A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “Would you like something to drink? Wine, whisky or coffee?”

  His tone was almost studiously polite, but neither sardonic nor provocatively obsequious. Dalgliesh knew his opinion of the Metropolitan Police; he had proclaimed it often enough. But he was playing this very carefully. They were all to be on the same side, at least for the present. Dalgliesh and Kate refused his offer of a drink, and there was a small silence broken by Sarah Berowne. She said:

  “You’re here about my father’s death, of course. I don’t think there’s very much I can say to help. I haven’t seen or spoken to him for over three months.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “But you were at 62 Campden Hill Square on Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Yes, to see my grandmother. I had an hour to spare between appointments, and I wanted to try to find out what was happening, my father’s resignation, the rumour about his experience in that church. There was no one else to ask, to talk to. But she was out to tea. I didn’t wait. I left at about four thirty.”

  “Did you go into the study?”

  “The study?”

  She looked surprised, then asked:

  “I suppose you’re thinking of his diary. Grandmama told me that you’d found it half-burnt in the church. I was in the study, but I didn’t see it.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “But you knew where he kept it?”

  “Of course. In the desk drawer. We all knew that. Why do you ask?”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Just in the hope that you might have seen it. It would have been useful to know if the diary was there at four thirty. We can’t trace your father’s movements after he left the office of an estate agent in Kensington High Street at half past eleven. If you had happened to look in the drawer and seen the diary, then there is the possibility that he came back to the house unnoticed sometime during the afternoon.”

  That was only one possibility and Dalgliesh didn’t deceive himself that Garrod, for one, was ignorant of the others. Now he said:

  “We don’t even know what happened, except what Sarah has learned from her grandmother, that Sir Paul and the tramp had their throats cut and that it looks as if his razor was the weapon. We were hoping you would be able to tell us more. Are you suggesting that it was murder?”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Oh, I don’t think there can be any doubt that this was murder.” He watched as the two bodies opposite seemed visibly to stiffen, then added calmly:

  “The tramp, Harry Mack, certainly didn’t slit his own throat. His death may not be of shattering social significance, but no doubt his life had some importance, at least to him.”

  He thought: If that doesn’t provoke Garrod, then I wonder what would. But Garrod merely said:

  “If you’re asking us to provide an alibi for Harry Mack’s murder, then we were here together from six o’clock on Tuesday until nine o’clock Wednesday morning. We had supper here. I bought a mushroom flan from Marks and Spencer’s in Kensington High Street and we ate that. I could tell you what wine we drank with it, but I don’t suppose that’s relevant.”

  It was the first sign of irritation, but his voice was still mild, the gaze clear and unflustered. Sarah Berowne said:

  “But Daddy! What happened to Daddy?”

  Suddenly she sounded as frightened and helpless as a lost child. Dalgliesh said:

  “We’re treating it as a suspicious death. We can’t say much more until we get the result of the post-mortem and the forensic tests.”

  Suddenly she got up and moved over to the window, staring out over the thirty yards of dishevelled autumnal garden. Garrod slid down from the arm of the sofa and went to the drinks cupboard, then poured a couple of glasses of red wine. He took one over to her and offered it silently, but she shook her head. He moved back to the sofa and sat holding his own glass, not drinking. He said:

  “Look, Commander, this isn’t exactly a visit of condolence, is it? And although it’s reassuring to hear of your concern for Harry Mack, you’re not here because of a dead tramp. If Harry’s body had been the only one in that church vestry, it would have ranked a detective sergeant at best. I would have thought Miss Berowne had a right to know whether she’s being questioned in a murder investigation or whether you’re just curious to know why Paul Berowne should have slit his own throat. I mean, either he did or he didn’t. Criminal investigation is your job, not mine, but I should have thought that, by now, it ought to be pretty clear-cut one way or the other.”

  Dalgliesh wondered whether the dreadful pun had been intentional. Either way, Garrod saw no reason to apologize for it. Watching that still figure by the window, Dalgliesh saw Sarah Berowne give a little shudder. Then, as if by an act of will, she turned from the window and faced him. He ignored Garrod and spoke directly to her.

  “I should like to be more positive but, at the moment, that just isn’t possible. Suicide is obviously one possibility. I was hoping that you might have seen your father recently and been able to say how he seemed to you, whether he said anything that could be relevant to his death. I know this is painful for you. I’m sorry that we have to ask these questions, that we have to be here.”

  She said:

  “He did speak to me once about suicide, but not in the way you mean.”

  “Recently, Miss Berowne?”

  “Oh no, we haven’t spoken for years. Not really spoken, really talked to each other, as opposed to making sounds with our mouths. No, this was when I was home from Cambridge after my first term. One of my friends had killed himself, and my father and I talked about his death, about suicide generally. I’ve always remembered it. He said that some people thought of suicide as one of the options open to them. It wasn’t. It was the end of all options. He quoted Schopenhauer: ‘Suicide may be regarded as an experiment, a question which man puts to nature trying to force her to an answer. It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.’ Daddy said that while we live there is always the possibility, the certainty of change. The only rational time for a man to kill himself is not when life is intolerable, but when he would prefer not to live it even if it became tolerable, even pleasant.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “That sounds like the ultimate despair.”

  “Yes. I suppose that’s what he could have felt, ultimate despair.”

  Suddenly Garrod spoke. He said:

  “He could more reasonably have quoted Nietzsche. ‘The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night.’”

  Ignoring him, Dalgliesh still spoke directly to Sarah Berowne. He said:

  “So your father didn’t see you or write to you? He didn’t explain what had happened in that church, why he was giving up his job, his parliamentary seat?”

  He almost expected her to say: “What has that to do with this enquiry and what has it to do with you?” Instead she said:

  “Oh no! I don’t suppose he thought that I cared one way or the other. I only learned about it when his wife telephoned me. That was when he gave up his ministerial job. She seemed to think I might have some influence over him. It showed how little she understood either of us. If she hadn’t telephoned, I should have had to learn about his resignation from the newspapers.” Then she suddenly broke out:

  “My God! He couldn’t even get converted like an ordinary man. He had to be granted his own personal beatific vision. He couldn’t even resign his job with decent reticence.”

  Dalgliesh said mildly:

  “He seems to have acted with considerable reticence. He obviously felt that it was a private experience to be acted upon rather than discussed.”

  “Well, he could hardly splash it on the front pages of the Sunday heavies. Perhaps he realized that he’d only make himself ridiculous. Himself and the family.”

  Dalgliesh asked:

  “Would that have mattered?”

  �
�Not to me, but Grandmama would have minded—will mind now, I suppose. And his wife, of course. She thought she was marrying the next Prime Minister but one. She wouldn’t relish being tied to a religious crank. Well, she’s free of him now. And he’s free of us, all of us.”

  She was silent for a moment, then said with sudden vehemence:

  “I’m not going to pretend. Anyway, you know perfectly well that my father and I were—well, estranged. There’s no secret about it. I didn’t like his politics, I didn’t like the way he treated my mother, I didn’t like the way he treated me. I’m a Marxist, there’s no secret about that either. Your people will have me on one of their little lists somewhere. And I care about my political beliefs. I don’t believe he really did. He expected me to discuss politics as if we were chatting about a recent play we’d both seen, or a book we’d read, as if it were an intellectual diversion, something you could have what he would call a civilized argument about. He said that was one of the things he deplored about the loss of religion, it meant that people elevated politics into a religious faith and that was dangerous. Well, that’s what politics are for me, a faith.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Feeling as you do about him, his bequest to you must present you with a dilemma of conscience.”

  “Is that your tactful way of asking me if I killed my father for his money?”

  “No, Miss Berowne. It’s a not particularly tactful way of finding out what you feel about a not uncommon moral dilemma.”

  “I feel fine, just fine. There’s no dilemma as far as I’m concerned. Anything I get will be put to good use for a change. It won’t be much. Twenty thousand, isn’t it? It’s going to need more than twenty thousand pounds to change this world.”

  Suddenly she went back to the sofa, sat down, and they saw that she was crying. She said:

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This is ridiculous. It’s only shock. And tiredness. I didn’t sleep much last night. And I’ve had a busy day, things I couldn’t cancel. Why should I cancel them, anyway? There’s nothing I can do for him.”

  The phenomenon wasn’t new to him. Other people’s tears, other people’s grief were inseparable from a murder enquiry. He had learned not to show surprise or embarrassment. The response varied, of course. A cup of hot, sweet tea if there was someone around to make it, a glass of sherry if the bottle was to hand, a slug of whisky. He had never been good at the comforting hand on the shoulder, and here, he knew, it wouldn’t be welcome. He felt Kate stiffen at his side as if to make an instinctive move towards the girl. Then she looked at Garrod, but Garrod didn’t move. They waited silently. The sobbing was quickly checked and Sarah Berowne again raised her face to them. She said:

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please don’t mind me. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Garrod said:

  “I don’t think there’s anything else we can usefully tell you, but if there is, perhaps it could wait until another time. Miss Berowne is upset.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “I can see that. If she wants us to go, of course we shall.”

  She looked up and said to Garrod:

  “You go. I’m all right. You’ve said what you came to say. You were here with me on Tuesday night, all night. We were together. And there’s nothing you can say about my father. You never knew him. So why don’t you go?”

  Dalgliesh was surprised by the sudden venom in her voice. Garrod could have hardly welcomed this curt dismissal, but he was too controlled and too astute to protest. He looked at her with what seemed detached interest rather than resentment and said:

  “If you need me, just ring.”

  Dalgliesh waited until he was at the door, then said quietly:

  “One moment. Diana Travers and Theresa Nolan. What do you know about them?”

  Garrod was motionless for a second, then swung slowly round. He said:

  “Only that they’re both dead. I do occasionally see the Paternoster Review.”

  “The recent article about Sir Paul in the Review was partly based on a scurrilous communication sent to him and to a number of papers. This communication.”

  He took it from his briefcase and handed it to Garrod. There was a silence while he read it. Then, his face devoid of expression, he handed it to Sarah Berowne. He said:

  “You aren’t, surely, suggesting that Berowne cut his throat because someone sent him an unkind letter? Wouldn’t that be a little over-sensitive for a politician? And he was a barrister. If he thought it was actionable, he had his remedy.”

  “I’m not suggesting that it provides a motive for suicide. I was wondering whether you or Miss Berowne had any idea who could have sent it?”

  The girl handed it back, merely shaking her head. But Dalgliesh saw that its production had been unwelcome. She was neither a good actress nor a good liar. Garrod said:

  “I admit that I took it for granted that the child Theresa Nolan aborted was Berowne’s, but I didn’t feel called upon to do anything about it. If I had, I’d have done something more effective than this farrago of unsubstantiated spite. I only met the girl once, at an unfortunate dinner party at Campden Hill Square. Lady Ursula was convalescent; it was her first night down. The poor girl certainly didn’t look happy. But then, Lady Ursula was brought up to know what room people are entitled to dine in and, of course, their proper placement at table. Nurse Nolan, poor child, was eating out of her station and was made to feel it.”

  Sarah Berowne said softly:

  “Not intentionally.”

  “Oh, I didn’t say it was intentional. Women like your grandmother are offensive merely by existing. Intention doesn’t come into it.”

  Then, without touching Sarah Berowne, without even a glance at her, he said his good-byes to Kate and Dalgliesh as formally as if they had been fellow guests at a dinner party, and the door closed behind him. The girl tried to control herself, then broke into open sobbing. Kate got up, went through the opposite door and, after what seemed to Dalgliesh an unnecessarily long time, came back with a glass of water, then sat down beside Sarah Berowne and silently offered it. The girl drank it thirstily, then said:

  “Thank you. This is silly. It’s just that I can’t believe he’s dead, that I’ll never see him again. I suppose I always thought that sometime, somehow, things would be right between us. I suppose I thought that there was plenty of time. All the time in the world. They’re all gone now, Mummy, Daddy, Uncle Hugo. Oh, God, I feel so hopeless.”

  There were things that he would like to have asked, but now wasn’t the time. They waited until she was calm again and then asked if she was sure she was all right before they left. The question struck him as insincere, a formal hypocrisy. She was as right as she would ever be when they were there.

  As they drove away, Kate was for a time silent, then she said:

  “It’s an all-electric kitchen, sir. There’s one wrapped packet of four boxes of Bryant and May matches in the cupboard, that’s all. But that doesn’t prove anything. They could have bought a single box and chucked it away afterwards.”

  Dalgliesh thought: She was fetching the glass of water showing genuine sympathy, genuine concern. But her mind was still on the evidence. And some of my officers think women are more sentimental than men. He said:

  “We shan’t get much joy trying to trace a single box of matches. A safety match is the easiest thing to lay hands on, the most difficult to identify.”

  “There’s another thing, though, sir. I looked in the waste bin. I found the cardboard packet from the Marks and Spencer mushroom flan. They ate it all right, but it was two days past its last marked date of sale on Tuesday. He couldn’t have bought it then. Since when have Marks and Spencer sold stale food? I wasn’t sure whether you’d want the package or not.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “We haven’t yet a right to take anything out of that flat. It’s too early. You could argue that it’s a clue in their favour. If they’d planned this crime I suspect Garrod would have bought th
e food on Tuesday morning and have made sure that the girl at the desk remembered him. And there’s another thing, they’ve produced an alibi for the whole night. That suggests that they may not know the relevant time.”

  “But isn’t Garrod too clever to fall into that trap?”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t produce an alibi neatly timed for eight o’clock, but the somewhat over-generous one he has produced to cover every hour from six to nine the next morning does suggest that he’s playing safe.”

  And, like the other alibis, it wouldn’t be an easy one to break. They had briefed themselves before this visit as they did before every interview. They knew that Garrod lived alone in a single-bedroom mansion flat in Bloomsbury, a large, anonymous block, without a porter. If he claimed to have spent the night elsewhere it was difficult to see who could prove otherwise. Like everyone else concerned with the case whom they had interviewed to date, Sarah Berowne and her lover had produced an alibi. The police might not consider it a particularly convincing one, but Dalgliesh had too high an opinion of Garrod’s intelligence to suppose that it could be easily broken and certainly not by a date stamp on the carton of a mushroom flan.

  Back at the Yard, Dalgliesh had hardly entered his office before Massingham came in. He prided himself on his ability to control his excitement and his voice was carefully nonchalant.

  “Harrow Road have just been on the phone, sir. There’s an interesting development. A couple walked into the station ten minutes ago, a twenty-one-year-old and his girl. They say they were on the towpath on Tuesday evening, courting apparently. They passed through the turnstile by St. Matthew’s just before seven. There was a black Rover parked outside the south door.”