The Black Tower

by P. D. James

  “I have learnt something of interest about our dear Wilfred. I shall share it with you in time but you must forgive me if I savour it alone for a little longer. There will be a right moment for disclosure. One strives always for the maximum dramatic effect.” Hatred and boredom had reduced them to this, thought Henry, two schoolboy buddies whispering secrets together, planning their petty stratagems of vengeance and betrayal.

  He looked out of the tall, curved window westward over the rising headland. The darkness was falling. Somewhere out there the restless tide was scouring the rocks, rocks washed clean for ever of Holroyd’s blood. Not even a twist of torn cloth remained for the barnacles to fasten on. Holroyd’s dead hands like floating weeds moving sluggishly in the tide, sand-filled eyes turned upwards to the swooping gulls. What was that poem of Walt Whitman which Holroyd had read at dinner on the night before he died:

  “Approach strong deliveress,

  When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead,

  Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,

  Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.

  The night in silence under many a star,

  The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voices I know,

  And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veiled death,

  And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.”

  Why that poem, in its sentimental resignation, at once so alien to Holroyd’s embattled spirit, and yet so prophetically apposite? Was he telling them, even subconsciously, that he knew what must happen, that he embraced and welcomed it? Peter and Holroyd. Holroyd and Baddeley. And now this policeman friend of Baddeley’s had arrived out of his past. Why, and for what? He might learn something when they drank together after dinner with Julius. And so, of course, might Dalgliesh. “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” But Duncan was wrong. There was a great deal of art and one in which a Commander of the Metropolitan Police would be better practised than most. Well, if that was what he had come for, he could make a beginning after dinner. Tonight he, Henry, would dine in his room. Philby when summoned would bring up his tray and plonk it unceremoniously and grudgingly in front of him. It wasn’t possible to buy civility from Philby but it was possible, he thought with grim exultation, to buy almost anything else.

  III

  “My body is my prison; and I would be so obedient to the Law, as not to break prison; I would not hasten my death by starving or macerating this body. But if this prison be burnt down by continual fevers, or blown down with continual vapours, would any man be so in love with the ground upon which that prison stood, as to desire rather to stay there than to go home?”

  It wasn’t so much, thought Dalgliesh, that the Donne didn’t go with the stewed mutton, as that the mutton didn’t go with the home-brewed wine. Neither was in itself unpalatable. The mutton, cooked with onions, potatoes and carrots, and flavoured with herbs, was unexpectedly good if a little greasy. The elderberry wine was a nostalgic reminder of duty visits paid with his father to house-bound and hospitable parishioners. Together they tasted lethal. He reached for the water carafe.

  Opposite him sat Millicent Hammitt, her square slab of a face softened by the candlelight, her absence during the afternoon explained by the pungent scent of lacquer which was wafted to him from the stiff, corrugated waves of greying hair. Everyone was present except the Hewsons, dining presumably in their own cottage, and Henry Carwardine. At the far end of the table, Albert Philby sat a little apart, a monkish Caliban in a brown habit, half crouching over his food. He ate noisily, tearing his bread into crusts and wiping them vigorously around his plate. All the patients were being helped to eat. Dalgliesh, despising his squeamishness, tried to shut his ears to the muted slobbering, the staccato rattle of spoon against plate, the sudden retching, unobtrusively controlled.

  “If thou didst depart from that Table in peace, thou canst depart from this world in peace. And the peace of that Table is to come to it in pace desiderii, with a contended minde….”

  Wilfred stood at a reading desk at the head of the table, flanked by two candles in metal holders. Jeoffrey, distended with food, lay ceremoniously curved at his feet. Wilfred had a good voice and knew how to use it. An actor manqué? Or an actor who had found his stage and played on, happily oblivious of the dwindling audience, of the creeping paralysis of his dream? A neurotic driven by obsession? Or a man at peace with himself, secure at the still centre of his being?

  Suddenly the four table candles flared and hissed. Dalgliesh’s ears caught the faint squeak of wheels, the gentle thud of metal against wood. The door was slowly swinging open. Wilfred’s voice faltered, and then broke off. A spoon rasped violently against a plate. Out of the shadows came a wheelchair, its occupant, head bent, swaddled in a thick plaid cloak. Miss Willison gave a sad little moan and scratched the sign of the cross on her grey dress. There was a gasp from Ursula Hollis. No one spoke. Suddenly Jennie Pegram screamed, thin and insistent as a tin whistle. The sound was so unreal that Dot Moxon jerked her head round as if uncertain where the sound was coming from. The scream subsided into a giggle. The girl clamped her hand against her mouth. Then she said:

  “I thought it was Victor! That’s Victor’s cloak.”

  No one else moved or spoke. Glancing along the table, Dalgliesh let his eyes rest speculatively on Dennis Lerner. His face was a mask of terror which slowly disintegrated into relief, the features seeming to droop and crumble, amorphous as a smudged painting. Carwardine wheeled his chair to the table. He had some difficulty in getting out his words. A globule of mucus gleamed like a yellow jewel in the candle light and dribbled from his chin. At last he said in his high distorted voice:

  “I thought I might join you for coffee. It seemed discourteous to absent myself on our guest’s first night.”

