Death of an Expert Witness

by P. D. James

  Massingham said: “So she and Angela Foley get nothing. But that’s not a reason for killing herself. And why here, of all places?”

  Dalgliesh got to his feet. “I don’t think she did kill herself. This was murder.”

  BOOK FIVE

  THE CLUNCH PIT

  1

  They were at Bowlem’s Farm before first light. Mrs. Pridmore had begun her baking early. Already two large earthenware bowls covered with humped linen stood on the kitchen table, and the whole cottage was redolent with the warm, fecund smell of yeast. When Dalgliesh and Massingham arrived Dr. Greene, a squat broad-shouldered man with the face of a benevolent toad, was folding his stethoscope into the depths of an old-fashioned Gladstone bag. It was less than twelve hours since Dalgliesh and he had last met, since, as police surgeon, he had been the first doctor to be called to Stella Mawson’s body. He had examined it briefly and then pronounced: “Is she dead? Answer: yes. Cause of death? Answer: hanging. Time of death? About one hour ago. Now you’d better call in the expert and he’ll explain to you why the first question is the only one he’s at present competent to answer.”

  Now he wasted no time on civilities or questions but nodded briefly to the two detectives and continued talking to Mrs. Pridmore. “The lass is fine. She’s had a nasty shock but nothing that a good night’s sleep hasn’t put right. She’s young and healthy, and it’ll take more than a couple of corpses to turn her into a neurotic wreck, if that’s what you’re frightened of. My family has been doctoring yours for three generations and there’s none of you gone off your heads yet.” He nodded to Dalgliesh. “You can go up now.”

  Arthur Pridmore was standing beside his wife, his hand gripping her shoulder. No one had introduced him to Dalgliesh; nor was there need. He said: “She hasn’t faced the worst yet, has she? This is the second body. What do you think life in the village will be like for her if these two deaths aren’t solved?”

  Dr. Greene was impatient. He snapped shut his bag. “Good grief, man, no one’s going to suspect Brenda! She’s lived here all her life. I brought her into the world.”

  “That’s no protection against slander, though, is it? I’m not saying they’ll accuse her. But you know the fens. Folk here can be superstitious, unforgetting and unforgiving. There’s such a thing as being tainted with bad luck.”

  “Not for your pretty Brenda, there isn’t. She’ll be the local heroine, most likely. Shake off this morbid nonsense, Arthur. And come out to the car with me. I want a word about that business at the Parochial Church Council.” They went out together.

  Mrs. Pridmore looked up at Dalgliesh. He thought that she had been crying. She said: “And now you’re going to question her, make her talk about it, raking it all up again.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dalgliesh gently, “talking about it will help.”

  She made no move to accompany them upstairs, a tact for which Dalgliesh was grateful. He could hardly have objected, particularly as there hadn’t been time to get a policewoman, but he had an idea that Brenda would be both more relaxed and more communicative in her mother’s absence. She called out happily to his knock. The little bedroom with its low beams and its curtains drawn against the morning darkness was full of light and colour, and she was sitting up in bed fresh and bright-eyed, her aureole of hair tumbling around her shoulders. Dalgliesh wondered anew at the resilience of youth. Massingham, halted suddenly in the doorway, thought that she ought to be in the Uffizi, her feet floating above a meadow of spring flowers, the whole sunlit landscape of Italy stretching behind her into infinity.

  It was still very much a schoolgirl’s room. There were two shelves of schoolbooks, another with a collection of dolls in national costumes, and a cork board with cut-outs from the Sunday supplements and photographs of her friends. There was a wicker chair beside the bed holding a large teddy bear. Dalgliesh removed it and placed it on the bed beside her, then sat down.

  He said: “How are you feeling? Better?”

  She leaned impulsively towards him. The sleeve of her cream dressing jacket fell over the freckled arm. She said: “I’m so glad you’ve come. No one wants to talk about it. They can’t realize that I’ve got to talk about it sometime and it’s much better now while it’s fresh in my mind. It was you who found me, wasn’t it? I remember being picked up—rather like Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility—and the nice tweedy smell of your jacket. But I can’t remember anything after that. I do remember ringing the bell, though.”

  “That was clever of you. We were parked in Hoggatt’s drive and heard it, otherwise it might have been hours before the body was found.”

  “It wasn’t clever really. It was just panic. I suppose you realize what happened? I got a puncture in my bike and decided to walk home through the new Lab. Then I got rather lost and panicked. I started thinking about Dr. Lorrimer’s murderer and imagining that he was lying in wait for me. I even imagined that he might have punctured the tyres on purpose. It seems silly now, but it didn’t then.”

  Dalgliesh said: “We’ve examined the bicycle. There was a lorry-load of grit passing the Lab during the afternoon and some of the load was shed. You had a sharp flint in each tyre. But it was a perfectly natural fear. Can you remember whether there really was someone in the building?”

  “Not really. I didn’t see anyone and I think I imagined most of the sounds I heard. What really frightened me was an owl. Then I got out of the building and rushed in a panic across a field straight towards the chapel.”

  “Did you get the impression that anyone might be there alive in the chapel?”

  “Well, there aren’t any pillars to hide behind. It’s a funny chapel, isn’t it? Not really a holy place. Perhaps it hasn’t been prayed in enough. I’ve only been there once before when Dr. Howarth and three of the staff from the Lab gave a concert, so I know what it’s like. Do you mean he could have been crouched down in one of the stalls watching me? It’s a horrible idea.”

  “It is rather. But now that you’re safe, could you bear to think about it?”

  “I can now you’re here.” She paused. “I don’t think he was. I didn’t see anyone, and I don’t think I heard anyone. But I was so terrified that I probably wouldn’t have noticed. All I could see was this bundle of clothes strung up on the wall, and then the face drooping down at me.”

  He didn’t need to warn her of the importance of his next question.

  “Can you remember where you found the chair, its exact position?”

  “It was lying overturned just to the right of the body as if she had kicked it away. I think it had fallen backwards, but it might have been on its side.”

  “But you’re quite sure that it had fallen?”

  “Quite sure. I remember turning it upright so that I could stand on it to reach the bell-rope.” She looked at him, bright-eyed. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I? Now you won’t be able to tell whether any marks or soil on the seat came from my shoes or hers. Was that why Inspector Massingham took away my shoes last night? Mummy told me.”

  “Yes, that’s why.” The chair would be tested for prints, then sent for examination to the Metropolitan Laboratory. But this murder, if it were murder, had been premeditated. Dalgliesh doubted whether, this time, the killer would have made any mistakes.

  Brenda said: “One thing has struck me, though. It’s odd, isn’t it, that the light was on?”

  “That’s another thing that I wanted to ask you. You’re quite sure that the chapel was lit? You didn’t switch on the light yourself?”

  “I’m quite sure I didn’t. I saw the lights gleaming through the trees. Rather like the City of God, you know. It would have been more sensible to have run for the road once I’d got clear of the new building. But suddenly I saw the shape of the chapel and the light shining faintly through the windows, and I ran towards it almost by instinct.”

  “I expect it was by instinct. Your ancestors did the same. Only they would have run for sanctuary to St. Nicholas’s.”r />
  “I’ve been thinking about the lights ever since I woke up. It looks like suicide, doesn’t it? I don’t suppose people kill themselves in the dark. I know I wouldn’t. I can’t imagine killing myself at all unless I was desperately ill and lonely and in terrible pain, or someone was torturing me to make me give them vital information. But if I did, I wouldn’t switch the lights off. I’d want to see my last of the light before I went into the darkness, wouldn’t you? But murderers always want to delay discovery of the body, don’t they? So why didn’t he turn off the light and lock the door?”

  She spoke with happy unconcern. The illness, the loneliness and the pain were as unreal and remote as was the torture. Dalgliesh said: “Perhaps because he wanted it to look like suicide. Was that your first thought when you found the body, that she’d killed herself?”

  “Not at the time. I was too frightened to think at all. But since I’ve woken up and started considering it all—yes, I suppose I do think it was suicide.”

  “But you’re not sure why you think that?”

  “Perhaps because hanging is such a strange way of killing someone. But suicides often do hang themselves, don’t they? Mr. Bowlem’s previous pigman did—in the tithe-barn. And old Annie Makepiece. I’ve noticed that, in the fens, people usually shoot themselves or hang themselves. You see, on a farm, there’s always a gun or a rope.”

  She spoke simply and without fear. She had lived on a farm all her life. There was always birth and death, the birth and death of animals and of humans too. And the long nights of the fen winters would bring their own miasma of madness or despair. But not to her.

  He said: “You appal me. It sounds like a holocaust.”

  “It doesn’t happen often, but one remembers when it does. I just associate hanging with suicide. Do you think this time I’m wrong?”

  “I think you could be. But we shall find out. You’ve been very helpful.”

  He spent another five minutes talking to her, but there was nothing that she could add. She hadn’t gone with Inspector Blakelock to Chief Inspector Martin’s office when he set the night alarms, so couldn’t say whether or not the key to the chapel was still on its hook. She had only met Stella Mawson once before at the concert in the chapel, when she had sat in the same row as Angela Foley, Stella Mawson, Mrs. Schofield and Dr. Kerrison and his children.

  As Dalgliesh and Massingham were leaving, she said: “I don’t think Mum and Dad will let me go back to the Lab now. In fact I’m sure they won’t. They want me to marry Gerald Bowlem. I think I would like to marry Gerald, at least, I’ve never thought of marrying anyone else, but not just yet. It would be nice to be a scientist and have a proper career first. But Mum won’t have an easy moment if I stay at the Lab. She loves me, and I’m all she’s got. You can’t hurt people when they love you.”

  Dalgliesh recognized an appeal for help. He went back and sat again in the chair. Massingham, pretending to look out of the window, was intrigued. He wondered what they would think at the Yard if they could see the old man taking time from a murder investigation to advise on the moral ambiguities of Women’s Lib. But he rather wished that she had asked him. Since they had come into the room she had looked only at Dalgliesh. Now he heard him say: “I suppose a scientific job isn’t easy to combine with being a farmer’s wife.”

  “I don’t think it would be fair to Gerald.”

  “I used to think that we can have almost anything we want from life, that it’s just a question of organization. But now I’m beginning to think that we have to make a choice more often than we’d like. The important thing is to make sure that it’s our choice, no one else’s, and that we make it honestly. But one thing I’m sure of is that it’s never a good thing to make a decision when you’re not absolutely well. Why not wait a little time, until we’ve solved Dr. Lorrimer’s murder anyway. Your mother may feel differently then.”

  She said: “I suppose this is what murder does, changes people’s lives and spoils them.”

  “Changes, yes. But it needn’t spoil. You’re young and intelligent and brave, so you won’t let it spoil yours.”

  Downstairs, in the farmhouse kitchen, Mrs. Pridmore was sandwiching fried rashers of bacon between generous slices of crusty bread. She said gruffly: “You both look as if you could do with some breakfast. Up all night, I dare say. It won’t hurt you to sit down and take a couple of minutes to eat these. And I’ve made fresh tea.”

  Supper the previous night had been a couple of sandwiches fetched by a constable from the Moonraker and eaten in the antechapel. Not until he smelt the bacon did Massingham realize how hungry he was. He bit gratefully into the warm bread to the oozing saltiness of home-cured bacon, and washed it down with strong, hot tea. He felt cosseted by the warmth and friendliness of the kitchen, this cosy womb-like shelter from the dark fens. Then the telephone rang. Mrs. Pridmore went to answer it. She said: “That was Dr. Greene ringing from Sprogg’s Cottage. He says to tell you that Angela Foley is well enough to speak to you now.”

