The Black Tower

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh, when stopping in Toynton village to post his letter, had taken the precaution of telephoning the police before calling in at divisional headquarters. His arrival was, therefore, expected and provided for. The Divisional Superintendent, called away unexpectedly to a meeting with his Chief Constable, had left apologies and instructions for the entertainment of the visitor. His final words to Detective Inspector Daniel, deputed to do the honours, had been:

  “I’m sorry to miss the Commander. I met him last year when he lectured at Bramshill. At least he tempers the arrogance of the Met. with good manners and a plausible show of humility. It’s refreshing to meet someone from the smoke who doesn’t treat provincial forces as if we recruit by lurking outside the hill caves with lumps of raw meat on a pole. He may be the Commissioner’s blue-eyed boy but he’s a good copper.”

  “Doesn’t he write verse, Sir?”

  “I shouldn’t try to ingratiate yourself by mentioning that. I invent crossword puzzles for a hobby, which probably requires much the same level of intellectual skill, but I don’t expect people to compliment me on it. I got his last book from the library. Invisible Scars. Do you suppose, given the fact that he’s a copper, that the title is ironic?”

  “I couldn’t say, Sir, not having read the book.”

  “I only understood one poem in three but I may have been flattering myself. I suppose he didn’t say why we’re being honoured.”

  “No, Sir, but as he’s staying at Toynton Grange he may be interested in the Holroyd case.”

  “I can’t see why; but you’d better arrange for Sergeant Varney to be available.”

  “I’ve asked Varney to join us for lunch, Sir. The usual pub, I thought.”

  “Why not? Let the Commander see how the poor live.”

  And so Dalgliesh found himself, after the usual polite preliminaries, invited to lunch at the Duke’s Arms. It was an unprepossessing pub, not visible from the High Street, but approached down a dark alleyway between a corn merchant and one of those general stores common in country towns where every possible garden implement and an assortment of tin buckets, hip baths, brooms, twine, aluminium tea pots and dogs’ leads swing from the ceiling above a pervading smell of paraffin and turpentine. Inspector Daniel and Sergeant Varney were greeted with uneffusive but evident satisfaction by the burly, shirt-sleeved landlord who was obviously a publican who could afford to welcome the local police to his bar without the fear of giving it a bad name. The saloon bar was crowded, smoky and loud with the burr of Dorset voices. Daniel led the way down a narrow passage smelling strongly of beer and faintly of urine and out into an unexpected and sun-filled cobbled yard. There was a cherry tree in the centre, its trunk encircled by a wooden bench, and half a dozen sturdy tables and slatted wooden chairs set out on the paved stones which surrounded the cobbles. The yard was deserted. The regulars probably spent too much of their working lives in the open air to see it as a desirable alternative to the camaraderie of the snug, smoke-filled bar, while tourists who might have valued it were unlikely to penetrate to the Duke’s Arms.

  Without being summoned the publican brought out two pints of beer, a plate of cheese-filled rolls, a jar of homemade chutney and a large bowl of tomatoes. Dalgliesh said he would have the same. The beer proved excellent, the cheese was English Cheddar, the bread had obviously been baked locally and was not the gutless pap of some mass-production oven. The butter was unsalted and the tomatoes tasted of the sun. They ate together in companionable silence.

  Inspector Daniel was a stolid six-footer, with a jutting comb of strong undisciplined grey hair and a ruddy suntanned face. He looked close to retirement age. His black eyes were restless, perpetually moving from face to face with an amused, indulgent, somewhat self-satisfied expression as if he felt himself personally responsible for the conduct of the world and was, on the whole, satisfied that he wasn’t making too bad a job of it. The contrast between these glittering unquiet eyes and his unhurried movements and even more deliberate countryman’s voice was disconcerting.

