by P. D. James
Three minutes later, waiting bag in hand outside the flat, she saw the car turn into the driveway. The working day had begun.
3
* * *
Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith lived alone on the sixteenth floor of a post-war block to the north-west of Shepherd’s Bush. Beneath him were fifteen floors of identical flats and identical balconies. The balconies, which stretched the whole length of each floor, afforded no privacy but he was only rarely disturbed by his neighbours. One used his flat as a pied-à-terre and was seldom there, and the other, engaged in some mysterious work in the City, left even earlier than did Benton and returned with conspiratorial quietness in the small hours. The block, previously local authority housing, had been sold off by the council, renovated by private developers, and the flats then put on the market. Despite a reconstructed entrance hall, the modern unvandalised lifts and the new paint, the block was still an unhappy compromise between prudent economy, civic pride and institutional conformity, but at least architecturally it was inoffensive. It aroused no emotion other than surprise that anyone should have bothered to put it up.
Even the wide view from the balcony was unremarkable. Benton looked out on a drab industrial landscape patterned in black and greys and dominated by rectangular slabs of high-rise flats, featureless industrial buildings and narrow streets of obstinately surviving nineteenth-century terraces, now the carefully preserved habitat of aspiring young professionals. The Westway rose in a curve above a closely packed caravan-park of transients who lived under the concrete pillars, rarely venturing out. Beyond them was a yard piled high with the crumpled metal of derelict cars, the spiked tangle a rusting symbol of the vulnerability of human life and hope. But when night fell the view was metamorphosed, made insubstantial and mystical by light. Traffic signals changed, cars moved like automata on liquid roads, the high cranes with their single top lights were angled like praying mantises, grotesque Cyclopes of the night. Aircraft descended silently towards Heathrow from a blue-black sky bruised with garish clouds and, as dusk deepened—floor by floor, as if by a signal—the lights came on in the high-rise flats.
But neither by night or day was this uniquely a London landscape. Benton felt that he could be looking out over any large city. None of the familiar landmarks lay beneath him—no glimpse of the river, no painted floodlit bridges, no familiar towers or domes. But this carefully chosen anonymity, even the landscape, was what he had wanted. He had put down no roots, having no native soil.
He had moved into the flat six months after joining the police and it could not be more different from his parents’ home in the leafy street in South Kensington: the white steps up to the pillared front door, the gleaming paint and immaculate stucco. He had decided to leave the small self-contained flat at the top of the house, partly because he felt it demeaning to be still living at home after the age of eighteen, but chiefly because he couldn’t imagine inviting a colleague to his flat. Even to walk through the main door of the house was to know what it represented: money, privilege, the cultural assurance of the prosperous liberal upper-middle class. But he knew that his present apparent independence was spurious; the flat and its contents had been paid for by his parents—on his salary he couldn’t otherwise have afforded to move. And he had made himself comfortable. He told himself wryly that only a visitor knowledgeable about modern furniture would have guessed how much the deceptively simple pieces had cost.
But there had been no visitors among his colleagues. As a new recruit he had trodden carefully at first, knowing that he was on a probation more rigorous and protracted than any provisional assessment from senior officers. He had hoped, if not for friendship, for tolerance, respect and acceptance, and to an extent he had earned them. But he was aware that he was still regarded with wary circumspection. He felt himself to be surrounded by a variety of organisations, including the criminal law, dedicated to protecting his racial sensitivities, as if he could be as easily offended as a Victorian virgin confronted by a flasher. He wished that these racial warriors would leave him alone. Did they want to stigmatise minorities as over-sensitive, insecure and paranoid? But he accepted that the problem was partly of his making, a reserve that was deeper and less forgivable than shyness and which inhibited intimacy. They didn’t know who he was; he didn’t know who he was. It wasn’t, he thought, only the result of being mixed-race. The London world he knew and worked in was peopled with men and women of mixed racial, religious and national backgrounds. They seemed to manage.
His mother was Indian, his father English, she a paediatrician, he the headmaster of a London comprehensive school. They had fallen in love and married when she was seventeen, his father twelve years older. They had been passionately in love and they still were. He knew from the wedding photographs that she had been exquisitely beautiful; she still was. She had brought money as well as beauty to the marriage. From childhood he had felt an intruder into that private self-sufficient world. They were both over-busy and he had learned early that their time together was precious. He knew that he was loved, that his welfare was their concern, but coming quietly and unexpectedly into a room where they were alone, he would see the cloud of disappointment on their faces quickly change into smiles of welcome—but not quickly enough. Their difference in religious belief seemed never to worry them. His father was an atheist, his mother a Roman Catholic and Francis had been brought up and schooled in that faith. But when in adolescence he gradually let it go as he might relinquish a part of childhood, neither parent appeared to notice, or if they did, felt that they were justified in questioning him.
