An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

by P. D. James

  2

  Next morning Cordelia left Cremona Road before seven o’clock. Despite her tiredness the night before, she had made her major preparations before she went to bed. They hadn’t taken long. As Bernie had taught her, she checked systematically the scene-of-crime kit, an unnecessary routine since nothing had been touched since, in celebration of their partnership, he had first set it up for her. She put ready the Polaroid camera; sorted into order the road maps from the jumble pushed into the back of his desk; shook out the sleeping bag and rolled it ready; filled a carrier bag with iron rations from Bernie’s store of tinned soup and baked beans; considered, and finally decided to take, their copy of Professor Simpson’s book on forensic medicine and her own Hacker portable radio; checked the first-aid kit. Finally, she found herself a fresh notebook, headed it CASE OF MARK CALLENDER and ruled up the last few pages ready for her expense account. These preliminaries had always been the most satisfying part of a case, before boredom or distaste set in, before anticipation crumbled into disenchantment and failure. Bernie’s planning had always been meticulous and successful; it was reality which had let him down.

  Finally, she considered her clothes. If this hot weather continued, her Jaeger suit, bought from her savings after much careful thought to see her through almost any interview, would be uncomfortably hot, but she might have to interview the head of a college and the dignified professionalism best exemplified by a suit would be the effect to aim at. She decided to travel in her fawn suede skirt with a short-sleeved jumper and pack jeans and warmer jumpers for any fieldwork. Cordelia enjoyed clothes, enjoyed planning and buying them, a pleasure circumscribed less by poverty than by her obsessive need to be able to pack the whole of her wardrobe into one medium-sized suitcase like a refugee perpetually ready for flight.

  Once she had shaken free from the tentacles of north London, Cordelia enjoyed the drive. The Mini purred along and Cordelia thought that it had never run so sweetly. She liked the flat East Anglian countryside, the broad streets of the market towns, the way in which the fields grew unhedged to the edge of the road, the openness and freedom of the far horizons and wide skies. The country matched her mood. She had grieved for Bernie and would grieve for him again, missing his comradeship and his undemanding affection, but this, in a sense, was her first case and she was glad to be tackling it alone. It was one that she thought she could solve. It neither appalled nor disgusted her. Driving in happy anticipation through the sunbathed countryside, the boot of the car carefully packed with her gear, she was filled with the euphoria of hope.

  When she finally reached Duxford Village she had difficulty at first in finding Summertrees. Major Markland was apparently a man who thought that his importance warranted omitting the name of the road from his address. But the second person she stopped to ask was a villager who was able to point the way, taking infinite trouble over the simple directions as if fearing that a perfunctory answer would have seemed discourteous. Cordelia had to find a suitable place to turn and then drive back a couple of miles, for she had already passed Summertrees.

  And this, at last, must be the house. It was a large Victorian edifice of red brick, set well back, with a wide turfed verge between the open wooden gate leading to the drive and the road. Cordelia wondered why anyone should have wanted to build such an intimidatingly ugly house or, having decided to do so, should have set down a suburban monstrosity in the middle of the countryside. Perhaps it had replaced an earlier, more agreeable house. She drove the Mini onto the grass but at some distance from the gate and made her way up the drive. The garden suited the house; it was formal to the point of artificiality and too well kept. Even the rock plants burgeoned like morbid excrescences at carefully planned intervals between the terrace paving stones. There were two rectangular beds in the lawn, each planted with red rose trees and edged with alternate bands of lobelia and alyssum. They looked like a patriotic display in a public park. Cordelia felt the lack of a flagpole.

  The front door was open, giving a view of a dark, brown-painted hall. Before Cordelia could ring, an elderly woman came round the corner of the house trundling a wheelbarrow full of plants. Despite the heat, she was wearing Wellington boots, a jumper and a long tweed skirt, and had a scarf tied round her head. When she saw Cordelia she dropped the handle of the wheelbarrow and said: “Oh, good morning. You’ve come from the church about the jumble, I expect?”

  Cordelia said: “No, not the jumble. I’m from Sir Ronald Callender. It’s about his son.”

