An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

by P. D. James

  “If he did try to kill you, he exceeded his instructions. I merely asked him to keep an eye on you. I had contracted for your sole and whole-time services, if you remember; I wanted to be sure I was getting value. I am getting value of a kind. But you mustn’t indulge your imagination outside this room. Neither the police nor the courts are sympathetic to slander nor to hysterical nonsense. And what proof have you? None. My wife was cremated. There is nothing alive or dead on this earth to prove that Mark was not her son.”

  Cordelia said: “You visited Dr. Gladwin to satisfy yourself that he was too senile to give evidence against you. You needn’t have worried. He never did suspect, did he? You chose him as your wife’s doctor because he was old and incompetent. But I have one small piece of evidence. Lunn was bringing it to you.”

  “Then you should have looked after it better. Nothing of Lunn except his bones has survived that crash.”

  “There are still the female clothes, the black pants and the bra. Someone might remember who bought them, particularly if that person was a man.”

  “Men do buy underclothes for their women. But if I were planning such a murder, I don’t think buying the accessories would worry me. Would any harassed shop girl at the cash desk of a popular multiple store remember a particular purchase, a purchase paid for with cash, one of a number of innocuous items, all presented together at the busiest time of the day? The man might even have worn a simple disguise. I doubt whether she would even notice his face. Would you really expect her to remember, weeks afterwards, to identify one of thousands of customers and identify him with sufficient certainty to satisfy a jury? And if she did, what would it prove unless you have the clothes in question? Be sure of one thing, Miss Gray, if I needed to kill I should do it efficiently. I should not be found out. If the police ever learn how my son was found, as they well may do since, apparently, someone other than yourself knows it, they will only believe with greater certainty that he killed himself. Mark’s death was necessary and, unlike most deaths, it served a purpose. Human beings have an irresistible urge towards self-sacrifice. They die for any reason or none at all, for meaningless abstractions like patriotism, justice, peace; for other men’s ideals, for other men’s power, for a few feet of earth. You, no doubt, would give your life to save a child or if you were convinced that the sacrifice would find a cure for cancer.”

  “I might. I like to think that I would. But I should want the decision to be mine, not yours.”

  “Of course. That would provide you with the necessary emotional satisfaction. But it wouldn’t alter the fact of your dying nor the result of your death. And don’t say that what I’m doing here isn’t worth one single human life. Spare me that hypocrisy. You don’t know and you’re incapable of understanding the value of what I’m doing here. What difference will Mark’s death make to you? You’d never heard of him until you came to Garforth House.”

  Cordelia said: “It will make a difference to Gary Webber.”

  “Am I expected to lose everything I’ve worked for here because Gary Webber wants someone to play squash or discuss history with?”

  Suddenly he looked Cordelia full in the face. He said sharply: “What is the matter? Are you ill?”

  “No, I’m not ill. I knew that I must be right. I knew that what I had reasoned was true. But I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that a human being could be so evil.”

  “If you are capable of imagining it, then I’m capable of doing it. Haven’t you yet discovered that about human beings, Miss Gray? It’s the key to what you would call the wickedness of man.”

  Suddenly Cordelia could no longer bear this cynical antiphony. She cried out in passionate protest: “But what is the use of making the world more beautiful if the people who live in it can’t love one another?”

  She had stung him at last into anger.

  “Love! The most overused word in the language. Has it any meaning except the particular connotation which you choose to give it? What do you mean by love? That human beings must learn to live together with a decent concern for each other’s welfare? The law enforces that. The greatest good of the greatest number. Beside that fundamental declaration of common sense all other philosophies are metaphysical abstractions. Or do you define love in the Christian sense, caritas? Read history, Miss Gray. See to what horrors, to what violence, hatred, and repression the religion of love has led mankind. But perhaps you prefer a more feminine, more individual definition, love as a passionate commitment to another’s personality. Intense personal commitment always ends in jealousy and enslavement. Love is more destructive than hate. If you must dedicate your life to something, dedicate it to an idea.”