They had taken him with them on their annual visits to Delhi, and there too he had felt an alien. It was as if his legs, painfully stretched across a spinning globe, could find no secure footing in either continent. His father loved to revisit India, was at home there, was greeted with loud exclamations of delight, laughed, teased and was teased, wore Indian clothes, performed the salaam with more ease than he shook hands at home, left after tearful goodbyes. As a child and adolescent, Benton was made a great fuss of, exclaimed over, praised for his beauty, his intelligence, but he would stand there ill-at-ease, politely exchanging compliments, knowing that he didn’t belong.
He had hoped that selection to Adam Dalgliesh’s Special Investigation Squad would help to make him more at home in his job, perhaps even in his disjointed world. Perhaps to some extent it had. He knew himself to be lucky; time spent in the Squad was a recognised asset when it came to promotion. His last case—which was also his first—a death by fire in a Hampstead museum, had been a test that he felt he had successfully passed. With the next call there could be problems. Inspector Piers Tarrant was known to be a demanding and occasionally tricky senior officer but Benton had felt that he knew how to cope with Tarrant, recognising in him that touch of ambition, cynicism and ruthlessness that he understood and which mirrored his own. But with Tarrant transferred to the anti-terrorist branch, he would be working under Detective Inspector Kate Miskin. Kate Miskin was a less straightforward challenge and not just because she was a woman. She was always correct and less openly critical than Tarrant, but he sensed that she was uncomfortable with him as a colleague. It had nothing to do with his colour, his sex or his social status, although he sensed that she had some hang-ups over class. She just didn’t like him. It was as simple and intractable as that. Somehow, and perhaps soon, he would have to learn how to deal with it.
But now his thoughts turned to his plans for this free day. He had already cycled to the farmers’ market at Notting Hill Gate and bought organic fruit, vegetables and meat for the weekend, some of which he had arranged to take to his mother during the afternoon. He hadn’t been home for six weeks and it was time he showed his face, if only to assuage a nagging guilt that he was a less-than-punctilious son.
And in the evening he would cook dinner for Beverley. She was a twenty-one-year-old actress who, straight from drama school, had landed a small part in a long-running television serial s
et in a Suffolk village. They had met in a local supermarket, a well-known pick-up resource for the solitary or temporarily deprived. After studying him covertly for a minute, she had made the first move by asking him to lift down a tin of tomatoes conveniently beyond her reach. He was enchanted by her looks, the delicate oval face, the straight black hair cut in a fringe above the slightly slanting eyes, which gave her an engaging look of Oriental delicacy. She was in fact robustly English and from much the same professional background as himself. She would have been perfectly at home in his mother’s drawing room. But Beverley had cast off her middle-class social nuances and accent and changed her unfashionable first name in the service of her career. Her part in the serial, the wayward daughter of the village publican, had caught the public imagination. There were rumours that the character would be developed with exciting possibilities—a rape, an illegitimate child, an affair with the church organist, perhaps even a murder, though not, of course, of her or the baby. Audiences, she told Benton, didn’t like to see murdered babies. In the glitzy ephemeral firmament of popular culture, Beverley was becoming a star.
After sex, which Beverley liked to be inventive, prolonged but inconveniently hygienic, she would practise her yoga. Propped up on his arm in the bed, Benton would watch her extraordinary contortions with fascinated and indulgent affection. At these moments he knew himself to be dangerously close to love, but he had no expectation that the affair would last. Beverley, who was as vocal as a hellfire preacher about the dangers of promiscuity, preferred serial monogamy but with a carefully defined time limit for each partner. Boredom usually set in after six months, she explained helpfully. They had now been together for five, and although Beverley hadn’t yet spoken, Benton had no expectation that either his lovemaking or his cooking had qualified him for extra time.
He was still unpacking his purchases and finding room for them in the fridge when the designated mobile he kept on his bedside table began to ring. He would put out his hand each night to reassure himself that it was still in place. In the morning, setting out for his interim job at the Met, he would slip it in his pocket willing it to ring. Now, slamming the refrigerator door, he dashed to answer it as if fearful that the ringing might stop. He listened to the brief message, said “Yes, sir,” and switched off. The day was transformed.
His bag, as always, was already packed. He had been told to bring his camera and binoculars, both of which were superior to those owned by other members of the team. So they were to be on their own, calling in no back-up, no photographer or SOCO unless it proved necessary. Mystery deepened his excitement. And now he had nothing to do but make two quick phone calls, one to his mother, the second to Beverley. Both, he suspected, would cause minor inconvenience, but no pain. In happy but half-fearful expectation, he turned his mind to the challenge that awaited him on that as yet unknown offshore island.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
Great Britain is fortunate in the variety and beauty of her offshore islands, but the setting for this novel, Combe Island off the coast of Cornwall, will not be found among them. The island, the deplorable events which took place there and all the characters in the story, living or dead, are entirely fictitious, existing only in that interesting psychological phenomenon, the imagination of the crime novelist.
