A Taste for Death (39 page)

Afterwards the three of them lunched together in the

elegant first-floor dining room overlooking the river, now running thick and turbulent under the driving rain. As they were seated, Musgrave said:

'My great-grandfather once dined with Disraeli at this table. They looked out over much the same view.'

The words confirmed what Dalgliesh had suspected, that it was Musgrave whose family had always voted Tory and who would find any other allegiance unthinkable, the General who had come to his political philosophy by a process of thought and intellectual commitment.

It was an agreeable meal, stuffed shoulder of lamb, fresh vegetables beautifully cooked, a gooseberry tart with cream. He guessed that both his companions had tacitly agreed not to pester him with inquiries about the progress of the police investigation. They had earlier asked the obvious questions and had met his reticence with tactful silence. He was inclined to put this restraint down to a wish that he should enjoy a meal over which they had obviously taken trouble, rather than to any reluctance to discuss a painful subject, or any fear that they might let slip things best left unspoken. They were served by an elderly black-coated waiter with the face of an anxiously amiable toad, who poured an excellent Niersteiner with shaky hands, but without spilling a drop. The dining room was almost empty - there were only two couples and they were at distant tables. Dalgliesh suspected that his hosts had tactfully ensured that he should enjoy his luncheon in peace. But both men found an opportunity to give him their opinion. When, after coffee, the General remembered the need to make a telephone call, Musgrave leaned con-fidingly across the table:

'The General can't believe it was suicide. It isn't some-thing he'd do himself so he can't imagine it in his friends. I'd have said the same myself once, about Berowne, I mean. Not so sure now. There's a madness in the air. Nothing's certain any more, least of all people. You think you know them, know how they'd behave. But you don't, you can't. We're all strangers. That girl now, the nurse, the one who killed herself. If it was Berowne's child she

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aborted, that couldn't have been easy for him to live with. Not trying to interfere, you understand. Your job, of course, not mine. But the case seems pretty straightforward to me.'

And it was in the car park when Musgrave had left them to go to his car that the General said:

'I know that Frank thinks that Berowne killed himself, but he's wrong. Not malicious, or disloyal or unkind; just

wrong. Berowne wasn't the kind of man to kill himself.' Dalgliesh said:

'I don't know whether he was or wasn't. What I am reasonably sure of is that he didn't.'

They watched in silence while Musgrave, with a final wave, negotiated the gate and accelerated out of sight. It seemed to Dalgliesh an additional perversity of fate that he should be driving a black Rover with an A registration.

Half an hour later Frank Musgrave turned into the drive of his house. It was a small but elegant red-bricked country house designed by Lutyens and bought by his father forty years earlier. Musgrave had inherited it with the family business and regarded it with as much obsessional pride as if it had been a two-hundred-year-old family seat. He maintained it with jealous care as he looked after every-thing that was his, his wife, his son, his business, his car. Usually he drove up to it with no more than customary satisfaction at the old man's good eye for a house, but every six months, as if in obedience to some unstated law, he would halt the car and make a deliberate revaluation of its market price. He did that now.

He had hardly entered the hall when his wife, anxious faced, came out to meet him. Taking the coat from his shoulders, she said:

'How did it go, dear?'

'All right. He's an odd man. Not altogether friendly but perfectly civil. Seemed to enjoy his lunch.' He paused and added:

'He knows that it was murder.'

i 'Oh Frank, no! Not that! What are you going to do?'

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'What everyone else concerned with Berowne will do, try to limit the damage. Has Betty Hurrell rung?'

'About twenty minutes ago. I told her that you'd be coming to see her.'

'Yes,' he said heavily, 'I must do that.'

He laid his hand momentarily on his wife's shoulder. Her family hadn't wanted her to marry him, hadn't thought him good enough for the only child of a previous Lord Lieutenant of the County. But he had married her and they had been happy, were still happy. He thought with sudden anger: He's done enough damage, but this is where it stops. I'm not going to risk everything I've worked for, everything I've achieved and my father before me, just because Paul Berowne goes off his head in a church vestry.

