A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “Please sit down. If Inspector Miskin is required to make notes, then she may find that chair by the window convenient. Perhaps you will sit opposite me, Commander.”

  The voice, with its timbre of upper-class arrogance, an arrogance of which its owner so often seems unaware, was exactly as he would have expected. It seemed artificially produced as if, in an attempt to control any quavering, she had had to gather both breath and energy to produce the measured cadences. But it was still a beautiful voice. As she sat facing him, rigidly upright, he saw that her chair was one designed for the disabled, with a button in the armrest to raise the seat when she wanted help in rising. Its functional modernity struck a discordant note in a room which was otherwise cluttered with eighteenth-century furniture; two chairs with embroidered seats, a Pembroke table, a bureau, each a fine example of its period, were strategically placed to provide an island of support if she needed to make her painful progress to the door, so that the room looked rather like an antique shop with its treasures ineptly displayed. It was an old woman’s room, and above the smell of beeswax and the faint summer scent from a bowl of pot-pourri on the Pembroke table, his sensitive nose could detect a whiff of the sour smell of old age. Their eyes met and held. Hers were still remarkable, immense, well spaced and heavily lidded. They must once have been the focus of her beauty, and although they were sunken now, he could still see the glint of intelligence behind them. Her skin was cleft with deep lines running from the jaw to the high jutting cheekbones. It was as if two palms had been placed against the frail skin and forced it upwards, so that he saw with a shock of premonitory recognition the shine of the skull beneath the skin. The scrolls of the ears flat against the sides of the skull were so large that they looked like abnormal excrescences. In youth she would have dressed her hair to cover them. Her face was devoid of make-up and, with the hair drawn back tightly and twisted into a high roll, it looked naked, a face stripped for action. She was wearing black trousers topped with a belted tunic in thin grey wool, high-buttoned almost to the chin, and deep-cuffed. Her feet were lodged in wide, black-barred shoes, and in their immobility gave the impression of being clamped to the carpet. There was a paperback on the round table to the right of her chair. Dalgliesh saw that it was Philip Larkin’s Required Writing. She put out her hand and laid it on the book, then said:

  “Mr. Larkin writes here that it is always true that the idea for a poem and a snatch or line of it come simultaneously. Do you agree, Commander?”

  “Yes, Lady Ursula, I think I do. A poem begins with poetry, not with an idea for poetry.”

  He betrayed no surprise at the question. He knew that shock, grief, trauma took people in different ways, and if this bizarre opening was helping her, he could conceal his impatience. She said:

  “To be a poet and a librarian, even if unusual, has a certain appropriateness, but to be a poet and a policeman seems to me eccentric, even perverse.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Do you see the poetry as inimical to the detection, or the detection to the poetry?”

  “Oh, the latter, surely. What happens if the muse strikes—no, that is hardly the appropriate word—if the muse visits you in the middle of a case? Although if I remember, Commander, your muse in recent years has been somewhat fugitive.” She added with a note of delicate irony: “To our great loss.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “It hasn’t so far happened. Perhaps the human mind can deal with only one intense experience at a time.”

  “And poetry is, of course, an intense experience.”

  “One of the most intense there is.”

  Suddenly she smiled at him. It lit up her face with the intimacy of a shared confidence, as if they were old sparring partners.

  “You must excuse me. Being interrogated by a detective is a new experience for me. If there is an appropriate dialogue for this occasion, I haven’t yet found it. Thank you, anyway, for not burdening me with your condolences. I have received too many official condolences in my time. They have always seemed to me either embarrassing or insincere.”

  Dalgliesh wondered what she would reply if he said: “I knew your son. Not well, but I did know him. I accept that you don’t want my condolences, but if I had been able to speak the right words, they would not have been insincere.”

  She said:

  “Inspector Miskin broke the news to me with tact and consideration. I am grateful. But she was, of course, unable or unwilling to tell me much more than that my son was dead, and that there were certain wounds. How did he die, Commander?”

  “His throat was cut, Lady Ursula.”

  There was no way of softening that brutal reality. He added:

  “The tramp with him, Harry Mack, died the same way.”

  He wondered why he had felt it important to speak Harry’s name. Poor Harry, so incongruously yoked in the forced democracy of death, whose stiffening body would receive far more attention in its dissolution than it had ever received in life. She said:

  “And the weapon?”

  “A bloodstained razor, his apparently, was close to your son’s right hand. There are a number of forensic tests to be carried out, but I expect to find that the razor was the weapon.”

  “And the door to the church—the vestry, or wherever he was—that was open?”

  “Miss Wharton, who with a young boy discovered the bodies, says that she found it unlocked.”

  “Are you treating this as suicide?”

  “The tramp, Harry Mack, didn’t kill himself. My preliminary view is that neither did your son. It’s too early to say more until we get the results of the post-mortem examination and the forensic tests. Meantime I am treating it as a double murder.”

  “I see. Thank you for being so frank.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “There are questions I need to ask. If you would rather wait I could come back later, but it is, of course, important to lose as little time as possible.”

  “I would prefer to lose none, Commander. And two of your questions I can anticipate. I have no reason to believe that my son was contemplating ending his life and he had to my knowledge no enemies.”

  “As a politician that makes him unusual, surely.”

  “He had political enemies, obviously. Some few from his own party, no doubt. But none as far as I know is a homicidal maniac. And terrorists, surely, use bombs and guns, not their victim’s razor. Forgive me, Commander, if I’m stating the obvious, but isn’t it most likely that someone unknown to him, a tramp, a psychopath, a casual thief, killed both him and this Harry Mack?”

  “It is one of the theories we have to consider, Lady Ursula.” He asked: “When did you last see your son?”

  “At eight o’clock yesterday morning, when he carried up my breakfast tray. That was his usual practice. He wished to reassure himself, no doubt, that I had survived the night.”

  “Did he tell you then or at any time that he intended returning to St. Matthew’s?”

  “No. We didn’t discuss his plans for the day, only mine, and those I presume are hardly of interest to you.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “It could be important to know who was here in the house during the day and at what time. Your own timetable could help us to that.”

  He gave no further explanation and she asked for none.

  “My chiropodist, Mrs. Beamish, arrived at ten thirty. She always comes to the house. I was with her for about an hour. Then I was driven to a luncheon engagement with Mrs. Charles Blaney at her club, the University Women’s. After luncheon we went to look at some watercolours in which she is interested at Agnew’s, in Bond Street. We had tea at the Savoy together and dropped Mrs. Blaney at her Chelsea house before returning here at about half past five. I asked Miss Matlock to bring me up a thermos of soup and a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches at six o’clock. She did so and I told her I preferred not to be disturbed again that evening. The luncheon and exhibition had been more tiring than I had expected. I spent the even
ing reading, and rang for Miss Matlock to help me to bed shortly before eleven.”

  “Did you see any other members of the household during the day apart from your son, Miss Matlock and the chauffeur?”

  “I saw my daughter-in-law briefly when I had occasion to go into the library. That was some time during the early part of the morning. I presume that this is relevant, Commander?”

  “Until we know how your son died it is difficult to be sure what is or is not relevant. Did any other member of the household know that Sir Paul intended revisiting St. Matthew’s yesterday evening?”

  “I have had no opportunity to ask them. I can’t believe it likely that they did. No doubt you will enquire. We have only a small staff. Evelyn Matlock, whom you have met, is the housekeeper. Then there is Gordon Halliwell. He is an ex-sergeant in the Guards, who served with my elder son. He, I suppose, would describe himself as a chauffeur-handyman. He came here just over five years ago, before Hugo was killed, and has stayed on.”

  “He drove your son?”

  “Rarely. Paul, of course, had the use of his ministerial car before he resigned; otherwise he drove himself. Halliwell drives me almost daily, and occasionally my daughter-in-law. He has a flat over the garage. You will have to wait, Commander, to hear anything he may disclose. Today is his day off.”

  “When did he leave, Lady Ursula?”

  “Either very late last night or early this morning. That is his usual practice. I have no idea where he is. I don’t question my servants about their private lives. If the news of my son’s death is broadcast this evening, as I expect it will be, no doubt he will return early. In any case he is normally back before eleven. Incidentally, I spoke to him by house telephone yesterday evening shortly after eight o’clock and, again, at about nine fifteen. Apart from Halliwell, there is now only one other member of the staff, Mrs. Iris Minns, who comes here four days a week to do general housework. Miss Matlock can give you her address.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “This experience of your son’s in the vestry of St. Matthew’s, did he talk to you about it?”

  “No. It was not a subject with which he would expect me to sympathize. I have not since 1918 been a religious woman. I doubt if I ever was in any real sense. Mysticism, in particular, is as meaningless to me as music must be to the tone deaf. I accept, of course, that people do have these experiences. I would expect the causes to be physical and psychological; overwork, the ennui of middle age, or a need to find some meaning to existence. That to me has always been a fruitless quest.”

  “Did your son find it fruitless?”

  “Until this happened, I would have described him as a conventional Anglican. I suspect that he used the offices of his religion as a reminder of fundamental decencies, an affirmation of identity, a brief breathing space when he could think without fear of interruption. Like most upper-class Anglicans, he would have found the incarnation more understandable if God had chosen to visit His creation as an eighteenth-century English gentleman. But like most of his class, he got over that little difficulty by more or less refashioning Him in the guise of an eighteenth-century English gentleman. His experience—his alleged experience—in that church is inexplicable, and to do him justice, he didn’t attempt to explain it, at least not to me. I hope you won’t expect me to discuss it. The subject is unwelcome, and it can surely have had nothing to do with his death.”

  It was a long speech, and he could see that it had tired her. And she could not, thought Dalgliesh, be as naive as that; he was surprised that she could expect him to believe that she was. He said:

  “When a man changes the whole direction of his life and is dead—possibly murdered—within a week of that decision, it must be relevant, at least to our investigation.”

  “Oh yes, it’s relevant to that, I’ve no doubt. There will be very few privacies in this family which won’t be relevant to your investigation, Commander.”

  He saw that in the last few seconds she had been overcome with exhaustion. Her body looked diminished, almost shrivelled, in the huge chair, and the gnarled hands on the arms began very gently to shake. But he controlled his compassion as she was controlling her grief. There were questions he still needed to ask and it wouldn’t be the first time that he had taken advantage of tiredness or grief. He bent and took from his case the half-burnt diary still in its protective transparent wrapping. He said:

  “It’s been examined for fingerprints. We shall need in time to check which belong to people who had a right to handle the diary—Sir Paul, yourself, members of the household. I wanted you to confirm that it is in fact his. It would be helpful if you could do that without unwrapping it.”

  She took the package and it lay for a moment in her lap while she stared down at it. He had a sense that she was unwilling to meet his eyes. She sat with extraordinary stillness, then she said:

  “Yes, this is his. But it’s unimportant surely. A mere record of engagements. He wasn’t a diarist.”

  “It’s odd, in that case, that he should wish to burn it—if he did burn it. And there’s another oddity; the top half of the last page has been torn away. It’s the page setting out last year’s calendar and the calendar for 1986. Can you recall what else, if anything, was on that page, Lady Ursula?”

  “I can’t remember that I ever saw that page.”

  “Can you recall when and where you last saw the diary?”

  “I’m afraid that’s the kind of detail it’s impossible for me to remember. Is there anything else, Commander? If there is, and it isn’t urgent, perhaps it could wait until you are sure that you are, in fact, investigating murder.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “We know that already, Lady Ursula. Harry Mack was murdered.”

