A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “He got a knife, miss. George tried to get it but he threatened him. That’s right, ain’t it, George?”

  George, white, small, weasel-like in the corner:

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And he’s got Mabelle in with him, Mabelle and the kid.”

  A woman whispered:

  “Blessed Jesus, he’s got the kid in there.”

  They had fallen back to let her through, herself and Terry. She asked:

  “What’s his name?”

  “Leroy.”

  “His other name?”

  “Price. Leroy Price.”

  The hallway was dark, the room itself, unlocked since the lock was smashed, was even darker. The harsh glare filtered through a torn piece of carpet nailed over the window. She could see dimly the stained double mattress on the floor, a folding table, two chairs, one on its side. There was a smell of vomit, of sweat, of beer overlaid with the strong oily smell of fish and chips. Against the wall cowered a woman, a child in her arms.

  She said gently:

  “It’s all right, Mr. Price. I’ll have that knife. You don’t mean to hurt them. She’s your kid. You wouldn’t want to hurt either of them. I know what it is, it’s too hot, and you’ve had enough. We all have.”

  She had seen it before on the estate as well as on the beat, that moment when the burden of frustration, hopelessness and misery suddenly became too heavy and the mind exploded into an anarchy of protest. He had indeed had too much. Too many unpaid, unpayable bills, too much worry, too many demands, too much frustration and, of course, too much drink. She had walked up to him not speaking, calmly meeting his eyes, holding out her hand for the knife. She wasn’t aware of fear, only the fear that Terry might come crashing in. There was no sound; the group at the foot of the stairs was frozen into silence, the street outside stilled in one of those strange moments of quietness which sometimes fall on even the rowdiest quarters of London. She could hear only her own quiet breathing and his harsh grating breaths. Then with a wild sob he had dropped the knife and flung himself towards her. She had held him, murmuring as she might to a child, and it was over.

  She had overplayed Terry’s part in the affair, and he had let her. But old Moll Green, never absent when there was a chance of excitement and the hope of bloodshed, had been one of those waiting, bright-eyed, at the foot of the stairs. The following Tuesday Terry had busted her for carrying hash, admittedly with small provocation, but he was behind with his self-imposed weekly quota of arrests. Moll, motivated either by an unexpected surge of female solidarity or by a revulsion against men in general and Terry in particular, had given her own version of the incident to the station sergeant. Little was subsequently said to Kate, but enough to make it plain that the truth was known, and that her reticence had done her no harm. Now she wondered briefly what had happened to that man, to Mabelle, to the child. For the first time it struck her as odd that, the incident over, her report made, she had never given any of them another thought.

  She came in, closed the door and drew the heavy linen curtains, then went to telephone Alan. They had planned to see a film the following night, but this would no longer be possible. It was pointless to make any plans until the case was finished. He took the news calmly, as he always did when she had to break a date. One of the many things she liked about him was that he never fussed.

  He said:

  “It looks then as if dinner next Thursday may not be possible either.”

  “We may be through by then, but it’s unlikely. Still, keep it free and if I have to I’ll ring and cancel.”

  “Well, good luck with the case. I hope it won’t be love’s labour’s lost.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. Berowne is the name of an attendant lord in Shakespeare. It’s an unusual and interesting name.”

  “It was an unusual and interesting death. See you next Thursday at about eight.”

  “Unless you find it necessary to cancel. Good-bye, Kate.”

  She thought that she detected a trace of irony in his voice, then decided that tiredness had made her imaginative. It was the first time he had wished her good luck with a case, but he had still asked no questions. He was, she thought, as punctiliously discreet about her job as she was herself. Or was it merely that he didn’t care? Before he put the receiver down she said quickly:

  “That attendant lord, what happened to him?”

  “He loved a woman called Rosalind, but she told him to go and nurse the sick. So he went off to jest a twelvemonth in a hospital.”

  There was hardly, she thought, much inspiration to be gained from that. She smiled as she put down the receiver. It was a pity about next Thursday’s dinner. But there would be other dinners, other evenings. He would come when she rang and asked him. He always did.

  She suspected that she had met Alan Scully just in time. Her early sexual education in the concrete underpasses of the high-rise flats and behind the bicycle sheds of her north London comprehensive school, the mixture of excitement, danger and disgust, had been a good preparation for life but a poor preparation for loving. Most of the boys had been less intelligent than she. This might not have mattered to her if they had had looks or some wit. She was amused, but also a little dismayed, to realize by the time she was eighteen that she was thinking of men as they were alleged so often to regard women, an occasional sexual or social diversion, but too unimportant to be allowed to interfere with the serious business of life: passing her A-levels, planning her career, getting away from Ellison Fairweather buildings. She found that she could enjoy sex while despising the source of her pleasure. It wasn’t, she knew, an honest basis for any relationship. And then, two years ago, she had met Alan. His flat in a narrow street behind the British Museum had been burgled, and it was she who had arrived with the fingerprint and scene-of-crime officers. He told her that he worked in a theological library in Bloomsbury and that he was an amateur collector of books of early Victorian sermons—it seemed to her an extraordinary choice—and that two of the most valuable volumes had been taken. They had never been recovered, and she sensed from the calm resignation with which he answered her questions that he had hardly expected that they would be. His flat, small, cluttered, a repository for books rather than a space for living, was unlike any place she had ever seen, as he was unlike any man. She had had to make a return visit, and they had spent about an hour chatting over coffee. He had then asked her, simply, to go with him to see a Shakespearean production at the National Theatre.

  It was less than a month after that evening that they first went to bed together and he had demolished one of her firmly held assumptions, that intellectuals weren’t interested in sex. He was both interested in and very good at it. They had settled into a comfortable, apparently mutually satisfactory, loving friendship in which each saw the other’s job, without resentment or envy, as foreign territory, its speech and mores so far removed from any possibility of comprehension that they rarely spoke of it. Kate knew that he was intrigued, not so much by her lack of religious faith as by the fact that she apparently had no intellectual curiosity about its diverse and fascinating manifestations. She sensed, too, although he never said so, that he thought that her literary education had been neglected. She could, if challenged, quote angry modern verse about unemployed youth in the inner cities and the subjection of the blacks in South Africa, but this he saw as a poor substitute for Donne, Shakespeare, Keats or Eliot. She, for her part, saw him as innocent, so deficient in the skills necessary for survival in the urban jungle that it amazed her that he should walk with such apparent indifference through its perils. Apart from the burglary, which remained mysterious, nothing untoward ever seemed to happen to him or, if it did, he failed to notice. It amused her to ask him to recommend books, and she persevered with those which, diffidently, he produced for her. At present her bedtime reading was Elizabeth Bowen. The life of her heroines, their private incomes, their charming houses in St. John’s Wood, their uniformed parlourma
ids and formidable aunts, above all the delicate sensitivity of their emotions amazed her. “Not enough washing up, that’s their trouble,” she told Allen, having in mind the author as well as her characters. But it interested her that she needed to go on reading.

  And now it was close to midnight. She was both too excited and too tired to feel much hunger, but she supposed that she ought to cook something light, perhaps an omelette, before she went to bed. But first she switched on the answerphone. And with the first sound of the familiar voice, euphoria died to be replaced by a confusion of guilt, resentment and depression. It was her grandmother’s social worker. There were three messages, at two-hour intervals, controlled professional patience gradually giving way to frustration and, finally, an irritation that was close to hostility. Her grandmother, weary of incarceration in her seventh-floor flat, had gone out to the post office to collect her pension and had come back to find that the window had been smashed and an attempt made to force the door. It was the third such incident in less than a month. Mrs. Miskin was now too apprehensive to go out. Would Kate please ring the local authority social services department as soon as she got in, or, if it was after five thirty, ring her grandmother direct. It was urgent.

