The Black Tower

by P. D. James

  Still without speaking they moved together warily over the carpet. The head, hacked into anonymity lay among a holocaust of marble fragments. The dark grey carpet was bejewelled with gleaming grits of stone. Broad ribbons of light from the windows and open door lay across the room and, in their rays, the jagged slivers twinkled like a myriad of infinitesimal stars. It looked as if the destruction had at first been systematic. Both ears had been cleanly severed, and lay together, obscene objects oozing invisible blood, while the bouquet of flowers, so delicately carved that the lilies of the valley had seemed to tremble with life, lay a little distance from the hand as if tossed lightly aside. A miniature dagger of marble had lodged upright in the sofa, a microcosm of violence.

  The room was very still; its ordered comfort, the measured ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelshelf, the insistent thudding of the sea, all heightened the sense of outrage, the crudity of destruction and hate.

  Julius dropped to his knees and picked up a shapeless lump which had once been the child’s head. After a second he let it drop from his loosened grasp. It rolled clumsily, obliquely, across the floor and came to rest against the foot of the sofa. Still without speaking, he reached over and picked up the posy of flowers cradling it gently in his hands. Dalgliesh saw that his body was shaking; he was very pale and his forehead, bent over the carving, glistened with sweat. He looked like a man in shock.

  Dalgliesh went over to the side table which held a decanter and poured out a generous measure of whisky. Silently he handed the glass to Julius. The man’s silence and the dreadful shaking worried him. Anything, he thought, violence, a storm of rage, a spate of obscenity would be better than this unnatural silence. But when Julius did speak his voice was perfectly steady. He shook his head at the offered glass.

  “No, thank you. I don’t need a drink. I want to know what I’m feeling, know it here in my belly not just in my head. I don’t want my anger dulled, and by God, I don’t need it stimulated! Think of it, Dalgliesh. He died three hundred years ago, this gentle boy. The marble must have been carved very shortly afterwards. It was of absolutely no practical use to anyone for three hundred years except to give comfort and pleasure and remind us that we are dust. Three hundred years. Three hundred years of war, revolution, violence, greed. But it survived. It survived until this year of grace. Drink that whisky yourself, Dalgliesh. Raise the glass and toast the age of the despoiler. He didn’t know that this was here, unless he peers and pries when I am away. Anything of mine would have served. He could have destroyed anything. But when he saw this, he couldn’t resist it. Nothing else could have given him quite such an exaltation of destruction. This isn’t just hatred of me you know. Who ever did it, hated this too. Because it gave pleasure, was made with an intention, not just a lump of clay thrown against a wall, paint stamped into a canvas, a piece of stone smoothed into innocuous curves. It had gravity and integrity. It grew out of privilege and tradition, and contributed to it. God, I should have known better than to bring it here among these barbarians!”

  Dalgliesh knelt beside him. He picked up two portions of a smashed forearm and fitted them together like a puzzle. He said:

  “We know probably to within a few minutes when it was done. We know that it needed strength and that he—or she—probably used a hammer. There ought to be marks on that. And he couldn’t have walked here and back in the time. Either he escaped down your path here to the shore, or he came by van and then went on to collect the post. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out who is responsible.”

  “My God, Dalgliesh, you have a policeman’s soul haven’t you? Is that thought supposed to comfort me?”

  “It would me; but then, as you say, it’s probably a matter of soul.”

  “I’m not calling in the police if that’s what you’re suggesting. I don’t need the local fuzz to tell me who did this. I know, and so do you, don’t you?”

  “No. I could give you a short list of suspects in order of probability, but that’s not the same thing.”

  “Spare yourself the trouble. I know and I’ll deal with him in my own way.”

  “And give him the added satisfaction of seeing you brought up on a charge of assault or G.B.H. I suppose.”

  “I wouldn’t get much sympathy from you would I, or from the local bench? Vengeance is mine saith Her Majesty’s Commission of the Peace. Naughty, destructive boy, underprivileged lad! Five pounds fine and put him on probation. Oh! don’t worry! I shan’t do anything rash. I’ll take my time, but I’ll deal with it. You can keep your local pals out of it. They weren’t exactly a flaming success when they investigated Holroyd’s death were they? They can keep their clumsy fingers out of my mess.”