  “I mean love, as a parent loves a child.”

  “The worse for them both, perhaps. But if he doesn’t love, there is no power on earth which can stimulate or compel him to. And where there is no love, there can be none of the obligations of love.”

  “You could have let him live! The money wasn’t important to him. He would have understood your needs and kept silent.”

  “Would he? How could he—or I—have explained his rejection of a great fortune in four years’ time? People at the mercy of what they call their conscience are never safe. My son was a self-righteous prig. How could I put myself and my work in his hands?”

  “You are in mine, Sir Ronald.”

  “You are mistaken. I am in no one’s hands. Unfortunately for you that tape recorder is not working. We have no witnesses. You will repeat nothing that has been said in this room to anyone outside. If you do I shall have to ruin you. I shall make you unemployable, Miss Gray. And first of all I shall bankrupt that pathetic business of yours. From what Miss Leaming told me it shouldn’t be difficult. Slander can be a highly expensive indulgence. Remember that if you are ever tempted to talk. Remember this too. You will harm yourself; you will harm Mark’s memory; you will not harm me.”

  Cordelia never knew how long the tall figure in the red dressing gown had been watching and listening in the shadow of the door. She never knew how much Miss Leaming had heard or at what moment she had stolen quietly away. But now she was aware of the red shadow moving soundlessly over the carpet, eyes on the figure behind the desk, the gun held closely against her breast. Cordelia watched in fascinated horror, not breathing. She knew exactly what was going to happen. It must have taken less than three seconds but they passed as slowly as minutes. Surely there had been time to cry out, time to warn, time to leap forward and wrench the gun from that steady hand? Surely there had been time for him to cry out? But he made no sound. He half rose, incredulous, and gazed at the muzzle in blind disbelief. Then he turned his head towards Cordelia as if in supplication. She would never forget that last look. It was beyond terror, beyond hope. It held nothing but the blank acceptance of defeat.

  It was an execution, neat, unhurried, ritually precise. The bullet went in behind the right ear. The body leapt into the air, shoulders humped, softened before Cordelia’s eyes as if the bones were melting into wax, and lay discarded at last over the desk. A thing; like Bernie; like her father.

  Miss Leaming said: “He killed my son.”

  “Your son?”

  “Of course. Mark was my son. His son and mine. I thought you might have guessed.”

  She stood with the gun in her hand, gazing with expressionless eyes through the open window to the lawn. There was no sound. Nothing moved. Miss Leaming said: “He was right when he said that no one could touch him. There was no proof.”

  Cordelia cried out, appalled: “Then how could you kill him? How could you be so sure?”

  Without releasing her hold on the pistol, Miss Leaming put her hand into the pocket of her dressing gown. The hand moved over the desktop. A small gilt cylinder rolled over the polished wood towards Cordelia, then rocked into stillness. Miss Leaming said: “The lipstick was mine. I found it a minute ago in the pocket of his dress suit. He hadn’t worn that suit since he last dined in Hall on Feast night. He was always a magpie. H
e put small objects instinctively into his pockets.”

  Cordelia had never doubted Sir Ronald’s guilt but now every nerve was desperate for reassurance.

  “But it could have been planted there! Lunn could have put it there to incriminate him.”

  “Lunn didn’t kill Mark. He was in bed with me at the time Mark died. He only left my side for five minutes and that was to make a telephone call shortly after eight o’clock.”

  “You were in love with Lunn!”

  “Don’t look at me like that! I only loved one man in my life and he’s the one I’ve just killed. Talk about things you understand. Love had nothing to do with what Lunn and I needed from each other.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Cordelia said: “Is there anyone in the house?”

  “No. The servants are in London. No one is working late at the lab tonight.”

  And Lunn was dead.

  Miss Leaming said with weary resignation: “Hadn’t you better phone the police?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Prison matters. Losing your freedom matters. And do you really want the truth to come out in open court? Do you want everyone to know how your son died and who killed him? Is that what Mark himself would want?”

  “No. Mark never believed in punishment. Tell me what I have to do.”

  “We’ve got to work quickly and plan carefully. We have to trust each other and we have to be intelligent.”

  “We are intelligent. What must we do?”

  Cordelia took out her handkerchief and, dropping it over the gun, took the weapon from Miss Leaming and placed it on the desk. She grasped the woman’s thin wrist and pushed her protesting hand against Sir Ronald’s palm, pulling against the instinctive recoil, forcing the stiff but living fingers against the soft unresisting hand of the dead.

  “There may be firing residue. I don’t really know much about that, but the police may test for it. Now wash your hands and get me a pair of thin gloves. Quickly.”

  She went without a word. Left alone, Cordelia looked down at the dead scientist. He had fallen with his chin against the desktop and his arms swinging loosely at his sides, an awkward, uncomfortable-looking pose which gave him the appearance of peering malevolently over his desk. Cordelia could not look at his eyes, but she was conscious of feeling nothing, not hatred, or anger, or pity. Between her eyes and the sprawled figure swung an elongated shape, head hideously crooked, toes pathetically pointed. She walked over to the open window and looked out over the garden with the casual curiosity of a guest kept waiting in a strange room. The air was warm and very still. The scent of roses came in waves through the open window, alternately sickeningly sweet and then as elusive as a half-caught memory.

  This curious hiatus of peace and timelessness must have lasted less than half a minute. Then Cordelia began to plan. She thought about the Clandon case. Memory pictured herself and Bernie, sitting astride a fallen log in Epping Forest and eating their picnic lunch. It brought back the yeasty smell of fresh rolls, butter and tangy cheese, the heavy fungoid smell of summer woods. He had rested the pistol on the bark between them and had mumbled at her through the bread and cheese, “How would you shoot yourself behind the right ear? Go on, Cordelia—show.”

  Cordelia had taken the pistol in her right hand, index finger lightly resting on the trigger, and with some difficulty had strained back her arm to place the muzzle of the gun against the base of the skull. “Like that?” “You wouldn’t, you know. Not if you were used to a gun. That’s the little mistake Mrs. Clandon made and it nearly hanged her. She shot her husband behind the right ear with his service revolver and then tried to fake a suicide. But she pressed the wrong finger on the trigger. If he’d really shot himself behind the right ear he’d have pressed the trigger with his thumb and held the revolver with his palm round the back of the butt. I remember that case well. It was the first murder I worked on with the Super—Inspector Dalgliesh, as he was then. Mrs. Clandon confessed in the end.” “What happened to her, Bernie?” “Life. She’d probably have got away with manslaughter if she hadn’t tried to fake a suicide. The jury didn’t much like what they heard about Major Clandon’s little habits.”

  But Miss Leaming couldn’t get away with manslaughter; not unless she told the whole story of Mark’s death.

  She was back in the room now. She handed Cordelia a pair of thin cotton gloves. Cordelia said: “I think you’d better wait outside. What you don’t see you won’t have the trouble of forgetting. What were you doing when you met me in the hall?”

  “I was getting myself a nightcap, a whisky.”

  “Then you would have met me again coming out of the study as you took it up to your room. Get it now and leave the glass on the side table in the hall. That’s the kind of detail the police are trained to notice.”

  Alone again, Cordelia took up the gun. It was astonishing how repulsive she found this inert weight of metal now. How odd that she should ever have seen it as a harmless toy! She rubbed it thoroughly with the handkerchief, erasing Miss Leaming’s prints. Then she handled it. It was her gun. They would expect to find some of her prints on the butt together with those of the dead man. She placed it again on the desktop and drew on the gloves. This was the more difficult part. She handled the pistol gingerly and took it over to the inert right hand. She pressed his thumb firmly against the trigger, then wound the cold, unresisting hand round the back of the butt. Then she released his fingers and let the gun fall. It struck the carpet with a dull thud. She peeled off the gloves and went out to Miss Leaming in the hall, closing the study door quietly behind her.

  “Here, you’d better put these back where you found them. We mustn’t leave them lying around for the police to find.”

  She was gone only a few seconds. When she returned, Cordelia said: “Now we must act the rest just as it would have happened. You meet me as I come out of the room. I have been with Sir Ronald about two minutes. You put down your glass of whisky on the hall table and walk with me to the front door. You say—what would you say?”

  “Has he paid you?”

  “No, I’m to come in the morning for my money. I’m sorry it wasn’t a success. I’ve told Sir Ronald that I don’t want to go on with the case.”

  “That’s your concern, Miss Gray. It was a foolish business in the first place.”

  They were walking out of the front door now. Suddenly Miss Leaming turned to Cordelia and said urgently and in her normal voice: “There’s one thing you had better know. It was I who found Mark first and faked the suicide. He’d rung me earlier in the day and asked me to call. I couldn’t get away until after nine because of Lunn. I didn’t want him to be suspicious.”

  “But didn’t it occur to you when you found Mark that there might be something odd about the death? The door was unlocked although the curtains were drawn. The lipstick was missing.”

  “I suspected nothing until tonight when I stood in the shadows and heard you talking. We’re all sexually sophisticated these days. I believed what I saw. It was all horror but I knew what I had to do. I worked quickly, terrified that someone would come. I cleaned his face with my handkerchief dampened with water from the kitchen sink. It seemed that the lipstick would never come off. I undressed him and pulled on his jeans which had been thrown over the back of a chair. I didn’t wait to put on his shoes, that didn’t seem important. Typing the note was the worst part. I knew that he would have his Blake with him somewhere in the cottage and that the passage I chose might be more convincing than an ordinary suicide note. The clattering of the typewriter keys sounded unnaturally loud in the quietness; I was terrified that someone would hear. He had been keeping a kind of journal. There wasn’t time to read it but I burnt the typescript in the sitting-room grate. Last of all, I bundled up the clothes and the pictures and brought them back here to be burnt in the lab incinerator.”

  “You dropped one of the pictures in the garden. And you didn’t quite succ
eed in cleaning the lipstick from his face.”

  “So that’s how you guessed?”

  Cordelia didn’t reply immediately. Whatever happened she must keep Isabelle de Lasterie out of the case.

  “I wasn’t sure if it was you who had been there first but I thought it must have been. There were four things. You didn’t want me to investigate Mark’s death; you read English at Cambridge and could have known where to find that Blake quotation; you are an experienced typist and I didn’t think that the note had been typed by an amateur despite the late attempt to make it look like Mark’s work; when I was first at Garforth House and asked about the suicide note you spoke the whole of the Blake quotation; the typed version was ten words short. I first noticed that when I visited the police station and was shown the note. It pointed direct to you. That was the strongest evidence I had.”

  They had reached the car now and paused together. Cordelia said: “We mustn’t waste any more time before ringing the police. Someone may have heard the shot.”

  “It’s not likely. We’re some distance from the village. Do we hear it now?”

  “Yes. We hear it now.” There was a second’s pause then Cordelia said: “What was that? It sounded like a shot.”

  “It couldn’t have been. It was probably a car backfiring.”

  Miss Leaming spoke like a bad actress; the words were stilted, unconvincing. But she spoke them; she would remember them.

  “But there isn’t a car passing. And it came from the house.”

  They glanced at each other, then ran back together through the open door into the hall. Miss Leaming paused for a moment and looked Cordelia in the face before she opened the study door. Cordelia came in behind her. Miss Leaming said: “He’s been shot! I’d better phone the police.”

  Cordelia said: “You wouldn’t say that! Don’t ever think like that! You’d go up to the body first and then you’d say: ‘He’s shot himself. I’d better phone the police.’ ”