An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

by P. D. James

  She stated her business concisely and showed him her note of authority from Sir Ronald. He handed it back to her, remarking without rancour: “Sir Ronald said nothing to me to suggest that he was not satisfied with the verdict.”

  “I don’t think that’s in question. He doesn’t suspect foul play. If he did, he would have come to you. I think he has a scientist’s curiosity to know what made his son kill himself and he couldn’t very well indulge that at public expense. I mean, Mark’s private miseries aren’t really your problem, are they?”

  “They could be if the reasons for his death disclosed a criminal offence—blackmail, intimidation—but there was never any suggestion of that.”

  “Are you personally satisfied that he killed himself?”

  The Sergeant looked at her with the sudden keen intelligence of a hunting dog on the scent.

  “Why should you ask that, Miss Gray?”

  “I suppose because of the trouble you took. I’ve interviewed Miss Markland and read the newspaper report of the inquest. You called in a forensic pathologist; you had the body photographed before it was cut down; you analysed the coffee left in his drinking mug.”

  “I treated the case as a suspicious death. That’s my usual practice. This time the precautions proved unnecessary, but they might not have been.”

  Cordelia said: “But something worried you, something didn’t seem right?”

  He said, as if reminiscing: “Oh, it was straightforward enough to all appearances. Almost the usual story. We get more than our share of suicides. Here is a young man who gave up his university course for no apparent reason and went to live on his own in some discomfort. You get the picture of an introspective, rather solitary student, one who doesn’t confide in his family or friends. Within three weeks after leaving college he’s found dead. There’s no sign of a struggle; no disturbance in the cottage. He leaves a suicide note conveniently in the typewriter, much the kind of suicide note you would expect. Admittedly, he took the trouble to destroy all the papers in the cottage and yet left the garden fork uncleaned and his work half-completed, and bothered to cook himself a supper which he didn’t eat. But all that proves nothing. People do behave irrationally, particularly suicides. No, it wasn’t any of those things which gave me a bit of worry; it was the knot.”

  Suddenly he bent down and rummaged in the left-hand drawer of his desk.

  “Here,” he said. “How would you use this to hang yourself, Miss Gray?”

  The strap was about five feet long. It was a little over an inch wide and was made of strong but supple brown leather, darkened in places with age. An end was tapered and pierced with a row of metal-bound eye holes, the other was fitted with a strong brass buckle. Cordelia took it in her hands.

  Sergeant Maskell said: “That was what he used. Obviously it’s meant as a strap, but Miss Leaming testified that he used to wear it wound two or three times round his waist as a belt. Well, Miss Gray, how would you hang yourself?”

  Cordelia ran the strap through her hands.

  “First of all, of course, I’d slip the tapered end through the buckle to make a noose. Then, with the noose round my neck, I’d stand on a chair underneath the hook in the ceiling and draw the other end of the strap over the hook. I’d pull it up fairly tight and then make two half hitches to hold it firm. I’d pull hard on the strap to make sure that the knot didn’t slip and that the hook would hold. Then I’d kick away the chair.”

  The Sergeant opened the file in front of him and pushed it across the desk.

  “Look at that,” he said. “That’s a picture of the knot.”

  The police photograph, stark in black and white, showed the knot with admirable clarity. It was a bowline on the end of a low loop and it hung about a foot from the hook.

  Sergeant Maskell said: “I doubt whether he would be able to tie that knot with his hands above his head, no one could. So he must have made the noose first just as you did and then tied the bowline. But that can’t be right either. There were only a few inches of strap between the buckle and the knot. If he’d done it that way, he wouldn’t have had sufficient play on the strap to get his neck through the noose. There’s only one way he could have done it. He made the noose first, pulled it until the strap fitted his neck like a collar, and then tied the bowline. Then he got on the chair, placed the loop over the nail and kicked the chair away. Look, this will show you what I mean.”

  He turned over a new page of the file and suddenly thrust it towards her.

  The photograph, uncompromising, unambiguous, a brutal surrealism in black and white, would have looked as artificial as a sick joke if the body were not so obviously dead. Cordelia felt her heart hammering against her chest. Beside this horror Bernie’s death had been gentle. She bent her head low over the file so that her hair swung forward to shield her face, and made herself study the pitiable thing in front of her.

  The neck was elongated so that the bare feet, their toes pointed like a dancer’s, hung less than a foot from the floor. The stomach muscles were taut. Above them the high ribcage looked as brittle as a bird’s. The head lolled grotesquely on the right shoulder like a horrible caricature of a disjointed puppet. The eyes had rolled upwards under half-open lids. The swollen tongue had forced itself between the lips.

  Cordelia said calmly: “I see what you mean. There are barely four inches of strap between the neck and the knot. Where is the buckle?”

  “At the back of the neck under the left ear. There’s a photograph of the indentation it made in the flesh later in the file.”

  Cordelia did not look. Why, she wondered, had he shown her this photograph? It wasn’t necessary to prove his argument. Had he hoped to shock her into a realization of what she was meddling in; to punish her for trespassing on his patch; to contrast the brutal reality of his professionalism with her amateurish meddling; to warn her perhaps? But against what? The police had no real suspicion of foul play; the case was closed. Had it, perhaps, been the casual malice, the incipient sadism of a man who couldn’t resist the impulse to hurt or shock? Was he even aware of his own motives?

  She said: “I agree he could only have done it in the way you described, if he did it. But suppose someone else pulled the noose more tightly about his neck, then strung him up. He’d be heavy, a deadweight. Wouldn’t it have been easier to make the knot first and then hoist him on to the chair?”

  “Having first asked him to hand over his belt?”

  “Why use a belt? The murderer could have strangled him with a cord or a tie. Or would that have left a deeper and identifiable mark under the impression of the strap?”

  “The pathologist looked for just such a mark. It wasn’t there.”

  “There are other ways, though: a plastic bag, the thin kind they pack clothes in, dropped over his head and held tight against his face; a thin scarf; a woman’s stocking.”

  “I can see you would be a resourceful murderess, Miss Gray. It’s possible, but it would need a strong man and there would have to be an element of surprise. We found no sign of a struggle.”

  “But it could have been done that way?”

  “Of course, but there was absolutely no evidence that it was.”

  “But if he were first drugged?”

  “That possibility did occur to me; that’s why I had the coffee analysed. But he wasn’t drugged, the PM confirmed it.”

  “How much coffee had he drunk?”

  “Only about half a mug, according to the PM report, and he died immediately afterwards. Sometime between seven and nine p.m. was as close as the pathologist could estimate.”

  “Wasn’t it odd that he drank coffee before his meal?”

  “There’s no law against it. We don’t know when he intended to eat his supper. Anyway, you can’t build a murder case on the order in which a man chooses to take his food and drink.”

  “What about the note he left? I suppose it isn’t possible to raise prints from typewriter keys?”

  “Not easily on that typ
e of key. We tried but there was nothing identifiable.”

  “So in the end you accepted that it was suicide?”

  “In the end I accepted that there was no possibility of proving otherwise.”

  “But you had a hunch? My partner’s old colleague—he’s a Superintendent of the CID—always backed his hunches.”

  “Ah, well, that’s the Met, they can afford to indulge themselves. If I backed all my hunches I’d get no work done. It isn’t what you suspect, it’s what you can prove that counts.”

  “May I take the suicide note and the strap?”

  “Why not, if you sign for them? No one else seems to want them.”

  “Could I see the note now, please?”

  He extracted it from the file and handed it to her. Cordelia began to read to herself the first half-remembered words:

  A void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us …

  She was struck, not for the first time, by the importance of the written word, the magic of ordered symbols. Would poetry hold its theurgy if the lines were printed as prose, or prose be so compelling without the pattern and stress of punctuation? Miss Leaming had spoken Blake’s passage as if she recognized its beauty, yet here, spaced on the page, it exerted an even stronger power.

  It was then that two things about the quotation caught at her breath. The first was not something which she intended to share with Sergeant Maskell but there was no reason why she should not comment on the second.

  She said: “Mark Callender must have been an experienced typist. This was done by an expert.”

  “I didn’t think so. If you look carefully you’ll see that one or two of the letters are fainter than the rest. That’s always the sign of an amateur.”

  “But the faint letters aren’t always the same ones. It’s usually the keys on the edges of the keyboard which the inexperienced typist hits more lightly. And the spacing here is good until nearly the end of the passage. It looks as if the typist suddenly realized that he ought to disguise his competence but hadn’t time to retype the whole passage. And it’s strange that the punctuation is so accurate.”

  “It was probably copied direct from the printed page. There was a copy of Blake in the boy’s bedroom. The quotation is from Blake, you know, the Tyger tyger burning bright poet.”

  “I know. But if he typed it from the book, why bother to return the Blake to his bedroom?”

  “He was a tidy lad.”

  “But not tidy enough to wash up his coffee mug or clean his garden fork.”

  “That proves nothing. As I said, people do behave oddly when they’re planning to kill themselves. We know that the typewriter was his and that he’d had it for a year. But we couldn’t compare the typing with his work. All his papers had been burnt.”

  He glanced at his watch and got to his feet. Cordelia saw that the interview was over. She signed a chit for the suicide note and the leather belt, then shook hands and thanked him formally for his help. As he opened the door for her he said, as if on impulse: “There’s one intriguing detail you may care to know. It looks as if he was with a woman sometime during the day on which he died. The pathologist found the merest trace—a thin line only—of purple-red lipstick on his upper lip.”

  3

  New Hall, with its Byzantine air, its sunken court and its shining domed hall like a peeled orange, reminded Cordelia of a harem; admittedly one owned by a sultan with liberal views and an odd predilection for clever girls, but a harem nonetheless. The college was surely too distractingly pretty to be conducive to serious study. She wasn’t sure, either, whether she approved of the obtrusive femininity of its white brick, the mannered prettiness of the shallow pools where the goldfish slipped like blood-red shadows between the water lilies, its artfully planted saplings. She concentrated on her criticism of the building; it helped to prevent her being intimidated.

  She hadn’t called at the Lodge to ask for Miss Tilling, afraid that she might be asked her business or refused admission; it seemed prudent just to walk in and chance to luck. Luck was with her. After two fruitless enquiries for Sophia Tilling’s room, a hurrying student called back at her: “She doesn’t live in college but she’s sitting on the grass over there with her brother.”

  Cordelia walked out of the shadow of the court into bright sunlight and over turf as soft as moss towards the little group. There were four of them, stretched out on the warm-smelling grass. The two Tillings were unmistakably brother and sister. Cordelia’s first thought was that they reminded her of a couple of Pre-Raphaelite portraits with their strong dark heads held high on unusually short necks, and their straight noses above curved, foreshortened upper lips. Beside their bony distinction, the second girl was all softness. If this were the girl who had visited Mark at the cottage, Miss Markland was right to call her beautiful. She had an oval face with a neat slender nose, a small but beautifully formed mouth, and slanted eyes of a strikingly deep blue which gave her whole face an oriental appearance at variance with the fairness of her skin and her long blond hair. She was wearing an ankle-length dress of fine mauve patterned cotton, buttoned high at the waist but with no other fastening. The gathered bodice cupped her full breasts and the skirt fell open to reveal a pair of tight-fitting shorts in the same material. As far as Cordelia could see, she wore nothing else. Her feet were bare and her long, shapely legs were untanned by the sun. Cordelia reflected that those white voluptuous thighs must be more erotic than a whole city of sunburnt limbs and that the girl knew it. Sophia Tilling’s dark good looks were only a foil to this gentler, more entrancing beauty.

  At first sight the fourth member of the party was more ordinary. He was a stocky, bearded young man with russet curly hair and a spade-shaped face, and was lying on the grass by the side of Sophie Tilling.

  All of them, except the blond girl, were wearing old jeans and open-necked cotton shirts.

  Cordelia had come up to the group and had stood over them for a few seconds before they took any notice of her. She said: “I’m looking for Hugo and Sophia Tilling. My name is Cordelia Gray.”

  Hugo Tilling looked up: “What shall Cordelia do, love and be silent.”

  Cordelia said: “People who feel the need to joke about my name usually enquire after my sisters. It gets very boring.”

  “It must do. I’m sorry. I’m Hugo Tilling, this is my sister, this is Isabelle de Lasterie and this is Davie Stevens.”

  Davie Stevens sat up like a jack-in-the-box and said an amiable “Hi.” He looked at Cordelia with a quizzical intentness. She wondered about Davie. Her first impression of the little group, influenced perhaps by the college architecture, had been of a young sultan taking his ease with two of his favourites and attended by the captain of the guard. But, meeting Davie Stevens’ steady intelligent gaze, that impression faded. She suspected that, in this seraglio, it was the captain of the guard who was the dominant personality.

  Sophia Tilling nodded and said, “Hullo.”

  Isabelle did not speak but a smile beautiful and meaningless spread over her face.

  Hugo said: “Won’t you sit down, Cordelia Gray, and explain the nature of your necessities?”

  Cordelia knelt gingerly, wary of grass stains on the soft suede of her skirt. It was an odd way to interview suspects—only, of course, these people weren’t suspects—kneeling like a suppliant in front of them. She said: “I’m a private detective. Sir Ronald Callender has employed me to find out why his son died.”

  The effect of her words was astonishing. The little group, which had been lolling at ease like exhausted warriors, stiffened with instantaneous shock into a rigid tableau as if struck to marble. Then, almost imperceptibly, they relaxed. Cordelia could hear the slow release of held breath. She watched their faces. Davie Stevens was the least concerned. He wore a half-rueful smile, interested but unworried, and gave a quick look at Sophie as if in complicity. The look was not returned; she and Hugo were staring rigidly ahead. Cordelia felt that the two Tillings were carefully avoiding
each other’s eyes. But it was Isabelle who was the most shaken. She gave a gasp and her hand flew to her face like a second-rate actress simulating shock. Her eyes widened into fathomless depths of violet blue and she turned them on Hugo in desperate appeal. She looked so pale that Cordelia half expected her to faint. She thought: “If I’m in the middle of a conspiracy, then I know who is its weakest member.”

  Hugo Tilling said: “You’re telling us that Ronald Callender has employed you to find out why Mark died?”

  “Is that so extraordinary?”

  “I find it incredible. He took no particular interest in his son when he was alive, why begin now he’s dead?”

  “How do you know he took no particular interest?”

  “It’s just an idea I had.”

  Cordelia said: “Well, he’s interested now, even if it’s only the scientist’s urge to discover truth.”

  “Then he’d better stick to his microbiology, discovering how to make plastic soluble in saltwater, or whatever. Human beings aren’t susceptible to his kind of treatment.”

  Davie Stevens said with casual unconcern: “I wonder that you can stomach that arrogant fascist.”