A Taste for Death (37 page)

'We'd better have a word with the couple who were dining here with Mr Lampart and Lady Berowne on August the seventh. They might be able to say when exactly Lampart left the table to fetch the car, how long he was away. Get their names and addresses, will you, Kate? I suggest from the lady, rather than Lampart. And it would be useful to know more about the mysterious Diana Travers. According to the police report on the drowning she emigrated with her parents to Australia in 1963. They stayed, she came back. Neither of them came over for the inquest or the funeral. Thames Valley had some difficulty in finding someone to identify her. They dug up an aunt and she made the funeral arrangements. She hadn't seen her niece for over a year but she had absolutely no doubt about the identification. And while you're at number sixty-two, see if you can get anything more out of Miss Matlock

about the girl.'

Kate said:

'Mrs Minns might be able to tell us something, sir. We're seeing her first thing tomorrow.' She added:

'There was one thing Higgins said about the Traver

drowning which struck me as odd. It doesn't tie up.'

So she had noticed the anomaly. Dalgliesh said:

'It seems to have been an evening for river sports. It was almost as odd as Henry's story. Paul Berowne with his wet clothes clinging to him, but walking towards the river, not away from it.'

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Kate still lingered, her hand on the car door. Dalgliesh gazed out over the high beech hedge which separated the car park from the river. The day was changing. The early morning air had held a brittle and transitory brightness, but now the storm clouds, forecast for the afternoon, were rolling in from the west. But it was still warm for early autumn and there came to him as he stood in the almost deserted car park, cleansed of the smell of hot metal and petrol, the scent of river water and sun-warmed grasses. He stood for a moment savouring it like a truant, feeling the pull of the water, wishing that there were time to follow the wraith of that dripping figure through the gateway to the peace of the riverbank. Kate, coming out of her moment-ary trance, opened the car door and slid in. But she seemed to have shared his mood. She said:

'It all seems so far away from that dingy Paddington vestry.' He wondered if she was implying, not daring to say:

'It's Berowne's murder we're supposed to be in-vestigating, not the coincidental drowning of a girl he may hardly have seen.'

But now, more than ever, he was convinced that the three deaths were linked, Travers, Nolan, Berowne. Anti the main purpose of their visit to the Black Swan had been achieved. Lampart's alibi held. Even driving

Porsche it was hard to see how he could have killed Bc-rowne and still been seated by eight forty.

2

With the electrification of the north-east suburban line, Wrentham Green had increasingly become a commuter town despite the protestations of its older inhabitants that it was a county town of character not a dormitory suburb of London. The town had woken up sooner than some of its less vigilant neighbours to the post-war despoliation of

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England's heritage by developers and local authorities, and had checked the worst excesses of that unholy alliance just in time. The broad eighteenth-century high street, although desecrated by two modern multiple stores, was essentially intact, and the small close of Georgian houses facing the river was still regularly photographed for Christmas calendars even if it required some contortions on the part of the photographer to exclude the end of the car park and the municipal lavatories. It was in one of the smaller houses of the close that the Constituency Con-servative Party had its headquarters. Passing through the porticoed door with its gleaming brass plate, Dalgliesh was met by the Chairman, Frank Musgrave, and the Vice-Chairman, General Mark Nollinge.

As always he had prepared himselffor the visit. He knew more about both of them than he suspected either would have thought necessary. Together in amicable harness they had for the last twenty years run the local Party. Frank Musgrave was an estate agent who ran a family business, still independent of the large conglomerates, which he had originally inherited from his father. From the number of house boards Dalgliesh had noticed on his drive through the town and the neighbouring villages, the business was flourishing. The single word, 'Musgrave', bold black letter-ing on white, had met him at every turn. Its reiteration had become an irritating, almost premonitory, reminder of his destination.

