A Taste for Death (51 page)

right cuff and the front looked as if he'd dribbled on it.' Dalgliesh said:

'It's a garment he practically lives in, Lady Ursula.' 'He could buy a spare, surely.'

'If he could afford one. And he had made an attempt to sponge off the stain.'

'Had he? Not very effectively. Well, that's the sort of thing you're trained to notice, of course.'

It did not surprise him that they were discussing ecclesi-astical garb while what remained of her son lay headless and disembowelled in a mortuary ice box. Unlike herself and Father Barnes, they had been able to communicate from their first meeting. She shifted a little in her chair, then she said:

'But you are not, of course, here to discuss Father Barnes's spiritual problems. What are you 'here to say, Commander?'

'I'm here to ask you again, Lady Ursula, whether or not you saw your son's diary in the desk drawer when General

Nollinge rang this house at six o'clock last Tuesday.' The remarkable eyes looked straight into his.

'You have asked that question twice before. I am, of course, always happy to talk to the poet who wrote "Rhesus Negative" but your visits are becoming rather frequent and your conversation predictable. I've nothing

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It was the most from the alter-were speaking the couldn't be sure. fact that she was is against his might of a woman whose He heard

ar inquiries, Corn badgering her, r my solicitor to be

Ursula. And we're

will show the lam out.' Street when the it, listened, then

enthusiasm. C:m't I think she'd like

under control but :of heady optim{:,m.

[p, sir. Hearne and

m Millicent Gentle's published her and � time to trace her.

Lane, near C,

Coldham Lane

Sir, she must have seventh.'

number?' either the .,!drcss

checked:" she

'Ring he

ossible ton

P

He repla 'The clue the author

Cookham, sil' 'No, JohK At the M. assing,harr[ vgorousiy ti strophobic t,i mism. He hellish day, ill-temper, provable from his sho',i

Tomorrox(i[ Black Swan

when I knol die. I may ri

6

Brian Nich[

. io.n r, resen l

rntating twenty-five thies with a case against Dalgliesh he but this Dalgliesh co/ lack of concerti condescende)[: own more

, not

to add to what I told you before. I find this reiteration rather offensive.'

'You do understand the implication of what you're saying?'

'Naturally I understand it. Is there anything else you need to ask?'

'I should like you to confirm that you did, in fact, speak to Halliwell twice on the evening your son died and that, to your knowledge, the Rover was not taken out that nighl before ten o'clock.'

'I've already told you, Commander. ! spoke to him about eight o'clock and then at nine fifteen. That must have been about forty-five minutes before he left for Suf-folk. And I think you can safely assume that, if anyone had taken the Rover, Halliwell would have known. Any-thing else?'

'Yes, I should like to see Miss Matlock again.'

'In that case I would prefer that you see her here and that I remain. Perhaps you will ring the bell.'

He tugged at the bell-cord. Miss Matlock didn't hurry. But three minutes later she stood in the doorway wearing again the 10ng grey skirt with its gaping pleat, the same ill-fitting blouse.

Lady Ursula said:

'Sit down will you, Mattie. The Commander has some questions for you.'

The woman took one of the chairs against the wall and brought it over, placing it beside Lady Ursula's chair. She looked stolidly at Dalgliesh. This time she seemed alr:'t without anxiety. He thought, she's beginning to get dence. She knows how little we're able to do if she sti, ks to her story. She's beginning to think that it could be after all. He went through her account again. She answ his questions about the Tuesday evening in almost the s: words she had previously used. At the end he said:

'It wasn't, of course, unusual for Mr Dominic Swa.:e to call here for a bath, perhaps a meal?'

'I've told you. He did it from time to time. He's L;dy Berowne's brother.'

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'But Sir Paul wasn't necessarily aware of these visits?'

'Sometimes he was, sometimes not. It wasn't my place to tell him.'

'What about the time before last, not Tuesday but the time before? What did you do then?'

'He had a bath as usual, then I cooked him supper. He doesn't always have supper here when he comes for his bath but that night he did. I cooked him a pork chop with mustard sauce, saut potatoes and green beans.'

A more substantial meal, thought Dalgliesh, than the omelette she had cooked on the night of Berowne's death. But on that night he had arrived at shorter notice. Why? Because his sister had telephoned him after her quarrel with her husband? Because she had told him where Berowne would be that night? Because his plan of murder was be ginning to take shape?

