A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “Did they get the number?”

  “No such luck. They can’t even be sure of the make. But they are definite about the time. The girl was expected home by seven thirty and they looked at their watches just before leaving the towpath. And the boy, Melvin Johns, thinks that it could have been an A registration. Harrow Road think he’s telling the truth. The poor kid seems petrified. He’s certainly not a nut case looking for publicity. They’ve asked the couple to wait until I get over.” He added:

  “That parking lot by the church could be useful for anyone who knew it. But the local people obviously prefer to park their cars where they can keep an eye on them. And it isn’t as if the area has a theatre, fashionable restaurants. For my money, there’s only one black Rover one might expect to see parked outside that church.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “That’s premature, John. It was getting dark, they were in a hurry. They can’t even be sure of the make.”

  “You’re depressing me, sir, I’d better get over there. It’ll be just my luck to discover it was the local undertaker’s hearse!”

  seven

  She knew that Ivor would come back that night. He wouldn’t telephone first, partly out of excessive caution, partly because he always expected her to be there waiting when she knew he was likely to arrive. For the first time since they had become lovers she found herself dreading his signal, the one long ring of the entry phone followed by the three short. Why couldn’t he telephone, she thought resentfully, let her know when to expect him. She tried to settle to work on her newest project, the montage of two black-and-white photographs taken last winter in Richmond Park of the naked boughs of huge oak trees under a sky of tumbling clouds, and which she now planned to mount, one reversed under the other, so that the tangled boughs looked like roots reflected in water. But it seemed to her as she shifted the prints with increasing dissatisfaction that the device was meaningless, a cheap derivative effect, that this, like all her work, was symbolic of her life, thin, insubstantial, second-hand, pilfered from other people’s experience, other people’s ideas. Even the London pictures, cleverly composed, were without conviction, stereotypes seen through Ivor’s eyes, not her own. She thought: I must learn to be my own person, however late, however much it hurts, I have to do it. And it seemed to her strange that it should have taken her father’s death to show her what she was.

  At eight o’clock she was aware of hunger and cooked herself scrambled eggs, stirring them carefully over a low heat, taking as much trouble as if Ivor had been there to share them. If he did arrive while she was eating, he could cook his own. She washed up and he still hadn’t arrived. Walking out to the balcony, she gazed over the garden to the darkening bulk of the opposite terrace, whose windows were beginning to light up like signals from space. Those unknown people would be able to see her window, too, the huge expanse of lighted glass. Would the police call on them, ask them whether they had seen a light here on Tuesday night? Had Ivor, for all his cleverness, thought of that?

  Gazing out over the darkness, she made herself think of her father. She could recall the precise moment at which things had changed between them. They had been living then in the Chelsea house, just her parents, herself and Mattie. It had been seven o’clock on a misty August morning and she had been alone in the dining room, pouring her first cup of coffee, when the call came. She answered the telephone from the hall and had been given the news just as her father came down the stairs. He had seen her face, stopped, his hand on the banister, and she had looked up at him.

  “It’s Uncle Hugo’s colonel. He wanted to ring himself. Daddy, Hugo’s dead.” And then their eyes had met, had for a moment held, and she had seen it clearly: the mixture of exultation and wild hope, the knowledge that now he could have Barbara. It had lasted only a second. Time had moved on. And then he had taken the receiver from her and, without speaking, she had walked back into the dining room, through the French windows and into the enclosing greenness of the garden, shaking with the horror of it.

  Nothing afterwards could ever be right between them. Everything that followed, the car accident, her mother’s death, his marriage to Barbara less than five months later, had seemed only the inevitable consequence of that moment of realization, not willed by him, not even connived at, but accepted as inescapable. And even before the marriage the enormity of that mutual knowledge made it impossible for them to meet each other’s eyes. He was ashamed that she knew. She was ashamed of knowing. And it seemed to her that when they moved into Hugo’s house, the house which from their first moment of possession had seemed to resent and reject them, she carried her knowledge like a secret infection, that if Halliwell, Mattie, her grandmother knew, they had caught the knowledge from her.

  At Campden Hill Square she and her father had been like fellow guests at a hotel who had met by chance, aware of a shared and shameful history, creeping down the passages in case the other should suddenly appear, planning to take meals at different times, harassed by the knowledge of the other’s presence, the footstep in the hall, the key in the door. Ivor had been her escape and her revenge. She had been desperate for a cause, for an excuse to distance herself from her family, for love; but most of all for revenge. Ivor, whom she had met when he had commissioned a series of photographs, had provided them all. Before her father’s marriage to Barbara she had moved out, borrowing against her modest legacy from her mother’s will to put down a deposit on the Cromwell Road flat. She had tried by embracing with passion everything he most disliked or despised to free herself of her father. But now he was gone and she would never be free of him, never again.

  One of the dining chairs was still pulled out from the table. Here, only yesterday, her grandmother had painfully seated herself and had told her the news in brutal monosyllables, the taxi meter ticking away outside. She had said:

  “No one expects you to show much grief, but try, when the police arrive, as they will, to behave with reasonable discretion. If you have any influence over him, persuade your lover to do the same. And now perhaps you could help me with the lift door.”