  Dot Moxon’s voice was sharp:

  “Did you have to wear that cloak?”

  He turned to her:

  “It was hanging in the business room and I felt cold. And we hold so much in common. Need we exclude the dead?”

  Wilfred said:

  “Shall we remember the Rule?”

  They turned their faces to him like obedient children. He waited until they had again begun to eat. The hands which gripped the sides of the reading desk were steady, the beautiful voice perfectly controlled.

  “That so riding at Anchor, and in that calme, whether God enlarge thy voyage, by enlarging thy life, or put thee into the harbour by the breath, by the breathlessness of Death, either way, East or West, thou maist depart in peace….”

  IV

  It was after eight-thirty before Dalgliesh set out to wheel Henry Carwardine to Julius Court’s cottage. The task wasn’t easy for a man in the first stages of convalescence. Carwardine, despite his leanness, was surprisingly heavy and the stony path wound uphill. Dalgliesh hadn’t liked to suggest using his car since to be hoisted through the narrow door might be more painful and humiliating for his companion than the customary wheelchair. Anstey had been passing through the hall as they left. He had held open the door and helped guide the wheelchair down the ramp, but had made no attempt to assist, nor did he offer the use of the patients’ bus. Dalgliesh wondered whether it was his imagination that detected a note of disapproval of the enterprise in Anstey’s final goodnight.

  Neither man spoke for the first part of the journey. Carwardine rested a heavy torch between his knees and tried to steady its beam on the path. The circle of light, reeling and spinning before them with every lurch of the chair, illumined with dazzling clarity a secret circular night world of greenness, movement and scurrying life. Dalgliesh, a little light-headed with tiredness, felt disassociated from his physical surroundings. The two thick rubber handgrips, slippery to the touch, were loose and twisted irritatingly beneath his hands, seeming to have no relation to the rest of the chair. The path ahead was real only because its stones and crevices jarred the wheels. The night was still and very warm for autu
mn, the air heavy with the smell of grass and the memory of summer flowers. Low clouds had obscured the stars and they moved forwards in almost total darkness towards the strengthening murmur of the sea and the four oblongs of light which marked Toynton Cottage. When they were close enough for the largest oblong to reveal itself as the rear door of the cottage, Dalgliesh said on impulse:

  “I found a rather disagreeable poison pen letter in Father Baddeley’s bureau. Obviously someone at Toynton Grange didn’t like him. I wondered whether this was personal spite or whether anyone else had received one.”

  Carwardine bent his head upwards. Dalgliesh saw his face intriguingly foreshortened, his sharp nose a spur of bone, the jaw hanging loose as a marionette’s below the shapeless void of mouth. He said:

  “I had one about ten months ago, placed inside my library book, I haven’t had one since, and I don’t know of anyone else who has. It’s not the kind of thing people talk about, but I think the news would have got around if the trouble had been endemic. Mine was, I suppose, the usual muck. It suggested what methods of somewhat acrobatic sexual self-gratification might be open to me supposing I still had the physical agility to perform them. It took the desire to do so for granted.”

  “It was obscene, then, rather than merely offensive?”

  “Obscene in the sense of calculated to disgust rather than to deprave or corrupt, yes.”

  “Have you any idea who was responsible?”

  “It was typed on Toynton Grange paper and on an old Remington machine used chiefly by Grace Willison to send out the quarterly newsletter. She seemed the most likely candidate. It wasn’t Ursula Hollis; she didn’t arrive until two months later. And aren’t these things usually sent by respectable middle-aged spinsters?”

  “In this case I doubt it.”

  “Oh, well—I defer to your greater experience of obscenity.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “Only Julius. He counselled against telling anyone else and suggested I tear the note up and flush it down the WC. As that advice coincided with my own inclination, I took it. As I said, I haven’t had another. I imagine that the sport loses its thrill if the victim shows absolutely no sign of concern.”

  “Could it have been Holroyd?”

  “It didn’t really seem his style. Victor was offensive but not, I should have thought, in that particular way. His weapon was the voice, not the pen. Personally I didn’t mind him as much as some of the others did. He hit out rather like an unhappy child. There was more personal bitterness than active malice. Admittedly, he added a somewhat childish codicil to his will the week before he died; Philby and Julius’s housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, witnessed it. But that was probably because he’d made up his mind to die and wanted to relieve us all of any obligation to remember him with kindness.”

  “So you think he killed himself?”

  “Of course. And so does everyone else. How else could it have happened? It seems the most likely hypothesis. It was either suicide or murder.”

  It was the first time anyone at Toynton Grange had used that portentous word. Spoken in Carwardine’s pedantic, rather high voice it sounded as incongruous as blasphemy on the lips of a nun.

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Or the chair brakes could have been defective.”

  “Given the circumstances, I count that as murder.”