Scarsdale Lodge was a large, L-shaped, modern block of flats, brick-built, its front disfigured rather than enhanced by a series of irregular, jutting balconies. A path of stone blocks led between twin lawns to the canopied entrance porch. In the middle of each lawn, a small circular flower bed closely packed with dwarf dahlias ranging in circles through white to yellow and, finally, red glared upwards like a bloodshot eye. To the left a driveway brought them to the rear garage block and to a marked parking lot with a notice warning that it was strictly for the use of visitors to Scarsdale Lodge. It was overlooked by the smaller windows at the back of the building and Dalgliesh, knowing how paranoid flat residents became over un-licensed parking, guessed that a watch would be kept on it for alien cars. Almost certainly Berowne would have judged it safer to leave his car in the public park at $tanmore Station and would have walked the last quarter of a mile uphill, an anonymous commuter with the

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ubiquitous briefcase, the carder bag of wine, the offering of flowers probably bought from a stall near Baker Street or Westminster Underground. And Stanmore wasn't so very far out of his way. It was, in fact, conveniently on the route to his Hertfordshire constituency. He would be able to snatch the odd hour on a Friday night, that hiatus between his London life and his Saturday morning constitu-ency surgery.

He and Kate walked in silence to the front door. It was fitted with an intercom; hardly the most effective security but better than none, and with the advantage that there was no porter to watch comings and goings. Kate's ring and her careful announcement of their names through the grille was answered only by the burr of the released door and they passed through a hall that was typical of a thou-sand in similar apartment blocks in suburban London. The floor was of checkered vinyl, polished to mirror brightness. On the left wall was a cork board with notices from the managing agents about the date of lift maintenance and the cleaning contract. To the right an immense cheese plant in a green plastic pot, inadequately supported, drooped its bifurcated leaves. Ahead of them were the twin lifts. The silence was absolute. Somewhere up there, people must be living their cabined lives, but the air, sharp with the tang of floor polish, was as silent as if this were an apartment house of the dead. The tenants would be Londoners, transients most of them, young professionals on their way up, secretaries sharing with each other, retired couples living their self-contained lives. And a visi-tor could be coming to any one of the forty-odd flats. If Berowne were sensible he would have taken the lift to a different floor each time and walked up. But the risk would be small. Stanmore, for all its high leafiness, was no longer a village. There would be no peeping eyes behind the curtains to watch when he came or went. If Berowne had bought it for his mistress, as a convenient, anonymous meeting place he had chosen well.

Number forty-six was the corner flat on the top floor. They trod silently along a carpeted corridor to the white

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unnamed door. When Kate rang he wondered whether an eye was regarding them through the peephole, but the door was opened at once as if she had been standing there waiting for them. She stood aside and motioned them in. Then she turned to Dalgliesh and said:

'I've been expecting you. I knew you'd come sooner or later. And at least I'll know now what happened. I can hear someone speak his name, even if it's only a police-man.'

She was ready for them. She had done her crying; not all the crying she would do for her lover, but that dreadful howling anguish that tears the body apart was over now, at least for a time. He had had to witness its effects too often to miss the signs; the puffy eyelids, the skin dulled by griefs despoiling power, the lips swollen and unnaturally red, as if the lightest blow would burst them open. It was difficult to know how she normally looked. He thought that she had a pleasant, intelligent face, long-nosed but with high cheekbones and a firm jaw and a good skin. Her hair, mid-brown, strong and straight, was drawn back from her face and tied with a tag of crumpled ribbon. A few hairs lay damply across her forehead. Her voice was cracked and strained with recent crying but she had it well under control. He felt a respect for her. If grief was the criterion, she was the widow. As they followed her into the sitting room, he said:

'I'm very sorry to have to trouble you, and so soon. You know why we're here, of course. Do you feel able to talk about him? I need to know him better than I do if I'm to get anywhere.' She seemed to understand what he meant, that the victim was central to his death. He died because of what he was, what he knew, what he did, what he planned to do. He died because he was uniquely himself. Murder destroyed privacy, laid bare with brutal thor-oughness all the petty contrivances of the dead life. Dal-gliesh would rummage through Berowne's past as thor-oughly as he rummaged through a victim's cupboards and files. The victim's privacy was the first to go, but no one intimately concerned with murder was left unscathed. The

