A Taste for Death (28 page)

'I don't want him. I don't need him. I hope you won't be disappointed, Commander, but I think I have an alibi. That is ifBerowne died between seven and midnight.' Still Dalgliesh didn't speak. Lampart went on: 'I was with Barbara for the whole of that time as, no doubt, you already know. You must have seen her. Earlier, from two o'clock until five I was here operating. The list is available and theatre sister and the anaesthetist can corroborate. I know I was gloved, gowned and masked, but I can assure you that my staff recognize my work even if they don't actually see my face. But, of course, they did see it, before I gowned up. I mention that in case you had some fanciful idea that I might have persuaded a colleague to stand in for me.'

Dalgliesh said:

'That might work in fiction but hardly in real life.' 'And afterwards, Barbara and I had tea in this room then spent some time in my private fiat, upstairs. Then I changed and we left here together at about seven forty. The night porter saw us go and can probably confirm the time. We drove to the Black Swan at Cookham where we had dinner together. I wasn't particularly noticing the time but I suppose we got there at about eight thirty. I drive a red Porsche, in case that's significant. The table was booked for eight forty-five. Jean Paul Higgins is the manager. He'll be able to confirm it. No doubt he'll also confirm that it was after eleven when we left. But I'd be grateful for a little tact. I'm not over-sensitive about re-putation, but I can't afford to have half of fashionable London gossiping about my private life. And while some

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of my patients have their little foibles like giving birth under water or squatting on the drawing room carpet, being delivered by a murder suspect isn't everyone's fancy.'

'We'll be discreet. When did Lady Berowne arrive here? Or did you call for her earlier at Campden Hill Square?'

'No. I haven't been inside number sixty-two for weeks. Barbara came by cab. She dislikes driving in London. She arrived about four, I suppose. She was in the theatre watch-ing me operate from about four fifteen until I finished. Did I mention that?'

'She was with you the whole time?'

'Most of the time. I think she slipped out for a few

minutes after I'd completed the third Caesarean.'

'And she was masked and gowned too?'

'Of course. But what possible relevance is that? He couldn't have died, surely, before the evening.'

'Is that something she often does? Watch you operate?'

'It isn't uncommon. It's a fancy she has,' he paused and added, 'from time to time.'

They were both silent. There were some things, thought Dalgliesh, that even Stephen Lampart, with his pose of ironic detachment and contempt for reticence, couldn't bring himself actually to say. So that was how she got her kicks. That was what turned her on; watching, masked and gowned, while his hands cut into another woman's body. The erotic charge of the medical priesthood. The attendant nurses moving in patterned ceremony about him. The grey eyes meeting the blue above the mask. And afterwards, watching, while he peeled off his gloves, held out his arms in a parody of benediction while an acolyte lifted the gown from his shoulders. The heady mixture of power, mystery, ruthlessness. The rituals of knife and blood. Where, he wondered, had they made love. His bedroom, a private sitting room? It was surprising that they didn't couple on the operating table. Perhaps they did.

The telephone on the desk rang. With a muttered apol-ogy, Lampart picked up the receiver. The conversation,

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apparently with a colleague, was highly clinical and one-sided with Lampart doing most of the listening. But he made no attempt to cut it short. Dalgliesh gazed out over the garden while his mind busied itself with its preliminary assessment. If they had left Pembroke Lodge at seven forty it would need fast driving to get to the Black Swan by eight thirty. Time to take in a murder on the way? It was feasible provided he could make an excuse to leave her in the car. No man in his senses would take her with him into the church on such a bloody mission even if she knew or guessed what he had in mind. So there would have to be an excuse. Someone he had briefly to see. Some business to be transacted. The car would have to be parked close to the church. That in itself would be risky. A red Porsche was conspicuous. And then what? The knock on the church door. Berowne letting him in. The rehearsed excuse for calling. How long for these preliminaries? Less than a minute perhaps. The sudden blow to knock Berowne out. Then to the washroom for the razor which he could be sure he would find, the quick stripping off of jacket and shirt and back to the vestry, razor in hand. The careful tentative cuts followed by the final slash to the bone. He must have done some forensic medicine when a student, if not since. He would know better than any other suspect how to simulate a suicide.

And then the disaster. Harry appears, stumbling, probably half-drunk, half-asleep, but not so asleep that lac couldn't see, couldn't remember. And now, there would be no time for finesse and none needed. And afterwari-: the quick wash; the razor placed near Berowne's hay,i: the rapid glance to left and right; the covering darkne the door left unlocked since he couldn't take away key; the unhurried return to the car. He would have depend on her silence, of course. He would need to bc certain that she would stick to their story and say that they had driven straight to the Black Swan. But it was an easy lie, no complicated fabrication, no difficult details of timing to remember. She would say what in fact she had in effect already said. 'We drove straight there. No, I can't

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remember the route. I wasn't noticing. But we didn't stop.' He would have to fabricate a good reason for asking her to lie. 'I needed to see one of my patients, a woman.' But why not tell the police that? There's nothing wrong about a quick professional visit. The need to stop would have to be faintly disreputable. Either that or something he had suddenly remembered. A telephone call which had been unanswered. Too quick. He would need longer than that. And why not wait and make it from the Black Swan? But, of course, there was the obvious ploy. He would say he had called at the church, spoken to Berowne, left him alive and well. That way, she would back up his alibi in her own interest as well as his. And if, in the end, she didn't, he would still have his story. 'I called to talk to Berowne about his wife. ! only stayed for ten minutes at the most. The discussion was perfectly amicable. ! saw no one but Berowne and ! left him alive and well.'

Lampart replaced the receiver. He said:

'Sorry about that. Where were we, Commander At the Black Swan?' '

But Dalgliesh changed the tack of the questioning. He said:

'You knew Sir Paul Berowne intimately once, even if you weren't particularly close at the end. No two men share a woman without being interested in each other.' He could have added, 'sometimes obsessed with each other'. He went on: 'You're a doctor. I'm wondering what you make of it, this experience he had in the vestry at St Matthew's.' The flattery was hardly subtle and Lampart was too clever a man to miss it. But he wouldn't be able to resist it. He was used to being asked his opinion, to being listened to with deference. It was partly what he lived by. He said:

I'm an obstetrician, not a psychiatrist. But I shouldn't have thought the psychology of it was particularly compli-cated. The usual story. It's only the manifestations that are a little bizarre. Call it the mid-life crisis. I don't like the expression "male menopause". It's inaccurate anyway. The two things are fundamentally different. I think he

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looked at his life, what he'd achieved, what he could hope for, and didn't much care for it. He'd tried law and politics and neither satisfied him. He had a wife he lusted after but didn't love. A daughter who didn't love him. A job which constrained any hope he might have of breaking out into spectacular or exuberant protest. All right; he'd got himself a mistress. That's the easy expedient. I haven't seen the lady but from what Barbara told me it's more a question of comfort and cocoa, a bit of mild office gossip on the side rather than any breaking of the straitjacket he got himself strapped into. So he needed an excuse for chucking it all. What better one than proclaiming that God himself has told you you're on the wrong tack? I don't think it would be my way out. But you can argue that it's preferable to a nervous breakdown, alcoholism or cancer.'

When Dalgliesh didn't speak he went on quickly, with a kind of nervous sincerity which was almost convincing.

'I see it all the time. The husbands. They sit where you're sitting now. Ostensibly, they come to talk to me about their wives. But they're the ones with the problem. They can't win. It's the tyranny of success. They spend most of their youth working to qualify, most of their young manhood building up success - the right wife, the right house, the right schools for the children, the right clubs. For what? For more money, more comfort, a bigger house, a faster car, more taxation. And they don't even get much of a kick out of it. And there's another twenty years to be got through. And it isn't much better for those who aren't disillusioned, who find their niche, who actually enjoy what they do. Their fear is the prospect of retirement. Overnight you're nobody. The walking dead. Haven't you seen those dreadful old men, trawling for a committee, angling for a royal commission, a job, any kind of a job, as long as it gives them the illusion that they're still irr-portant.'

Dalgliesh said:

'Yes, I've seen them.'

'Christ, they practically go down on their knees and slaver for it.'

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'I think that's true enough, but it didn't apply to him. He was still only a junior minister. His success was ahead. He was still at the striving stage.'

'Oh yes, I know. The next Tory Prime Minister but one. Do you think that was a serious possibility? I don't. He hadn't the fire in the belly, not for politics anyway. Not even one little smouldering coal.'

He spoke with a kind of triumphant bitterness. He said: 'I'm all right, Jack. I'm one of the lucky ones. No hostages to fortune. The job gives me what ! need. And when I'm ready for the scrapheap, I've got the Mayflower, a sloop, fifty feet. She's berthed at Chichester. I don't get much time for her now. But once retired, I'll provision

her and be off. And you, Commander? No Mayflower?' 'No Mayflower.'

'But you've your poetry, of course. I was forgetting.' He spoke the word as if it were an insult. As if he were saying, 'you've got your woodwork, your stamp collection, your embroidery'. Worse, he spoke it as if he knew there hadn't been a poem for four years, that there might never be one again. Dalgliesh said:

'For someone who wasn't intimate, you know a lot about him.'

'He interested me. And at Oxford his elder brother and I were friends. I dined at Campden Hill Square fairly often when he was alive and the three of us used to sail together. To Cherbourg specifically, in 1978. You get to know a man when you've survived a force ten gale together. Actually, Paul saved my life. I went overboard and he got me back.'

'But isn't yours a rather superficial assessment, the obvious explanation?'

'It's surprising how often the obvious explanation is the correct one. If you were a diagnostician, you'd know that.'

Dalgliesh turned to Kate:

'Is there anything you wanted to ask, Inspector?' Lampart wasn't quite quick enough to restrain his moment-ary frown of surprise and discomfiture that a woman he

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had taken to be no more than Dalgliesh's helot, whose role was to take unobtrusive notes and sit as a meek and silent witness, was apparently licensed to question him. He turned on her a half-smiling over-attentive gaze but his

eyes were wary.

Kate said:

'This dinner at the Black Swan, is that a favourite place of yours? Do you and Lady Berowne go there often?'

'Fairly often in summer. Less so in winter. The ambience is agreeable. It's a convenient distance from London and now that Higgins has changed his chef the food is good. If you're asking for a recommendation for a quiet dinner, yes, I can recommend it.' The sarcasm was unsubtle and he had made his resentment too obvious. The question, innocuous enough, if apparently irrelevant, had rattled him. Kate said:

'And you were there, both of you, on the evening of the

seventh of August, when Diana Travers was drowned?' He said dryly:

'You obviously already know that we were there so there seems little point in asking. It was Lady Berowne's twenty-seventh birthday party. She was born on the seventh of August.'

'And you escorted her, not her husband?'

'Sir Paul Berowne was otherwise engaged. I gave the party for Lady Berowne. He was expected to join us later but rang to say that he couldn't make it. Since you know that we were there, you obviously know, too, that we left before the tragedy.'

'And the other tragedy, sir, Theresa Nolan? You were not, of course, present when that happened either?' Careful, Kate, thought Dalgliesh. But he didn't interfere, and he wasn't anxious.

'If you mean did I sit by her side in Holland Park whex she swallowed a bottle of Distalgesic tablets and washed them down with cooking sherry, no I wasn't. If I had been, obviously I should have stopped her.'

'She left a note making it plain that she'd killed herself because of guilt over her abortion. A perfectly legal

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abortion. She was one of your nurses here. I wonder why she didn't have the operation at Pembroke Lodge?'

'She didn't ask. And if she had, I wouldn't have done it. I prefer not to operate on my own staff. If there appear to be medical reasons for termination, I refer them to a fellow gynaecologist or a psychiatrist. Actually, I can't see how her death or that of Diana Travers has anything to do with the business that brings you here this morning. Ought

we to be wasting time with irrelevant questions' Dalgliesh said: '

'Not irrelevant. Sir Paul received letters suggesting, obliquely but fairly unmistakably, that he was somehow connected with those two deaths. Anything that happened to him during the last weeks of his life has to be relevant. The letters were probably the usual malicious nonsense that politicians expose themselves to but it;s as well to clear them out of the way.'