  She had always been a little afraid of her grandmother, knowing from childhood that she was a disappointment, that she should have been a son. And she had none of the qualities her grandmother admired: beauty, intelligence, wit, not even courage. There was no comfort for her in that cluttered top-floor sitting room at Campden Hill Square, where the old lady had sat since Hugo’s death like some archaic prophetess awaiting the inevitable doom. It was her father who had always come first with her, in her childhood and afterwards. It was her father who had been the more supportive when she had left Cambridge at the end of her first year and had gone to a London polytechnic to study photography. How much had she really cared about her mother’s anguish when the infatuation with Barbara became obvious? Wasn’t it just that she had hated the threat to her comfortable, ordered, conventional life, resented the fact that, entranced, her father no longer seemed even to notice her? Perhaps, she thought, the belated acknowledgement of that old jealousy was one small step towards becoming her own person.

  It was after eleven before Ivor arrived, and she was very tired. He made no excuses and wasted no time on preliminaries. Throwing himself down on the sofa, he said:

  “It wasn’t very clever, was it? The idea of my being here was to have a witness. You let yourself be left alone with probably the most dangerous detective of the Yard and a female sidekick brought along to reassure you that he wasn’t going to stop behaving like a gentleman.”

  She said:

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t reveal the Boy Scout password. And they’re human, I suppose. Inspector Miskin was rather kind.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The girl’s a fascist.”

  “Ivor, how can you say that? How can you know?”

  “I make it my business to know. I suppose she held your hand, made you a nice cup of tea.”

  “She fetched me a drink of water.”

  “Which gave her an
excuse to ferret around in the kitchen without the trouble of getting a search warrant.”

  She cried:

  “It wasn’t like that! She wasn’t like that!”

  “You haven’t an idea what any of the police are like. The trouble with you middle-class liberals is that you’re conditioned to see them as allies. You never accept the truth about them. You can’t. To you they’re always the avuncular Sergeant Dixon tugging his forelock and telling the kids the time. It’s what you’re brought up on. ‘If you’re ever in difficulty, darling, if a nasty man approaches you and wiggles his johnny at you, always find a policeman.’ Look, Dalgliesh knows your politics, he knows about the legacy, he knows you’ve got a lover who’s a committed Marxist and who might like to get his hands on the cash for the best or worst of reasons. So he’s got a motive and a suspect, a very satisfactory suspect from his point of view, just what the Establishment are hoping for. Then he can get down to the business of fabricating the evidence.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Sarah, there are precedents. You can’t have lived for over twenty years with your eyes shut. Your grandmother prefers to believe that her son wasn’t a murderer or a suicide. Fair enough. She may even persuade the police to play along with her fantasy. She’s nearly in her dotage, but these old women still have extraordinary influence. But she’s not making me the sacrificial victim to Berowne family pride. There’s only one way to treat the police. Tell them nothing, nothing. Let the bastards find out the hard way. Make them do some work for their index-linked pensions.”

  She said:

  “I suppose if it really comes to it, you’ll let me tell them where I was Tuesday night?”

  “If it comes to what? What are you talking about?”

  “If they actually arrest me.”

  “For cutting your father’s throat? Is it likely? Come to think of it, a woman could have done it. Given a razor, it wouldn’t need much strength, only immense nerve. But it would have to be a woman he trusted, one who could get close to him. That could explain why there wasn’t a struggle.”

  She said:

  “How do you know that there wasn’t a struggle, Ivor?”

  “If there had been, the press and the police would have said so. It would have been one of the strongest indications that it wasn’t suicide. You must have read the sort of thing they print: ‘Sir Paul put up a desperate struggle for life. There were considerable signs of disorder in the room.’ Your father killed himself, but that doesn’t mean that the police won’t use his death to make nuisances of themselves.”

  She said:

  “Suppose I decide to tell?”

  “Tell what? Give them the code names of eleven people whose addresses, whose real names you don’t even know? Give them the address of a suburban terraced house where they’ll find nothing incriminating? The moment a police officer sets foot in the safe house the cell is disbanded, re-formed, re-housed. We’re not fools. There is a procedure for treachery.”

  “What procedure? Throwing me in the Thames? Slitting my throat?”

  She saw the surprise in his eyes. Was it her imagination that it was tinged with respect? But he only said:

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He unwound himself from the sofa and made for the door. But there was something she needed to ask. Once she would have been afraid. She was still a little afraid, but perhaps it was time to take a small step towards courage. She said:

  “Ivor, where were you on Tuesday night? You’ve never been late for a cell meeting before, you’ve always been there before the rest of us. But it was after ten past nine before you arrived.”

  “I was with Cora at the bookshop and there was a hold-up on the tube. I explained at the time. I wasn’t at St. Matthew’s Church cutting your father’s throat, if that’s what you’re implying. And until the police are forced to accept that he killed himself, we’d better not meet. If it’s necessary, I’ll be in touch in the usual way.”

  “And the police? Suppose they come back?”

  “They’ll come back. Stick to the alibi and don’t try to be clever. Don’t embroider. We were here together from six o’clock all night. We ate a mushroom flan, we drank a bottle of Riesling. All you have to do is to remember what we did on Sunday night and transpose it to Tuesday. Don’t think you’re doing me any great favour, it’s yourself you need to protect.”

  And without touching her he was gone. So that, she thought wearily, was how love ended, with the slam of a grille door, the grind of the lift bearing him slowly downwards out of her life.

  BOOK FOUR

  Devices and Desires

  one

  The Black Swan, despite its name, didn’t derive from a riverside pub but from an elegant two-storey villa built at the turn of the century by a prosperous Kensington painter seeking a weekend retreat with country quiet and a river view. After his death it had suffered the usual vicissitudes of a private residence too damp and inconveniently situated to be suitable as a permanent home and too large for a weekend cottage. It had been a restaurant of sorts for twenty years under its original name, but hadn’t flourished until Jean Paul Higgins took it over in 1980, renamed it, built on a new dining room with wide windows overlooking the river and the far water meadows, employed a French chef, Italian waiters, and an English doorman, and set out to win his first modest mention in the Good Food Guide. Higgins’s mother had been a Frenchwoman and he had obviously decided that, as a restaurateur, it was that half of his parentage he had better emphasize. His staff and customers called him Monsieur Jean Paul, and it was only his bank manager who, to his chagrin, insisted on greeting him with cheerful exuberance as Mr. Higgins. He and his bank manager were on excellent terms and for the best of reasons: Mr. Higgins was doing very well. In the summer it was necessary to book a table for luncheon or dinner at least three days in advance. In autumn and winter the place was less busy and the luncheon menu offered only three main dishes, but the standard of cooking and service never varied. The Black Swan was close enough to London to attract a number of city regulars willing to drive twenty-odd miles for the Black Swan’s peculiar advantages: an attractive ambience, tables spaced at a reasonable distance, a low noise level, no piped music, unostentatious service, discretion and excellent food.

  Monsieur Jean Paul was small and dark with melancholy eyes and a thin moustache which made him look like a stage Frenchman, an impression strengthened when he spoke. He himself greeted Dalgliesh and Kate at the door with unflurried courtesy as if there were nothing he had been looking forward to more than a visit from the police. But Dalgliesh noticed that despite the early hour and the quietness of the house, they were shown into his private office at the rear of the building with the minimum of delay. Higgins was of the school which believes, not without reason, that even when the police come visiting in plainclothes and don’t actually kick down the door, they are always unmistakably the police. Dalgliesh didn’t miss his quick glance of appraisal at Kate Miskin, the quickly suppressed look of surprise changing to modified approval. She was wearing slacks in fawn gabardine with a well-cut, unobtrusive checked jacket over a rollneck cashmere jumper and with her hair bound back in a short, thick plait. Dalgliesh wondered what Higgins expected a plainclothes policewoman to look like, an over-made-up harpy in black satin and a trench coat?

  He offered refreshment, at first carefully ambiguous about the kind, and then more specific. Dalgliesh and Kate accepted coffee. It came quickly, served by a young waiter in a short white jacket, and it was excellent. When Dalgliesh had swallowed his first sip, Higgins gave a small sigh of relief as if his guest, now irrevocably compromised, had lost some of his power.

  Dalgliesh said:

  “As I expect you know, we are investigating the death of Sir Paul Berowne. You may have information which can help fill in some of the background.”

  Jean Paul spread his palms and launched into his voluble Frenchman act. But the melancholy eyes were wary
.

  “The death of Sir Paul, so terrible, so tragic. I ask myself what the world is coming to when such violence is possible. But how can I help the Commander? He was murdered in London, not here, thank God. If it was murder. There’s a rumour that, maybe, Sir Paul himself … But that, too, would be terrible, more terrible for his wife than murder, perhaps.”

  “He came here regularly?”

  “From time to time, not regularly. He was a busy man, of course.”

  “But Lady Berowne was here more often, usually with her cousin, I understand?”

  “A delightful lady. She adorned my dining room. But, of course, one does not always notice who is dining with whom. We concentrate on the food and the service. We are not gossip writers, you understand.”

  “But presumably you can remember whether she was dining with her cousin, Stephen Lampart, on the Tuesday of this week, just three days ago?”

  “On the seventeenth. That was so. They were seated at twenty minutes to nine. It is a little foible of mine, to note the time the customer is actually seated. The booking was for eight forty-five, but they were a little early. Monsieur may wish to inspect the book.”

  He opened his desk drawer and produced it. Obviously, thought Dalgliesh, he had been expecting a visit from the police and had placed the evidence to hand. The time against the name Lampart was written clearly and there was no sign that the figures had been altered.

  He asked:

  “When was the table booked?”

  “That morning. At ten thirty, I believe. I cannot, I regret, be more precise.”

  “Then he was fortunate to get it.”

  “We can always find a table for an old and valued customer, but it is, of course, easier if a booking is made. The notice was sufficient.”