Unnatural Causes

by P. D. James

  The girl looked as if she were about to remonstrate but Elizabeth Marley said with brief finality: “I’ll take her. I want to get home myself. I’m supposed to be convalescent and this hasn’t exactly been a restful evening, has it? Where’s her coat?”

  There was a little spurt of activity. Everyone seemed to feel relief in action and there was much fuss over Sylvia Kedge’s coat, her crutches and her general comfort. Miss Calthrop handed over her car keys and said graciously that she would walk home escorted, of course, by Oliver and Justin. Sylvia Kedge, surrounded by a bodyguard of helpers, began to hobble her way to the door.

  It was then that the telephone rang. Immediately the little party froze into a tableau of apprehension. The raucous sound, at once so ordinary and so ominous, petrified them into silence. Miss Dalgliesh had moved to the telephone and lifted the receiver when Reckless rose swiftly and without apology took it from her hand.

  They could make little of the conversation, which on Reckless’s part was conducted briefly and in monosyllables. He seemed to be speaking to a police station. For most of the time he listened in silence interspersed with grunts. He ended: “Right. Thank you. I shall be seeing him at Seton House first thing in the morning. Good night.” He replaced the receiver and turned to face the waiting company who were making no effort to hide their anxiety. Dalgliesh half-expected him to disappoint them but instead he said: “We’ve found Mr. Digby Seton. He has telephoned Lowestoft Police Station to say that he was admitted to hospital last night after driving his car into a ditch on the Lowestoft road. They are discharging him first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Miss Calthrop’s mouth had opened for the inevitable question when he added: “His story is that someone telephoned him just after nine o’clock last night to ask him to go at once to Lowestoft Police Station to identify his brother’s body. The caller told him that Mr. Maurice Seton’s corpse had come ashore in a dinghy with both hands chopped off at the wrists.”

  Latham said incredulously: “But that’s impossible! I thought you said the body wasn’t found until early this evening?”

  “Nor was it, Sir. No one telephoned from the Lowestoft Police yesterday night. No one knew what had happened to Mr. Maurice Seton until his body came ashore this evening. Except one person, of course.”

  He looked round at them, the melancholy eyes moving speculatively from face to face. No one spoke or moved. It was as if they were all fixed in a moment of time waiting helplessly for some unavoidable cataclysm. It was a moment for which no words seemed adequate; it cried out for action, for drama. And Sylvia Kedge, as if obligingly doing her best, slid with a moan from Eliza’s supporting arms and crumpled to the floor.

  7

  Reckless said: “He died at midnight on Tuesday, give or take an hour. That’s my guess based on the stage of rigor and the general look of him. I shall be surprised if the PM doesn’t confirm it. The hands were taken off sometime after death. There wasn’t much bleeding but it looked as if the seat of the dinghy had been used as a chopping block. Assuming that Mr. Bryce was telling the truth and the dinghy was still beached here at five o’clock Wednesday afternoon, he was almost certainly pushed out to sea after the tide turned an hour later. The butchery must have been done after dusk. But he had been dead then for the best part of eighteen hours, maybe longer. I don’t know where he died or how he died. But I shall find out.”

  The three policemen were together in the sitting room. Jane Dalgliesh had made an excuse to leave them alone by offering them coffee; from the kitchen Dalgliesh could hear the faint tinkling sounds of its preparation. It was over ten minutes since the rest of the company had left. It had required little time or effort to revive Sylvia Kedge and once she and Liz Marley were on their way, there had been a general tacit agreement that the excitements of the evening might now be drawn to a close. The visitors looked suddenly bedraggled with weariness. When Reckless, as if gaining energy and animation from their exhaustion, began to question them about a possible weapon, he was met by weary incomprehension. No one seemed able to remember whether he or she owned a chopper, a cleaver or an axe, where these implements were kept or when they had last been used. No one except Jane Dalgliesh. And even Miss Dalgliesh’s calm admission that she had lost a chopper from her woodshed some months previously provoked no more than mild interest. The company had had enough of murder for one night. Like overexcited children at the end of the party, they wanted to go home.

  It was not until Miss Dalgliesh had also left them that Reckless spoke of the case. This was to be expected but Dalgliesh was irritated to discover how much he resented the obvious implication. Reckless was presumably neither stupid nor crassly insensitive. He would utter no warnings. He wouldn’t antagonise Dalgliesh by inviting a discretion and cooperation which both of them knew he had the right to take for granted. But this was his case. He was in charge. It was for him to decide at leisure which pieces of the puzzle he would lay out for Dalgliesh’s inspection; how much he would confide and to whom. The situation was a novel one for Dalgliesh and he wasn’t sure he was going to like it.

  The room was still very close. The fire was dying now into a pyramid of white ash but the heat trapped between the stone walls beat on their faces as if from an oven and the air smelt heavy. The Inspector seemed unaffected by it. He said: “These people who were here this evening, Mr. Dalgliesh. Tell me about them. Do they all call themselves writers?”

  Dalgliesh replied: “I imagine that Oliver Latham would call himself a dramatic critic. Miss Calthrop likes to be known as a romantic novelist, whatever that may mean. I don’t know what Justin Bryce would call himself. He edits a monthly literary and political review which was founded by his grandfather.”

  Reckless said surprisingly: “I know. The Monthly Critical Review. My father used to take it. That was in the days when sixpence meant something to a working man. And for sixpence the Monthly Crit. gave you the message, warm and strong. Nowadays it’s about as pink as the Financial Times; advice on your investments, reviews of books which nobody wants to read; cosy competitions for the intelligentsia. He can’t make a living out of that.”

  Dalgliesh replied that, so far from making a living, Bryce was known to subsidise the review from his private income.

  Reckless said: “He’s apparently one of those men who don’t mind people thinking he’s a queer. Is he, Mr. Dalgliesh?”

  It was not an irrelevant question. Nothing about a suspect’s character is irrelevant in a murder investigation, and the case was being treated as one of murder. But, irrationally, Dalgliesh was irritated. He replied: “I don’t know. He may be a little ambivalent.”

  “Is he married?”

  “Not as far as I know. But we surely haven’t yet reached the point when every bachelor over forty is automatically suspect?”

  Reckless did not reply. Miss Dalgliesh had returned with the tray of coffee and he accepted a cup with grave thanks but with no appearance of really wanting it. When she had again left them he began noisily sipping; his sombre eyes above the rim of the cup fixed on a water-colour of avocets in flight by Jane Dalgliesh which hung on the opposite wall. He said: “They’re a spiteful lot, queers. Not violent on the whole. But spiteful. And there was a spiteful crime. That secretary girl, the cripple. Where does she come from, Mr. Dalgliesh?”

  Dalgliesh, feeling like a candidate at a viva voce examination, said calmly: “Sylvia Kedge is an orphan who lives alone in a cottage in Tanner’s Lane. She is said to be a highly competent shorthand typist. She worked chiefly for Maurice Seton but she does quite a bit for Miss Calthrop and Bryce. I know very little about her, about any of them.”

  “You know enough for my needs at present, Mr. Dalgliesh. And Miss Marley?”

  “Also an orphan. Her aunt brought her up. At present she’s at Cambridge.”

  “And all these people are friends of your aunt?”

  Dalgliesh hesitated. Friendship was not a word his aunt used easily and he thought it doubtful whether she wo
uld in fact speak of more than one person at Monksmere as a friend. But one does not willingly deny one’s acquaintances when they are about to be suspected of murder. Resisting the temptation to reply that they knew each other intimately but not well, he said cautiously: “You had better ask my aunt. But they all know each other. After all, it’s a small and isolated community. They manage to get on together.”

  Reckless said: “When they’re not killing each other’s animals.” Dalgliesh didn’t reply. Reckless added: “They weren’t particularly upset were they? Not a word of regret the whole evening. Being writers you’d think one of them might have managed a stylish little epitaph.”

  “Miss Kedge took it badly,” suggested Dalgliesh.

  “That wasn’t grief. That was shock. Clinical shock. If she isn’t better tomorrow someone should get a doctor to her.”

  He was right, of course, thought Dalgliesh. It had been shock. And that in itself was interesting. Certainly the evening’s news had been shocking enough, but would it have been quite so shocking to someone to whom it wasn’t news? There had been nothing faked about that final faint and it hardly suggested guilty knowledge.

  Suddenly Reckless got up from his chair, looked at his empty cup as if uncertain how it came to be in his hand and replaced it with slow deliberation on the coffee tray. Sergeant Courtney, after a moment’s hesitation, did the same with his. It looked as if they were at last preparing to go. But first there was something which Reckless had to be told. Since it was a perfectly straightforward piece of information which might or might not prove to be important, Dalgliesh was irritated at his reluctance to get it out. He told himself that the next few days were going to be difficult enough without letting Reckless inveigle him into a mood of morbid self-analysis. Firmly he said: “There’s something you ought to know about that fake manuscript. I may be wrong—there’s not a lot to go on—but I think I recognise the description of the nightclub. It sounds like the Cortez Club in Soho, L. J. Luker’s place. You probably remember the case. It was in 1959. Luker shot his partner, was sentenced to death, but was released when the verdict was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.”

  Reckless said slowly: “I remember Luker. Mr. Justice Brothwick’s case wasn’t it? The Cortez Club would be a useful place to know if you were hoping to pin a murder on someone. And Luker would be as good a man to pin it on as any.”

  He walked to the door, his Sergeant following him like a shadow. Then he turned for a last word. “I can see that it’s going to be a great advantage having you here, Mr. Dalgliesh.”

  He made it sound like an insult.

  8

  The contrast between the brightness of the sitting room and the cool darkness of the autumn night was absolute. It was like stepping into a pit. As the door of Pentlands closed behind them Celia Calthrop experienced a moment of blind panic. The night pressed around her. She breathed darkness like a physical weight. It was as if the air had thickened with night, had become a heaviness through which she had to fight her way. There was no longer direction nor distance. In this black and numinous void the sullen, melancholy thudding of the sea sounded on all sides, so that she felt menaced and rooted like a lost traveller on some desolate shore. When Latham shone his torch on the path the ground looked unreal and very far away like the surface of the moon. It was impossible that human feet could make contact with this remote and insubstantial soil. She stumbled and would have lost her balance if Latham hadn’t gripped her arm with sudden and surprising force.

  They started together on the inland path. Celia, who had not expected to walk home, was wearing light, high-heeled shoes which alternately skidded on the smooth sea pebbles which littered the path or sank into soft patches of sand so that she lurched forward in Latham’s grip like a graceless and recalcitrant child. But her panic was over. Her eyes were getting accustomed to the night and with every stumble forward the roar of the sea grew fainter and less insistent.

  But it was a relief when Justin Bryce spoke, his voice unaltered, ordinary: “Asthma is a peculiar complaint! This has been a traumatic evening—one’s first contact with murder—and yet one feels quite well. Yet last Tuesday one had the most appalling attack with no apparent cause. One may get a reaction later of course.”

  “One certainly may,” agreed Latham caustically. “Especially if Forbes-Denby doesn’t confirm one’s alibi for Tuesday night.”

  “Oh, but he will, Oliver! And one can’t help thinking that his testimony will carry rather more weight than anything your sleeping partner may say.”

  Celia Calthrop, gaining confidence from their nearness, their normality, said quickly: “It’s such a comfort that Adam Dalgliesh happens to be here. After all, he does know us. Socially I mean. And being a writer himself I feel that he belongs at Monksmere.”

  Latham gave a shout of laughter. “If you find Adam Dalgliesh a comfort I envy your capacity for self-deception. Do tell us how you see him, Celia! The gentleman sleuth, dabbling in detection for the fun of it, treating his suspects with studied courtesy? A kind of professional Carruthers, straight out of one of Seton’s dreary sagas? My dear Celia, Dalgliesh would sell us all to Reckless if he thought it would enhance his reputation one iota. He’s the most dangerous man I know.”

  He laughed again and she felt his grip tighten on her arm. Now he was really hurting her, hurrying her forward as if she were in custody. Yet she could not bring herself to shake free. Although the lane was wider here, the ground was still uneven. Stumbling and slipping, her feet bruised and her ankles aching, she had no chance of keeping up with them except in Latham’s remorseless grip. And she could not bear to be left alone.

  Bryce’s voice fluted in her ear. “Oliver’s right you know, Celia. Dalgliesh is a professional detective and probably one of the most intelligent in the country. I don’t see that his two volumes of verse, much as I personally admire them, can alter that.”

  “Reckless is no fool though.” Latham still seemed amused. “Did you notice how he said hardly a word but just encouraged us to babble on in our childish, egotistical way? He probably learned more from us in five minutes than other suspects would tell him in hours of orthodox questioning. When will we learn to keep our mouths shut?”

  “As we’ve nothing to hide I don’t see that it matters,” said Celia Calthrop. Really Oliver was extraordinarily irritating tonight! One might almost imagine that he was a little drunk.

  Justin Bryce said: “Oh, Celia! Everyone has something to hide from the police. That’s why one is so ambivalent about them. Wait until Dalgliesh asks why you kept referring to Seton in the past tense, even before we heard that his body had been found. You did, you know. Even I noticed it so it must have struck Dalgliesh. I wonder whether he’ll feel it his duty to mention the matter to Reckless.”

  But Celia was too tough to be intimidated by Bryce. She said irritably, “Don’t be stupid, Justin! I don’t believe you. And, even if I did, it was probably because I was speaking of Maurice as a writer. And one does somehow feel that, as a writer, poor Maurice has been finished for quite a time.”

  “God yes!” said Latham. “Dead and done for. Finished. Written out. Maurice Seton only wrote one effective passage of prose in his life but that was straight from the heart all right. And from the brain. It produced exactly the effect he intended. Every word selected to wound and the whole—lethal.”

  “Do you mean his play?” asked Celia. “I thought you despised it. Maurice always said that it was your notice that killed it.”

  “Celia darling, if my notice could kill a play, half the little pieces now running in London would have folded after the first night.” He jerked her forward with fresh impetus and for a minute Justin Bryce lagged behind them.

  Hurrying to catch them up he called breathlessly: “Maurice must have been killed on Tuesday night. And his body was pushed out to sea late on Wednesday evening. So how did the murderer get it to Monksmere? You drove from London on Wednesday, Oliver. It wasn’t in the boot of your Jagua
r, was it?”

  “No dear,” said Latham easily. “I’m very particular what I carry in the boot of my Jaguar.”

  Celia said complacently: “Well, I’m in the clear. Sylvia can give me an alibi until late on Tuesday and that’s obviously the crucial time. I admit that I was out alone on Wednesday night but Reckless will hardly suspect me of mutilating the body. And that reminds me. There’s one person who doesn’t even claim an alibi for Tuesday or Wednesday, Jane Dalgliesh. And what’s more—it was her chopper!”

  Latham said: “Why in God’s name should Miss Dalgliesh wish to kill Seton?”

  “Why should any of us want to?” retorted Celia. “And I’m not saying she did. I’m merely pointing out that it was apparently her chopper.”

  Bryce said happily: “I wanted to at one time. Murder Seton, I mean. After I found Arabella I could willingly have killed him. But I didn’t. All the same, I can’t feel sorry about it. I wonder if I ought to ask to view the body after the inquest. It might shock me out of this insensitivity which I can’t feel is at all healthy.”

  But Latham was still meditating on the missing chopper. He said fiercely: “Anyone could have taken it! Anyone! We all walk in and out of each other’s houses at will. No one here locks up anything. There’s never been the need. And we don’t even know yet that it was the weapon.”

  “My dears,” said Bryce. “Consider this and calm yourselves. Until we know the cause of death we can’t even be sure that Maurice was murdered.”

  9

  They left her at the door of Rosemary Cottage and she watched them disappear into the night. Justin’s high voice and Latham’s laugh came back to her long after their figures had merged with the darker shadows of hedgerow and tree. There were no lights in the cottage and the sitting room was empty. So Elizabeth was in bed. She must have driven home fast from Tanner’s Cottage. Her aunt was uncertain whether to be glad or sorry. She had a sudden need of company but she couldn’t face questions or arguments. There would be much to discuss, but not tonight. She was too tired. She switched on the table lamp and, kneeling on the hearth rug, poked ineffectually at the slates and ashes of the dead fire. Then she got unsteadily to her feet, grunting with the effort like an old woman, and let herself down into an armchair. Opposite her an identical chair loomed squat and solid, plump with cushions, empty and poignant. Here Maurice had sat on that October afternoon six years ago. It was the day of the inquest; a day of cold and sudden squalls. There had been a good fire that evening. She had been expecting him and had taken care that both she and the room were ready. The firelight and the one discreet lamp had shed a nicely calculated glow over the polished mahogany and cast soft shadows on the soft pinks and blues of cushions and carpet. The tray of drinks had been set ready to hand. Nothing had been left to chance. And she had waited for him as eagerly as a young girl before her first date. She had worn a dress of soft blue-grey wool. It had really made her look quite slim, quite young. It still hung in her wardrobe. She had never cared to wear it again. And he had sat opposite her, stiff and black in his formal mourning, an absurd little mannikin with his black tie and armband, his face rigid with grief. But she hadn’t understood then that it was grief. How could she? It was impossible that he could be grieving for that shallow, egotistical, monstrous nymphomaniac. Of course, there had been the shock of hearing that Dorothy was dead, had killed herself, the horror of identifying the drowned body, the ordeal of the inquest, of facing the rows of white, accusing faces. He knew what they were saying all right, that he had driven his wife to suicide. No wonder he had looked shocked and ill. But grief? It had never occurred to her that he might grieve. Somehow she had taken it for granted that there must, in his heart, have been a spring of relief. Relief that the long years of torment and self-control were over at last, that he could begin to live again. And she would be there to help him, just as she had helped with her sympathy and advice when Dorothy was alive. He was a writer, an artist. He needed affection and understanding. From tonight he need never be alone ever again.