  2

  Angela Foley came slowly into the room. She was fully dressed and perfectly calm, but both men were shocked by the change in her. She walked stiffly, and her face looked aged and bruised as if she had suffered all night a physical assault of grief. Her small eyes were pale and sunken behind the jutting bones, her cheeks were unhealthily mottled, the delicate mouth was swollen and there was a herpes on the upper lip. Only her voice was unchanged; the childish, unemphatic voice with which she had answered their first questions.

  The district nurse, who had spent the night at Sprogg’s Cottage, had lit the fire. Angela looked at the crackling wood and said: “Stella never lit the fire until late in the afternoon. I used to lay it in the morning before I went to the Lab, and she’d put a match to it about half an hour before I was due home.”

  Dalgliesh said: “We found Miss Mawson’s house keys on her body. I’m afraid we had to unlock her desk to examine her papers. You were asleep, so we weren’t able to ask you.”

  She said, dully: “It wouldn’t have made any difference, would it? You would have looked just the same. You had to.”

  “Did you know that your friend once went through a form of marriage with Edwin Lorrimer? There wasn’t a divorce; the marriage was annulled after two years because of non-consummation. Did she tell you?”

  She turned to look at him, but it was impossible to gauge the expression in those small, pig-like eyes. If her voice held any emotion, it was closer to wry amusement than to surprise.

  “Married? She and Edwin? So that’s how she knew …” She broke off. “No, she didn’t tell me. When I came to live here it was a new beginning for both of us. I didn’t want to talk about the past and I don’t think she did either. She did sometimes tell me things, about her life at university, her job, odd people she knew. But that was one thing she didn’t tell me.”

  Dalgliesh asked gently: “Do you feel able to tell me what happened last night?”

  “She said that she was going for a walk. She often did, but usually after supper. That’s when she thought about her books, worked out the plot and dialogue, striding along in the darkness on her own.”

  “What time did she go?”

  “Just before seven.”

  “Did she have the key of the chapel with her?”

  “She asked me for it yesterday, after lunch, just before I went back to the Lab. She said she wanted to describe a seventeenth-century family chapel for the book, but I didn’t know that she meant to visit it so soon. When she hadn’t come home at half past ten, I got worried and went to look for her. I walked for nearly an hour before I thought of looking in the chapel.”

  Then she spoke directly to Dalgliesh, patiently, as if explaining something to an obtuse child: “She did it for me. She killed herself so that I could have the money from her life assurance. She told me that I was her only legatee. You see, the owner wants to sell this cottage in a hurry; he needs the cash. We wanted to buy it, but we hadn’t enough money for
the deposit. Just before she went out, she asked me what it was like to be in local authority care, what it meant to have no real home. When Edwin was killed, we thought that there might be something for me in his will. But there wasn’t. That’s why she asked me for the key. It wasn’t true that she needed to include a description of the chapel in her book, not this book anyway. It’s set in London, and it’s nearly finished. I know. I’ve been typing it. I thought at the time that it was odd that she wanted the key, but I learned never to ask Stella questions.

  “But now I understand. She wanted to make life safe for me here, where we’d been happy, safe forever. She knew what she was going to do. She knew she’d never come back. When I was massaging her neck to make her headache better, she knew that I should never touch her again.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “Would any writer, any writer who wasn’t mentally ill, choose to kill herself just before a book was finished?”

  She said dully: “I don’t know. I don’t understand how a writer feels.”

  Dalgliesh said: “Well, I do. And she wouldn’t.”

  She didn’t reply. He went on gently: “Was she happy, living here with you?”

  She looked up at him eagerly, and, for the first time, her voice became animated, as if she were willing him to understand. “She said that she had never been as happy in all her life. She said that was what love is, knowing that you can make just one other person happy, and be made happy by them in return.”

  “So why should she kill herself? Could she really have believed that you’d rather have her money than herself? Why should she think that?”