He asked:

'And after that?'

'He had apple tart and cheese.'

'I mean, what did you do after the meal?'

'After that we played Scrabble.'

'You and he seem extraordinarily fond of Scrabble.'

'I like it. I think he plays to please me. There's no one here to give me a game.'

'And who won that time, Miss Matlock?'

'I think I did. I can't remember by how much, but I think I won.'

'You think you won? It was only ten days ago, can't you be sure?'

Two pairs of eyes looked into his, hers and Lady Ursula's. They were not, he thought, natural allies, but now they sat side by side rigidly upright, motionless as if held in a field of force which both sustained and linked them. Lady Ursula was, he sensed, almost at the end of her endurance, but he thought he saw in Evelyn Matlock's

defiant gaze a glint of triumph. She said:

'I can remember perfectly. I won.'

It was, he knew, the most effective way of fabricating an alibi. You described events which had, in fact,

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happened, but on a different occasion. It was the most difficult of all alibis to break since, apart from the alter-ation in time, the parties concerned were speaking the truth. He thought she was lying, but he couldn't be sure. She was, he knew, a neurotic, and the fact that she was now beginning to enjoy pitting her wits against his might be no more than the self-dramatization of a woman whose life had afforded few such heady excitements. He heard Lady Ursula's voice:

'Miss Matlock has answered all your inquiries, Com-mander. Should you propose to continue badgering her, then I think we shall have to arrange for my solicitor to be present.'

He said coldly:

'That, of course, is her right, Lady Ursula. And we're not here to badger either you or her.'

'In that case, Mattie, perhaps you will show the Commander and Chief Inspector Massingham out.'

They were driving down Victoria Street when th,: telephone rang. Massingham answered it, listened, tht. handed the receiver to Dalgliesh.

'It's Kate, ir. I detect a note of girlish enthusiasm. Cax't wait until we get back apparently. But I think she'd like to tell you herself.'

Kate's voice, like her enthusiasm, was under control but Dalgliesh, too, couldn't miss the note of heady optimism. She said:

'Something interesting has turned up, sir. Hearne and Collingwood rang ten minutes ago with Millicent Gentle's address. She's moved since they last published her and hadn't told them where so it took a little time to trace her. She's at Riverside Cottage, Coldham Lane, near Cook-ham. I've looked at the ordnance survey. Coldham Lane runs almost opposite the Black Swan. Sir, she must have handed Sir Paul her book on August the seventh.'

'It seems likely. Have you a telephone number?'

'Yes, sir. The firm wouldn't give me either the address or the number until they'd rung her and checked thtl she agreed.'

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'Ring her then, Kate. Ask if she'll see us as early as possible tomorrow morning.'

He replaced the receiver. Massingham said:

'The clue of the romantic novelist. I can't wait to meet the author of A Rose by Twilight. Do you want me to go to Cookham, sir?'

'No, John,I'll go.'

At the Yard entrance he got out of the Rover, leaving Massingham to garage it, then hesitated and strode off vigorously to St James's Park. The office was too clau-strophobic to contain this sudden surge of irrational opti-mism. He needed to walk free and alone. It had been a hellish day, beginning in Gilmartin's office with peevish ill-temper, ending in Campden Hill Square with provable lies. But now the vexations and frustrations fell from his shoulders. He thought:

Tomorrow I shall know exactly what happened at the Black Swan on the night of the seventh of August. And when I know that, I shall know why Paul Berowne had to die. I may not yet be able to prove it. But I shall know.

Brian Nichols, recently promoted Assistant Commis-sioner, resented Dalgliesh and found this dislike the more irritating because he wasn't sure that it was justified. After twenty-five years of policing he regarded even his antipa-thies with a judicial eye; he liked to be confident that the case against the accused would stand up in court. With Dalgliesh he wasn't sure. Nichols was the senior in rank but this gave him small satisfaction when he knew that Dalgliesh could have outstripped him had he chosen. This lack of concern about promotion, which Dalgliesh never condescnded to justify, he saw as a subtle criticism of his own more ambitious preoccupations. He deplored the poetry, not on principle, but because it had conferred

