A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “Darren!”

  He turned and looked at her face. And then, immediately, he was back at her side.

  Gently at first, and then with one sharp movement, she opened the door. Her eyes dazzled with light. The long fluorescent tube which disfigured the ceiling was on, its brightness eclipsing the gentle glow from the passageway. And she saw horror itself.

  There were two of them, and she knew instantly, and with absolute certainty, that they were dead. The room was a shambles. Their throats had been cut and they lay like butchered animals in a waste of blood. Instinctively she thrust Darren behind her. But she was too late. He, too, had seen. He didn’t scream but she felt him tremble and he made a small, pathetic groan, like an angry puppy. She pushed him back into the passage, closed the door, and leaned against it. She was aware of a desperate coldness, of the tumultuous thudding of her heart. It seemed to have swollen in her chest, huge and hot, and its painful drumming shook her frail body as if to burst it apart. And the smell, which at first had been tentative, elusive, no more than an alien tincture on the air, now seemed to seep into the passage with the strong effluvium of death.

  She pressed her back against the door, grateful for the support of its solid carved oak. But neither its strength nor her tightly closed eyes could shut out horror. Brightly lit as on a stage, she saw the bodies still, more garish, more brightly lit than when they had first met her horrified eyes. One corpse had slipped from the low single bed to the right of the door and lay staring up at her, the mouth open, the head almost cleft from the body. She saw again the severed vessels, sticking like corrugated pipes through the clotted blood. The second was propped, ungainly as a rag doll, against the far wall. His head had dropped forward and over his chest a great mat of blood had spread like a bib. A brown and blue woollen cap was still on his head but askew. His right eye was hidden, but the left leered at her with a dreadful knowingness. Thus mutilated, it seemed to her everything human had drained away from them with their blood: life, identity, dignity. They no longer looked like men. And the blood was everywhere. It seemed to her that she herself was drowning in blood. Blood drummed in her ears, blood gurgled like vomit in her throat, blood splashed in bright globules against the retinas of her closed eyes. The images of death she was powerless to shut out swam before her in a swirl of blood, dissolved, re-formed, and then dissolved again, but always in blood. And then she heard Darren’s voice, felt the tug of his hand on her sleeve.

  “We gotta get outer here before the filth arrive. Come on. We ain’t seen nothin’, nothin’. We ain’t been ’ere.”

  His voice squeaked with fear. He clutched at her arm. Through the thin tweed, his grubby fingers bit, sharp as teeth. Gently she prised them loose. When she spoke, she was surprised at the calmness of her voice.

  “That’s nonsense, Darren. Of course they won’t suspect us. Running away … now, that would look suspicious.”

  She hustled him along the passage.

  “I’ll stay here. You go for help. We must lock the door. No one must come in. I’ll wait here and you fetch Father Barnes. You know the vicarage? It’s the corner flat in that block on Harrow Road. He’ll know what to do. He’ll call the police.”

  “But you can’t stay ’ere on your own. Suppose ’e’s still here? In the church, waitin’ and watchin’? We gotta keep together. OK?”

  The authority in his childish voice disconcerted her.

  “But it doesn’t seem right, Darren, to leave them. Not both of us. It seems, well, callous, wrong. I ought to stay.”

  “That’s daft. You can’t do nothin’. They’re dead, stiff. You saw ’em.”

  He made a swift gesture of drawing a knife across his throat, rolled up his eyes and gagged. The sound was horribly realistic, a gush of blood in the throat. She cried out:

  “Oh, don’t, Darren, please don’t!”

  Immediately he was conciliatory, his voice calmer. He put his hand in hers. “Better come along with me to Father Barnes.” She looked down at him, piteously, as if she were the child.

  “If you think so, Darren.”

  He had regained his mastery now. The small body almost swaggered. “Yeah, that’s what I think. Come along with me.” He was excited. She heard it in the raised treble, saw it in the bright eyes. He was no longer shocked and he wasn’t really upset. It had been silly to think that she needed to protect him from the horror. That spurt of fear at the thought of the police had passed. Brought up on those bright, flickering images of violence, could he distinguish between them and reality, she wondered. Perhaps it was more merciful that, protected by his innocence, he shouldn’t be able to. He put a thin arm around her shoulders, helping her to the door, and she leaned against him, feeling the sharp bones under her arm.

  How kind he is, she thought, how sweet, this dear, dear child. She would have to talk to him about the flowers and the salmon. But she needn’t think about that now, not now.

  They were outside. The air, fresh and cold, smelled to her as sweet as a sea breeze. But when, together, they had pulled shut the heavy door with its iron-decorated bands, she found she couldn’t fit the key into the lock. Her fingers were jumping rhythmically, as if in spasm. He took the key from her and, stretching high, thrust it into the lock. And then her legs gently folded and she subsided slowly on the step, ungainly as a marionette. He looked down at her.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t walk, Darren. I’ll be better soon. But I have to stay here. You fetch Father Barnes. But hurry!”

  As he still hesitated, she said:

  “The murderer, he can’t be still inside. The door was unlocked when we arrived. He must have left after he’d—he wouldn’t hang about inside waiting to be caught, would he?”

  How odd, she thought, that my mind can reason that out while my body seems to have given up.

  But it was true. He couldn’t still be there, hiding in the church, knife in hand. Not unless they had died very recently. But the blood hadn’t looked fresh … Or had it? Her bowels suddenly churned. Oh God, she prayed, don’t let that happen, not now. I’ll never get to the lavatory. I can’t make it past that door. She thought of the humiliation, of Father Barnes coming, the police. It was bad enough to be slumped here like a heap of old clothes.

  “Hurry” she said. “I’ll be all right. But hurry!”

  He made off, running very fast. When he had gone, she still lay there, fighting the terrible loosening of her bowels, the need to vomit. She tried to pray but, strangely, the words seemed to have got muddled up. “May the souls of the righteous, in the mercy of Christ, rest in peace.” But perhaps they hadn’t been the righteous. There ought to be a prayer that would do for all men, all the murdered bodies all over the world. Perhaps there was. She would have to ask Father Barnes. He would be sure to know.

  And then came a new and different terror. What had she done with her key? She looked down at the one clutched in her hand. This was weighted with a large wooden tag charred at the end, where Father Barnes had put it down too close to a gas flame. So this was his spare key, the one he kept at the vicarage. It must be the one they had found in the lock and she had handed it to Darren to relock the door. So what had she done with hers? She rummaged frantically in her handbag as if the key were a vital clue, its loss disastrous, seeing in imagination a phalanx of accusing eyes, the police demanding she account for it, Father Barnes’s tired and dispirited face. But her scrabbling fingers found it safe between her purse and the bag lining, and she drew it out with a moan of relief. She must have automatically put it away when she found the door already open. But how odd that she couldn’t remember! Everything was a blank between their arrival and the moment in which she had thrust open the Little Vestry door.

  She was aware of a dark shadow looming beside her. She looked up and saw Father Barnes. Relief flooded her heart. She said:

  “You’ve rung the police, Father?”

  “Not yet. I thought it was better to see for myself, in case th
e boy was playing tricks.”

  So they must have stepped past her, into the church, into that dreadful room. How odd that, huddled in the corner, she hadn’t even noticed. Impatience rose like vomit in her throat. She wanted to cry out, “Well, now you’ve seen!” She had thought that when he arrived everything would be all right. No, not all right but better, made sense of. Somewhere there were the right words and he would speak them. But looking at him, she knew that he brought no comfort. She looked up at his face, unattractively blotched by the morning chill, at the grubby stubble, at the two brittle hairs at the corners of his mouth, at the trace of blackened blood in the left nostril, as if he had had a nosebleed, at the eyes, still gummy with sleep. How silly to think that he would bring his strength, would somehow make the horror bearable. He didn’t even know what to do. It had been the same over the Christmas decorations. Mrs. Noakes had always done the pulpit, ever since Father Collins’s time. And then Lilly Moore had suggested that it wasn’t fair, that they ought to take turns at the pulpit and the font. He should have made up his mind and stood firm. It was always the same. But what a time to be thinking of Christmas decorations, her mind a tangle of hollyberries and gaudy poinsettias, red as blood. But it hadn’t been so very red, more a reddish brown.

  Poor Father Barnes, she thought, irritation dissolving into sentimentality. He’s a failure like me, both failures. She was aware of Darren shivering beside her. Someone ought to take him home. Oh God, she thought, what will this do to him, to both of us? Father Barnes was still standing beside her, twisting the door key in his ungloved hands. She said gently:

  “Father, we have to get the police.”

  “The police. Of course. Yes, we must call the police. I’ll phone from the vicarage.”

  But still he hesitated. On an impulse she asked:

  “Do you know them, Father?”

  “Oh yes, yes. The tramp. That’s Harry Mack. Poor Harry. He sleeps in the porch sometimes.”

  He didn’t need to tell her that. She knew that Harry liked to doss down in the porch. She had taken her turn at clearing up after him, the crumbs, the paper bags, the discarded bottles, sometimes even worse things. She ought to have recognized Harry, that woollen hat, the jacket. She tried not to dwell on why it was that she hadn’t. She asked, with the same gentleness:

  “And the other, Father. Did you recognize him?”

  He looked down at her. She saw his fear, his bewilderment, and above all, a kind of astonishment at the enormity of the complications that lay ahead. He said slowly, not looking at her:

  “The other is Paul Berowne. Sir Paul Berowne. He is—he was—a Minister of the Crown.”

  two

  As soon as he had left the Commissioner’s office and was back in his own room Commander Adam Dalgliesh rang Chief Inspector John Massingham. The receiver was snatched at the first ring and Massingham’s disciplined impatience came across as strongly as his voice. Dalgliesh said:

  “The Commissioner has had a word with the Home Office. We’re to take this one, John. The new squad will officially be in existence on Monday anyway, so we’re only jumping the gun by five days. And Paul Berowne may still technically be the Member for Hertfordshire North East. He wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds on Saturday, apparently, and no one seems quite sure whether the resignation dates from the day the letter was received or the date the warrant is signed by the Chancellor. Anyway, all that is academic. We take the case.”

  But Massingham was uninterested in the procedural details for the resignation of a parliamentary seat. He said:

  “Division are sure, sir, that the body is Sir Paul Berowne?”

  “One of the bodies. Don’t forget the tramp. Yes, it’s Berowne. There’s evidence of identity at the scene, and the parish priest knew him, apparently. It wasn’t the first time Berowne had spent the night in St. Matthew’s Church vestry.”

  “An odd place to choose to sleep.”

  “Or to die. Have you spoken to Inspector Miskin?”

  Once they had begun working together they would both be calling her Kate, but now Dalgliesh gave her her rank. Massingham said:

  “She’s off today, sir, but I managed to get her at her flat. I’ve asked Robins to collect her gear and she’ll meet us at the scene. I’ve alerted the rest of the team.”

  “Right, John. Get the Rover, will you. I’ll meet you outside. Four minutes.”

  It crossed his mind that Massingham might not have been too displeased had Kate Miskin already left her flat and been impossible to contact. The new squad had been set up in C1 to investigate serious crimes which, for political or other reasons, needed particularly sensitive handling. It had been so self-evident to Dalgliesh that the squad would need a senior woman detective that he had devoted his energy to choosing the right one rather than to speculating how well she would fit into the team. He had selected the twenty-seven-year-old Kate Miskin on her record and her performance at interview, satisfied that she had the qualities for which he was looking. They were also the ones he most admired in a detective: intelligence, courage, discretion and common sense. What else she might have to contribute remained to be seen. He knew that she and Massingham had worked together before when he had been a newly promoted divisional detective inspector and she a sergeant. It was rumoured that the relationship had at times been stormy. But Massingham had learned to discipline some of his prejudices since then, as he had the notorious Massingham temper. And a fresh, even an iconoclastic, influence, even a little healthy rivalry, could be more effective operationally than the collusive and machismo freemasonry which frequently bound together a team of all male officers.

  Dalgliesh began rapidly but methodically to clear his desk, then checked his murder bag. He had told Massingham four minutes, and he would be there. Already he had moved, as if by a conscious act of will, into a world in which time was precisely measured, details obsessively noticed, the senses preternaturally alert to sound, smell, sight, the flick of an eyelid, the timbre of a voice. He had been called from this office to so many bodies, in such different settings, such different states of dissolution, old, young, pathetic, horrifying, having in common only the one fact, that they were violently dead and by another’s hand. But this body was different. For the first time in his career, he had known and liked the victim. He told himself that it was pointless to speculate what difference, if any, this would make to the investigation. Already he knew that the difference was there.

  The Commissioner had said:

  “His throat is cut, possibly by his own hand. But there’s a second body, a tramp. This case is likely to be messy in more ways than one.”

  His reaction to the news had been partly predictable and partly complex and more disturbing. There had been the natural initial shock of disbelief at hearing of the unexpected death of any person even casually known. He would have felt no less if he’d been told that Berowne was dead of a coronary or killed in a car smash. But this had been followed by a sense of personal outrage, an emptiness and then a surge of melancholy, not strong enough to be called grief but keener than mere regret, which had surprised him by its intensity. But it hadn’t been strong enough to make him say “I can’t take this case. I’m too involved, too committed.”

  Waiting briefly for the lift, he told himself that he was no more involved than he would be in any other case. Berowne was dead. It was his business to find out how and why. Commitment was to the job, to the living, not to the dead.

  He had hardly passed through the swing doors when Massingham drove up the ramp with the Rover. Getting in beside him, Dalgliesh asked:

  “Fingerprints and photography, they’re on their way?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the lab?”

  “They’re sending a senior biologist. She’ll meet us there.”

  “Did you manage to get Dr. Kynaston?”

  “No, sir, only the housekeeper. He’s been in New England visiting his daughter. He always goes t
here in the fall. He was due back at Heathrow on BA flight 214 arriving at seven twenty-five. It’s landed, but he’s probably stuck on the Westway by now.”

  “Keep on trying his home until he arrives.”

  “Doc Greeley is available, sir. Kynaston will be jet-lagged.”

  “I want Kynaston, jet-lagged or not.”

  Massingham said:

  “Only the best for this cadaver.”

  Something in his voice, a tinge of amusement, even contempt, irritated Dalgliesh. He thought, My God, am I getting over-sensitive about this death even before I’ve seen the body? He fastened his seat belt without speaking and the Rover slid gently into Broadway, the road he had crossed less than a fortnight earlier on his way to see Sir Paul Berowne.

  Gazing straight ahead, only half-aware of a world outside the claustrophobic comfort of the car, of Massingham’s hands stroking the wheel, the almost soundless changing of the gears, the pattern of traffic lights, he deliberately let his mind slip free of the present and of all conjecture about what lay ahead, and remembered, by an exercise of mental recall, as if something important depended on his getting it right, every moment of that last meeting with the dead man.

  three

  It was Thursday 5 September and he was about to leave his office to drive to Bramshill Police College to begin a series of lectures to the Senior Command Course when the call came through from the Private Office. Berowne’s private secretary spoke after the manner of his kind. Sir Paul would be grateful if Commander Dalgliesh could spare a few minutes to see him. It would be convenient if he could come at once. Sir Paul would be leaving his office to join a party of his constituents at the House in about an hour.