A Taste for Death (44 page)

Graham Greene novel.'

She said:

'You make it sound as if it were in poor taste, eccentric, a bit presumptuous.' She was silent for a moment and then asked:

'If you have a kid will you have him christened?'

'Yes. Why do you ask?'

'So you believe in it, God, the Church, religion.' 'I didn't say so.' 'Then why?'

'My family have been christened for 400 years, longer I suppose. Yours too, I imagine. It doesn't seem to have done us any harm. I don't see why I should be the first to break the tradition, not without some positive feelings against it which I don't happen to have.'

And wasn't that, she thought, one of the things which Sarah Berowne had resented in her father, the ironic de-tachment which is too arrogant even to care. She said:

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'So it's a matter of class.'

He laughed:

'Everything with you is a matter of class. No, it's a

matter of family, of family piety if you like.'

She said, carefully not looking at him:

'I'm hardly the person to talk to about family piety.

I'm illegitimate, if you didn't know.'

'No, I didn't know.'

'Well, thank you for not telling me it isn't important.' He said:

'It only concerns one person. You. If you think it's important then OK, it has to be important.'

Suddenly she almost liked him. She glanced at the freckled face under a shock of red hair and tried to see him against the background of that college chapel. Then she thought of her own school. Ancroft Comprehensive had certainly had a religion all right, fashionable and, in a school with twenty different nationalities, expedient. It was anti-racism. You soon learned that you could get away with any amount of insubordination, indolence or stupid-ity if you were sound on this essential doctrine. It struck her that it was like any other religion; it meant what you wanted it to mean: it was easy to learn, a few platitudes, myths and slogans; it was intolerant, it gave you the excuse for occasional selective aggression, and you could make a moral virtue out of despising the people you disliked. Best of all, it cost nothing. She liked to pretend that this early indoctrination had absolutely nothing to do with the cold fury which seized her when she met its opposite, the obsce' graffiti, the shouted insults, the terror of Asian famili,' afraid to leave their barricaded homes. If you had to have a school ethos to give the illusion of togetherness then 1 her money anti-racism was as good as any. And whate'x c she might think about its more absurd manifestations, it wasn't likely to lead you to see visions in a dusty church.

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7

Dalgliesh had decided to drive alone on the Saturday afternoon to see the Nolans in their Surrey cottage. It was the kind of chore he would normally have entrusted to Massingham and Kate, or even to a detective sergeant and DC, and he could see the surprise in Massingham's eyes when he told him that he had no need of a witness nor of anyone to take notes. The journey itself wasn't un-necessary. If Berowne's murder were linked to Theresa Nolan's suicide, anything he could discover about the girl, who was at present no more than a photograph in a police file, a pale, childish face under a nurse's cap, could be important. He needed to clothe that shadowy ghost with the living girl. But in intruding on her grandparents' grief he could at least make it as easy as possible for them. One police officer must surely be more tolerable than two.

But there was, he knew, another reason for going himself and alone. He needed an hour or two of solitude and quietness, an excuse to get away from London, from his office, from the insistent telephone, from Massingham and the squad. He needed to escape from the AC's carefully unspoken criticism that he was making a mystery out of a tragic but unremarkable suicide and murder, that they were all wasting time on a manhunt without a quarry. He needed to escape, however briefly, from the clutter of his desk and the pressure of personalities, to see the case with clearer, unprejudiced eyes.

It was a warm, blustery day. Torn shreds of clouds dragged across a sky of clear azure blue and cast their frail shadows over the shorn, autumnal fields. He was travelling via Cobham and Effingham, and once off the A3 he drove the Jaguar XJS into a layby and thrust open the car roof. After Cobham, with the wind tearing at his hair, he thought he could smell in its fitful gusts the rich, pine-scented woodsmoke of autumn. The narrow country roads, bleached white between the grass verges, wound through the Surrey woodlands which would suddenly clear to give

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him a wide view to the South Downs and Sussex. He found himself wishing that the road would straighten before his wheels and run empty, unsignposted, for ever, that he could press down the accelerator and lose all his frustra-tions in the surge of power, that this rush ofautumn-scented air screaming in his ears could cleanse his mind as well as his eyes of the colour of blood for ever.