  Getting to his feet he added with sulky obstinacy, almost as an afterthought:

  “Besides, I don’t want any more fuss here at present, not just after Grace Willison’s death. Wilfred’s got enough on his plate. I’ll clear this mess away and tell Henry that I have taken the marble back to London. No one else from the Grange comes here, thank God, so I shall be spared the usual insincere condolences.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “I find it interesting, this concern for Wilfred’s peace of mind.”

  “I thought you might. In your book I am a selfish bastard. You’ve got an identikit to selfish bastards, and I don’t precisely fit. Ergo, find a reason. There has to be a first cause.”

  “There’s always a cause.”

  “Well, what is it? Am I somehow in Wilfred’s pay? Am I fiddling the books? Has he some hold over me? Is there, perhaps, some truth in Moxon’s suspicions? Or perhaps I’m Wilfred’s illegitimate son.”

  “Even a legitimate son might reasonably feel that it was worth causing Wilfred some distress to discover who did this. Aren’t you being too scrupulous? Wilfred must know that someone at Toynton Grange, probably one of his disciples, nearly killed him, intentionally or otherwise. My guess is that he’d take the loss of your marble fairly philosophically.”

  “He doesn’t have to take it. He’s not going to know. I can’t explain to you what I don’t understand myself. But I am committed to Wilfred. He is so vulnerable and pathetic. And it is all so hopeless! If you must know, he reminds me in some way of my parents. They had a small general store in Southsea. Then when I was about fourteen, a large chain store opened next door. That was the end for them. They tried everything; they wouldn’t give in. Extended credit when they weren’t getting their money anyway; special offers when their profit margins were practically nil; hours spent after closing time rearranging the window; balloons given free to the local kids. It didn’t matter, you see. It was all utterly pointless and futile. They couldn’t succeed. I thought I could have borne their failure. What I couldn’t bear was their hope.”

  Dalgliesh thought that, in part, he did see. He knew what Julius was saying. Here am I, young, rich, healthy. I know how to be happy. I could be happy, if only the world were really as I want it to be. If only other people wouldn’t persist in being sick, deformed, in pain, helpless, defeated, deluded. Or if only I could be just that bit more selfish so that I didn’t care. If only there weren’t the black tower. He heard Julius speaking:

  “Don’t worry about me. Remember I am bereaved. Don’t they say that the bereaved always have to work through their grief? The appropriate treatment is a detached sympathy and plenty of good plain nourishment. We’d better get some breakfast.”

  Dalgliesh said quietly:

  “If you’re not going to ring the police, then we might as well clear up this mess.”

  “I’ll get a dustbin. I can’t bear the noise of the vacuum cleaner.”

  He disappeared into his immaculate, fashionably overequipped kitchen, and came back with a dustpan and two brushes. In an odd companionship they knelt together to their task. But the brushes were too soft to dislodge the slivers of marble, and in the end they had to pick them up laboriously one by one.

  IX

  The forensic pathologist was a locum tenens s
enior registrar, and if he had expected this three-week stint of duty in the agreeable West Country to be less arduous than his London job, he was disappointed. When the telephone rang for the tenth time that morning he peeled off his gloves, tried not to think about the fifteen naked cadavers still waiting on their refrigerated shelves and lifted the receiver philosophically. The confident masculine voice, except for its pleasant country burr, could have been the voice of any Metropolitan police officer, and the words, too, he had heard before.

  “That you, Doc? We’ve got a body in a field three miles north of Blandford which we don’t like the look of. Could you come to the scene?”

  The summons seldom differed. They always had a body they didn’t like the look of, in a ditch, a field, a gutter, in the tangled steel of a smashed car. He took up his message pad and asked the usual questions, heard the expected replies. He said to the mortuary assistant:

  “OK Bert, you can sew her up now. She’s no twelve-guinea special. Tell the Coroner’s officer that he can issue the disposal order. I’m off to a scene. Get the next two ready for me, will you?”