  There was silence for a moment. The chair lurched over a small boulder and the torch light swung upwards in a wide arc, a miniature and frail searchlight. Carwardine steadied it and then said:

  “Philby oiled and checked the chair brakes at eight-fifty on the night before Holroyd died. I was in the workroom messing about with my modelling clay at the time. I saw him. He left the workroom shortly afterwards and I stayed on until about ten o’clock.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “Since they asked me, yes. They enquired with heavy tact where exactly I had spent the evening and whether I had touched Holroyd’s chair after Philby had left. Since I would hardly have admitted the fact if I had, the question was naïve. They questioned Philby, although not in my presence, and I’ve no doubt that he confirmed my story. I have an ambivalent attitude towards the police; I confine myself strictly to answering their questions, but on the premise that they are, in general, entitled to the truth.”

  They had arrived. Light streamed from the rear door of the cottage and Julius Court, a dark silhouette, emerged to meet them. He took the wheelchair from Dalgliesh and pushed it along the short stone passage leading into the sitting-room. On the way Dalgliesh just had time to glimpse through an open door the pine-covered walls, red tiled floor and gleaming chrome of Julius’s kitchen, a kitchen too like his own where a woman, overpaid and underworked to assuage her employer’s guilt for hiring her at all, cooked the occasional meal to gratify one person’s over-fastidious taste.

  The sitting-room occupied the whole of the front ground floor of what had obviously originally been two cottages. A fire of driftwood crackled on the open hearth but both the long windows were open to the night. The stone walls vibrated with the thudding of the sea. It was disconcerting to feel so close to the cliff edge and yet not know precisely how close. As if reading his thoughts, Julius said:

  “We’re just six yards from the forty-foot drop to the rocks. There’s a stone patio and low wall outside; we might sit there later if it’s warm enough. What will you drink, spirits or wine? I know Henry’s preference is for claret.”

  “Claret please.”

  Dalgliesh didn’t repent of his choice when he saw the labels on the three bottles which were standing, two already uncorked, on the low table near the hearth. He was surprised that wine of such quality should be produced for two casual guests. While Julius busied himself with the glasses, Dalgliesh wandered about the room. It contained enviable objects, if one were in a mood to prize personal possessions. His eyes lit on a splendid Sunderland lustreware jug commemorating Trafalgar, three early Staffordshire figures on the stone mantelpiece, a couple of agreeable seascapes on the longest wall. Above the door leading to the cliff edge was a ship’s figure-head finely and ornately carved in oak; two cherubs supported a galleon topped with a shield and swathed with heavy seaman’s knots. Seeing his interest, Julius called out:

  “It was made about 1660 by Grinling Gibbons, reputedly for Jacob Court, a smuggler in these parts. As far as I can discover, he was absolutely no ancestor of mine, worse luck. It’s probably the oldest merchant ship figure-head known to exist. Greenwich think they have one earlier, but I’d give mine the benefit of a couple of years.”

  Set on a pedestal at the far end of the room and faintly gleaming as if luminous was the marble bust of a winged child holding in his chubby hand a posy of rosebuds and lilies of the valley. The marble was the colour of pale coffee except over the lids of the closed eyes which were tinged with a faint pink. The unveined hands held the flowers with the upright, unselfconscious grip of a child; the boy’s lips were slightly parted in a half-smile, tranquil and secretive. Dalgliesh stretched out a finger and gently stroked the cheek; he could imagine it warm to his touch. Julius came over to him carrying two glasses.

  “You like my marble? It’s a memorial piece, of course, seventeenth or very early eighteenth century and derived from Bernini. Henry, I suspect, would like it better if it were Bernini.”

  Henry called out:

  “I wouldn’t like it better. I did say I’d be prepared to pay more for it.”

  Dalgliesh and Court moved back to the fireplace and settled down for what was obviously intended to be a night of serious drinking. Dalgliesh found his eyes straying around the room. There was no bravura, no conscious striving after originality or effect. And yet, trouble had been taken; every object was in the right place. They had, he thought, been bought because Julius liked them; they weren’t part of a careful scheme of capital appreciation, nor acquired out of an obsessive need to add to his collection. Yet Dalgliesh doubted whether any had been casually disco
vered or cheaply bought. The furniture too, betrayed wealth. The leather sofa and the two winged and back buttoned leather chairs were perhaps too opulent for the proportions and basic simplicity of the room, but Julius had obviously chosen them for comfort. Dalgliesh reproached himself for the streak of puritanism which compared the room unfavourably with the snug, unindulgent shabbiness of Father Baddeley’s sitting-room.

  Carwardine, sitting in his wheelchair and staring into the fire above the rim of his glass, asked suddenly:

  “Did Baddeley warn you about the more bizarre manifestations of Wilfred’s philanthropy, or was your visit here unpremeditated?”

  It was a question Dalgliesh had been expecting. He sensed that both men were more than casually interested in his reply.

  “Father Baddeley wrote to say that he would be glad to see me. I decided to come on impulse. I’ve had a spell in hospital and it seemed a good idea to spend a few days of my convalescence with him.”

  Carwardine said:

  “I can think of more suitable places than Hope Cottage for convalescence, if the inside is anything like the exterior. Had you known Baddeley long?”

  “Since boyhood; he was my father’s curate. But we last met, and only briefly, when I was at university.”

  “And having been content to know nothing of each other for a decade or so, you’re naturally distressed to find him so inconveniently dead.”