  It always was, she thought wearily. And this was a ridiculously late hour at which to ring. But it couldn’t wait until morning. Her grandmother wouldn’t sleep until she had rung. Her call was answered after the first burr, and she guessed that the old lady had been sitting waiting by the telephone.

  “Oh, there you are. Fine time to ring. Nearly bloody midnight. Mrs. Mason’s been trying to get you.”

  “I know. Are you all right, Gran?”

  “Course I’m not all right. Bloody hell, I’m not. When are you coming round?”

  “I’ll try to look in some time tomorrow, but it won’t be easy. I’m in the middle of a case.”

  “Better come at three o’clock. Mrs. Mason said she’ll look in at three. She wants to see you ‘specially. Three o’clock, mind.”

  “Gran, that’s just not possible.”

  “How’m I goin’ to get my shopping, then? I’m not leaving this flat alone, I tell you that.”

  “There should be enough in the freezer for at least another four days.”

  “I don’t fancy that made-up muck. I told you before.”

  “Can’t you ask Mrs. Khan? She’s always so helpful.”

  “No I can’t. She don’t go out now, not unless her husband’s with her, not since that lot from the National Front were up this way. Besides, it’s not fair. More than enough trouble luggin’ up her own stuff. The kids have broken the bloody lift again, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Gran, is the window mended?”

  “Oh, they’ve been and mended the window.” Her grandmother’s voice suggested that this was no more than an unimportant detail. She added:

  “You gotta get me out of this place.”

  “I’m trying, Gran. You’re on the waiting list for a one-person flat in one of those blocks with a warden, sheltered housing. You know that.”

  “I don’t need any bloody warden. I ought to be with my own kith and kin. See you tomorrow then at three o’clock. Mind you come. Mrs. Mason wants to see you.”

  She put down the receiver.

  Kate thought: Oh God, I can’t cope with this again, not now, not just at the beginning of a new case.

  She told herself, with angry self-justification, that she wasn’t irresponsible, that she did what she could. She had bought her grandmother a new refrigerator topped with a small freezer and visited every Sunday to stock it with meals for the week ahead, only, more often than not, to be met with the familiar complaint:

  “I can’t eat that fancy stuff. I want to do my own shopping. I want to get out of here.”

  She had paid for a telephone to be installed and had taught her grandmother not to be afraid of it. She had liaised with the local authority and arranged for a weekly visit from a home help to clean the flat. She would willingly have cleaned it herself if her grandmother would have tolerated the interference. She would take any trouble, spend any money, to avoid taking her grandmother to live with her in Charles Shannon House. But that, she knew, was what the old lady, in alliance with her social worker, was inexorably pressing her to accept. And she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give up her freedom, Alan’s visits, the spare room where she did her painting, her privacy and peace at the end of the day for an old woman’s impedimenta, the ceaseless noise of her television, the mess, the smell of old age, of failure, the smell of Ellison Fairweather House, of childhood, of the past. And now, more than ever, it was impossible. Now, with her first case with the new squad, she needed to be free.

  She was seized with a spurt of envy and resentment against Massingham. Even if he had a dozen difficult and demanding relatives, no one would expect him to have to cope. And if she did have to take time off from the job, he would be the first to point out that, when the going got really tough, you couldn’t rely on a woman.

  eight

  In her bedroom on the second floor Barbara Berowne lay back on her bank of pillows and stared ahead at the television screen mounted on the wall opposite her uncurtained four-poster. She was waiting for the late-night movie, but had switched on the set as soon as she had got into bed, and was now tuned to the last ten minutes of a political discussion. She had turned down the sound so low that she could hear nothing, but she still gazed intently at the restless mouths as if she were lip-reading. She remembered how Paul’s mouth had tightened with disapproval when he had first seen the television set, mounted on its swivel, obtrusively over-large, spoiling the wall and dwarfing into insignificance the two Cotman watercolours of Norwich Cathedral each side of it. But he had said nothing, and she had told herself defiantly that she didn’t care. But now she could watch the late film without being uneasily aware that he was there in the next room, perhaps lying sleepless in rigid disapproval, hearing the muted screams and gunfire like the noisy manifestations of their own subtler, undeclared warfare.

  He had disliked, too, her untidiness, an unconscious protest against the impersonality, the obsessive neatness of the rest of the house. In the light of her bedside lamp she gazed untroubled over the muddle in the room, the clothes strewn where she had dropped them—the sheen of her satin dressing-gown thrown across the foot of the bed, the grey skirt splayed fan-like over a chair, her pants lying like a pale shadow on the carpet, her brassiere hanging by one strap from the dressing table. What an indecent, silly garment it looked, thus casually discarded; so precisely shaped and moulded and looking surgical, for all its lace and delicacy. But Mattie would tidy up her things in the morning, gather up her underclothes for washing, hang jackets and skirts in the wardrobe. And she would lie with the breakfast tray on her knees and watch; then get up, bath, dress and face the world, as always immaculate.

  It had been Anne Berowne’s room and Barbara had moved into it after their marriage. Paul had suggested that they might change bedrooms, but she hadn’t seen why she should sleep in a smaller, inferior room, deprived of the view of the square garden, simply because this had been Anne’s bed. First it had been Anne’s room, then it was Paul’s and hers, then it was hers alone, but always with the knowledge that he was sleeping next door. And now it was hers absolutely. She remembered the afternoon when they had first stood in the bedroom together after their marriage, his voice so formal that she had hardly recognized it. He could have been showing round a prospective purchaser.

  “You may care to choose different pictures; there are some in the small salon. Anne liked watercolours and the light here is good for them, but you don’t have to keep them.”

  She hadn’t cared about the pictures, which had seemed to her rather dull, insignificant English landscapes by painters Paul seemed to think she ought to recognize. She still didn’t care, not even enough to change them. But the bedroom had, from her first possession, taken on a different personality: softer, more luxurious, scented and femi
nine. And gradually it had become as cluttered as an indiscriminately stocked antique shop. She had gone round the house and moved up to her room the items of furniture, the oddly assorted objects which had taken her fancy, as if obsessively raping the house, leaving no space for those rejected but insidious ghosts. A Regency two-handled vase under a glass dome filled with multicoloured flowers intricately devised from shells, a gilt-bronze Tudor wood cabinet decorated with porcelain ovals of shepherds and shepherdesses, a bust of John Soane on a marble pedestal, a collection of eighteenth-century snuff boxes, taken from their showcase and now casually littering her dressing table. But there were still ghosts, living ghosts, voices on the air which no object, however desired, had power to exorcise. Propped against the scented pillows she was back in her childhood bed, a twelve-year-old lying rigid and sleepless, hands clutching the bedclothes. Snatches of endless argument half-heard over weeks and months, then only partly understood, had come together into a coherent whole, refined by her imagination and now unforgettable. First her mother’s voice:

  “I thought you’d want custody of the children. You’re their father.”

  “And leave you free of responsibility to enjoy yourself in California? Oh no, my dear, you were the one who wanted children, you take them. I suppose Frank didn’t bargain for two stepchildren? Well, he’s got them. I hope he likes them.”

  “They’re English. Their place is here.”

  “What did you tell him? That you were coming without encumbrances? A little shop-soiled, darling, but unencumbered? Their place is with their mother. Even a bitch has some maternal instincts. You take them or I fight the divorce.”

  “My God, they’re your children. Don’t you care? Don’t you love them?”

  “I might have done if you’d let me and if they’d been less like you. As it is, I’m frankly indifferent. You want freedom, so do I.”

  “All right, we’ll share. I’ll take Barbie, you have Dicco. A boy’s place is with his father.”