  He glanced for the last time at the emaciated body on the table. There had been nothing difficult about Grace Miriam Willison, spinster, aged 57. No external signs of violence, no internal evidence to justify sending the viscera for analysis. He had muttered to his assistant with some bitterness that if the local GPs were going to look to an over-stretched forensic pathology service to settle their differential diagnoses the service might as well pack up. But her doctor’s hunch had been right. There was something he’d missed, the advanced neoplasm in the upper stomach. And much good that knowledge now would do him or her. That, or the D.S. or the heart condition had killed her. He wasn’t God and he’d taken his choice. Or maybe she’d just decided that she had had enough and turned her face to the wall. In her state it was the mystery of continuing life not the fact of death that needed explaining. He was beginning to think that most patients died when they decided that it was their time to die. But you couldn’t put that on a certificate.

  He scribbled a final note on Grace Willison’s record, called out a final instruction to his assistant, then pushed his way through the swing doors towards another death, another body, towards, he thought, with something like relief, his proper job.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mist on the Headland

  I

  THE CHURCH OF ST. MICHAEL’S at Toynton was an uninteresting Victorian reconstruction of an earlier building, the churchyard a triangular patch of swathed grass between the west wall, the road and a row of rather dull cottages. Victor Holroyd’s grave, pointed out by Julius, was an oblong mound crudely patched with squares of weedy turf. Beside it, a simple wooden cross marked the spot where Father Baddeley’s ashes had been buried. Grace Willison was to lie next to him. Everyone at Toynton Grange was at the funeral except Helen Rainer who had been left to nurse Georgie Allan, and Maggie Hewson whose absence, unremarked, was apparently taken for granted. But Dalgliesh, when he arrived alone, had been surprised to see Julius’s Mercedes parked opposite the lych gate beside the Toynton Grange bus.

  The churchyard was encumbered and the path between the headstones narrow and overgrown so that it took some time to manoeuvre the three wheelchairs round the open grave.

  The local vicar was taking a belated holiday and his substitute, who apparently knew nothing of Toynton Grange, was obviously surprised to see four of the mourners garbed in brown monk’s habits. He asked if they were Anglican Franciscans, an enquiry which provoked a fit of nervous giggling from Jennie Pegram. Anstey’s answer, unheard by Dalgliesh, apparently failed to reassure and the priest, puzzled and disapproving, took the service with carefully controlled speed as if anxious to free the churchyard as soon as possible from the risk of contamination by the imposters. The little party sang, at Wilfred’s suggestion, Grace’s favourite hymn “Ye Holy Angels Bright.” It was, thought Dalgliesh, a hymn peculiarly unsuited for amateur unaccompanied singing and their uncertain and discordant voices rose reed thin in the crisp autumnal air.

  There were no flowers. Their absence, the rich smell of newly turned earth, the mellow autumn sunlight, the ubiquitous scent of burning wood, even the sense of unseen but inquisitive eyes peering morbidly from behind the hedges, brought back with stabbing pain the memory of another funeral.

  He had been a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, at home for his half term. His parents were in Italy and Father Baddeley was in charge of the parish. A local farmer’s son, a shy, gentle, over-conscientious eighteen-year-old, home for the weekend from his first term at university, had taken his father’s gun and shot dead both parents, his fifteen-year-old sister and, finally, himself. They were a devoted family, he a loving son. For the young Dalgliesh, who was beginning to imagine himself in love with the girl, it had been a horror eclipsing all subsequent horrors. The tragedy, unexplained, appalling, had at first stunned the village. But grief had quickly given way to a wave of superstitious anger, terror and repulsion. It was unthinkable that the boy should be buried in consecrated ground and Father Baddeley’s gentle but inexorable insistence that all the family should lie together in one grave had made him temporarily an outcast. The funeral, boycotted by the village, had been held on such a day as this. The family had no close relatives. Only Father Baddeley, the sexton and Adam Dalgliesh had been there. The fourteen-year-old boy, rigid with uncomprehended grief, had concentrated on the responses willing himself to divorce the unbearably poignant words from their sense, to see them merely as black unmeaning symbols on the prayer book page, and to speak them with firmness, even with nonchalance, across the open grave. Now, when this unknown priest raised his hand to speak the final blessing over Grace Willison’s body, Dalgliesh saw instead the frail upright figure of Father Baddeley, the wind ruffling his hair. As the first sods fell on the coffin and he turned away he felt like a traitor. The memory of one occasion on which Father Baddeley had not relied on him in vain only reinforced his present nagging sense of failure.