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prestige and, therefore, couldn't be regarded as a harmless hobby like fishing, gardening or woodwork. A policeman, in his view, should be satisfied with policing. An added grievance was that Dalgliesh chose most of his friends from outside the force and those fellow officers he consorted with weren't always of an appropriate rank. In a junior officer that would have been regarded as a dangerous idiosyn-crasy and in a senior it had a taint of disloyalty. And to compound these delinquencies, he dressed too well. He was standing now with easy assurance looking out of the window wearing a suit in a subtle brown tweed which Nichols had seen him wearing for the last four years. It bore the unmistakable stamp of an excellent tailor, probably, thought Nichols, the firm his grandfather had patronized. Nichols, who enjoyed buying clothes, som-times with more enthusiasm than discrimination, felt th;t it was becoming in a man to own rather more suits ad those not so well tailored. Finally, whenever he was with Dalgliesh, he felt inexplicably that he ought perhaps to shave off his moustache and would find his hand movig involuntarily to his upper lip as if to reassure himself t[;tt the moustache was still a respectable appendage. This impulse, irrational, almost neurotic, irritated him pro-roundly.

Both men knew that Dalgliesh needn't be here in Nic-hols's tenth-floor office, that the casual suggestion tlat the AC should be put in the picture was no more thn an invitation, not a command. The new squad was n.w formally set up; but Berowne's murder had happened ix days too soon. In future, Dalgliesh would report directly to the Commissioner. But for now Nichols could claim a legitimate interest. It was his department, after all, which had provided most of the men for Dalgliesh's supporting team. And with the Commissioner temporar-ily away at a conference, he could argue that he had a right at least to a brief progress report. But, irratio,-ally, part of him wished that Dalgliesh had objected, had given him the excuse for one of those departmental wrangles which he provoked when the job offer ! less

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excitement than his restless spirit craved and which he was adept at winning.

While Nichols looked through the file on the case Dal-gliesh gazed out eastward over the city. He had seen many capitals from a similar height, all different. When he looked down on Manhattan from his hotel bedroom its spectacular soaring beauty always seemed to him precarious, even doomed. Images would rise from films seen in his boyhood, prehistoric monsters towering above the skyscrapers to claw them down, a vast tidal wave from the Atlantic obliterating the skyline, the light-spangled city darkening into the final holocaust. But London, laid out beneath him under a low ceiling of silver-grey cloud, looked eternal, rooted, domestic. He saw the panorama, of which he never tired, in terms of painting. Sometimes it had the softness and immediacy of watercolour; sometimes, in high summer, when the park burgeoned with greenness, it had the rich texture ofoil. This morning it was a steel engraving, hard-edged, grey, one-dimensional.

He turned away from the window with reluctance. Nichols had closed the file but was swivelling his chair and moving his body restlessly as if to emphasize the compara-tive informality of the proceedings. Dalgliesh moved over and took a seat opposite him. He gave a concise summary of his investigation as far as it had gone and Nichols listened with a show of disciplined patience, still swivelling, his eyes on the ceiling. Then he said:

'All right, Adam, you've convinced me that Berowne was murdered. But then I'm not the one who has to be convinced. But what have you got by way of direct evidence? One small smudge of blood under a fold of Harry Mack's jacket.'

'And a matching stain on the pocket. Berowne's blood. He died first. There's no room for doubt. We can prove that the smear is identical with his blood.'

'But not how it got there. You know what defending counsel will argue if it ever gets to court. One of your chaps carried it there on his shoes. Or the boy did, the one who found the body. Or that spinster - what's her name -Edith Wharton.'

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'Emily Wharton. We examined their shoes and I'm confident neither went into the Little Vestry. And, even if they had, it's difficult to see how they could have left a smudge of Berowne's blood under Harry's jacket.'

'It's a very convenient smudge from your point of view. From the family's too, I suppose. But without it there's nothing to suggest that this isn't exactly what it first appeared - murder followed by suicide. A politician, prominent, successful, has some kind of religious conver-sion, quasi-mystical experience, call it what you will. He throws over his job, his career, possibly his family. Then, don't ask me how or why, he discovers that it's all a chimera.' Nichols repeated the word as if to reassure himself of the pronunciation. Dalgliesh wondered where he had come across it. Then he went on: