A Taste for Death

by P. D. James

  “Christ, I must have looked daft. Naked, or practically. Just my pants. And the razor. He must have seen the razor. I mean, I wasn’t hiding it or anything. So why didn’t he stop me? He didn’t even look surprised. He was supposed to be terrified. He was supposed to prevent it happening. But he knew what I’d come for. He just looked at me as if he were saying ‘So it’s you. How strange that it has to be you.’ As if I had no choice. Just an instrument. Mindless. But I did have a choice. And so did he. Christ, he could have stopped me. Why didn’t he stop me?”

  She said:

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why he didn’t stop you.” And then she asked: “You said you spared the boy. What boy? Have you spoken to Darren?”

  He didn’t reply. He stood staring at her, but as if he weren’t seeing her, suddenly remote as if he’d entered a private world. Then he said in a voice so cold, so full of menace, that she could hardly recognize it:

  “That message about the Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost. That was a code, wasn’t it?”

  He smiled a grim, self-satisfied smile, and she thought: Oh God, he knows and he’s glad that he knows. Now he’s got the excuse he wants, the excuse to kill us. Her heart began thumping, a leaping animal hurling itself against her chest. But she managed to keep her voice steady.

  “Of course not. How could it be? What on earth gave you that idea?”

  “Your bookcase. I had a look at it while I was exploring the flat before you came back. Quite a little self-improver, aren’t you? All that usual boring stuff people think they ought to have when they are trying to make an impression. Or is the boyfriend trying to educate you? Some job. Anyway, you’ve got a Shakespeare.”

  She said solidly through lips that seemed to have grown dry and huge:

  “It wasn’t a code. What possible code could it be?”

  “I hope for your sake that it wasn’t. I’m not going to get myself banged up in this hole with the police outside waiting for an excuse to burst in and kill me. That would be tidy. No awkward questions. I know how they operate. No death penalty any more, so they set up their own execution squads. Well, it isn’t going to work with me. So you’d better pray that we get away from here safely before they arrive. Look, you can leave that stuff. We’re going now.”

  Oh God, she thought, he means it. It would have been better to have done nothing, not to have telephoned Alan, to have got away from the flat as soon as possible, to trust to the hope of crashing the car. And then her heart seemed for a moment literally to stop and she was seized with a dreadful coldness. There was a difference in the room, in the flat. Something had changed. And then she knew what it was. The ceaseless background roar of the traffic along the avenue, faint but continuous, had stopped, and nothing was moving down Ladbroke Road. The police were diverting the traffic. Both roads were closed. They weren’t risking a shootout. The siege had begun. And any minute he, too, would realize it.

  She thought: I can’t bear it. He’ll never be able to stand a siege. Neither of us will. He meant what he said. As soon as he realizes the police are outside, as soon as they ring, then he’ll shoot us. I’ve got to get that gun. I’ve got to get it now.

  She said:

  “Look, this is ready now. I’ve cooked it. We may as well eat it. It’ll only take a few minutes, and it’s not as if we can stop on the road.”

  There was a silence, and then he spoke again in a voice like ice.

  “I want to see that Shakespeare. Go and fetch it.”

  She forked a strand of spaghetti from the saucepan and tested it with trembling fingers. Without looking round, she said:

  “It’s about ready. Look, I’m busy. Can’t you fetch it? You know where it is.”

  “Go and fetch it, unless you want to rid yourself of this old bag.”

  “All right.”

  It had to be now.

  She willed her hands into stillness. With her left fingers she slipped undone the two buttons at the top of her shirt as if the kitchen had suddenly become too hot. The slab of liver lay on the draining board in front of her, bleeding into its wrapping. She plunged her hands into it, tearing at it, squeezing it, smearing her hands until they were thick with blood. It was the work of seconds, no more. Then with an instantaneous gesture she drew her bloody hand fiercely across her throat and swung round, wide-eyed, head thrown back, and thrust out at him the blood-clotted hands. Without even waiting for the terror in his eyes, his gasp like a sob, she flung herself at him and they crashed down together. She heard the clatter of the gun as it spun out of his hand and then a thud as it ricochetted against the door.

  He had been trained. He was as good at combat as she was and as desperate. And he was strong, far stronger than she had expected. With a sudden convulsive jerk, he was on top of her, mouth to mouth, fierce as a rapist, his harsh breath rasping down her throat. She ground her knee into his groin, heard his yelp of pain, prised his hands from her throat and slid her bloody hands over the floor, feeling for the gun. Then she almost screamed with agony as he jammed his thumbs into her eyes. With their bodies locked, both were reaching desperately for the gun. But she couldn’t see. Her eyes were dancing stars of coloured pain, and it was his right hand which found the weapon.

  The shot shattered the air like an explosion. Then there was a second explosion and the door of the flat burst open. She had a bizarre sensation of male bodies leaping through the air, then standing, arms stretched, guns rigid, their bodies towering over her like dark colossi. Someone was pulling her up. There were shouts, commands, a cry of pain. And then she saw Dalgliesh in the doorway and he was moving towards her, deliberately, gently, like a film in slow motion, speaking her name and, as it seemed, willing her to fix her eyes only on him. But she turned and looked at her grandmother. The sunken eyes were still fixed in that glazed extremity of fear. The hair still hung in its multicoloured strands. The pad of gauze was still taped to the forehead. But nothing else was there. Nothing. The bottom of her face had been shot away. And strapped to her execution chair by the linen bands which Kate herself had fixed, she couldn’t even fall. In that second in which she could bear to look, it seemed to Kate that the rigid figure fixed on her a glance of sad, reproachful astonishment. Then she was sobbing wildly, burying her head against Dalgliesh’s jacket, smearing it with her bloody hands. She could hear him whispering:

  “It’s all right, Kate. It’s all right. It’s all right.” But it wasn’t. It never had been. It never would be.

  He stood there, holding her in his strong clasp among the loud masculine voices, the commands, the sounds of scuffling. And then she pulled away from him, fighting for control, and saw over his shoulder Swayne’s blue eyes blazing, triumphant. He was handcuffed. An officer she didn’t know was dragging him out. But he looked back at her as if she were the only person in the room. Then he jerked his head at her grandmother’s body and said:

  “Well, you’re free of her now. Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  BOOK SEVEN

  Aftermath

  one

  Massingham had never been able to understand why it was traditional for police officers to attend the funeral of a murder victim. When a crime was still unsolved there might be some justification for it, although he had never himself believed in the theory that a killer was likely to expose himself to the public gaze merely for the satisfaction of watching his victim’s corpse go underground or into the fire. He had, too, an unreasonable aversion to cremation—his family had for generations preferred to know where the bones of their forebears lay—and disliked canned religious music, a liturgy denuded of grace and meaning and the hypocrisy of attempting to dignify a simple act of hygienic disposal with a spurious significance.

  Mrs. Miskin’s funeral enabled him to indulge all these prejudices. He was further disgusted when it came to the ritual of examining the wreaths, a pathetically small line of floral contrivances set out along the crematorium wall, to find that a particularly florid example was from the squad. He w
ondered who had been given the job of buying it and whether the somewhat fulsome message of sympathy was directed at Mrs. Miskin, who wouldn’t see it, or Kate, who wouldn’t want it. But at least the affair had been brief and, by luck, had coincided with the extravagant vulgarity of a pop star’s funeral in the neighbouring chapel, so that public and press interest in their more subdued entertainment had been mercifully small.

  They were to go back to the Lansdowne Road flat. Waiting for Dalgliesh in the car, he only hoped that Kate had provided an adequate amount of refreshment; he badly needed a drink. The experience, too, seemed to have soured his chief’s temper. On the drive south into London he was more than usually uncommunicative. Massingham said:

  “Did you read that article by Father Barnes in one of the Sunday heavies, sir? Apparently he’s claiming that some kind of miracle happened at St. Matthew’s, that Paul Berowne had stigmata on his wrists after his first night in that vestry.”

  Dalgliesh’s eyes were fixed on the road ahead.

  “I read it.”

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  “Enough people will want it to be to fill the church for the foreseeable future. They should be able to afford a new carpet for the Little Vestry.”

  Massingham said:

  “I wonder why he did it? Father Barnes, I mean. It won’t exactly please Lady Ursula. And Berowne would have hated it, I imagine.”

  Dalgliesh said:

  “Yes, he’d have hated it. Or perhaps it would have amused him. How can I possibly know? As for why he did it, even a priest apparently isn’t immune to the temptations of becoming a hero.”

  They were driving down the Finchley Road before Massingham spoke again.

  “About Darren, sir. Apparently his mum has finally taken off. The council are applying to the juvenile court to convert the supervision order into a care order. Poor little sod, he’s fallen into the clutches of the welfare state with a vengeance.”

  Dalgliesh said, his eyes still on the road:

  “Yes I heard, the social service director found time to ring me. And it’s just as well. They think he has leukaemia.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “There’s an excellent chance of a cure. They’ve got it early. They admitted him to Great Ormond Street yesterday.”

  Massingham smiled. Dalgliesh glanced at him.

  “What’s amusing you, John?”

  “Nothing, sir. I was thinking about Kate. She’ll probably ask me if I seriously suppose that God would kill off Berowne and Harry to get young Darren cured of his leukaemia. It was Swayne, after all, who first pointed out that the kid was sick.”

  It had been a mistake. His chief’s voice was cold:

  “It would argue a certain extravagant use of human resources, wouldn’t you say? Watch your speed, John, you’re over the limit.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  He eased his foot from the accelerator and drove on in silence.

  two

  An hour later, balancing a plate of cucumber sandwiches on his knee, Dalgliesh thought that all the funeral teas he had attended had been curiously alike in their mixture of relief, embarrassment and unreality. But this one evoked a stronger and more personal memory. He had been thirteen at the time and had returned with his parents to a Norfolk farmhouse after his father had conducted the funeral service of a local tenant farmer. Then, watching the young widow in new black clothes which she couldn’t afford passing round the home-made sausage rolls and sandwiches, pressing on him the fruit cake which she knew was his favourite, he had felt for the first time an adult and almost overwhelming sense of the sadness at the heart of life and had marvelled at the grace with which the poor and the humble could meet it. He had never thought of humility in connection with Kate Miskin, and she had nothing in common with that country widow and her desolate and uncertain future. But when he saw the food brought in, the sandwiches made before she left for the crematorium, then covered with foil to keep them fresh, the fruit cake, he saw that it was almost exactly the same food, and it evoked the same surge of pity. It had, he guessed, been difficult for her to decide what should suitably be offered, alcohol or tea. She had decided on tea and she was right; as far as he was concerned, it was tea they needed.

  It was a small and curiously assorted party. A Pakistani who had been her grandmother’s neighbour and his very beautiful wife, both of them more at ease at this funeral than he guessed they might have been at a festivity, sat together in gentle dignity. Alan Scully helped hand round the teacups with a vague self-effacement. Dalgliesh wondered whether he was anxious not to give the impression that he had a right to treat the flat as his own, then decided that this interpretation was over-subtle. Here, surely, was a man supremely unworried about what other people might think. Watching Scully handing round plates with the air of a man unsure what exactly he was holding, or what he was expected to do with it, Dalgliesh recalled that surprising telephone conversation, the persistence with which Scully had ensured that he spoke only to Dalgliesh himself, the clarity of the message, the extraordinary calmness of his voice and, not least, those perceptive last words.

  “And there’s another thing. There was a pause after I lifted the receiver before she spoke, and then she spoke very fast. I think someone else actually dialled the number and then handed over the receiver. I’ve given it some thought, and there’s only one interpretation which fits all the facts. She’s under some kind of duress.”

  Watching Scully’s gangling six-foot-two body, the mild eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles, the lean, rather handsome face, the long strands of fair untidy hair, he thought how unlikely a lover for Kate he seemed, if lover he was. And then he caught Scully’s glance at Kate as she was talking to Massingham, speculative, intense, for a moment vulnerable in its open longing, and thought: He’s in love with her. And he wondered whether Kate knew, and if she did, how much she cared.

  It was Alan Scully who was the first to leave, fading gently away rather than making a definite exit. When the two Khans had also said their good-byes, Kate carried the tea things into her kitchen. There was a sense of anticlimax, the usual uncomfortable hiatus at the end of a vaguely social occasion. Both men wondered if they should offer to help wash up, or whether Kate wanted them out of the way. And then, suddenly, she said that she would like to go back to the Yard with them and, indeed, there seemed no good reason why she should stay at home.

  But Dalgliesh was a little surprised when she followed him into his office and stood in front of the desk as rigid as if she had been summoned for a reprimand. He looked up and saw her face flushed and almost bloated with embarrassment; then she said gruffly:

  “Thank you for choosing me for the squad. I’ve learnt a lot.” The words came out with a harsh ungraciousness which made him realize what it had cost her to say them. He said gently:

  “One always does. That’s what so often makes it painful.”

  She nodded as if it were she dismissing him, then turned and walked stiffly to the door. Suddenly she swung round and cried:

  “I shall never know whether I wanted it to happen like that. Her death. Whether I caused it. Whether I meant it. I shall never know. You heard what Swayne called out to me. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’ He knew. You heard him. How shall I ever be sure?”

  He said what it was possible to say:

  “Of course you didn’t want it to happen. When you think about it calmly and sensibly you know that. You’re bound to feel partly responsible. We all do when we lose someone we love. It’s a natural guilt, but it isn’t rational. You did what you thought was right at the time. We can’t any of us do more. You didn’t kill your grandmother. Swayne did, his final victim.”

  But with murder there never was a final victim. No one touched by Berowne’s death would remain unchanged: himself, Massingham, Father Barnes, Darren, even that pathetic spinster, Miss Wharton. Kate knew that perfectly well. Why should she suppose that she was different? The well-worn reassuring phrases sounde
d false and glib even as he spoke them. And some things were beyond his reassurance. Berowne’s foot, hard on the accelerator at that dangerous corner; her bloodstained hands thrust out to the killer. There was action and there was consequence. But she was tough, she would cope. Unlike Berowne, she would learn to accept and carry her personal load of guilt, as he himself had learnt to carry his.

  three

  Miss Wharton’s only experience of a children’s hospital was fifty years ago when she had been admitted to her local cottage hospital to have her tonsils out. Great Ormond Street could hardly have been more different from her traumatic memories of that ordeal. It was like walking into a children’s party; the ward so full of light, of toys, of mothers and happy activity that it was difficult to believe that this was a hospital until she saw the pale faces and the thin limbs of the children. Then she told herself: But they’re ill, they’re all ill, and some of them will die. Nothing can prevent it.

  Darren was one of those in bed but sitting up, lively and occupied with a jigsaw on a tray. He said with happy self-importance:

  “You can die with what I’ve got. One of the kids told me.”

  Miss Wharton almost cried out her protest.

  “Oh, Darren, no, no! You aren’t going to die!”

  “I reckon I won’t. But I could. I’ve gone to foster parents now. Did they tell you?”

  “Yes Darren; that’s lovely. I’m so glad for you. Are you happy with them?”