  “Then I expect you’ve called for his things? We wondered when Sir Ronald was going to send for them. They’re all still at the cottage. We haven’t been down there since Mark died. We called him Mark, you know. Well, he never told us who he was, which was rather naughty of him.”

  “It isn’t about Mark’s things. I want to talk about Mark himself. Sir Ronald has engaged me to try to find out why his son killed himself. My name is Cordelia Gray.”

  This news seemed to puzzle rather than disconcert Mrs. Markland. She blinked at Cordelia rapidly through troubled, rather stupid, eyes and clutched at the wheelbarrow handle as if for support.

  “Cordelia Gray? Then we haven’t met before, have we? I don’t think I know a Cordelia Gray. Perhaps it would be better if you came into the drawing room and talked to my husband and sister-in-law.”

  She abandoned the barrow where it stood in the middle of the path and led the way into the house, pulling off her headscarf and making ineffective pats at her hair. Cordelia followed her through the sparsely furnished hall smelling of floor polish, with its clutter of walking sticks, umbrellas and mackintoshes draping the heavy oak hatstand, and into a room at the back of the house.

  It was a horrible room, ill-proportioned, bookless, furnished not in poor taste but in no taste at all. A huge sofa of repellent design and two armchairs surrounded the fireplace and a heavy mahogany table, ornately carved and lurching on its pedestal, occupied the centre of the room. There was little other furniture. The only pictures were framed groups, pale oblong faces too small to identify posed in straight innominate lines in front of the camera. One was a regimental photograph; the other had a pair of crossed oars above two rows of burly adolescents, all of whom were wearing low-peaked caps and striped blazers. Cordelia supposed it to be a school boating club.

  Despite the warmth of the day, the room was sunless and cold. The doors of the French windows were open. On the lawn outside were grouped a large swinging sofa with a fringed canopy, three cane chairs sumptuously cushioned in a garish blue cretonne, each with its footrest, and a wooden slatted table. They looked part of a setting for a play in which the designer had somehow failed to catch the mood. All the garden furniture looked new and unused. Cordelia wondered why the family should bother to sit indoors on a summer morning while the lawn was so much more comfortably furnished.

  Mrs. Markland introduced Cordelia by sweeping her arm in a wide gesture of abandonment and saying feebly to the company in general: “Miss Cordelia Gray. It isn’t about the church jumble.”

  Cordelia was struck by the resemblance that husband and wife and Miss Markland bore to each other. All three reminded her of horses. They had long bony faces, narrow mouths above strong, square chins, eyes set unattractively close, and grey, coarse-looking hair which the two women wore in thick fringes almost to their eyes. Major Markland was drinking coffee from an immense white cup, much stained about the rim and sides, which had been set on a round tin tray. He held the Times in his hands. Miss Markland was knitting, an occupation which Cordelia vaguely felt was inappropriate to a hot summer morning.

  The two faces, unwelcoming, only partly curious, regarded her with faint distaste. Miss Markland could knit without looking at the needles, an accomplishment which enabled her to fix Cordelia with sharp, inquisitive eyes. Invited by Major Markland to sit, Cordelia perched on the edge of the sofa, half expecting the smooth cushion to let out a rude noise as it subsided beneath her. She found it, however, unexpectedly hard. She
composed her face into the appropriate expression—seriousness combined with efficiency and a touch of propitiatory humility seemed about right, but she wasn’t sure that she managed to bring it off. As she sat there, knees demurely together, her shoulder bag at her feet, she was unhappily aware that she probably looked more like an eager seventeen-year-old facing her first interview than a mature business woman, sole proprietor of Pryde’s Detective Agency.

  She handed over Sir Ronald’s note of authority and said: “Sir Ronald was very distressed on your account. I mean it was awful for you that it should happen on your property when you’d been so kind in finding Mark a job he liked. His father hopes you won’t mind talking about it; it’s just that he wants to know what made his son kill himself.”

  “And he sent you?” Miss Markland’s voice was a compound of disbelief, amusement and contempt. Cordelia didn’t resent rudeness. She felt Miss Markland had a point. She gave what she hoped was a credible explanation. It was probably true.

  “Sir Ronald thinks that it must have been something to do with Mark’s life at university. He left college suddenly, as you may know, and his father was never told why. Sir Ronald thought that I might be more successful in talking to Mark’s friends than the more usual type of private detective. He didn’t feel that he could trouble the police; after all, this sort of enquiry isn’t really their kind of job.”

  Miss Markland said grimly: “I should have thought it was precisely their job; that is, if Sir Ronald thinks there’s something odd about his son’s death …”

  Cordelia broke in: “Oh no, I don’t think there’s any suggestion of that! He’s quite satisfied with the verdict. It’s just that he badly wants to know what made him do it.”

  Miss Markland said with sudden fierceness: “He was a dropout. He dropped out of university, apparently he dropped out of his family obligations, finally he dropped out of life. Literally.”

  Her sister-in-law gave a little bleat of protest. “Oh, Eleanor, is that quite fair? He worked really well here. I liked the boy. I don’t think—”

  “I don’t deny that he earned his money. That doesn’t alter the fact that he was neither bred nor educated to be a jobbing gardener. He was, therefore, a dropout. I don’t know the reason and I have no interest in discovering it.”

  “How did you come to employ him?” asked Cordelia.

  It was Major Markland who answered. “He saw my advertisement in the Cambridge Evening News for a gardener and turned up here one evening on his bicycle. I suppose he cycled all the way from Cambridge. It must have been about five weeks ago, a Tuesday I think.”

  Again Miss Markland broke in: “It was Tuesday, May 9th.”

  The Major frowned at her as if irritated that he couldn’t fault the information. “Yes, well, Tuesday the 9th. He said that he had decided to leave university and take a job and that he’d seen my advertisement. He admitted that he didn’t know much about gardening but said that he was strong and was willing to learn. His inexperience didn’t worry me; we wanted him mostly for the lawns and for the vegetables. He never touched the flower garden; my wife and I see to that ourselves. Anyway, I quite liked the look of the boy and I thought I’d give him a chance.”

  Miss Markland said: “You took him because he was the only applicant who was prepared to work for the miserable pittance you were offering.”

  The Major, so far from showing offence at this frankness, smiled complacently. “I paid him what he was worth. If more employers were prepared to do that, the country wouldn’t be plagued with this inflation.” He spoke as one to whom economics was an open book.

  “Didn’t you think it was odd, his turning up like that?” asked Cordelia.

  “Of course I did, damned odd! I thought he had probably been sent down; drink, drugs, revolution, you know the sort of thing they get up to at Cambridge now. But I asked him for the name of his tutor as a referee and rang him, a fellow called Horsfall. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming but he did assure me that the boy had left voluntarily and to use his own words, his conduct while in college had been almost boringly irreproachable. I need not fear that the shades of Summertrees would be polluted.”

  Miss Markland turned her knitting and broke into her sister-in-law’s little cry of “What can he have meant by that?” with the dry comment: “A little more boredom of that kind would be welcome from the city of the plains.”

  “Did Mr. Horsfall tell you why Mark had left college?” asked Cordelia.

  “I didn’t enquire. That wasn’t my business. I asked a plain question and I got a more or less plain answer, as plain as you can expect from those academic types. We certainly had no complaint about the lad while he was here. I speak as I find.”

  “When did he move into the cottage?” asked Cordelia.

  “Immediately. That wasn’t our idea, of course. We never advertised the job as residential. However, he’d obviously seen the cottage and taken a fancy to the place and he asked if we’d mind if he camped out there. It wasn’t practicable for him to cycle in from Cambridge each day, we could quite see that, and as far as we knew there was no one in the village who could put him up. I can’t say I was keen on the idea; the cottage needs a lot doing to it. Actually we have it in mind to apply for a conversion grant and then get rid of the place. It wouldn’t do for a family in its present state but the lad seemed keen on roughing it there, so we agreed.”

  Cordelia said: “So he must have inspected the cottage before he came for the job?”

  “Inspected? Oh, I don’t know. He probably snooped around to see what the property was like before he actually came to the door. I don’t know that I blame him, I’d have done the same myself.”

  Mrs. Markland broke in: “He was very keen on the cottage, very keen. I pointed out that there was no gas or electricity but he said that that wouldn’t worry him; he’d buy a Primus stove and manage with lamps. There’s water laid on, of course, and the main part of the roof is really quite sound. At least I think it is. We don’t go there, you know. He seemed to settle in very happily. We never actually visited him, there was no need, but as far as I could see he was looking after himself perfectly well. Of course as my husband said, he was very inexperienced; there were one or two things we had to teach him, like coming up to the kitchen early every morning for the orders. But I liked the boy; he was always working hard when I was in the garden.”

  Cordelia said: “I wonder if I might have a look at the cottage?”

  The request disconcerted them. Major Markland looked at his wife. There was an embarrassed silence and for a moment Cordelia feared that the answer would be no. Then Miss Markland stabbed her needles into the ball of wool and got to her feet: “I’ll come with you now,” she said.

  The grounds of Summertrees were spacious. First there was the formal rose garden, the bushes closely planted and grouped according to variety and colour like a market garden, the name tags fixed at precisely the same height from the earth. Next was the kitchen garden cut in two by a gravel path with evidence of Mark Callender’s work in the weeded rows of lettuce and cabbages, the patches of dug earth. Finally they passed through a gate into a small orchard of old and unpruned apple trees. The scythed grass, smelling richly of hay, lay in thick swathes round the gnarled trunks.

  At the furthest end of the orchard was a thick hedge, so overgrown that the wicket gate into the rear garden of the cottage was at first difficult to see. But the grass around it had been trimmed and the gate opened easily to Miss Markland’s hand. On the other side was a thick bramble hedge, dark and impenetrable and obviously allowed to grow wild for a generation. Someone had hacked a way through, but Miss Markland and Cordelia had to bend low to avoid catching their hair on its tangled tentacles of thorn.

  Once free of this barrier, Cordelia lifted her head and blinked in the bright sunshine. She gave a little exclamation of pleasure. In the short time in which he had lived here Mark Callender had created a little oasis of order and beauty out of chaos and neglect. Old flo
wer beds had been discovered and the surviving plants tended; the stone path had been scraped free of grass and moss; a minute square of lawn to the right of the cottage door had been cut and weeded. On the other side of the path a patch about twelve feet square had been partly dug. The fork was still in the earth, driven deep about two feet from the end of the row.

  The cottage was a low brick building under a slate roof. Bathed in the afternoon sunshine, and despite its bare, rain-scoured door, its rotted window frames and the glimpse of exposed beams in the roof, it had the gentle melancholy charm of age which hadn’t yet degenerated into decay. Just outside the cottage door, dropped casually side by side, was a pair of heavy gardening shoes encrusted with earth.

  “His?” asked Cordelia.

  “Who else’s?”

  They stood together for a moment contemplating the dug earth. Neither spoke. Then they moved to the back door. Miss Markland fitted the key into the lock. It turned easily as if the lock had been recently oiled. Cordelia followed her into the sitting room of the cottage.

  The air was cool after the heat of the garden but unfresh, with a taint of contagion. Cordelia saw that the plan of the cottage was simple. There were three doors. One straight ahead obviously led to the front garden but was locked and barred, the joints hung with cobwebs as if it hadn’t been opened for generations. One to the right led, as Cordelia guessed, to the kitchen. The third door was ajar and she could glimpse through it an uncarpeted wooden stairway leading to the first floor. In the middle of the room was a wooden-topped table, the surface scarred with much scrubbing, and with two kitchen chairs, one at each end. In the middle of the table a blue ribbed mug held a posy of dead flowers, black brittle stems bearing sad tatters of unidentifiable plants, their pollen staining the surface of the table like golden dust. Shafts of sunlight cut across the still air; in their beams a myriad of motes, specks of dust and infinitesimal life danced grotesquely.