He half-dreaded his journey's end, and it came un-expectedly quickly. He passed through Shere and found himself climbing a short hill; and there on the left-hand side of the road, bounded by oaks and silver birch, and separated from the road by a short garden, was an un-remarkable Victorian cottage with its name, 'Weaver's Cottage', painted on the white gate. About twenty yards beyond it the road straightened and he drove the Jaguar gently on to the sandy verge. When he had turned off the engine the silence was absolute, birdless, and he sat for a moment, motionless and exhausted, as if he had come through some self-imposed ordeal.

He had telephoned, so he knew that they-must be ex-pecting him. But all the windows were fastened, there was no woodsmoke from the stack and the cottage had the secretive, oppressive air of a place not deserted but deliber-ately closed against the world. The front garden was untended with none of the haphazard exuberance of the normal cottage garden. All the plants were in ro. chrysanthemums, Michaelmas daisies, dahlias, with tween them half-denuded rows of vegetables. But ground was unweeded and the small patch of lawn each side of the door unmown and shaggy. There was iron knocker in the form ora horse-shoe, but no bell. Hc it fall gently, guessing that they must have heard the must surely be expecting the knock, but it was a full mirte

before the door opened.

He said:

'Mrs Nolan?' and took out his card, feeling as he always did, like an importunate door-to-door salesman. She barely looked at it, but stood aside to let him in. She xust, he thought, be nearer seventy than sixty, a small-boned

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woman with a sharp, anxious face. The exophthalmic eyes, so like her granddaughter's, gazed into his with a look with which he was only too familiar: a mixture of ap-prehension, curiosity and then relief that at least he looked human. She was wearing a suit in blue and grey crimplene, ill-fitting at the shoulders and puckered where she had shortened it at the hem. In her lapel was a round brooch of coloured stones in silver. It dragged at the thin crim-plene. He guessed that this wasn't her usual wear for a Saturday afternoon, that she had dressed up for his visit. Perhaps she was a woman who dressed up to meet all life's ordeals and tragedies; a small gesture of pride and defiance in the face of the unknown.

The square sitting room with its single window looked to him more typical of a London suburb rather than these deep country woods. It was neat, very dean, but char-acterless and rather dark. The original fireplace had been replaced by one of mock marble with a wooden overmantel and was furnished with an electric fire, one bar of which was burning. Two walls had been papered in a lurid mixture of roses and violets, and two with a plain paper in blue stripes. The thin, unlined curtains were hung with the patterned side towards the road so that the afternoon sunshine was filtered through a pattern of bulbous pink roses and ivy clad latticework. There were two modern armchairs, one each side of the fireplace, and a square central table with four chairs. Against the far wall was a large television set, high on a trolley. Except for a copy of both the Radio Times and TV Times, there were no maga-zines and no books. The only picture was a garish print of the Sacred Heart over the fireplace.

Mrs Nolan introduced her husband. He was sitting in the right-hand armchair, facing the window, a huge, gaunt man, who responded to Dalgliesh's greeting with a stiff nod, but didn't get up. His face was rigid. In the shaft of sunlight between the curtains its planes and angles looked as if they had been carved in oak. His left hand, crossed in his lap, was beating a ceaseless, involuntary tattoo.

Mrs Nolan said:

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'You'd like some tea, I dare say?'

He said:

'Very much, thank you, if it isn't too much trouble,' and thought: I seem to have heard that question and spoken those words all my life.

She smiled and nodded as if satisfied, and bustled out. Dalgliesh thought: I say the conventional insincerities and she responds as if I were the one doing the favour. What is it about this job that makes people grateful that I can act like a human being?

The two men waited in silence, but the tea came very quickly. So that, he thought, accounted for the delay in opening the door. She had hurried at his knock to put on the kettle. They sat at the table in stiff formality waiting while Albert Nolan raised himself stiffly from his chair and edged his way painfully into his seat. The effort set up a new spasm of shaking. Without speaking his wife poured his tea and set the cup before him. He didn't grasp it, but bent his head and slurped his tea noisily from the side. His wife didn't even look at him. There was a half-cut cake which she said was walnut and marmalade and she smiled again when Dalgliesh accepted a slice. It was dry and rather tasteless, rolling into a soft dough in his mouth. Small pellets of walnut lodged in his teeth and the occasional sliver of orange-peel was sour to the tongue. He washed it down with a mouthful of strong, over-milked tea. Somewhere in the room a fly was makig

a loud intermittent buzz.

He said:

'I'm sorry that I have to trouble you, and I'm afraid it may be painful for you. As I explained on the telephonic, I'm investigating the death of Sir Paul Berowne. A time before he died he had an anonymous letter. It gested that he might have had sonqething to do with granddaughter's death. That's whj I'm here.'

Mrs Nolan's cup rattled in her saucer. She put hands under the table like a well-behaved child at a par?. Then she glanced at her husband. She said:

'Theresa took her own life. I thought you'd know t:t, sir.'

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'We did know it. But anything which happened to Sir Paul in the last weeks of his life could be important, and one thing that happened was the arrival of that an-onymous letter. We should like to know who sent it. You

see, we think it probable that he was murdered.'

Mrs Nolan said:

'Murdered? That letter wasn't sent from this cottage, sir. God help us, we've no call to do such a thing.'

'I know that. We never for a moment thought that it was. But I wondered whether your granddaughter ever talked to you about anyone, a close friend perhaps, someone

who might have blamed Sir Paul for her death.'

Mrs Nolan shook her head. She said:

'You mean, someone who might have killed him?' 'It's a possibility we have to consider.'

'Who could there be? It doesn't make sense. She hadn't anyone else, only us, and we never laid hands on him,

though God knows we were bitter enough.' 'Bitter against him?' Suddenly her husband spoke:

'She got pregnant while she was in his house. And he knew where to find her body. How did he know? You tell me that.'

His voice was harsh, almost expressionless, but the words came out with such force that his body shook. Dalgliesh said:

'Sir Paul said at the inquest that your granddaughter spoke to him one night about her love of the woods. He thought that if she had decided to end her life, she might choose the only piece of wild woodland in central London.'

Mrs Nolan said:

'We never sent that letter to him, sir. I did see him at the inquest. Dad didn't go but I thought one of us ought to be there. He just spoke to me, Sir Paul. He was kind

really. Said he was sorry. Well, what else can people say?' Mr Nolan said:

'Sorry. Ay, I dare say.'

- She turned to him:

'Dad, there's no proof. And he was a married man. Theresa wouldn't... Not with a married man.'

'There's no knowing what she might have done. Or him. What does it matter? She killed herself, didn't she? First gettirsg the baby, then the abortion, then suicide. What's

one more sin when you've got that on your conscience?' Dalgliesh said gently:

'Can you tell me something about her? You brought her up, didn't you?'

'That's right. She hadn't anyone else. We only had the one child, her dad. Her mum died ten days after Theresa was born. She had appendicitis and the operation went wrong. A chance in a million, the doctor said.'

Dalgliesh thought: I don't want to hear this. I don't want to listen to their pain. That was what the consultant obstetrician had said to him when he had gone to take a last look at his dead wife with her newborn son in the crook of her arm, both of them composed in the secret nothingness of death. A chance in a million. As if there could be comfort, almost pride, in the knowledge that chance had singled out your family to demonstrate the arbitrary statistics of human fallibility. Suddenly the buzzing of the fly was intolerable. He said:

'Excuse me,' and seized the copy of the Radio Times. He swiped at it violently, but missed. It took another two vehement slaps against the glass before the buzzing finally stopped and it dropped out of sight leaving only a faint smear. He said:

'And your son?'

'Well, he couldn't look after the baby. It wasn't to be expected. He was only 21. And I think he wanted to get away from the house, from us, even from the baby. In a funny way I think he blamed us. You see, we didn't really want the marriage. Shirley, his wife, she wasn't the girl we would have chosen. We told him no good would come of it.'