  Sergeant Varney was two inches shorter with a round, bland, boyish face on which experience had so far, left no trace. He looked very young, the prototype of that officer whose boyish good looks provoke the perennial middle-aged complaint that the policemen get younger each year. His manner to his superiors was easy, respectful, but neither sycophantic nor deferential. Dalgliesh suspected that he enjoyed an immense self-confidence which he was at some pains to conceal. When he talked about his investigation of Holroyd’s death, Dalgliesh could understand why. Here was an intelligent and highly competent young officer who knew exactly where he was going and how he proposed to get there.

  Dalgliesh carefully understated his business.

  “I was ill at the time Father Baddeley wrote and he was dead when I arrived. I don’t suppose he wanted to consult me about anything important, but I have something of a conscience about having let him down. It seemed sensible to have a word with you and see whether anything was happening at Toynton Grange which might have worried him. I must say it seems to me highly unlikely. I’ve been told about Victor Holroyd’s death, of course, but that happened the day after Father Baddeley wrote to me. I did wonder, though, whether there was anything leading up to Holroyd’s death which might have worried him.”

  Sergeant Varney said:

  “There was no evidence that Holroyd’s death concerned anyone but himself. As I expect you know, the verdict at the inquest was accidental death. Dr. Maskell sat with a jury and if you ask me he was relieved at the verdict. Mr. Anstey is greatly respected in the district even if they do keep themselves very much to themselves at Toynton Grange, and no one wanted to add to his distress. But in my opinion, Sir, it was a clear case of suicide. It looks as if Holroyd acted pretty much on impulse. It wasn’t his usual day to be wheeled to the cliff top and he seemed to make up his mind to it suddenly. We had the evidence of Miss Grace Willison and Mrs. Ursula Hollis, who were sitting with Holroyd on the patients’ patio, that he called Dennis Lerner over to him and more or less nagged him into wheeling him out. Lerner testified that he was in a particularly difficult mood on the journey and when they got to their usual place on the cliff he became so offensive that Lerner took his book and lay some little distance from the chair. That is where Mr. Julius Court saw him when he breasted the hill in time to see the chair jerk forward and hurtle down the slope and over the cliff. When I examined the ground next morning I could see by the broken flowers and pressed grass exactly where Lerner had been lying and his library book, The Geology of the Dorset Coast, was still on the grass where he’d dropped it. It looks to me, Sir, as if Holroyd deliberately taunted him into moving some distance away so that he wouldn’t be able to get to him in time once he’d slipped the brakes.”

  “Did Lerner explain in court exactly what it was that Holroyd said to him?”

  “He wasn’t specific, Sir, but he more or less admitted to me that Holroyd taunted him with being a homosexual, not pulling his weight at Toynton Grange, looking for an easy life, and being an ungentle and incompetent nurse.”

  “I would hardly describe that as unspecific. How much truth is there in any of it?”

  “That’s difficult to say, Sir. He may be all of those things including the first; which doesn’t mean to say that he’d welcome Holroyd telling him so.”

  Inspector Daniel broke in:

  “He’s not an ungentle nurse and that’s for certain. My sister Ella is a staff nurse at the Meadowlands Nursing Home outside Swanage. Old Mrs. Lerner—over eighty she is now—is a patient there. Her son visits regularly and isn’t above lending a hand when they’re busy. It’s odd that he doesn’t take a post there, but perhaps it’s no bad thing to keep your professional and private life separate. Anyway, they may not have a vacancy for a male nurse. And no doubt he feels some loyalty to Wilfred Anstey. But Ella thinks very highly of Dennis Lerner. A good son, is how she describes him. And it must take the best part of his salary to keep Mum at Meadowlan
ds. Like all the really good places, it’s not cheap. No, I’d say that Holroyd was a pretty impossible chap. The Grange will be a good deal happier without him.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “It’s an uncertain way of committing suicide, I should have thought. What surprises me is that he managed to move that chair.”

  Sergeant Varney took a long drink of his beer.