He and the General were an incongruous pair. It was Musgrave who at first sight looked like a soldier, indeed his resemblance to the late Field-Marshal Montgomery was so marked that Dalgliesh wasn't surprised to hear him speak in a parody of that formidable warrior's staccato bark. The General barely came up to his shoulder. He held his slight body so rigidly that it seemed as if his ver-tebrae were fused, and his tonsured head, the crown ringed with fine white hair, was speckled as a thrush's egg. As Musgrave made the introductions he looked up at Dalgliesh with eyes as innocently candid as a child's, but strained and puzzled as if he had looked too long on unattainable

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horizons. In contrast to Musgrave's formal business suit and black tie, the General was wearing an ancient tweed jacket cut according to some personal whim with two oblong patches of suede on each elbow. His shirt and regi-mental tie were immaculate. With his shining face he had the polished vulnerability of a well-tended child. Even in the first minutes of casual conversation the mutual respect of the two men was immediately apparent. Whenever the General spoke, Musgrave would gaze from him to Dal-gliesh with the slightly anxious frown of a parent, worried lest his offspring's brilliance should be underrated.

Musgrave led the way through the wide hall, down a short passage to the room at the back of the house which Berowne had used as his office. He said:

'Kept it locked since Berowne's death. Your people rang, but we'd have locked it anyway. The General and I thought it the right thing to do. Not that there's anything here to shed light. Shouldn't think so, anyway. Welcome to look, of course.'

The air smelt stale and dusty, almost sour, as if the room had been locked for months rather than days. Musgrave switched on the light, then strode over to the window and vigorously tugged back the curtains with a rattle of rings. A thin northern light filtered through the plain nylon curtains beyond which Dalgliesh could see a small walled car park. He had seldom, he thought, been in a more depressing room, and yet it was difficult to ex-plain why he should feel this sudden weight of dejection. The room was no worse than any of its kind, functional, uncluttered, impersonal, and yet he felt that the very air

he breathed was infected by melancholy.

He said:

'Did he stay in this house when he was in the constituency?' 'No. Just used this room here as an office. He always stayed at the Courtney Arms. Mrs Powell kept a bed for him. It was cheaper and less trouble than having a flat in the constituency. Talked occasionally about asking me to find one, but it never came to anything. I don't think his wife was keen.'

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Dalgliesh asked casually:

'Did you see very much of Lady Berowne?'

'Not a lot. Did her bit, of course. Annual fte, appear-ances at the local elections, that sort of thing. Decorative and gracious all round. Not much interested in politics, would you say, General?'

'Lady Berowne? No, not greatly. The first Lady Be-rowne was different, of course. But then, the Manstons have been a political family for four generations. I used to wonder sometimes whether Berowne entered politics to please his wife. I don't think he felt the same commitment after she was killed.'

Musgrave gave him a sharp glance as if this were a heresy, previously unacknowledged, which even now was better left unspoken. He said quickly:

'Yes, well, water under the bridge. A sad business. He

was driving at the time. I expect you've heard.' Dalgliesh said: 'Yes. I had heard.'

There was a short, uncomfortable pause during which it seemed to him that the golden image of Barbara Berowne glimmered, unacknowledged and disturbing, in the still air.

He began his examination of the room, aware of the General's anxious, hopeful gaze, of Musgrave's sharp eyes on him as if watching a trainee clerk taking his first inven-tory. Set in the middle of the floor and facing the window was a solid Victorian desk and a button-backed swivel chair. In front of it were two smaller leather armchairs. There was a modern desk with a heavy old-fashioned typewriter to one side and two more chairs and a low coffee table in front of the fireplace. The only memorable piece of furniture was a bureau-bookcase with brass bound panes which occupied the recess to the right of the fire-place. Dalgliesh wondered if his companions knew its value. Then he guessed that respect for tradition would forbid its sale. Like the desk, it was part of the room, inviolate, not to be disposed of for a quick profit. Strolling over to it, he saw that it held an oddly assorted collection of reference

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books, local guides, biographies of notable Tory politi-cians, Who's Who, parliamentary reports, Stationery Office publications, even a few classical novels, apparently gummed together by immutable time.

On the wall behind the desk was a copy of a well-known oil portrait of Winston Churchill with a large colour photo-graph of Mrs Thatcher hung to its right. But it was the picture above the fireplace which immediately caught the eye. Moving to it from the bookcase, Dalgliesh saw that it was an eighteenth-century oil painting by Arthur Devis of the Harrison family. The young Harrison, legs elegantly crossed in their satin breeches, stood with proprietorial arrogance beside a garden seat on which sat his thin-faced wife, her arm round a young child. A small girl sat demurely beside her holding a basket of flowers, while to the left her brother's arm was raised to the string of a kite, luminous in the summer sky. Behind the group stretched a gentle English landscape in high summer, smooth lawns, a lake, a distant manor house. Dalgliesh recalled from his interview with Anthony Farrell that Musgrave had been left a Devis. This, presumably, was it. The General said:

'Berowne brought it here from Campden Hill Square. He moved the Churchill portrait and hung it here instead. There was some feeling about it at the time. The Churchill had always hung over the mantelpiece.'

Musgrave had moved up beside Dalgliesh. He said: 'I'll miss that picture. Never tired of looking at it. It was painted in Hertfordshire, only six miles from here. You can still see that landscape. The same oak tree, same lake. And the house. It's a school now. My grandfather was agent when it was sold. It couldn't be anywhere else but England. I never knew that painter's work till Berowne brought it here. Rather like a Gainsborough, isn't it? But I'm not sure I don't like it better than that one in the National Gallery - Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews. The women are a bit alike, though, aren't they? Thin-faced, arrogant, wouldn't care to be married to either of them. But it's lovely, lovely.'

The General said quietly:

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'I'I1 be relieved when the family send for it. It's a re-sponsibility.'

So neither of them knew about the legacy, unless they were better actors than he thought likely. Dalgliesh kept a prudent silence, but he would have given much to have seen Musgrave's face when he learned of his good luck. He wondered what spurt of quixotic generosity had prompted the gift. It was surely an exceptionally generous way of rewarding political loyalty. And it was an irritating complication. Common sense and imagination protested at the thought of Musgrave slitting a friend's throat to possess a picture, however obsessively desired, which there was no evidence he even knew had been willed to him. But in the normal course of human life he would have been lucky to have outlived Berowne. He had been at the Campden Hill Square house on the afternoon of Berowne's death. He could have taken the diary. He almost certainly knew that Berowne used a cut-throat razor. Like everyone else who benefited from the death, he would have to be tactfully investigated. It was almost certainly a waste of effort; it would take time; it complicated the main thrust of the inquiry; but it still had to be done.

They were, he knew, waiting for him to talk about the murder. Instead he walked over to the desk and seated himself in Berowne's chair. That, at least, was comfortable, fitting his long limbs as if made for him. There was a thin film of dust on the desk surface. He pulled open the right-hand drawer and found nothing but a box of writing paper and envelopes, and a diary similar to the one found by the body. Opening it, he saw that it contained only en-gagements and an aide-mgmoire for the days he spent in his constituency. Here, too, his life had been ordered, com-partmentalized.

Outside, a thin drizzle was beginning to fall, misting the window, so that he saw the brick wall of the car park and the bright curved roofs of the cars as if in a pointillist oil painting. What burden, he wondered, had Berowne brought with him into this sunless and depressing office? Disenchantment with the second job to which he had

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committed himself?. Guilt over his dead wife, his failed marriage? Guilt over the mistress whose bed he had so recently left? Guilt over his neglect of his only child, over the baronetcy which had been rightly his brother's? Guilt because that better loved elder son was dead and he was still alive? 'Most of the things I expected to value in life have come to me through death.' And had there been, perhaps, a more recent guilt, Theresa Nolan, who had killed herself because she had aborted a child? His child? And what was there for him here amid these files and papers, mocking in their meticulous order his disordered life, but the Catch 22 of the well-intentioned? The miser-able batten on their victims. If you provide them what they crave, open your heart and mind to them, listen with sympathy, they come in ever increasing numbers, draining you emotionally and physically until you have nothing left to give. If you repel them they don't come back and you're