A Certain Justice

by P. D. James

  Dalgliesh said, “That won’t be necessary at present. But if there is anything else that you have concealed, half-told or lied about I suggest you remind yourself that this is a case of murder and that the offence of obstructing the police in the execution of their duty applies as much to members of the criminal Bar as it does to anyone else.”

  Costello answered calmly: “Some of your colleagues see my job as a defence counsel as obstructing the police in the execution of their duty.”

  There was nothing more at present which could be usefully said. As Dalgliesh made his way downstairs to Mr. Langton’s room he wondered how many more lies he’d been told, what else had been concealed and by whom, and had again the uncomfortable conviction that this case might never be solved.

  Hubert Langton was working at his desk. He rose and shook hands with Dalgliesh as if it were the first time they had met, then led him to one of the leather armchairs in front of the fireplace. Looking across at Langton’s face, Dalgliesh thought again how much he had aged since the murder. The sharp dominant features seemed to be blurring into old age. The jaw was less firm, the pouches under the eyes were becoming pendulous, the flesh was becoming more mottled. But there were more than physical changes. The spirit was devitalized. Quietly Dalgliesh told him what Kate and Robbins had discovered during their visit to Catherine Beddington.

  Langton said: “So that’s where I was. At the rehearsal. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. The truth is that I didn’t know. The best part of an hour out of Wednesday evening is missing from my life. You tell me that they saw me. I must have been there.”

  Dalgliesh thought that it was as difficult for him to make this admission as it would have been to accept a more damaging truth.

  The tired voice went on. “I remember being about three-quarters of an hour late home, but that’s all I remember. I can’t understand what happened or why. I suppose I shall eventually find the courage to go to my doctor but I doubt whether he’ll be able to help. It doesn’t seem like any form of amnesia I’ve ever heard about.” He smiled, then said: “Perhaps I’m secretly in love with Catherine. Perhaps that’s why I can’t accept that I spent the best part of an hour gazing at her—if that’s what I did. Isn’t that the kind of explanation a psychiatrist would come up with?”

  Dalgliesh said: “Can you remember whether you went straight home when you left the church?”

  “Not even that, I’m afraid. But I’m sure I was home before eight, and my two helpers should be able to confirm it. Venetia spoke on the telephone to her housekeeper—didn’t she?—at a quarter to eight, so surely I’m in the clear.”

  Dalgliesh said: “I’ve never seen you as a suspect. What I did wonder was whether you saw anyone you knew in the church or in Pawlet Court when you left. Obviously, if you can’t remember, there’s no point in pursuing it.”

  “I can give you no help, I’m afraid.” He paused and then said: “Old age can be very frightening, Commander. My son died young, and at the time it seemed the most terrible thing that could happen to anyone in the world—to him as well as to me. But perhaps he was one of the fortunate ones. I shall, of course, be retiring as Head of Chambers at the end of the year, and retiring from work at the Bar. A lawyer whose mind is apt to go blank isn’t just inefficient, he’s dangerous.”

  7

  Dalgliesh was not yet ready to leave Chambers. There was something else he had to do. He went upstairs and unlocked Venetia Aldridge’s room. It held no sense of her presence. He seated himself in her comfortable chair and swivelled it round to adjust the height to his six feet two. There came into his mind for a moment Naughton’s description of finding the body, of the chair swinging round under his touch to confront him, of her dead upturned eye. But the room evoked no shudder of horror; it was just an empty office, elegantly proportioned, functional, waiting as it had for the last two hundred years for the next temporary occupant to move in, to spend brief working years there and finally close the door on success or failure.

  He switched on the desk lamp and unwrapped and opened Edmund Froggett’s scrapbook, turning the pages at first with casual interest, and then with a more deliberate attention. It was an extraordinary record. He had obviously made it his business in the last two years to attend every trial in which Venetia Aldridge was due to appear, whether, rarely, as prosecuting counsel or, more frequently, for the defence. He had noted the venue, the name of the defendant, the judge, counsel for the prosecution and for the defence, and had set out briefly the details of the case as presented by the prosecuting counsel. The arguments of both sides were also summarized with occasional comments.

  The writing was very small and not always easy to read, the letters meticulously formed. The reports showed a remarkable grasp of the intricacies of the law. Froggett had concentrated on the performance of the object of his obsession. Sometimes his comments betrayed the pedagogue; he could have been a senior counsel assiduously monitoring the performance of a junior or a pupil. He must have had a small notebook with him and transcribed the details in court or as soon as he got home. Dalgliesh could picture the little man returning in solitude to his empty flat and sitting down to add a few more pages of analysis, comment and criticism to this record of a professional life. It was apparent, too, that he liked to embellish the record with pictures, some from newspaper accounts of the crime, published after the verdict. There were press photographs of judges processing to the service at the beginning of the new legal year, with a ring round whichever one had tried the case under review. There was even the occasional photograph, almost certainly taken by Froggett himself, of scenes outside the court.

  It was these illustrations, so meticulously pasted in, labelled in that small precise handwriting, which began to induce in Dalgliesh the familiar uncomfortable mixture of pity and irritation. What would Froggett do with his life now that his passion had been brutally wrenched from him, his book becoming no more than a pathetic memento mori? Already some of the press cuttings were browning with age and exposure. And how much was he grieving? Froggett had spoken with a dignified regret that could be covering a more personal loss, but Dalgliesh suspected that the reality of Aldridge’s death had yet to hit him. At present he was caught up in the excitement of it, the self-importance of bringing his record to the police, the sense that he still had a part to play. Or was his interest more in the criminal law than in the lawyer? Would he still go regularly to the Old Bailey in search of the drama which could give his life meaning? And what about the rest of that life? What had happened at the school? It was difficult to believe that Froggett had ever been deputy head. And what had Venetia Aldridge suffered with a sadist as a father, herself powerless to help his victims, growing up in that phobic world of terror and shame?

  With half his mind on the past, he turned the next page almost without thinking. Then he saw the photograph. It was captioned: “Queue waiting outside the Old Bailey for the trial of Matthew Price, 20th October 1994.” The snapshot showed a group of about twenty men and women photographed from across the road. And near the head of the queue was Janet Carpenter. Dalgliesh took out his magnifying-glass and scrutinized the image more clearly, but that first look had been enough. The photograph was so plain that he wondered whether Froggett had taken it to record her face rather than the size of the queue. It seemed unlikely that she had been aware of him. Her head was turned to the camera but she was looking over her shoulder as if something—a shout, a sudden noise—had attracted her attention. She was carefully dressed, and with no apparent attempt at disguise.

  It could, of course, be a coincidence. Mrs. Carpenter might have had a sudden wish to experience a trial. She might have had some interest in the case. He went to the bookcase and began a quick search among the blue notebooks. The trial was easily found. Venetia Aldridge had defended a small-time crook who had unwisely moved into a more dangerous league and had attempted an armed robbery on a suburban jeweller’s shop in Stanmore. Then one shot had injured but not killed the owner. The
evidence had been overwhelming. Venetia Aldridge had been able to do little for her client except mount an impressive plea in mitigation which had probably taken some three years from the inevitably long sentence. Reading the details, Dalgliesh could see no possible connection either with Janet Carpenter or with the present case. So what was she doing there, patiently queuing outside the Old Bailey? Had there been another trial on that day in which she had a personal interest? Or was this tied up with her interest in Aldridge?

  He resumed his careful study of the scrapbook. He was now about halfway through and then, turning a page, he saw not a face he knew but a name: Dermot Beale, convicted on 7 October 1993 at Shrewsbury Crown Court of the murder of Mrs. Carpenter’s granddaughter. For a disorientating second the carefully printed name seemed to grow as he looked at it, the letters to blacken on the page. He went to the cupboard and found Miss Aldridge’s notebook. The same name; an earlier trial. It wasn’t the only time Dermot Beale had been accused of the rape and murder of a child. In October 1992, just a year earlier, Venetia Aldridge had successfully defended him at the Old Bailey. Dermot Beale had gone free, free to kill again. The two murders had been remarkably similar. Beale was a forty-three-year-old commercial traveller. In both cases a child had been knocked from her bicycle, abducted, raped and murdered. In both the body had been found some weeks later buried in a shallow grave. Even the accidental discovery had been the same; the family with their dogs taking a Sunday-morning walk, the sudden excitement of the animals, the scraping away of soft earth, the discovery of clothing and then of a small hand.

  Sitting at the desk absolutely motionless, Dalgliesh pictured what might have happened, probably had happened. The pretended accident that was no accident, the rush to comfort, the suggestion that the child, dazed and wanting her mother, should get into the car and be taken home. He could picture the bicycle at the side of the road, the spinning wheels coming slowly to a stop. In the first case the defence had been brilliant. On the Aldridge blue notebook the main defence strategy was clearly set out. “Identification? Main prosecution witness easily muddled. Time? Could Beale have driven to Potters Lane in thirty minutes from the sighting in the supermarket car-park? Identification of car not positive. No forensic evidence linking Beale to the victim.” But there would be no mention in Froggett’s book, and no record among Miss Aldridge’s blue notebooks, of that second trial in 1993 following the murder of Mrs. Carpenter’s granddaughter. That had been held at Shrewsbury. The same crime but a different venue, a different defence counsel. But, of course, there would have been. Dalgliesh had heard that Miss Aldridge never defended the same man or woman twice on the same charge.

  But what had she thought when she learned of that second murder? Had she felt any responsibility? Was this every defence counsel’s private nightmare? Had it been hers? Or had she comforted herself with the thought that she had only been doing her job?

  He replaced the Aldridge blue notebook in its place, then telephoned the incident room. Piers wasn’t there but Kate answered. Succinctly he described the evidence he had found.

  There was a pause, then Kate said: “It’s the motive, sir. And now we’ve got the lot: motive, means, opportunity. But it’s odd, I could have sworn that when I first saw her—that time in the flat—the murder was news to her.”

  Dalgliesh said: “It still could have been. But we’re getting close to solving one part of the case. First thing tomorrow morning we’ll see Janet Carpenter at her flat. I’d like you to come with me, Kate.”

  “Not tonight, sir? She’s given up her job at Chambers. She won’t be working till ten. We’ll probably find her at home.”

  “Even so, it’s late. It would be nearly ten before we arrived. And she isn’t young. I want her to be rested. We’ll take her in for questioning first thing tomorrow. It will be easier then for her to get a solicitor. She’ll need one present.”

  Sensing Kate’s impatience in her silence, he added, untouched by the slightest apprehension, or any premonition of impending disaster: “There’s no hurry. She knows nothing of Edmund Froggett. And she isn’t going to run away.”

  8

  Some of Dalgliesh’s early months as a police officer had been spent in South Kensington, and he remembered Sedgemoor Crescent as a somewhat raucous enclave of multi-occupied houses in a street chiefly remarkable for being difficult to find in the complicated urban maze between the Earls Court Road and Gloucester Road. It was a crescent of ornate stuccoed houses, their late-Victorian grandeur interposed with concrete blocks of undistinguished modern flats built to replace houses destroyed by enemy action. The far end of the crescent was dignified by the needle-sharp spire of St James’s Church, an immense brick-and-mosaic monument to Tractarian piety much regarded by devotees of high-Victorian architecture.

  The street seemed to have come up in the world since his last visit. Most of the houses had been restored, the gleaming white stucco and newly painted doors shining with almost aggressive respectability, while others with scaffolding erected against their discoloured and crumbling walls had boards advising their conversion to luxury flats. Even the modern blocks, once loud with the shrieks of children and the shouts of their parents across the balconies, and festooned with drying clothes, now held a subdued air of drab conformity.

