A Certain Justice (41 page)

But what had she thought when she learned of that second murder? Had she felt any responsibility? Was this every defence counsel’s private nightmare? Had it been hers? Or had she comforted herself with the thought that she had only been doing her job?

He replaced the Aldridge blue notebook in its place, then telephoned the incident room. Piers wasn’t there but Kate answered. Succinctly he described the evidence he had found.

There was a pause, then Kate said: “It’s the motive, sir. And now we’ve got the lot: motive, means, opportunity. But it’s odd, I could have sworn that when I first saw her — that time in the flat — the murder was news to her.”

Dalgliesh said: “It still could have been. But we’re getting close to solving one part of the case. First thing tomorrow morning we’ll see Janet Carpenter at her flat. I’d like you to come with me, Kate.”

“Not tonight, sir? She’s given up her job at Chambers. She won’t be working till ten. We’ll probably find her at home.”

“Even so, it’s late. It would be nearly ten before we arrived. And she isn’t young. I want her to be rested. We’ll take her in for questioning first thing tomorrow. It will be easier then for her to get a solicitor. She’ll need one present.”

Sensing Kate’s impatience in her silence, he added, untouched by the slightest apprehension, or any premonition of impending disaster: “There’s no hurry. She knows nothing of Edmund Froggett. And she isn’t going to run away.”

S
ome of Dalgliesh’s early months as a police officer had been spent in South Kensington, and he remembered Sedgemoor Crescent as a somewhat raucous enclave of multi-occupied houses in a street chiefly remarkable for being difficult to find in the complicated urban maze between the Earls Court Road and Gloucester Road. It was a crescent of ornate stuccoed houses, their late-Victorian grandeur interposed with concrete blocks of undistinguished modern flats built to replace houses destroyed by enemy action. The far end of the crescent was dignified by the needle-sharp spire of St James’s Church, an immense brick-and-mosaic monument to Tractarian piety much regarded by devotees of high-Victorian architecture.

The street seemed to have come up in the world since his last visit. Most of the houses had been restored, the gleaming white stucco and newly painted doors shining with almost aggressive respectability, while others with scaffolding erected against their discoloured and crumbling walls had boards advising their conversion to luxury flats. Even the modern blocks, once loud with the shrieks of children and the shouts of their parents across the balconies, and festooned with drying clothes, now held a subdued air of drab conformity.

Number 16, now named Coulston Court, had like most of the large houses been converted into flats. There was a bank of ten bells with the single word “Carpenter” on the card next to the bell-push, marked “10,” indicating the top floor. Knowing the unreliability of some systems, Dalgliesh was patient, but after three minutes of trying he said to Kate: “We’ll press all the bells; someone usually responds. They ought not to let us in without checking identity, but we could be lucky. Of course, most of them may have left for work.”

He pressed the bells in succession. Only one voice, deep but female, replied. There was a low buzzing and the door clicked open to his touch. A heavy oak table was set against the wall, obviously there to hold the post. Kate said: “We had this arrangement at my first flat. Whoever came down first in the morning picked up the letters and put them on the table. Tenants who were punctilious or inquisitive set them out by name, but usually they were just left in a pile and you found your own. No one bothered to send on post and the circulars just accumulated. I hated having other people see my letters. If you wanted privacy you had to get up early.”

Dalgliesh looked at the few letters left in the hall. One, in a window envelope, typed and bearing the words “Private and Confidential,” was addressed to Mrs. Carpenter.

He said: “It looks like a bank statement. She hasn’t collected her post. The bell could be defective. We’ll go up.”

The top floor, lit by a large skylight, was surprisingly light. Against the wall of the square landing was a wide storage cupboard with four numbered doors. Kate was about to press the doorbell of Flat Ten when they heard footsteps and, looking down the stairs, saw a girl looking up at them, anxious-eyed. She had obviously just woken. Her hair was a tousled mat fringing a face still bleared with sleep and she was enveloped in a man’s large dressing-gown. As she looked at them her face lightened with relief.

“Was it you who rang? God, I’m sorry. I was asleep when the bell went. I thought it was my boyfriend. He works nights. They’re always telling us, the weirdies on the Residents’ Association, that we mustn’t let people in without identification. The sound system isn’t very clear and if you’re expecting someone you don’t always think. And I’m not the only one. Old Miss Kemp is always doing it, that is when she hears the bell. Do you want Mrs. Carpenter? She should be there. I saw her yesterday evening about six-thirty. She went out to post a letter — at least she was carrying one. And later I heard her TV on really loud.”

Dalgliesh asked: “What time was that?”

“The TV? About seven-thirty, I suppose. She can’t have been out long. I don’t usually hear her. The flats aren’t badly insulated and she’s very quiet. Is anything wrong?”

“I don’t think so. We’re just calling.”

She hesitated for a moment, but something in his voice reassured her or was taken as a dismissal. She said, “That’s OK, then,” and seconds later they heard her door close.

There was no reply to their ring. Neither Dalgliesh nor Kate spoke. Their thoughts were running on similar lines. Mrs. Carpenter could have left early, before the post, or after seven-thirty the previous night, perhaps to stay with a friend. It was premature to begin thinking of breaking down doors. But Dalgliesh knew that this sudden weight of premonition, familiar from so many past cases and apparently intuitive, invariably had its basis in rationality.

There was a row of plants in pots outside Number Nine. He went over to them and found among the leaves of a lily a folded note. The note read: “Miss Kemp. These are for you to keep, not just to water for me. The calathea and the bird’s-nest fern love humidity. I found they did best in the bathroom or kitchen. I’ll drop in the keys before I leave in case of flood or burglary. I shall be away about a week. Many thanks.” It was signed “Janet Carpenter.”

Dalgliesh said: “There’s usually a key-holder. Let’s hope Miss Kemp’s at home.”

She was, but it took three rings before they heard the rasp of a bolt. The door was carefully opened on a chain and an elderly woman peered out at them into Dalgliesh’s eyes.

Dalgliesh said: “Miss Kemp? We’re sorry to trouble you. We’re police officers. This is Detective Inspector Miskin and my name is Dalgliesh. We were hoping to have a word with Mrs. Carpenter but there’s no reply and we want to check that she’s all right.”

Kate showed her warrant card. Miss Kemp took it and peered at it closely, silently mouthing the words. Then, for the first time, her eyes lit on the plants.

“So she’s left them. She said she would. That’s kind of her. Police officers, are you? Then I suppose it’s all right. But she’s not here. You won’t find her at home. She told me she was going for a short holiday and she’d leave me the plants. I always water and feed them if she’s away — not that she is very often. Just a weekend at the sea occasionally. I’d better take them in, no use leaving them out here.”

She unchained the door and picked up the nearest pot with gnarled and shaking hands. Kate bent to help her. “I see there’s a note. That’ll be to say goodbye and to tell me about the plants too, I dare say. Well, she knows they’re going to a good home.”

Dalgliesh said: “If we might have the key, Miss Kemp.”

“But I told you, she’s not here. She’s on holiday.”

“We’d like to be sure.”

Kate was holding two of the plants and, after a long look at her, Miss Kemp opened the door wide. Kate and Dalgliesh followed her into the hall.

“Set them down on the hall table. The saucers are clean at the bottom, aren’t they? She never over-watered. Wait here.”

She returned quickly with two keys on a ring. Thanking her, Dalgliesh wondered how he could persuade her to stay in her flat. But she showed no further interest in them or in their doings except to say again: “You won’t find her. She isn’t there. She’s gone for a holiday.”

Kate carried in the last two plants and the door was quickly and firmly closed.

He knew what he would find as soon as he turned the key and pushed open the door. Beyond the small entrance hall, the door to the sitting-room was open. The premonition of disaster isn’t confined to violent death; there is always that instant of realization, however brief, before the blow falls, the car strikes, the ladder gives way. Part of his mind had been forewarned of the horror which smell and sight now confirmed. But not of its extent. Never that. Her throat had been cut. Strange that those five monosyllables could cover such an effusion of blood.

Janet Carpenter was lying on her back, her head towards the door, her legs splayed in a stiff decrepitude which looked somehow indecent. The left leg was grotesquely bent, the heel raised, the toe just touching the floor. Close to her right hand was a kitchen knife, the blade and handle heavily bloodstained. She was wearing a skirt in brown-and-blue-flecked tweed and a high-necked blue jumper with a matching cardigan. The left sleeve of both had been pushed up to reveal the forearm. There was a single cut across the left wrist and, above it on the inner side of the arm, some letters written in blood.

They squatted beside the body. The blood had dried into a brownish smear but the initials were plain, the date even plainer: “R v Beale 1992.”

It was Kate who put the obvious into words, whispering as if to herself: “Dermot Beale. The murderer Aldridge defended in 1992 and got off. And a year later he raped and murdered again. This time it was Emily Carpenter.”

Like Dalgliesh, Kate was being careful not to tread in the blood. It had spurted across the room to spot the ceiling, the wall, the polished wooden floor, and had seeped into the single rug on which she lay. Her jumper was stiff with it. The very air smelt of blood.

It was not, perhaps, the most terrible of violent deaths. It was quick enough, more merciful than most methods if one had the strength of hand and will to make that first incision deep and certain. But few suicides did. There were usually a few tentative slices of the throat or wrist. Not here, however. Here the preliminary cut on the wrist, which had provided the blood for the message, was superficial but purposeful, a single smudged thread beaded with dried blood.

He glanced at Kate as she stood quietly by the body. Her face was white but calm and he had no fear that she would faint. She was a senior officer; he could rely on her to behave like one. But whereas, with his male colleagues, their calm professionalism came from long experience, an acquired protective insensitivity and the stolid acceptance of the realities of their job, he suspected that with Kate it took a more painful discipline of the heart. None of his officers, male or female, was unfeeling. He rejected the callous, the incipient sadist, those who needed a crude graveyard humour to anaesthetize horror. Like doctors, nurses or the traffic police who extract the pulped bodies from the crushed metal, you couldn’t do the job if your thoughts were centred on your own emotions. It was necessary to grow a carapace, however fragile, of acceptance and detachment if one was to remain competent and sane. Horror might enter, but must never be allowed to take a permanent lodging in the mind. But he sensed Kate’s effort of will and he sometimes wondered what it was costing her.

With a part of his mind formed in early childhood, he wished for a moment that she was not there. His father had had a great respect and love for women, had desperately wanted daughters, had thought women capable of anything, short of actions requiring great physical strength, that a man could do. But he had seen them, too, as a civilizing influence without whose peculiar sensitivity and compassion the world would have been an uglier place. The young Dalgliesh had been brought up to believe that these qualities should be protected by chivalry and respect. In this as in other things his clerical father could not have been less politically correct. But he had never found it easy in a very different and more aggressive age to shake off this early indoctrination, nor in his heart did he really wish to.

Kate said: “A clean cut through the jugular. She must have more strength in her hands than you’d expect. They don’t look particularly strong, but, then, the hands always do look frail.” She added, “More dead than the rest of the body,” and then blushed slightly, as if the comment had been stupid.

“More dead and sadder, perhaps because they are the busiest part of us.”

Still squatting, and without touching the body, he looked carefully at each hand. The right was covered with blood, the left lying curled with the palm upwards. He gently pressed the mound of the flesh at the base of the fingers, then ran an exploring hand down each of her fingers. After a moment he got quickly to his feet and said: “Let’s have a look at the kitchen.”

If Kate was surprised, she didn’t show it. The kitchen was at the end of the sitting-room and must originally have been part of it; the high curved window matched the two in the larger room and gave the same leafy view of the garden. The room was small but well fitted out and immaculately tidy. The double-drainer sink was set under the window and the working surface of simulated wood ran from it and then right down the whole length of the room with cupboards beneath and above. A ceramic hob was set into the working surface with, to its left, a large wooden chopping-board. To the left of this was a knife-block. One slot — the one on the left at the back, for the largest knife — was empty.

Dalgliesh and Kate stood in the doorway but did not go in. Dalgliesh asked: “Anything strike you as odd?”