitchen at Leamings, an incongruous compromise between a laboratory and rustic domesticity, Howarth was mixing sauce vinaigrette. The sickly, pungent smell of the olive oil, curving in a thin golden stream from the bottle, brought back, as always, memories of Italy and of his father, that dilettante collector of trivia, who had spent most of each year in Tuscany or Venice, and whose self-indulgent, hypochondriacal, solitary life had ended, appropriately enough since he affected to dread old age, on his fiftieth birthday. He had been less a stranger to his two motherless children than an enigma, seldom with them in person, always present mysteriously to their minds.

  Maxim recalled a memory of his dressing-gowned figure, patterned in mauve and gold, standing at the foot of his bed on that extraordinary night of muted voices, sudden running footsteps, inexplicable silences in which his stepmother had died. He had been home from prep school for the holidays, eight years old. Ignored in the crisis of the illness, frightened and alone. He remembered clearly his father’s thin, rather weary voice, already assuming the languors of grief.

  “Your stepmother died ten minutes ago, Maxim. Evidently fate does not intend me to be a husband. I shall not again risk such grief. You, my boy, must look after your stepsister. I rely on you.” And then a cold hand casually laid on his shoulder as if conferring a burden. He had accepted it, literally, at eight years old, and had never laid it down. At first the immensity of the trust had appalled him. He remembered how he had lain there, terrified, staring into the darkness. Look after your sister. Domenica was three months old. How could he look after her? What ought he to feed her on? How dress her? What about his prep school? They wouldn’t let him stay at home to look after his sister. He smiled wryly, remembering his relief at discovering next morning that her nurse was, after all, to remain. He recalled his first efforts to assume responsibility, resolutely seizing the pram handles and straining to push it up the Broad Walk, struggling to lift Domenica into her high chair.

  “Give over, Master Maxim, do. You’re more of a hindrance than a help.”

  But afterwards the nurse had begun to realize that he was becoming more of a help than a nuisance, that the child could safely be left with him while she and the only other servant pursued their own unsupervised devices. Most of his school holidays had been spent helping to look after Domenica. From Rome, Verona, Florence and Venice his father, through his solicitor, sent instructions about allowances and schools. It was he who helped buy the clothes, took her to school, comforted and advised. He had attempted to support her through the agonies and uncertainties of adolescence, even before he had outgrown his own. He had been her champion against the world. He smiled, remembering the telephone call to Cambridge from her boarding school, asking him to fetch her that very night “outside the hockey pavilion—gruesome torture house—at midnight. I’ll climb down the fire escape. Promise.” And then their private code of defiance and allegiance: “Contra mundum.”

  “Contra mundum.” His father’s arrival from Italy, so little perturbed by the Reverend Mother’s insistent summons that it was obvious that he had, in any case, been planning to return.

  “Your sister’s departure was unnecessarily eccentric, surely. Midnight assignation. Dramatic car drive across half England. Mother Superior seemed particularly pained that she had left her trunk behind, although I can appreciate that it would have been an encumbrance on the fire escape. And you must have been out of college all night. Your tutor can’t have liked that.”

  “I’m post-graduate now, Father. I took my degree eighteen months ago.”

  “Indeed. Time passes so quickly at my age. Physics, wasn’t it? A curious choice. Couldn’t you have called for her after school in the orthodox way?”

  “We wanted to get as far away from the place as possible before they noticed she’d gone and started looking.”

  “A reasonable strategy, so far as it goes.”

  “Dom hates school, Father. She’s utterly miserable there.”

  “So was I at school, but it never occurred to me to expect otherwise. Reverend Mother seems a charming woman. A tendency to halitosis when under stress, but I shouldn’t have thought that would have troubled your sister. They can hardly have come into intimate contact. She isn’t prepared to have Domenica back, by the way.”

  “Need Dom go anywhere, Father? She’s nearly fifteen. She doesn’t have to go to school
. And she wants to be a painter.”

  “I suppose she could stay at home until she’s old enough for art college, if that’s what you advise. But it’s hardly worth opening the London house just for one. I shall return to Venice next week. I’m only here to consult Dr. Mavers-Brown.”

  “Perhaps she could go back to Italy with you for a month or so. She’d love to see the Accademia. And she ought to see Florence.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that would do, my boy. Quite out of the question. She had much better take a room at Cambridge and you can keep an eye on her. They have some quite agreeable pictures in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Oh dear, what a responsibility children are! It’s quite wrong that I should be troubled like this in my state of health. Mavers-Brown was insistent that I avoid anxiety.”

  And now he lay coffined in his final self-sufficiency, in that most beautiful of burial grounds, the British Cemetery in Rome. He would have liked that, thought Maxim, if he could have borne the thought of his death at all, as much as he would have resented the over-aggressive Italian drivers whose ill-judged acceleration at the junction of the Via Vittoria and the Corso had placed him there.

  He heard his sister’s steps on the stairs. “So they’ve gone.”

  “Twenty minutes ago. We had a brief valedictory skirmish. Was Dalgliesh offensive?”

  “No more offensive than I to him. Honours even, I should have said. I don’t think he liked me.”

  “I don’t think he likes anyone much. But he’s considered highly intelligent. Did you find him attractive?”

  She answered the unspoken question. “It would be like making love to a public hangman.” She dipped her finger in the vinaigrette dressing. “Too much vinegar. What have you been doing?”

  “Apart from cooking? Thinking about Father. Do you know, Dom, when I was eleven I became absolutely convinced that he’d murdered our mothers.”

  “Both of them? I mean yours and mine? What an odd idea.