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victim had at least escaped beyond earthbound considera-tions of dignity, embarrassment, reputation. But for the living, to be part of a murder investigation was to be contaminated by a process which would leave few of their lives unchanged. But at least, he thought, it had the merit of democracy. Murder remained the unique crime. Peer and pauper stood equal before it. The rich were, of course, advantaged in this as in everything. They could afford the best lawyers. But in a free society there was little else they could buy. She asked:

'Would you like some coffee?'

'Very much please, if it's not too much trouble.' Kate asked:

'Clan I help?'

'It won't take long.'

Kate apparently took the words as an acceptance and followed the girl into the kitchen leaving the door ajar. It was typical of her, thought Dalgliesh, this unsentimental, practical response to people and their immediate concerns. Without hectoring or presumption, she could reduce the most embarrassing situation to something approaching normality. It was one of her strengths. Now, above the tinkle of kettle lid and crockery, he could hear their voices, conversational, almost ordinary. From the few phrases he could catch, they seemed to be discussing the merits of a make of electric kettle which both possessed. Suddenly he felt that he shouldn't be there, that he was redundant as a detective and a man. They would both get on better with-out his male, destructive presence. Even the room seemed inimical to him, and he could almost persuade himself that the low broken sibilants of female voices were in con-spiracy.

There was the grinding roar of a coffee mill. So, she used fresh ground beans. But of course. She would take trouble over the coffee. It was the drink she and her lover must most often have shared. He looked around the sit-ting room with its long window giving a distant view of the London skyline. The furniture represented a rather orthodox good taste. The sofa, covered with fawn linen,

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uncrumpled, still pristine, looked expensive and was probably Scandinavian in the austerity of the design. On each side of the fireplace were matching armchairs, the covers more worn than that on the sofa. The fireplace itself was modern, a simple shelf of white wood above a plain surround. And the fire, he saw, was one of the newest gas models which gave an illusion of burning coals and a living flame. She would have been able to turn it on as soon as she heard his ring; instant comfort, instant warmth. And if he didn't come, if there was business at the House or at home or in the constituency which kept him from her, there would be no cold ash the next morning to mock her with its easy symbolism.

Above the sofa was a line ofwatercolours; gentle English landscapes, their quality unmistakable. He thought he re-cognized a Lear and a Cotman. He wondered if these had been Berowne's gifts, a way perhaps of transferring to her something of value which both could enjoy and which her pride could accept. The wall opposite the fireplace wax covered with wooden adjustable units reaching from floor to ceiling. These held a simple stereo system, racks for records. a elevision set, and her books. Walking over to inspect them and flicking them open, he saw she had read history at Reading University. Take away the books and substitute popular prints for the watercolours and the room could haw' been a showroom in a newly built block of flats, seducing the prospective buyer with a depressingly orthodox good taste, He thought: there are rooms designed to be got away from, bleak anterooms where the armour is buckled on to confront the real world outside. There are rooms to come back to, claustrophobic refuges from the arduous business of work and striving. This room was a world in itself, a still centre provisioned with economy and care but containing eve%'-thing necessary to its owner's life; the fiat itself an inves!-ment in more than property. All her capital had been tiel up here, monetary and emotional. He looked at the row i plants, varied, well-tended, glossily healthy, which we' ranged on the window sill. But then, why shouldn't they t healthy? She was always there to tend them.

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The two women came back into the room, Miss Washburn carrying a tray with a percolator, three large white cups, a jug of hot milk, and sugar crystals. She set it down on the coffee table. Dalgliesh and Kate seated them-selves on the sofa. Miss Washburn poured the coffee, in-cluding a cup for herself, then carried it over to her seat by the fire. As Dalgliesh had expected, the coffee was excellent, but she didn't drink. She gazed across at them and said: