A Taste for Death (11 page)

'Lady Ursula, you really should see your doctor. Malcolm Hancock, isn't it? Let me ring him.' She shook her head.

'I'm all right. I can't cope with another person yet. Until the police arrive I need to be alone.' It was a con-fession of weakness which she hadn't expected to make, not to him and not at such a moment. He walked to the door. When his hand was on the knob she said:

'There's one more thing. What do you know about Theresa Nolan?'

'No more than you, I imagine, probably less. She only worked at Pembroke Lodge for four weeks and I hardly set eyes on her. She nursed you, lived in this house, for over six. And when she came to me she was already preg-nant.'

'And Diana Travers?'

'Nothing, except that she was unwise enough to overeat, drink too much and then dive into the Thames. As you must know, Barbara and I had left the Black Swan before she drowned.' He was silent for a moment and then said, gravely:

'I know what you're thinking about, that ludicrous article in the Paternoster Review. Lady Ursula, may I give you some advice? Paul's murder, if it is murder, is per-fectly simple. He let someone into that church, a thief, another derelict, a psychopath, and that person killed him. Don't complicate his death which, God knows, is horrible enough, with old, irrelevant tragedies. The police will have enough to get their teeth into without that.'

'Are they both irrelevant?'

7O

He didn't answer. Instead he said:

'Has Sarah been told?'

'Not yet. I tried to telephone her this morning at the flat but there was no reply. She was probably out getting a paper. I'll try again as soon as you leave.'

'Would you like me to go round? She is Paul's daughter, after all. This will be a terrible shock to her. She oughtn't

to learn it from the police or the television news.'

'She won't. If necessary, I'll go round myself.'

'But who will drive you? Isn't Wednesday Halliwell's day off?'

'There are taxis.'

She resented the way in which he seemed to be taking over, insinuating himself into the family as cunningly as he once had in Oxford. And then, again, she reproached herself for unfairness. He had never lacked his measure of kindness. He said:

'She ought to have time for preparation before the police burst in on her.'

Time for what? she wondered. To make a decent pre-tence that she cared? She didn't reply. Suddenly she wanted him gone so urgently that it was all she could do not to order him to get out. Instead she held out her hand. Bending, he took it in his and then raised it to his lips. The gesture, theatrical and ludicrously inappropriate dis-concerted but did not disgust her. After he had left, she found herself looking down at her thin, ring-encrusted fingers, at the age-mottled knuckles against which, briefly, his lips had rested. Was the gesture a tribute to an old woman facing with dignity and courage a last tragedy? Or had it been something more subtle, a pledge that, despite everything, they were allies, that he understood her priori-ties and would make them his?

8

Dalgliesh remembered a surgeon Once telling him that. Miles Kynaston had shown promise ofbecoming a brilliant diagnostician, but had given up general medicine for pathology at registrar level because he could no longer bear to watch human suffering.. The surgeon had sounded a note of amused condescension as though he were be-traying a colleague's unfortunate weakness, wryly observed, which a more prudent man would have detected before beginning his medical training, or at least would have come to terms with before his second year. It could, Dalgliesh thought, have been true. Kynaston had fulfilled his promise, but now he applied his diagnostic skills to the unrepining dead, whose eyes couldn't implore him to offer hope, whose mouths could no longer cry out. Certainly he had a taste for death. Nothing about it disconcerted him; its messiness, its smell, the most bizarre of its trappings. Unlike most doctors, he saw it, not as the final enemy, but as a fascinating enigma, each cadaver, which he would gaze at with the same intent look as he must once have fixed on his living patients, a new piece of evidence which might, if rightly interpreted, bring him closer to its central mystery.

Dalgliesh respected him more than any other pathologist with whom he had worked. He came promptly when called, and was equally prompt reporting on a post-mortem. He didn't indulge in the crude autopsy humour which some of his colleagues found necessary to bolster their social self-esteem; dinner guests could know them-selves safe from distasteful anecdotes about carving knives or missing kidneys. Above all he was good in the witness box, too good for some people. Dalgliesh remembered the sour comment of a defending counsel after a verdict of guilty: 'Kynaston's getting dangerously infallible with juries. We don't want another Spilsbury.'

He never wasted time. Even as he greeted Dalgliesh he was taking off his jacket and was drawing his fine latex

gloves over stubby-fingered hands which looked un-naturally white, almost bloodless. He was tall and stolidly built, giving an impression of shambling clumsiness until one saw him working in a confined space when he would seem physically to contract and become compact, even graceful, moving about the body with the lightness and precision of a cat. His face was fleshy, the dark hair re-ceding from a high speckled forehead, the long upper lip as precisely cmved as an arrowhead, and the full, heavily lidded eyes dark and very bright, giving his face a look of sardonic, humorous intelligence. Now he squatted, toad-like, by Berowne's body, his hands hanging loosely in front of him, palely disembodied. He gazed at the throat wounds with extraordinary concentration, but made no move to touch the body except to run his hand lightly over the back

of the head, like a caress. Then he said:

'Who are they?'

'Sir Paul Berowne, late MP and junior minister, and a tramp, Harry Mack.'

'On the face of it, murder followed by suicide. The cuts are textbook; two fairly superficial from left to right, then one above, swift, deep, severing the artery. And the razor neatly to hand. As I say, on the face of it obvious. A little too obvious?'

Dalgliesh said:

'I thought so.'

Kynaston stepped gingerly over the carpet to Harry, prancing on tiptoe like an inexpert dancer.

'One cut. Enough. Again from left to right. Which means that Berowne, if it were Berowne, stood behind him.'

'So why isn't Berowne's right' shirt-sleeve soaked with blood? All right, it's heavily bloodstained, his own or Harry's blood or both. But if he killed Harry, wouldn't you expect a greater amount of soaking?'

'Not if he turned up his shirt-sleeve first and took him from behind.'

'And turned it down again before slitting his own throat? Unlikely, surely.'

73

Kynaston said:

'Forensic should be able to identify Harry's blood, or what could be Harry's blood, on the shirt-sleeve as well as Berowne's own. There seem to be no visible stains between the bodies.'

Dalgliesh said:

'Forensic have been over the carpet with the fibre-optic lamp. They may get something. And there is one dis-cernible smudge under Harry's jacket and a trace of what looks like blood on the jacket lining immediately above it.'

He lifted the corner. Both of them looked at the stain on the carpet in silence. Dalgliesh said:

'It was under the jacket when we found it. That means it was there before Harry fell. And if it proves to be Be-rowne's blood, then he died first, unless, of course, he staggered across to Harry after making one or more of the superficial cuts in his own throat. As a theory, it strikes me as ludicrous. If he were in the very act of cutting his own throat, how could Harry have stopped him? So why bother to kill him? But is it possible, medically possible?'

Kynaston looked at him. Both knew the importance of the question. He said:

'After the first superficial cut, I'd say that it was.'

'But would he still have had the strength to kill Harry?' 'With his own throat partly cut? Again, after that first superficial cut, I don't think one can rule it out. He'd be in a state of high excitement, remember. It's amazing what strength people do find. After all, we're supposing that he was interrupted in the act of suicide. Hardly the moment when a man is at his most rational. But I can't be certain.

No one can. You're asking the impossible, Adam.'

'I was afraid so. But it's too neat.'

'Or you want to believe it's too neat. How do you see it?' 'From the position of the body I think he could have been sitting on the edge of the bed. Assuming he was murdered, assuming that the murderer went first into the kitchen, then he could have crept back silently and attacked Berowne from behind. A blow, a cord round the throat. Or he grabs him by the hair, drags back the head,

74

makes the first deep cut. The others, the ones designed look tentative, could have come afterwards. So we look any mark under the cuts, or for a bump on the back of head.'

Kynaston said:

'There is a bump but it's small. It could have been cau,. by the body falling. But we'll know more at the PM.'

'An alternative theory is that the killer knocked him c first, then went into the washroom to strip and came b. for the final throat-cutting before Berowne had a char to come round. But that raises obvious objections. H have to judge the force of the blow very carefully t

you'd expect it to leave more than a slight bump.' Kynaston said:

'But it raises fewer objections than the first theory, tE he came in half-naked and armed with a razor and there are no obvious signs that Berowne put up any sistance.'

'He could have been taken by surprise. He would expe his visitor to come back through the door to the kitche It's possible that he tiptoed down the passage and came by the main door. That's the most likely theory, given t

position of the body.'

Kynaston said:

'You're assuming premeditation then? That the kill knew he'd find a razor to hand?'

'Oh yes. IfBerowne were murdered then the killing w premeditated. But I'm theorizing in advance of the fac the unforgivable sin. All the same, there's somethi

contrived about it, Miles. It's too obvious, too neat.' Kynaston said:

'I'll finish the preliminary examination and then yo can take them away, I would normally do the PM fir: thing tomorrow but they aren't expecting me back at tX hospital until Monday and the PM room is tied up unt the afternoon. Three thirty is the earliest. Is that all rigt for your people?'

'I don't know about the lab. The sooner the better fi

US.'

Something in his voice alerted Kynaston. He said: 'Did you know him?'

Dalgliesh thought: this is going to come up again and again. You knew him. You're emotionally involved. You don't want to see him as mad, a suicide, a killer. He said:

'Yes, I knew him slightly, mostly across a committee table.'

The words seemed to him g-udging, almost a small

treachery. He said again:

'Yes, I knew him.'

'What was he doing here?'

'He had some kind of religious quasi-mystical experience here in this room. He may have been hoping to recapture it. He'd arranged with the parish priest to stay the night

here. He gave no explanation.' '

'And Harry?'

'It looks as if Berowne let him in. He may have found him sleeping in the porch. Apparently Harry couldn't toler-ate being with other people. There's evidence that he was proposing to sleep further along the passage in the larger vestry.'

Kynaston nodded and got down to his familiar routine. Dalgliesh left him to it and went out into the passage. Watching this violation of the body's orifices, preliminaries to the scientific brutality to follow, had always made him feel uncomfortably like a voyeur. He had often wondered why he found it more offensive and ghoulish than the autopsy itself. Was it, perhaps, because the body was so recently dead, sometimes hardly cold. A superstitious man might fear that the spirit, so recently released, hovered around to be outraged at this insult to the discarded, still vulnerable, flesh. There was nothing for him to do now until Kynaston had finished. He was surprised to find himself tired. He expected to be exhausted later in an investigation when he would be working a sixteen-hour day, but this early heaviness, the feeling that he was already spent in mind and body was new to him. He wondered whether it was the beginning of age, or one more sign that this case was going to be different.

76

He went back into the church, sat down in a chair in front of a statue of the Virgin. The huge nave was empty ow. Father Barnes had gone, escorted home by a police constable. He had been readily helpful about the mug, identifying it as one Harry had often had with him when he was found sleeping in the porch. And he had tried to be helpful about the blotter, staring at it with almost painful intensity before saying that he thought that the black markings hadn't been there when he had last seen the blotter on Monday evening. But he couldn't be sure. He had taken a sheet of writing paper from the desk and used it to make notes during the meeting. This had covered the blotter so that he had really only seen it for a short time. But, as far as his memory went, the black markings were new.

Dalgliesh was grateful for these minutes of quiet con-templation. The scent of incense seemed to have inten-sifted, but it smelled to him overlaid with a sickly, more sinister smell, and the silence wasn't absolute. At his back he could hear the ring of footsteps, an occasional raised voice, calm, confident and unhurried, as the unseen pro-fessionals went about their work behind the grille. The sounds seemed very far off and yet distinct and he had the sensation of a secret, sinister busy-ness, like the scrabbling of mice behind the wainscot. Soon, he knew, the two bodies would be neatly parcelled in plastic sheeting. The rug would be carefully folded to preserve bloodstains, and in particular, that one significant stain of dried blood. The scene of crime exhibits, packed and tagged, would be carried to the police car; the razor, the crumbs of bread and cheese from the larger room, the fibres from Harry's clothing, that single burnt matchhead. For the moment he would keep possession of the diary. He needed to have it with him when he went to Campden Hill Square.