  It was probably this which made him reply tartly to Wilfred when he walked up to him and said:

  “We are going back for luncheon now. We shall start the family council at half past two and the second session at about four. Are you quite sure you won’t help us?”

  Dalgliesh opened the door of his car.

  “Can you give me one reason why it would be right that I should?” Wilfred turned away; for once he looked almost disconcerted. Dalgliesh heard Julius’s low laugh.

  “Silly old dear! Does he really think that we don’t know that he wouldn’t be holding a family council if he weren’t confident that the decision would go his way? What are your plans for the day?”

  Dalgliesh said that they were still uncertain. In fact he had decided to exercise away his self-disgust by walking along the cliff path as far as Weymouth and back. But he wasn’t anxious to invite Julius’s company.

  He stopped at a nearby pub for a luncheon of cheese and beer, drove quickly back to Hope Cottage, changed into slacks and windcheater and set off eastwards along the cliff path. It was very different from that first early morning walk the day after his arrival when all his newly awakened senses had been alive to sound and colour and smell. Now he strode strongly forward, deep in thought, eyes on the path, hardly aware even of the laboured, sibilant breath of the sea. He would soon have to make a decision about his job; but that could wait for another couple of weeks. There were more immediate if less onerous decisions. How much longer should he stay at Toynton? He had little excuse to linger. The books had been sorted, the boxes were almost ready for cording. And he was making no progress with the problem which had kept him in Hope Cottage. There was small hope now of solving the mystery of Father Baddeley’s summons. It was as if, living in Father Baddeley’s cottage, sleeping in his bed, Dalgliesh had absorbed something of his personality. He could almost believe that he smelt the presence of evil. It was an alien faculty which he half resented and almost wholly distrusted. And y
et it was increasingly strong. He was sure now that Father Baddeley had been murdered. And yet, when as a policeman he looked hard at the evidence, the case dissolved like smoke in his hand.

  Perhaps because he was deep in unproductive thought the mist took him by surprise. It rode in from the sea, a sudden physical invasion of white obliterating clamminess. At one moment he was striding in the mellow afternoon sunlight with the breeze prickling the hairs on his neck and arms. The next, sun, colour and smell were blotted out and he stood stock still pushing at the mist as if it were an alien force. It hung on his hair, caught at his throat and swirled in grotesque patterns over the headland. He watched it, a writhing transparent veil passing over and through the brambles and bracken, magnifying and altering form, obscuring the path. With the mist came a sudden silence. He was only aware that the headland had been alive with birds now that their cries were mute. The silence was uncanny. In contrast, the sound of the sea swelled and became all pervasive, disorganized, menacing, seeming to advance on him from all sides. It was like a chained animal, now moaning in sullen captivity, now breaking free to hurl itself with roars of impotent rage against the high shingles.

  He turned back towards Toynton, uncertain of how far he had walked. The return journey was going to be difficult. He had no sense of direction except for the thread of trodden earth under his feet. But he thought that the danger would be slight if he went slowly. The path was barely visible but for most of the route it was fringed with brambles, a welcome if prickly barrier when, momentarily disorientated, he lost his way. Once the mist lifted slightly and he strode forward more confidently. But it was a mistake. Only just in time he realized that he was teetering on the edge of a wide crevice splitting the path and that what he had thought was a rising bank of moving mist was foam dying on the cliff face fifty feet below.