  “It surprised me too, Sir. We weren’t able to get the chair intact so I couldn’t experiment with it. But Holroyd was a heavy chap, about half a stone heavier than I am, I estimate, and I experimented with one of the older chairs at Toynton Grange as close as possible to the model of his. Provided it were on fairly firm ground and the slope was more than one in three, I could get it moving with a sharp jerk. Julius Court testified that he saw Holroyd’s body jerk although he couldn’t say from that distance whether the chair was being thrust forward or whether it was a spontaneous reaction on Holroyd’s part to the shock of finding himself moving. And one has to remember, Sir, that other methods of killing himself weren’t readily to hand. He was almost entirely helpless. Drugs would have been the easiest way, but those are kept locked in the clinical room on the upper floor; he hadn’t a hope of getting to anything really dangerous without help. He might have tried hanging himself with a towel in the bathroom but there are no locks on the bathroom or lavatory doors. That, of course, is a precaution against patients collapsing and being too ill to summon assistance, but it does mean that there’s a lack of privacy about the place.”

  “What about a possible defect of the chair?”

  “I thought about that, Sir, and it was, of course, brought out at the inquest. But we only recovered the seat of the chair and one of the wheels. The two side pieces with the hand-brakes and the cross-bar with the ratchets have never been found.”

  “Exactly the parts of the chair where any defects of the brakes, whether natural or deliberately produced, might have been apparent.”

  “If we could have found the pieces in time, Sir, and the sea hadn’t done too much damage. But we never found them. The body had broken free of the chair in mid-air or on impact and Court naturally concentrated on retrieving the body. It was being tumbled by the surf, the trousers were waterlogged and it was too heavy for him to shift far. But he got his bathing towel into Holroyd’s belt and managed to hold on until help, in the persons of Mr. Anstey, Dr. Hewson, Sister Moxon and the handyman Albert Philby arrived with a stretcher. Together they managed to get the body on to it and struggled back along the beach to Toynton Grange. It was only then that they rang us. It occurred to Mr. Court as soon as they reached the Grange that the chair ought to be retrieved for examination and he sent Philby back to look for it. Sister Moxon volunteered to go with him. The tide had gone out about twenty yards by then and they found the main part of the chair, that is the seat and the back, and one of the wheels.”

  “I’m surprised that Dorothy Moxon went to search, I would have expected her to stay with the patients.”

  “So should I, Sir. But Anstey refused to leave Toynton Grange and Dr. Hewson apparently thought that his place was with the body. Nurse Rainer was off duty for the afternoon, and there was no one else to send unless you count Mrs. Millicent Hammitt, and I don’t think anyone thought of counting Mrs. Hammitt. It did seem important that two pairs of eyes should be looking for the chair before the light faded.”

  “And what about Julius Court?”

  “Mr. Court and Mr. Lerner thought they ought to be at Toynton Grange to meet us when we arrived, Sir.”

  “A very proper thought. And by the time you did arrive no doubt it was too dark to make an effective search.”

  “Yes, Sir, it was seven fourteen when we got to Toynton Grange. Apart from taking statements and arranging for the body to be removed to the mortuary, there was very little we could do until the morning. I don’t know whether you’ve seen that shore at low tide, Sir. It looks like a great sheet of black treacle toffee which some prodigious giant has amused himself by smashing-up with a gigantic hammer. We searched pretty thoroughly over a wide area but if the metal pieces are lodged in the crevasses between any of those rocks it would take a metal detector to find them—and we’d be lucky then—and lifting tackle to retrieve them. It’s most likely, I think, that they’ve been dragged down under the shingle. There’s a great deal of turbulence there at high tide.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Was there any reason to suppose that Holroyd had suddenly become suicidal, I mean—why choose that particular moment?”

  “I asked about that, Sir. A week earlier, that is on the 5th September, Mr. Court with Doctor and Mrs. Hewson had taken him in Court’s car up to London to see his solicitors and a consultant at St. Saviour’s Hospital. That’s Dr. Hewson’s own training hospital. I gather that Holroyd wasn’t given much hope that anything more could be done for him. Dr. Hewson said that the news didn’t seem to depress him unduly. He hadn’t expected anything else. Dr. Hewson more or less told me that Holroyd had insisted on the consultation just for the trip to London. He was a restless man and liked an excuse to get away from Toynton Grange occasionally. Mr. Court was travelling up anyway and offered the use of his car. That matron, Mrs. Moxon, and Mr. Anstey were both adamant that Holroyd hadn’t come back particularly depressed; but then they’ve got something of a vested interest in discrediting the suicide theory. The patients told me a rather different story. They noticed a change in Holroyd after his return. They didn’t describe him as depressed, but he certainly wasn’t any easier to live with. They described him as excited. Miss Willison used the word elated. She said that he seemed to be making up his mind to something. I don’t think that she has much doubt that Holroyd killed himself. When I questioned her she was obviously shocked by the idea and distressed on Mr. Anstey’s account. She didn’t want to believe it. But I think that she did.”

  “What about Holroyd’s visit to his solicitor? Did he learn anything there to distress him I wonder.”

  “It’s an old family firm, Holroyd and Martinson in Bedford Row. Holroyd’s elder brother is now the senior partner. I did ring him to ask but I didn’t get far. According to him, the visit was almost entirely social and Victor was no more depressed than usual. They were never close but Mr. Martin Holroyd did visit his brother occasionally at Toynton Grange, particularly when he wanted to talk to Mr. Anstey about his affairs.”

  “You mean that Holroyd and Martinson are Anstey’s solicitors?”

  “They’ve acted for the family for over 150 years I understand. It’s a very old connection. That’s how Victor Holroyd came to hear about the Grange. He was Anstey’s first patient.”

  “What about Holroyd’s wheelchair? Could anyone at Toynton Grange have sabotaged that, either on the day Holroyd died or on the evening before?”

  “Philby could, of course. He had the best opportunity. But a number of people could have done it. Holroyd’s rather heavy chair, the one which was used for these outings, was kept in the workroom at the end of the passage in the southern extension. I don’t know whether you know it, Sir, but it’s perfectly accessible even to wheelchairs. Basically it’s Philby’s workshop. He has the usual standard equipment and tools for carpentry and some metal work there. But the patients can use it too and are, in fact, encouraged either to help him or to indulge in their own hobbies. Holroyd used to do some fairly simple carpentry before he got too ill and Mr. Carwardine occasionally models in clay. The women patients don’t usually use it but there’d be nothing surprising to seeing one of the men there.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Carwardine told me that he was in the workroom when Philby oiled and checked the brakes at eight forty-five.”

  “That’s rather more than he told me. He gave me the impression that he hadn’t really seen what Philby was up to. Philby was a bit coy about whether he could actually remember testing the brakes. I wasn’t surprised. It was pretty obvious that they all wanted it to look like an accident if that could be done wit
hout provoking the coroner into too many strictures about carelessness. I had a bit of luck, however, when I questioned them about the actual morning of Holroyd’s death. After breakfast Philby went back to the workroom shortly after eight forty-five. He was there for just an hour and when he left he locked the place up. He was glueing some repairs and didn’t want them disturbed. I got the impression that Philby thinks of the workroom as his domain and doesn’t exactly welcome the patients being allowed to use it. Anyway, he pocketed the key and didn’t unlock the room until Lerner came fussing to ask for the key shortly before four o’clock so that he could get Holroyd’s wheelchair. Assuming that Philby was telling the truth, the only people at Toynton Grange without alibis for the time when the workroom was unlocked and unoccupied early on the morning of 12th September are Mr. Anstey, Holroyd himself, Mr. Carwardine, Sister Moxon and Mrs. Hewson. Mr. Court was in London and didn’t arrive back at his cottage until just before Lerner and Holroyd set out. Lerner is clear too. He was busy with the patients at all the relevant times.”

  That was all very well, thought Dalgliesh, but it proved very little. The workroom had been unlocked the previous evening after Carwardine and Philby had left and, presumably, also during the night. He said:

  “You were very thorough, Sergeant. Did you manage to discover all this without alarming them too much?”