  She didn’t reply, and for about a minute they sat in silence, facing each other. Then she lifted her great eyes to his and he thought he detected a mixture of fleeting emotions: resolution, appeal, defiance. He said:

  “I am afraid I’ve kept you too long and tired you. There is really only one more matter. Is there anything you can tell me about the two young women who died after they had been working in this house, Theresa Nolan and Diana Travers?”

  The production of the half-burnt diary had shocked her deeply, but this question she took in her stride. She said calmly:

  “Very little, I’m afraid. I’ve no doubt you know most of it already. Theresa Nolan was a gentle, considerate nurse and a competent, but not, I think, very intelligent, young woman. She came as night nurse on the second of May, when I had a bad attack of sciatica, and left on the fourteenth of June. She had a room in this house but was on duty only at night. She went, as I expect you know, to a maternity nursing home in Hampstead. I accept that she probably became pregnant while she was working here, but I can assure you that no one in this house was responsible. Pregnancy is not an occupational hazard of nursing an eighty-two-year-old arthritic woman. I know even less of Diana Travers. She was apparently an unemployed actress who was doing domestic work while she was ‘resting’—I think that’s the euphemism they use. She came to the house in response to a card Miss Matlock had placed in a local newsagent’s window, and Miss Matlock took her on to replace a cleaning woman who had recently left.”

  “After consulting you, Lady Ursula?”

  “It was hardly a matter on which she needed to consult me and, in fact, she did not. I know, of course, why you are enquiring about both women. One or two of my friends made it their business to send me the cutting from the Paternoster Review. I’m surprised that the police should trouble themselves with what is surely no more than cheap journalistic spite. It can hardly be relevant to my son’s murder. If that is all, Commander, perhaps you would like to see my daughter-in-law now. No, don’t bother to ring. I prefer to take you down myself. And I can manage perfectly well without your help.”

  She pressed the knob in the arm of her chair and the seat slowly rose. It took her a moment to establish her balance. Then she said:

&n
bsp; “Before you meet my daughter-in-law there is something I should perhaps say. You may find her less apparently distressed than you expect. That is because she has no imagination. Had she found my son’s body she would have been disconsolate, certainly too shocked and distressed to talk to you now. But what her eyes don’t actually see she finds it difficult to imagine. I say this only in justice to both of you.”

  Dalgliesh nodded but didn’t reply. It was, he thought, the first mistake she had made. The implication of her words was obvious, but it would have been wiser of her to have left them unspoken.

  two

  He watched while she braced herself for the first step, steeling herself for the expected gripe of pain. He made no move to help her; he knew that the gesture would be as presumptuous as it was unwelcome and Kate, sensitive as always to unspoken commands, closed her notebook, then waited in watchful silence. Slowly Lady Ursula made her way to the door, steadying herself with her cane. Her hand shook on the gold knob, the veins starting out like blue cords. They followed her slowly down the carpeted corridor and into the lift. There was barely room in its elegantly curved interior for three, and Dalgliesh’s arm was against hers. Even through the tweed of his sleeve he could sense its brittleness and could feel its gentle, perpetual shaking. He was aware that she was under intense strain, and he wondered how much it would take to break her and whether it would be his job to see that she did break. As the lift ground slowly down the two floors he knew that she was as aware of him as he was of her, and that she saw him as the enemy.

  They followed her into the drawing room. This room, too, Paul Berowne would have shown him, and for a moment he had the illusion that it was the dead man, not his mother, who stood at his side. Three tall curved windows, ornately curtained, gave a view of the garden trees. They looked unreal, a one-dimensional woven tapestry in an infinite variety of green and gold. Under the elaborately enriched ceiling with its curious mixture of the classic and Gothic, the room was sparsely furnished, and the air had the melancholy, unbreathed atmosphere of a seldom-visited country house drawing room, an amalgam of pot-pourri and wax polish. Almost he expected to see a white looped cord marking off the area where tourists’ feet were forbidden to tread.