A Certain Justice

by P. D. James

  “We couldn’t take that risk.”

  “I thought he loved me. It was as silly as thinking that Mummy loved me. Or Daddy. He’s been to see me, but it wasn’t any good. Nothing has changed. Well it doesn’t, does it? He came to visit me, and on his own too, but he doesn’t really want me. He loves that woman and Marie.”

  Kate thought: Love, always love. Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for. And if we don’t get it early enough we panic in case we never shall. Easy to say to Octavia: Stop bleating for love, love yourself, take hold of your own life. If you get love it’s always a bonus. You’ve got youth, health, money, a home. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop looking to others for love and affection. Heal yourself. But the child had some right to self-pity. Perhaps there were things she could say which would help. If so, she ought to say them; Octavia deserved honesty.

  She said: “My mother died having me and I never knew who my father was. I was brought up by my grandmother. I thought she didn’t love me, but afterwards, when it was too late, I realized that she did, that we’d loved each other. It was just that we weren’t very good at saying so. But I knew after she died that I was on my own, that we’re all on our own. Don’t let what’s happened spoil your life; it doesn’t have to. If help is offered, take it if you want it. But in the end, find the strength to take hold of your own life and make what you want of it. Even the bad dreams fade in time.”

  She thought: I’ve said the wrong thing. Perhaps she hasn’t that kind of strength and never will have. Am I laying on her a burden which she’ll never be able to carry?

  They were silent for a moment, and then Octavia spoke: “Mrs. Buckley has been really kind since I’ve been ill. She’s visited several times. I thought perhaps she could move back into the basement flat. She’d like that. I suppose that’s why she comes to see me, because she wants the flat.”

  Kate said: “Perhaps that’s part of the reason, but it isn’t the whole. She’s a nice woman. She seems capable too. You need someone you can trust in the flat to keep an eye on things when you aren’t there. She needs a home, you need someone reliable. It seems a good arrangement.”

  “I might not be there all the time. I have to think about getting a job. I know I’ll have Mummy’s money but I can’t live all my life on that. I’m not qualified for anything, so I thought I ought to get some A levels. That would be a start.”

  Kate said carefully: “I think that’s a good idea, but you don’t have to make any decisions in a hurry. There are plenty of good places in London where you could study for A levels. You need to decide what you’re interested in. I expect they’ll be able to advise you about the A levels while you’re staying at the convent. You’ll be going there when you leave here, won’t you?”

  “Just for a time. Reverend Mother wrote to invite me. She said come home and be with your friends for a little time. Perhaps it will feel like that when I get there.”

  “Yes,” said Kate, “perhaps it will.”

  She thought: You’ll be offered love of a kind there, the love that Father Presteign deals in, and, if love is what you want more than anything, it’s as well to look for it where you can be sure it won’t let you down.

  As she rose to go, Octavia said: “If I want to talk to you again, would you be able to come? I don’t want to be a nuisance. I was rude to you when we first met and I’m sorry.”

  Kate said: “I’ll come if I can. Police officers never really know when they’ll be free, so you might want to see me when I’m on duty and can’t come. But if I can, I will.”

  She was at the door when Octavia suddenly spoke again.

  “What about Mummy?”

  It was the first time Kate had heard Octavia call Venetia Aldridge “Mummy” and it made her sound very young. Kate went back to the bedside.

  Octavia said: “It will be easier to catch the murderer, now that you know it was Mrs. Carpenter who put on that wig and poured the blood. You’ll find him, won’t you?”

  Kate thought: She has a right to the truth—or at least part of it. After all, it was her mother. She said: “We can separate the killing from what happened to your mother’s body afterwards. That’s an advance, but actually it widens the field of suspicion. Anyone could have killed her who had a key to Chambers, anyone whom your mother might have thought it safe to let in.”

  “But you’re not going to give up?”

  “No, we won’t give up. We never give up on murder.”

  “And you do suspect someone, don’t you?”

  Kate said cautiously: “Suspicion isn’t enough. We have to have the evidence, evidence that will stand up in court. The police don’t prosecute. That decision is for the Director of Public Prosecutions and she needs to be satisfied that there is at least a fifty-per-cent chance of getting a conviction. Taking hopeless cases to court wastes time and money.”

  “So sometimes the police can be sure that they’ve got the right man and still aren’t able to take him to court?”

  “That happens quite often. It’s frustrating when it does. But it’s not for the police, it’s for the court to decide guilt or innocence.”

  “And if you arrest him, he’ll have someone like Mummy to defend him?”

  “Of course. That would be his right. And if his lawyer is as clever as your mother was, he may be acquitted.”

  There was a pause, then Octavia said: “It’s a funny system, isn’t it? Mummy tried to explain it to me, but I wasn’t interested. I never even went to hear her in court except for one time with Ashe. She never said anything, but I think she minded. I was horrid to her most of the time. She thought I only went with Ashe to annoy her. But I didn’t. I thought I loved him.”

  Ashe and Octavia. Ashe and Venetia Aldridge. Octavia and her mother. This was an emotional minefield and Kate had no intention of being drawn onto that dangerously explosive terrain. She went back to what Octavia had first said, and spoke of what she knew.

  “It is a funny system, but it’s the best we have. We can never expect perfect justice. We have a system which sometimes lets the guilty go free so that the innocent can live in safety under the law.”

  “I thought you were so keen to catch Ashe that you’d forgotten about Mummy.”

  “We hadn’t forgotten. Officers were working on the case while we were trying to find you.”

  Octavia put out her thin hands and began to pull at the heads of flowers on her over-bed table. The petals fell like blobs of blood. She said quietly: “I know now that he didn’t love me, but he did care a little. He lit that fire. I was terribly cold and I begged him to light it. He knew that it was dangerous, that the smoke might be seen. But he did light it. That was for me.”

  If that was what she wanted to believe, why not let her? Why make her face the truth? Ashe had lit the fire because he knew that, for him, the end had come. He had died exactly as he had planned to die. He knew the police wouldn’t come unarmed. The only question was whether he had intended to take Octavia with him. But was there really any doubt? That first cut had been deep enough. As if she had guessed Kate’s thoughts, Octavia said: “He wouldn’t have killed me. He wouldn’t have cut my throat.”

  “He did cut your throat. If Inspector Tarrant hadn’t fired you’d be dead.”

  “You don’t know that really. You don’t know him. He never had a chance.”

  Kate wanted to cry out: “For God’s sake, Octavia, he had health, strength, intelligence and food in his belly. He had more than three-quarters of the world can ever hope to have. He had a chance.”

  But it wasn’t as easy as that, and she knew it. How did you apply logic to a psychopath, that convenient word devised to explain, categorize and define in statute law the unintelligible mystery of human evil? Suddenly she remembered a visit paid a year ago to the Black Museum at Scotland Yard, the high shelf with the rows of death masks—only they had been death heads—of executed criminals, the blackness of the heads, the encircling mark of the rope with the deeper impression of the thick
leather washer behind the ear. The masks had been taken to test Cesare Lombroso’s theory that there was a criminal type which could be identified by studying physiognomy. That nineteenth-century theory had been discredited, but were we any closer to knowing the answer? Perhaps for some people it lay in the incense-laden air of St. James’s Church. If so, it had never been open to her. But the altar table was, after all, only an ordinary table covered with gorgeous cloth. The candles were wax candles. The statue of the Virgin had been made by human hands, painted, bought, fixed in place. Under his cassock and his robes Father Presteign was only a man. Was what he offered part of some complicated system of belief, richly adorned, embellished with ritual and music, pictures and stained glass, designed, like the law itself, to bring men and women to the comforting illusion that there was an ultimate justice and that they had a choice?

  She was aware that Octavia was still speaking. “You don’t know where he was born. He told me about it. I’m the only one he did tell. In one of those high-rise estates in North-West London. It’s a terrible place. No trees, no green, just concrete towers, shouting, ugliness, stinking flats, broken windows. It’s called Ellison Fairweather Buildings.”

  It seemed to Kate that her heart gave a great leap and then began a drumming which surely even Octavia would be able to hear. For a moment she couldn’t speak, only her mind seemed to have power. Was this deliberate? Did Octavia know? But of course she didn’t. The words had been spoken with no malicious intent. Octavia wasn’t even looking at her, she was plucking at the sheet. But Dalgliesh knew, of course he did; there wasn’t much about Garry Ashe that he hadn’t learned from Venetia Aldridge’s notebooks. But he hadn’t shown them to her, hadn’t told her that she and Ashe had shared a past, separated in years but rooted in the same childhood memories. What was AD trying to do? Spare her embarrassment? Was it as simple as that? Or had he feared to reactivate a memory which he knew was painful and, by reactivating it, load it with additional trauma. And then she remembered. Surely that resolution made as she stared out over the Thames wasn’t about to be so quickly forgotten. The past had happened. It was part of her now and for ever. And had it been so much worse than the childhoods of millions of others? She had health, she had intelligence, she had food in her belly. She had had her chance.

  They shook hands. It was a curiously formal goodbye. Kate wondered for a moment whether what Octavia really needed were her arms about her, but that was something she couldn’t give. Travelling down the escalator, she felt a spasm of anger, but whether it was against herself or, irrationally, against Dalgliesh, she was unable to decide.

  10

  The next day Dalgliesh went for the last time to Eight, Pawlet Court. He walked into the Temple from the Embankment entrance. It was late afternoon, but already the day was fading. A thin wind crept up from the river, bringing with it the first frigid breath of winter. As he reached the door of Chambers, Simon Costello and Drysdale Laud were coming out together.

  Costello gave him a hard, long look of undisguised hostility and said: “That was a bloody business, Commander. I should have thought a posse of police could have arrested one man without blowing his head off. But I suppose we should be grateful. You’ve saved the country the expense of keeping him in prison for the next twenty years.”

  Dalgliesh said: “And you or one of your colleagues the task of having to defend him. He would have proved an unrewarding and not particularly lucrative client.”

  Laud smiled as if secretly enjoying an antagonism which he didn’t share. He asked: “Any news? You haven’t come to make an arrest, I take it. Of course not, there would be at least two of you. There should be a Latin tag about it. Vigiles non timendi sunt nisi complures adveniunt. I leave the translation to you.”

  Dalgliesh said, “No, I haven’t come to make an arrest,” and stood aside to let them out.

  Inside Chambers, Valerie Caldwell was at her desk, with Harry Naughton bending over her holding an open file. Both looked happier than when Dalgliesh had last seen them. The girl smiled at him. He greeted them, then asked after Valerie’s brother.

  “He’s settling in much better, thank you. That’s a funny way of talking about prison, but you know what I mean. He’s concentrating on earning his remission and getting out. Not long now. And my gran knows about him and that makes visiting easier. I don’t have to pretend.”

  Harry Naughton said: “Miss Caldwell has been promoted. She’s our Chambers secretary now.”

  Dalgliesh congratulated her and asked whether Mr. Langton and Mr. Ulrick were in Chambers.

  “Yes, they’re both here, although Mr. Langton said that he’d be leaving early.”

  “Will you tell Mr. Ulrick that I’m here, please?”

  He waited until she had telephoned, then made his way down the stairs. The basement room was as claustrophobic and as over-heated as on his first visit, but the afternoon was cooler and the heat of the fire less oppressive. Ulrick, seated at his desk, didn’t get up but motioned him to the same armchair, and Dalgliesh felt again the warm stickiness of the leather. Among the old furniture, the books and papers piled on every surface, the archaic gas fire, the stark white refrigerator set against the wall was a discordant intrusion of modernity. Ulrick swung his chair round and gravely regarded him.

  Dalgliesh said: “When we last spoke in this room we talked of your brother’s death. You said that someone bore a heavy responsibility but that it wasn’t Venetia Aldridge. I thought afterwards that you might mean yourself.”

  “That was percipient, Commander.”

  “You were eleven years older. You were at Oxford, only a few miles away. An elder brother, particularly one so much older, is often hero-worshipped or at least looked up to. Your parents were overseas. Did Marcus write to you about what was happening at school?”

  There was a silence before Ulrick replied, but when he did his voice was calm, unworried. “Yes, he wrote. I should have gone to the school at once, but the letter came at the wrong time. I played cricket for my college. There was a match that day and a party in London afterwards. Then three more days passed quickly, as they do when you’re young, happy, busy. I intended to go to the school. On the fourth day I received a telephone call from my uncle with the news that Marcus had killed himself.”

  “And you destroyed the letter?”

  “Is that what you would have done? Perhaps we are not so unalike. I argued that it was unlikely that anyone at the school knew of the letter’s existence. I burned it, more I think in panic than after careful thought. There was, after all, enough evidence against the headmaster without it. Once the dam breaks nothing can hold back the waters.”

  Again there was a silence, not awkward but curiously companionable. Then Ulrick asked: “Why are you here, Commander?”

  “Because I think I know how and why Venetia Aldridge died.”

  “You know, but you can’t prove it and you never will be able to prove it. What I’m telling you now, Commander, is a little for your satisfaction, perhaps more for my own. Think of it as fiction. Imagine as our protagonist a man, successful in his career, reasonably content if not happy, but who loved only two people in his life: his brother and his niece. Have you ever experienced obsessive love, Commander?”

  After a moment, Dalgliesh replied: “No. I was close to it once, close enough, perhaps, to have some understanding of it.”

  “And close enough to feel its power and draw back. You are armoured, of course, by the creative artist’s splinter of ice in the heart. I had no such defence. Obsessive love is the most appalling, the most destructive of all love’s tyrannies. It is also the most humiliating. Our protagonist—let us use my name and call him Desmond—well knew that his niece, despite her beauty, was selfish, greedy, even a little silly. Nothing made any difference. But perhaps you would like to go on with the story, now that we have the characters and the beginning of the plot.”

  Dalgliesh said: “I think, although I have no evidence, that the niece telephoned her uncl
e and told him that her husband’s career was in jeopardy, that Venetia Aldridge had acquired information which might prevent him ever becoming a QC, might even destroy him as a lawyer. She pleaded with her uncle to put a stop to it, to use his influence to see that it didn’t happen. She was, after all, used to coming to her uncle for advice, for money, for help, for support—for anything she wanted. Always he had provided it. So I see him going upstairs to reason with Venetia Aldridge. That couldn’t have been easy for him. I see him as a proud and private man. Venetia Aldridge and he are the only two people in Chambers. She was taking a telephone call when he entered and he could tell by her voice that it was a bad time to choose. She had recently learned of her daughter’s affair with a man she had defended but knew was a particularly brutal murderer. She had looked for advice and support from men who might have been expected to help and had found none. I don’t of course know what was said, but I imagine that it was a bitter rejection of our protagonist’s plea for mercy or restraint. And there was something which she could use, some knowledge which she could throw in his face. I think she did use that knowledge. I think it was Venetia Aldridge who posted Marcus Ulrick’s letter. Letters at prep schools are invariably censored. How else could he get it out unless he gave it to Venetia to post on her way to school?”

  Ulrick said: “We are, of course, devising fiction, inventing a plot. This isn’t a confession. There will be no confession and no admission of anything that is said between us. That is an ingenious sophistication of our plot. Let us assume that it is true. What then?”

  Dalgliesh said: “I think it’s your turn now.”

  “My turn to continue this interesting fabrication. So let us suppose that all the suppressed emotions of an essentially private man come together. Long years of guilt, disgust with himself, anger that this woman whose family have already harmed his so irrevocably should be planning more destruction. The paper-knife was on the desk. She had moved to the door, a file in her hand to replace in the cabinet. It was a way of saying that she had work to do, that the interview was over. He seized the dagger, rushed at her and struck. It must, I think, have been an amazement to him that he was capable of the deed, that the dagger went in so cleanly, so easily, that he had actually killed a human being. Astonishment rather than horror or fear would have been the first emotion.