  Number 16, now named Coulston Court, had like most of the large houses been converted into flats. There was a bank of ten bells with the single word “Carpenter” on the card next to the bell-push, marked “10,” indicating the top floor. Knowing the unreliability of some systems, Dalgliesh was patient, but after three minutes of trying he said to Kate: “We’ll press all the bells; someone usually responds. They ought not to let us in without checking identity, but we could be lucky. Of course, most of them may have left for work.”

  He pressed the bells in succession. Only one voice, deep but female, replied. There was a low buzzing and the door clicked open to his touch. A heavy oak table was set against the wall, obviously there to hold the post. Kate said: “We had this arrangement at my first flat. Whoever came down first in the morning picked up the letters and put them on the table. Tenants who were punctilious or inquisitive set them out by name, but usually they were just left in a pile and you found your own. No one bothered to send on post and the circulars just accumulated. I hated having other people see my letters. If you wanted privacy you had to get up early.”

  Dalgliesh looked at the few letters left in the hall. One, in a window envelope, typed and bearing the words “Private and Confidential,” was addressed to Mrs. Carpenter.

  He said: “It looks like a bank statement. She hasn’t collected her post. The bell could be defective. We’ll go up.”

  The top floor, lit by a large skylight, was surprisingly light. Against the wall of the square landing was a wide storage cupboard with four numbered doors. Kate was about to press the doorbell of Flat Ten when they heard footsteps and, looking down the stairs, saw a girl looking up at them, anxious-eyed. She had obviously just woken. Her hair was a tousled mat fringing a face still bleared with sleep and she was enveloped in a man’s large dressing-gown. As she looked at them her face lightened with relief.

  “Was it you who rang? God, I’m sorry. I was asleep when the bell went. I thought it was my boyfriend. He works nights. They’re always telling us, the weirdies on the Residents’ Association, that we mustn’t let people in without identification. The sound system isn’t very clear and if you’re expecting someone you don’t always think. And I’m not the only one. Old Miss Kemp is always doing it, that is when she hears the bell. Do you want Mrs. Carpenter? She should be there. I saw her yesterday evening about six-thirty. She went out to post a letter—at least she was carrying one. And later I heard her TV on really loud.”

  Dalgliesh asked: “What time was that?”

  “The TV? About seven-thirty, I suppose. She can’t have been out long. I don’t usually hear her. The flats aren’t badly insulated and she’s very quiet. Is anything wrong?”


  “I don’t think so. We’re just calling.”

  She hesitated for a moment, but something in his voice reassured her or was taken as a dismissal. She said, “That’s OK, then,” and seconds later they heard her door close.

  There was no reply to their ring. Neither Dalgliesh nor Kate spoke. Their thoughts were running on similar lines. Mrs. Carpenter could have left early, before the post, or after seven-thirty the previous night, perhaps to stay with a friend. It was premature to begin thinking of breaking down doors. But Dalgliesh knew that this sudden weight of premonition, familiar from so many past cases and apparently intuitive, invariably had its basis in rationality.

  There was a row of plants in pots outside Number Nine. He went over to them and found among the leaves of a lily a folded note. The note read: “Miss Kemp. These are for you to keep, not just to water for me. The calathea and the bird’s-nest fern love humidity. I found they did best in the bathroom or kitchen. I’ll drop in the keys before I leave in case of flood or burglary. I shall be away about a week. Many thanks.” It was signed “Janet Carpenter.”

  Dalgliesh said: “There’s usually a key-holder. Let’s hope Miss Kemp’s at home.”

  She was, but it took three rings before they heard the rasp of a bolt. The door was carefully opened on a chain and an elderly woman peered out at them into Dalgliesh’s eyes.

  Dalgliesh said: “Miss Kemp? We’re sorry to trouble you. We’re police officers. This is Detective Inspector Miskin and my name is Dalgliesh. We were hoping to have a word with Mrs. Carpenter but there’s no reply and we want to check that she’s all right.”