A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “Come in, come in. We know what you’re here for, dear boy. It’s about my little piece in the Review. I’m glad you haven’t felt it necessary to come in pairs. We’re quite prepared to help the police with their enquiries, as you so tactfully put it when you’ve caught your man and he’s having his arms twisted in a little back room, but I draw the line at giving afternoon tea to some oversized minion who wears out the springs in my sofa and eats my cucumber sandwiches with one hand while taking down everything I say with the other.”

  “Be serious, Conrad. We’re talking about murder.”

  “Are we? There was a rumour—just a rumour, of course—that Paul Berowne could have made his own quietus. I’m glad it isn’t true. Murder is more interesting and far less depressing. It’s inconsiderate of one’s friends to commit suicide; too like setting a good example. But all that can wait. Tea first.”

  He called up the stairs:

  “Nellie, darling, Adam is here.”

  Looking at him as he led the way into the drawing room, Dalgliesh thought that he never seemed a day older than when they had first met. He gave the impression of plumpness, perhaps because of his almost round face and the chubbiness of his marsupial cheeks. But he was firm-fleshed, active, moving with the nimble grace of a dancer. His eyes were small and upward-slanting. When he was amused he would narrow them into twin creases of flesh. The most remarkable thing about his face was the restless mobility of his small, delicately formed mouth, which he used as a moist focus of emotion. He would press it in disapproval, turn it down like a child’s in disappointment or disgust, lengthen and curve it when he smiled. It seemed never the same shape. Even in repose he would munch with it, as if relishing the taste of his tongue.

  Nellie Ackroyd, in contrast, was slim where he was plumpish, fair where he was dark, and topped him by three inches. She wore her long blond hair twined in a plait round her head in the fashion of the twenties. Her tweed skirts were well cut but longer than had been fashionable for half a century and topped invariably by a loose cardigan. Her shoes were pointed and laced. Dalgliesh remembered one of his father’s Sunday school teachers who could have been her double. As she came into the room, he was for a moment back in that village church hall, sitting in a circle with the other children on the low wooden chairs and waiting for Miss Mainwaring to hand out that Sunday’s stamp, a coloured biblical picture which he would lick and stick with infinite care on that week’s space on his card. He had liked Miss Mainwaring—dead now for over twenty years, of cancer, and buried in that distant Norfolk churchyard—and he liked Nellie Ackroyd.

  The Ackroyds’ marriage had astounded their friends and been a source of prurient speculation to their few enemies. But whenever he was with them, Dalgliesh never doubted that they were genuinely happy together and he marvelled anew at the infinite variety of marriage, that relationship at once so private and public, so hedged with convention and yet so anarchical. In his private life Ackroyd was reputed to be one of the kindest men in London. His victims pointed out that he could afford to be: one issue of the Paternoster Review commonly contained sufficient spleen to satisfy a normal life span. The reviews of new books and plays were always clever and entertaining, sometimes perceptive and occasionally cruel, and were a form of fortnightly entertainment cherished by all except the victims. Even when the Times Literary Supplement changed its practice, the Paternoster continued to preserve the anonymity of its reviewers. Ackroyd took the view that no reviewer, not even the most scrupulous or disinterested, could be completely honest if his copy were signed, and he preserved the confidence of his contributors with all the high-minded zeal of an editor who knows that he is hardly likely to be presented with a court injunction. Dalgliesh suspected that the most vicious reviews were written by Ackroyd himself, abetted by his wife, and indulged a private picture of Conrad and Nellie sitting up in their separate beds and calling their happier inspirations through the open communicating door.

  Whenever he was with them he was struck anew by the self-sufficiency amounting to conspiracy of their connubial felicity. If ever there were a marriage of convenience, this was it. She was a superb cook. He loved food. She liked nursing, and he suffered each winter from a mild recurrent bronchitis and from attacks of sinus headache which exacerbated his mild hypochondria and which kept her happily busy with chest rubs and inhalations. Dalgliesh, although the least prurient of men about the sex lives of his friends, couldn’t resist wondering occasionally whether the marriage had ever been consummated. On the whole he thought that it had. Ackroyd was a stickler for legality, and on one honeymoon night at least he must have closed his eyes and thought of England. After which necessary sacrifice to legal and theological requirements, they had both settled down to the more important aspects of matrimony, the decoration of their house and the state of Conrad’s bronchial tubes.

  Dalgliesh hadn’t come empty-handed. His hostess was a passionate collector of 1920s and 1930s girls’ school stories, her series of early Angela Brazil being particularly notable. The shelves of her sitting room were witness to her addiction for this potent nostalgia: stories in which a succession of sloping-bosomed heroines, bloused and booted, called Dorothy or Madge, Marjorie or Elspeth, whacked hockey sticks with vigour, exposed the cheat in the upper fourth or were instrumental in unmasking German spies. Dalgliesh had found his first edition some months earlier in a second-hand bookshop in Marylebone. The fact that he couldn’t recall precisely when or where reminded him how long it had been since he had last seen the Ackroyds. He suspected that they were most often visited by people who, like himself, wanted something, usually information. Dalgliesh reflected again on the oddness of human relationships in which people could describe themselves as friends who were content not to see each other for years, yet when they did meet could resume their intimacy as if there had been no interval of neglect. But their mutual liking was genuine enough. Dalgliesh might call only when there was something he needed. But he was never less than glad to sit in Nellie Ackroyd’s elegant sitting room and gaze out through the Edwardian conservatory to the shimmer of the canal. Resting his eyes on it now, he found it difficult to believe that this light-dappled water seen through hanging baskets of variegated ivy and pink geraniums was the same which, a couple of miles upstream, slid like a liquid menace through the dark tunnels and flowed sluggishly past the south door of St. Matthew’s Church.

  He handed over his offering with the customary chaste kiss which seemed to have become a social convention even among comparatively recent acquaintances.

  “For you,” he said. “I think it’s called Dulcy on the Game.”

  Nellie Ackroyd unwrapped it with a little squeak of pleasure.

  “Don’t be naughty, Adam. Dulcy Plays the Game. How lovely! And it’s in perfect condition. Where did you find it?”

  “In Church Street, I think. I’m glad you haven’t got it already.”

  “I’ve been looking for it for years. This completes my pre-1930 Brazils. Conrad, darling, look what Adam has brought.”

  “Very civil of you, dear boy. Ah, here comes tea.”

  It was brought in by an elderly maid and set down in front of Nellie Ackroyd with almost ritual care. The tea was substantial. Thin crustless bread and butter, a plate of cucumber sandwiches, homemade scones with cream and jam, a fruitcake. It reminded him of childhood rectory teas, of visiting clergy and parish workers balancing their wide-brimmed cups in his mother’s shabby but comfortable drawing room, of himself, carefully schooled, handing round plates. It was odd, he thought, that the sight of a coloured plate of thinly cut bread and butter could still evoke a momentary but sharp pain of grief and nostalgia. Watching Nellie as she carefully aligned the handles, he guessed that all their life was governed by small diurnal rituals: early-morning tea, the cocoa or milk last thing at night, beds carefully turned down, nightdress and pyjamas laid out. And now it was five fifteen, the autumn day would soon be darkening into evening and this small, very English tea ceremony was des
igned to propitiate the afternoon furies. Order, routine, habit, imposed on a disorderly world. He wasn’t sure that he would like to live with it, but as a visitor he found it soothing and he didn’t despise it. He had, after all, his own contrivances for keeping reality at bay. He said:

  “This piece in the Review. I hope you’re not thinking of turning the paper into a new gossip magazine.”

  “Not at all, dear boy. But people like an occasional titbit. I’m thinking of including you in our new column, ‘What They Find to Talk About.’ Incongruous people seen dining together. Adam Dalgliesh, poet-detective, with Cordelia Gray at Mon Plaisir, for example.”

  “Your readers must lead very dull lives if they can find vicarious excitement in a young woman and myself virtuously eating duck à l’orange.”

  “A beautiful young woman dining with a man over twenty years her senior is always interesting to our readers. It gives them hope. And you’re looking very well, Adam. The new adventure obviously suits you. All right, I meant the new job, of course. Aren’t you in charge of the sensitive crime squad?”

  “It doesn’t exist.”

  “No, that’s my name for it. The Met probably call it C3A or something equally boring. But we know about it. If the Prime Minister and the leader of the Social Democrats imbibe arsenic while secretly dining together to plan a coalition and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and His Grace of Canterbury are seen tiptoeing mysteriously from the scene, we don’t want the local CID charging in to dirty the carpets with their size twelves. Isn’t that rather the idea?”

  “A fascinating if unlikely scenario. What about the editor of a literary review found battered to death and a senior detective observed tiptoeing from the scene? Your piece about Paul Berowne, Conrad, what started it off?”

  “An anonymous communication. And you needn’t assume a look of pained disgust. We all know that your people sit in pubs paying out taxpayers’ money to the most sordid ex-cons for information received, most of it no doubt of highly dubious accuracy. I know all about snouts. And I didn’t even have to pay for this. It came through the post, free and gratis.”

  “Who else had it, do you know?”

  “It went to three of the dailies, to the gossip writers. They decided to wait and see before using it.”

  “Very prudent. You checked it.”

  “Naturally I checked it. At least, Winifred did.”

  Winifred Forsythe was nominally Ackroyd’s editorial assistant, but there were few jobs connected with the Review that she couldn’t turn her hand to, and there were those who claimed that it was Winifred’s financial nous that kept the journal afloat. She had the appearance, dress and voice of a Victorian governess, an intimidating woman who was accustomed to getting her own way. Perhaps because of some atavistic fear of female authority, few people stood up to her, and when Winifred asked a question she expected to get an answer. There were times when Dalgliesh wished that he had her on his staff.

  “She began by telephoning the Campden Hill Square house and asking for Diana Travers. A woman answered, not Lady Berowne or Lady Ursula. Either a servant or housekeeper—Winifred said she didn’t sound like a secretary, not authoritative enough, not that competent kind of voice. Anyway, Berowne never had a living-in secretary. It was probably the housekeeper. When she heard the question there was a silence and she gave a kind of gasp. Then she said: ‘Miss Travers isn’t here, she’s left.’ Winifred asked if they had an address and she said ‘No’ and put down the receiver rather sharply. It wasn’t well handled. If they wanted to conceal the fact that Travers had worked there, they should have schooled the woman more efficiently. There was no mention at the inquest that the girl had worked for Berowne, and no one else seems to have caught on to it. But it looked as if our poison pen was right in at least one of his facts. Travers was certainly known at Campden Hill Square.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “And after that?”

  “Winifred went down to the Black Swan. I have to admit her cover story wasn’t particularly convincing. She told them that we were thinking of doing an article on drowning accidents in the Thames. We could confidently expect that no one would have heard of the Paternoster Review, so that the essential incongruity of it wouldn’t be apparent. Even so, everyone was remarkably cagey. The proprietor—what’s his name, some Frenchman?—wasn’t there when Winifred called, but the people she did talk to had been well rehearsed. After all, no restaurant owner wants a death on the premises. In the midst of life we are in death, but not, one hopes, in the midst of dinner. Dropping unfortunate live lobsters into boiling water is one thing—really, how can people believe that they don’t feel it?—but a drowned customer on the premises is quite another. Not that the Thames exactly counts as his premises, but the general theory holds. Much too close to be comfortable. From the moment one of the party she was with came dripping in to say the girl was dead, he and his staff took up their defensive positions, and I must say they seemed to have carried it off very neatly.”

  Dalgliesh didn’t say that he had already studied the local police reports. He asked:

  “What happened exactly? Did Winifred find out?”

  “The girl, Diana Travers, came with a party of five friends. I gather they were mostly theatrical people, on the fringe anyway. No one well known. They got a little noisy after dinner and went out to the riverbank, where there was a certain amount of larking about. That isn’t encouraged at the Black Swan, tolerated if you’re a young viscount with the right connections no doubt, but this particular lot weren’t rich enough, aristocratic enough or famous enough for that kind of licence. The owner was wondering whether to send someone out to remonstrate when the party moved further downstream and more or less out of earshot.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Presumably they’d paid their bill by then.”

  “Oh yes, everything settled.”

  “Who paid?”

  “Now, this may surprise you: Dominic Swayne, Barbara Berowne’s brother. It was his party. He booked the table, he paid.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “The young man must have plenty of money if he could settle a bill for six at the Black Swan. Why wasn’t he a member of his sister’s birthday party?”

  “Now, that wasn’t a question Winifred thought it would be productive to ask. But it did occur to her that he might have held his own party on the same night to embarrass his sister or, of course, her escort.”

  It had also occurred to Dalgliesh. He recalled the police report. There had been six in the party: Diana Travers, Dominic Swayne, two female drama students whose names he couldn’t recall, Anthony Baldwin, a stage designer, and Liza Galloway, who was taking a course in stage management at the City College. None had a criminal record, and it would have been a matter of mild surprise if they had. None had been investigated by the Thames Valley police, and that wasn’t surprising either. There had been nothing suspicious, at least on the surface, about the Travers death. She had dived naked into the Thames and drowned with unspectacular efficiency in twelve feet of reed-infested water on a warm summer night.

  Ackroyd went on with his story:

  “Apparently the party had the good sense, from the restaurant’s point of view, not to carry a dead and weed-wrapped body straight through the french windows into the dining room. Luckily the side door which leads to the kitchen quarters was the one closest. The girls rushed in bleating that one of their party had drowned, while Baldwin, who seems to have behaved with more good sense than the rest of them, was trying to give the girl the ‘kiss of life,’ not very efficiently. The chef ran out and took over with rather more expertise and worked on her until the ambulance arrived. By then she was dead by any criteria. She probably had been from the moment they brought her out. But you know all this. Don’t tell me that you haven’t studied the inquest report.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Did Winifred ask whether Paul Berowne had been there that evening?”

  “Yes, she did, w
ith as much tact as she’s capable of. Apparently he was expected. He had some business that prevented him joining the party for dinner, but he said that he would try to get there in time for coffee. Just before ten there was a telephone call to say that he had been delayed and couldn’t make it. The interesting thing is that he was there … at least his car was.”

  “How did Winifred discover that?”

  “Well, I must say, by a great deal of cleverness and even more good luck. You know the car park at the Black Swan presumably?”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “No, I’ve never been there, it’s a pleasure to come. Tell me.”

  “Well, the proprietor dislikes the sound of cars arriving and leaving and I don’t blame him, so the park is about fifty yards from the restaurant and surrounded by a high beech hedge. They haven’t got valet parking, presumably that would be too expensive. People just have to walk the fifty yards, and if it’s raining they drop their guests at the door first. So the car park is secluded and reasonably private. Even so, the doorman does keep an eye on it from time to time, and it occurred to Winifred that Berowne would hardly leave his car there if he were actually telephoning to say that he couldn’t arrive. After all, any of the party might have taken it into their heads to leave soon afterwards and would have recognized it. So she made some enquiries further down the lane. There’s a kind of lay-by just before you reach the A3 opposite a farm cottage lying a little back from the road. She enquired there.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “On what pretext?”

  “Oh, she just said that she was a private enquiry agent trying to trace a stolen car. People will answer almost anything as long as you ask with sufficient assurance. You should know that, my dear Adam.”