P. D. James
BOOK ONE
* * *
Death on an Offshore Island
1
* * *
At seven o’clock on the previous day in Atlantic Cottage on Combe Island, Emily Holcombe stepped out of her shower, tied a towel round her waist and began smoothing moisturising cream into her arms and neck. It had become a daily routine for the last five years since her seventy-fifth birthday, but she had no sanguine expectation that it could do more than temporarily alleviate the ravages of age, nor did she greatly care. In youth and middle age she had taken little trouble with her looks, and she occasionally wondered whether it might not be both pointless and a little demeaning to begin these time-consuming rituals when the results could gratify no one but herself. But then, whom else had she ever wished to gratify? She had always been handsome, some thought beautiful, certainly not pretty, strong-featured, with high cheekbones, large hazel eyes under straight brows, a narrow, slightly aquiline nose and a wide, well-shaped mouth which could look deceptively generous. Some men had found her intimidating; others—among them the more intelligent—were challenged by her barbed wit and responded to her latent sexuality. All her lovers had given her pleasure, none had caused her pain, and the pain she had caused them had long since been forgotten, and even at the time had left her unburdened by remorse.
Now, with all passion spent, she had come back to the beloved island of her childhood, to the stone cottage on the cliff edge which she intended should be her permanent home for the rest of her life. She had no intention that anyone—certainly not Nathan Oliver—should take it from her. She respected him as a writer—he was, after all, acknowledged to be one of the world’s greatest novelists—but she had never considered that major talent, even genius, entitled a man to be more selfish and self-indulgent than was common in the majority of his sex.
She strapped on her watch. By the time she went back to her bedroom Roughtwood would have removed the early-morning tea tray, which arrived promptly at six-thirty each morning, and breakfast would have been laid out in the dining room: the home-made muesli and marmalade, the unsalted butter, the coffee and the warm milk. Toast wouldn’t be made until he heard her passing the kitchen door. She thought of Roughtwood with satisfaction and some affection. She had made a good decision for both of them. He had been her father’s driver, and when, the last of her family, she had been at the family house on the edge of Exmoor, arranging the final details with the auctioneer and selecting the few items she wished to retain, he had asked to speak to her.
“As you are taking up residence on the island, madam, I would like to apply for the post of butler.”
Combe Island was always referred to as “the island” by the family and servants, as Combe House on the island was spoken of only as “the house.”
Getting to her feet, she had said, “What on earth would I want with a butler, Roughtwood? We haven’t had a butler here since my grandfather’s day, and I shan’t need a driver. No cars are allowed on the island except the buggy for delivering food to the cottages, as you well know.”
“I used the word ‘butler,’ madam, as a generic term. What I had in mind were the duties of a personal servant but, conscious that the words could be taken to imply that I was serving a gentleman, ‘butler’ seemed a more convenient if not entirely appropriate description.”
“You’ve been reading too much P. G. Wodehouse, Roughtwood. Can you cook?”
“My range is limited, madam, but I think you’ll find the results satisfactory.”
“Oh well, there probably wouldn’t be much cooking. An evening meal will be provided at the house and I’ll probably book in for that. But how healthy are you? Frankly, I don’t see myself as a nurse; I have no patience with illness either in myself or others.”
“I haven’t found it necessary to consult a doctor for twenty years, madam. And I’m twenty-five years younger than yourself, if you’ll excuse my mentioning it.”
“Naturally in the course of things I can expect to predecease you. When that happens, there probably won’t be a house for you on the island. I wouldn’t want you to find yourself homeless at sixty.”
“That would present no problem, madam. I’ve a house in Exeter which at present is let furnished on short-term leases, usually to academics from the university. I propose to retire there eventually. I have an affection for the city.”
Why Exeter? she had wondered. What part had Exeter played in Roughtwood’s mysterious past? It was not, she thought, a city to provoke strong affection except in its residents.
“Then we might try the experiment. I’ll have to consult the other Trustees. It will mean that the Trust must
provide me with two cottages, preferably adjacent to each other. I imagine neither of us wish to share a bathroom.”
“I’d certainly prefer a separate cottage, madam.”
“Then I’ll see what can be arranged and we could try it for a month. If we don’t suit each other, we can part without acrimony.”
That had been fifteen years ago and they were still together. He had proved to be an excellent servant and a surprisingly good cook. Increasingly she ate her evening meal in Atlantic Cottage, not at the house. He took two holidays a year, each of ten days exactly. She had no idea where he went or what he did, nor did he ever confide in her. She had always assumed that long-term residents on the island were escaping from something even if, as in her case, the items on her list were too commonly accepted by the malcontents of her generation to be worth dwelling on: noise, mobile phones, vandalism, drunken louts, political correctness, inefficiency and the assault on excellence by renaming it elitism. She knew no more about him now than she did when he had driven her father, and then she had seen him rarely, a square immobile face, his eyes half-hidden by the brim of his chauffeur’s cap, his hair unusually blond for a man, precisely cut in a half-moon on the thick neck. They had established a routine agreeable to both. Every evening at five o’clock they would sit down together in her cottage for their daily game of Scrabble, following which they would have a glass or two of red wine—the only time they ate or drank with each other—and he would return to his own cottage to prepare her dinner.
